The idea of ‘faking it until you make it’ receives a bad rap in this authentic era.  Better to be real than bogus, goes the current thinking.  But by taking advantage of a bit of brain science, you can trick yourself into thinking that you are more of a superstar than you are yet really – and reap the rewards accordingly.

First, the brain science.  We think that our brains work like Mr. Spock’s of Star Trek: logical, straightforward, with our conscious minds clearly in charge.  So, for example, we get a thought, such as “I’m going to reach for my coffee, the cup that’s sitting there at the end of the desk,” then we direct our hand to grab the cup, and then we drink.  It’s all very sensible – and it’s obviously the way it works, right?

But it turns out that it’s actually our unconscious minds that decide on the coffee, and we then start moving our bodies, and only after we have embodied our unconscious thought do we finally realize consciously what has happened.  The flow is ucs decision, to movement, to cs awareness.  It’s very counterintuitive, because we generally feel like we are in conscious control of our bodies and always aware of our movements as they are happening.  But in fact, our brains elide out the lag between ucs decision and cs awareness of the movement associated with it, so that we don’t have the weird experience of watching our bodies move without knowing why.

We evolved this way for speed, no doubt – our unconscious minds move much faster than our conscious minds – but lately, as the need to outrun sabre-tooth tigers has lessened, we are more often in the situation of being evaluated for, say, confidence and enthusiasm by our fellow humans than we are literally running away from such dire dangers.

Which means we can use this quirk of the brain to influence what our conscious minds are thinking and how we are feeling — by embodying the feeling we want to have.  For example, a study from 2015 (Michalak et al., 2015) found that people who were instructed to walk in a cheery, bouncy, energetic way felt happier than people who just go from one place to another without a spring in their step – regardless of how they were faring initially.  And the reverse was also true – if you walked in a dejected way – with shoulders rounded and arms depressed, you were likely to feel more depressed than a control group.

So if you are getting ready to attend an important meeting, or give a crucial speech, adding a spring to your step, standing tall with shoulders back, and slapping a smile on your face, will likely help you feel better, give a better talk, and show up with more perceived confidence than if you go in like William H. Macy in The Cooler.

You are using your body to enhance your confidence, because of the feedback loop your body sends your conscious mind.  It’s not really faking – it’s deciding to take charge of how you feel and directing your body in order to elevate your mind.  We are not used to thinking that we can control our feelings; hence the sense of manipulation.  But if you want to think of that as faking it, then be my (somewhat cheerier) guest!