Amy Cuddy gave a fascinating, and research-backed, suggestion for anyone heading into a job interview, a first date or a public speaking event: stand in front of a mirror, put your hands on your hips, tilt your chin up, and make yourself as tall as you can get. Even better: throw your arms up and out. In her lab, Cuddy found that “power posing” for two minutes was enough to increase testosterone levels and decrease cortisol, making people feel more in control. In other words, the way you hold your body can change how you feel about yourself.

Amy Cuddy: Your body language shapes who you areThis is the idea that today’s TED Weekends on the Huffington Post explores: can feeling follow from the way you use your body? Here, three of the great essays that are available now for your reading pleasure. 

Amy Cuddy: Power is great, but warmth comes first

You must understand the people you’re trying to influence or lead by building trust first before demonstrating competence and power. You must be able to show them that you understand them — and, better yet, that you can relate to them. By doing that, you’re laying the groundwork for trust. And it’s only then that they can really hear you and be open to your ideas. Trust is the conduit for influence; it’s the medium through which ideas travel. If they don’t trust you, your ideas are just dead in the water. If they trust you, they’re open and they can hear what you’re offering. Having the best idea is worth nothing if people don’t trust you.

It’s not uncommon for people to overvalue the importance of demonstrating their competence and power, often at the expense of demonstrating their warmth. I think it’s especially common for people striving for leadership positions — in politics, business, law, medicine… you name it. Too many people try to be the smartest guy in the room — the alpha — and that’s not actually how you become persuasive or become a good leader. It’s a mistake. People judge trustworthiness before competence. They make inferences of trustworthiness and warmth before competence and power.

Read the full essay >>

Dr. Douglas Fields: Thinking with Your Body

I’d like you to imagine a specific incident in your past. Imagine the last time you were afraid. I mean really afraid – terrified. It might have been a close encounter with a robber on a dark street, or quaking just before speaking in front of a crowd, or a personal phobia, such as fear of heights or flying. Recall the sensations of that fear — the racing heart about to burst, panting, intestines twisted into knots, knees shaking and hands trembling, cold sweat oozing out of your palms and beading up on your forehead.

Now imagine exactly the same scene, but without any of the bodily sensations that fear brings. No sweaty palms, heart rate and breathing calm, your muscles relaxed and your stomach content. Are you still afraid? What would fear be without the body? Can fear exist only in the mind?

Read the full essay >>

Dr. Craig Malkin: Can Acting in Love Help You Stay in Love?

In her deeply fascinating, often moving TEDTalk, “Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are,” Amy Cuddy offers up a thesis with startling implications: even the simplest act, repeated over time, can profoundly shape our destiny. After citing evidence from her own research that two minutes of standing in a more powerful position alters our brain and body chemistry, helping us become more assertive, confident, and passionate, Dr. Cuddy goes on to describe how she, herself, overcame the debilitating neurological effects of a devastating auto accident by faking confidence until she actually becameconfident. She stands before us, transformed from the diffident, traumatized young woman she once was, into a vibrant, compelling leader in her field — living proof that how we behave shapes not just our feelings, but who we are.

For many, this research may come as a surprise, but Dr. Cuddy’s findings are actually part of a rapidly growing body of evidence that, across a range of important human experiences, feeling often follows action.

Read the full essay >>

TED Talks often get 100 or more comments — a mixed bag of kudos, critiques and questions. Looking back on the year, here are a few comments that wowed us.

Our speakers want to hear from you! If something in the talk was unclear or you’re wondering where the research will go next, don’t be shy – ask about it. Many speakers check their talk pages routinely, so it’s the perfect place to seek answers and updates.

Here, commenter Adel Alsuhaimion asks a question of Amy Cuddy about her talk “Your body language shapes who you are”:

“Well presented topic & very useful tools. Thank you.

You’re absolutely right, Amy, that body language can and will change the outcome of many situations where face-to-face contact is the case.

I wonder if the same conclusions can be generalized to present time visual/audio communications via laptops and or iPhones? Would body language effect still prevail or contract due to limited viewing through the 4″X6″ tiny screens?

Just curious!”

Read Cuddy’s response »

Commenter Karim Nasser addresses a question to Max Little about :A test for Parkinson’s with a phone call”:

“This is truly amazing, I don’t know much about PD and I wonder, does early detection help treat the disease?”

