The samurai strategist Yagyū Munenori had a term for the leader who projects too much — one whose deliberate display of strength becomes the very thing their opponents read. He called it 'suki': a gap, an opening, created not by weakness but by trying too hard to appear strong. Modern performance researcher Amy Cuddy found something adjacent in her work on presence: people who perform confidence for an audience leak stress hormones that undermine the very impression they're managing. The insight these two traditions share — separated by four centuries and entirely different methods — is that projected authority is structurally different from inhabited authority. One broadcasts; the other simply occupies. The practical move is small but strange: before your next high-stakes conversation, don't rehearse how you'll come across. Instead, get genuinely curious about what you don't yet know about the situation. Curiosity, it turns out, is one of the few mental states that simultaneously quiets self-monitoring and sharpens perception — the two things real authority actually requires.

When did you last walk into a difficult conversation genuinely uncertain how it would go — and did that uncertainty help or hinder you?

Drawing from Japanese Martial Philosophy / Performance Psychology — Yagyū Munenori (The Life-Giving Sword) and Amy Cuddy (Presence, 2015)