What if you could effortlessly be more confident, authentic, passionate and captivating?
What if there was a simple, powerful life hack that instantly raised your chances of securing that job or promotion, getting the date, of being more assertive in challenging conversations?
Well, there is. Power poses are Nature’s gift to us for when we need a little help in the self belief and confidence department, so when we’re feeling less than capable we have an effective technique to give us a boost and help us make an impact.
We often wait until we feel fully confident and self assured before going after what we truly want or creating our own opportunities, we doubt our ability to succeed so we procrastinate, sometimes waiting years before taking the risk and acting on our dreams. But what if we didn’t have to wait, what if we could affect the way we feel from the outside in? In her fascinating talk about Body Language, Amy Cuddy talks about how assuming various physical shapes – Power Poses - can powerfully affect how we feel and how people perceive us. How magical is that? She says:
‘Our bodies change our minds, our minds change our behaviour and our behaviour changes our outcomes’.
Consider when animals want to defend themselves or territory, cat’s fluff their fur and amble sideways to look bigger, gorillas stick their chests out and we, Human animals, naturally adopt these stances too. We get a physical feeling of expansion from winning a race or game and we instantly raise our arms to take up space. We do this when we win but we can also improve our chances of winning by using power poses. Much like creative visualisation where we mentally rehearse or imagine the winning outcome, we can impact the outcome of our situation by adopting the power pose and embodying the feeling of a winner before we go into a situation that requires our confidence and self belief.
It’s well documented that, even if we don’t feel it initially, smiling actually makes us feel happy, our systems are that intelligent that we can rewire our brain to signal to it that we are indeed happy just by faking it – giving credence to the old adage - fake it til you make it - go on, try it 😊.
So the next time you’ve got a job interview or you're in any high stakes situation where you need to show up as your best, most confident self remember Power Posing. Either spend two minutes with your hands behind your head and elbows and feet wide, hands on hips, or arms outstretched in a V shape and take some deep full breaths. Another beautiful thing about Power Posing is no one needs to know you’re doing it, you can slink off to the bathroom and assume your position of choice and voila, you’re inviting in full power, authenticity, confidence and self belief.
Happy Power Posing!