Idioms | animals, parts of the body | vocabulary | ESL & ELT

May 8, 2019 / brain perks by mvm

you will be able to post photos, videos or GIFs in ur re-tweets | twitter | social media

May 8, 2019May 8, 2019 / brain perks by mvm

Twitter will now let you add photos, videos, or GIFs to retweets

Chris Welch, 8th may 2019

Beginning today, Twitter users can add images, videos, and GIFs to their retweets / quoted tweets. The company is rolling out this new feature across Android, iOS, and Twitter’s mobile website; it’s not on desktop quite yet, however. Adding media to a retweet works just like you’d expect: tap the “retweet with comment” option and then choose the image or GIF icon in the toolbar.

This is a small addition to the service, but Twitter says it was actually quite difficult to design in a way that made sense and wasn’t overwhelming when viewed in the timeline. “We found it was challenging for people to quickly understand all the content in a Retweet with media. This was due to the layout; two large tweets stacked on top of each other,” a spokesperson said. To solve for that, Twitter puts the original tweet in a smaller, indented box (with the user’s avatar still visible), and it makes your own media full width.

Twitter notes that some brands and creators are already using the new functionality on day one. Again, if you’re seeing this on a desktop browser, it’s not going to look quite right. Hopefully Twitter will fix that before long.

C U again | song | music| ESL & ELT activity with key

May 8, 2019 / brain perks by mvm

Sing along with Wiz khalifa & Charlie Puth

“See You Again” (feat. Charlie Puth)

[Charlie Puth:]
It’s been a long day  _____you, my friend
And I’ll tell you   about it when I see you again
We’ve come a long way from where we  _
Oh, I’ll tell you …  _ it when I see you again
When I see you again
(Hey)

[Wiz Khalifa:]
Damn, who knew?
All the  _ we flew
things we’ve been through
That I’ll be  _ right here talking to you
‘Bout another path
I know we loved to  __ the road and laugh
But   told me that it wouldn’t last
Had to  _ up
Look at things different, see the bigger  __
Those were the days
Hard work   pays
Now I see you in a better  _  (see you in a better place)

Uh
How can we not  ____ about family when family’s all that we got?
Everything I went through you were  _ there by my side
And now you gon’ be with me for the last  _

[Charlie Puth:]
It’s been a long day … you, my friend
And I’ll tell you … about it when I see you again (I see you again)
We’ve come a long way (yeah, we came a long way) from where we … (you know we started)
Oh, I’ll tell you … about it when I see you again (let me tell you)
When I see you again

(Aah oh, aah oh
Wooooh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh)
Yeah

[Wiz Khalifa:]
First you   go out your way
And the vibe is  strong
And what’s small turn to a  _

A friendship  _____________to a bond
And that bond will never be  _
The love will never   lost (and the love will never get lost)
And when   come first
Then the line will never be  __
Established it on our own
When that line had to be
And that line   what we reach
So   me when I’m gone (remember me when I’m gone)

How can we not … about family when family’s all that we got?
Everything I went through you were … there by my side
And now you gon’ be with me for the last ride

[Charlie Puth:]
So let the light  _ your way, yeah
Hold  _ memory as you go
And every road you take, will  ____________ lead you home, home

to correct this activity, visit:

brainperks4u.wordpress.com/2019/05/08/c-u-again-song-music-esl-elt-activity-with-key/

C U again | song | music| ESL & ELT activity with key

May 8, 2019 / brain perks by mvm

correct your activity !

“See You Again” (feat. Charlie Puth)

[Charlie Puth:]
It’s been a long day  without you, my friend
And I’ll tell you  all about it when I see you again
We’ve come a long way from where we  began
Oh, I’ll tell you …  about it when I see you again
When I see you again
(Hey)

[Wiz Khalifa:]
Damn, who knew?
All the  planes we flew
Good things we’ve been through
That I’ll be  standing right here talking to you
‘Bout another path
I know we loved to  hit the road and laugh
But  something told me that it wouldn’t last
Had to  switch up
Look at things different, see the bigger  picture
Those were the days
Hard work  forever pays
Now I see you in a better  place (see you in a better place)

Uh
How can we not  talk about family when family’s all that we got?
Everything I went through you were  standing there by my side
And now you gon’ be with me for the last  ride

[Charlie Puth:]
It’s been a long day … you, my friend
And I’ll tell you … about it when I see you again (I see you again)
We’ve come a long way (yeah, we came a long way) from where we … (you know we started)
Oh, I’ll tell you … about it when I see you again (let me tell you)
When I see you again

