Cuddy - Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges

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For Jonah and Paul,

the loves of my life

Thank you for patiently reminding me, again and again,

to just stand up on the surfboard

Karen Peris (the innocence mission)

I M SITTING AT THE counter in my favorite Boston bookstore-caf, laptop open, writing. Ten minutes ago I ordered coffee and a muffin. The servera young, dark-haired woman with a broad smile and glassespaused and quietly said, I just want to tell you how much your TED talk meant to mehow much it inspired me. A couple years ago my professor posted it for a class I was taking. Now Im applying to medical school, and I want you to know that I stood in the bathroom like Wonder Woman before I took my MCAT, and it really helped. So even though you dont know me, you helped me figure out what I really wanted to do with my lifego to medical schooland then you helped me do what I needed to do to get there. Thank you.

Tears in my eyes, I asked, Whats your name?

Fetaine, she said. Then we chatted for the next ten minutes about Fetaines challenges in the past and newfound excitement about her future.

Everyone who approaches me is unique and memorable, but this kind of interaction happens far more frequently than Id ever have anticipated: a stranger warmly greets me, shares a personal story about how they successfully coped with a particular challenge, and then simply thanks me for my small part in it. Theyre women and men, old and young, timid and gregarious, struggling and wealthy. But something binds them: all have felt powerless in the face of great pressure and anxiety, and all discovered a remarkably simple way to liberate themselves from that feeling of powerlessness, at least for that moment.

For most authors, the book comes first, then the responses. For me, it was the other way around. First, I conducted a series of experiments that gave rise to a talk I delivered at the TEDGlobal conference in 2012. In that talk, I discussed some intriguing findings, from my own and others research, about how our bodies can influence our brains and behavior. (This is where I described that Wonder-Woman-in-the-bathroom thing Fetaine mentioned, which I will explain by and by, that can quickly increase our confidence and decrease our anxiety in challenging situations.) I also shared my own struggles with impostor syndrome and how I learned to trick myself to feeland actually to becomemore confident. I referred to this phenomenon as fake it till you become it. (By the way, in the talk, that part about my own struggles was almost entirely unplanned and unscripted, because I didnt think I had the audacity to disclose something so personal to the hundreds of people in that audience. Little did I know.) I didnt know whether these topics would resonate with people. They surely spoke to me. Immediately after the twenty-one-minute video of the talk was posted on the Internet, I began hearing from people who had seen it.

Of course, watching my talk didnt magically give Fetaine the knowledge she needed to do well on the MCAT. She didnt miraculously acquire a detailed understanding of the characteristics of smooth-strain versus rough-strain bacteria or how the work-energy theorem relates to changes in kinetic energy. But it may have released her from the fear that could have prevented her from expressing the things she knew. Powerlessness engulfs usand all that we believe, know, and feel. It enshrouds who we are, making us invisible. It even alienates us from ourselves.

The opposite of powerlessness must be power, right? In a sense thats true, but its not quite that simple. The research Ive been doing for years now joins a large body of inquiry into a quality I call presence . Presence stems from believing in and trusting yourselfyour real, honest feelings, values, and abilities. Thats important, because if you dont trust yourself, how can others trust you? Whether we are talking in front of two people or five thousand, interviewing for a job, negotiating for a raise, or pitching a business idea to potential investors, speaking up for ourselves or speaking up for someone else, we all face daunting moments that must be met with poise if we want to feel good about ourselves and make progress in our lives. Presence gives us the power to rise to these moments.

The path that brought me to that talk and this breakthrough was roundabout, to say the least. But its clear where it started.

What I most remember were the cartoonish sketches and sweet notes on the whiteboard, left by my friends. Im a sophomore in college. I wake up in a hospital room. I look aroundcards everywhere, and flowers. Im exhausted. But Im also anxious and agitated. I can barely keep my eyes open. Ive never felt like this. I dont understand, but I dont have the energy to try to make sense of it. I fall asleep.

Repeatmany times.

My last clear memory before waking up in that hospital was of traveling from Missoula, Montana, to Boulder, Colorado, with two of my good friends and housemates. Wed gone up to Missoula to help organize a conference with University of Montana students and to visit with friends. We left Missoula in the early evening, around six, on a Sunday. We were trying to get back to Boulder for morning classes. In retrospect, especially as a parent, I now see how incredibly stupid this was, given that the drive time between Missoula and Boulder is thirteen to fourteen hours. But we were nineteen.

We had what we thought was a good plan: we would each drive a third of the trip; one passenger would stay up to help the driver stay awake and alert while the other passenger would sleep in the back of the Jeep Cherokee, seats down, in a sleeping bag. I drove my shift; I think I went first. Then I was the active passenger, keeping an eye on the driver. And its a really tender memory. So peaceful. I loved these people I was with. I loved the openness of the West. I loved the wilderness. No headlights to count on the highway. Just us. Then came my turn to sleep in the backseat.

As I learned later, heres what happened next. My friend was driving the worst shift. It was the time of night when you feel as though you might be the only person in the entire world who is awake. Not only was it the middle of the night, it was the middle of the night in the middle of Wyoming. Very dark, very open, very lonesome. Very little to keep you awake. At around four in the morning, my friend veered off the road. When she hit the rumble strip on the shoulder, she overcorrected in the opposite direction. The car rolled several times, eventually landing on its roof. My friends in the front seat were wearing their seatbelts. I, who had been sleeping in back with the seats down, was ejected from the car and thrown into the night. The right-front side of my head slammed into the highway. The rest of me remained in the sleeping bag.

I sustained a traumatic brain injury. More specifically, I suffered a diffuse axonal injury (DAI). In a DAI, the brain is subjected to shearing forces, usually from severe rotational acceleration, which is quite common in car accidents. Imagine what happens during a high-speed car crash: with the sudden and extreme change in velocity upon impact, your body abruptly stops but your brain continues to move and sometimes even rotate within the skull, which it is not meant to do, and even bangs back and forth against your skull, which it is also not meant to do. The force of my head slamming into the highway, which fractured my skull, probably didnt help matters.