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:

1. 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
2. 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
3. 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

Body Language. How to get your body saying the same thing as your words.

Try this exercise.

Get the video footage of a speech, any speech. Turn the sound down and watch, focusing only on the body language of the speechmaker.

Then, watch it again with the sound up and check whether the message of the speaker’s words matched the  tone of the speaker’s body language.

Body language matters. It counts. It works on a subconscious and subliminal level, either enhancing and supporting the message of your speech, or undermining and conflicting with it.

If your audience is in any doubt about you or your message, the tone you convey through your body language can help convince them you are sincere; on the other hand, get it wrong and their doubts will be confirmed and they will turn away from your message.

        

There is of course much science and research about body language, its effect and impact.

Tune into any decent modern day crime thriller and you’ll find some ‘expert’ proponent in the art of reading body language. Watch Jack Bauer in ’24’ figure out who the terrorist is just from observing a single betraying physical gesture of the suspect, or ‘The Mentalist’ identify the killer in the first 5 minutes of the episode from the way he shook hands.

In a speechmaking context, if you are watching the keynote speech of a confident and comfortable CEO, look out for how often he or she holds both arms out welcomingly at midriff level as though inviting you in. This has been shown to engender a feeling of trust. Or note how often they raise their hands up animated around chest level to convey a sense of passion and commitment.

Jack Welch, legendary CEO of General Electric &  

master of corporate communication

But it is easy to get lost and confused in the science of it all, when what public speaking needs most of all is clarity.

So, here are 7 tips and techniques to help you get your body in control and get your mouth and your movements speaking the same language:

1) Be natural:  What works is what works naturally for you. If you are naturally expansive in your movements, then work with that. If you are more comfortable with minimal gestures, work with this too. Ronald Reagan was described as ‘The Great Communicator’, yet his style involved almost no hand gestures at all, preferring to let his intonation and timing do the work, because that was what felt most natural to him. JFK by contrast gesticulated quite forcefully to emphasise his points.

Your aim when giving a speech or presentation is to have a conversation with your audience, translating what you would do naturally in a private setting, into the unnatural context of public speaking.

If you force it, your audience wont believe it and then they wont believe you. So keep it natural.

2) Record yourself: If you don’t know what you do with your body when you speak, you won’t know what to do to improve. Record yourself giving your speech, then watch it back both with the sound off and then again with the sound on. What do you notice about your stance, your gestures, your facial expressions? Do you have any irritating habits? Are you too static or too mobile bearing in mind what you are talking about?

Knowing what you do is the first step to doing it better.

3) Show your body: the more your audience sees of you physically, the more receptive it tends to be towards your message. Showing the whole of your body literally shows the audience you have nothing to hide. Therefore, if there is a tall lectern or podium covering most of your body, this will limit the connection you can have with your audience.  

If you have to use a podium, try to incorporate movement away or back from the podium so that the audience gets to see more of your body during the presentation. If you can, work the stage with fluid and natural movement around, so that the audience gets a full view of your body in motion, which again helps the audience to understand your message and fall in step with your rhythm.

4) Maintain eye contact: you cannot connect with people if you do not look at them and look them in the eye. Eye contact, in the context of public speaking, means more than just sweeping glances above the heads of the audience without actually making a connection with anyone in particular. It means catching and holding the gaze of a specific audience member for at least the duration of a phrase in your speech, before moving on and catching and holding the gaze of another audience member for at least a phrase, and so on, and so on.

Eye contact gives you a sense of authority with your audience, which will automatically enhance the impact of your words.

5) Q: What do I do with my hands? A: Whatever you normally do with them. this is one of the most common questions when the issue of body language comes up and there is good news and bad news. No doubt you want the bad news first.

The bad news is: There is no single right answer for what you should do with your hands.

And the good news? The good news is:  There is no single right answer for what you should do with your hands.

Anything can work. The simple rule of thumb is to take what you would do naturally during a private conversation discussing the same topic and try to replicate that when you are speaking publicly, but taking care to avoid obviously annoying habits, whilst at the same time emphasising positive gestures.

So, if you would naturally make a sweeping movement with your hands to reflect a bold point you are making, do this during your speech. But if you tend to fiddle, ie twiddling a pen, constantly flicking your hair with your fingers, rubbing or scratching incessantly at a non-existant itch, work out how to stop yourself doing this as it will only draw more attention towards your nerves and away from your actual message. Try working out a pre-prepared simple hand gesture that you can use as your go-to movement whenever you sense an urge to fiddle.

In particular, avoid pointing at people with your index finger. Do people like it when you do it in private conversations? Of course not. That’s why you find many speechmakers, politicians in particular trying alternative methods to achieve the same effect without offending the audience.

 Bill Clinton famously used a ‘thumb tacking’ gesture (copied from JFK). 

 Cameron splays his fingers wide in a gesture unkindly labelled ‘fake hands’.

6) Watch your posture: standing firm and balanced is likely to give you a better grounding to project your voice confidently, than slouching or hunching; but do not be afraid to change your body posture to reflect the tone you want to convey at different parts of your speech. Rocking back and forth is a common unconscious movement for nervous speakers. Unless, it fits with the tone you want to convey, best to avoid doing this.

7) Watch your face: micro-expressions (the fleeting frown, involuntary scowl, fake smile) have an incredibly powerful impact sometimes more so than big gestures and expressions, because audiences sense that these gestures reveal the true feelings of the speaker. Watch them and control them so that they did not send the wrong message.

Your body language speaks volumes, so make sure it says what you want it to say.

Prepare, plan and practise to get it right so that the message of your speech is amplified positively. Most of all, control those irritating or distracting gestures so that they do not undermine your words and detract from your message.

Remember to tell your body to follow the primary  principle of the Hippocratic oath: First, do no harm!