Body Language: Did Jake Paul Lose the Fight Before it Began?

In the press coverage leading up to the much anticipated fight between boxing royalty Tommy Fury and social media giant Jake Paul, Jake Paul was able to draw from his years of experience of being on camera. He constantly spoke in memorable soundbites that created those made-for-tv moments to hype the fight. Tommy, less used to the spotlight, held his own in the banter, but didn’t have the same spice in his remarks.

However, just before the fight began, a change in body language indicated that Jake Paul might not have the same inner confidence that he portrayed with his clever comments. Tommy showed a lot of dominant behaviors: making himself big with power poses, initiating more eye contact, stepping into Jake’s territory right away. Jake, on the other hand, was making himself small with noticeably shoulders rolled inwards, averting Tommy’s eye contact, and pacing in the ring much longer than his counterpart.

After he lost, he complained his performance fell flat. But you could see he was off the moment he walked in the ring. As presenters, it’s no different. The anticipation of giving a speech can produce a fight-or-flight response. This is a good thing because it primes the body with primal energy to give a powerful performance, if the surge in survival hormones can be harnessed. A pre-speech routine allows us to to prime our performance before the primitive chemicals dominate our system, turning off the logical brain by design and making it difficult to give the optimal speech.

Something as simple as saying the magic phrase: “I’m excited” can start that process. Harvard Researcher Alison Wood Brooks found it wasn’t about calming down, but about taking advantage of the chemical similarities between fear-based anticipation and happiness-based excitement. Overall, this fits into a larger realm of research about “reappraising stress” or using how we think about stress to physically optimize how the body processes stress.

More on pre-speech routines later. For now, whether it’s Olympic athletes or legendary communicators, it’s not just about practicing the speech, but about knowing what to do just before you go on stage to make sure you can bring everything you practiced to the presentation on the big day when under pressure!