Power Posing

I love quick fixes.  I have nothing against spending the time needed to truly understand the source of problems, working to eliminate the root of the issue once and for all, but sometimes we just need an answer now.  Sometimes we just need to make our present better, while we do the background work.

When working with busy executives it definitely becomes all about the quick fix.  They need something they can act on right now that will help them in their next meeting, presentation or negotiation.  It needs to be effective and it needs to work fast.  The most popular 'quick fix' addresses the need to appear more confident and powerful.

In order to help with this instantaneous transformation, it is important to understand that the body helps shape the mind.  This means that you can drive your thoughts about yourself and how you interpret the world based solely on how you 'move' through life.  Therefore, if we want to shift how you are feeling about yourself and how you appear to others, we shift the way you hold and carry yourself.  You adopt a Power Pose.

Research addressing this very issue* has found that getting participants to adopt a power pose for as little as two minutes made them...

• more willing to take risks
• present their ideas with greater enthusiasm and confidence
• perform better in demanding situations
• experience an increase in testosterone, a hormone linked to assertiveness
• experience a decrease in cortisol, a hormone linked to stress

The findings clearly supported the fact that adopting a Power Pose makes you feel more powerful and therefore results in your acting more powerful.  Just two minutes of Preparatory Power Posing, prior to engaging in a task, optimizes the brain to function better during those challenges.

In any Power Pose the main goal is to open your body up to take up more space.  In essence, you want to make yourself look as 'big' as you can.  I remember camping one year at Algonquin Park when my youngest son was maybe about 5.  My husband, son and I were sitting around the campfire one evening when a wolf came walking through the campsite, pausing just on the other side of the fire.  This was not a normal occurrence by any stretch, but what was unnerving was having that wolf pause and stare straight at my young son.  

I followed the wolf's gaze and saw that my son was tucked into a small ball, curled up in his camp chair.  I immediately told him quietly to slowly put his feet on the ground and to extend his arms out toward his father and me... effectively making him appear much larger.  The wolf stood watching closely as my son, in essence, grew larger.  He moved on.  The next morning we learned that the wolf had 'stolen' a small dog from a campsite down the path from us, shortly after leaving our site.  Perceived size and power mattered a great deal that day.

In business you want to recognise that taking up space equates with power as much as it does in the wild.  Powerless people contract their bodies inward, hunching in on themselves, making themselves appear smaller.  Powerful people expand out, opening themselves physically up to the world.

To practice your Power Posing, adopt one of the following power poses...

1. Stand with an open stance, feet one to one and half shoulder widths apart.  Distribute your weight evenly between your feet so you are centered and firmly planted.  Extend your spine upward so that you are fully erect, your head is up and your eyes are looking directly ahead.  Place your hands on your hips or above your head in a wide 'V' position
2. In a seated position stretch your legs out fully in front of you, propping them up on a desk or table.  Lean back in your chair and place your hands behind your head, lacing the fingers and angling your elbows out and away from your head.

Consider engaging in a couple of minutes of Preparatory Power Posing just before heading off to your next important meeting to ensure that you enter that room with a heightened level of confidence and power.  How you interact with others during those first opening moments serves to set the tone for what follows.  Let them see your confidence right from the start.  Remember... although you may feel that you are merely 'posing', your brain doesn't know the difference.  If you carry yourself confidently and powerfully, your brain will assume you must BE confident and powerful and will therefore ensure that you FEEL confident and powerful.  Give it a try.  It could just prove to be two of the most effective minutes you've ever spent.

*see work by Amy Cuddy, Associate Professor at Harvard Business School

Change your Posture... Change your Thoughts

We are hearing a lot in the media lately about how to 'read' someone's body language to uncover their feelings about our product, the situation, the offer, or even us.  But little seems to be written about the impact of body language on how we feel.  When learning to read and interpret the body language of others, instructors will often have you shift your body into the position of the other party. When you are standing or sitting exactly like them, question yourself about what you are feeling while in this posture.  Odds are... it's similar to what they are feeling.

As much as we can use this to help us understand others, it has another important lesson for us.  If we can shift how we feel by shifting how we sit or stand, then we can strategically Craft our thoughts and feelings by modifying our posture. Want to feel more confident?  Adopt a more confident way of standing and moving.  Want to feel happier? Start smiling.  Want to feel more energetic?  Stop slumping and shorten the length of your gestures, moving your limbs a little faster when speaking.

