Do Possible Selves and Power Posing Actually Work Together?

What each one is actually for

Possible Selves Exercise

The Possible Selves Exercise asks you to write two specific portraits, not two adjectives. Not "successful" — a scene: what does the person you hope to become actually do on a Tuesday, what do they say in the meeting you're dreading, what does their apartment or their inbox or their relationship with their kid look like a year from now if things go the way you hope. Then the same exercise in the other direction, for the version of yourself you're afraid of becoming if nothing changes. The value isn't in either picture alone — it's in the gap between the hoped-for picture and where you actually are today, because that gap is specific enough to suggest an actual next action, in a way that a vague wish like "I want to be more confident" never does.

Power Posing

Power Posing, as popularized by the social psychologist Amy Cuddy, is the practice of physically holding an expansive posture — standing tall with feet apart, or leaning back with arms behind the head, rather than hunching or crossing your arms — for about two minutes before walking into something that makes you nervous, such as a negotiation or an interview. The idea, in its original and boldest form, was that the posture itself changes your hormones and your felt sense of confidence before you ever open your mouth. What actually holds up under later, larger studies is narrower: adopting an open posture can shift how confident you feel in the moment, a real if modest effect, but the specific hormonal claim that made the idea famous — that the pose measurably changes testosterone and cortisol — did not replicate and is now widely considered unsupported.

What you get out of pairing them

The Possible Selves Exercise buys you a target specific enough to act on, instead of a general wish to do better that never quite turns into a Tuesday-afternoon task. What it does not buy you is the felt readiness to walk into the room and act on that target today — a written plan for who you want to become says nothing about how your body is going to feel ninety seconds before you have to speak. That's the specific, narrow thing Power Posing offers instead: not a plan, and not evidence of a hormonal shift, but for some people a small, real bump in how confident they feel walking into a single specific moment. Put together honestly, one gives you the destination and the reason to move; the other, taken for exactly what current evidence actually supports and no more, is a small pre-game ritual for the doorway — not a second engine doing comparable work.

What Possible Selves Exercise rests on

• Concrete goals outperform vague aspirations observational studies
  Specifying a concrete hoped-for or feared image of the future is more motivating and actionable than an abstract aspiration.
• Future self continuity motivates present action observational studies
  Vividly imagining one's own future self increases psychological connection to that self and motivates present behavior aligned with it.
• Gap awareness motivates change plausible mechanism
  Awareness of the gap between one's current self and a hoped-for or feared future self motivates action to close that gap.

What Power Posing rests on

• Embodied posture shapes felt state practitioner report
  Adopting an expansive body posture can shift a person's subjective feeling of confidence apart from the contested hormonal claims.
• Self perception through behavior plausible mechanism
  Noticing one's own confident body language can update one's self-perception of confidence.

Where they actually meet

Both practices try to produce a felt state before the evidence for that state exists in your actual circumstances yet — the Possible Selves Exercise imagines a future identity vividly enough to feel some pull toward it before you've done anything to earn it, and Power Posing arranges the body into the shape confidence usually takes before any confidence-justifying event has happened in the room. Neither waits for the feeling to show up on its own first; both try to act (or imagine, or stand) their way into it. The scales are wildly different — months of identity work against two minutes of stance — and that difference is most of why they don't actually combine into much.

The principle underneath both

Acting, imagining, or physically arranging yourself into the shape of a state you don't yet fully feel can nudge you a little closer to actually having it, in both a writing exercise about identity and a two-minute stance before a doorway — but a shared shape of mechanism at this level of generality covers an enormous number of unrelated techniques, and shared shape alone does not mean the two practices reinforce each other in practice.

What that makes the real goal

If there is a common goal at all, it is narrowing the distance between how you currently feel and how you'd need to feel to act on a goal you've already decided matters — but the Possible Selves Exercise is doing that work on the goal itself, over a long horizon, while Power Posing is doing a much smaller version of it on your state for a single afternoon. Naming a shared objective this broadly risks implying a partnership that the actual scope of each practice doesn't support.

