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Confidence can be a powerful tool if you know how to show it.

If there's one "trick" to achieving success regardless of skill, ability, or talent, it's confidence. And the good news is it doesn't necessarily have to be actual confidence—merely the appearance of confidence is often enough to influence people and change outcomes.

Confidence is how con men are able to rope people in, but confidence can also be used for good. If you learn how to exude confidence, it can be one of the most powerful tools for creating the life you want and effecting positive change in the world.

So what does that look like, especially when you're not really feeling it? We all wish we could walk boldly through the world without any worry or self-doubt, but most of us don't feel 100% confident 100% of the time. That doesn't mean we can't appear confident, though. Former FBI agent and body language expert Joe Navarro shares six elements we need to understand in order to project confidence with WIRED.

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1. Understanding Confident Traits

There are certain traits confident people have that help them appear comfortable when they walk into a room and command whatever space they are in.

"When we talk about confidence, it's so many things," says Navarro. "It has to do with our posture, the way we present, how we look. Where's our chin? Where are the eyes looking and gazing? Our gestures are loose, but they're smoother. As we walk about, we walk as though we are on a mission."

Even how we move our eyeballs makes a difference. "The less confident we are, the less eye contact we make," Navarro says. "The less confident we are, the more reluctant we are to look about."

eye contact, confidence, looking around with confidence, body language, eyesPeople who are confident make more eye contact and look around more.Photo credit: Canva

Confident people don't show their confidence in the way many people assume. "I think sometimes people mistake machismo or theatrical displays of power as confidence," Navarro adds. "Confidence can be very quiet."

Jane Goodall, for example, is not a loud-speaking person bursting with bravado. She's rather meek and mild, and yet she commands every room. "One of the things you notice is they sort of have this command of themselves, and in doing so, that command transmits outward," Navarro explains.

You can also use time to convey confidence. Don't rush, go at your own pace. "If you're in charge, you're in charge of time," says Navarro. "I'm gonna take my time to walk out. I'm gonna take my time to answer your question. I will answer it in the pace, manner, and tone that I choose. And in doing that, we are demonstrating that we are confident and in control."

2. Modeling Confidence

One of the most effective ways of exuding confidence is to choose someone who is confident in a way that you admire and model yourself after them. What traits do they have that you could emulate? How do they move? How do they speak?

confident behavior, exuding confidence, how to seem more confident, body language, relating to othersHow do people who are confident behave?Photo credit: Canva

This doesn't mean changing who you are on a fundamental level, but rather observing the people who have an ability you're struggling with and behaving your way toward gaining that ability.

"You know, we're not born this way," says Navarro. "These are things that we have to develop, and say, 'How do I want to be perceived? And what can I do to achieve that?'"

3. Little Behaviors

Navarro shares that little things can make a difference. For instance, indicating a direction by pointing with your finger is an undesirable behavior almost universally, but pointing with an open hand is not.

He gave an example of something he had to learn when he first joined the police force and had to make an arrest. The first time he had to say, "Stop, you're under arrest!" he said it in a high-pitched voice and said it sounded terrible.

"You have to work at having that command presence, where you say [in a deeper voice], 'Stop right there, don't move.' That's almost theatrical, but it's what is needed."

confidence, under arrest, body language, voice, toneUnder Arrest GIF by ABC NetworkGiphy

He gave another example of saying "No, stop," with confidence, using a lower voice and an outstretched hand. The more confident you are in saying it, the more your fingers will spread apart. Those little behaviors convey confidence more than people realize.

4. Intonation

We all have certain vocal habits that include how we use tone in our speaking. Navarro describes a phenomenon known as "uptalk," which is when you raise your intonation at the end of phrases or sentences, almost as if you're asking a question even when you're not.

He shared that speaking with confidence involves bringing your voice down in a more declarative way when you speak rather than sounding as if you're questioning.

confidence when public speaking, the power of pauses, speaking slowly and confidently, uptalk, declarationSlowing down and using powerful pauses can make you appear confident.Photo credit: Canva

5. Cadence

Many of us, especially when we're not feeling comfortable or confident, talk too fast. But when you talk too fast, people stop listening. Pacing your speech and using the power of pauses can be a powerful way to convey confidence.

