Can you fake confidence until you become confident?

For some people confidence comes naturally yet for others it takes a lot of effort to act and behave in a confident manner.

Firstly, it is important to distinguish the difference between confidence and self-esteem. Both terms relate to your own self-worth, feelings about yourself and beliefs in your own abilities. Confidence is manifested externally while self-esteem is more internal.

Self- esteem develops from the life experiences, relationships and situations which have shaped how you view yourself today. People don’t know how you feel internally so even if you don’t believe in yourself or your capabilities on the inside, you can still come across as a confident person on the outside by acting as if you have a lot of confidence.

So if it is possible to act confident on the outside while having low internal self- worth, then can our self-esteem and positive self-regard increase by portraying external confidence? The good news is: YES it can and even better news is that it is easier than you may think.

You may already know that our body language and mind, thoughts and self-talk have a huge impact on our behaviour, so for example if you feel down or sad it is unlikely that you will have happy, positive thoughts and therefore you will not feel happy and motivated on the outside. Our mind, body and behaviour are strongly connected therefore by changing or altering one of those components you will impact the others.

In addition, hormones, and more specifically testosterone and cortisol levels have a huge impact on our confidence. Testosterone is the hormone of power, dominance, and confidence while cortisol is a hormone that impacts how your body responds to fear or stress. In short, high levels of testosterone lead to increased feelings of confidence, while lower levels of cortisol lead to decreased anxiety and an improved ability to deal with stress.

I recently came across a piece of research and a simple technique that can reduce your anxiety, improve your ability to deal with stress, and boost your confidence in just 2 minutes.

Social psychologist Amy Cuddy claims that 2 minutes of “power posing” (Standing or sitting in a powerful, confident pose) is enough to significantly alter the physiological and psychological and feeling states as well as your behaviour.

Our body language actually physically changes the testosterone and cortisol levels in the brain and according to Cuddy’s experiment just by sitting or standing for 2 minutes in power poses, the level of testosterone in participants raised by 20% and those who were sitting or standing in low power poses noticed a 10% decrease in their testosterone level. When it comes to Cortisol, high power people experienced a 25% decrease in cortisol levels and low power people experienced a 15% increase.

So what does this mean?

It means that the correct hormone levels can increase our appetite for risk, cause us to perform better in job interviews, and generally configure our brains to be more assertive, confident, focused and handle pressure better and cope well in stressful situations.

So although you may feel foolish at first standing in your best super hero pose for two minutes, and it's not advisable to do this in public, the research shows that it can change your body chemistry, naturally making you feel more empowered. Power posing can really improve your performance in a short period of time and the better your performance, the better the internal feeling you will get, which will build into both higher self esteem and confidence, until eventually you become who you were striving to be.

I would encourage you to take a look at the link below. It's a short video presentation of Amy Cuddy explaining her research and how it could potentially change your life. I watched it and it had a huge impact on me so what have you got to lose?


http://www.ted.com/talks/amy_cuddy_your_body_language_shapes_who_you_are?language=en