Try the 'Wonder Woman' pose

BODY LANGUAGE

The TED conference has made a star of many unlikely people, but perhaps no one more so than Amy Cuddy, a social psychologist and associate professor at Harvard Business School, whose talk promises personal transformation with nary a pill, cleanse or therapy bill.

Her rousing presentation in 2012 at TED Global on what she calls “power poses” is among the most viewed TED Talks of all time (it is no: 2; Sir Ken Robinson’s “how schools kill creativity” is no: 1). In its wake, Amy, 42, has attracted lucrative speaking invitations from around the world, a contract from Little, Brown & Co for a book and an eclectic army of posture-conscious followers.

Elementary school students, retirees, elite athletes, surgeons, politicians, victims of bullying and sexual assault, beleaguered refugees, people dealing with mental illness or physical limitations (including a quadriplegic): they have all written to say that adopting a confident pose — or simply visualising one, as in that last case — delivers almost instant self-assurance.

Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook, who calls herself “a huge fan,” invited Amy to
develop teaching materials for her ‘Lean In’ initiatives. David Gergen, a director of the Kennedy School for Public Leadership at Harvard, says her technique “gives
people a taste of what it feels like to be the president striding into the cabinet room.”
People tend to do curious things after hearing Amy speak.

In Las Vegas last year, she told an auditorium of 1,500 Zappos employees that “making yourself big” for just two minutes before a meeting changes the brain in ways that build courage, reduce anxiety and inspire leadership. “We tested it in the lab — it really works,” she said on stage. In the lobby afterward, clusters of men and women in blue Zappos T-shirts stretched out like starfish and stood like Wonder Woman (hands on hips, legs wide) to try out the effects.

The next night at a downtown youth shelter, Amy clicked through images of Oprah, Freddie Mercury and Usain Bolt in expansive mode. “Let your body tell you you’re powerful and deserving, and you become more present, enthusiastic and authentically yourself,” she said to young people gathered on shabby couches. Once again, limbs lengthened, spines straightened, shoulders drew back.

Making her space

At five-foot-six, Amy, who is slender and blonde with sky-blue eyes, isn’t very big herself, even in heels. A classically-trained ballet dancer, who once worked as a roller-skating waitress, she might come across as fragile were it not for her tendency to keep her arms away from her sides and a hand on her hip or a chair.

Women, in particular, often shrink in public settings, she said. The men in her Harvard classes shoot their arms straight up to answer questions, while the women tend toward a bent-elbow wave. They also tend to touch the face or neck or cross the ankles tightly while sitting. “These postures are associated with powerlessness and intimidation and keep people back from expressing who they really are,” Amy said.

She developed the idea for power posing in 2009 after hearing the former FBI agent Joe Navarro describe how police investigators would sometimes make themselves feel imposing by using a bigger chair during interrogations. She decided to test the science behind it. A paper that she wrote in 2010 with researchers Dana R Carney and Andy J Yap found that lab participants who spent two minutes in a room alone doing high-power poses (feet on the desk with fingers laced behind the head, let’s say) increased testosterone levels by about 20 per cent and lowered the stress hormone cortisol by about 25 per cent.

Numerous well-documented follow-up studies by other scholars showed significant effects on behaviour outcomes. In one, students assigned to adopt upright, open postures were more likely to pick seats at the front of a classroom and saw themselves as better leaders than their slouched counterparts. In another, baseball pitchers who evinced more submissive postures were perceived by competitors to be less competent. Preliminary findings in a new study by Amy and Maarten Bos show that stretching out comfortably in a desk chair at a large monitor causes subjects to act far more assertively than those hunched up over tablets and smartphones.

To scroll through the email Amy has received since TED is to understand how much impact a simple idea, well delivered, can make. Mac McGill watched Amy’s talk in a homeless shelter in Santa Barbara, California, and started to “do the Wonder Woman” for two minutes every morning. On the way to a job interview, he “took over the whole bench” at a bus stop, helping him gain confidence, he said. Mac got the telemarketing gig and he continued with the daily poses. “The first day after training, I made sales on two out of three calls — literally in my first 15 minutes,” Mac said. “My boss told me he worked half a week before his first sale.”

Amy has more than 20 fieldwork studies and collaborations in development. At the New York University Polytechnic School of Engineering, computer scientists at the Game Innovation Lab are developing video games to see if power posing before exams reduces math anxiety. Amy’s team is collaborating with a Tufts Medical School professor to see whether the technique can prevent new surgeons from becoming too anxious and “choking” during ophthalmology procedures. An economist is assessing power posing as a tool to help impoverished women in Nairobi make better financial decisions.

Her work never rests. Lately, she has been examining the differences between subjects who sleep sprawled out versus those who curl up. Early results show that people who arise with arms and legs extended feel brighter and more optimistic than the 40 per cent who start the day in a fetal position. But there’s hope. “If you wake in fetal pose,” Amy said, “open yourself up like the guy on the subway taking up too much space, and soon enough you’ll feel like a happy warrior.”