Transcription
Being calm, cool, collected, open, relaxed in your face is the best way to feel more confident and look more confident.
If we haven't met yet, my name is Sage. I teach how to be free from your face tension and why we want to do it, how we can live a better, healthier, happier life, and we can also look better by releasing our face tension.
You know when you meet someone and you just have a feeling about them? You can't quite put your finger on it, you just know something about them. You can either tell that they're angry, they would fly off the handle at any moment, or maybe you feel like, "Oh, they're a little nervous." Like they just come off like a little bit nervous. There's a reason for that. And of course, body language is part of it. The way that they talk, the way that they present themselves, that's all part of it. But a huge part of it is also how they tend to hold their face and how those face tension patterns have reformed their features and their face shape over time.
This is what we see first on a person. We first, first see their face. We're like, taking this in as a billboard to the world. Who we are shows up on the face. Expressions don't just tell us how someone feels in the moment, although we also are picking up on that, picking up on those subtle cues of how someone may be feeling because they are moving their face in ways that they're not even conscious of to show how they feel inside. And this is part of good intuition. You can work on developing this skill of reading it. But also, facial expressions, micro-expressions will reform the face because of how we are holding subtle states of tension in the face over time.
This is what happens when we store nervous, anxious, and self-doubting energy in the face. First of all, what is happening when others see us? Our face is a billboard to the world. This is like the resume of the self. We go out and we can see about others, their personality, their tendencies, how they react in certain situations. All that is coming up because of micro-expressions and how we hold emotions and expressions here. Yes, we have the micro-expressions that are fleeting, they're very quick, like a microsecond, and it's just a flash of emotion on the face that shows how people feel. But also, we can see how people tend to hold their face long-term.
So, nervous energy is going to show up in the face in a form of kind of like wincing and pinching in and kind of the nervous smile. So this is like face armor. It's like we're putting an armor on ourselves to protect ourselves from the world because we were literally like, "Don't hurt me. It's all good. Please." So rather than that, you want to work on being fully open, relaxed, calm, confident. The eyebrows are coming up and out, the eyes are wide, they're expressive, you're not wincing away, the mouth is not pinched in. And we can feel calm in the face, and that signals to others that you are calm, even in all kinds of situations. And think how that affects how they view you and how they interact with you. It is huge.
It is not saying that you can't have emotions or feel nervous. But if you can keep this calm, cool, collected, open, relaxed, then you are changing how the social situation goes. You're changing the dynamic. When you tend to hold your face in a closed-off, winced manner, you signal to others that you are giving away your power in some sense. You're looking for approval or you're looking to not be hurt by the situation, rather than having a central power, a personal power, and a core within yourself so that you have things happening around you and you're not, you're not influenced by that. You're like, "I'm good."
Now, what happens to you when you hold your face in these ways? You are also signaling to yourself that you feel self-doubt, that you don't feel good about yourself. Because it's not just your brain telling your body, your face to react in a certain way. The way that you hold your face also sends a signal from the body to the brain. This is how you should feel. Feel tense, feel nervous. I mean, we're, we're wincing for a reason, right? There must be some reason. So that is what you're signaling to yourself. It's because of the facial feedback hypothesis that this feedback loop goes both ways.
It is truly a slippery slope when you start to build up nervous tension in the face. You start to feel it coming a little. It's kind of wincing in, it's coming, and then your brain feels it. You're like, "Oh gosh, I'm feeling nervous." Even on a subconscious level, you may not even notice that it's happening for you, but it is. And then we get the signal sent back from the brain to the body again, "Hey, I think, I think we're nervous right now." And then back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. We have all felt this happened to us before, right? Where you feel anxious, and the fact that you're anxious is making you be more anxious. The fact that you can feel your blood pressure going up, your sweat, your heart racing, all of that is increasing this mental, cognitive experience of the anxiety.
So by learning how to relax our face, our fine-tuned little muscles in the face, we can make huge strides in not only appearing confident to others but also feeling more confident. And then you operate completely differently in a situation. When you are calm in the face, our expressive center of our bodies, you are able to make choices in a different way, and then the outcome is completely different. An example would be like a public speaking event. That would be like a more extreme example. Imagine that you go onto stage and your face is just like wrought with with tension, just you are like so bound up. How is that going to affect how you speak? When you're speaking, these muscles are going to be tight, they're going to be pulling, tensing up. Something that I tend to do when I'm nervous is yank down this corner of my mouth, it gets really pulled back. So how does that affect not only how people are seeing you in this situation, how they're seeing you manage it and move through it, but also how you are feeling in it?
The best remedy for this is non-judgmental, objective facial awareness. We just become neutrally aware of, "Hmm, yeah, I am, I'm holding my face that way. I'm nervous, but it's okay. I'm fine." And you give yourself the healthy alternative. We want to work on a neutral resting face. We have good facial posture, which is tongue on the roof of the mouth, fully all the way to the back. We have a suppleness and relaxed feeling in the cheek area. We're not pulling it back as in a nervous smile. We may have the corners of the mouth lifted slightly, so like this, but it's not activating the cheek area. We're not clamping our jaws. We are not tensing the eyebrows in. We are not wincing the eyes. Everything is opened up, relaxed, and free-flowing all the way into the scalp area. You will feel how this pulls back, this openness flows open, and then you're ready to face the world and feel more confident.
If you want to learn some specific face tension release techniques, let me know in the comments. Let me know what areas you tend to carry tension, and I will be making more videos on that. In the meantime, remember, you are amazing, you're beautiful, and you can be confident and approach the world in an open, relaxed way.