Power Postures Explained by Amy Cuddy

Amy Cuddy did a TED talk (no cost, 18 minute talks) on Power Dynamics.  There is a video and also a transcription of it, if you want to watch it or read it in it's totality.  I have copied a few excerpts here, it's worth its weight in gold, I promise.  The "non-tech life hack" will increase testosterone, decrease cortisol, and allow you to feel more assertive, confident, and comfortable.  As she suggests, this would be beneficial for every one of us that is not currently a high-powered Alpha male and/or a powerful leader, when we are in situations where we would like to feel more powerful......always, please!!  However, it is especially well-suited for job interviews and public speaking engagements, yay:)

She specifically asks that we share this with others who are in less powerful positions, what an amazing gift to the world!!

".........Alex Todorov at Princeton has shown us that judgments of political candidates' faces in just one second predict 70 percent of U.S. Senate and gubernatorial race outcomes, and even, let's go digital, emoticons used well in online negotiations can lead to you claim more value from that negotiation.......

......we know that our minds change our bodies, but is it also true that our bodies change our minds? And when I say minds, in the case of the powerful, what am I talking about? So I'm talking about thoughts and feelings and the sort of physiological things that make up our thoughts and feelings, and in my case, that's hormones. I look at hormones. So what do the minds of the powerful versus the powerless look like? So powerful people tend to be, not surprisingly, more assertive and more confident, more optimistic. They actually feel that they're going to win even at games of chance. They also tend to be able to think more abstractly. So there are a lot of differences. They take more risks. There are a lot of differences between powerful and powerless people............

.........this is what we did. We decided to bring people into the lab and run a little experiment, and these people adopted, for two minutes, either high-power poses or low-power poses, and I'm just going to show you five of the poses, although they took on only two. So here's one. A couple more. This one has been dubbed the "Wonder Woman" by the media. Here are a couple more. So you can be standing or you can be sitting. And here are the low-power poses. So you're folding up, you're making yourself small. This one is very low-power. When you're touching your neck, you're really protecting yourself.......

 .......Here's what we find on testosterone.  From their baseline when they come in, high-power people experience about a 20-percent increase, and low-power people experience about a 10-percent decrease. So again, two minutes, and you get these changes. Here's what you get on cortisol. High-power people experience about a 25-percent decrease, and the low-power people experience about a 15-percent increase.So two minutes lead to these hormonal changes that configure your brain to basically be either assertive, confident and comfortable, or really stress-reactive, and, you know, feeling sort of shut down."

The condensed version of the official study is that doing a power posture for two minutes can provide you with "Alpha" hormones and qualities of leadership, allowing more of our authentic selves to shine through in stressful situations.  Please pass it on!!  

Have a wonderful day!

Xo

Conni

Today's Mantra:  I choose to use Power Poses to allow my authentic self to shine.

Mantra for Every Day: I choose to send love to all; receiving love back multiplied in infinite proportions, creating and nurturing pathways of love.