Fess up. Ever bomb an interview? Maybe it was for a job your really wanted. Or a talk with your boss about a salary increase. Or critical performance review. Or an important sales call.
It’s a little bit like a bad dream, because you probably know you’re bombing, while you’re bombing! Your body reads the signals and reacts and it’s hard to pull out. Then, when you “get back on the horse” and go to your next interview, you’ve really got to work on not connecting with the previous experience.
As part of Jamesson Solutions High Impact Presentation Skills workshop, Donna Warrick fesses up about her flops to share insights on how to avoid them through embodied cognition psychology. That’s a way to use your body to change your mind.
The kind of embodied cognition we advocate (more here) is the claim that the brain, while important, is not the only resource we have available to us to generate behaviour. Instead, the form of our behaviour emerges from the real-time interaction between a nervous system in a body with particular capabilities and an environment that offers opportunities for behaviour and information about those opportunities. The reason this is quite a radical claim is that it changes the job description for the brain; instead of having to represent knowledge about the world and using that knowledge to simply output commands, the brain is now a part of a broader system that critically involves perception and action as well. The actual solution an organism comes up with for a given task includes all these elements.—Jeff Thompson, PhD in Psychology Today
Cognition is embodied when it is deeply dependent upon features of the physical body of an agent, that is, when aspects of the agent’s body beyond the brain play a significant causal or physically constitutive role in cognitive processing.—Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy