Speech ready. Now, what do I do with my hands?
You know what you’re going to say. Slides are done; notes typed; and you’ve practised til you know your speech almost by heart. But the question still nagging at the back of your mind is:
What do I do with my hands?
Surprisingly, this remains one of the most common public speaking questions out there.
Though we are all born with a natural predisposition to use gestures as part of our every day communication (even blind people will use hand gestures when speaking with each other), for some reason as soon as we get in front of an audience, we become hyper conscious of our hands.
Perhaps it’s because of that famous (or infamous) statistic about how we understand communication – you know that it’s 7% words, 38% tone and 55% body language. Never mind that this statistic has actually been completely misunderstood, and is not at all what Professor Mehrabian, who devised the formula, was measuring (watch this video for the best explanation I’ve seen of the misunderstanding of that statistic).
When giving a speech, the single most important determinant of success is, and always will be, what you actually say; your words. It is your words that people will listen to and hopefully remember.
But that’s not to say that things like body language, tone, and hand gestures are irrelevant. Used well, they can certainly enhance the overall impression you make on your audience. So, since we both know you’re already looking at your hands wondering what you do with them next time you do some public speaking, here are 3 key things to remember (and a couple of things not to do):
1) Listen to old Fists of Fury himself, Bruce Lee
Bruce Lee was a man, who knew what to do with his hands.
There’s an amusing early scene at the beginning of the movie ‘Enter the Dragon’ in which Bruce Lee is schooling his young apprentice. When the young fighter stares at Bruce Lee’s pointing finger instead of up at the sky, Lee smacks him on the head with the classic instruction:
‘Don’t concentrate on the finger, otherwise you’ll miss all that heavenly glory!’
The same goes with your public speaking. The first rule about what to do with your hands is… don’t worry about what you’re doing with your hands. In the grand scheme of things, your hands hardly matter.
Ronald Reagan was known as the Great Communicator because of his intuitive ability to communicate and connect with the American public, and yet he used pretty much no hand gestures throughout his entire political career (and probably his acting career too!).
By contrast, Adolf Hitler (psycho nut job though he was) was undoubtedly one of the most powerful orators of the 20th century despite all that wild saluting and spitting.
Focus on the message you want to convey and your hands will take care of themselves.
2) 6,000 ways to gesture. Choose 3
Good things come in 3s, and so it is with hand gestures. There are 3 basic purposes for which you should use your hands:
- To convey information e.g. counting on your fingers to list items; holding your hands apart to convey distance or size; extending your thumb and little finger to signal a phone etc
- To convey emotion e.g. clutching your hands to your chest to show your passion; clenching and waiving your fist to show anger; shaking your hands to highlight
- To convey ideas or meaning e.g. rolling your hands to signify motion; holding up your palms in apology; giving a thumbs up to suggest positivity.
Understanding and focusing on those 3 basic purposes will stop you using your hands randomly, and give your body language a much greater sense of control.
Armed with this information, you should analyse the content of any speech you are giving for information, emotion and meaning, and choose appropriate gestures to suit at certain points.
The trick is to let your hands do what they naturally want to, but then use some key gestures at certain moments. (Wikipedia has a pretty useful List of Gesturesthat might give you some ideas).
And I personally don’t agree with the prevailing views of some of my fellow public speaking professionals, who say things like you can’t put your hands in your pockets, don’t cross your arms, or only point with your thumb but never your finger.
Certainly there are a few things I’d advise you to avoid (see below), but even then, I’ve seen people do those things and still give great speeches.
Most of all just try to be easy and natural. Think about what you do with your hands when you are having a great conversation with a good friend. Then do that.
Remember, no one will actually notice your hands unless you do something big with them; but ‘big’ in this context means deliberate, rather than wild. So, use your gestures deliberately and you’ll have the audience in the palm of your hands (see what I did there!?)
3) Practise. Practise. Practise.
You should know by now that any how to guide I put out there will always involve practice. Steve Jobs practised. Martin Luther King practised. Winston Churchill practised. And as Mark Twain once wrily observed:
It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech
So, as you practise the delivery of your words, be sure to incorporate your hand movements into that rehearsal so that when game time comes, those movements will feel fluid and natural.
What about mistakes?
I really do believe that there are no hard and fast rules on this stuff. Yet, for all but the most charismatic and experienced of speakers, there are definitely a few things you would probably be better off avoiding. Here are the big ones:
- don’t copy politicians – speechmaking in the political arena has become so contrived and stilted, it has lost all sense of authenticity and sincerity for the public; and hand movements have become so scripted they have lost all meaning. If you copy these guys, it will ring false. Feel free to study them, and take a few pointers 🙂 But stay true to yourself. Be original.
- don’t fidget – that’s the quickest way to distract your audience. If you feel those fingers starting to scratch and tap, clench your fist for a moment and get them back under control.
- stay away from your groin – common sense really but you really don’t want to be directing your audience anywhere near there. A general rule is to keep your hands in the power zone (the area between the top of your waist and the line of your shoulders). Lower than that feels ‘wrong’; hands going above your shoulders feels slightly crazed.
