When we close ourselves off, we're not just closing ourselves off to other people, we're closing ourselves off from ourselves and impeding ourselves. When you open up, you allow yourself to be who you are.

My primary goal is really to get people to open up and when they feel themselves contracting and collapsing to reduce that, and to know when that happens, "Oh, something's going on that's making me feel this way, and if I force my body open a bit, I will feel less powerless."

Your body language shapes who you are

The whole body-mind thing comes into play, when you are feeling that self-doubt and your body is not going to help you if you're not paying attention. Your body's going to go with the self-doubt and make you feel worse, so by making the adjustments - pulling your shoulders back, standing up straight, walking in a more sort of expansive way - all sorts of little things will help pull you out of that self-doubt.

Our bodies change our minds and our minds can change our behavior and our behavior can change our outcomes.

Everyone is walking around with these self doubts, so there's something reassuring about that. And self-doubt in one or a few areas doesn't mean that you have generally low self-esteem. And you have the power to get yourself out of feeling that way.

Even more dramatic, Alex Todorov at Princeton has shown us that judgments of political candidates' faces in just one second predict 70 percent of U.S. Senate and gubernatorial race outcomes, and even, let's go digital, emoticons used well in online negotiations can lead to you claim more value from that negotiation. If you use them poorly, bad idea. Right? So when we think of nonverbals, we think of how we judge others, how they judge us and what the outcomes are. We tend to forget, though, the other audience that's influenced by our nonverbals, and that's ourselves.