than a hundred milliseconds,

and then it's over.

So, I can trace my interest in this topic

back to something that happened to me in the 1980s.

Before I was an academic, I worked for a short time in public relations.

And, found myself one day in a meeting at 9 o'

clock in the morning with a very powerful entertainment industry executive.

And he had a little refrigerator at the edge of his desk.

While we were meeting, he would open it up.

Bottle of vodka.

Drank vodka straight out of the bottle, and had a bag of raw onions.

He was munching on those while this was going on.

And nobody said anything to him about it.

We didn't react while it was happening.

We didn't talk about it afterwards.

He didn't even offer to share anything with us.

It seemed perfectly appropriate to him to behave that way in a meeting with us.

Would never have occurred to us to do that in a meeting with him.

I want to talk with you about power, and I want to try to provide

a new way of thinking about how to

approach situations where you want to have impact.

One of the things that I've observed in my work in this area

is that, most people, when they are trying to prepare for a situation

where they want to have influence, going to a meeting or change somebody's

mind, is they tend to think a lot about what they're going to say.

That situation.

So, I'm going to suggest that rather than thinking about what you're going to say

in situations like this, you need to think about what your body is telling people.

When people are forming an impression of you, what you

say accounts for only 7% of what they come away with.

[MUSIC]

What I'd like to do today is to start first by telling you

a little bit about the actual mechanics of the body language of power.

What are the cues that we send, and what do they mean?

And then I'd like to talk with you about how you can

think about using those different cues

to address specific challenges in specific situations.

There is actually a body language of power.

And we know it, but we know it so well that we don't know that we know it.

It, it's something that we've been learning through

our socialization since a very, very young age.

So, we learn how to tune our

bodies to specific situations and specific relationships.

When we need to show someone respect, or be deferential, we know how to

use our body in a way that allows us to be effective in that role.

And we learn how to take charge with our bodies, and

how to make sure other people aren't taking advantage of us.

Most of us are socialized, you know, over the course of our lives, based

on other people's expectations of where they

think we should be within, in a hierarchy.

And so we learn how to do certain aspects of this, sort of performance, very well.

And other parts we know less well.

And sometimes we find ourselves in situations where the things we do

with our bodies that come most naturally don't fit the situation at all.

So, I wanna raise awareness of the ways in which we use our bodies,

and the impact that it has on our ability to have power and influence.

If you wanna be strategic about acting with power there

are two objectives that you have to keep in mind.

The first one is that you wanna be able to show up authoritative.

In charge, able to make the decisions, and able to privilege

your knowledge and experience over the knowledge and experience of other people.

The same time you need to be able to show approachable.

Which is, open, empathetic, willing to take others knowledge and experiences into

account and be able to relate to people on a human level.

So, let me see if I can start by

giving you a framework for thinking about two main

objectives for addressing the set of questions about how

your body language can be used to change your impact.

There are really two things I think you need

to be able to do if you wanna have influence.

The first is, you need to be able to show up authoritative.

Being authoritative means showing up and letting people know that you're in charge.

And what it involves psychologically and from a

body language perspective, is that you're going to

be closing yourself off a little bit to

other people, you're privileging your knowledge and experience.

Over and above the knowledge and experience

of other people, you're becoming more directive

and more concerned with controlling other people's

behavior than from taking direction from others.

The second objective, and it's equally important, is that

you need to be able to show up approachable.

Being approachable means that people feel that they can come to you with

whatever is on their mind, and relate to you on a human level.

Being approachable is just as important as knowing how to show authoritative.

It's really the basis of your likability.

It's the basis of the extent to which other people want to

be close to you, and it requires really, a totally opposite orientation

from showing up authoritative, it really involves being more open to other

people, being prepared psychologically to relate to them on a human level.

And if you think about the challenge of

showing up authoritative as increasing the psychological distance

between yourself and other people, either by raising

yourself a little or by lowering others a little.

Being approachable is really about shrinking the

psychological distance between you and other people.

It's about lowering yourself a little or raising other people up.

So, in the framework that I'm introducing to you today,

which I call acting with power, the body language associated

with showing up authoritative is called playing high and the

body language associated with showing up approachable is called playing low.

[MUSIC]

The actions associated with playing high come from what we observe whenever

we look at animals or human beings in the context of a social hierarchy.

When you look at people with, or group members with high rank, what

you'll see is a general body language that reflects a state of relaxation.

And openness, because at the top of hierarchy you have nothing to worry about.

