Nobody Walks Normally Past a Shop Window

There is a stretch of pavement on most high streets where the shopfronts turn to dark glass, and every woman alive knows what happens when you hit it. You see yourself. For the next six steps you are not walking, you are operating a walk. Arms feel long. You become aware that you have a head and that it is attached to something. By the time the glass runs out you have lost the thread entirely and you are just a person moving a pair of legs by hand.

This is worth understanding, not because you should fix your walk, but because the difference between those two walks explains a great deal about how bodies behave under observation.

What a good mood actually does to a gait

You can recognise the walk of someone who feels good from the far end of a car park, without seeing her face, and if you try to list what you are seeing it turns out to be quite specific:

The stride opens up. Steps get slightly longer and land with more commitment. Arms swing more freely and from higher in the shoulder rather than being held. The upper body stops apologising - the chest is open, not because anyone is presenting anything, but because the shoulders have stopped rounding forward. The head is up and level, so the eyes are on the horizon rather than the next four feet of pavement. And the whole thing has bounce, a small vertical rise with each step, which is the piece that reads most clearly at a distance.

The reverse is just as legible. Tired, sad, or braced walking is shorter, flatter, quieter, with the arms held closer and the gaze dropped. Nobody has to teach you to read this. You can do it through a window, in the dark, from behind.

None of that is a technique. It is what happens to a skeleton when the mood it is carrying changes. Which is why the single most effective way to change your walk is to change how you feel, and why every attempt to go the other way round feels like acting.

The observed walk is a different animal

Now the second walk: the one that appears the moment you know there are eyes on you. Down the middle of a restaurant. Into a room where a meeting has already started. Past a group of men outside a pub. Across a stage.

The strange thing about it is that it rarely becomes more graceful. It becomes more careful. Careful is not the same as good.

Conscious attention on a movement you have performed since you were one year old does not improve it. It interferes. You start managing the parts separately, and the parts do not want to be managed separately. You get the slightly stiff arms, the too-deliberate step, the sense that everyone can see you thinking about walking.

And here is the thing that makes it better to know: everybody has this. It is not a defect in your particular gait. It is what happens when a deeply automatic skill gets audited mid-performance, the same way saying your own name too many times makes it sound fake. Dancers get it. Models get it, which is why runway walking is trained until it becomes automatic again, not until it becomes controlled.

The part that is the shoes, not you

Before anyone builds a theory about herself, a short list of things that change a walk and have nothing to do with confidence, mood, or anyone watching:

• Heel height, and whether the heel is under your body or behind it.
• How slippery the floor is. An office lobby in leather soles produces a cautious walk from anybody.
• Whether the skirt lets your leg travel.
• A bag on one shoulder, which turns the whole torso into a counterweight.
• Carrying something you are afraid of dropping.
• Any small pain anywhere in the chain from foot to hip, which the rest of the body silently reorganises around.

A great deal of what women read into their own walk turns out to be footwear and flooring. If your walk feels wrong in a particular pair of shoes, the shoes are usually telling the truth.

The unglamorous fixes are the real ones

If you want to walk better, and it is entirely fine not to care, the useful interventions are physical and boring rather than mental and theatrical.

Shoes you can actually walk in beat shoes you can only stand in. A bag on your back, or across your body, beats one hand permanently occupied. Hips and ankles that get moved regularly produce a longer stride without being told to. Looking at the horizon rather than the pavement changes the whole upper body at once, and unlike most posture advice it is one instruction rather than five, which is why it survives contact with real life.

What does not work is running a checklist while you cross a room. Nobody has ever got to the other side of a bar thinking "shoulders back, longer step, chin level" and arrived looking relaxed.

What this is really for

The reason any of this is worth knowing is not so you can perform a walk. It is so you can stop reading your own self-consciousness as evidence about your body.

The awkwardness you feel crossing a room is not a report on how you look. It is the predictable result of watching yourself do something automatic. The walk that other people mostly see is the one you do when you are late, thinking about something else, on your way somewhere you want to be. You have never watched that one. It is better than you think.