Founder & Chief Executive Officer
A few videos ago I talked about the Superman and Superwoman pose. Hands on your hips, stand tall, and you walk into a recording with noticeably more confidence. I do it myself and I think it genuinely helps.
It also does something for the person watching, because confident body language reads as somebody who knows their subject and cares about it. We are social animals and we read posture constantly, usually without noticing we are doing it.
I want to add to that, though, because the pose is a tool for the sixty seconds before you record. The confidence itself gets built somewhere else entirely.
Worth being precise here, since the original power posing research became famous and then contested.
The dramatic claims from the original 2010 study, about testosterone rising and cortisol falling, did not survive replication. Multiple attempts failed to reproduce them, and a 2017 review found close to zero effect on hormonal and behavioural outcomes.
The part about how you feel held up well. A 2017 meta-analysis covering 1,071 participants found significant effects on subjectively experienced feelings of power, and a later systematic review confirmed that posture affects how powerful somebody feels. Interestingly, the mechanism may have more to do with avoiding hunched, closed postures than with expansive ones adding something.
So the version of this I actually use is supported. Standing tall before you record changes how you feel going into it. The claims that went too far were about your bloodstream rather than your state of mind.
Summary The hormonal claims from the original power posing research failed replication, while a 2017 meta-analysis of 1,071 participants found posture does affect subjectively felt power. Standing tall changes how you feel going in.
The second half of this matters just as much, since you are being watched.
People process posture, facial expression, and energy almost instantly and mostly unconsciously. Somebody hunched and tentative reads as unsure of their material, even when the material is excellent. Somebody open and settled reads as somebody who knows what they are talking about, before a single word has been evaluated.
That judgment forms in the first second or two, well ahead of any assessment of what you actually said. It is the reason two people can deliver identical information to very different effect, and it is why how you hold yourself on video is a content decision rather than a cosmetic one.
Summary People read posture and energy almost instantly and unconsciously, forming a judgment before evaluating what you said. How you hold yourself on video is a content decision rather than a cosmetic one.
The pose is a useful trigger. It is not a confidence supply. The supply comes from having done the thing enough times that it stops being frightening.
This is well established in psychology. Albert Bandura’s work on self-efficacy identified four sources of belief in your own ability, and the most influential by a distance is mastery experience, meaning actually performing the thing successfully. Watching others, being encouraged, and managing your emotional state all contribute, and none of them come close to the effect of having done it yourself.
Which means confidence on video is not a prerequisite you need to acquire before you start. It is the output of starting. Waiting until you feel ready reverses the order, and the waiting never resolves, because nothing in the waiting produces the mastery experiences that would make you ready.
Summary Bandura’s research identified mastery experience, meaning actually performing the thing, as the most influential source of self-efficacy. Confidence is the output of starting rather than a prerequisite for it.
Here is the part I most want people to take seriously. Record on the days you feel sick, tired, or convinced that what you have to say is not good enough.
Those sessions are worth more than the ones where you feel great, because of what they teach your brain. Recording when you feel brilliant proves you can perform under good conditions, which you already suspected. Recording while tired and unconvinced proves something far more useful, which is that your ability to show up is not conditional on how you feel that day.
Once that belief is in place, the whole thing becomes easier, since you have removed the negotiation. You are no longer waiting for the right mood, the right energy, or the sense that today’s idea is strong enough. You just record, and the evidence that you will keep showing up accumulates every time you do.
Summary Recording while tired or unconvinced proves your ability to show up is not conditional on how you feel. That removes the negotiation about whether today is a good enough day.
What follows is a loop, and it runs in your favour once it starts.
You record when you do not feel like it, which proves you are willing. The practice makes you better, because talking to a camera is a skill that responds to repetition like any other. Better delivery produces better content, which performs better, which makes the whole exercise feel worthwhile. Feeling more capable makes you more likely to record again. More recording produces more practice.
Every pass around that loop raises the floor. The version of you recording in six months will be better than today’s version regardless of talent, purely because of volume. The only requirement is that you keep entering the loop, including on the days when entering it is the last thing you want to do.
Summary Recording builds skill, better delivery produces better content, better content makes the effort feel worthwhile, and that makes you more likely to record again. Every pass raises the floor.
One thing that makes the early rough videos easier to accept is that they are not wasted even when they are mediocre.
Every video you record is material. The thinking in it can become a blog post on your website, which is where it does long-term work, since written content can be found in search for years while a video cycles out of a feed in days. Even a clumsy video contains a useful idea explained in your own words, and that idea is worth keeping.
So the practice period is building two things at once. You are getting better at being on camera, and you are accumulating a library of content that can live on your site. Search engine optimization works on written material, which means those early videos converted into blog posts start earning traffic while you are still finding your feet on camera. Strong website design gives that library a home, and a good SEO company can make sure it gets found. The confidence and the asset are being built in the same sessions.
Summary Every recorded video is material that can become a blog post on your website, where written content gets found in search for years. The practice period builds confidence and a content library at the same time.
Do the pose. Stand tall before you hit record, because the research supports it changing how you feel, and your audience reads your posture whether they notice it or not.
Then build the actual confidence the only way it gets built, which is by recording when you are sick, tired, and sure your information is not good enough. Each of those sessions proves to your brain that you will show up regardless, and each one makes the next one better.
The better you get, the better your content, and the more likely you are to keep going. That loop starts the moment you record something you did not feel ready to record.
Sources:
British Psychological Society, A decade of power posing: where do we stand? (a 2017 meta-analysis of 1,071 participants found significant effects on subjectively experienced feelings of power, while hormonal and behavioural effects from the original research failed to replicate).
https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/decade-power-posing-where-do-we-stand
Albert Bandura, self-efficacy theory (mastery experience, meaning direct performance of a task, is the most influential of the four sources of self-efficacy), summarised via Simply Psychology.
https://www.simplypsychology.org/self-efficacy.html
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