- don’t be wild – unless you’re going for the maniacal fascist dictator look (which admittedly does drift in and out of fashion), keep your movements smooth and contained. Excessive pointing in particular can feel aggressive to many audiences.
- don’t over do it – like anything else, too much of a good thing is bad. Don’t have a gesture planned for every sentence or you’ll undermine your results. Less, as always, is more
- no jazz hands!
- don’t concentrate on the finger, otherwise you’ll miss all that heavenly glory!
Good luck.
p.s. Have you got a burning question on any public speaking topic? I’m trying to make sure these posts really focus on things you most want to hear about. If you don’t do much public speaking then this isn’t for you, but if you do, please take this anonymous 3 question survey and tell me what kind of stuff you’d like me to cover.
Kolarele Sonaike
Founder, Elevator Pitch School
Cricket Captain – the hardest job in the leadership business
OH CAPTAIN, MY CAPTAIN.
Perhaps it is just my love for the game, or maybe it’s the effect of an all too rare mini heatwave in London and the start of a new Ashes series today, but it occurred to me that of all the leadership positions there are in the world, perhaps the most challenging has to be that of the captain of a cricket team.
(apologies for the jargon in this post. If you don’t get it…ask a cricketer!)
Sure, it’s hard to run a large company; an army general must have some pretty tough calls to make; and I guess being Prime Minister or President ain’t no picnic. But put those obvious candidates to one side for a moment and examine the case:
Is there a more phenomenally complex game than the 5 day Test Match? Think about all the things the cricket captain has to manage:
- team selection – working out the best 11 players for each game. Do you need fast bowlers, seamers or spinners, specialist wicketkeeper or wicketkeeper/batsman? what’s the optimum batting order?
- opposition – studying your opponents’ strengths & weaknesses; understanding their approach to the game, and likely team selection; what is their own captain’s game approach? how do you counter their plans?
- game strategy – planning the best tactics for the match; adapting those tactics during the match; what do you do if your bowlers are having an off day? what if there’s a batting collapse? when do you declare if things go well? do you use a nightwatchman if things look grim? do you stick with your field for all batsmen or move them around for each batsman? If there’s an edge to 4th slip, do you add one and lose your fine leg or stick with the plan? If you think the umpire’s got it wrong, do you use up one of your reviews at that time or save it for a more crucial moment?
- weather – if it’s cloudy and you win the toss, do you bat or bowl? if the sun breaks out and the wicket dries out, do you instruct your strike bowler to bang it in, or call up your spinner to beguile?
- man management – empowering each individual to help them perform to their highest level when it counts; motivating when needed; soothing when called for; calling to order when necessary; supporting when under-performing; do you sack early to cut your losses or help the player work through a slump?
- dealing with management – protecting the interests of the team; agreeing pay & reward levels; discussing the vision for future success
- personal performance – leading by example with strong individual performance; maintaining your authority when your own personal performance suffers
- liaising with match officials – engaging with umpires; advocating for the team; controlling your team’s emotions against the umpire when an incorrect call is made
I could go on!
And the skills a captain must draw on to perform these duties are legion: great communication, courage, persistence, empathy, emotional intelligence, flexibility, strategic thinking, respectfulness, resilience, positivity, realism, adventurousness, instinct, clear-headedness and much more.
It’s a tough job, certainly the toughest in sports. Only the most impressive characters are fully up to the task.
You can keep your Winston Churchills and your Steve Jobses and your Nelson Mandelas.
Give me the charismatic Imran Khan, or the inspirational Steve Waugh, or the definitive authority of the legend that is Sir Clive Lloyd, every day of the week.
Come on the Ashes!
Nice Speech, Mr President Buhari – But Remember you’re a Democrat now!
Inauguration Speech of New Nigeria President, Muhammadu Buhari – Analysed
“If you must break the law, do it to seize power: in all other cases observe it.” – Julius Caesar
Inauguration speeches tell you everything you need to know about a new President; and at the same time they also tell you absolutely nothing.
On the one hand, the tone that a new President adopts in the speech, often gives you a real sense of the nature and essence of the man (or woman); on the other hand, the words themselves and particularly the promises made, typically mean little or nothing in practice.
This was a special day for Nigeria. Never before had there been a peaceful handover of power from an incumbent President (Goodluck Jonathan) to an opposition challenger (Muhammadu Buhari). It needed a special speech.
As inauguration addresses go, President Buhari’s speech was actually pretty good, but not perfect.
My Grade for the Speech: Good, nearly Great (but 2 mistakes).
The Good Stuff
The President chose wisely in making the celebration of democracy a key theme of his speech.
He opened on that very subject and generously commended the hapless former President Goodluck Jonathan for his magnanimous concession of electoral defeat and subsequent peaceful handover. He then promised not to seek retribution against his enemies, reminding us that “the past is prologue”, which we should expect him to trot out as a line whenever anyone tries to refer back to his military past.