Other practices that serve the same goal

For closing the gap between a current self and a hoped-for one, Implementation Intentions — writing a specific if-then plan for when and how you'll act — have strong randomized-trial support for actually converting a goal into behavior, which is more than either practice here can currently claim for that step. For a genuine pre-event confidence ritual with better-replicated backing than Power Posing's hormonal claim, a brief physiological down-regulation technique — slow paced breathing for sixty to ninety seconds before a stressful event — has more consistent evidence for lowering felt anxiety in the room than posture alone does.

Using the Possible Selves Exercise to give Power Posing a reason to exist

Power Posing on its own is a two-minute ritual with no particular target — confident for what, exactly? The Possible Selves Exercise can supply that target. If your hoped-for self is someone who speaks up in leadership meetings instead of staying quiet, that specific written scene is what you bring to mind while you're standing in the expansive posture beforehand, rather than a generic sense of wanting to feel powerful. The posture, whatever small effect it has, is more likely to translate into an actual different sentence coming out of your mouth in the meeting if it's aimed at a scene you've already rehearsed in writing than if it's aimed at nothing in particular.

Using Power Posing to soften one single moment inside a Possible Selves plan

The honest use here is small and should stay small. If your hoped-for-self work has produced an actual next action with a specific hard doorway attached to it — walking into the room to ask for the raise, showing up to the audition — a couple of minutes in an open, expansive posture beforehand costs nothing and, for some people, takes a little of the edge off walking in. Treat it as what the evidence actually supports: a minor, optional pre-game habit for that one doorway, not a technique that does meaningful work on the months-long identity shift the Possible Selves Exercise is actually trying to produce. Leaning on it for more than that oversells what a two-minute stance can do.

Ninety seconds outside the conference room before you ask for the promotion

Three weeks ago you wrote out, in detail, the version of yourself who asks for the promotion directly instead of hinting at it and hoping someone notices — what she says, how she holds the pause after asking instead of rushing to fill the silence. Today is the day. You're standing outside the conference room with two minutes before the meeting starts. You are not doing anything Power Posing's original, boldest claim promised — you don't expect your cortisol to drop. You stand a little taller, arms uncrossed, and you bring the written scene back to mind, the specific sentence you decided you'd say. Whatever the posture itself is or isn't doing to your body, what actually walks through the door is the sentence you rehearsed for weeks, held a little more accessibly for the two minutes you gave it a body to stand in.

When this is worth reaching for

The honest use of this pairing is narrow: you've already done real Possible Selves work and arrived at a specific, imminent action with a physical doorway attached to it — a meeting, an audition, a call — and you want a low-cost, low-risk minute or two before walking in. It is not a substitute for the identity work itself and does nothing for a goal that doesn't yet have a specific next moment attached to it.

Where this does not apply

Do not reach for this pairing expecting Power Posing to compensate for a Possible Selves picture that's still vague — a two-minute stance cannot supply the specificity that a fuzzy hoped-for self is missing, and no amount of posture fixes a goal you haven't actually defined. And do not rely on the hormonal version of the Power Posing claim at all; treat any felt lift as a placebo-adjacent, modest, individually variable nudge, not a physiological mechanism, and never let a stance substitute for actual preparation for the moment ahead.

What the evidence does and does not support

The Possible Selves Exercise rests on observational and mechanistic support connecting vivid future self-imagery and gap awareness to motivation; it has not been tested in large randomized trials as a standalone named protocol. Power Posing's original hormonal claim — that the pose itself shifts testosterone and cortisol — failed to replicate in a much larger follow-up study and is now widely treated as not supported; what plausibly survives is a smaller, subjective, individually variable effect on felt confidence, and even that rests on thinner evidence than most practices in this corpus. No study has tested combining these two specifically, and given how limited Power Posing's own supported effect now is, this page treats the combination as a minor, optional add-on rather than a genuine second mechanism.