Presence
Amy Cuddy · 2015
Presence (2015) is a book by Amy Cuddy on career & skills. Harvard psychologist Amy Cuddy shows how presence, being attuned to and able to express your true self, beats bravado in high-stakes moments, and how small tweaks to posture and mindset can summon it on demand.
Your biggest moments aren't lost to a lack of talent but to a lack of presence, and Cuddy shows you can summon it in about two minutes.
Two of the ideas you’ll keep
The Clif summary of Presence pulls out 7 insights. Here are the first two.
- Cuddy defines **presence** as the state of being attuned to and able to comfortably express your true thoughts, feelings, values, and abilities. It's not a permanent personality trait but a fleeting, summonable state, and it's what makes others trust and connect with you.
- There are two kinds of power: **social power** (control over others and resources) and **personal power** (a felt sense of control over your own states and outcomes). Presence springs from personal power, which is non-zero-sum and available to anyone, regardless of rank.
The other 5 — and the full 11-minute summary — are in the app.
What’s inside: 9 chapters
The whole summary runs about 11 minutes, read or listened to.
- What Presence Really Means
- Believing Your Own Story
- The Two Faces of Power
- How Powerlessness Shackles the Self
- The Body Shapes the Mind
- Power Posing
- Preparing for Your Big Moment
- Fake It Till You Become It
- Nudging Yourself, and the iHunch
Finish Presence tonight.
Read or listen to the full summary in about 11 minutes, then keep the ideas with a minute of review a day. Start with the 2-minute quiz — no card required.
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