Gestures your body speaks

Editor's Notes

• #2: A gesture is a specific bodily movement that reinforces a verbal message or conveys a particular thought or emotion. Although gestures may be made with the head, shoulders, or even the legs and feet, most are made with the hands and arms. Your hands can be marvelous tools of communication when you speak. But many inexperienced speakers are unsure what to do with their hands. Some try to get them out of the way by putting them in their pockets or behind their backs. Others unconsciously relieve nervous tension by performing awkward, distracting movements. A few speakers over-gesture out of nervousness, waving their arms and hands wildly. A speaker’s gestures can suggest very precise meaning to an audience. The Indians of North America devised a sign language that enabled people with entirely different spoken languages to converse. Sign language has also made it possible for deaf people to communicate without speaking. The use of gestures in communication varies from one culture to the next. In some cultures, such as those of Southern Europe and the Middle East, people use their hands freely and expressively when they speak. In other cultures, people use gestures less frequently and in a more subdued way. The specific gesture we make and the meanings we attach to them are products of our cultural training. Just as cultures differ, so do the perceived meanings of gestures. For example, nodding one’s head up and down signifies agreement or assent in Western cultures – but in some parts of India this gesture means the exact opposite. A common gesture used in the United States – that of making a circle with the thumb and forefinger to indicate approval – is considered an insult and an obscenity in many areas of the world. To be effective, a speaker’s gestures must be purposeful – even if they’re performed unconsciously. They must be visible to the audience. They must mean the same thing to the audience that they mean to the speaker. And they must reflect what’s being said, as well as the total personality behind the message.
• #4: Clarify and support your words. Gestures strengthen the audience’s understanding of your verbal message. Dramatize your ideas. Together with what you say, gestures help paint vivid pictures in your listeners’ minds. Lend emphasis and vitality to the spoken word. Gestures convey your feelings and attitudes more clearly than what you say. Help dissipate nervous tension. Purposeful gestures are a good outlet for the nervous energy inherent in a speaking situation. Function as visual aids. Gestures enhance audience attentiveness and retention. Stimulate audience participation. Gestures help you indicate the response you seek from your listeners. Are highly visible. Gestures provide visual support when you address a large number of people and the entire audience may not see your eyes.
• #5: Descriptive gestures clarify or enhance a verbal message. They help the audience understand comparisons and contrasts, and visualize the size, shape, movement, location, function, and number of objects. Emphatic gestures underscore what’s being said. They indicate earnestness and conviction. For example, a clenched fist suggests strong feeling, such as anger or determination. Suggestive gestures are symbols of ideas and emotions. They help a speaker create a desired mood or express a particular thought. An open palm suggests giving or receiving, usually of an idea, while a shrug of the shoulders indicates ignorance, perplexity, or irony. Prompting gestures are used to help evoke a desired response from the audience. If you want listeners to raise their hands, applaud, or perform some specific action, you’ll enhance the response by doing it yourself as an example. Gestures made above the shoulder level suggest physical height, inspiration, or emotional exultation. Gestures made below shoulder level indicate rejection, apathy, or condemnation. Those made at or near shoulder level suggest calmness or serenity. The most frequently used gestures involve an open palm held outward toward the audience. The meaning of this type of gesture depends on the position of the palm. Holding the palm upward implies giving or receiving, although this gesture is sometimes used as an unconscious movement, with no specific intended meaning. A palm held downward can express suppression, secrecy, completion, or stability. A palm held outward toward the audience suggests halting, repulsion, negation, or abhorrence. If the palm is held perpendicular to the speaker’s body, it tends to imply measurement, limits in space or time, comparisons, or contrasts.
