Dress and stand for how you want to feel: confidence from the outside in
Stylist Erin Walsh asks 'How do I want to feel?' before getting dressed, social psychologist Amy Cuddy explains postural feedback and expansive posture, and Vanessa Van Edwards teaches claiming space and using your hands to project and build confidence. Each treats clothing, stance and gesture as inputs you can set before a hard moment, which gives people something concrete to do when telling themselves to feel confident fails.
Before a hard moment you can set something physical: what you wear, how you stand and breathe, and what your hands are doing. Three experts who work on very different things each offer a piece of that, and one of them, Amy Cuddy, explains why simply telling yourself you are great can fail.
Stylist Erin Walsh starts at the closet. Before choosing anything she pauses and asks, "How do I want to feel?", answers in three words and dresses to match. Most people, she says, ask what they should wear or what fits, and that starts a spiral in which you feel you are not enough. Asking how you want to feel is a decision that what you think and feel matters. The answer is not always about power. One morning Mel Robbins felt awful, chose safe, protected and soft, put on old sweatpants and a flannel shirt, and gave herself permission to rest.
Social psychologist Amy Cuddy starts with posture, which she says sends your nervous system a signal that you are safe or not safe. Before a stressful event, she says to find a private space and make yourself big in whatever way feels comfortable. In everyday life the goal is good neutral posture. Her favorite tool is 4-7-8 breathing: inhale for four counts, hold for seven, exhale for eight, and repeat a few times. Tell yourself you are great when you feel self-doubt, she argues, and "you're just lying to yourself and now you trust yourself even less". What she recommends in its place is affirming your values, not your greatness.
Behavior researcher Vanessa Van Edwards starts with two measurements: the distance between your earlobes and your shoulders, and the distance between your torso and your arms. Hunching your shoulders toward your ears, which she calls turtling, protects the neck, but in that posture, she says, you feel worse, your vocal power drops and you look less confident. We do it every time we hunch over a phone, often right before dates and presentations. Her fix is to check the phone up and out: phone raised, chin up, elbows wide.
The three agree that the body is an input, not just a readout. They start from different places. Walsh insists on beginning with how you want to feel, and warns that starting from how you want to be seen leaves you uncomfortable and unlike yourself. Van Edwards teaches cues partly for how others read you, though she also says the cues change how you feel. Only Cuddy says outright that self-talk can fail. Cuddy and Van Edwards both steer away from the big pose: Cuddy keeps the expansive version for a private space, and Van Edwards calls the Rocky entrance too socially aggressive.
There are limits. Cuddy says personal power is not a substitute for skills and knowledge. She also says that for many people powerlessness is rooted in trauma, and where that is the case, a mental health professional's advice matters more than any of these tools.
What to do with it: on the day of the hard thing, ask the question and dress your three words with what you own. While you wait, hold your phone up and out. Make yourself big in private, and keep breathing. Walk in with your shoulders down and back, choose the chair with armrests, and let your hands show. Then follow Van Edwards's rule and try each cue three times in three different situations before you drop it.