Amy Cuddy, TedTalk Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words - 2

Amy Cuddy, TedTalk - Essay Example We usually forget another important audience, influenced, mainly by our body language, and that is certainly ourselves. We are not only influenced by our body language our physiology and feelings but also our thoughts. Amy has researched on this issue extensively and has come up with an amazing maxim; fake it till you make it! Her study is based mostly on body language expressions of dominance and power. Amy narrates her experiences with MBA students, who really exhibit full range of body language. Some of the students come, get right in the middle of the classroom like they are occupying space. As they sit down, they are spread out, raising their hands. The other lot is virtually collapsing as they come in, its written all over their bodies and faces as they take their seats and continue making themselves small, even while raising their hands. These nonverbals have a close relationship with gender and the extent of participation and how good they were at it. Women most times feel that men are more powerful than them and thus exhibit nonverbals depicting their powerlessness. This gap in gender grade has been a struggle for business schools and although all students admitted are equally qualified, you realise differences in grades, which is partially attributed to participation. This is what led to Amy’s questioning whether it was possible to convince her students to fake cour age and thus lead to more participation from all. Thus Amy and her main collaborator at Berkeley, Dana Carney wanted to find out if one can fake it, till they make it. That is to say that you can practice this for some time and actually get to experience an outcome in behavior that makes one feel powerful. It is known that our body language governs how other persons may feel and think about us. Evidence exists to support this, but Amy’s and Dana’s question was whether our nonverbals control