Amy Cuddy is a psychologist who specialises in adapting body language to succeed in your career, in business or in any other setting, such as a job interview.
While most experts recommend changing your body language to appear to be, hide or pretend to be someone you really are not, for Amy, working on certain postures and correcting “wrong” body language could bring a real benefit: not just faking it, but actually becoming the person we are pretending to be.
Amy Cuddy, whose TED talk is linked at the end of this article, mainly distinguishes two types of body posture:
1. The power pose: expansive, dominant and confident.
2. The powerless pose (that of people who will lose in a job interview or a negotiation, and who generally won’t make a good impression on you).
But all of this can be changed. Picture two people side by side, one in each kind of posture: anyone can tell who has the power just by looking at them. You don’t need to know anything at all about body language, because it is simply perceived.
The body speaks for itself, and that is why, when we study body language, we can tell whether someone likes us, whether a negotiation is on the right track, and even quickly spot who is in charge in a group of businesspeople we are negotiating with.
Imagine you walk into a room and find two people in postures of inferiority, the powerless kind.
Now imagine you walk into a room and find two people in postures of superiority, the powerful kind.
Clearly, if you were a recruiter, on seeing the second pair you would think these two candidates were very cocky, couldn’t-care-less, arrogant and so on; in fact, these are postures that are not recommended. But if they were the boss or the owner of a company, they would be showing a lot of confidence and, above all, power.
Changing our body language to change ourselves
Amy Cuddy explains how adopting the body language of the most powerful people would help us get better jobs, make us feel more confident and, in general, bring us more success. But her explanation is not just about fooling others by pretending; it is about the hormonal changes that this would produce in us.
The two hormones in question are testosterone and cortisol.
While testosterone is the hormone of power, of the fighter, of the focused and concentrated person, which helps us be better leaders, cortisol is the stress hormone that makes us feel more powerless and overwhelmed.
(Read: 10 things you can use to get an edge over others)
Amy Cuddy’s impressive experiment
In this psychologist’s study, people were taken into a room and, for two minutes, some of them had to hold a power (expansive) pose while the others had to hold a “powerless” pose. The results, according to Cuddy, were impressive.
Neutral recruiters who did not know it was an experiment ended up choosing to hire the people who had held the expansive pose for those two minutes.
But it didn’t stop there: the participants’ actual hormone levels changed dramatically after holding the poses. In those who had held the powerless poses, testosterone levels fell while cortisol rose, and in the others the opposite happened.
- 7 body language techniques that will help you in business
- 9 body language mistakes that could cost you the job
So Amy Cuddy confirms the theory that you can “fake it till you make it”.
This is Amy Cuddy’s talk:
Watch: Your body language may shape who you are (Amy Cuddy, TED)
See also: Part 2: How to change your body language and where to start
Featured image: PopTech, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Flickr.
