The Handmaid's Tale

Stop Winging It: How to Actually Build Company Culture That Works

Learn the 5-step system to build real company culture: align, walk, talk, celebrate, enforce. Stop hoping culture works and start making it stick.

www.thinkforwardhub.com/2025/08/how-to-actually-bu…

3 months ago | [YT] | 2

The Handmaid's Tale

The Impossible Balancing Act: Being Loved by Your Team AND Your Boss

Master the art of balancing team loyalty with boss expectations. Learn to translate between levels without losing your integrity or convictions.

www.thinkforwardhub.com/2025/08/the-impossible-bal…

3 months ago | [YT] | 4

The Handmaid's Tale

The Four Types of Employees

Discover the 4 types of employees every manager faces: Stars, Departed, Headaches, and Heartaches. Learn specific strategies for each category.

www.thinkforwardhub.com/2025/08/the-four-types-of-…

3 months ago | [YT] | 6

The Handmaid's Tale

Create Engagement: Approach Conversations with Curiosity, with Brian Grazer, Film and Television Producer, Author of A Curious Mind

Curiosity is essential in creating human connection. And when it goes deeper than that you would call it – it’s intimacy. If you think about your very best date, the best date you’ve ever had in your life. That best date is defined through curiosity. That intimacy came because you were in the state of flow. You were in present real time and those questions, the back-and-forth that you have with that very best date that evolve and become chemistry. You’re really living that moment and you care about that person’s answers and they care about your answers and something kind of magical, an alchemy is given birth to.

Since the Internet has entered our lives I think our first reflex is to go to the Internet as opposed to seeking out new people to meet because that’s really disrupting your comfort zone. I mean every time I do this it’s challenging. That isn’t going to be your natural reflex. Your natural reflex is going to go Google a subject, Google the person, get IMDB and that is how it’s going to work. What you want to do is you want to try to figure out how extraordinary people become extraordinary. Because you are getting out of your comfort zone meeting a new person, if you treat it as an act of generosity that you are wanting to share part of your life with somebody, it will reduce your anxiety.

When you reach out to somebody you go beyond just asking a question, you might give them a piece of information. Like when I met some famous designers like Vivian Westwood, I come to Vivian Westwood immediately with in olive branch. “What do you think of this new soundtrack,” or “what do you think of this piece of music?” Because look, designing goes hand in hand with music. I mean you know music is going to have some compatibility to fashion.

Ultimately what I’m trying to do is find a way to intersect with how their psyches actually works. So often what I’m trying to do is understand very quickly what is it that they are going through emotionally. Because emotionally what they’re going through is going to relate to what they do and achieve professionally. And what’s deeper than that is what do they think is their purpose in life? What is valuable to them? I mean what has meaning in their life?

I think curiosity is probably the most elevated form of a management tool because what you can do is you will create engagement. If I say, “Hey what do you think about that idea?” And then they say, “Well, I really like the idea.” And then I say, “Well, do you think there’s a better or different way of doing it?” And then they say, “Well, there might be.” And then I say, “Well, what would be a different way?” And you continue to engage somebody and you do this as a parent, if you’re doing this right, and you do it as an adult and you definitely do this with movie stars because that’s the only way to get movie stars to rise to that extraordinary Oscar level is through asking questions and engagement.

About the expert:
Brian Grazer is an Academy Award, Golden Globe, Emmy, and Grammy award-winning producer and New York Times bestselling author.

His films and television shows have been nominated for 43 Oscars and 195 Emmys. He won the Best Picture Oscar for A Beautiful Mind. Grazer also produced the films American Gangster, 8 Mile, Liar Liar, Parenthood, and Splash, the television series Genius, Empire, 24, Arrested Development, Friday Night Lights, and Felicity, and the documentary The Beatles: Eight Days a Week – The Touring Years, which won multiple awards including the 2017 Grammy for Best Music Film.

Grazer has worked on several film projects including Pavarotti, Hillbilly Elegy, Tick, Tick…Boom!, Curious George, re-imaginings of the hit films Friday Night Lights and Fear, a biopic about Gucci Mane, and the documentary Rebuilding Paradise, which follows the community of Paradise, California as it attempts to rebuild following the devastation of the 2018 California wildfires.

