Body Language Expert Explains How to Show Confidence | WIRED

people that are supremely confident when they enter the room they feel comfortable in that room they don't hesitate to look around their gestures are smooth but they're very broad and that has to do with confidence and for a lot of people this is very difficult i remember the great actress helen mirren saying one of the most difficult things to learn as an actress is how to walk onto a scene i've thought about that even in my career how early on the difficulty of mastering that how do you walk onto a crime scene how do you

walk into the public and demonstrate that i am confident and so forth we can all work a little bit on our non-verbal so we come across as more confident [Music] when we talk about confidence it's so many things it has to do with our posture the way we present how we look where's our chin where are the eyes looking and gazing our gestures are loose but they're smoother as we walk about we walk as though we are on a mission i'm walking out to shake your hand or i'm walking out to a podium or i'm

walking to where i'm going to sit so the less confident we are the less eye contact we make the less confident we are the more reluctant we are to look about you know when i look at someone i admire like colin powell when he walks onto a stage even before he speaks he has total command of the room and he does that because he brings two things into this equation one is a tremendous amount of knowledge and experience plus he has shaped and defined himself into a statesman we've got to think of america as a

family where every member of the family cares about every other member of the family i think sometimes people mistake machismo or theatrical displays of power as confidence confidence can be very quiet jane goodall hears this ethologist very meek very mild and yet wherever she goes she commands the room one of the things you notice is they sort of have this command of themselves and in doing so that command transmits outward the other thing that confident people realize is the temporal aspect of leadership if you're in charge you're in charge of time i'm going to take

my time to walk out i'm going to take my time to answer your question i will answer it in the pace manner and tone that i choose and in doing that we are demonstrating that we are confident and in control [Music] where do we get that confident voice where do we get those confident gestures this is what's called socialization we notice the principal who acts this way we like this leader because of this or that trait so i try to model their behaviors and say this is a shortcut and if i have to work on

my vocabulary that's what high status people do if i have to change my gestures to to fit in in this society and then that's what i'm going to have to do that doesn't mean it changes me completely it just means that this is what is required of me and this is what i want to achieve at this moment in time i think of cary grant here's an individual born in the uk grew up very poor and as he said in his biography i became cary grant i adopted all the behaviors that i saw from high

status individuals just think about that but make up your mind and it is difficult to prescribe this but one of the easiest things that we can do you know if you're a woman maybe you want to model yourself on the actress kate blanchette or some other actor and say you know when they're being interviewed how do they look they look so confident they look interesting they have such a command presence you know we're not born this way these are things that we have to develop and say how do i want to be perceived and what

can i do to achieve that [Music] are there better behaviors that you can do here's a simple one how many of you somebody says where'd they go and you go like this and as it turns out this is one of the most hated signs around the world and yet if we just go like this he went that way we're already perceived differently little things i tell the story often of when i first came into law enforcement they said well you know you you've got to get out there and make some arrests and the first time

i went out there and my voice just went really high stop you're under arrest that sounds horrible and you have to work at having that command presence where you say stop right there don't move that's almost theatrical yeah but it's what is needed so let's do this exercise i want you to say no just go ahead say it out loud all right now let's do it right say it as i say it no no no do you see the difference between the way you said it and this way did you notice that your voice kept

getting deeper but did you also notice that the finger became wider and wider the more confident you became the wider your fingers were spreading there's a big difference between saying no stop and going no stop this potentiates the message but to get to this we actually have to practice it so let's do it again no now go out there and teach your children how to do that i love sometimes selfies in the mirror one of my pet peeves is what we hear every day with what's called up talk up talk is where someone says something

and then they end making it sound like a question mark so so it sounds like this four score and seven years ago four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation my company has done research on this and we've asked ceos and we've asked executives and some will say well you know i've gotten used to it and so forth but when we asked them does it really matter they also yeah we'd rather not see it i get pushback from people that say

well you know this is just the way that i speak and no doubt but don't expect the same results we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy but because they are hard because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills the cadence in our speech is extremely powerful for a couple of reasons one we know that when people machine gun a statement when they talk very fast we are less likely to listen to them over a long

period of time but when we talk in cadence we are sort of held still listening to what will come next and i'll give you an example of from that great speech martin luther king gave as you notice with a cadence i have a dream i have a dream and then he pauses that one day and then he goes on and churchill used the same thing churchill's notes literally would create spaces for how long he would pause from stephen in the baltic to trieste in the adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the continent these pauses

make people listen and one of the things that we teach is if you want people to listen to you use cadence to get their attention hold their attention but then look forward to what that next set of words will be it lets them know at a subconscious level this is the person in charge and we know that they're in charge because they have temporal control over this they're not in a hurry [Music] so you know a lot of times people say to me well is does confidence look like you know chest out shoulders back chin

up yeah that looks pretty good but you know a lot of times confidence is just sitting comfortably in a chair and that may have more to do with how much space you control it may have to do with the gestures that you use you probably notice that i use a lot of steepling i tend to interlace my fingers and so forth these are gestures that contribute to that communication that i'm trying to get across that i am confident about what i'm talking about so it's not just about puffing your chest out or certainly not about

talking louder or anything it's about controlling my environment but making sure that what i'm transmitting at all times is confidence and that means i'm prepared i'm ready to answer i'm going to answer you now i'm going to answer you effectively and i'm gonna make sure that you understand what i said i'm here to convey i'm not here to convince a lot of times people who are lacking confidence are trying to convince you of something hey if i'm confident i just say it once it's this way and that's it i convey the information rather than sit

there and try to beat it into you by repeating it ten different ways compare the gestures i'm about to do it's about temporal movement controlling time so the person in charge has the time to look up at their own pace the gestures are smooth there's no hesitation there's no quick movements there's no jitteriness there doesn't have to be i'm in charge when i feel less confident i feel like i have to be in a hurry that i've got to look up and i've got to answer right away and there's a lot of preening behaviors and

these are detracting from me [Music] i was really shy a few years ago probably this is changing a little bit people are horrified to speak in public i used to be horrified to speak in public i still get nervous to speak in public but here's some tricks i found that you might find useful the first one is don't hesitate ever to to say you know what this is scary be honest with yourself this is unnatural number two take refuge and knowing that if i sit down and study this material i will know it better than

my audience the third thing i always do is i rehearse really helps so that the first time you hear it in a forum it doesn't scare you when it's time to do the presentation one of the things i like to do is to warm up i find a good solid wall and i will just lean into it like i'm holding this wall up pressing against it just as if i were doing a push-up and one of the things that that does is it releases a lot of muscular tension and because i'm doing it very wide

it makes me feel more powerful and i need to walk on that stage as though it's mine with full confidence it is only then that i look at my audience and then i just take a second to get myself together and to begin with practice obviously you're going to get better and better and better [Music] let's face it people are not born confident they're just not we can become confident with the assistance of our parents who encourage us we can become confident through our own achievements we can become confident by going beyond our boundaries but

confidence is something that we can grow we can nurture i mean i have seen people in wheelchairs that are supremely confident i have seen elderly people in their 90s who are very confident i've seen children who are holding a violin with such confidence if you want to be confident know your material know the information hone that skill work at it have that mastery of things and of self and that's how you will come across as confident no matter what your station in in life is [Music]