Amy Cuddy Quotes

Trust is the conduit for influence; it's the medium through which ideas travel.

— Amy Cuddy

It's not uncommon for people to overvalue the importance of demonstrating their competence and power, often at the expense of demonstrating their warmth.

— Amy Cuddy

“Being a comfortable public speaker, which involves easily being able to go off-script, strongly signals competence.”

— Amy Cuddy

“I sometimes work with a communications and media training firm called KNP Communications. It's nice to bring the research to the practitioners; I learn a lot watching how they put it into practice, and I know they like to be on top of what's happening on the research front.”

— Amy Cuddy

“Politicians are very experienced - maybe too experienced - at using body language to signal power and competence. But what these politicians are much more likely to struggle with, or just neglect to do altogether, is communicate warmth and trustworthiness.”

— Amy Cuddy

“A lot of politicians, not surprisingly, hire consultants to help them with their nonverbals, presence, generally how they come across.”

— Amy Cuddy

“Don't fake it till you make it. Fake it till you become it.”

— Amy Cuddy

“Our bodies change our minds, and our minds can change our behavior, and our behavior can change our outcomes.”

— Amy Cuddy

“The whole body-mind thing comes into play, when you are feeling that self-doubt and your body is not going to help you if you're not paying attention. Your body's going to go with the self-doubt and make you feel worse, so by making the adjustments - pulling your shoulders back, standing up straight, walking in a more sort of expansive way - all sorts of little things will help pull you out of that self-doubt.”

— Amy Cuddy

Everyone is walking around with these self doubts, so there's something reassuring about that. And self-doubt in one or a few areas doesn't mean that you have generally low self-esteem. And you have the power to get yourself out of feeling that way.

— Amy Cuddy

“I would say there is a conversation happening between your body and mind all the time. Even when you're sleeping, your body is communicating the information to your mind. And so to me it feels like, why not harness that? If it's happening all the time, why not control the content of the conversation?”

— Amy Cuddy

That's the dream scenario: when people approach these stressful situations not focused on that concrete outcome but just focused on being there and being themselves and enjoying connecting with people. You're not going to be present all the time, but if you can figure out how to connect with yourself and bring that self forth in those moments, you will probably be feeling a lot better over time, and it's likely that even though you're not focused on the outcome, the outcomes will be better.

— Amy Cuddy

“Our nonverbals govern how other people think and feel about us.”

— Amy Cuddy

“My primary goal is really to get people to open up and when they feel themselves contracting and collapsing to reduce that, and to know when that happens, "Oh, something's going on that's making me feel this way, and if I force my body open a bit, I will feel less powerless."”

— Amy Cuddy

“When we close ourselves off, we're not just closing ourselves off to other people, we're closing ourselves off from ourselves and impeding ourselves. When you open up, you allow yourself to be who you are.”

— Amy Cuddy

“Your body language shapes who you are”

— Amy Cuddy

“Even more dramatic, Alex Todorov at Princeton has shown us that judgments of political candidates' faces in just one second predict 70 percent of U.S. Senate and gubernatorial race outcomes, and even, let's go digital, emoticons used well in online negotiations can lead to you claim more value from that negotiation. If you use them poorly, bad idea. Right? So when we think of nonverbals, we think of how we judge others, how they judge us and what the outcomes are. We tend to forget, though, the other audience that's influenced by our nonverbals, and that's ourselves.”

— Amy Cuddy

“Tiny tweaks can lead to big changes.”

— Amy Cuddy

“Power is generally defined as control over resources and control over access to resources, which often means control over other people because we're thinking about things like financial resources or shelter, or even love and affection, but we also possess resources that we sometimes can't access.”

— Amy Cuddy

“I've been studying sexism for many years, and it's much easier to document the existence of sexism than it is to document the existence of interventions that reduce it. It's really hard to find ways to change the way people see people in different groups. It should be our goal, and we're working for that, but it's hard.”

— Amy Cuddy

“I hear from so many women who really started to pay attention to it at all times and stopped, you know, touching their faces and necks and playing with their hair and twisting their legs. I think women become more aware of it when they learn about this stuff, and you see their body language change.”

— Amy Cuddy

“When we think of nonverbals, we think of how we judge others. ... We tend to forget, though, the other audience that's influenced by our nonverbals: ourselves.”

— Amy Cuddy