Grazer is working on Wu-Tang: An American Saga with THE RZA and Alex Tse for Hulu, Swagger with Kevin Durant for Apple, Filthy Rich with Tate Taylor for FOX, Why Women Kill with Marc Cherry for CBS All Access, Langdon for NBC, and an installment of Genius about the legendary “Queen of Soul” Aretha Franklin with Clive Davis and NatGeo.

Grazer has been honored by numerous organizations and was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World. His book A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life was a New York Times bestseller. Grazer’s second book, Face to Face: The Art of Human Connection, was released in September 2019.

4 months ago | [YT] | 4

The Handmaid's Tale

Cognitive biases are essentially predictable ways that our brains fool us. When we fall into these thinking traps, we allow ourselves to be hijacked by essentially emotion disguised as reason.

Loss Aversion

Loss Aversion refers to the fact that the pain of a loss is much deeper than the joy of a gain. We see this, for example, when we're investing. The pain of money that we've worked so hard to earn disappearing feels so much more emotionally resonant than the joy of seeing money that we haven't earned with our time, effort, or sweat magically appear or mysteriously appear through the magic of compounding growth. We might be prone to investing more conservatively than we actually need to, and the result of that may be that over the long term, we end up earning less through our investment portfolio than we otherwise could have. Or it might mean that when the market drops, like at the beginning of the pandemic, we panic and we sell, and we lock in those paper losses and turn those into real losses. That's how loss aversion can lead us astray.

Negativity Bias

Negativity Bias means that if something negative happens, we give it more weight than the positive things that have happened. And if you post something on Instagram, and ten of your friends say, "You look great," and then one person says, "Oh, you're an idiot, or you look ugly," you're gonna remember that one person more than you're gonna remember the other ten. If we have one bad experience with investing, then that can sour our feelings about investing. Maybe you have a bad experience owning a rental property. You have a nightmare tenant. It might not even have happened to you. Maybe it happened to your mom or dad, or to your cousin, to someone you know, but that one experience that happened to one person somewhere at some time has such a profound emotional impact that it knocks you out of the game, and you stay away from owning rental properties for years, for decades, maybe for your entire life. One experience can do that to you.

Overconfidence Bias

Overconfidence Bias is the bias in which we think that we're better at something than we actually are. For example, most people believe that they are above-average drivers, which is mathematically impossible. There's a well-documented effect called the Dunning-Kruger Effect, in which people who know the least about a topic believe that they know the most about it. They're operating at what's called the level of “unconscious incompetence,” meaning they don't know what they don't know. They underestimate the depth, the nuance of that field. By contrast, people who are actually experts in a given field are less confident than the people who know nothing because they know enough about that field to recognize how much they don't know. So let's link that to the world of investing. If you don't know a whole lot about stock investing, real estate investing, or cryptocurrency investing, then you might take some hot stock tip at the water cooler and it sounds good because you don't know enough to be able to exercise critical judgment about it. And you have that level of overconfidence that comes from ineptitude.

Anchoring Bias

Anchoring Bias happens when you see a given price point and that initial price point that you see then anchors in your mind as what that price point ought to be. And any comparison that you make is made based relative to that anchor. You'll see, for example, people say, "Oh, I used to be able to buy this particular house at 123 Main Street for $200,000, and today it's worth $300,000. And because there's such a difference between what my brain has anchored at and what it's worth today, I'm going to judge it based on its previous value." Now, the problem with that is that it can cause you to have a poor understanding of how things should be priced in the present. You pass up homes that are good deals, and you pass up stocks that are good deals because you're thinking about what Apple or Tesla used to be worth five years ago. You accept job opportunities that don't pay as well as they ought to because you're anchored to what you used to make five years ago versus what you really could command today. Anchoring bias skews what we think we can both command and spend.

