Posts Tagged ‘hand gestures’

There was a time when public speaking orthodoxy was that you let your arms hang loosely at your sides whenever you are not gesturing.  The idea was to keep your hands apart so that you did not unconsciously start wringing them or tightly clutching them together.

It’s rare to see a speaker adhere to this orthodoxy anymore because it feels awkward.  To counteract the awkwardness, I long ago started advising people to “cheat” by lightly touching the fingertips of one hand to a conveniently located piece of furniture, like a table.  This fingertip technique creates a feeling of being grounded and secure—and, it still keeps the hands apart.

Although the fingertip technique works well, I recently observed a few speakers using the traditional arms-hanging-loosely approach.  It looked good.  If they were feeling awkward, it didn’t show.  They appeared confident and poised.

It would not be a bad idea for a speaker to practice the traditional approach enough to have it as an option.  Conveniently-located furniture cannot always be counted on and letting the hands get together can lead to nervous or defensive body language.

The next time you are at a meeting watch what people do when they are speaking while seated at a table.

You will notice that most of them unconsciously play with an object.

They may spin their pen on the table or straighten a paper clip.  If they brought coffee to the meeting and the Styrofoam cup is now empty, they may start breaking it into pieces.

Rubber bands get wrapped around hands.  Ball point pens get clicked over and over.  Caps get taken off markers and put back on, repeatedly.  The possibilities are endless.

It’s not a big deal except that it can become distracting and, possibly, send a message of nervousness.

If you think this describes you, consider eliminating the temptations before it is your turn to speak.  Put the pen in your pocket and push the empty cup away.

Then, when you speak, combine occasional hand gestures with comfortably folded hands.

Most speakers have just a few hand gestures that they repeat over and over.  It would be good if they developed more variety.

In my book Presentation Skills 201 I recommend simple pantomiming as a way to easily and naturally generate different gestures.  For example, you can pretend to be pushing something while talking about pushing a contract through committee.  Or, you can move your hands farther and farther apart while talking about lengthening a project’s timetable.

I was pleased to see in Allan and Barbara Pease’s book The Definitive Book of Body Language that research has actually shown that such hand gesturing increases message recall.  Geoffrey Beattie and Nina McLoughlin of the University of Man            qchester tested how well audiences remember information based on whether or not the presenter augmented the message with gestures.  Gesturing was shown to increase recall by up to one-third after ten minutes.

So, simple pantomiming doesn’t just create a richer variety of hand gestures.  It also helps people remember what the speaker said.