Read Little’s response »

Commenter Michael Bois on Margaret Heffernan’s talk “Dare to disagree “:

“I notice that some comments suggest it’s difficult to develop such an organisational culture. If you’re part of this school of thought it is possible that you are either the fearful employee or the unchallengeable leader. World class businesses – and people for that matter – are seekers of truth. We don’t mind if you ruffle our feathers provided your aim is to find the best solution.

That said, this can be dangerous ground for many organisations. If you hope to foster a culture of ‘disagreement’ it’s important to provide a structure for disagreements to be raised and managed. This will differ of course from one business to the next.

While the notion is undeniably beneficial, can anyone provide examples of its effective (or ineffective) implementation? How was the culture taught and to what demographic? What resources were required to facilitate disagreements? What happened if disagreements got out of hand? How were boundaries set to manage interpersonal relationships and boss vs employee expectations? If there are any texts or journals on this topic please post a link as a reply.”

Read Heffernan’s response »

“Her talk made me resolve to stop slouching this year. After watching it, I became hyper-aware of all the ways that I make myself look smaller,” says TED’s Customer Service Specialist Becky Chung. “Another resolution of mine is to do the Wonder Woman pose during breaks.”

Writer Kate Torgovnick echoes, “In 2013, I’m not going to let myself get stressed out. When I feel that rush of stress, I’m going to sit back, put my hands behind my head and stretch out my legs.”

Here, more talks that helped TED staffers form New Year’s resolutions.

Be vulnerable and keep an open heart — Brené Brown’s 2012 talk inspires one TED staffer. Photo: James Duncan Davidson

In the TEDTalk “Your body language shapes who you are,” Amy Cuddy shared that posing for two minutes in a powerful position — with the body expansive and the limbs stretched out — can have a profound effect on how a person feels. Yesterday, Cuddy and her co-researcher Dana Carney sat down for an interview with CNN’s Don Lemon to talk about their work.

“High-power individuals take on these non-verbal behaviors,” said Cuddy in the interview, while looking at images of classic power posing. “But the question Dana and I wanted to ask was, ‘Can this work the other way around? Can you actually use these poses and make people more powerful?’”

To hear more about how power posing can affect the way we think about ourselves, watch Cuddy’s talk or read her study “Power Posing” in the journal Psychological Science. And to hear what Cuddy makes of the candidate’s body language in the debates, read the TED Blog’s Q&A with her.

At TEDGlobal 2012, Amy Cuddy gave a talk about the remarkable power of our posture to affect our mental state: Strike a powerful pose (in private) before a job interview, and your performance will improve. 

With the US election coming up, we asked Cuddy, an expert on nonverbal communication, for her insights into political posturing — and what to look for in the upcoming presidential debates.

We’re right in the middle of politics season. I presume we can be looking for a lot of this kind of signaling. As an observer, what should we be looking for?

Stepping back from this specific research on power posing, more broadly what I study is how people judge and communicate both power/competence and warmth/trustworthiness. These are the two primary dimensions along which people evaluate each other — we ask: do I like this person (warmth/trustworthiness)? And do I respect this person (power/competence)? We’re constantly — although usually unintentionally — sending nonverbal signals that people use to judge how warm or powerful we are, and we’re also constantly judging how warm and powerful they are based on their nonverbal signals. So that’s what I’m looking for when I’m watching politicians: what their body language says — or is trying to say — about their power and their warmth.

I don’t see a lot of politicians in the national spotlight who are really struggling to communicate power, mostly because they focus so obsessively on appearing the strongest, the most alpha. But if you look for power poses, you’ll start noticing lots of them, especially in the debates. I have to admit, watching for them is a sort of guilty pleasure. Pay attention to how expansive the candidates’ postures are: Are they using wide, open, strong, defined gestures? Are they standing with their feet apart? Do they have their hands resting on the outsides of the podium, to spread out a bit more? Puffing out their chests a bit? Racing to be the first one to reach out and initiate the handshake? And how much space are they taking up? Are they trying to occupy each other’s space, by doing something like grabbing their opponent’s arm during the handshake? Or doing even more aggressive things, like walking toward their opponent and really getting up in their space, LBJ-style? It’s also interesting to track the nonverbals throughout the debate — is the stronger debater becoming even more expansive and the weaker debater beginning to close up a bit, even in subtle ways, like how much they lift or lower their chin?