Sunk Cost Fallacy

And our final example is something called Sunk Cost Fallacy. If I've invested a given amount of money or time into something, I don't want the emotional pain of feeling that that has gone to waste. Let's say that I've bought a stock and that stock goes down. Instead of reevaluating, "You know, was it a wise decision for me to buy that?", I might instead say, "All right, well I'm just gonna dollar-cost average all the way down," and then just start throwing good money after bad in the hopes that if I can continue to buy it on its way down, it'll eventually come back up. The reality is a given stock doesn't care what I bought it for, and just because it's gone down doesn't mean it's going to necessarily go back up. And the same thing happens with the way that we spend our time. Let's say that there's a project that you're working on that you hope could be an interesting side project or side hustle that could bring you a little bit of extra income every month. So you spend $3,000 or $4,000 building out this side project, and you try to sell it, but like nobody's buying, right? You don't want to admit that what you've already invested is just not gonna work out. So you double down. You throw good time and money after bad, and you do it not because of a rational analysis of your future prospects but rather because of the emotional toll of just not wanting to admit failure. That's sunk cost fallacy.

The reality is none of us will ever overcome our cognitive biases. It's how our brains and our emotions work, and it's part of what it is to be human. Even professional financial analysts. There's a famous quote that "An analyst is only as good as their biases." What we need to do instead is to, number one, accept the fact that we have them, and, number two, develop a very strong sense of self-awareness so that we can notice when these biases are coming up for us and we can stop. We can face them head-on, we can slow down, and we can say, "Hey, is this genuinely a rational decision that I'm making, or am I rationalizing my decision based on the biases that are influencing me?"

About the expert:
Paula Pant
Host, Afford Anything Podcast

4 months ago | [YT] | 2

The Handmaid's Tale

Two Goals of Sharing Chatter

When you find yourself experiencing chatter, you may feel intensely motivated to share what you’re going through with someone else. In other words, you may wanna talk about your chatter with another person. And the reason why that is is we often look to other people to help us satisfy two goals that we’re trying to fulfill. The first goal that we have is we want someone to help satisfy our social and emotional needs. We want someone to be there to empathically connect with us. We want someone to just be there to listen and validate what we’re going through, which can often be quite scary and hurtful. You also have cognitive goals as well. You’re struggling. You want to work through this experience. That’s why you’re focusing your attention inward in the first place, to get to the bottom of the problem you’re dealing with so you can move on with your lives. But you’re having trouble finding a solution for how to do that.

Here’s the problem. Throughout history, going back to Aristotle, continuing through Freud and to modern times, we’ve been getting strong messages from our culture which really focus on just the social needs that we have. We get these messages that tell us that when you’re experiencing chatter, find someone to just dump your emotions to. Just get it out, express your feelings, vent what’s going on in your head. Here’s what we know about venting. Venting to another person can be really good for satisfying our social and emotional needs. It feels good to know that there’s someone out there who’s willing to take the time to listen to us, a person who’s willing to take the time to empathically connect with you. But if all you do is vent in a conversation with someone else, that doesn’t provide you with the cognitive support you need.

Expressing your emotions is only one part of the solution. You also wanna ideally find someone who can not only listen to you, but also, at the appropriate time in a conversation, help you reframe your experience in ways that ultimately allow you to work through it.

Providing Support to Others

When you’re on the support side of the equation, when someone comes to you for chatter support, it’s important to keep in mind these two goals that the person talking to you has. And so what you ideally want to do is get that person to share their feelings and express their emotions. But at a certain point in the conversation, you wanna start queuing that person to think about the bigger picture. You wanna start offering them ways of thinking differently about what they’re going through that will ultimately help them reframe their experience in ways that make them feel better.

Now there’s an art to doing this. Some people that you speak to are gonna need to spend a little bit more time expressing their emotions before they’re receptive to getting you to help reframe their experience. And then during the conversation, feel it out. Ask that person, “Hey, do you wanna keep talking about what you’re going through?” If so, that’s great. Gently offer them alternatives. “Hey, can I share with you something that I’ve experienced here that’s relevant?” Or, “Have you thought about it this way?” And so you wanna feel that out during the conversation. When you switch from expression mode to giving advice is gonna differ depending on who you’re talking to and what they’re going through.