You want to feel more positive, energetic and happy about life?  You can take the long route and explore why you aren't those things already, eliminate barriers and obstacles to those feelings, and then forge ahead to experience more of them in your life.  Or...  you can adopt the body language of someone who is positive, energetic and happy and... begin to feel and experience more of them in your life.  Either path gets you to the same place.  One just gets you there faster.

The simple truth is that our brain doesn't know the difference.  It believes that if we are standing, sitting, or moving a certain way then we must 'be' a certain way and it makes it so.  Pretty powerful stuff.  The following are 5 examples of shifts you can make in your body language to experience more of these in your life...

Power.

To appear more powerful to others and, more importantly, to feel more confident and powerful in your interactions, you need to learn to adopt a more powerful pose.  Powerful people take up space so plant your feet firmly (at least shoulder width apart) and open up your limbs.  You want to make more expansive gestures, ending them away from your body.  Elongate your spine, ensuring that your shoulders are back, your head is up.

Willpower.

Willpower implies that we are feeling challenged, but that we are pushing through.  It therefore has a tension to it.  You want to feel willpower in those moments when yours are slipping?  Tense up your muscles.  Studies show that when you firm up your muscles you can better withstand pain, take unpleasant medicine, resist temptation, etc.  So the next time you are faced with the display case of 'goodies' en route to ordering your 'skinny' latte, don't slink on past and avoid eye contact with the case, tighten up your muscles while elongating your spine.  This will give you the willpower you need to resist and will also communicate to your brain that you have the strength to do it again, and again, and again.

Insight.  If you are trying to solve a particularly difficult problem... lie down.  Let's face it, we often solve major issues or come up with our best ideas after we sleep on them.  Lying down increases our propensity for arriving at creative solutions.  Sure, they may think you're a little crazy at work (you might want to ensure you're in a room with a closed door!) but hey... it works!

Persuasive.

We all have times where we need to influence or persuade the thinking or decisions of others.  Know that hand gestures are critical to helping increase the persuasiveness of your argument.  The most effective gestures, of course, are called Illustrators; those gestures that help to support and illustrate the point you are making.  Any gestures that help your audience to 'visualize' what you are saying, helps to bring them closer to your message and find it more agreeable.

Happiness.

It is generally safe to say that most of us could do with feeling happy more often.  As mentioned earlier, if you want to feel more happiness... smile.  The smile is the only universal gesture that there is.  It transcends gender, age, culture, socio-economic status, or ethnicity.  A smile... is a smile.  Babies in the womb smile.  Those born blind at birth smile when happy.  Research has shown that the simple act of smiling, whether you mean it or not, releases endorphins into the body that help you feel good and... happier.

The bottom line... if you are feeling an emotion that isn't serving you then shift your posture and body language to one that does.  That simple shift will move you into a mindset that will be more productive for you and will net you more positive results.

Presentation Basics - Breathing

Breathing is life.  If you're not breathing, you're dead.  Simple fact that we're all aware of.  However, breathing is also voice.  Without breath there is no voice.  It stands to reason then that the quality of your voice and the amount of voice you have is also driven by the type and quality of breath.  Typically, when working with clients on their personal presence or formal presentation skills, we will need to work on their breathing.   For most of us, as long as we were breathing, people were happy with however we chose to make it happen.

If we want stronger, deeper, louder or more compelling voices though, we may need to relearn the way in which we breath.  Most of us breathe from the upper third of our lungs (called Tidal Breathing).  If we want to increase the depth of our voices, or we want to project them more, we need to learn to breathe from the middle third of our lungs, called diaphragmatic breathing.  To do so requires us to breathe from a different place, not to take in a different amount of air.  Professional singers, actors on stage, deep sea divers, musicians that play a wind or horn instrument all learn to breathe from the diaphragm in order to support their craft.  You can too.

To practice, start by standing up.  It is important that you stand fully upright, with the spine elongated.  If you slump you compress your diaphragm and cannot breathe from it.  Place a hand on your upper chest and one on your upper stomach area, just below the bridge of your ribs.  Take a nice, slow, deep breath in.  Watch which hand moves.  (Breathe out!)  Instead of seeing the upper hand rise and fall as you breathe (indicating that you are filling the upper third of your lungs with air), try to make the bottom hand (the one on your diaphragm) move in an out.  This will require that you target your breath more, but it will begin to train your brain and body to begin breathing from this area more often.  The more consistently you practice breathing from your diaphragm the more you begin to create the habit of breathing from it.

