By Alexander Hoyt-HeydonLaw Career Development Graduate Fellow
In my last entry, I talked briefly about the importance of keeping yourself healthy to help let your body do what it does best. A little over a year ago, the LCD blog posted a fantastic article about TED talks to watch before your next interview, as well as an article about networking during the holiday season. What do each of these have to do with each other? You might not realize it, but your personal health and well-being has a direct impact on your ability to network and find a job. How well you take care of yourself not only influences the way you feel about yourself, but also how those that you meet feel about you. Health is a key to your personal success in life.
Prior to attending Golden Gate University, I was a bartender, and to earn a little extra money during law school, I worked for a staffing agency that would routinely send me out to bar-tend for catered events all throughout the Bay Area. At one of these events, a tech company was hosting a guest speaker as she toured the country promoting her upcoming book. That speaker was Amy Cuddy, a professor and researcher at Harvard Business School, and her new book is about how nonverbal behavior and snap judgments affect people. If that name sounds familiar to you, it’s because her TED talk on how Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are, as well as her popularization of the ‘Wonder Woman’ pose, have made her one of the most watched TED talks over the last couple of years. As luck would have it, I was able to snag an advanced copy of her new book, Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges, and read it 2 months before its expected date of release.
As I mentioned in my last post, John Romaniello and Adam Bornstein are not the only ones talking about how hormones affect your body and mind. As part of her research into nonverbal behavior, Professor Cuddy was able to observe how certain postures, attitudes, and habits not only affected how other people saw each other, but also what happened to a person’s hormonal balance. Those people who adopted a more ‘powerful’ pose would often be viewed as being more confident, more in control of a situation, and even more likeable as a person, all without any words being said. At the same time, hormones like testosterone increased while simultaneously decreasing cortisol. This simple change in posture led to participants to become more confident, less confrontational, and even more likable in the eyes of those around them.
In her presentation, as well as in her book, Professor Cuddy talks about her first experience what many graduate students call an ‘elevator pitch’. Basically, this is the 30 second explanation of a graduate student’s thesis meant to show other members of the academic community what the student is working on, as well as a way for a graduate student to find work after the thesis’s completion. Professor Cuddy’s first elevator pitch was a disaster, and it left her in a state of shock for the rest of the day. This experience, however, would later inspire her on ways to build confidence in those people who do not already possess any, and ways that others can be spared the embarrassment she felt on that fateful day.
Let’s bring this all together for a moment. I’m sure that by now many of you have heard at least once how important it is to take care of yourself, how it’s important to stay in shape and work out, and that it’s important to eat healthy. The legal world can be busy enough as is, and finding the time to go to a gym or even cook dinner might not always take precedence over studying for a final or finishing that memorandum. But the truth is that even little habit changes can make a big difference in how we approach things, and that taking just a few moments to take care of ourselves, even just adjusting our posture, can go a long way to affecting everything else that we do for the day.
Don’t believe me? Then take a look at this short video of the New Zealand Rugby team’s Haka ritual. Professor Cuddy showed this during her presentation, and one of the things she mentioned is how powerful it was for the team to get their head into the game. While most might view it as an overly macho intimidation tactic, the truth is the opposite. When interviewed, the team said that they normally did better on days they did the ritual before they even got out on the field, out of everyone’s view. The Haka served both as an inspirational dance, as well as bonding opportunity between members of the team. The whole thing lasts less than two minutes, but that’s enough time for the whole All-Black team to get in sync with one and other, and get their game faces on.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not asking anyone here to get a bunch of friends together and perform an ancient Maori war dance. Instead, I’m asking you to take a moment and realize how your health and well-being can affect those around you, and how you can change little things in your life to make it that much easier for you. Books like What Every BODY is Talking About: An Ex-FBI Agent's Guide to Speed-Reading People by Joe Navarro can tell you how to read other people’s body language, and books like Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell can show you how powerful first impressions and intuitions can be, but it’s books like Amy Cuddy’s Presence that remind you how these things can also be used in your favor to change how the people around you feel.
By now it has been repeated to almost nausea, but the holiday season is an excellent time for networking. But just as many law students and new lawyers are going to be avoiding these events out of nerves and lack of confidence. Don’t let these opportunities slip by you, and take a few moments to follow some of the tricks given by Professor Cuddy in her TED talk. You’d be surprised how much of a difference that they can make. Tweaking a few minor habits, striking a pose in the mirror, and practicing your ‘elevator pitch’ might not make you instantly healthier, but they could help push you in the direction of a better state of well-being. Sometimes all it takes is a few baby steps to break into a run, so you have no reason not to at least give it a try.
And remember, you can always make an appointment with Law Career Development to help get your elevator pitch, and your resume, ready for all the holiday parties. We would love to see you in our office, and maybe if you ask nicely enough, we can help you find the perfect pose to build your confidence.