Your Chatter Board of Advisors

Talking to other people about our problems can be an incredible source of help, but it can also really sink us. It can make our problems worse if we talk to the wrong people. So it’s worth investing some time to think really carefully about who your trusted advisors are when it comes to managing your chatter. Who are the people in your life who are skilled at not only listening to you and getting you to talk about your emotions, but but they’re also able to help you think differently about the situation? They’re able to help you reframe the experience in ways that ultimately allow you to move on with your life. The more people that can help you do this, the better. I like to think of this as having a chatter board of advisors.

If you think about companies, companies have a board of advisors that they turn to when the company is experiencing problems. They go to the board. They get advice. And who do they put on those boards? It’s not just anyone. It’s people who have made a career of making good decisions, right? They’re trusted sources. I think we’d all be better off if we identified individuals who comprise our own personal board of advisors and then turn to those individuals when we’re experiencing chatter to get their support.

About the expert:
Ethan Kross
Professor of Psychology and Management & Organizations; Author, University of Michigan

4 months ago | [YT] | 3

The Handmaid's Tale

Adopt an anti-budget

In a traditional budget, you make this excruciatingly line-itemized, detailed list of how you want to spend, and then you look at how you have been spending, and you try to get those two to match up as closely as possible. The problem with traditional budgets is that they are very hard to stick to. So if you want to use an analogy from the world of nutrition: traditional budgeting is the calorie counting of money. It's painstakingly detailing every single morsel of food that you ate and trying to account for every calorie, every macro, every gram of fat, and protein, and carbs. You might be able to pull it off for a month or two, sure. But to be able to do that consistently for your entire life? There are very few people who can do that because it's so onerous, it's so detailed.

Instead, what I like to recommend is an approach that I call the anti-budget. And the anti-budget is the intuitive eating approach to managing your money. So instead of calorie counting, like you do with a traditional line-item budget, you are instead following a very simple formula.

First, you decide how much money you want to save. And in this context, when I say save, I mean anything that improves your net worth. So that might be making additional payments towards a debt above and beyond the minimum required. It might mean making investments, or it might mean literal savings in a savings account. Any net worth improvement is what I call savings in this context. Step two, pull that off the top first, and step three, just live on whatever is left over. And if you do that, your spending will naturally, over time, fit into the amount that's left over because your brain sees what's in your bank account and your brain intuitively has the sense of like, "All right, I paid my rent. I paid my bills. This is how much is left. I can or cannot have a big weekend on Friday and Saturday." You tend to adjust to that new normal baseline once you've pulled your savings off the top first.

Don’t rely on willpower

Willpower is a limited resource. There's only so much of it that we can generate. Oftentimes, in the morning, our willpower is strongest because we wake up refreshed, and oftentimes, at night, that's when we make our worst decisions, right? You probably make worse decisions at 2:00 AM than you do at 9:00 AM. And so it is folly to try to assume that we can just willpower or muscle our way through making smart decisions with our money. Instead, to the extent that you can, automate your decision-making, meaning it's outside of your cognitive load and you don't even have to think about it. It just hums in the background, outside of your level of consciousness — that's the best. Savings is a really good example of that. You get paid every two weeks and automatically some portion of that paycheck gets pulled out of your bank account and gets sent into a retirement account, gets sent as an extra debt payment, or gets sent into an investment account, right? That automation? Perfect! You don't have to do anything. It just hums in the background for you.

Now, for anything that you can't automate, if you can form a habit around it, that habit is better than any source of willpower. So for example, if you form such an automatic habit of making a cup of coffee at home first thing in the morning, you nail that habit to the point where you don't even think about doing it. It's muscle memory. You hit the water kettle right when you brush your teeth. That habit is going to be much more powerful than the alternative, which is trying to willpower yourself into not buying that latte at Starbucks.

