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The Nanodynamics of Power: How Small Behaviors Shape Confidence—Even at the Top

myra@myralaldin.com (Myra LalDin) — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 00:22:43 GMT

At a Fortune 100 company known for its leadership development, the executives had been through years of development, individualized coaching, and experience leading large, complex businesses. Many were recognized as experts in their fields and regularly asked to speak, teach, advise, and serve on boards.

Over the course of months working with their executive coaches, something began to surface among a group of senior women. It wasn’t something any one executive identified at the beginning, and it wasn’t something the coaches were specifically looking for. But as the conversations accumulated, similar comments and experiences began appearing across the group.

Several women described leaving certain meetings with less confidence in their ideas than they had when they entered. They were not describing obvious conflict or criticism. They could not always identify what had happened or point to a particular interaction that explained how they felt afterward.

Eventually, a pattern became difficult to ignore.

For a company that had invested so heavily in developing its leaders, the question was what these executives were experiencing that traditional leadership development had not addressed.

We began by watching their meetings. At first, we did not pay much attention to what people were saying. We watched the behavior around the conversation instead. Who received immediate eye contact when they began speaking? Whose comments were quickly acknowledged? Whose ideas were picked up and developed by other people? Who had to work a little harder to get the same level of attention?

The differences were often very small. There was no obvious attempt to exclude anyone or diminish their contribution. The behaviors were ordinary enough that most people would never think to describe them as part of the power structure in the room.

When we later asked the executives about what they had noticed, their responses were remarkably similar. They could recognize the behaviors once we pointed them out, but they did not consider them particularly meaningful. They had seen them. They simply had not registered them as something that was affecting them.

That distinction matters.

We are capable of noticing something intellectually without fully registering its significance. A person can know that they were interrupted more often in a meeting, that their idea received less engagement, or that someone consistently looked to another executive before responding to them. They can describe the behavior accurately and still have very little awareness of what repeated exposure to those behaviors is doing to their own confidence and participation.

This is part of what makes power difficult to observe. Much of it operates through patterns that are too small to attract conscious attention.

Our brains are constantly making predictions about the social environment and filtering information according to what they have learned is relevant. We do not process every glance, pause, shift in posture, or change in tone with equal attention. We become more sensitive to some signals because our experience has taught us that they matter.

For someone who has spent years in positions of authority, many aspects of power may simply feel normal. They are accustomed to being listened to, deferred to, or looked to for a decision. They may therefore have less reason to pay close attention to the small variations in those behaviors.

The same process can work in the other direction. Someone who repeatedly experiences subtle signals that their contribution carries less weight may become increasingly attentive to them. Over time, that can affect how they participate. They may hesitate before offering an idea, qualify their language, wait for someone else to speak first, or decide that pushing a point is not worth the effort.

None of those moments has to be particularly consequential on its own. The significance comes from repetition.

This is where the individual experience begins to connect to organizational culture. When a particular pattern occurs repeatedly, people adapt to it. They learn who tends to receive attention, whose ideas get developed, who gets interrupted, who gets deferred to, and whose disagreement creates friction. Eventually those patterns become part of how the organization operates, even when nobody has explicitly decided that they should.

The women in this group were already highly accomplished. They had reached positions where they were expected to be confident, decisive, and authoritative. That made the pattern especially interesting. The question was not whether they were capable of confidence. It was whether subtle social signals were influencing when and how that confidence was expressed.

There is another complication for people in senior positions. Their authority can make some of these patterns harder to see. People behave differently around someone with substantial power. They may be more careful about what they say, less likely to challenge them directly, and less likely to explain the small moments that are affecting their participation.

A leader can therefore receive considerable information about the organization’s performance while receiving surprisingly little information about how their own presence is shaping the behavior of the people around them.

This is what we mean by the nanodynamics of power: the small behavioral exchanges through which power is communicated and experienced. A glance, a pause, an interruption, a response, or a decision about whose idea to develop can seem inconsequential when viewed individually. Repeated across hundreds of interactions, they can influence who feels confident enough to speak, who expects to be heard, and whose ideas become part of the conversation.

And these dynamics do not stop at the C-suite. They operate anywhere people have different levels of authority, influence, status, or perceived credibility. The difference at the top is that the consequences can be harder to see because the people experiencing them are often assumed to have already developed the confidence and authority to withstand them.

That assumption deserves more scrutiny.

For leaders, the useful question is fairly practical: What patterns are people experiencing around me that I am not experiencing myself?

Answering that question requires paying attention to behavior at a finer level than most leadership programs typically ask leaders to consider. It also requires resisting the temptation to assign meaning to every individual interaction. A glance does not necessarily mean anything. An interruption does not necessarily reveal a person’s view of your authority. What matters is the pattern, particularly when the same pattern appears repeatedly across situations and relationships.

