Amy Cuddy’s speech “Your Body Language May Shape Who You Are” is one of the most popular videos on the TED Talks platform in the past 10 years.
Even if you have never watched this specific video, you may have heard of an expression such as “fake it till you make it”, and that’s the subject and idea Amy tried to explore in her research and deliver to her audience -can you fake it till you make it?
The answer is affirmative.
Our mind changes our body, and it’s also true that our body changes our mind.
Amy’s study shows that a simple change to the body poses can affect one’s tolerance of the risk. In her experiment, participants with high-power poses tend to have higher tolerances of the risk. Powerful people tend to be more assertive, confident, and optimistic. Furthermore, they feel as if they are going to win and that ends up making them take up more risks.
Her research also shows there are differences in the hormones between powerful and powerless people, and there are two key hormones: testosterone and cortisol. The former is known as the dominance hormone and the latter one represents a stress hormone.
In her study, high-power alpha males in primate hierarchies have high testosterone low cortisol, and similarly, powerful and effective leaders demonstrate similar hormonal outcomes.
Nonverbals govern how other people think and feel about us as well as how we think and feel about ourselves. In conclusion, feeling powerful does not only mean being confident or dominant but also helps us manage stress.
When dealing with stressful situations, we can strike a high-power pose to pretend we are feeling powerful in order to alter our hormones, and eventually, we will empower ourselves with a boosted feeling of confidence and that might lead to a greater chance for success.
