(Image: Westend61/ Getty)
You excel in life by working hard and being competent, right? Maybe so, but a growing body of research suggests that’s not the whole story. What you wear, how you sit, even what’s in the room with you might increase your chances of success – so why not try out the following confidence-boosting tricks?
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Write yourself successful
If you’re knock-kneed ahead of an important interview or test, try reaching for paper and pen. Social psychologist Joris Lammers of the University of Cologne in Germany and his colleagues found that students who did a mock business school interview after being hoodwinked into writing about a time when they felt powerful than those who wrote nothing beforehand – while those who had written about a time they had lacked confidence fared even worse.
Pump up the bass
Mood music really is a thing, according to Dennis Hsu of the University of Hong Kong and his colleagues: they found people who listened to both felt more empowered and chose more power-related words in a word-completion task afterwards. The ultimate booster was rapper 50 Cent’s 2003 classic In Da Club.
Surround yourself with (gender-specific) greatness
Ioana Latu, now at Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey, and her colleagues discovered that women spoke more briefly than men at a specially arranged public speaking event. When a picture of Hillary Clinton or Angela Merkel was placed in the background, however, the gender gap evaporated. “It argues for having more visible female role models out there,” says Latu.
Sit up straight
Your mum was right all along: good posture can really have a positive effect on the psyche. Johannes Michalak, a clinical psychologist at the University of Hildesheim in Germany, and his colleagues showed that people suffering from depression recalled more than when slumped in the chair. Something similar seems to be true for with shoulders back and arms swinging. “[Bad] posture may be part of a vicious cycle,” says Michalak. “There is a close connection between the body and emotional processes.”
Dress to impress
Power dressing might not just be in the eye of the beholder, according to a study by Hajo Adam and Adam Galinsky, then both at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. They gave participants the same white coat to wear, telling one group it was a doctor’s coat, and the other a painter’s smock. Those who were dressed as doctors in their own mind concentrated better on a subsequent task than those who thought they were dressed as artists – a phenomenon the researchers dubbed ““.
Read more: “Self-confidence school: Can you really fake it to make it?“
