So I wanna start by offering you a free, no-tech life hack and all it requires of you is this:
that you change your posture for two minutes. I became especially interested in non-verbal
expressions of power and dominance. And what are non-verbal expressions of power and dominance?
So, in the animal kingdom they are about expanding so you make yourself big you stretch out and
humans do the same thing. So they do this both when they have power sort of chronically
and also when they're feeling powerful in the moment. So, powerful people tend to be
not surprisingly more assertive and more confident. Physiologically there also are differences-
on two key hormones. Testosterone which is the dominance hormone and cortisol which is
the stress hormone. We decided to bring people into the lab and run a little experiment and
these people adopted for two minutes, high power poses or low power poses. And I'm just
gonna show you five of the poses although they took on only two. This is what happens.
They come in they spit into a vial. We for two minutes say you need to do this or this.
We then ask them how powerful do you feel on a series of items... and then we take another
saliva sample. Here's what we find on testosterone: from their baseline when they come in, high
power people experience about a 20% increase and low power people experience about a 10%
decrease. Here's what you get on cortisol: High power people experience about a 25% decrease
and the low power people experience about a 15% 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. But the next question of course is can power
posing for a few minutes really change your life in meaningful ways? And so what matters
in where you wanna use this is evaluative situations- we decided that the one that most
people could relate to was the job interview. What do you do before you go into a job interview?
You do this. Right, you're sitting down, you're looking at your notes, you're hunching up
and making yourself small. When really what you should be doing maybe- is this. Like,
in the bathroom. Okay, so we bring people into a lab and they do either high or low
power poses again. They go through a very stressful job interview, it's five minutes
long, they are being recorded, they're being judged also. We then have these coders look
at these tapes, four of them. They're blind to the hypothesis, they're blind to the conditions
they have no idea who's been posing and in what pose. They end up looking at these sets
of tapes and they say "oh we wanna hire these people, all the high power posers. We don't
wanna hire these people. But what's driving it? It's not about the content of the speech,
it's about the presence that they're bringing to the speech. The last thing I'm going to
leave you with is this: Tiny Tweaks can lead to big changes. Before you go into the next
stressful evaluative situation, for two minutes, try doing this- in the elevator, in a bathroom
stall, at your desk behind closed doors, that's what you wanna do. Get, configure your brain
to cope the best in that situation. Get your testosterone up, get your cortisol down and
it can significantly change the outcomes of your life. Thank you.