There is a corridor in a conference center in Vienna that I have stood in, alone, feeling slightly ridiculous, before three different keynotes.
Arms out. Chest open. Feet wide. Taking up as much space as I can in a narrow corridor while trying not to be seen by anyone walking past.
Two minutes. Then I adjust my jacket, pick up my notes, and walk on stage.
I want to be straightforward about the science here, because this is a topic where the research has become complicated. Amy Cuddy’s original power posing paper — published in 2010, which argued that expansive body postures before high-stakes situations caused measurable hormonal changes, specifically increases in testosterone and decreases in cortisol — generated enormous interest and an enormous backlash. Follow-up studies had difficulty replicating the specific hormonal effects. Cuddy has defended her work; other researchers have disputed it; the scientific community remains genuinely divided on the hormonal mechanism.
I am telling you this upfront because I think intellectual honesty matters, and because the complicated science does not actually change my experience or my practice.
What the Research Does and Does Not Show
Here is what seems to be robust in Cuddy’s work, even accounting for the replication challenges: expansive body posture before high-stakes performance does affect felt confidence. Not hormones, or at least not reliably — but subjective experience. People who hold expansive postures for two minutes before difficult situations report feeling more powerful, more confident, and less anxious than people who hold contracted postures or who hold neutral ones.
This matters. Felt confidence is not the same as performed confidence. Performed confidence — the bluffing I described in an earlier post — is a construction, a mask that the audience can often sense through. Felt confidence is something different: a genuine internal state that generates different behavior, different timing, different presence.
Cuddy’s more recent framing, which she developed partly in response to the replication debates, emphasizes something she calls “presence” — the alignment between your internal state, your thoughts, your feelings, and your body. The body-based intervention may or may not reliably change hormones, but it does seem to reliably create a felt sense of being more fully in yourself.
That is what I experience in the corridor.
The Backstage Reality
Before I explain what the ritual does, I should describe what it is replacing.
Before I developed any particular pre-performance practice, my backstage experience went something like this: arrive at venue, check setup, run through the sequence mentally a few times, talk to event staff, check setup again, talk to the client contact, check whether the microphone was working, mentally run through the sequence again, try to look calm while my internal monologue ratcheted steadily upward in anxiety until someone gave me the signal to walk on.
The anxiety was not devastating. I am not someone who freezes or falls apart. But it was a particular quality of anxious energy — scattered, slightly reactive, monitoring the external situation obsessively because turning attention outward felt safer than being with the internal state.
The problem with this approach is that you walk on stage in that scattered, reactive state. And the first two or three minutes of a performance often reflect it — a slight over-speed, a sense of trying to find your footing, of performing toward stability rather than operating from it.
What the two-minute physical ritual does is change the direction of attention in the final moments before I walk on. Instead of monitoring the room, the microphone, the host, the timing, I am attending to my body. Taking up space. Breathing into the expansion. Noticing that I am solid, that I am here, that the body I am performing with is an asset rather than something to be managed.
The Specifics of the Ritual
Two minutes before I walk on — not longer, because standing in an expansive posture for too long starts to feel performative even to yourself, and it starts to drain rather than fill. Two minutes.
I find the most private space available. Sometimes this is a corridor. Sometimes a bathroom. Sometimes just a corner of a backstage area where no one is looking. I need to not be in conversation, not be monitoring anything external.
I take up space. This can be as simple as standing with feet wider than shoulder-width, hands on hips or arms slightly extended from the body. The specific shape matters less than the general principle: open, expanded, taking up more room than ordinary standing.
I breathe into the expansion. The posture creates more room for breath, which means the breath naturally becomes fuller. And fuller breath, as I wrote about in relation to Rodenburg’s work, changes the physiological state in ways that are robustly documented — activating the parasympathetic nervous system, reducing the stress response.
I think about one specific thing: what I want the audience to leave with. Not the sequence, not the technique, not the timing. Just the single most important thing. This is an attention-anchoring practice that gives me something to walk on toward rather than away from.
Then I walk on.
Why I Keep Doing It
I have now been doing this long enough to have some personal data. And the data — which is entirely anecdotal but also entirely consistent — is that performances preceded by the ritual go better than performances without it.
Better by how much? Hard to quantify. But better in a specific, recognizable way: I find my footing faster. The first two minutes, which used to be the shakiest period, have become more stable. The internal monitoring — the part of my attention that is watching myself from outside and making anxious quality assessments in real time — is quieter.
I have also noticed something that Cuddy’s presence framework would predict: I recover faster from unexpected moments. When something goes differently than planned — and in live performance, something always goes differently than planned — the emotional residue of the unexpected thing dissipates more quickly when I started from a more grounded state. It is as if the ritual creates a baseline that has better return-to capacity.
The Principle Behind the Practice
The deeper idea here is something I have become increasingly convinced of through everything I have read and experienced in performance: the body is not a vehicle for the performance. The body is the performance. What you are carrying in your body when you walk on determines the quality of what the audience receives, at a level that is mostly below conscious awareness.
You can have excellent technique. You can know your material. You can have made every correct intellectual preparation. And still, if your body is contracted, anxious, and reactive in the final moments before you walk on, you will perform from that state. The techniques will be correct. The material will be there. But the presence will not be.
The physical intervention is not magic — or rather, it is not the kind of magic I usually discuss here, the formal performance kind. But it shares something with that kind of magic: it is a deliberate intervention that creates a real change in the experience of the person undergoing it. You do something with your body. Something changes.
Whether the hormones are demonstrably different is, honestly, a question for scientists. The feeling is different. The performance is different. The audience receives something different.
That is enough for me to keep standing in corridors with my arms out, slightly ridiculous, two minutes before I walk on.