What changes companies is leadership and if a leader wants to shift a company’s thinking they need influence. If you are able to influence the managers and staff driving a process, you can action change. If you want a partnership with a company, that requires influence. If you want to impact society, that requires influence. If you can influence systems, you can influence culture. Influence can change anything.

In your professional encounters, major emphasis has to be on what you say, how smooth your presentation is and how convincing your content is. If you adopt a confident posture which is not backed up by substance, you may overreach yourself. However, the people you’re hoping to influence are evaluating your credibility and trustworthiness – and that evaluation will only partially be determined by what you say. The rest will be based on physical gestures, posture, facial expressions, and eye contact. These can either support their image of you and further enhance it or weaken your impact as a leader.

Posture can have a greater impact than title and rank

According to research by Kellogg School, posture plays an important role in determining whether leaders act as though they are really in charge. Humans and animals all express power by adopting big, bold stances. The opposite is also true: they cringe into in-turned and contractive postures when they feel helpless. The research finds that “posture expansiveness,” positioning oneself in a way that opens up the body and takes up space, activates a sense of power in one that produces behavioral changes, independent of one’s actual rank or hierarchical role in an organization.
These findings demonstrate that posture may be more significant to a person’s psychological ability to express power than their title or rank alone. The researchers did indeed find that posture mattered more than status or hierarchical role — it had a strong effect, making a person think and act in a more powerful way. In an interview situation, for example, an interviewee’s posture will not only convey confidence and leadership, but the person will actually think and act more powerfully. Astoundingly, the effect of posture superseded the effect of role in each and every study.

Body language affects how you feel about yourself

Research in the field of embodied cognition demonstrates that there is a very strong feedback loop between how we express our emotions with our bodies and how we experience our emotions, but the idea is not a new one.
In 1872 Charles Darwin proposed that facial expressions feed information back to our brains, altering our emotions positively or negatively. We all know how frustrating it is to be told to smile when we are having a bad day, but it seems there really is a good argument for reminding ourselves to smile, stand up tall, spread our shoulders wide and express physical positivity. We’ve known for a long time the importance of first impressions and the effect our body language can have on other people, but what we often forget – and what we’re only recently seeing strong evidence for – is the effect our body language can have on ourselves, on the inside. In his article Big Think Simon Oxenham explores various pieces of research in the field of embodied cognition and shares many experiments where people were placed in positions of power, or cast as the underdogs, and he shows how the body language they acted out (even through acted and false) impacted the way they thought and behaved. Interestingly, it also resulted in increased levels of testosterone or reduced levels of the stress hormone cortisol.

Begin with the end in mind

In Richard Bach’s iconic book, Jonathan Livingstone Seagull tells us that in order to reach a destination, we must begin by imagining that we have already arrived. So standing in a posture of confidence – even when you don’t feel confident – can really boost your feelings of confidence, and can have an impact on your chances of success. The term for this technique is “power posing” and it has also more recently been called posture feedback.

Remember that the posture you adopt sends a message to observers but does also feed back into yourself. To be influential is to make things happen and change. When next you need to exert influence, it may be a good idea to unfold your arms, push back your shoulders and – yes – smile.  Adopt the body language of leaders.