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What do I do with my hands and feet?

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Getting on stage or standing in front of a conference room can be a nerve-wracking experience. Once we’ve figured out what to say and how to speak eloquently, the next hurdle is what to do with our hands and our feet. We know that nonverbal communication is up to 85% of the message we communicate, but our limbs can feel like foreign attachments when we are in the public eye. My clients will not be surprised that I recommend being intentional and adapting to the audience, but it is helpful to have some actionable advice. We can find a strong stance for our home base then move our hands and feet to make specific meaning that reinforces our talking points.

Find a Home Base

In between movements or gestures, it is comforting to have a place where our hands and feet can rest so we feel confident and (mostly) comfortable. Place our feet hip width apart with our toes pointing toward the audience, rest our elbows on our bodies next to our hips, and place one palm up with the other hand lightly resting on top palm down. This pose is an excellent confident home base for public speaking.

Make a Hand Move

Use hand motions that relay meaning and specifically connect them to words in the speech. To be at the ready, we move our hands can apart and bend our elbows a bit more. The general understanding is that palms up is positive, movement up is growth/acceleration and movement down is the opposite. Palms moving together is joining/connection while moving apart shows size/extension. Here are some specific examples of common talking points and associated hand motions.

Talking Point

Associated Hand Motion

“Team cooperation has really increased.”

Hands come together and then move up

“We achieved this and that.”

One palm up and then the other palm up

“New sales increased; renewals declined.”

One palm up moving up, the other the down

“We are expanding across the globe.”

Flat palms together then move apart

Take Step in the Right Direction

A slightly wider-than-hip stance with toes pointing forward and shoulders squared is the most assertive stance for public speaking. This is a good pose for being at the ready to move our feet. We can take a step back with one foot and rest on that hip to convey relaxed confidence. Then we can move that back foot forward and the upper body forward a bit to emphasize an important point. Some like to move across the stage, but the walking motion can easily become meaningless and distracting. To move effectively, take two steps in one direction and then pause and face the audience. This will generate enthusiasm to emphasize a particular piece of content without being distracting.

What we do with our hands and our feet is always sending a message in public speaking. When we are intentional about the message we send, our communication is more effective, and we feel more confident.

Practice Makes Better

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Like everything in life, when we practice speaking, we get better. We don’t get perfect, but that is not what we are striving for. Perfect sounds fake and looks impersonal. Better is about highlighting our natural talents and employing a few audience-engaging techniques such as voice variation, pauses, and meaningful body language.

We get the chance to practice written and interpersonal communication as a regular part of our job, but most of us do not speak formally to a crowd on a daily basis. When we do get the opportunity to speak, we need to set aside the time to practice in order be as effective as we are at our daily communication. Beyond organizing content, looking over slides, and thinking through talking points, there are ways to practice that help us improve.

Of course, I recommend working with a communication coach as that is my livelihood. In addition, there are several things we can do that help memorize the content and to condition our bodies to perform effectively. I categorize these into three groups of tips:

  1. Practicing in daily life
  2. Getting feedback
  3. Over dramatizing

Say Your Speech During Daily Life Tasks

Once we have a good sense of our talking points, we can incorporate practice into our daily life. That helps us find the best wording and get really comfortable with our content and flow. We can say our speech, or parts of our speech, out loud when doing the dishes, working out, going for a hike, or driving in our car. While we are doing this, we will not say the same things we wrote for our talking points and that is actually beneficial. We will find the words that are most natural for us and still get the concepts across. I also recommend practicing a speech right before bedtime as the brain solidifies knowledge while we sleep.

Get Feedback from Yourself and Others

Even when you are getting feedback from a coach, it is helpful to get additional feedback from other sources. Sharing your speech, or parts of your speech, with friends and family helps you to simplify your content for a general audience and gives you reactions from a variety of perspectives. It may feel awkward in the moment to practice in front of others, but it makes us more at ease on speech day. While we are our own worst critics, or maybe because we are our own worst critics, it is helpful to record and review our speeches. I recommend both audio and video recording. Capturing just the words, on Voice Memos or other devices gives, us information about our enunciation, pitch variation, pace variation, and pauses. Video gives us information about our body language and helps us get our verbal and nonverbal communication in alignment. We can see our facial expressions and note if our hand motions are adding to or detracting from our words. I also recommend practicing in front of a mirror so we can get instant input and can immediately adjust what we are doing.

Over Dramatize to Calm Nerves

Everyone gets nervous when speaking. Some feel that energy as positive and some feel it as dread. If you fall into the dread category, adding a bit of drama to your practice can lighten you up. Try taking your content and singing it to a tune from a toddler song, like the ABCs or Itsy-Bitsy Spider. It will make you laugh, and you will remember your talking points. If your voice is monotone or cracks when you are nervous, try saying your talking points in a whisper and then really loud. We can also do this dramatization with our body language, making big facial expressions and big hand motions, exaggerating our movements. Adding drama during practice makes us more comfortable with ourselves when we present.

Practice makes better. We can count on giving better speeches using these strategies. May you enjoy experimenting and feel more at ease giving audience-engaging speeches.

Keep It Simple: Top Three Tricks

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We have all had the experience of reading or hearing something and having no idea what it means, making us either feel stupid or stop paying attention or both. Good communicators use simple language to help others understand their message, especially when communicating complex or technical topics.

Just yesterday I read on my Twitter feed, “In response to today’s coronal mass ejection (CME) from Region 2887 associated with the X1 flare a G2 (moderate) watch is in effect . . .”

