What Do I Do with My Hands When I’m Speaking?

PROBLEM: Every time I get up to speak, I never know what to do with my hands. When I’m at a lectern, I usually just hang on to that, but when I’m just in front of a group of people, it just feels unnatural. What should I do with my hands?

SOLUTION: First of all, you should never lean on a lectern. The lectern is there to hold your notes and possibly a microphone, it is not there to hold YOU up. As a Presenter, you are the leader, at least for that moment in time, and you must behave like a leader. That means standing on your own two feet. Leaning on a lectern makes you appear tired or lazy, which are not traits people admire in a leader. Further, it can make your jacket or shirt bunch up in the back of your neck, which can make you look sloppy, yet another undesirable trait.

Let’s take a minute to review how communication works. As Presenter, we have an image in our brain that we decide to share with our listener. Once conjured, that image gets sent to two separate parts of our brain; the gesture center and the word center. The word center is where we figure out how to describe that image using the proper language, syntax, expressions, etc., in a way that particular listener will understand (which can vary greatly depending on who we are talking to, be it our Board of Directors or our toddler). Naturally, all this sentence creation takes a measurable amount of time.

Meanwhile, the route to the gesture center is short and direct. It takes just a split second for our gesture center to decide whether or not the image warrants a gesture, and what that gesture should be. That’s why in an ordinary conversation, when you aren’t thinking about it, your gestures will always come first, preceding your words by a considerable margin. That’s the natural way to do it, and the way that we are used to seeing them as listeners. When the gesture is in the wrong place, i.e. after the words, at the same time as the words, or not at all, we as listeners sense the speaker’s discomfort, which often makes us uncomfortable as well.

The challenge arises when a speaker knows he should gesture, but doesn’t know how or when. A novice Presenter may very well attempt to solve the problem by simply making a conscious decision to not gesture. Unfortunately, not gesturing is very unnatural. Humans gesture all the time, and anyone who watches any group of people in a normal interactive environment will notice that no one is ever still. We are always moving, our hands, our bodies, our faces are always shifting. When a Presenter chooses not to gesture, they are eliminating at least half of their communication effectiveness.

Once a novice Presenter figures that out (either by good training or bad experience), his next step may be to try to solve the problem by planning some gestures. That’s another huge mistake. Because you will be inherently more worried about what you’re saying, your mind will be busy conjuring up images and transferring them into words. Once the words finally reach your mouth, chances are just as they are coming out, you will remember that you were going to gesture there, so you then instruct your hands to gesture. By the time your hands get the message, the words are almost gone, and the gesture arrives late. Both you and your listener realize that that didn’t work very well, though neither of you probably really know why. Quite simply, it’s because late gestures are as unnatural as no gestures, both for the Presenter to do and for the listener to see.

Another problem that arises from trying to plan your gestures is repetitiveness. Having now reached the point, through trial and error, of realizing that trying to remember when to perform a planned gesture is an impossible task, a Presenter may now decide the answer is to gesture as often as possible, figuring that will be more effective than either no gesturing or late gesturing. He forces himself to gesture at every opportunity until it becomes a habit, thus disengaging himself from the image in his brain.

Unfortunately, the sorry result of this strategy is that most Presenters on automatic will only use one or two gestures. They will simply repeat them over and over again, with no consideration for whether they are actually the right gesture for the image they are describing, because they believe that any gesture will do. In reality, we seldom gesture the same way twice in a normal conversation, and doing so, one again, makes us appear unnatural.

So as a Presenter gains experience, he generally passes through these phases: 1) He learns he must gesture, because no gesturing is unnatural, 2) he learns he can’t plan his gestures, or they will always be late, 3) he learns he can’t keep repeating the same gesture over and over, as it, too, will become unnatural. So what’s a Presenter to do to shortcut the learning curve?

Here’s what to do. First and foremost understand that gestures originate from the image center of the brain. Don’t fight them, don’t plan them, just realize that your brain has been doing this dance between your word center and your gesture center all your life, and the best thing you can do is to get out of it’s way. The trick is easy; simply wait for an overwhelming urge to gesture, and when it comes, give yourself the freedom to gesture. Sounds simple, and it is. Don’t force gestures, but be aware that your natural instinct is to make gestures, and open your mind to that inevitable instruction from the gesture center. When it comes, don’t try to stop it, or minimize it, just let it come out.

At first, you’ll probably be afraid to do that. So while you’re waiting for that first overwhelming urge to gesture, it’s okay to rest a hand on the lectern (remember, leaning on it or grabbing it hard are bad, resting a hand on it, temporarily, is okay.) If you want to put on hand in a pocket (never both hands) that’s okay, too. The key here is that after a minute or two, you’ll discover your word center is doing it’s job just fine and you will start to relax. Soon you will remember that the gesture center is giving you instructions as well. As you become more aware of it, and start listening to it, you will become more sensitive to it. Soon, your personal understanding of "overwhelming" will become more subtle. The result will be that all of your gestures will become more natural, and will son require no thinking on your part at all. Now that’s a gesturing habit worth mastering!