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Changing Your Posture Can Boost Your Confidence Before a Job Interview
2-minute exercise for any stressful social situation
If you’ve ever sat in line outside the hiring manager’s office, waiting for your turn among your peers, then you know what the picture looks like. A row of slouched backs, crossed arms and twitching legs.
Turns out, you can boost your confidence significantly just by changing your posture.
Social psychologist Amy Cuddy calls them power poses — the body language of confident, powerful people. Power poses are basically variations of straightening your shoulders, raising your hands upwards in a “V” formation, raising your chin and spreading your legs.
(This, she says, is the instinctive posture of a winner — just look at how runners raise their hands and chin right after they cross the finish line. It’s something we’re born with, not taught.)
In her experiment, she discovered that people who spend 2 minutes in one of the power poses reported significantly higher testosterone levels and significantly lower cortisol levels.
And the beauty of it? You can encourage your brain into being more confident just by changing your posture.