Form new habits in 2 steps

The best way to form a habit is, number one, to start small, and number two, to tie it to an existing habit. So when I say start small, if you want to do a hundred pushups a day, start with one pushup. Get down on the ground, do a pushup, and then get back up again. Once you form a habit of doing that, then that one can turn into two, can turn into three, and it can grow from there. But what you want to do is reduce friction. The bigger you make that habit, the more of a lifestyle change it is, the more friction there is, and therefore, the more likely it is to fail.

Now, on top of that, tie it to an existing habit. This is something that's called “habit chaining” or “habit linking.” It’s another effective strategy because there are certain things that you already do that are already habits. You probably, I hope, brush your teeth twice a day, right? That's already a habit. So what can you do that ties directly to that? Something that becomes so ingrained that it's muscle memory. And it might not even make any sense. It might be the moment that you're done brushing your teeth, you check the balance in your checking account. Now you've developed a habit of checking the balance in your checking account every single day when you brush your teeth. And based on that, you know how much is left in your checking account. Based on that, you get an intuitive sense of how much you can spend this weekend, and that's what makes the anti-budget work.

About the expert:
Paula Pant is the host of the Afford Anything podcast, an award-winning show with more than 24 million downloads. It was named by the New York Times as one of “7 Podcasts Your Wallet Will Love.”

She is also the founder of Afford Anything, a personal finance brand with more than 75,000 newsletter subscribers.

She is a Knight-Bagehot Business and Economics Journalism Fellow at Columbia University.

Pant is frequently featured in financial media including Money Magazine, the Washington Post, Oprah.com, CNBC, Fortune, Marie Claire, Marketplace Money, Men’s Health, Real Simple, Outside Magazine, Cosmopolitan, the New York Times, and more. She’s spoken at the “Talks at Google” series and guest lectured at Georgetown University. She lives in New York City.

4 months ago | [YT] | 3

The Handmaid's Tale

Finding Real Happiness at Work: Mindfulness, A Misunderstood Quality, with Sharon Salzberg, Buddhist Meditation Teacher and Author, Real Happiness at Work: Meditations for Accomplishment, Achievement, and Peace

Mindfulness as a word is so utilized now. It’s very funny for me because I came back from India in 1974 and maybe, I joke and I say, maybe there were five people in the country who ever used the word mindfulness. And now you see it everywhere. And I think it is only a partially understood quality as, you know, the full scope of it is found in the Buddhist teaching which is where it’s been preserved all these years. It’s a very vital dynamic connection to what’s happening and my concern is twofold.

One is that we say things like mindfulness means accepting things the way that they are which sounds kind of dull, right. Like you just go, okay, I’ll just accept things the way that they are. Or it can sound passive or complacent. And so to say I’m going to be with things without judging them also sounds like you’re going to lose discernment. You’re going to lose your edge. You’re going to lose energetic application. And none of that is true at all.

I was once doing a meditation instruction somewhere and I started as we often do by saying, “Let’s just sit and listen to sound.” And somebody right away he raised his hands and he said, “Well what if it’s the sound of the smoke alarm I hear going off. Should I just sit here mindfully knowing that the smoke alarm is going off? Or should I get up?” And I said, “I’d get up.” So I think we have to look more deeply into what mindfulness actually.

My other concern is that classically mindfulness is considered to have several different kinds of benefits. Only one is pretty pronounced in the way it’s talked about now and that is a quality of fulfillment.

You know, if you’re drinking a cup of tea and checking your email and on a conference call and have the TV on mute reading the crawl, it’s not going to be a very fulfilling cup of tea. And so there’s a lot of emphasis on, well try maybe just to drink the cup of tea. Feel the warmth of the cup, smell the tea, taste the tea. It would be a whole lot better. And that’s true and that’s how mindfulness is mostly talked about. But classically, the most important benefit of mindfulness is said to be insight or wisdom.

We can see so much more clearly our own situation, the nature of our connection to others. We see so many more options that we might choose from if we’re going to take action if we’re mindful. And that’s kind of lost sometimes in the conversation. And yet you can see if we’re talking about insight, we’re talking about perspective, we’re talking about having a really big awareness so that we’re not caught in tunnel vision, we’re not lost in our own agenda. We can really listen. We can find new solutions. We can be creative. Then it also makes much more sense that mindfulness could be applicable in the corporate world.

