There’s a trick to feeling more confident, and it involves impersonating Wonder Woman.
No joke!
Social scientist Amy Cuddy found that standing in a power pose—with your hand on your hips, back straight, head up high, feet firmly on the ground—for just two minutes makes you feel like you can take on the world.[1]
Now, just to be clear, she recommends that you do this in a bathroom stall or somewhere private so that no one will look at you strangely. 😉
But it really works, and it works for a surprising reason…
We all know that our body language reveals what we’re feeling.
You can tell whether a person is feeling shy or confident just by the way they hold themselves.
But what most people don’t realize is that our body language can CHANGE how we feel.
Consciously holding ourselves in a different way affects our mood and our confidence and even what thoughts are going through our head.
Any of you who’ve done a yoga class know this from experience.
You go in feeling stressed out and in a hurry and thinking about the thousand things you have to do…
And you leave feeling relaxed and calm and blissed out. Hopefully!
Now for the even MORE exciting bit of research…
Changing the way you hold your body doesn’t just change how YOU feel.
It changes how other people see you.
Adjusting the way you hold your body can not only make you come across as more confident and authoritative, but it can also make you MUCH more attractive.
Here’s how…
You Don’t Look The Way You Think You Look
We are bombarded 24-7 with two-dimensional images of women.
Beauty ads. Billboards. Even our own reflection in the mirror.
So it’s natural that, when we think about how we look, we think of ourselves as an image. We imagine ourselves the way the camera sees us. Flat, frozen, two-dimensional.
But that is not how we look to others.
When other people see us, they see beings in motion.
They see our posture, our facial expressions, our gestures, our movements.
We’re never still. We’re always moving.
And our gestures and movements are SO revealing.
They reveal how we’re feeling and what we’re thinking. They reveal cultural influences and habits. They even reveal how we feel about our bodies.
We give ourselves away, and we can’t help it.
Our bodies are ALWAYS communicating.
Yet we focus so much on outward appearances—our hair and our makeup and our physique—and so little on what our movements are communicating.
Some people lug their bodies around like they’re weights.
Other people hold their bodies stiffly, like tin soldiers.
Others almost dance, like they’re performing with each movement.
The way we hold our bodies is mostly habitual, but it’s also affected by what’s going on for us in the moment.
If someone meets you right after you’ve just had a massage, they might form a different conclusion about you than if they met you when you were feeling stiff and achy.
The way we move can reveal how old we are, how comfortable we feel in ourselves, whether we’re mostly sedentary or athletic, whether we’re tired, and so much more.
And if you’ve never thought much about how you hold your body, then you are in for a treat, because a better relationship with your body will bring you confidence, happiness, and a whole lot more male attention!
Here are 3 steps to get you started.
Step #1. Quality Time
You should be spending quality time with your body at least once a week.
Do something nice for your body that makes it feel good. Block out some time on the weekends to just hang out with your body. No phone, no TV, just you and your body and maybe some nice music and something you’ll both enjoy…
Like dancing or swimming or a hot bath or sitting out in the sun or even just lying flat on your bed breathing in and out.
Turn off your mind and feel the sensations you normally tune out. Notice the warmth on your skin, the pressure of the sofa against your legs, the way your breath fills your chest and releases.
If you have the time, do this daily as soon as you get home from work. Before jumping straight into cooking dinner or doing chores, take 5 to 15 minutes for yourself to remember how it feels to be embodied.
Step #2. Awareness
It is so easy to lose sight of the fact that you live in a body.
We spend so much time in our heads!
For many of us, our work keeps us in our heads. When we get home, we just want to stare at our devices. Our bodies end up becoming little more than vehicles driving our brains to where they need to go.
No wonder we end up struggling to create chemistry, because we’re trying to use our minds to attract when in fact we should be letting our bodies do the talking.
So, in this step, I’d like you to start noticing when you are leaving your body.
When are you in your head, completely disconnected from your physicality?
We tend to disconnect from our bodies any time we’re under pressure.
You’re talking to someone, and all of a sudden all you can think about is how they’re seeing you. You’re not in your body anymore. You’re using your mind to get outside your body and imagine how it looks like to someone else.
Self-consciousness is a sign that you need to get back into your body.
You can do that by redirecting part of your attention to what you’re experiencing through your senses.
A classic exercise is to ask yourself:
What’s one thing I see? What’s one thing I smell? What’s one thing I taste? What’s one thing I’m touching?”
You can also take deep breaths. Breathwork is a fantastic practice for connecting more deeply with your body.
Step #3. Alignment
As you cultivate your relationship with your body, and you become more aware of when you’re leaving your body, you may start to notice little thing about your body that you never noticed before…
Like how slight changes in your posture make you feel different.
Or how you move your body in a different way after you’ve finished a workout compared to after you’ve finished a day of work.
Or the difference between when you feel centered and grounded versus when you feel spacey and awkward.
What you notice, you can change.
If you notice you’re slumping, pull your head up and straighten your spine.
If you notice you’re squeezed tight in order to avoid taking up much space, relax and expand.
If you notice tension, breathe into those tense spots to loosen them up.
If you notice you’re tight, stretch out and get that flexibility back.
Ideally, you’ll be able to do these adjustments on the fly any time you need to, because you’ll be aware of how your body is feeling and what you need to do to get back in alignment.
When your body is aligned and grounded, you feel more confident and empowered, and people react to you differently.
You’re more attractive without changing a thing about how you look.
So give it a try. When you enjoy your body, and you enjoy moving your body and being a body, it makes a huge difference—regardless of what the mirror says!
[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/amy_cuddy_your_body_language_may_shape_who_you_are/transcript?language=en
Let us know what you think!