Your Shoulders Decide More Than Your Words Ever Will
- Brainz Magazine
- 1 day ago
- 9 min read
Iva Perez is on a mission to help 1,000 women and entrepreneurs achieve higher levels of success, confidence, and freedom. She has successfully merged 20 years of corporate experience with her studies on the Science of the Mind into her role as a Licensed Transformational Hypnotherapist and is endorsed by the UK’s No. 1 Therapist, Marisa Peer.
You can walk into a room with a decade of experience, a sharp strategy in your head, and your talking points polished to perfection… and still be misread in under a second. Not because you’re unqualified. Not because you’re unclear. Not because you lack confidence. But because your shoulders, your breath, your tone, and your nervous system spoke before your mouth ever did. Long before your words land, your biology has already introduced you. And here’s the part no one told you in business school, leadership training, or personal branding workshops. The room decides how safe you feel before it decides how smart you are. This is not a mindset. This is not motivation. This is not “just be more confident.” This is the hidden layer of leadership most women were never taught to see, let alone command.
The blink that decides everything
There’s a window of time so small it feels almost offensive to measure it. 0.07 seconds. That’s how long it takes the human brain to register threat, safety, dominance, or submission. Before language. Before logic. Before context. In that blink, your shoulders, jaw, eyes, breath, and posture send a silent broadcast, Safe or unsafe. Leader or follower. Threat or stabilizer. You can be saying all the right things, while your body quietly says something else entirely. And people, without realizing it, will believe your body. This is why so many women say, “I don’t understand why I’m not being taken seriously.” You are being taken seriously. Just not through words.
The shoulder cue that predicts confidence across cultures
One of the strongest signals of perceived confidence across nearly every culture is a detail most women were never taught to manage intentionally: the distance between your shoulders and your ears. When the shoulders rise toward the ears, especially under pressure, the nervous system is broadcasting protection, vigilance, and threat. When the shoulders drop away from the ears and widen subtly, the signal changes immediately to:
I am grounded.
I am resourced.
I am not under attack.
Behavioral researcher Vanessa Van Edwards has shown that the single cue most consistently correlated with perceived confidence across cultures is shoulder–ear distance. When the shoulders drop and widen subtly away from the ears, the brain reads grounded authority. When they lift, the nervous system reads threat, even if the words are calm.
It’s also why so many highly competent women are unknowingly read as tense, defensive, or uncertain… even when they feel composed on the inside.
In high-stakes environments, the male nervous system often prioritizes visual threat signals over verbal meaning. The amygdala, the brain’s rapid danger scanner, reacts to posture in fractions of a second, especially the upper body.
Raised shoulders? The brain reads danger. Tight chest? The brain reads resistance. Crossed arms? The brain reads rejection.
The body is always speaking. The question is whether it’s speaking the message you intend.
The quiet crisis: Why women are still being misread
Here’s where the story gets uncomfortable. Women are not just being misunderstood at work or in leadership. They are being misread by biological pattern-recognition systems that were never trained on female authority in the first place. Leadership cues were coded, studied, and rewarded through male bodies for centuries:
More space means more power.
Fewer words means more authority.
Downward vocal tone means certainty.
Stillness means control.
Women, on the other hand, were socially trained to signal:
Warmth
Softness
Receptivity
Care
So when a woman walks into a high-stakes conversation carrying both competence and relational intelligence, the room often doesn’t know how to read her.
Too warm? She’s underestimated.
Too firm? She’s labeled difficult.
Too calm? She’s seen as passive.
Too expressive? She’s seen as emotional.
It’s a double bind that drains power quietly. And most women internalize it as a personal failure instead of a systemic misinterpretation.
The two-question test the brain runs on you
Princeton neuroscientist Susan Fiske, one of the world’s leading researchers on social perception, discovered that the human brain sizes people up using two primary filters within seconds:
Warmth – Can I trust you?
Competence – Can you deliver?