But politicians can definitely make the mistake of coming across as too dominant, too alpha. There’s a good clip from the 2004 Australian Federal Election campaign. It was another handshake video. Mark Latham shakes the hand of his opponent’s — prime minister John Howard – really aggressively. Latham grabs Howard’s hand and yanks Howard toward him, almost to the point where their faces are touching, and staring him right in the eyes. A lot of Australians found it offensive; they didn’t like it at all — it just reinforced the image some people already had of Latham as a bit of a bully. It was an ultra-alpha move, and a lot of experts feel it severely damaged his image. So it’s a great example of too much dominance, too much power. The interaction — the handshake — is only about 4 seconds long; but, wow, is it a 4-second power pose that totally backfired.

Politicians are very experienced — maybe too experienced — at using body language to signal power and competence. But what these politicians are much more likely to struggle with, or just neglect to do altogether, is communicate warmth and trustworthiness.

So a lack of warmth can be damaging in a campaign?

Yes, definitely. Let me give you an example.

I wrote a case about a US Congressional candidate who was really having trouble communicating warmth, getting voters to like him and trust him. He wasn’t having trouble projecting competence and power – voters generally respected him and believed he was smart. But his inability to convey warmth was really doing him in. He was really trailing in the polls behind his opponent, who was a 26-year incumbent who was both respected (competence/power) and loved (warmth/trustworthiness) by the voters. So it turned out this newcomer candidate had a few nonverbal habits that were especially problematic. One was that he very, very rarely produced natural smiles, or Duchenne smiles, where the muscles around your eyes contract. (An aside – be kind to your crow’s feet, because they help you build relationships and make friends.) Natural smiles are contagious, almost like yawns: when you see one, it’s hard to resist smiling. And they’re also self-reinforcing: when you smile, your mood actually improves, making it easier to keep smiling. Second, when he did smile, it was when he was criticizing his opponent or his opponent’s party. And so there he’d be, talking about some very negative thing … while smiling. People don’t like that; it comes across as snarky and self-satisfied. Voters were like, “Sure, he’s smart, but I don’t like the guy.” I have to say, he really is a truly nice person – he cared so much about what he was doing – but he just didn’t know how to get that across. His third nonverbal bad habit was that he kept his eyebrows raised nearly all the time – during speeches, when he was meeting people one-on-one … so he looked alarmed and panicked – it’s like writing every email in ALL CAPS – and that makes the audience and the people you’re interacting with anxious and uncomfortable and even a little panicked themselves. When you’re watching someone give a speech or give a pitch and they have their eyebrows raised the whole time, it doesn’t give you a warm fuzzy feeling about the person. If somebody reaches out to shake your hand and their eyebrows are raised like that, it’s also off-putting. He was wise and open to feedback, so he brought in some very good consultants who worked closely to help him change these habits, and he – to everyone’s surprise – ended up coming from behind and winning the election.

Amazing. Why does that work so well?

You must understand the people you’re trying to influence or lead. You must be able to show them that you understand them – and, better yet, that you can relate to them. By doing that, you’re laying the groundwork for trust. And it’s only then that they can really hear you and be open to your ideas. Trust is the conduit for influence; it’s the medium through which ideas travel. If they don’t trust you, your ideas are just dead in the water. If they trust you, they’re open and they can hear what you’re offering. Having the best idea is worth nothing if people don’t trust you.

It’s not uncommon for people to overvalue the importance of demonstrating their competence and power, often at the expense of demonstrating their warmth. I think it’s especially common for people striving for leadership positions – in politics, business, law, medicine…you name it. Too many people try to be the smartest guy in the room – the alpha – and that’s not actually how you become persuasive or become a good leader. It’s a mistake. People judge trustworthiness before competence. They make inferences of trustworthiness and warmth before competence and power. And the reason is that it answers the question, “Is this person friend or foe?” With a stranger, you first want to know what their intentions are toward you, and then you want to know, can they carry out those intentions? You have to connect with people and build trust before you can influence or lead them.

Women – Hillary Clinton, for example – have faced a kind of treacherous double bind when it comes to being seen as both competent AND warm. Women are much more likely than men to be seen as high on one dimension and low on the other (the sweet, incompetent, fragile, feminine woman vs. the strong, cruel, inhuman, masculine woman who doesn’t have a heart). I do quite a bit of research on this phenomenon, and I could talk for hours to this point. Women in the public eye are really penalized for deviations from what society has prescribed for them – which is usually to be a warm, soft caretaker – and they have to work doubletime to manage that. It’s pretty unfair.