Power does not only operate through major decisions, formal authority, or explicit direction. It also operates through ordinary interactions that are easy to overlook. At the highest levels of an organization, where those patterns can influence how people participate and what they learn about their own standing, those interactions are worth paying attention to.

References

Barrett, L. F. (2017). How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Damasio, A. R. (1994). Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. Penguin Books.

Galinsky, A. D., Magee, J. C., Inesi, M. E., & Gruenfeld, D. H. (2006). Power and perspectives not taken. Psychological Science, 17(12), 1068–1074.

Huttenlocher, P. R. (2002). Neural Plasticity: The Effects of Environment on the Development of the Cerebral Cortex.Harvard University Press.

AI Disclaimer: The ideas are mine, and I’ve been using them in my work for the past decade. AI did a line edit, which means it may have improved my writing, ruined my voice, or added a little AI wisdom where none was requested. If something sounds suspiciously like a robot, blame the robot.

About the Author

Myra LalDin is a leadership consultant specializing in the behavioral and cognitive dynamics of power, leadership, and organizational behavior. She advises leaders on how subtle social interactions shape individual and organizational outcomes.

Your First READ IS NOT THE Whole Truth: And what it takes to keep it evolving

myra@myralaldin.com (Myra LalDin) — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 00:07:20 GMT

For the most part, we’ve agreed as a society that stereotyping people is painting the complexity of humans with super broad brushstrokes and is a bit of an ignorant move. But somehow, dress up that same move with a little therapy speak and now it’s acceptable.

Your boss didn’t answer an email, so that’s an avoidant attachment style. A coworker asks a few too many follow-up questions, so he’s gaslighting you. Someone is difficult and self-centered, so now they’re a narcissist.

We love these labels because they give us instant certainty about a confusing situation.

I’m not telling you to stop. Partly because you won’t, and partly because pattern recognition is an asset. Your brain is built to recognize what it has seen before and predict what comes next. The problem isn’t the first judgment. It’s what happens after it.

Once you have the theory, you start using it to explain everything that happens afterward. What started as a useful shortcut becomes the lens you read everything else through.

The point isn’t to stop making first reads. It’s to hold an evolving model.

What a mental model actually is

A mental model is a working theory about how something works. You have them for people, your industry, your company, food, money, and yourself. They give your brain a starting point instead of making it work everything out from scratch every time.

And they’re supposed to be incomplete.

The problem is that we forget that part. The theory does its job on day one and never gets revisited.

An evolving model is a working theory you expect to get more refined as you gather information. You can act confidently from what you currently believe while knowing your picture is still crude. You don’t have to suspend judgment until you have perfect information. You make the best call you can from what you have, then stay willing to take in what comes next.

That’s what it means to stand in confident uncertainty: to act from the model you have while knowing it isn’t finished. You don’t wait for new information to change your mind. You go looking for information that could change your read.

You can still make decisions. You can decide that a coworker is difficult to work with. You can decide not to trust someone with a particular responsibility. You can decide that a strategy isn’t working. The question is whether you can make that decision without getting invested in the explanation you built around it.

Research on judgment has found that people who are more willing to actively seek out information that could challenge their existing views tend to make more accurate judgments. Being smart doesn’t mean you will do this. In fact, the research found that being open-minded was associated with greater accuracy even when intelligence was taken into account. [1][2]

Why we close so fast

Not knowing is uncomfortable. A confusing situation sits there without an explanation, and a label ends it. “Narcissist” gives a chaotic interaction a name. “Avoidant” gives an unanswered email a reason.

And there’s a little relief in it. If he’s the narcissist, I’m the reasonable one.

Once you’ve decided what someone is, you don’t have to keep figuring them out. You can read whatever happens next through the model you already built. That’s efficient. It’s also how a useful model becomes a distorted one.

There’s another reason it’s hard to reopen a read. The read becomes part of the story you’ve built about yourself in relation to that person.

If I decide my boss is avoidant, I’m not only forming an opinion about my boss. I’m forming a story about what happens between us. I’m the person who communicates clearly. He’s the person who doesn’t.

Now anything that challenges his label also challenges how I understand the relationship. It asks me to reconsider him and the role I gave myself in the story.

That’s harder to give up.

And the read costs him something too. He might genuinely be avoidant. But if I decided that from one unanswered email, that’s what he becomes. To me, and to anyone I tell.

A provisional interpretation has quietly become a reputation.

What evolving models look like

The person who is good at this doesn’t necessarily look uncertain. They often look more grounded than everyone else in the room.

They’ll tell you clearly where they stand. Then, when new information comes in, they adjust their position without treating the adjustment as a loss of status. You can watch them refine their thinking in real time without the flinching that usually happens when someone feels their position moving in public.

