So powerful people tend to be, not surprisingly, more assertive and more confident, more optimistic.

You want the person who's powerful and assertive and dominant, but not very stress reactive, the person who's laid back.

So two minutes lead to these hormonal changes that configure your brain to basically be either assertive, confident and comfortable, or really stress reactive, and feeling sort of shut down.

I would set boundaries for the voices, and try to interact with them in a way that was assertive yet respectful, establishing a slow process of communication and collaboration in which we could learn to work together and support one another.

But for years I denied this intuition, and so I became a Wall Street lawyer, of all things, instead of the writer that I had always longed to be partly because I needed to prove to myself that I could be bold and assertive too.