(Aah oh, aah oh
Wooooh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh)
Yeah

[Wiz Khalifa:]
First you  both go out your way
And the vibe is  feeling strong
And what’s small turn to a  friendship
A friendship  turn to a bond
And that bond will never be  broken
The love will never  get lost (and the love will never get lost)
And when  brotherhood come first
Then the line will never be  crossed
Established it on our own
When that line had to be  drawn
And that line  is what we reach
So  remember me when I’m gone (remember me when I’m gone)

How can we not … about family when family’s all that we got?
Everything I went through you were … there by my side
And now you gon’ be with me for the last ride

[Charlie Puth:]
So let the light  guide your way, yeah
Hold  every memory as you go
And every road you take, will  always lead you home, home

Body Language influences who you are | Amy Cuddy | Listening skills, comprehension, vocabulary, language, grammar, pronunciation | ESL & ELT activity with answer key

May 8, 2019 / brain perks by mvm

ESL & ELT Activities with answer key

Body language affects how others see us, but it may also change how we see ourselves. Social psychologist Amy Cuddy argues that “power posing” — standing in a posture of confidence, even when we don’t feel confident — can boost feelings of confidence, and might have an impact on our chances for success. (Note: Some of the findings presented in this talk have been referenced in an ongoing debate among social scientists about robustness and reproducibility. Read Amy Cuddy’s response here: http://ideas.ted.com/inside-the-debat…)

ESL & ELT activities

Task 1: watch the video and complete the text of the presentation

So I want to start by offering you a free no-tech life _________________________, and all it requires of you is this: that you change your posture for two minutes. But before I give it away, I want to ask you to right now do a little audit of your body and what you’re doing with your body. So how many of you are sort of making yourselves smaller? Maybe you’re hunching, crossing your legs, maybe wrapping your ankles. Sometimes we hold onto our arms like this. Sometimes we spread out. (Laughter) I see you. So I want you to pay attention to what you’re doing right now. We’re going to come back to that in a few minutes, and I’m hoping that if you learn to tweak this a little bit, it could significantly *change the way your life unfolds.

So, we’re really fascinated with body language, and we’re particularly interested in other people’s body language. You know, we’re interested in, like, you know — (Laughter) — an awkward interaction, or a smile, or a contemptuous glance, or maybe a very awkward ______________________, or maybe even something like a handshake.

Narrator: Here they are arriving at Number 10. This lucky policeman gets to shake hands with the President of the United States. Here comes the Prime Minister — No. (Laughter) (Applause)

Amy Cuddy: So a handshake, or the lack of a handshake, can have us talking for weeks and weeks and weeks. Even the BBC and The New York Times. So obviously when we think about nonverbal behavior,or body language — but we call it nonverbals as social scientists — it’s language, so we think about communication. When we think about communication, we think about ______________________. So what is your body language communicating to me? What’s mine communicating to you?

And there’s a lot of reason to believe that this is a valid way to look at this. So social scientists have spent a lot of time looking at the effects of our body language, or other people’s body language, on judgments. And we make sweeping judgments and inferences from body language. And those judgments can predict really meaningful life outcomes like who we hire or promote, who we ask out on a date. For example, Nalini Ambady, a researcher at Tufts ___________________, shows that when people watch 30-second soundless clips of real physician-patient interactions, their judgments of the physician’s niceness predict whether or not that physician will be sued. So it doesn’t have to do so much with whether or not that physician was incompetent, but do we like that person and how they interacted? Even more dramatic, Alex Todorov at Princeton has shown us that judgments of political candidates’ faces in just one second predict

______________________ percent of U.S. Senate and gubernatorial race outcomes, and even, let’s go digital, emoticons used well in online negotiations can lead to you claim more value from that negotiation. If you use them poorly, bad idea. Right?

So when we think of nonverbals, we think of how we judge others, how they judge us and what the outcomes are. We tend to forget, though, the other audience that’s influenced by our nonverbals, and that’s ourselves. We are also influenced by our nonverbals, our thoughts and our feelings and our physiology.

So what nonverbals am I talking about? I’m a ____________________ psychologist. I study prejudice, and I teach at a competitive business school, so it was inevitable that I would become interested in power dynamics. I became especially interested in nonverbal expressions of power and dominance.