     What do I do with that information?

Climate change advocates are explaining carbon neutral as, “. . . when anthropogenic CO2 emissions are balanced globally by anthropogenic CO2 removals over a specified period.”

     When was the last time you used anthropogenic in a sentence?

At a conference I heard a speaker say, “Create the environment without conspicuously otherizing people with the difference.”

     How many times do I have to repeat that back to myself to figure out what it means?

Here are simplified examples of the above statements that are easier to understand.

  • We might see gorgeous lights in the sky called an Arora because of an electrical storm.
  • Balancing out the carbon dioxide we put in the air with the carbon dioxide we take out is called carbon neutral.
  • Make everyone feel included without pointing out differences.

Keeping our communication simple helps people understand better and it does not offend those who may already have an understanding. Here are the top three tricks for keeping it simple.

Top Three Tricks to Keep it Simple

  1. Use Everyday Language

Think of explaining something to a recent high school graduate with no job experience. Using words and phrases they would understand is everyday language. We can write out our message and then edit it to reword anything that requires a dictionary or an internet search.

  1. Avoid Jargon and Acronyms

People outside of a specific industry are totally lost with jargon and acronyms. Take for example the acronym EMT; it can mean ‘emergency medical technician’ or ‘electrical mechanical tubing’ depending on the industry. Both ‘exercise induced asthma’ and ‘environmental impact assessment’ are abbreviated as EIA. Even people within a specific industry need to spend more time figuring out what something means when jargon and acronyms are used.

  1. Explain with Stories

Stories bring ideas to life. When we share situations where something relevant happened, people are more likely to understand our ideas. When I tried to explain to a friend how my AeroPress was not working, I failed to gain understanding until I told a story of coffee spurting out in all directions as I tried to make my morning caffeine fix. 

Wise words taken from a symposium on science communication remind us, “We cannot afford to assume that the public, or even sometimes our colleagues, will understand our science without investing some effort into the manner of its delivery.”

We want to communicate in a way that makes our audience easily understand our ideas, and most definitely not feel stupid. Using the top three tricks of everyday language, no jargon, and story explanations keeps our communication simple and our audiences engaged.

Three Foundations of Presenting with Technology

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Whether it is a project update to a team, a sales pitch, or a conference engagement, as business professionals we are often asked to speak with a presentation. Coaching on how to do this effectively is at the heart of my passion and work, which I share with others through workshops and 1:1 training. My coaching on this topic highlights three fundamentals: start with a narrative; create a visual presentation; be the center of audience attention.

Start with a Narrative

Develop your story outside of PowerPoint. The worse thing you can do is open PowerPoint or Keynote or Prezi and start creating your presentation. You will most likely end up with a string of facts that has no narrative structure. Narrative structure is what helps people remember what you said. It is much better to first create your story in a traditional paper outline or hand-drawn storyboard. Your story needs to include a description of your audience and a statement of what they will get from listening to you. It also needs a clear beginning, middle, and end. In simple terms, the beginning defines the story conflict, the middle explores that conflict, and the end resolves the conflict. A conflict can be as simple as the audience not clearly understanding your topic or as intense as the audience needing to take action to stop impending doom. Creating a detailed outline of your story before creating a presentation makes your narrative strong as a stand-alone piece. This is a critical element to effectively presenting with technology. Your story should be awesome without a presentation!

Creating a Visual Presentation

People learn better with a combination of pictures and words (Dr. Mayer, Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning). Dr. Mayer’s research along with Dr. Alley’s research and others, gives us clear guidelines we can use to create presentations that help people remember what is shared. Here’s the quick recipe: create each slide with a concise declarative full-sentence headline, and visual evidence to support that main idea. Minimize text by placing explanations in the Notes section to deliver verbally, not on the slide. As a whole, your presentation needs to reflect your narrative, so it is helpful to start off with an introduction slide or visual agenda incorporating the main idea and previews to all main ideas. From there, take your key outline points and create section starters. Each sub-point from your narrative fits within the main ideas as a slide within the one of your sections. Start by creating a presentation with just headlines on the slides and explanations in the Notes. Then go find, take, or create visuals to support the ideas. Remember, less is more. Not all your ideas need slides and every slide only need one visual.

Be the Center of Attention

You are the storyteller and the presentation is your visual aid. Presenters who get this relationship reversed give boring presentations. You want the audience looking at and listening to you; only occasionally do you want them looking at the presentation to better understand the information you are sharing. Practicing your entire story without your presentation is one way to stay the center of attention. Your confidence will increase and your audience will trust your delivery. When speaking, stand/sit confidently and use your modulating voice, facial expressions, and hand motions to engage your audience. As you are giving the presentation, I recommend starting each slide by silently reading your full-sentence headline to yourself, so that your audience has the time to do the same. Then dive into your explanation assuming that the audience will garner supporting evidence from your visual. Sometimes it is helpful to refer directly to the slide – such as the ‘the green bar on the right shows growth in the last quarter’ or ‘you can see by the picture that housing is developing along the transit line.’ To ensure that the narrative structure comes through in your delivery, preview all your key points up front, verbally remind people of all sections and the main point of the current section every time you start a new section, and summarize all key points and articulate what the audience received by listening to you at the end.

Keeping the three foundations top of mind will help you effectively communicate with presentations. First, create and practice a compelling stand-alone story. Second, develop a visual presentation that holds the narrative and has slides with declarative full-sentence headlines supported by a visual. Third, remain the center of attention when you deliver the presentation. May all your presentations be engaging!