It used to be a truism of body language studies that alpha males asserted their status by taking up more space through a number of gestural displays, such as spreading their legs out to either side while sitting, putting their hands behind their head and pushing their elbows out, even slouching in a chair to take up more space with both arms and legs.  Winston Churchill, a relatively short, pudgy man, famously put one hand on his hip and stuck out his elbow in order to take up more space horizontally, as it were, while holding his jacket lapel with the other hand.  Leaders as various as Martin Luther King Jr and Tony Robbins raise their hands above their heads while gesturing in one way or another.

And the epitome of evil, Adolf Hitler, put stick figures in the margins of his speeches, cueing himself to raise his hands in his infamous salute, as well as to gesture with one fist or two, and even to stand on tiptoe at certain climatic moments in his speeches.

All of these displays serve to take up more space.  We haven’t thought of this leaders’ retinue of gestures as suggesting attractiveness but rather power.

But now a study comes along that suggests that open, expansive postures increase attractiveness for both sexes.  The study tested the dating appeal of the same person in different photographs on – where else – an online dating app.  The photographs either showed the subjects with arms out and legs apart, taking up more space and being more open, or the opposite.

You get more dates, apparently, with the former rather than the latter.

This result shouldn’t surprise us – confidence, openness, and dominance on the whole are more attractive than their opposites – and it reminded me of a recent coaching session.  I was preparing a speaker for a high-stakes presentation to the board of the organization.  We had worked for some time on the presentation content, getting the messages ‘bulletproof,’ as that organization likes to say.  We’d simplified and clarified the slides so that the thicket of data we started with revealed a few essential numbers when the undergrowth was pruned away.  And then we’d started to work on the delivery.

Because the speaker was feeling some tension, we spend  time on relaxation and confidence-building techniques first.  Then we started in on where the speaker would stand, and how he should move, and when.  We worked on the gestural language that the speaker would use.

It was all coming together nicely, and time was running out in the session, but there was something nagging at me.  The speaker had a very slight stoop – that is, his shoulders were very slightly collapsed forward in an otherwise upright and strong posture.

The result was subtle, but the stance seemed self-protective, as if the speaker were protecting his heart from the scrutiny and exposure of the presentation by slightly withdrawing from his full space.

I brought the posture to the speaker’s attention, and we worked on a couple of exercises to help him stand to his full height.

The result was interesting – not only did the speaker look more confident, but he also reported feeling more confident.  By taking up his full space, he was in effect saying, ‘I’m here, I’m not hiding, I own this moment and this room.’

I’ve always said that your actual height doesn’t matter.  Tom Cruise is only 5′ 7″, but he strides like a colossus across the screen in movie after movie. What matters is how much of your space you occupy. Do you take it all, and broadcast your confidence and presence to the world, or are you trying to disappear in plain sight by shrinking into yourself? How you hold your head, how you set your shoulders, and how you stack your body on top of your spine – these all add up to confidence and authority if you take your full height.

Go for it.  It’s yours for the taking.