And what are nonverbal expressions of power and dominance? Well, this is what they are. So in the animal kingdom, they are about expanding. So you make yourself big, you stretch out, you take up space, you’re basically opening up. It’s about opening up. And this is true across the animal kingdom. It’s not just limited to primates. And ____________________ do the same thing. (Laughter) So they do this both when they have power sort of chronically, and also when they’re feeling powerful in the moment. And this one is especially interesting because it really shows us how universal and old these expressions of power are.This expression, which is known as pride, Jessica Tracy has studied. She shows that people who are born with sight and people who are congenitally blind do this when they win at a physical competition. So when they cross the finish line and they’ve won, it doesn’t matter if they’ve never seen anyone do it. They do this. So the arms up in the V, the chin is slightly lifted.

What do we do when we feel _______________? We do exactly the opposite. We close up. We wrap ourselves up. We make ourselves small. We don’t want to bump into the person next to us. So again, both animals and humans do the same thing. And this is what happens when you put together high and low power. So what we tend to do when it comes to power is that we complement the other’s nonverbals. So if someone is being really powerful with us, we tend to make ourselves smaller. We don’t mirror them. We do the opposite of them.

So I’m watching this behavior in the classroom, and what do I notice? I notice that MBA students really exhibit the full range of power nonverbals. So you have people who are like caricatures of alphas, really coming into the room, they get right into the middle of the room before class even starts, like they really want to occupy space. When they sit down, they’re sort of spread out. They raise their hands like this.You have other people who are virtually _________________________ when they come in. As soon they come in, you see it.You see it on their faces and their bodies, and they sit in their chair and they make themselves tiny, and they go like this when they raise their hand.

I notice a couple of things about this. One, you’re not going to be _____________________. It seems to be related to gender. So women are much more likely to do this kind of thing than men. Women feel chronically less powerful than men, so this is not surprising.

But the other thing I noticed is that it also seemed to be related to the extent to which the students were participating, and how well they were participating. And this is really important in the MBA classroom,because participation counts for half the grade.

So _______________________ schools have been struggling with this gender grade gap. You get these equally qualified women and men coming in and then you get these differences in grades, and it seems to be partly attributable to participation. So I started to wonder, you know, okay, so you have these people coming in like this, and they’re participating. Is it possible that we could get people to fake it and would it lead them to participate more?

So my main collaborator Dana Carney, who’s at Berkeley, and I really wanted to know, can you fake it till you make it? Like, can you do this just for a little while and actually experience a behavioral outcome that makes you seem more powerful? So we know that our nonverbals govern how other people think and feel about us. There’s a lot of ________________________. But our question really was, do our nonverbals govern how we think and feel about ourselves?

There’s some evidence that they do. So, for example, we smile when we feel happy, but also, when we’re forced to smile by holding a pen in our teeth like this, it makes us feel happy. So it goes both ways. When it comes to power, it also goes both ways. So when you feel powerful, you’re more likely to do this, but it’s also possible that when you pretend to be powerful, you are more _______________________ to actually feel powerful.

So the second question really was, you know, so we know that our minds change our bodies, but is it also true that our bodies change our minds? And when I say minds, in the case of the powerful, what am I talking about? So I’m talking about thoughts and feelings and the sort of physiological things that make up our thoughts and feelings, and in my case, that’s hormones. I look at hormones. So what do the minds of the powerful versus the powerless look like? So powerful people tend to be, not surprisingly,more assertive and more confident, more optimistic. They actually feel they’re going to win even at games of chance. They also ____________________ to be able to think more abstractly. So there are a lot of differences. They take more risks. There are a lot of differences between powerful and powerless people.Physiologically, there also are differences on two key hormones: testosterone, which is the dominance hormone, and cortisol, which is the stress hormone.

So what we find is that high-power alpha males in primate hierarchies have high testosterone and low cortisol, and powerful and effective leaders also have high testosterone and low cortisol. So what does that mean? When you think about __________________ dominant*, high on testosterone, but really stress reactive? Probably not, right? You want the person who’s powerful and assertive and dominant, but not very stress reactive, the person who’s laid back.

So we know that in primate hierarchies, if an alpha needs to take over, if an individual needs to take over an alpha role sort of suddenly, within a few days, that individual’s testosterone has gone up significantly and his cortisol has dropped significantly. So we have this evidence, both that the body can shape the mind, at least at the facial level, and also that role changes can shape the mind. So what happens, okay, you take a role change, what happens if you do that at a really minimal level, like this tiny manipulation, this tiny intervention? “For two ____________________________,” you say, “I want you to stand like this, and it’s going to make you feel more powerful.”

