Let’s go back to that meeting in Plano, Texas, where Christine has a decision to
make. In the past, as soon as she felt uncertain, she would have just looked down at
her notepad, said nothing, and in five seconds, the moment would have been over.
If one of her colleagues had raised a similar idea (as colleagues often do), she’d
spend the afternoon beating herself up for not talking.
But today, Christine does something different. She dreads what she is about to
do and she can feel the five second window closing as her own brain fights her. Her
stomach is in knots as she applies the Rule.
She starts counting backwards silently in her head to quiet the self-doubt and to
switch the gears in her brain.
5..4..3..2..1..
The counting interrupts her normal pattern of behavior, distracts her from her
fears, and creates a moment of deliberate action. By asserting control in that
moment, she activates her prefrontal cortex so that she can drive her thoughts and
actions. Then she opens her mouth and says, “I have an idea.”
Everyone turns and looks at her, and Christine feels like she might just die right
there. She forces herself to keep moving forward. She sits up a little taller, takes up
a little more space by sliding her elbows wider across the table (as power posing
suggests we do), and starts to speak: So I had this idea, you know how statistically all these
Millennials are using Snapchat as a platform to ...
Everyone listened to her idea, asked a few questions, and then her boss said,
“Thanks, Christine. Very interesting suggestion. Anyone else?” On the outside, nothing
earth-shattering happened, but on the inside something life-changing did. She
discovered the courage she needed to become the person she always wanted to be
at work—a rock star.