Simple Trick: Drastically Improve Your Confidence and Body Language

ou might walk into the classroom and notice students who seem more dominant while others seem to be collapsing, making themselves small and unnoticed. The bold student raises their hand with confidence and security while the other only raises it at the elbow feeling chronically less powerful and unsure.

We are all guilty of judging others by their body language, but most times it’s subconscious and unintentional. It has been proven that nonverbal communication has a huge impact on our lives. It can affect our chances of getting hired, landing a promotion, attracting others, political success, etc. In this article we will teach you a simple two minute exercise  that will help you improve your body language so you can not only fake it ’til you make it, rather you can fake it until you become it.

Using this simple trick is important for college students. Here are some more reasons this exercise help you:

• Become more assertive
• Think more abstractly
• Become more positive
• Increase class participation

Social scientists have also noticed that physiologically, your body language is affected by testosterone, which is the dominance hormone, and cortisol, which is the stress hormone. Without getting too technical, what you need to know is that high powered alpha males in primate hierarchies have high testosterone and low cortisol and powerful and effective leaders also have high testosterone and low cortisol.

What this means is that successful nonverbal communication and power is about dominance ( more testosterone) but also about how you react to stress ( less cortisol). A successful leader is someone who can be dominant but not easily susceptible to stress. The exercise we are about to explain to you was done by Amy Cuddy, an MBA professor from Harvard University.  The exercise involves you making a dominant high power pose for two minutes. That’s it.

High Powered Nonverbal Exercise Practice Position

Simply by doing this, the study proved that your testosterone will increase by 20% and cortisol decreases by 25%. The opposite is also true. Making yourself small and insecure for two minutes decreases testosterone and increases cortisol, which is not good. So by doing this simple exercise, and practicing a power position for just two minutes, you will become more assertive, confident, and comfortable. Our nonverbals do govern how we think and feel about ourselves and hopefully now you will be more prepared to handle difficult situations.

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