So this is what we did. We decided to bring people into the lab and run a little experiment, and these people adopted, for two minutes, either high-power poses or low-power poses, and I’m just going to show you five of the poses, although they took on only two. So here’s one. A couple more. This one has been dubbed the “Wonder Woman” by the media. Here are a couple more. So you can be standing or you can be sitting. And here are the low-power poses. So you’re folding up, you’re making yourself small.This one is very low-power. When you’re touching your neck, you’re really protecting yourself.

So this is what happens. They come in, they spit into a vial, for two minutes, we say, “You need to do this or this.” They don’t look at pictures of the poses. We don’t want to prime them with a concept of power.We want them to be feeling power. So two minutes they do this. We then ask them, “How powerful do you feel?” on a series of items, and then we give them an ________________________ to gamble, and then we take another saliva sample. That’s it. That’s the whole experiment.

So this is what we find. Risk tolerance, which is the gambling, we find that when you are in the high-power pose condition, 86 percent of you will gamble. When you’re in the low-power pose condition, only 60 percent, and that’s a whopping significant difference.

Here’s what we find on testosterone. From their _____________________ when they come in, high-power people experience about a 20-percent increase, and low-power people experience about a 10-percent decrease.So again, two minutes, and you get these changes. Here’s what you get on cortisol. High-power people experience about a 25-percent decrease, and the low-power people experience about a 15-percent increase. So two minutes lead to these hormonal changes that configure your brain to basically be either assertive, confident and comfortable, or really stress-reactive, and feeling sort of shut down. And we’ve all had the feeling, right? So it seems that our nonverbals do govern how we think and feel about ourselves, so it’s not just others, but it’s also ourselves. Also, our bodies change our minds.

But the next question, of course, is, can power posing for a few minutes really change your life in meaningful ways? This is in the lab, it’s this little task, it’s just a couple of minutes. Where can you actually apply this? Which we cared about, of course. And so we think where you want to use this is evaluative situations, like social threat situations. Where are you being evaluated, either by your friends?For teenagers, it’s at the lunchroom table. For some people it’s speaking at a school board meeting. It might be giving a pitch or giving a talk like this or doing a job interview. We decided that the one that most people could relate to because most people had been through, was the job ______________________________.

So we published these findings, and the media are all over it, and they say, Okay, so this is what you dowhen you go in for the job interview, right?

People hate this. It’s what Marianne LaFrance calls “standing in social quicksand.” So this really spikes your cortisol. So this is the job interview we put them through, because we really wanted to see what happened. We then have these coders look at these tapes, four of them. They’re blind to the hypothesis. They’re blind to the conditions.They have no idea who’s been posing in what pose, and they end up looking at these sets of tapes, and they say, “We want to hire these people,” all the high-power posers. “We don’t want to hire these people.We also evaluate these people much more positively overall.” But what’s driving it? It’s not about the content of the speech. It’s about the presence that they’re bringing to the speech. Because we rate them on all these _______________________ related to competence, like, how well-structured is the speech? How good is it? What are their qualifications? No effect on those things. This is what’s affected. These kinds of things.People are bringing their true selves, basically. They’re bringing themselves. They bring their ideas, but as themselves, with no, you know, residue over them. So this is what’s driving the effect, or mediating the effect.

So when I tell people about this, that our bodies change our _______________________ and our minds can change our behavior, and our behavior can change our outcomes, they say to me, “It feels fake.” Right? So I said, fake it till you make it. It’s not me. I don’t want to get there and then still feel like a fraud. I don’t want to feel like an impostor. I don’t want to get there only to feel like I’m not supposed to be here. And that really resonated with me, because I want to tell you a little story about being an impostor and feeling like I’m not supposed to be here.

When I was 19, I was in a really bad car accident. I was thrown out of a car, rolled several times. I was thrown from the car. And I woke up in a head injury rehab ward, and I had been withdrawn from college,and I learned that my ______________________ had dropped by two standard deviations, which was very traumatic. I knew my IQ because I had identified with being smart, and I had been called gifted as a child. So I’m taken out of college, I keep trying to go back. They say, “You’re not going to finish college. Just, you know, there are other things for you to do, but that’s not going to work out for you.”

So I really struggled with this, and I have to say, having your identity taken from you, your core identity,and for me it was being smart, having that taken from you, there’s nothing that leaves you feeling more powerless than that. So I felt entirely powerless. I worked and worked, and I got lucky, and worked, and got lucky, and worked.