About the expert:
Sharon Salzberg
Bestselling Author and Co-Founder of the Insight Meditation Society

4 months ago | [YT] | 1

The Handmaid's Tale

Well, the last foundational element of good power is resilience, being resilient. Because I guarantee you: anything hard and anything worth doing, you will not find a straight line to success. And it means you will have to persevere, and it may take time, and it may be very hard. And so in that way, being resilient, I think of it as the spirit of good power, because it is what makes you always have a way forward. And I would think of just two elements. It's your relationships and it is your attitude.

Building Strong Relationships

First, your relationships. Why? Because relationships are fuel and they give you perspective on any problem you have to solve. But a really important point: I ask you to think about how do you build a relationship? How do you build a network? It's not by what you get, it's by what you give. If you give, I guarantee that network will come back to you and, ironically, at just the right moments. And the more diverse, the better those relationships, whether it's your husband, your spouse, your partner, work people, anybody. And you want it big and broad because in some ways, they hold a mirror up to you in a way that you can accept it. And so that's your fuel.

Maintaining a Positive Attitude

And then your attitude. There is always, and I believe from my history, there is always a way forward. When my father left my mother with nothing, no money, no food, and about to have no home, she was determined that this was not going to be the end. I remember standing in the garage, I'd accidentally walked in, when he told her that, and he told her, "I really don't care if you go work on the street." And in that moment I thought, "My poor mother. She is in her 30s, four children, never worked outside the home, and didn't have anything beyond a high school degree." She could have been a victim of all of this. Never saw her cry. What she decided to do was, "No, no, there was a way forward." She would go back to community college, feeling, as she would say, "I feel like a dummy sitting here amongst all these people." But get enough skill to get a little better job and then a little better job. And she never said it to us, but by watching her actions, she showed us no one will ever define who you are but yourself. And there is always a way forward.

And so in that way forward, that's just about conviction. It's about the ability to control what you can control. I ask you what you can control, control it, because there's so much you can't. Hey, I wear a headband so my hair doesn't go in my eyes. In style, out of style, I don't care. I've got to keep it out of my eyes. Compartmentalize, because as you go on, or the bigger the problem you work on, things get harder and harder, you can't let that just sit in your head always. Take a problem, put a plan, put it in a box, put it on the side, go to the next thing, compartmentalize. So control, compartmentalize. Have conviction in what it is that you are doing. They're all such important tools about how do you find your way forward. And that's why at the end of the day, resilience: those relationships, and that attitude, which by the way will seep into whatever group you're part of, it's contagious. I can't underscore why it's so important, and it is the base of good power.

About the expert:
Ginni Rometty was the ninth chairman, president, and CEO of IBM. Under her leadership, the 100-year-old company reinvented 50% of its portfolio, built a $25 billion hybrid cloud business, and established leadership in AI and quantum computing.

Rometty also drove record results in diversity and inclusion and supported the explosive growth of an innovative high school program to prepare the workforce of the future in more than twenty-eight countries. Through her work with the Business Roundtable, Rometty helped redefine the purpose of the corporation. She has been named Fortune's #1 Most Powerful Woman three years in a row, is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and was honored with the designation of Officier in the French Légion d'Honneur.

Today Rometty serves on multiple boards and cochairs OneTen, a coalition committed to upskilling, hiring, and promoting one million Black Americans by 2030 into family-sustaining jobs and careers.