By far the best quote of the speech came when he promised to govern for all of Nigeria:is
“I belong to everybody and I belong to nobody”.
A great sound-bite!
If (and it’s a big If) he actually lives up to his promise to eschew the sectionalism that has blighted so much of Nigeria’s politics, this one quote could ultimately define his Presidency.
Of course, everyone wanted to hear what he had to say on the subject of Boko Haram, a militant Islamic Jihadist insurgency that has committed terrible acts of barbarism, including the despicable kidnap of the 212 Chibok school girls.
The President gave a surprisingly hard-hitting analysis of the terrorist sect, describing it as a ‘mindless, godless group who are as far away from Islam as one can think of’, but at the same time was insightful enough to highlight that its fame had begun as a result of the extra-judicial killing of its preacher by the police, and that its power had been allowed to grown through the complacency and mishandling of the last regime. When he then promised to go after the terrorist organisation and do everything possible to rescue the kidnapped girls alive, you kind of believed he would do just that. Yet, at the same time, he surprised us with a promise to address the human rights violations of the Armed Forces.
Whether this actually ever happens in practice remains to be seen, nevertheless it was a smart thing to nod to the international community, who were watching intently.
Aside from dealing with terrorism, like all new leaders, he promised to address pretty much every other problem afflicting the country: cross-border terrorism, sea piracy, refugees and boat people, financial crime, cyber crime, climate change, the spread of communicable diseases, pervasive corruption, fuel and power shortages, kidnappings, armed robberies, herdsmen/farmers clashes, cattle rustlings, youth unemployment, weak agriculture, lack of road and rail infrastructure development, judicial reform.
What a list!
Of course, no President can really hope to tackle all or even most of these problems, each of which could dominate an entire Presidential term. But when it’s your first day in the job, you can be forgiven such over-exuberance. From Day 2 of his Presidency though, he would be wiser to under-promise and over-deliver.
“We must not succumb to hopelessness and defeatism. We can fix our problems.“, he declared somewhat Obamaesque, and then challenged those who doubted him with a reminder of the achievements of the great civilisations of the nation’s past like the Benin, Borno Oyo and other empires.
You half-expected him to start chanting “Yes, We Can!”.
But of course, few leaders do public speaking as well as Obama, and at times President Buhari struggled to match his oral delivery to the fluency of text. Yet as a first Presidential effort, there was much to commend in this speech, particularly the sense of the authority of the tall man, which had been so lacking under the muted leadership of Goodluck Jonathan.
The Bad
The thing about speeches, is that whatever the words themselves say, there is always an unwritten subtext that tends to say more.
And for all his attempts to present himself as a reformed Democrat, President Buhari still could not help but reveal that underlying hard man instinct. It no doubt served him well in a military dictatorship, but in a democracy, it is counter productive.
At one point, he spoke warmly of the nation’s Founding Fathers, but then described their successors as ‘spoilt children breaking everything and bringing disorder to the house’. A little hypocritical you might say, unless of course he assumed that we had already forgotten about his tenure has military ruler in the 80s.
He warned the media including social media users, to act with ‘responsibility and patriotism.’ But this sounded more like a veiled threat, and a disturbing one at that from someone, who as leader had passed the repressive 1984 Protection Against False Accusations Decree, under which journalists were tried and imprisoned for criticising the military government.
He should know that in the 24 hour news cycle of modern democracy, media houses chase the story irrespective of where it leads, and without much consideration for patriotism; and more importantly in this day and age of twitter, facebook, and smartphones, you definitely can’t hope to have any control over the public using social media – just ask leaders like Mubarak during the Arab Spring.
This was a mistake, and one that tended to undermine his new democratic credentials.
His second mistake was more about style than substance, but as a speech purist it still bugged me.
Quotes are a great tool in speeches, but only if you choose a quote that is well known and that resonates with your audience.
But in what should have been the climactic high point to a decent speech, President Buhari chose to end with this:
“There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life, Is bound in shallows and miseries.”
Recognise it? No. Neither did I.
It’s an unfamiliar quote from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, with a meaning that is pretty obscure.
And seriously, Mr President, how wise is it to quote from a military dictator, who was ultimately assassinated by his own Senate, when the theme you have been propounding is that of democracy and good government?
Instead of soaring to a momentous conclusion with a quote that encapsulated the essence of his theme, it meant that his speech ended with a whimper that undermined the strong foundations he had built to that point.
Shame! It should have been better. Still, no one’s perfect, and it still was a pretty good speech.
But now the real work begins.
The best of luck, Mr President! Your country definitely needs the best of you.
And remember, lest you allow your military instincts to get the better of you, please remember that leadership in a democracy, unlike dictatorship, is messy and uncertain. But democracy and the rule of law really is the better option. As Winston Churchill once highlighted:
‘Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried’.
Or, if you insist on quotes by Julius Caesar, remember this one:
“If you must break the law, do it to seize power: in all other cases observe it.”
You’ve already got the power, so your job now is to defend of the rule of law and see the nation thrive!
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