Breathing from the diaphragm also has a number of additional benefits.  Let's face it, most of us don't give many formal presentations and, even if we do, we tend to get very anxious and stressed about doing one.  We carry this tension in our bodies, which then influences the way we move and sound - making us appear uncomfortable.  Our presentation suffers.  I offer you two suggestions below to help you deal with some of this tension...

1. It is not unusual for people, when they get nervous, to feel short of breath or sick to their stomachs.  This is because the nerves that control your digestion and your respiration attach to the C3 and C4 vertebrae, which are in the middle of the back of your neck.  When we get nervous and tense, we tend to tighten and bunch up these muscles (how many of your feel stress through the muscles of your neck and upper shoulders?).  As we tense these muscles up, we impact the nerves controlling our breathing and digestion.  The solution then is to relax those muscles, release the tension.  Certainly getting someone to massage them for you would work.  When at work or at other times you don't have access to someone willing to give you a neck massage, try the following exercise.  Stand comfortably and bend over, letting the head hand freely.  Really make an effort to fully relax the neck muscles.  You can test this out by taking your fingers and gently pushing on your head (while it's hanging).  If you feel resistance your haven't fully released it.  Allowing the neck to hang freely, and using the weight of the head (much heavier than you realize!) to pull and extend the vertebrae of the neck, helps relieve the tension and release the pressure on those nerves.


2. Practice your breathing!  Take a couple of quiet moments periodically throughout the day to breathe deeply and fully.  Sit fully upright and put a hand lightly on your diaphragm to serve as a target for the muscles you want to engage.  In addition to practicing breathing from the diaphragm, concentrate on the breath you take.  Breathe through the nose only since breathing through the mouth tends to signal to your brain that you are in distress.  Not the effect we're after!  Deepen your breathing by elongating your exhalations, not your inhalations.  Your lungs will adjust naturally and automatically to replace the air you have lost through your exhalations. Therefore, you don't have to focus on your inhalations, they will take care of themselves.  Additionally, when you're nervous, trying to inhale more could result in hyperventilation.  Focusing on the exhalation is what will prove calming.  Try to extend and lengthen the number of outward counts of breath each time.  Although you could certainly start and end your day with 15-30 minutes of controlled breathing, most of my clients don't tend to find, have or make the time for this.  Instead, using this technique periodically throughout the day, for 3-5 breaths, will serve to help you maintain a greater sense of calmness, well-being  and will help keep your stress in check.

Posture Perfect

I speak about posture with my clients... a lot.  And, by 'a lot', I mean A LOT!  In fact, I spoke about it with a coaching client today.  It is one of the top two elements that arises when we speak about Leadership and Executive presence.  What boggles my mind though is no one is ever surprised that I mention it as a key detractor from their projection of confidence, poise and potential.  In fact... they typically all indicate that they have been told this same thing many times in the past.  Yep, MANY times, and yet... they still slump and slouch.

What?

Your posture is one of the key elements that communicates to others what your relative level of confidence is, either with the situation itself or with yourself.  Round your shoulders forward, compress your diaphragm and sink down into your lower spine and you will look more submissive, unsure, hesitant and, yes, weak.    Lord knows that if you are a parent of a teen, in particular a teenage boy, you have been admonishing them forever to stop slouching!  Why then do so many adults continue to demonstrate this self-same behaviour?

Recent research now shows us that not only does poor posure make a bad impression, but that it can actually make you physically weaker.  According to a study conducted by Scott Wiltermuth (USC Marshall School of Business) and Vanessa K. Bohns (J.L. Rotman School of Mnagement at the University of Toronto), adopting a positive dominant posture, versus a negative submissive posture actually decreases your sensitivity to pain. 

According to the study, those adopting more dominant poses felt more powerful, in control and capable of handling more distress.  They were comfortably able to tolerate more pain than those who were assigned more neutral or submissive stances. 

These results would indicate that adopting a stronger, more positive and dominant posture will not only create a more positive impression with those around you but will actually serve to help you be and feel stronger.  Certainly, when experiencing emotional stress and trauma, you would be better served by standing erect than curling into a ball on your bed!   It seems that the old adage to 'Fake it Until you Make it' happens to be true when it comes to posture.  Even if you are not feeling particularly confident, standing as though you are will help you to feel stronger and more in control.

So.  Don't wait for someone like me to have to tell you what you have known all along...  head up, shoulders back, stand up straight.   Mom would be proud.