that you change your posture for two minutes. I became especially interested in non-verbal

expressions of power and dominance. And what are non-verbal expressions of power and dominance?

So, in the animal kingdom they are about expanding so you make yourself big you stretch out and

humans do the same thing. So they do this both when they have power sort of chronically

and also when they're feeling powerful in the moment. So, powerful people tend to be

not surprisingly more assertive and more confident. Physiologically there also are differences-

on two key hormones. Testosterone which is the dominance hormone and cortisol which is

the stress hormone. We decided to bring people into the lab and run a little experiment and

these people adopted for two minutes, high power poses or low power poses. And I'm just

gonna show you five of the poses although they took on only two. This is what happens.

They come in they spit into a vial. We for two minutes say you need to do this or this.

We then ask them how powerful do you feel on a series of items... and then we take another

saliva sample. Here's what we find on testosterone: from their baseline when they come in, high

power people experience about a 20% increase and low power people experience about a 10%

decrease. Here's what you get on cortisol: High power people experience about a 25% decrease

and the low power people experience about a 15% increase. So two minutes lead to these

hormonal changes that configure your brain to basically be either assertive, confident

and comfortable, or really stress reactive. But the next question of course is can power

posing for a few minutes really change your life in meaningful ways? And so what matters

in where you wanna use this is evaluative situations- we decided that the one that most

people could relate to was the job interview. What do you do before you go into a job interview?

You do this. Right, you're sitting down, you're looking at your notes, you're hunching up

and making yourself small. When really what you should be doing maybe- is this. Like,

in the bathroom. Okay, so we bring people into a lab and they do either high or low

power poses again. They go through a very stressful job interview, it's five minutes

long, they are being recorded, they're being judged also. We then have these coders look

at these tapes, four of them. They're blind to the hypothesis, they're blind to the conditions

they have no idea who's been posing and in what pose. They end up looking at these sets

of tapes and they say "oh we wanna hire these people, all the high power posers. We don't

wanna hire these people. But what's driving it? It's not about the content of the speech,

it's about the presence that they're bringing to the speech. The last thing I'm going to

leave you with is this: Tiny Tweaks can lead to big changes. Before you go into the next

stressful evaluative situation, for two minutes, try doing this- in the elevator, in a bathroom

stall, at your desk behind closed doors, that's what you wanna do. Get, configure your brain

to cope the best in that situation. Get your testosterone up, get your cortisol down and

it can significantly change the outcomes of your life. Thank you.