But to come back to this point: you have to build trust before you can lead. I know this may seem to contradict what I say about power posing, but it absolutely doesn’t. It’s really important to separate what you do before the interaction, from what you do during the interaction. You want to feel powerful going in – but that does not equal dominant or alpha. You want to feel that you have the power to bring your full, spirited self to the situation, stripped of the fears and inhibitions that might typically hold you back. I believe this allows you not just to be stronger, but also to be more open and trusting. But nonverbally displaying power during the interaction – now that’s another thing with different prescriptions and outcomes. I’m definitely not an advocate, as I think I’ve made clear by now, of going in and power-posing in front of people in order to intimidate them or something. Yes, use strong, open nonverbals: Don’t slouch or make yourself small, and be as big as you can comfortably be. But don’t use alpha cowboy moves, like sitting with legs apart and your arm draped over the back of the chair next to you. That can directly undermine the trust you need to build.

So I think it’s more interesting, when watching politicians, to look for these warmth and trustworthiness nonverbals. Not that the power poses aren’t entertaining, because they definitely are. But I’d have to argue that warmth is actually more important. Look for natural smiles, for body language that is inviting, positive, and that signals interest in the other person or people. Even a gentle touch – one that’s appropriate, of course – like when one candidate gently touches the other on the shoulder.  But warm, natural smiles are hugely important. A nice, relatively recent example is watching Obama when he sings the first little bit of the Al Green song “Let’s Stay Together.” Not only does he have a surprisingly good voice, but when I watch people watch him break into that big smile, I watch them melt – I watch them warm up as they’re watching him. It’s contagious and hard to avoid. Obama has become pretty good nonverbally on both dimensions, although I think his ability to convey warmth has gotten much better as he’s become more relaxed. You see more of those natural smiles. He comes across as strong without seeming like an over-aggressive alpha. And I think he knows when it’s time to be really powerful nonverbally, and when it’s time to play it down a little bit.

Is there something people can do to convey warmth?

Yes, I think so. I sometimes work with a communications and media training firm called KNP Communications. It’s nice to bring the research to the practitioners; I learn a lot watching how they put it into practice, and I know they like to be on top of what’s happening on the research front. The KNP guys talk a lot about “inside-out vs. outside-in” nonverbals. Their approach is grounded in both science and method acting.

A lot of politicians, not surprisingly, hire consultants to help them with their nonverbals, presence, generally how they come across. The classic, now dated way consultants would deal with these issues was to tell politicians, “When you say this word I want you to move your hand like this.” And that’s the outside-in approach, where you try to change the nonverbal behavior from the outside, like it’s all perfectly choreographed. It’s really, really hard to do that and have it come across as natural. You can’t, in that very artificial way, synchronize across the nonverbal channels – you’ve got your tone of voice, what your face is doing, what your eyes are doing, what your hands are doing, what your lower body’s doing. If you’re told to make a very defined gesture at a scripted time, it looks really artificial, and people – voters, audience members – at some visceral level recognize that and find it a bit repulsive.

Using an inside-out approach really gets you into the right frame of mind. It’s more like preparatory power posing: you’re configuring your brain and body to smoothly and naturally perform well. So if you’re struggling to produce real smiles, like the Congressional candidate who wasn’t connecting with voters was, you need to figure out what you’re doing when you are producing natural smiles – because almost everyone does, at some times, produce natural smiles. For the Congressional candidate, it was when he talked about his son. So when KNP worked with him, they had him, in the next few speeches, talk about his son. He’d say, “Let me tell you about my son, Michael [a pseudonym].” And his face just authentically went into this natural smile, and everyone would smile, and he’d smile.

People send me political clips all the time because there’s just so much great stuff out there. But usually what they are sending me are examples of people who look uncomfortably artificial, versus really natural.

A couple of examples. There’s a John McCain clip, it’s really incredible, where he’s saying that he’s going to “follow Osama Bin Laden to the gates of hell.” And then at the very end of this aggressive, fierce statement, he breaks into this painfully fake smile. There he is, so angrily and forcefully talking about how he’s going to follow someone to the gates of hell … and smiling. McCain’s smiles were often poorly timed, almost random, and artificial. You can tell that someone, maybe a coach, maybe an advisor, said, “You need to smile more, Senator.” And it’s as if whenever he paused, he’d remember: “must smile more, must smile more,” but it was often at the most inopportune times. It looks terribly awkward, and it makes people really uncomfortable.

