How to use gesture when you present – and speak to sound confident (even when you’re not)
Frankie Kemp
6 March 2022
“I don’t use gesture! You’re making me do something unnatural, Frankie!” exclaimed the client, as he waved his hands in the air.
“Alright. Carry on, then.” I replied, “Do what you’re doing there.”
The problem is that most people don’t do what they naturally do when go into presentation mode.
They become all robotic, forgetting they have hands and not knowing how to speak expressively ?.
Wondering how to move and sound more confidently when you present?
Unsure how to sound more convincing in a pitch?
This video address BOTH challenges.
Learn when and how to move and sound to seem more confident: even when you’re not.
Transcript
Have you ever stood in front of an audience and realized suddenly that you’ve got arms and you don’t know really what to do with them and they’ve got these hands on the end and you’ve forgotten how to move?
Well, in this video I’m going to show you how to gesture when you present in a way that calms your nerves and makes you look and feel more confident. Let’s go.
Hi I’m Frankie Kemp from frankiekemp.com People Skills for Geeks, helping professionals in tech to become less vanilla and much more thriller.
So a lot of people don’t know how to move when they present. Now they do it naturally but when they present they seem to become so self-conscious that it inhibits people. So I’m going to say
a phrase. I’m going to say it in two ways, both are not optimal but you’ll see what happens to the voice and the gesture.
For example: “We’re really excited that you’re here today.”
That’s the first one when I’m not moving at all and you’ll find the voice is flat. The second one, wait for it…
“We’re really excited that you’re here today.” Too much, way too much.
Firstly, if it’s a virtual presentation you really mustn’t go beyond the screen. In Anglo-Saxon cultures you want to keep the gesture highest around here. From Iran to Italy the gestures can be a little bit higher but only when you really want to emphasize.
Now, the point is to make sure that your vocal pitch is aligned with your gesture and they only centre on your key words or phrases. So instead of looking like Robocop or a mad air traffic controller, what you would really want to do is just focus on the key words or phrases like this :
“We’re really excited to have you here today.”
That’s all. So you use the gesture and the vocal pitch will help you to come across with much more confidence and credibility.
What many people find is that they shake when they present so moving using a gesture, especially on key words at the beginning of a presentation, helps you to diffuse nervous energy.
So it has a third benefit, apart from sounding confident and looking confident and credible, you also feel calmer because it diffuses energy.
What tends to happen is when people start to shake vocally or physically they say to themselves stop shaking and they hold it in and it gets worse. So finding a key word as soon as possible where you can gesture makes you actually look so much more calmer and confident.
The Science of Credibility and Gesture: Researchers looked at the value of gesture and how an audience will perceive you when using movement in this way. While watching CEOs speaking about their companies, the viewers brainwaves were measure through EEG sensors monitoring their brain waves. When the CEOs spoke in a way that didn’t match their content, for example, using a downward gesture when they said, “Our stocks have gone up”, the brain waves of the listener went into a dip, like a valley.
That’s exactly what happens when suddenly you can’t work out what somebody has said in situations such as when the signal is lost on a mobile or there’s extraneous noise so you can’t decipher what being said. Using gesture that matches the key words and phrases, thereby reflecting the speaker’s intention – keeps an audience engaged. They will understand more of what you’ve said simply by using gesture in line with vocal emphasis
