Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are – TED talk

So I just watched this TED talk and it’s interesting.

In this TED talk, Amy Cuddy speaks about faking it till you make it, or better: faking it till you become it. She’s specifically talking about a change of body language, but the idea of faking it till you become it applies across the board.

People don’t appreciate the value of just going through actions, even if it’s fake. There’s a lot to be said about our actions affecting our minds.

Too many people seem to feel stuck with “who they are”. They are X and they can never be Y. I already went on a rant about this a week or two ago, but in three words: “Yes you can”. (Obviously, I’m not saying you can do anything. You can’t become the next Bill Gates, Michael Jordan or Michael Jackson, but you can do a lot more than you think).

What actually grinds my gears the most is not other people thinking they are X and that they’re stuck as X for all eternity. I don’t really care how high or low your self-esteem is and how you live your life. What grinds my gears the most is when someone judges me on how I acted in a specific situation and jumps to the conclusion that this means X, Y, Z about me and I can never act any differently in the future if a similar situation were to occur.

As a simple (and rather extreme) example, one time you don’t say thank you to someone and the person jumps to the conclusion that you never say thank you and are a person that is forever incapable of being someone that can say thank you. This didn’t happen to me, but something similar did and it pissed me off and the situation was probably just as ridiculous as this example. And it’s not just about being judged, it’s when the person’s judgement affects you detrimentally.

And that’s another thing. Jumping to outrageous conclusions from small things or little knowledge of something. Bad in all areas of life. Often we need to make decisions based off of very little information. Other times we don’t however and it just hurts everyone involved when jumping to conclusions.