Charlie from Charisma on Command explains how open body language signals confidence and affects how others perceive you. He draws on evolutionary psychology and power poses to show why posture matters for your social presence.
How's it going? This is Charlie from Charisma on Command with your daily Charisma tip of the day. So I've been talking a lot in the last couple days about open body language, right? What we've basically been doing is diagnosing where your shoulders were and what you could do physically to correct any imbalances you have. But I want to talk about why this is so important. So this goes back to caveman days. Back in the day, there were actual physical threats to your safety, right? There were claws and there were fangs and all these sorts of things that could end your life. So what people did when they were around a lion or some other sort of threat is they would tend to close up almost like a boxer or an MMA fighter. Today, they'd lower the chin, they tighten up here, they'd hunch down, and that way they could protect their vulnerable areas. Now, there's still a holdover today when people feel under social threat, what they actually do is they adopt that same body language. They lower their chin, they tighten up, and they go like this. And that's oftentimes why you get the phrases today, like keep your chin up. Right? That is all from chin down signifying sadness, nervousness, chin up signifying pride and comfortableness. So when you're going out there in the world, you want to be aware that closed body language is going to signify to other people and to your own nervous system that you're not comfortable, right? So if you're about to do a job interview and you're taking it like this, it doesn't matter how good your answers are, how spot on they are, you're going to have issues versus if you sit comfortably, you open up your chin, your chest, your neck, you expose the inside of your arms and your palms, all these traditionally vulnerable areas, you're going to come off as much more confident because you are literally showing your vulnerability, those points in your body where you could get hurt. Now, the cool thing is, today, you don't stand a chance of actual physical violence in an interview. So you have nothing to lose. You just need to get in your conscious brain that when you sit or when you're about to speak to someone in some sort of situation that might make you a little bit uncomfortable, the best thing you can do is open up your body language. So that's why I've been, you know, trying to help you with the shoulders, and we'll go to the lower body with that sort of stuff. But just some things to keep in mind when you find yourself out if you start to feel uncomfortable. The best way to hack your own brain is to open up. So what does that mean? It's going to be to pull the shoulders back, lift the chin up, turn the palms out so that they're exposed a little bit, stand a little bit wider. Right back in the day, you had to cover your genitalia because that was an area that could be attacked. So you stand a little bit wider, you open up, stand like this and just breathe deeply for 30 seconds is often enough. Amy Cuddy has a TED Talk on this. She calls them power poses. And there is scientific evidence that this will physically transform your brain chemistry. This will put more of the chemicals that you want, the chemicals that make you confident, the chemicals that actually make you competent, that make your brain function better, versus these ones which are just going to make those fight or flight chemicals kick in and make you much less eloquent, much less able to get what you want out of any given social situation. So that is the charismatic tip of the day. If you want more of these tips, subscribe below. And that's it for now.