They aren’t trying to preserve the appearance of having known all along. They want the better understanding more than they want the credit.

That’s confident uncertainty. It comes from being comfortable acting on a model that you know may need to change.

Why this is getting harder

We aren’t taught much about how to do this. We’re taught to make decisions, defend our positions, communicate with confidence, and project authority. We’re taught much less about what to do when the information changes.

Culturally, we also mistake certainty for authority. The leader with the clean answer sounds stronger than the leader who says, “Here’s what I think based on what we know. Here’s what would change my mind.” When a leader updates their position in light of new information, we read it as weakness or indecision rather than as evidence they’re paying attention.

Then there are the confirmation loops around us. Algorithms give us more of what we already engage with. Feeds compress complicated situations into short clips, declarations, and hot takes. Even our conversations can be self-reinforcing. You tell someone your interpretation, they agree, and now the interpretation feels more true.

AI makes this particularly easy. You give a system your framing and it hands that framing back to you in a cleaner, more coherent form. It can feel like independent confirmation when you’re really just hearing your own premise expressed more convincingly.

Disconfirming information used to arrive by accident. Increasingly, you have to go find it.

If everything around you reinforces the models you already have, evolving them becomes something you have to do on purpose.

Start with the read you’re most certain about

People are good material for this because they’re complicated and the feedback keeps coming. They’re also hard because you have something at stake, which makes them a better test than a market analysis.

Take the boss you decided is avoidant. Don’t try to talk yourself out of it. That isn’t the exercise. Go looking for what the read is missing.

Maybe he doesn’t answer anyone’s email, not just yours. Maybe he answers when a decision is needed and goes quiet when it’s an update. Maybe he’s still hard to get a straight answer from, but for a different reason than you assumed.

The original read is still useful. You’ve simply added enough information to make it more precise. You’re increasing the resolution of the model rather than swapping one conclusion for another.

Write the original read down. Record what you expected to happen and what actually happened. Your brain will edit the history otherwise. Once you know how something turned out, it’s remarkably easy to remember that you always knew. A written record makes that harder. Over time it shows you where your models were too broad, where they held up, and where reality made you get more precise.

You’re giving your brain repeated experiences of one thing: my model was incomplete, I refined it, and nothing bad happened.

Start with situations where you don’t have much at stake. Pay attention to the moments when your first interpretation turns out to be incomplete, and practice revising it. With enough repetition, you get better at doing the same thing when the stakes are higher.

Someone shuts down your idea in a meeting. Someone questions your expertise. A customer reacts differently than you expected. A strategy you believed in stops producing what you predicted. The emotional charge makes the original read harder to loosen, which is exactly why those moments matter. Instead of defending the model, ask what you haven’t accounted for.

People are just where you start. The same ability applies to a strategy, a business, a market, a decision, or your own read on yourself.

Where certainty should live

When you get good at evolving your models, you don’t lose certainty. You move it off the model and onto your ability to refine it.

You can know what you think, make a decision, and stand behind it without needing the explanation to stay fixed forever. You can run into information that changes the picture without feeling it as a threat to your judgment or your authority.

That confidence comes from trusting that you can keep learning, adapting, and refining your understanding as you gather more information.

Your first read will always be there. That’s part of being human. The difference is knowing that your first read is where the model starts, not where it ends.

Bibliography

1. Haran, U., Ritov, I., & Mellers, B. A. (2013). “The Role of Actively Open-Minded Thinking in Information Acquisition, Accuracy, and Calibration.” Judgment and Decision Making, 8(3), 188–201.
Cambridge University Press⁠

2. Stanovich, K. E., & West, R. F. (1997). “Reasoning Independently of Prior Belief and Individual Differences in Actively Open-Minded Thinking.” Journal of Educational Psychology, 89(2), 342–357.
Original paper⁠

AI Disclaimer: The ideas are mine. AI did a line edit, which means it may have improved my writing, ruined my voice, or added a little AI wisdom where none was requested. If something sounds suspiciously like a robot, blame the robot.

Behavior FLOW THROUGH THE System. Leaders Need to Learn to Read It.

myra@myralaldin.com (Myra LalDin) — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 22:44:07 GMT

In complex environments like aviation, manufacturing, or nuclear energy, leaders are trained to see systems, not just parts—to understand how systems behave. They don’t just monitor outputs; they study how small inputs move through the system and how subtle shifts can create cascading effects. A slight delay, a missed signal, a minor change in temperature — any of these can ripple outward and impact many areas along the way. In those settings, precision matters. You manage complex systems by understanding signal, causality, and consequence.