This is a fast, unconscious sorting mechanism that happens whenever you enter a room. These two filters, warmth and competence, account for the overwhelming majority of how we judge leadership, credibility, and likability. When either is missing, credibility collapses. Too much competence without warmth feels cold, suspicious, and unsafe. Too much warmth without competence feels pleasant, lacking authority, and dismissible. Charisma lives in the integration of both, not as performance, but as coherence. When your intention, your tone, your body, and your nervous system align, that’s when presence becomes unmistakable. And coherence does not come from performance. It comes from biology.
Warmth and competence are switches, not personalities
This is one of the most liberating truths most women never hear, warmth and competence are not personality traits. They are neurological signals you can modulate. And the leaders who modulate them intentionally are the ones the room organizes around. You are not “a warm person” or “a competent person.” You modulate warmth and power contextually, like a switch, based on what the room requires. If you’re constantly interrupted, underestimated, or overlooked, your competence signal is likely under-expressed. If people feel intimidated, guarded, or defensive around you, your warmth signal may be under-broadcast. Charisma is not who you are. It’s what you dial.
The hidden cost of “just regulate yourself”
The nervous system conversation has finally gone mainstream. Yes, your state shapes the room. Yes, your posture influences perception. Yes, your breath modulates trust. All true. And also, Why is emotional regulation still so often assigned as women’s unpaid labor? Why do women have to regulate first? Why must women de-escalate first? Why must women make rooms safe that were never built with their safety in mind? This tension is one I explored more deeply in my earlier work on manufactured guilt and survival instinct, how women are often asked to override biological threat responses while operating inside systems that still profit from their over-functioning. Women are asked to override threat responses while navigating systems that still profit from their over-functioning. Both realities exist at once, the nervous system governs perception. The burden has been unevenly distributed. And the solution is not shrinking. The solution is signal sovereignty. Knowing exactly what your body communicates and choosing when, where, and how to broadcast it consciously. Not for approval. For authority.
Your nervous system is the room’s thermostat
Walk into a tense room, and you can feel it before anyone speaks. Deadlines. Pressure. Power plays. Subtle threats no one names. Now here’s the uncomfortable truth: The most regulated nervous system in the room becomes the emotional leader, whether they hold the title or not. Calm doesn’t just feel pleasant. It commands. Sit within twenty-five feet of a calm, regulated person, and your cortisol levels begin to drop. Sit near someone anxious and frantic, and your amygdala quietly activates. Humans do not decide safety intellectually. They absorb it biologically. People unconsciously entrain to whoever feels like stability. This is why some leaders change the room without raising their voice. Their nervous system becomes the anchor. Calm is not passive. Calm commands.
The scent of stress and why presence is contagious
In laboratory studies, participants were exposed to two types of human sweat:
Sweat from a treadmill
Sweat from emotional fear
Only the fear-based samples activated the amygdala, the threat center of the brain. Humans can literally smell stress. Not metaphorically. Biologically. This is why rooms charged with hidden fear feel heavy… and why one regulated person can shift an entire meeting without saying a word.
The first trust accelerator: Movement
In high-pressure environments, fear speeds people up. Fast gestures. Fast speech. Fast breathing. Fast reactions. Certainty does the opposite. It slows you down. Behavioral profiling expert Chase Hughes, who trained U.S. intelligence teams in behavioral influence, found that when you reduce your physical pace by even ten percent, your movements, your pacing, and your gestures… the room reads authority. Your body is signaling:
I am not under threat.
I have time.
I am resourced.
Not because you’re trying to look confident. But because your biology actually is. Stillness becomes status.
The second trust accelerator: Tone
Authority is not volume. Authority is vibration. Say the same sentence two ways, “We’ll revisit the numbers? ”versus“ We’ll revisit the numbers.”