You can look at almost anything from John Kerry during his run for the presidency. Here’s this guy who really knew his stuff – very competent – but he absolutely could not connect with voters. As one of my practitioner- collaborators described him, “He learned oration at his father’s knee, pre-Oprah. He didn’t learn how to connect with voters. It was as if he could see his words chiseled in stone as they were coming out of his mouth.” I often show Kerry clips when I’m teaching, and the reaction is pretty universal – regardless of party membership or culture of origin – people see him as competent, but stiff, robotic, and unable to connect with voters. Same for Al Gore while he was running for President. He often looked wooden and overscripted, not able to pull off the bad choreography, and so focused on the content of his ideas that he forgot all about connecting.

Being overscripted can make you look both powerless and untrustworthy. The perceived powerlessness comes from the sense that you don’t have enough confidence in what you’re saying to go out there and say it. Being a comfortable public speaker, which involves easily being able to go off-script, strongly signals competence. And if you over-rely on a script, who knows whose ideas you’re even reciting? Of course all politicians use speechwriters, but voters want to feel that the ideas are yours, and that you are speaking with conviction. Being overscriped makes people trust you less, because you come across as disingenuous and distant. They want to feel like you’re speaking to them, not to a camera or a focus group; they want you to connect with them. If you can’t do that, your audience doesn’t feel understood, and if they don’t think you understand them, how can they trust you?

That’s amazing. In the TEDTalk, a lot of it was about how to strike a power pose. Is there something similar you can do with warmth?

As with power posing, I think it’s great to get yourself into a warm and trusting state of mind before you go into an interaction. How do you do that? The strategy that is most similar to preparatory power posing is to force yourself to smile by holding a pen or pencil horizontally between your teeth.  It actually forces the contraction of the muscles around both the mouth and the eyes. And if you do that, as I mentioned earlier, it improves your mood. Social psychologists call this facial feedback; I’d say power posing is postural feedback, and both are demonstrations of how nonverbals actually change our feelings. Facial feedback, which is sort of the parallel to the postural feedback you get from power posing, was the first real evidence that not only do nonverbals reflect our feelings, but nonverbals also change our feelings.

Anyway, things to make you warm: I think it really is about paying attention to your own nonverbals, even if that means watching video of yourself, thinking about, “What are the moments when I’m producing these natural smiles?” Basically, you’re trying to integrate your personal and your professional lives. You’re find the stimuli in your personal life that make you feel positive and trusting, and trying to find a way to import them into your professional interactions. My practitioner-collaborator friend refers to these things as “backyard barbeque behaviors,” and he helps his clients identify these things.

This may sound silly, but engaging in chitchat or small talk with someone you’re about to negotiate with has powerful effects on the outcomes of the negotiation. It establishes that sense of mutual understanding and trust that I was talking about earlier. Ask people where they’re from, talk about kids, sports teams, the city you’re in, things like that, before the interaction formally begins. A few minutes of chitchat before a negotiation improve your negotiation outcome. I’m not making this up – there’s sound experimental research that has shown this. Just chitchatting. Even in online/email negotiations, things like mimicking the emoticons used by the other party – at the right times – can improve your outcome. So it’s really that any effort you make to truly connect with the person that you are having a transaction or an interaction with is likely to lead to a more positive outcome for everybody, and to make you more persuasive.

And, of course, and this isn’t new, but just thinking about the things that make you feel the most relaxed and happy – your family, special places or memories, things you’re looking forward to, positive interactions you’ve had with people, news stories about normal people doing heroic things, spending time with your dog or cat – all of those things should help configure your brain in ways that will allow you to go into an interaction feeling more warm and trusting and positive.

A couple more questions about the talk: You say you’re supposed to hold a pose for 2 minutes. Where does that number come from?

We’ve tested between 1 and 7 minutes, and we get effects. We get the same effects for one – I think we’ve done 1, 2, 5 and 7 minutes. One minute seems to  actually be enough. I think you’re more likely to find a point where the effect diminishes by holding it for too long – shorter is probably better. But I don’t yet know what the optimal length of time is.

How much of posing is innate and how much is learned?

