Would you like to learn about an easy 2 minute exercise that is proven to boost your confidence and your sense of personal power, reduce reactiveness to stress, increase your tolerance for risk and pain and increase your ability to think abstractly?
How You Hold Your Body Affects How You Feel
You’ve heard that your thoughts can change how your body feels, right? Have you ever heard that the way you hold your body can change the way you feel about yourself? Studies have shown that powerful men and women tend to have high levels of testosterone (the dominance hormone) and low levels of cortisol (the stress hormone). “When you are nervous and insecure your testosterone goes down and your cortisol goes up. When you’re feeling powerful and confident the opposite can happen” says Harvard’s Amy Cuddy.
Cuddy’s cutting edge research sheds light on how these hormones can be manipulated to help enjoy even more confidence, optimism and assertiveness. She refers to power posing as a brain hack and explained that “By putting yourself into a power pose you signal confidence and power, most importantly, to yourself and also to others”. Power Posing raises your testosterone level by up to 20% and lowers your cortisol level by up to 25%. She explains that power posing “reconfigures the brain to better deal with and even thrive in any challenge that you face”.
What is Power Posing?
So what is a power pose? Remember Wonder Woman? Super Heroine to the rescue!
Check out Wonder Woman’s power pose. Stand with confidence – an open posture, with your arms stretched in a v above your head or with your hands on your hips and your feet hip width apart. Access your personal power by holding this pose for 2 minutes. You can do a power pose in a bathroom before an interview (better than huddled over your phone worrying), before giving a speech or presentation, to prepare for dealing with any prickly porcupinish people in your life etc. Step forward with a brain now configured to help you be assertive, confident, less stress reactive, and comfortable.
The flip side is that you can also change your physiology by making yourself smaller by hunching over, folding your arms and crossing your legs. I invite you to pay attention to how you hold your body. When you catch yourself closing up, making yourself small think “personal power” or “chin up” or “think big” or something else that resonates with you and expand your being to significantly change your outcome in any given situation. It’s totally OK to fake it till you make it! Or even better, fake it till you become it!
Why Not Try Power Posing?
In my practice as a Behavioral Therapist & Life Coach I specialize in Clinical Hypnotherapy and when the need arises, power posing is something that I introduce to clients to help increase their personal power. Here is a simple truth. It is by small and simple things that great things come to pass. Power posing definitely falls into this category. It is easy to do, it is also easy not to do. It is easy to embrace and it is easy to discard. But, if you have everything to gain and nothing to lose why not give it a whirl. Now is the time to access your personal power by using this small and simple 2 minute practice.
Why not?
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