FIRST, YOUR POSTURE

We know that using confident body language is one of the best ways for women to avoid being negatively stereotyped in the workplace, but standing up straight could be your most powerful tool yet

At a TED Global 2012 conference, social psychologist Amy Cuddy gave the talk “Your Body Language May Shape Who You Are”, in which she detailed the effects of “power posing”, based on her research that found that adopting expansive postures (where we open up, spread out and make ourselves big) causes people to feel more powerful. It was a simple finding that went viral, going on to become one of TED’S most-watched talks ever, with currently more than 44 million views.

In her work as a Harvard Business School professor, Cuddy observed that posture seemed to be related to gender, with women much more likely to make themselves smaller than men. “Women feel chronically less powerful than men, so this is not surprising,” she said. Her intent was to see if it was possible to fake it, that if you pretend to be powerful are you more likely to actually feel powerful. “We know that our minds change our bodies, but is it also true that our bodies change our minds?” Cuddy went so far as to say that assuming a power position (hands on hips, for example) for just two minutes was enough to have an effect on our hormones, spiking testosterone (related to dominance) and lowering cortisol (related to stress).

While the science is still out on those claims, Cuddy recently affirmed the power-posing effect has since been replicated in at least nine published studies and backed up by Columbia University professor Adam Galinsky, who wrote in a 2016 review that a person’s sense of power “produces a range of cognitive, behavioural and physiological consequences”, including improved executive functioning, optimism, creativity, authenticity and the ability to self-regulate.

Six years after her talk, the powerposing-for-two-minutes idea has been countlessly enacted before everything from job interviews to hot dates, but Cuddy recently told TED her unintentional oversimplification may have allowed people to miss the broader idea — “that how we carry our bodies affects how we feel about ourselves, how we interact with others, how we perform and so on... As Maya Angelou wrote, ‘Stand up straight and realise who you are, that you tower over your circumstances.’ It’s not just about standing like a superhero for two minutes; it’s about carrying yourself with power and pride and poise, as you deserve to do.”