This is one of those tricky questions for psychologists, because a lot of people assume that if something is “wired in the brain” it means it’s innate, or hardwired in the brain. But the unique ways in which our brains are wired are the products of both our nature and our experiences – and our brains are constantly rewiring. That said, I think some of the strongest evidence that power poses are at least partly hardwired or innate is work by Jessica Tracy, a social psychologist at the University of British Columbia. She studies how people nonverbally display pride, which is essentially the nonverbal expression of feeling powerful after experiencing a big win or success. The pride display is that iconic Olympic pose that we all can easily imagine: the victor crosses the finish line and raises his or her arms in a V-shape, and lifts the chin. Tracy finds not only that this display of pride is universal across cultures, but also that congenitally blind people nonverbally display pride the exact same way when they win a competition, even though they’ve never actually seen a person do it. So that certainly, to me, suggests that power posing is at least partly innate. Add to that the fact that power posing is pervasive throughout the animal kingdom – so many other animals expand and make themselves bigger to signal dominance or status or power, from nonhuman primates, to cats, to cobras, to swans. And that individuals with higher testosterone and lower cortisol are more likely to instinctively adopt these powerful postures. Those findings also suggest that power posing has an innate component.

There’s one very important thing that everyone should do before heading into a job interview, giving a big speech or attempting an athletic feat. According to Amy Cuddy, a social psychologist at Harvard Business School, everyone should spend 2 minutes power posing. What, you ask, is power posing? It is adopting the stances associated with confidence, power and achievement — chest lifted, head held high, arms either up or propped on the hips.

As Cuddy explains in this talk from TEDGlobal 2012, both humans and animals express power through their bodies. They tumble in on themselves when they feel unsure, making themselves smaller by hunching over, crossing their arms over their chest and avoiding big movements. When they feel on top of the world, they sprawl out. Cuddy wondered—could adopting these postures change a person’s internal state and make them feel more powerful?

Cuddy, along with her collaborator Dana Carney of Berkeley, ran an experiment in which people were directed to adopt either high-power or low-power poses for 2 minutes. Then they were asked if they wanted to gamble. Cuddy and Carney found that 86% of those who posed in the high-power position opted to gamble, while only 60% of the low-power posers felt comfortable taking a roll of the dice. But even more interesting — there were physiological differences between the two groups, as shown by saliva samples. While high-power posers showed an 8% increase in testosterone, low-power posers had a 10% decrease in the hormone. Meanwhile, the inverse relationship happened with cortisol, the hormone related to stress. While high-power posers experienced a 25% decrease in cortisol levels, low-power posers had a 15% increase in their stress levels.

“Our nonverbals govern how we think and feel about ourselves. Our bodies change our minds,” says Cuddy.

To hear Cuddy’s powerful story of how power posing helped her get her own life on track, watch her talk. Below, hear stories of how power posing has worked for others, as told to Cuddy through emails and online comments.

From a male high school physics teacher in the United States:

“I introduced my AP Physics students to power posing last spring. One student in particular was always so nervous during assessments and therefore her test scores did not represent her abilities at all. We all know that old saying about correlation and causation — and this was no scientific study — but from that day forward that student power posed before every physics test and her grades went from high ‘C’s and low ‘B’s to where she belonged — in the mid to lower ‘A’s. I’m convinced that power posing helped her even if it is difficult to prove.”

From an online commenter:

“It’s nice to see that there’s scientific support for Oscar Hammerstein’s King and I lyrics: ‘Whenever I feel afraid, I hold my head erect and whistle a happy tune, so no one will suspect I’m afraid …The result of this deception is very strange to tell, for when I fool the people I fear, I fool myself as well.’”

From a male musician in Canada:

“I tried your ‘power positions’ right before I went on stage with a symphony, and I have to say, it was the best performance I have had in terms of nerves in my life.”

From an online commenter:

“My dad used to do a lot of work over the phone. Great advice: You can hear a smile on the other end of the phone. He’d also often stand up tall over his desk when he was talking on the phone. Must have pumped up the confidence since I find myself doing the same.”

From a woman in finance in the United States:

“I power posed before my third interview for a job the other day! Moving onto fourth and final interview on Tuesday!!! I was seriously nervous and power posing calmed me down … Okay, there was a fifth interview today. I was freaking out, so while waiting I walked outside and power posed on the street. I can’t believe how much better I felt. And I did really well on the interview.”

From an online commenter:

“I believe this has wide implications for classroom teachers. Early in the school year, students note a teacher’s verbal and nonverbal language to determine if they can seize the power and authority from him/her. A teacher’s body language and voice must beam: ‘I have faith in me and I have faith in my ability to teach you. I have high standards and expectations.’”

Want to know more? Read about Cuddy’s latest research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last week, which shows that leaders tend to have lower cortisol levels. As Cuddy explains to the U.S. News and World Report, this relationship is mediated by their overall sense of having control over their lives, from the mundane to the significant.