Body language

1. Nonverbal means

     The nonverbal part of your speech is a presentation of yourself as well as your message. Your nonverbals are a key part of living and communicating in and through your body. Using the eye contact, body posture, gestures, and facial expression, you enhance your message and invite your audience to give their serious attention to it—and to you. Your credibility, your sincerity, and your knowledge of your speech become apparent through your nonverbal behaviors.

1.1. Eye contact

     Eye contact creates an intimate and interpersonal experience for individual audience members and it assists in maintaining rapport. Part of creating a meaningful aesthetic experience is through eye contact, and the general rule of thumb is that 80 % of your total speech time should be spent making eye contact with your audience. When you’re able to connect by using eye contact, you create a more intimate, trusting, and transparent experience. 

     It’s important to note that you want to establish genuine eye contact with your audience, and not “fake” eye contact. There have been a lot of techniques generated for “faking” eye contact, and none of them look natural. For example, these aren’t great:

• Three points on the back wall – You may have heard that instead of making eye contact, you can just pick three points on the back wall and look at each point. What ends up happening, though, is you look like you are staring off into space and your audience will spend the majority of your speech trying to figure out what you are looking at. This technique may work better for a larger audience, but in a more intimate space (like the classroom), the audience is close enough to be suspicious. Put simply: we can tell you aren’t looking at us.
• The swimming method – This happens when someone is reading their speech and looks up quickly and briefly, not unlike a swimmer who pops their head out of the water for a breath before going back under. Eye contact is more than just physically moving your head; it is about looking at your audience and establishing a connection.

Instead, work to maintain approximately 3 seconds of eye contact with audience members throughout the room. You are, after all, speaking to them, so use your eyes to make contact. This may also reduce some anxiety because you can envision yourself speaking directly to one person at a time, rather than a room full of strangers.

1.2. Gestures and hands

     Everyone who gives a speech in public gets scared or nervous. Even professionals who do this for a living feel that way, but they have learned how to combat those nerves through experience and practice. When we get scared or nervous, our bodies emit adrenaline, so we can deal with whatever problem is causing us to feel that way. In a speech, you are asked to speak for a specific duration of time, so that burst of adrenaline is going to try to work its way out of your body and manifest itself somehow. One of the main ways is through your hands.

3 common reactions to this adrenaline rush are:

• Jazz hands! It may sound funny, but nervous speakers can unknowingly incorporate “jazz hands”—shaking your hands at your sides with fingers opened wide— at various points in their speech. While certainly an extreme example, this and behaviors like it can easily becoming distracting.
• Stiff as a board. At the other end of the scale, people who don’t know what to do with their hands or use them “too little” sometimes hold their arms stiffly at their sides, behind their backs, or in their pockets, all of which can also look unnatural and distracting.
• Hold on for dear life! Finally, some speakers might grip their notes or a podium tightly with their hands. This might also result in tapping on a podium, table, or another object nearby.

     The key for knowing what to do with your hands is to know your own embodied movement and to trust or adjust your natural style as needed. Use your natural gestures to create purposeful aesthetic emphasis for your audience. Try to pay attention to what you do with your hands in regular conversations and incorporate that into your delivery. Be conscious, though, of being over the top and gesturing at every other word. Remember that gestures highlight and punctuate information for the audience, so too many gestures (like jazz hands) can be distracting.

1.3. Posture

     Just like your hands, nervous energy might try to work its way out of your body through your feet. Common difficulties include:

• The side-to-side. You may feel awkward standing without a podium and try to shift your weight back and forth. On the “too much” end, this is most common when people start “dancing” or stepping side to side.
• The twisty-leg. Another variation is twisting feet around each other or the lower leg.
• Stiff-as-a-board. On the other end are speakers who put their feet together, lock their knees, and never move from that position. Locked knees can restrict oxygen to your brain, so there are many reasons to avoid this difficulty.

     These options look unnatural, and therefore will prove to be distracting to your audience.

     The default position for your feet, then, is to have them shoulder-width apart, with your knees slightly bent. Since public speaking often results in some degree of physical exertion, you need to treat speaking as a physical activity. Public speaking is too often viewed as merely the transmission of information or a message rather than a fully body experience. Being in-tune and attuned to your body will allow you to speak in a way that’s both comfortable for you and the audience.

     Focusing on good posture and solid grounding will, in addition to increasing your confidence, assist you in maintaining your eye contact and focusing on projecting your voice throughout the space.

1.4. Moving in the space

     When you speak, moving in the space can be beneficial. As you plan your purposeful movement, be aware of the message you’re providing and the space in which you’re speaking.

     Changing the spatial dynamics goes beyond moving from side-to-side. You can also move forward and backward. This allows you to move closer to the audience or back away—depending on what experience you’re trying to create.

     In addition to engaging with the audience, movement often signals a transition between ideas or an attempt to visually enunciate an important component of your information. You may want to signal a change in time or mark progression. If you’re walking your audience through information chronologically, movement can mark that temporal progression where your body becomes the visual marker of time passing.

1.5. Facial expressions

     Your face communicates to others (and audiences) in ways that are congruent or incongruent with your message.

     Facial expressions are generally categorized as one of the following: happy, sad, angry, fearful, surprised and disgusted etc. Your facial expressions matter; your audience will be looking at your face to guide them through the speech, so they’re an integral part of communicating meaning and demonstrating to your audience a felt sense.