Your Most Confident Posture
Did you know that your Posture is directly correlated with your level of confidence, power, and self-worth? Posture is the expression of mind and body. How you feel inside is demonstrated by how you carry your body in space.
When you are excited and happy what does your posture look like? Positive Posture is associated with open postural design. Meaning that your shoulders are pulled back, head is up, and you have tight core musculature.
The movement of opening your arms in the air demonstrates joy and victory, and opening your arms to embrace another person demonstrates love. Our natural human emotions are expressed through our physiologic posture. Open, upright posture is welcoming and shows a state of positivity.
What does your posture say about you?
Do you have a positive or negative posture vibe? When people are mad, they cross their arms, look down, and slouch their shoulders forward. Curved posture like this is closed, uninviting, and negative.
Body language is a physical expression of communication. Whether or not someone talks to you, trusts you, or respects you may have nothing to do with what you say to them, and everything to do with your postural presentation.
Researchers have also found that posture embodies attitude and self-evaluation. Two groups of participants in this study were asked to sit with proper posture or with slumped posture and self-evaluate their best and worst characteristics. They concluded that people who present with an erect posture (straight spine, chest out, and shoulders back) had a more positive mentality with a confident self-image.
According to Brinol et al. (2009), “body postures can impact persuasion by affecting the direction of thoughts” from negative to positive. The results concluded that the group sitting with correct posture viewed themselves with more positive characteristics than negative, while the group with bad posture found more negative characteristics than positive.
Did you know that you can change your hormonal state of power with proper posture?
An interesting research study was done at Harvard University regarding Power Postures. When the body is in an open power pose the person not only looks more confident, but they actually are more confident.
The research shows that holding a power pose for just 2 minutes at a time increases the levels of testosterone that the body produces, and decreases levels of cortisol. High testosterone levels are associated with power and dominance, whereas low cortisol levels are associated with decreased stress.
You can literally change their physiology to be more powerful with proper posture. According to Carney et al. (2010), power postures “cause neuroendocrine and behavioral changes [including] elevations in testosterone, decreases in cortisol, and increased feelings of power and tolerance for risk.”
People with proper posture embody self-confidence and power due to neuroendocrine changes in their physiology!
Your posture right now is literally an expression of not only how you feel mentally, but what chemicals your body is producing physiologically. Posture is more than skin deep. Your unique posture is a representation of your mental thought processes, your physical health and well being, and your emotional state.
References:
Brinol, P. et al. (2009) Body posture effects on self-evaluation: a self-validation approach. European Journal of Self Psychology, 39 1053-1064.
Carney et al. (2010) Power posing, brief non-verbal displays affect neuroendocrine levels and risk tolerance. Psychological Science, 21(10) 1363-1368.