"If you want people to listen to you, use cadence to get their attention, hold their attention, but then look forward to what that next set of words will be," says Navarro. "It lets them know, at a subconscious level, this is the person in charge. And we know that they're in charge because they have temporal control over this. They're not in a hurry."

6. Non-verbals

People often think that confidence looks like holding your shoulders back, puffing up your chest, and keeping your chin up. It can look like that, says Navarro, but it doesn't have to.

A confident woman in a suit, smiling with a fist pump, exuding confidence, confidence, body language, queuesConfidence can be conveyed in lots of non-verbal ways.Photo credit: Canva

"You know, a lot of times confidence is just sitting comfortably in a chair. And that may have more to do with how much space you control. It may have to do with the gestures that you use."

When people look confident, their gestures are smooth. There's no hesitation, quick movements, or jitteriness. They appear calm and in charge. When people are less confident, they feel like they have to hurry and answer right away.

"Let's face it: people are not born confident," says Navarro. "They're just not. We can become confident with the assistance of our parents who encourage us. We can become confident through our own achievements. We can become confident by going beyond our boundaries. But confidence is something that we can grow, we can nurture."

Of course, we all want to feel truly confident and not just act like we are, but sometimes the behavior helps to create the feeling.

"If you want to be confident, know your material, know the information, hone that skill, work at it, have that mastery of things, and of self," says Navarro. "And that's how you will come across as confident, no matter what your station in life is."

Education

Former FBI agent and spy catcher shares the body language myths we erroneously believe

Joe Navarro's insights are fascinating—but you probably don't want to play poker with him.

Photo by Tyler Nix on Unsplash
man standing on concrete pavement

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If there's one guy you don't want to play poker with, it's Joe Navarro.

As a former FBI agent, Navarro's job was to catch spies—people whose entire job entails tricking people into thinking they are something they're not. In his 25-year career with the FBI, Navarro became an expert in body language and non-verbal communication. In fact, he's written multiple books on the subject, including "What Every Body Is Saying: An Ex-FBI Agent's Guide to Speed-Reading People" and "The Dictionary of Body Language: A Field Guide to Human Behavior."

Navarro shared with WIRED some of the myths surrounding body language—or "non-verbals"—and some of them are so common, we probably don't even question whether they're true.


For instance, crossing your arms is commonly seen as a "blocking" behavior, to place a barrier between you and whoever you're talking to. In reality, says Navarro, it's a self-soothing behavior. Other common myths are that looking in one direction or the other is a sign of deception or that people who cover their mouth or nose are lying. It's natural for people to look in various directions as they're processing information and touching the nose or covering the mouth are soothing behaviors.

"We humans are lousy at detecting deception," Navarro says. Sometimes there are clues in specific non-verbals. He shares how someone's hair, forehead, eyes, nose, mouth and neck can offer information about a person. How a person carries themselves can tell us something as well. But there's not one single indicator that a person is lying.

"When we study non-verbals, it's not about making judgments," he says. "It's about assessing 'What is this person transmitting in that moment?'"

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Navarro explained that reading people's body language is often about noticing how their non-verbals change rather than just what they are in any given moment. Sometimes it's about someone trying to hide a certain instinctual behavior, which means the person is trying to manage people's perception of them. And sometimes it comes down to knowing cultural differences, like how people in Eastern Europe carry flowers vs. how Americans do.

And as for poker? His analysis of what each player was doing at the table at different times was quite fascinating.

"The similitudes of sitting across from a spy or sitting across from players—it's their reactions to a stimulus. We have behaviors indicative of psychological discomfort that we use at home, at work, or at the poker table," he says. From head movements to chair shifting to where people place their hands, the players are saying something. Navarro's advice to watch someone's body language on double speed to see what movements really stand out was particularly interesting.

As Navarro says, most of our communication is actually non-verbal, so it's good to know what people are "saying" with their bodies. But as it turns out, it's not always as simple to figure out people's body language as we've been led to believe.

You can find Joe Navarro's books on body language here.