Gestures are an important part of your public speaking presence, they can add power to your presentation or take away from it. People who take our elocution lessons work on their body language when presenting.
Let's take a look at the gestures that are weakening your presence and your speech delivery.
1. Lack of gestures resulting from the stiffness of the body. Sometimes a person feels so nervous that they grab their speech in their hands and hold it during their entire presentation. This creates a closed body posture and shows a lack of confidence.
2. Scratching your head, nose or any part of the body can look a bit distracting and even inappropriate.
3. Trying to adjust cufflinks (a favourite gesture of the Prince of Wales), moving a ring on your finger, adjusting your clothes are also gestures that indicate that the person feels somewhat nervous.
4. Touching and trying to improve your hair shows that you are not sure of your looks and feeling you are not enough.
5. Too many gestures and repetitive gestures show you are trying too hard to compensate for a lack of confidence.
How can you use gestures effectively? Let's divide this into categories. Gestures can be:
1. Descriptive gestures are used to describe something or a situation. You can also use them for comparison and contrast. You can use your hands to show shapes, height, size, location, direction, left, right, etc.
2. Empathic gestures are used to symbolise feelings and help to make your presentation more genuine. It also helps with connecting with your audience on a deeper emotional level. You can use your head and posture to show enthusiasm, sadness, anger, happiness, etc. This also can be added with appropriate voice modulation which you can master with the app 4Ps, Power, Pitch,Pace,Pause. Make sure you use appropriate gestures to show different emotions.
3. Suggestive gestures show moods and expressions. By opening your arms you suggest openness, and by crossing the arms you suggest the opposite. By shrugging your shoulders you can show indifference.
4. Prompting gestures help to prompt the audience to do something.
By raising your hand and saying -raise your hands, you prompt people to raise theirs, for example.
I recommend that you video record your presentation and watch it by paying attention to your gestures. Analyse and feel which gestures look good and which you need to avoid. It can be useful to take a few elocution lessons if you feel that you need help with developing a great public speaking presence.
More on www.batcsglobal.com