A few weeks ago, I set a personal goal of publishing a post every day of the work week. Despite nearly achieving this goal, it just doesn’t feel right; there’s something lacking from those posts. An artist friend of mine compared these posts to painting. The only way I’m going to find out what a bad post looks like is by making them. She knows what a great painting looks like because she has painted a hundred bad ones. It is not that I don’t like writing about little black dresses or going on geocaching adventures, (because I do). But they are too surface level. I have to go deeper. I understand it is pretty unrealistic to expect every post to reflect what is in my heart but I have try, right?
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about confidence. What drives it? How to increase it in my life and in the lives of others? And how do I channel it to make this blog the best that it can be? I was really inspired by Amy Cuddy’s Ted Talk, “Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are.” You see I’m currently in the midst of giving myself a crash course in lifestyle blogging (if you haven’t figured that out already) more particularly, photo taking/selfies. I can’t help but wonder how my self image is affecting the non-verbals that are caught in the photographs I’m taking. I am not a trained model and more often than not take 25 terrible photos to get two or three passable ones. I’m finding in this exercise of openness and learning, that I have to make more of a conscious effort to be more confident than I actually am by forcing myself to stand in front of a camera. I’m constantly having self talks, “Melissa you can do this.” “It’s like learning to drive a stick shift, you’re going to stall all the way down Venice Blvd. before you get it right. It is only a matter of learning.” It is about pushing yourself out of your comfort zone to achieve the things you want.
According to Cuddy’s research, our non-verbals govern how we think about ourselves. That if we adopt what she dubs as power poses for two minutes, her studies show that there is a potential of a 20% increase in testosterone (the dominance hormone) and a 25% decrease in cortisol (stress hormone). She's saying that when I’m beating myself up over a tripod photo shoot, I need to sit in a power position for two minutes. Doing so will allow me to physically trick myself into reacting confidently. Did it work…? I think so but I’m going to need a few more tries before I get it right.
