Amy Cuddy is a social psychologist. She studies how our non verbal behaviours (how we hold our body) affects others but also how it affects us.
We all know that non verbal (and often non conscious) behaviour plays a huge role in our communication. According to Albert Mehrabian, 93% of our communication is done through non verbal means (in the context of interactions of a social nature). Public presenters, politicians, actors know this and learn techniques to become effective non-verbal communicators. (Many NLP techniques are effective in that context, scroll to the bottom of this post for link to certification courses).
What we do not know however, is that our communication styles affects US as well as others. In this 20mn TED talk video, Cuddy presents a convincing body of research that shows what happens to us when we stand tall and look confident.
“Risk tolerance, which is the gambling, what we find is that when you’re in the high-power pose condition, 86 percent of you will gamble. When you’re in the low-power pose condition, only 60 percent, and that’s a pretty whopping significant difference. Here’s what we find on testosterone. From their baseline when they come in, high-power people experience about a 20-percent increase, and low-power people experience about a 10-percent decrease. So again, two minutes, and you get these changes. Here’s what you get on cortisol. High-power people experience about a 25-percent decrease, and the low-power people experience about a 15-percent 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, and, you know, feeling sort of shut down. And we’ve all had the feeling, right? So it seems that our non-verbals do govern how we think and feel about ourselves, so it’s not just others, but it’s also ourselves. Also, our bodies change our minds.”
This means that if you can master part of your non-verbal behaviour, you can redesign the internal physiological processes, and create a virtuous circle of empowerment. It sounds a bit cliché, but the actual underlying process is remarkably powerful as illustrated in this video.
Click on this link to learn more about the transformational NLP certification courses where you will learn the secrets of effective communication, verbal and non-verbal.