Eventually I graduated from _______________________. It took me four years longer than my peers, and I convinced someone, my angel advisor, Susan Fiske, to take me on, and so I ended up at Princeton, and I was like, I am not supposed to be here. I am an impostor. And the night before my first-year talk, and the first-year talk at Princeton is a 20-minute talk to 20 people. That’s it. I was so afraid of being found out the next daythat I called her and said, “I’m quitting.” She was like, “You are not quitting, because I took a gamble on you, and you’re staying. You’re going to stay, and this is what you’re going to do. You are going to fake it. You’re going to do every talk that you ever get asked to do. You’re just going to do it and do it and do it, even if you’re terrified and just paralyzed and having an out-of-body experience, until you have this moment where you say, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m doing it. Like, I have become this. I am actually doing this.'” So that’s what I did. Five years in grad school, a few years, you know, I’m at Northwestern, I moved to Harvard, I’m at Harvard, I’m not really thinking about it anymore, but for a long time I had been thinking,”Not supposed to be here.”

So at the end of my first year at Harvard, a student who had not talked in class the entire semester, who I had said, “Look, you’ve gotta participate or else you’re going to fail,” came into my office. I really didn’t know her at all. She came in totally defeated, and she said, “I’m not supposed to be here.” And that was the moment for me. Because two things happened. One was that I realized, oh my gosh, I don’t feel like that anymore. I don’t feel that anymore, but she does, and I get that feeling. And the second was, she is supposed to be here! Like, she can fake it, she can become it.

So I was like, “Yes, you are! You are supposed to be here! And _______________________ you’re going to fake it, you’re going to make yourself powerful, and, you know —

And you’re going to go into the classroom, and you are going to give the best comment ever.” You know? And she gave the best comment ever, and people turned around and were like, oh my God, I didn’t even notice her sitting there. (Laughter)

She comes back to me months later, and I realized that she had not just faked it till she made it, she had actually faked it till she became it. So she had changed. And so I want to say to you, don’t fake it till you make it. Fake it till you become it. Do it enough until you actually become it and internalize.

The last thing I’m going to leave you with is this. _________________________ tweaks can lead to big changes. So, this is two minutes. Two minutes, two minutes, two minutes. Before you go into the next stressful evaluative situation, for two minutes, try doing this, in the elevator, in a bathroom stall, at your desk behind closed doors. That’s what you want to do. Configure your brain to cope the best in that situation. Get your testosterone up. Get your cortisol down. Don’t leave that situation feeling like, oh, I didn’t show them who I am. Leave that situation feeling like, I really feel like I got to say who I am and show who I am.

So I want to ask you first, you know, both to try power posing, and also I want to ask you to share the science, because this is simple. I don’t have ego involved in this. (Laughter) Give it away. Share it with people, because the people who can use it the most are the ones with no resources and no technology and no status and no power. Give it to them because they can do it in private. They need their bodies, privacy and two minutes, and it can significantly change the outcomes of their life.

Thank you.

to correct this exercise visit:

brainperks4u.wordpress.com/2019/05/08/body-language-influences-who-you-are-amy-cuddy-listening-skills-comprehension-vocabulary-language-grammar-pronunciation-esl-elt-activity-answer-key/

Body Language influences who you are | Amy Cuddy | Listening skills, comprehension, vocabulary, language, grammar, pronunciation | ESL & ELT activity answer key

May 8, 2019 / brain perks by mvm

Answer key to correct your exercise:

Fill in the missing words

So I want to start by offering you a free no-tech life hack, and all it requires of you is this: that you change your posture for two minutes. But before I give it away, I want to ask you to right now do a little audit of your body and what you’re doing with your body. So how many of you are sort of making yourselves smaller? Maybe you’re hunching, crossing your legs, maybe wrapping your ankles. Sometimes we hold onto our arms like this. Sometimes we spread out. (Laughter) I see you. So I want you to pay attention to what you’re doing right now. We’re going to come back to that in a few minutes, and I’m hoping that if you learn to tweak this a little bit, it could significantly *change the way your life unfolds.

So, we’re really fascinated with body language, and we’re particularly interested in other people’s body language. You know, we’re interested in, like, you know — (Laughter) — an awkward interaction, or a smile, or a contemptuous glance, or maybe a very awkward wink, or maybe even something like a handshake.

Narrator: Here they are arriving at Number 10. This lucky policeman gets to shake hands with the President of the United States. Here comes the Prime Minister — No. (Laughter) (Applause)

Amy Cuddy: So a handshake, or the lack of a handshake, can have us talking for weeks and weeks and weeks. Even the BBC and The New York Times. So obviously when we think about nonverbal behavior,or body language — but we call it nonverbals as social scientists — it’s language, so we think about communication. When we think about communication, we think about interactions. So what is your body language communicating to me? What’s mine communicating to you?

