You watch a video. You read a chapter. You learn that confident people stand a certain way and gesture a certain way, and you decide that from Monday you will be that person.

Monday arrives and you feel restricted, because you are. You are running someone else's instructions on your own body while also trying to have a conversation.

You are a certain way naturally. You cannot suddenly become another person, and the attempt is visible.

Watch the confident people you actually know. Some of them announce themselves the moment they walk in. Some of them are mild and quiet and you would not pick them out of the room, and they are just as confident.

So what is the second kind displaying it with, if not posture?

The way they talk. The clarity of the thought behind it. The fact that they know the thing they are talking about. That is where it is coming from, and no amount of shoulder positioning substitutes for it.

Which means most body language advice is aimed at the wrong layer. It is trying to fix the display when the thing being displayed is what needs work.

That said, there is a short list, and it is short enough to actually do.

Do not slouch. Not in a public setting. At home on your own sofa, sit however you like, nobody is asking otherwise. But in a meeting or an interview, slumping says you are not really there, and that reads before you have said anything.

Give a proper handshake. A lot of people offer a loose hand and look somewhere else while they do it. It takes two seconds and it is the first physical information anybody gets about you.

Look at the person. Not a staring contest, and not the intense unbroken eye contact the internet recommends. Just look at them while they are speaking, like a person who is interested, because you are.

Turn up groomed. This is unglamorous advice and it matters more than it should. Being clean, put together and not smelling of the commute is within everybody's control and a surprising number of people skip it.

Here is the way I would put the whole thing. In a room, sit like a person that somebody else would want to come over and speak to.

Not performing. Not posing. Just open enough, present enough and unhurried enough that approaching you looks easy.

That single instruction does more than a list of twenty postures, because it gives you one thing to hold in your head instead of twenty, and because it is about the other person rather than about you. Most of the self-consciousness in a room comes from monitoring yourself. Pointing your attention outward is the fastest way out of it.

Know your material well enough to be unhurried. Almost everything people read as nervous body language is actually the physical version of not being sure what you are about to say.

Then the four: sit up, shake hands properly, look at them, arrive put together. That is the entire physical checklist and you can do all of it tomorrow.

Do not add a fifth thing you read somewhere. The fifth thing is what makes you think about your hands.

This is Module 13 of the First Drop, and it pairs with Module 9 on interviews, because they are the same forty minutes of your life seen from two angles.

Sixteen modules, recorded as a conversation rather than a lecture, in Tinglish, a mix of Telugu and English.