Like a perennial Pied Piper, the first month of the year lures us out of routine and bad habits (read weariness and overindulgence) into a health frenzied world where milk comes from a nut and the cost of our new workout gear has us sweating before class even starts. If you’re after a more sustainable resolution, one that shares a space with mindfulness and meditation, is free, and requires no more than two minutes of your time we’ve got just the thing.
In one of the most popular TED talks of all time, Amy Cuddy turns the table on the mind body paradigm. The social psychologist from Harvard asks, ‘our minds change our bodies, but can our bodies change our minds?’. Drawing from the results of a series of simple experiments (including her own real life drama), Amy discovered that just by adopting a non-verbal expression of power and dominance, like a Wonder Woman pose, people were more assertive, confident and comfortable. Even biological changes were recorded, where levels of testosterone, the dominance hormone, increased, while cortisol levels, the stress hormone, decreased.
But where can we test the high power pose hypothesis? Sure, we want to feel more buoyant giving a presentation, though standing at the top of the room with our hands on our hips and our feet shoulder width apart won’t fly. The trick is tiny tweaks. Before your next stressful evaluation take two minutes to get your Lynda Carter on, in the bathroom at work or before you leave the house. Apply it to whatever social threat you’re anticipating – first day in a new job, a driving test, meeting your partners parents, the lot.
In true New Year style, we’re going to jump in head first, and go one step further, vowing to do it everyday. We’ve a feeling that come February or March, we won’t be looking for that next new thing, we’ll already be on our way to becoming it.
Seeing is believing, this could be the best twenty minutes of our life.