4 months ago | [YT] | 2

The Handmaid's Tale

Recognize the body-mind connection

There are universal expressions of emotions. It’s adaptive for us to be able to signal those things and for us to be able to read those things. So for example, when we feel good, smile. When we feel sad, we frown. When we feel surprised, we go like this. These are universal expressions across cultures. They’re expressed the same way in different cultures and they’re recognized in different cultures. When people are talking about emotion expressions, though, they tend to think about facial expressions. And it turns out there are some universal expressions of emotions that are postural expressions. They’re below-the-neck expressions. And one of the ones that I think has been most thoroughly studied now is what we call the pride posture or the power posture. The researcher who has lead that work is Jessica Tracy, who’s a social psychologist at the University of British Columbia. And Jessica Tracy has been studying it in dozens of cultures, and what she finds is that when people win first place they naturally throw their arms up into a “V”. They tend to lift their chin and open their mouth a bit. That’s a universal expression of pride. The other evidence we have that this is universal is that it’s not even limited to humans. So non-humans, when they’re trying to signal dominance or power or status, what do they do? They make themselves big. They expand. They stretch out as much as they can. They bulge their chests out. They pound their chests. Chimps will pick up sticks and hold them out to make themselves look bigger. A swan will bring its wings back and open. A peacock will lift and expand its tail feathers. All of these are expansive shows of dominance and power. So this is definitely something that seems to be hardwired in the brain - the link between feeling powerful and expanding.

Let the body lead the mind

The body leads the mind, and we have spent so many hundreds of years getting it backwards. I think that we as humans want to believe that the mind leads the mind. That we can talk ourselves off the ledge or think ourselves off the ledge. We’re actually not very good at doing that. But our body is constantly in conversation with the mind. Now, it is a conversation. So the communication is moving in both directions. But we neglect the body-mind piece. We forget how much our body is telling our mind what state we’re in. Are we in a threatening state, or are we in a safe state? So when we start hunching over our desks and not moving, the body is certainly not telling the mind, “Oh you’re feeling really powerful now. You should go out and do something.” It’s starts to signal to the mind that you’re powerless, and that’s related to feeling sad, and feeling inactive and not very creative, and just feeling generally defeated.

Calm yourself like a yogi

When I talk about this work, people are like yep, and yoga people have known this forever. And I say, yes they have. You’re right, they have. This is not new. This is just a little bit of science to backup thousands of years of what yoga practitioners have actually known, which is, when you expand the body, especially in these particular poses for short periods of time, and you also focus on your breathing, what’s happening is your body starts to tell your nervous system, “You are safe. You are powerful.” That’s what’s happening and that’s why it makes people feel better. Yoga also has physical benefits, obviously. Stretching and strengthening your muscles is beneficial. It’s not just psychological. But the effect that yoga has on the mind - we’re only beginning to understand it. Very simply yoga techniques are now being used to treat post-traumatic stress, and they are extremely effective. Post-traumatic stress is really one of the most powerless states that a person can experience. While talk therapy can work really well for some people, it doesn’t work for everyone. And one of the groups that is benefitting much more from body-mind interventions is combat veterans with post-traumatic stress. So they come back, and think of it - their identity has been dramatically disrupted, they have seen or experienced something really horrible, physically they might be in great pain. They are feeling utterly powerless. So using these yoga-based practices to treat post-traumatic stress among that population, and also among women who are rape victims with post-traumatic stress, has just been phenomenally effective.

Self-soothe in high-stress situations

This goes so far beyond the “Victory Pose.” This really is about how you hold yourself. Do you hold your shoulders back and open? Is your posture erect, or are you hunching over? Which we spend a lot of time doing at work. We certainly spend a lot of time doing that when we’re on our phones. The way you move and hold yourself is pretty easy for most of us to change. Let me give you an example. If you go in to give a talk and you feel nervous, and you feel your shoulders start to collapse and you wrap your hand around your arm, and feel your breathing get shallow and fast, force yourself out of that. Pull your shoulders open. Hold something in your hand like a water bottle or a slide advancer, something that forces you to open up your body. Pause. Take a deep breath. These are things that you can do. And these things, even if you are mentally resisting it, they are still going to be signaling to your nervous system, “You’re safe.” So they will calm you down.

About the expert:
Dr. Amy Cuddy is a social psychologist, bestselling author, award-winning Harvard lecturer, and expert on the behavioral science of power, presence, and prejudice.

Cuddy earned her Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2005. She was a professor at Rutgers University from 2005 to 2006, Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management from 2006 to 2008, and Harvard Business School from 2008 to 2017, where she continues to teach in executive education.

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