Body language

     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.