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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. 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.

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 percent of U.S. Senate and gubernatorial race outcomes, and even, let's go digital, emoticons used well in online negotiations can lead you to claim more value from that negotiation.

If you use them poorly, bad idea. Right?

Your body language may shape who you are

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