Everybody beneath you is gonna make sure that nothing bad ever happens.

So, playing high, in a very general sense,

will look like a very open, expansive, relaxed body.

When walking, you assume others will move out of your path, taking up maximum space,

and allowing your body and your gestures to flow into the space of other people.

Other actions associated with playing high include

keeping your head perfectly still while talking.

And speaking in complete sentences.

So it's not important when you're playing high to have long sentences, in fact, they

can be very short but they'll have a clear beginning and a clear end point.

You'll also see people, when playing high, holding eye

contact a little longer than normal when addressing someone else.

It's actually an interesting relationship.

I think the idea that staring someone down is associated with playing high

is something most people know, but actually

it's a little more subtle than that.

So, when you're playing high, you stare someone down when you're addressing them.

You don't let them out from under you gaze.

They know you're serious.

But when they're addressing you, you're free to look around, you got

other things on your mind, other people you need to talk to, right?

So when you're being addressed by other people, you're free to look away.

You don't check other people's eyes for any reaction to what you've

said, and you have no visual reaction to what other people say either.

And you can interrupt before you know what you're gonna say.

It's important to recognize that playing high is a source of dominance.

Other people, in many situations, are simply more likely

to defer just based on how you use your body.

It's also important to recognize that playing high

can be really dangerous, one of the easiest

ways to get in trouble in a group is to play higher than your actual rank.

So, the most general advice I can give about when to play high is that you play

high to reinforce your actual rank, or in

a competitive situation when status is up for grabs.

[MUSIC]

Let's talk about what it looks like to play low.

When you observe natural hierarchies in groups

what you'll see is that lower ranking members

have a body language that is exactly the opposite of what playing high looks like.

Low ranking members hold their bodies very close and tight, they try to make

themselves as small as they can, minimize their footprint, and do, sort of prepare

themselves to hide from other people or kind of fend off a blow, so you'll see a

much more an attempt to shrink a little bit and and hide.

So when someone's playing low, you'll see

them leaning forward and sometimes point their

toes inward, it's all different ways of

making your footprint a little bit smaller.

You'll see people speak in incomplete sentences.

And when someone's playing low, you get a lot of fleeting and jerking movements.

Talking with your hands near your face, and instead of looking

directly at someone, a lot more glancing around and looking away.

They'll talk to to you and just glance over to make

sure that it's going okay, but there's no actual eye contact.

When a high status person is addressing a lower status

person that's when the low status person's eyes are riveted.

So, one of the other really interesting differences between people

who are higher ranking and lower ranking in groups, is that

you see a lot more smiling from the low ranking

members and it's not because things are better at the bottom.

Right?

People in the lower ranks are smiling because it's their job

to make sure that the people above them are never uncomfortable.

So they're not genuine smiles.

You get this kind of a fake, apologetic smile.

It's a badge of appeasement.

A way of making sure that people above them are feeling okay.

Playing low is also really important.

It's the basis of building rapport.

For a low ranking person, it's really important that the people

above you know that you understand their position and respect theirs.

Playing low for a high status person actually makes you more approachable.

You can gain status as a high status person by playing low.

So, you're most likely to be effective when playing low if you do

it to reinforce your actual rank or when you wanna lift someone else up.

[MUSIC]

So, the next important question is, how should you think about using this?

And I can tell you that I use it in two different ways.

To make myself more comfortable in situations where I'm afraid I'm

not going to be able to show up the way I

want to, and I also use my body language to help

other people feel more comfortable in situations where I'm worried about that.

You can think about using your body language not to

change the way you show up, every day in every situation.

But, as a way of meeting specific kinds of challenges.

When you walk into a situation and something unexpected happens,

people aren't as receptive as you expected them to be.

You find that you're being attacked or you can't get someone who you thought

was gonna be open to open up and tell you what you need to know.

You can think about how to adjust your body

language to try to shift the dynamic in the relationship.

[MUSIC]

So, when you look at men and women

in leadership roles, what you find is that men

and women don't actually behave differently in these roles,

they're perceived entirely differently doing exactly the same things.

So, let me talk to you for a minute about women in power.

And what that means is that, we're socialized to use

the body language that's associated with having a lower rank.

This is not necessarily a problem, it just means that many of us are better

versed in that body language than we are in the body language of playing high.

And the socialization has implications for how

women are viewed in different types of roles.

Let me tell you about a study that

was conducted by one of my colleagues at Stanford.