Game changing Body Language

You don’t have to watch Strictly Come Dancing for too long before you hear some hapless celebrity being critiqued for their ‘top line.’ It’s done for good reason as the results are instant.  What they are saying is, quite simply, stand up straight and be ‘open’.

In a situation where you need to be noticed and remembered if you think about your posture and align your spine you will appear more confident and present.  It doesn’t mean that you have to spend you whole life from this moment onwards moving about like something out of the Bolshoi, but it does mean that have another technique for creating impact wherever you are.  Try it – it works.

This fascinating study by Amy Cuddy delves into the world of the ‘power pose’ and does so with discernable results.  After studying the habitual poses made by powerful people, she conducts an experiment with some less powerful students to see whether adopting similar poses affects the chemical balance in their bodies.  Some of the students adopted power poses for two minutes and others adopted ‘weaker’ poses for a similar amount of time.

The findings showed that there is a marked increase in testosterone, the chemical which is associated with confidence, in those who adopted the more powerful pose and so the theory is that by spending only a couple of minutes in a ‘power pose’ we can chemically change our levels of confidence.  Probably best to be reasonably discreet when adopting those poses though!