Want to ace your next interview and land that job you have been seeking? Want to confidently give a killer presentation? Or want to radiate self-confidence on your first date? Then you need to believe in the power of the body language. According to Amy Cuddy’s study, 86.36% of people feel more powerful and in charge when posing with certain body gestures.
Act Powerful, Be Powerful
Body language or Nonverbal communication is a common yet powerful tool that we can use to demonstrate our personality. It doesn’t matter whether you are feeling the confidence inside yourself or you are just faking it with body language; it will help you in the same way and present you as a confident person.
Your Posture Changes Your Hormonal level
An experiment carried out by Amy Cuddy, an American social psychologist, along with Dana Carney and Andy Yap at Harvard University and Columbia University respectively, showed that body language not only affects how people see us, it also affects how we see ourselves. Amy Cuddy discusses how our posture can affect testosterone and cortisol levels in the brain and change our feelings about ourselves. That means strong and confident body language, even if it’s not representative of how we feel, can have a positive impact on how we are perceived.
Cuddy and her team have classified different body positions as “high power” or “low power” poses. In general, the “high-power poses” are open and relaxed like the wonder woman pose which shows high confidence, while the “low-power poses” are closed and guarded which hint that you may lack self-confidence, or you need protection from other people.
Heather Wilson on the left, features a low power pose with her hands closed, while David Lee featuring a high-power posture with his hands wide open. Source.
Based on their experiment on forty-two participants (26 females and 16 males) who were randomly assigned to the high-power pose or low-power pose conditions and then checked for their hormone levels through their saliva; nonverbal expressions of power can decrease the cortisol level in our body and increase the testosterone hormone. Higher levels of testosterone (in both men and women) lead to increased feelings of confidence. Meanwhile, lower levels of cortisol lead to decreased anxiety and an improved ability to deal with stress.
The two-minute solution
Based on their interesting research, only two-minutes of “high power” posing, such as the wonder woman pose, can increase our confidence level.
Amy Cuddy demonstrating her theory of “power posing”. Source.
Watch Amy Cuddy’s 20–Minute TED Talk
Want more? Amy Cuddy’s experiment and its amazing result were widely reported in popular media. The following video is her talk from TEDGlobal 2012. She explains how our body language shapes who we are.
The key points to take from her speech:
” Our bodies change our minds;
Our minds change our behavior;
Our behavior changes our outcome! “