Behavior works the same way. But when it comes to human behavior, leaders are rarely trained to think with a systems lens. Most leadership frameworks focus on moments — how to motivate, give feedback, or navigate a tough conversation — as if those actions stand alone. But behavior doesn’t operate in isolation. Every team, organization, and even family is a living behavioral system — shaped by interactions, feedback loops, and the accumulation of signals from the leader over time.

The Hidden Gap

There’s no shortage of leadership advice about EQ, influence, or “difficult conversations.” These tools build essential awareness and interpersonal skill — but they treat behavior as a series of isolated events, not as part of a larger system. They don’t equip leaders to interpret the behavioral data unfolding around them, or to recognize second- and third-order consequences.

What’s missing is the systemic skill: understanding how behavior travels. A leader’s action is never just about the moment. Each behavior sends a signal about what matters and what doesn’t — a signal that moves through the system, layer by layer.

The Behavior Impact Chain

Layer 1 – Relational: It starts in the moment. A leader who repeatedly cuts someone off in meetings doesn’t just end a conversation; they teach the room how to behave in the next one. That interaction changes how people engage. Do they feel dismissed or respected? Do they speak up next time, or stay quiet? Repeated behaviors become signals that others learn to read — and eventually, to mirror.
Layer 2 – Normative: Over time, these patterns settle into shared norms about what’s rewarded, what’s risky, and how things get done. As those norms take hold, they shape culture — the background conditions that guide behavior even when the leader isn’t present.
Layer 3 – Reputational: As norms repeat, they shape reputation. A leader becomes known not for what they say, but for what people experience: how they handle disagreement, what they allow, what they ignore. It becomes the story others tell about who they are.

This is the cascading effect of behavioral systems: small, often unnoticed choices move through relationships and routines, accumulating into structures that outlast the moment that created them. That’s the hidden gap — leaders are taught to manage behavior in moments, not to see how those moments travel through people, layers, and time.

And it often starts not with what a leader explicitly promotes, but with what they consistently practice — or even what they silently permit.

The Power Paradox

Alongside this behavioral gap, there’s a neurological one. As leaders gain power, something subtle but consistent happens: their perception of social dynamics becomes less accurate. This isn’t about ego — it’s neurological.

Studies show that as people gain power, measurable changes occur in the brain. The more influence someone holds, the less precisely they register how their behavior affects others. The power paradox (Keltner et al., 2003; Galinsky et al., 2006) describes this phenomenon.

Activity in the brain’s mirror neuron system — which helps us simulate and emotionally register others’ experiences — decreases as power increases (Hogeveen et al., 2014). Perspective-taking declines. Predictive processing becomes biased toward internal assumptions rather than external feedback (Zinchenko et al., 2020).

These are the very capabilities leaders need to detect discomfort, disengagement, or misalignment — to read the room.Without them, they operate on incomplete information.

Social structures compound the problem. As leaders rise, social risk rises around them. People soften feedback, avoid disagreement, and filter what they share. Signals become thinner, safer, and less reflective of reality.

The result is a distorted internal model of the system — one that no longer matches what’s actually unfolding. Unless leaders deliberately retrain perception — to re-attune, listen, and adjust — their decisions will be shaped more by distortion than by intention.

Intentional Leadership

Power may narrow perception, but it doesn’t remove responsibility. Leaders still shape the systems they inhabit. Intentional leadership begins with awareness: realizing that every behavior sends a signal, and those signals accumulate into culture.

The capacities behind intentional leadership can be built. Leaders can strengthen behavioral precision — learning to recognize subtle cues that reveal when trust, safety, or alignment is shifting. They can map behavioral signals across teams to see how they spread. They can trace internal signals — understanding the early experiences and beliefs that shaped their own patterns.

These are disciplines that develop through reflection, feedback, and deliberate practice — but they start with a simple shift: learning to see behavior as a system.

This Happens to Everyone — and It’s Changeable

These effects appear across every context. Power doesn’t discriminate; it distorts perception for all of us. The brain leans toward what’s predictable, while systems reward what’s comfortable.

Over time, that narrowing becomes normalized. Teams adapt. Feedback softens. Disagreement fades. Silence becomes a survival skill. Eventually, that adaptation starts to look like competence: knowing what to avoid, how to read a mood, which topics not to raise. We excuse it with familiar phrases: “They’re under pressure.” “Don’t take it personally.” “Stay on their good side.”

Bad leadership gets framed as personality, not system failure — and the cycle repeats.

But it doesn’t have to. Leaders can retrain perception and rebuild attunement. They can learn to see what’s missing from feedback loops, how behavior travels, and when assumptions are hardening into culture.

The ability to see behavior as a system — to understand how signals move through it and to act with precision inside it — isn’t innate. It’s a skill that can be developed and, with deliberate practice, mastered.