And there’s a lot of reason to believe that this is a valid way to look at this. So social scientists have spent a lot of time looking at the effects of our body language, or other people’s body language, on judgments. And we make sweeping judgments and inferences from body language. And those judgments can predict really meaningful life outcomes like who we hire or promote, who we ask out on a date. For example, Nalini Ambady, a researcher at Tufts University, shows that when people watch 30-second soundless clips of real physician-patient interactions, their judgments of the physician’s niceness predict whether or not that physician will be sued. So it doesn’t have to do so much with whether or not that physician was incompetent, but do we like that person and how they interacted? Even more dramatic, Alex Todorov at Princeton has shown us that judgments of political candidates’ faces in just one second predict 70/seventy percent of U.S. Senate and gubernatorial race outcomes, and even, let’s go digital, emoticons used well in online negotiations can lead to you claim more value from that negotiation. If you use them poorly, bad idea. Right?

So what nonverbals am I talking about? I’m a social psychologist. I study prejudice, and I teach at a competitive business school, so it was inevitable that I would become interested in power dynamics. I became especially interested in nonverbal expressions of power and dominance.

And what are nonverbal expressions of power and dominance? Well, this is what they are. So in the animal kingdom, they are about expanding. So you make yourself big, you stretch out, you take up space, you’re basically opening up. It’s about opening up. And this is true across the animal kingdom. It’s not just limited to primates. And humans do the same thing. (Laughter) So they do this both when they have power sort of chronically, and also when they’re feeling powerful in the moment. And this one is especially interesting because it really shows us how universal and old these expressions of power are.This expression, which is known as pride, Jessica Tracy has studied. She shows that people who are born with sight and people who are congenitally blind do this when they win at a physical competition. So when they cross the finish line and they’ve won, it doesn’t matter if they’ve never seen anyone do it. They do this. So the arms up in the V, the chin is slightly lifted.

What do we do when we feel powerless?We do exactly the opposite. We close up. We wrap ourselves up. We make ourselves small. We don’t want to bump into the person next to us. So again, both animals and humans do the same thing. And this is what happens when you put together high and low power. So what we tend to do when it comes to power is that we complement the other’s nonverbals. So if someone is being really powerful with us, we tend to make ourselves smaller. We don’t mirror them. We do the opposite of them.

So I’m watching this behavior in the classroom, and what do I notice? I notice that MBA students really exhibit the full range of power nonverbals. So you have people who are like caricatures of alphas, really coming into the room, they get right into the middle of the room before class even starts, like they really want to occupy space. When they sit down, they’re sort of spread out. They raise their hands like this.You have other people who are virtually collapsing when they come in. As soon they come in, you see it.You see it on their faces and their bodies, and they sit in their chair and they make themselves tiny, and they go like this when they raise their hand.

I notice a couple of things about this. One, you’re not going to be surprised. It seems to be related to gender. So women are much more likely to do this kind of thing than men. Women feel chronically less powerful than men, so this is not surprising.

So business schools have been struggling with this gender grade gap. You get these equally qualified women and men coming in and then you get these differences in grades, and it seems to be partly attributable to participation. So I started to wonder, you know, okay, so you have these people coming in like this, and they’re participating. Is it possible that we could get people to fake it and would it lead them to participate more?

So my main collaborator Dana Carney, who’s at Berkeley, and I really wanted to know, can you fake it till you make it? Like, can you do this just for a little while and actually experience a behavioral outcome that makes you seem more powerful? So we know that our nonverbals govern how other people think and feel about us. There’s a lot of evidence. But our question really was, do our nonverbals govern how we think and feel about ourselves?

So the second question really was, you know, so we know that our minds change our bodies, but is it also true that our bodies change our minds? And when I say minds, in the case of the powerful, what am I talking about? So I’m talking about thoughts and feelings and the sort of physiological things that make up our thoughts and feelings, and in my case, that’s hormones. I look at hormones. So what do the minds of the powerful versus the powerless look like? So powerful people tend to be, not surprisingly,more assertive and more confident, more optimistic. They actually feel they’re going to win even at games of chance. They also tend to be able to think more abstractly. So there are a lot of differences. They take more risks. There are a lot of differences between powerful and powerless people.Physiologically, there also are differences on two key hormones: testosterone, which is the dominance hormone, and cortisol, which is the stress hormone.

