Body Language: Shaping Business Success
Business schools worldwide, management pros, and all sorts of success gurus give reasonable lectures on tips and techniques for upping your game, nailing negotiations, and attaining professional success. Although promising, all these entail some sort of strategy, hack, or sustained effort in order to achieve the coveted performance.
Amidst these complex, and somewhat complicated solutions for drawing success on one’s side, Amy Cuddy, social psychologist, researcher, and Associate Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School Negotiation, Organizations & Markets Unit, sheds new light on the matter.
Unlike the more sophisticated, and seemingly intricate, strategies for communicating one’s superiority throughout a boardroom, Cuddy’s solution brings a highly effective, simple method for proclaiming a dominant role in business exchanges: power posing. This implies mild modifications done to one’s body position, which will simply set you apart in the negotiation game.
Acknowledging that we perpetually analyze each other’s nonverbal communication, which in turn acts as a set of effects imposed on each of the parties involved in communication, the Harvard researcher highlights the ways in which we can suggest dominance, by assuming a particular body posture. The keyword here is “assume”, which entails more than mere mimicry but actually allowing your brain to pick up on the physiological hints given by your posture, which will inherently rearrange one’s thoughts and emotions.
Simply put, posturing as powerful, for a significant amount of time, will make you actually feel powerful, through a physiological, hormonal, and psychological linkage.
Having a clear understanding of the fact that we constantly get cues from our and others’ nonverbal behavior, which inherently influence decisions made on both sides, helps in building a better rapport in any interaction and increases our chances for success.
Watch this inspiring TED Talk, and get an insightful intro into the fascinating world of nonverbal communication and how you can make your presence do the talking.
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