Feel like a superhero
I have been on a mega Grey’s Anatomy binge. Before I start to feel guilty about all those life hours spent watching tv, I’d like to say that it’s educational. I now know what the sentence “Quick, quick- she’s in V-Fib, push one of epi, intubate her and get the O.R. ready for a whipple. Go. Go. Go,” means.
Please allow me to translate.
“Quick, quick, this patient has ventricular fibrillation, and the heart is beating rapidly with electrical impulses making the heart chambers quiver instead of pumping blood, making the blood pressure plummet, and not feeding the vital organs. Please give the patient some epinephrine which will increase and strengthen the heartbeat. Then, still speedily as this is serious, insert an endotracheal tube into the airway so the ventilator can push the air into the lungs. Please take the patient to the operating theatre and prepare them for a procedure where the surgeon will reattach the remaining portions of the digestive system after having removed them in dealing with pancreatic cancer. Go. Go. Go.”
My version is much better - perhaps I should write the script for Grey’s Anatomy?
Body language
There is a shorthand that in time we come to learn. Even though we might not understand the specifics, we get the gist. Our understanding isn’t just from language of course, we also have nonverbal behaviour, or body language – or ‘nonverbals' as social scientists call it. If you had a choice to speak to someone with their weight on one leg, arms crossed over the body and a scowl on face or a wide-eyed person with a beaming face and open arms, I think we all intuitively will pick the same person.
Research from Tufts University, showed that when people watched 30-second soundless clips of real physician-patient interactions, their judgments of the physician's niceness predicted whether or not that physician will be sued. It had little to do with whether or not that physician was incompetent, but more to do with whether we liked that person and how they interacted.
Research from Princeton has shown that judgments of political candidates' faces in just one second, predict 70% of U.S. Senate and gubernatorial race outcomes.
And research has shown (shockingly) that emoticons used well in online negotiations can lead you to claim more value from that negotiation.
But it is not just about these nonverbals affect how other people see us, they also affect how we feel about ourselves.
The superhero pose study
In Grey’s Anatomy, before a surgery one of the surgeons (Amelia) stands in a ‘superhero pose’ to gain confidence. (Think of Wonder Woman with her feet firmly on the ground slightly wider than hip distance and her hands on her hips and open chest). I remembered this being scientifically proven from a Ted talk I had heard many years ago -pre Grey’s Anatomy binge, even pre- Game of Thrones binge (the latter show also sent me down many research rabbit holes about dragons and the Dothraki language)*
Amy Cuddy, a social psychologist researching body language, gives a fascinating Ted talk about her quest ‘to discover if nonverbal actions govern how we think and feel about ourselves’ and ‘if it’s true that our bodies change our minds'? (We know our minds change our bodies).
She conducted an experiment where participants spat into a vial to get an initial hormone reading, then for two minutes took on a physical posture either high power (e.g. superhero aka Wonder Woman pose) or lower power pose (e.g. Slouching and arms folded closing the chest) Participants were then asked, “How powerful do you feel?" on a series of items and were given an opportunity to gamble. Finally, another saliva sample was taken to get another hormone reading.
The results
The results showed 86% of people will gamble if they have been in the high-power pose and only 60% would gamble if they were in the low-power pose condition. High-power people experience about a 20% increase of testosterone, and low-power people experience about a 10% decrease. High-power people experienced 25% decrease in cortisol (the stress hormone), and the low-power people experience about a 15% increase.
All of this just from holding a physical position! After just 2 minutes hormonal changes can configure your brain to either assertive, confident and comfortable, or really stress-reactive, and feeling sort of shut down.
Sometimes we are so busy being busy that we tune out of how we feel. We go into auto pilot and become unaware of the choices we make. We might feel miserable, lethargic, stressed and we think we have to do something enormous to change this. And yes, maybe that is the case, but sometimes taking 2 minutes out to change our posture can radically change how we feel. Just as changing our breathing can also affect our mood. And once we feel that mood shift, perhaps we can make better choices and understand better why we feel as we do.
Your turn
Why not try it and see if it works for you? The next time you need to be on top form, perhaps you have a job interview, or have to have a difficult conversation- stand with both feet slightly wider than hips distance apart and place your hands on your hips like a superhero for 2 minutes and see how that affects you. When you are feeling miserable and down in the mouth, smile for 2 minutes and see how that affects you.
You might want to do this away from other people as I am not sure what reaction you may get.
* Scholars believe that dragons are huge extinct or migrating crocodiles as they bear the closest resemblance, especially when encountered in forested or swampy areas, and are most likely the template of modern Oriental dragon imagery.
* David J. Peterson a linguist and co-founder of the Language Creation Society created the Dothraki language complete with functional grammar and nearly 2,000 words.
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