By tweaking your body language, you can tweak your brain into performing optimally in a stressful situation.
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“Fake it until you make it” is an expression, and a method of boosting my confidence, that I became aware of quite young. I read Mary Kay’s autobiography about 25 years ago, and was therein first exposed to the concept of my confidence level being malleable based on my internal dialogue. After watching Amy Cuddy’s TED talk on Power Posing, that idea has now graduated to, “Don’t fake it until you make it; fake it until you become it, ” and I learned a new methodology of increasing my confidence.
I think our society is becoming aware of how powerful our thoughts are at influencing our moods and our perception of incoming information, which then forms our reality. Athletes use visualization regularly as a means of achieving the goals they have set for themselves. Other people use affirmations or vision boards to motivate and direct themselves into meeting their goals or emotional ideals. However, being aware of how my brain is reacting to my posture was a new concept to me in the spectrum of life-hacks to achieve success.
We read, often subconsciously and quite swiftly, other people’s body language. The judgements we make based on another persons body language can have real life-changing consequences for them, such as getting a job or not, getting a promotion, being sued, or getting asked out on a date.
Body language is communication, which indicates interaction. Before this TED talk, I was only marginally aware of my own body language beyond “stand up straight, look people in the eye, and smile.” I was certainly not aware of the secondary audience to my body language: my brain. Have you put much thought into how your brain perceives your body language? Our body language not only affects how other people see us, it affects our thoughts, feelings, and physiology.
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Powerful people tend to be more assertive, optimistic, confident, think more abstractly, and are more likely to be risk takers.
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Picture any Superhero in your mind, how do they pose? Shoulders back, chest out, head up, and arms ready at the side. By posing this way, these fictional characters project authority, confidence, capability, and strength designed to reassure the reader or viewer that good will prevail over evil. There are five different power poses presented in the TED talk, some sitting and some standing, and one has been dubbed Wonder Woman, for good reason.
According to Ms. Cuddy, powerful people tend to be more assertive, optimistic, confident, think more abstractly, and are more likely to be risk takers. Feeling powerful creates physiological differences in your bodies hormonal levels. These hormone changes significantly impact how you perform in stressful situations. Ideally, to be powerful and effective, you want to be high on testosterone (the dominance hormone) while low on cortisol (the stress hormone). I once had a boss that would clearly fit the description of being authoritative yet laid back at the same time. He was so comfortably confident in his abilities that there was no need for him to be overbearing. He was fabulous to work for because I felt incredibly confident in his abilities, which soothed me, and as odd as it may sound, in a chaotic and stressful work environment, I felt safe and supported around him.
The theory Ms. Cuddy espouses suggests that changing your posture for just two minutes by standing in a position of confidence, even if we do not feel confident, can affect testosterone and cortisol levels in the brain significantly enough to give you a sense of power, thus reducing your stress levels. In the research, off their baseline, individuals who posed in high power poses experienced a whopping 20% increase in testosterone, along with a 25% decrease in cortisol after just a two minute pose.
When we feel powerful and calm, we also feel confident and capable. The key to this scenario is that as testosterone goes up, cortisol comes down, so we are not talking about the aggressive and stressed male, we are talking about the quietly confident and strong male, which is incredibly sexy for most women. I think all women want a partner that they feel physically and emotionally safe around, who they see as intelligent and confident, and who they believe is capable of being an assertive leader when needed, but whom they never worry will become aggressive. Is power posing the means to harnessing testosterone and utilizing its potential?
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When we feel powerless, we tend to hunch, collapse, make ourselves small, and close in on ourselves.
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Think of the man who sits down anywhere in public, maybe on the subway, and spreads his legs out, taking up premium space; is he obnoxiously trying to show off his package, or is that a form of power posing? If you watch the TED talk you will see that exact pose. Expanding, taking up space and opening your body up, in both the animal kingdom and within the human species, is indicative of feeling powerful, either in the moment, or habitually. Gender does seem to play a role in power dynamics. “Women chronically feel less powerful than men,” perhaps partly due to lower testosterone levels, thus are typically less likely to exhibit high power body language. All the more reason for our female readers to start power posing regularly.
When we feel powerless, we tend to hunch, collapse, make ourselves small, and close in on ourselves. Research in the lab with individuals who completed low power poses showed an increase in cortisol, and a decrease in testosterone. So, when I have to go to court in a few weeks, where I will see my ex for the first time in years, I will be completing some power poses beforehand, and I will deliberately be sitting in a “high power” pose.
I will do so, because, when met with power, we do not tend to mirror the other, which is generally the rule of human communication. Instead, we tend to compliment the level of power being demonstrated by doing the opposite. When meeting a person who demonstrates through their body language that they feel powerful, we will likely take a low power position. This behaviour will keep us safe in the jungles of Rwanda when we are in the vicinity of a Silverback Gorilla, but that is not necessarily to our benefit in our daily first world life. Keep that fact in mind the next time you are confronted with power and be mindful of what your body language instinctively does.
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Do I power pose? I did, for months. After watching this TED talk, I incorporated power posing into the healing plan I formulated to recover from a systemic life crisis that had left me feeling incredibly powerless. I used those two minutes, multiple times a day if needed, to not only pose, but to tell myself positive and powerful thoughts such as: I am strong; I am brave; I am capable; I will not let this beat me; I can recover.
Before you walk into the next socially threatening situation such as speaking publicly, taking a test, having a job interview, or meeting the boss to ask for a raise, take two minutes to power pose and “configure your brain to cope the best in that situation.”
Photo/Flickr:JD Hancock