So what we find is that high-power alpha males in primate hierarchies have high testosterone and low cortisol, and powerful and effective leaders also have high testosterone and low cortisol. So what does that mean? When you think about power, people tended to think only about testosterone, because that was about dominance. But really, power is also about how you react to stress. So do you want the high-power leader that’sdominant*, high on testosterone, but really stress reactive? Probably not, right? You want the person who’s powerful and assertive and dominant, but not very stress reactive, the person who’s laid back.

So we know that in primate hierarchies, if an alpha needs to take over, if an individual needs to take over an alpha role sort of suddenly, within a few days, that individual’s testosterone has gone up significantly and his cortisol has dropped significantly. So we have this evidence, both that the body can shape the mind, at least at the facial level, and also that role changes can shape the mind. So what happens, okay, you take a role change, what happens if you do that at a really minimal level, like this tiny manipulation, this tiny intervention? “For two minutes,” you say, “I want you to stand like this, and it’s going to make you feel more powerful.”

So this is what happens. They come in, they spit into a vial, for two minutes, we say, “You need to do this or this.” They don’t look at pictures of the poses. We don’t want to prime them with a concept of power.We want them to be feeling power. So two minutes they do this. We then ask them, “How powerful do you feel?” on a series of items, and then we give them an opportunity to gamble, and then we take another saliva sample. That’s it. That’s the whole experiment.

Here’s what we find on testosterone. From their baseline when they come in, high-power people experience about a 20-percent increase, and low-power people experience about a 10-percent decrease.So again, two minutes, and you get these changes. Here’s what you get on cortisol. High-power people experience about a 25-percent decrease, and the low-power people experience about a 15-percent increase. So two minutes lead to these hormonal changes that configure your brain to basically be either assertive, confident and comfortable, or really stress-reactive, and feeling sort of shut down. And we’ve all had the feeling, right? So it seems that our nonverbals do govern how we think and feel about ourselves, so it’s not just others, but it’s also ourselves. Also, our bodies change our minds.

So we published these findings, and the media are all over it, and they say, Okay, so this is what you dowhen you go in for the job interview, right?

You know, so we were of course horrified, and said, Oh my God, no, that’s not what we meant at all. For numerous reasons, no, don’t do that. Again, this is not about you talking to other people. It’s you talking to yourself. What do you do before you go into a job interview? You do this. You’re sitting down. You’re looking at your iPhone — or your Android, not trying to leave anyone out. You’re looking at your notes,you’re hunching up, making yourself small, when really what you should be doing maybe is this, like, in the bathroom, right? Do that. Find two minutes. So that’s what we want to test. Okay? So we bring people into a lab, and they do either high- or low-power poses again, they go through a very stressful job interview. It’s five minutes long. They are being recorded. They’re being judged also, and the judges are trained to give no nonverbal feedback, so they look like this. Imagine this is the person interviewing you.So for five minutes, nothing, and this is worse than being heckled. People hate this. It’s what Marianne LaFrance calls “standing in social quicksand.” So this really spikes your cortisol. So this is the job interview we put them through, because we really wanted to see what happened. We then have these coders look at these tapes, four of them. They’re blind to the hypothesis. They’re blind to the conditions.They have no idea who’s been posing in what pose, and they end up looking at these sets of tapes, and they say, “We want to hire these people,” all the high-power posers. “We don’t want to hire these people.We also evaluate these people much more positively overall.” But what’s driving it? It’s not about the content of the speech. It’s about the presence that they’re bringing to the speech. Because we rate them on all these variables related to competence, like, how well-structured is the speech? How good is it? What are their qualifications? No effect on those things. This is what’s affected. These kinds of things.People are bringing their true selves, basically. They’re bringing themselves. They bring their ideas, but as themselves, with no, you know, residue over them. So this is what’s driving the effect, or mediating the effect.

So when I tell people about this, that our bodies change our minds and our minds can change our behavior, and our behavior can change our outcomes, they say to me, “It feels fake.” Right? So I said, fake it till you make it. It’s not me. I don’t want to get there and then still feel like a fraud. I don’t want to feel like an impostor. I don’t want to get there only to feel like I’m not supposed to be here. And that really resonated with me, because I want to tell you a little story about being an impostor and feeling like I’m not supposed to be here.

When I was 19, I was in a really bad car accident. I was thrown out of a car, rolled several times. I was thrown from the car. And I woke up in a head injury rehab ward, and I had been withdrawn from college,and I learned that my IQ had dropped by two standard deviations, which was very traumatic. I knew my IQ because I had identified with being smart, and I had been called gifted as a child. So I’m taken out of college, I keep trying to go back. They say, “You’re not going to finish college. Just, you know, there are other things for you to do, but that’s not going to work out for you.”