Same words. Completely different nervous system impact. When declarative sentences end in upward inflection, the nervous system reads uncertainty, even if the content is strong. Downward inflection signals completion, stability, and authority at the level the brain trusts most. Depth, steadiness, and clean downward inflection broadcast competence at the level the brain trusts most, tone. In high-stakes leadership, your voice becomes currency. Your tone calibrates trust faster than your content ever will.
The integration of warmth and power
Warmth opens the door. Competence keeps it open. This is how you can dial warmth and competence cues up or down depending on the room, from neuroscientist Vanessa Van Edwards. Warmth is the signal that tells the brain, “You’re safe with me. You can trust me.” Use these five cues when the room needs safety:
Visible hands
Soft micro-smile
Steady eye contact
Gentle forward lean
If warmth opens the door, competence keeps it open. Here are the five cues that make people think, ‘She’s got this.’ Use when the room needs direction:
Open posture
Grounded shoulders
Downward vocal inflection
Intentional pauses
Charisma lives in their integration.
The freeze moment and the only way out
Every woman knows the moment. The tone shifts. The agenda blurs. The air changes. A subtle flirtation. A dismissive interruption. A power test disguised as charm. In that instant, the body enters micro-freeze. Not trauma. Protection. And here is the rule most coaching forgets: You cannot project authority from a nervous system in survival. Before you use any competence cues, drop all warmth cues because they signal availability. Then you must reset your internal state so your nervous system can become the thermostat. Three silent internal resets help your internal state reset:
Step 1: Drop into the body. Feel your seat or your feet.
Step 2: Expand peripheral vision. (This instantly calms the amygdala.)
Step 3: Slow exhale, 6 seconds down.
Your amygdala resets. Your authority returns. Your tone deepens. And suddenly, you’re the thermostat again. Power does not come from the tactic, or however many competence cues you can unload. It comes from the state you respond from. This is where real power lives. Not in strategy. In your internal state. This is biochemistry. Which means, It is not personality. It is trainable.
The real reason visibility feels exhausting
Most women don’t hate visibility. They hate dysregulated visibility. The kind that demands:
More output
More content
More performance
More proving
While the nervous system is already maxed out. Visibility built on cortisol burns fast. Visibility built on coherence compounds. One is loud and forgettable. The other is quiet and trusted.
Presence is the new proof
We are moving out of the era where credentials alone command authority. And into the era where coherent presence becomes the differentiator. People no longer buy confidence. They buy stability. They buy clarity. They buy the nervous system they want to be near when pressure hits. There is a profound difference between:
Alignment
Holding alignment
Leading from alignment
The last one rearranges rooms. This is why I don’t teach visibility as performance. I teach it as nervous system leadership. As signal calibration. As the art of becoming so internally congruent that the room organizes itself around you. When women stop running on cortisol, they start running on coherence. And coherence compounds: In trust. In calm. In credibility. In influence. In impact.
This is where being misread in the past exits the stage to the left. Your nervous system had just been speaking a language no one taught you how to read. Now you can. And when you do, you stop forcing impact. Rooms organize themselves around you. Conversations sharpen. Deals move. Decisions land. You no longer prove yourself twice. You’re simply felt once…and believed.
If you’re ready for visibility that no longer costs your nervous system, your next step is already waiting.
Read more from Iva Perez
Iva Perez, Visibility & Resilience Coach for Women in Leadership
Iva Perez is on a mission to help 1,000 women and entrepreneurs achieve higher levels of success, confidence, and freedom. She has successfully merged 20 years of corporate experience with her studies on the Science of the Mind into her role as a Licensed Transformational Hypnotherapist and is endorsed by the UK’s No. 1 Therapist, Marisa Peer. She helps women and entrepreneurs drop the overwhelm and anxiety and, instead, create new subconscious beliefs to facilitate powerful transformations. This way, mothers can successfully navigate the overlap between work and family life. Iva is the co-host of the Top Ranked podcast, Mom Bosses Abroad, as well as an avid speed reader and matcha evangelist.