• #6: 1. Respond Naturally to What You Think, Feel, and Say. When you present a speech, you naturally express yourself though gestures. No matter what our personality or cultural background may be, every one of us has a natural impulse to punctuate and strengthen our words with gestures. The trick is not to suppress that impulse by retreating behind a mask of impassiveness; this can only create a buildup of tension. At the same time, don’t get gestures out of a book or from another speaker. Be genuinely and spontaneously yourself. If you impose artificial gestures onto your natural style, your audience will sense it and label you a phony. Some people are naturally animated, while others are naturally reserved. If you naturally use your hands freely when you converse informally, use them freely when you give a speech. If you’re by nature a reserved, low-key person, don’t change your personality just to suit public speaking situations. 2. Create the Conditions for Gesturing – Not the Gesture. Your gestures should be a natural outgrowth of your own unique thoughts and feelings. They should arise naturally and habitually from your attitude toward the message you present. When you speak, you should be totally involved in communicating – not in thinking about your hands. Your gestures need to be motivated by the content of your presentation. By immersing yourself in your subject matter, you will create the conditions that will enable you to respond naturally with appropriate gestures. 3. Suit the Action to the Word and the Occasion. Your visual and verbal messages must act as partners in communicating the same thought or feeling. When a speaker fails to match gestures with words, the outcome can be wooden, artificial, and sometimes comical. Every gesture you make should be purposeful and reflective of your words. In this way your listeners will note the effect rather than the gesture. Make sure the vigor and frequency of your gestures are appropriate for your words. Use strong, emphatic gestures only when your feeling for the message calls for them. On occasion, you may need to adapt your gestures to fit the size and nature of your audience. Generally speaking, the larger the audience, the broader and slower your gestures should be. Also keep in mind that young audiences are usually attracted to a speaker who uses vigorous gestures, but older, more conservative groups may feel irritated or threatened by a speaker whose physical actions are too powerful. Your gestures during a speech are also affected by the logistics of the speaking situation. When you speak from a physically confining position, you may be restricted from using broad, sweeping gestures. A common example of a confining speaking position is a head table, where people are seated close to the speaker. 4. Make Your Gestures Convincing. Your gestures should be lively and distinct if they’re to convey the intended impression. A gesture performed in a half-hearted manner suggests that the speaker lacks conviction and earnestness. Every hand gesture should be a total body movement that starts from the shoulder – never from the elbow. Move your entire arm outward from your body freely and easily. Keep your wrists and fingers supple, rather than stiff or tense. Effective gestures are vigorous enough to be convincing, yet slow enough and broad enough to be clearly visible. Your gestures should be distinct but not jerky, and they should never follow a set pattern. 5. Make Your Gestures Smooth and Well-Timed. Any single gesture has three parts: the approach, the stroke, and the return. During the approach, your body begins to move in anticipation of the gesture. The stroke is the gesture itself, and the return brings your body back to a balanced speaking posture. The flow of a gesture – balance, approach, stroke, return, balance – must be smoothly executed in such a way that only the stroke is evident to the audience. Just as timing is an essential ingredient of comedy, a gesture’s timing is just as important as its quality. The stroke must come on the correct word – neither before nor after it. However, the approach can be initiated well before the stroke; in fact, you can obtain an especially powerful effect by approaching a gesture several seconds in advance, then holding the approach until the exact instant of the stroke. The return simply involves dropping your hands smoothly to your sides – it doesn’t have to be rushed. Don’t try to memorize gestures and incorporate them into a speech. Memorized gestures usually fail, because the speaker cues himself or herself by the word the gesture is designed to punctuate. This results in the gesture following the word, which looks artificial and foolish.6. Make Natural, Spontaneous Gesturing a Habit. The first step in becoming adept at gesturing is to determine what you’re doing now. Use the evaluation form on page 17 and the help of a fellow Toastmaster to find out if you have any bad habits. If you do, strive to eliminate them from your body’s spoken image. To improve your gestures, practice – but don’t wait until the day of your speech! Work on enhancing your gesturing abilities in front of friends, family members, and co-workers. Relax your inhibitions, gesture when you feel like it, and let yourself respond naturally to what you think, feel, and say. Through awareness and practice, you can make appropriate gesturing a part of your habitual behavior.
• #7: Sometimes we learn best by watching others and picking up our cues from them. If you are unsure about what types of gestures, expressions, and other body movements you would like to incorporate into your own speaking style, observing the techniques of others might be a good first step. For instance: Become a people watcher. The next time you are at a shopping mall, amusement park or other well-populated area, take some time to observe others. Not only is human behavior fascinating, but watching how others act and react can be invaluable for a speaker studying visual behaviors. Watch television. Here’s the catch: the sound must be turned down! Vintage shows such as “I Love Lucy” are especially instructive when watching body signals. But even the most straightforward news broadcaster communicates nonverbally; contrast the subtleties of this type of communication with the more exaggerated style displayed in broad physical comedy. Study photographs. Ever wonder why the saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words,” continues to be popular? Once you’ve studied old family photographs, the reason will be self-evident. Although social conventions of the time may have something to do with the way the people were posed, a great deal can be inferred from the proximity of the subjects, how – or if – they are physical
• #8: special evaluation form to help you identify your nonverbal strengths and weaknesses as a speaker. Begin by selecting an experienced Toastmaster other than your assigned speech evaluator. Ask him or her to read the following instructions and to complete the form while you deliver a manual speech to your Toastmasters club. After your speech, speak with the member and discuss the results, making sure you fully understand his/her ratings and comments. Then review the portions of Gestures: Your Body Speaks that deal with any problem areas. Give priority to eliminating any random, distracting mannerisms from your speech delivery. Work on all areas in which you received a low rating and/or recommended improvement; if there are several, focus on one at a time. You can gauge your progress by periodically conducting follow-up evaluations of your body’s spoken image.