Eventually I graduated from college. It took me four years longer than my peers, and I convinced someone, my angel advisor, Susan Fiske, to take me on, and so I ended up at Princeton, and I was like, I am not supposed to be here. I am an impostor. And the night before my first-year talk, and the first-year talk at Princeton is a 20-minute talk to 20 people. That’s it. I was so afraid of being found out the next daythat I called her and said, “I’m quitting.” She was like, “You are not quitting, because I took a gamble on you, and you’re staying. You’re going to stay, and this is what you’re going to do. You are going to fake it. You’re going to do every talk that you ever get asked to do. You’re just going to do it and do it and do it, even if you’re terrified and just paralyzed and having an out-of-body experience, until you have this moment where you say, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m doing it. Like, I have become this. I am actually doing this.'” So that’s what I did. Five years in grad school, a few years, you know, I’m at Northwestern, I moved to Harvard, I’m at Harvard, I’m not really thinking about it anymore, but for a long time I had been thinking,”Not supposed to be here.”

So at the end of my first year at Harvard, a student who had not talked in class the entire semester, who I had said, “Look, you’ve gotta participate or else you’re going to fail,” came into my office. I really didn’t know her at all. She came in totally defeated, and she said, “I’m not supposed to be here.” And that was the moment for me. Because two things happened. One was that I realized, oh my gosh, I don’t feel like that anymore. I don’t feel that anymore, but she does, and I get that feeling. And the second was, she is supposed to be here! Like, she can fake it, she can become it.

So I was like, “Yes, you are! You are supposed to be here! And tomorrow you’re going to fake it, you’re going to make yourself powerful, and, you know —

And you’re going to go into the classroom, and you are going to give the best comment ever.” You know? And she gave the best comment ever, and people turned around and were like, oh my God, I didn’t even notice her sitting there. (Laughter)

She comes back to me months later, and I realized that she had not just faked it till she made it, she had actually faked it till she became it. So she had changed. And so I want to say to you, don’t fake it till you make it. Fake it till you become it. Do it enough until you actually become it and internalize.

The last thing I’m going to leave you with is this. Tiny tweaks can lead to big changes. So, this is two minutes. Two minutes, two minutes, two minutes. Before you go into the next stressful evaluative situation, for two minutes, try doing this, in the elevator, in a bathroom stall, at your desk behind closed doors. That’s what you want to do. Configure your brain to cope the best in that situation. Get your testosterone up. Get your cortisol down. Don’t leave that situation feeling like, oh, I didn’t show them who I am. Leave that situation feeling like, I really feel like I got to say who I am and show who I am.

So I want to ask you first, you know, both to try power posing, and also I want to ask you to share the science, because this is simple. I don’t have ego involved in this. (Laughter) Give it away. Share it with people, because the people who can use it the most are the ones with no resources and no technologyand no status and no power. Give it to them because they can do it in private. They need their bodies, privacy and two minutes, and it can significantly change the outcomes of their life.

Thank you.

Firestone | song | music

May 8, 2019May 8, 2019 / brain perks by mvm

Sing along with Kygo !

Firestone

I’m a _____________________
You’re a fire
I’m the ___________________ in need of light
When we touch, you inspire
Feel the _______________________ in me tonight
So take me up, take me ______________________
There’s a world not far from here
We can dance in ___________________
Or we can burn in love tonight

Our ________________________ are like firestones
And when they strike, we feel the love
Sparks will fly, they ignite our ______________________
But when they strike, we light up the world
……………………….

We ______________________ up the world
Oooh oooh
World
Oooh oooh
Firestone

I’m from X, you’re from Y
Perfect ________________________ in the night
Here we are, come together
To the world we’ll ____________________
…………………………

Oooh oooh
World
Oooh oooh
Firestone

to correct yourself visit:

brainperks4u.wordpress.com/2019/05/08/firestone-song-music-answer-key/

Firestone | song | music | answer-key

May 8, 2019 / brain perks by mvm

sing along with kygo !

Fireston

I’m a
You’re a fire
I’m the in need of light
When we touch, you inspire
Feel the in me tonight
So take me up, take me
There’s a world not far from here
We can dance in
Or we can burn in love tonight

Our are like firestones
And when they strike, we feel the love
Sparks will fly, they ignite our
But when they strike, we light up the world
……………………….