The three benefits of gesturing - it’s not what you think

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Why is it, that when you’re speaking in front of a group you suddenly become aware of these great clumsy appendages at the end of your arms - your hands?

Why do you suddenly wonder what to do about them?

Gesturing is natural

In normal one-to-one conversation you never think “What shall I do with my hands?”. In normal conversation, your hands are probably gesturing without you giving them any conscious thought. On our courses, the participants rehearse their presentation in pairs before presenting to the group. So they get to present to just to one other person. As I stand back and observe the room I see all these people talking with animation and energy, with natural gestures to go along with what they’re saying. That’s because gesturing is normal and natural.

There is a theory that gestures were the precursor to language - the gestural theory of language evolution. In the June 2008 issue of Scientific American there was an article on the the neuroscience of dance. It reported that Broca’s area (the part of the brain which is associated with speech production) is also activated during certain movement tasks. So it seems that speaking and gestures go hand-in-hand.

But for some people when they speak in front of group their natural gesturing disappears. I see this on our courses when people who had been talking with lots of gestures in the one-on-one rehearsal suddenly seem to lose that ability when they speak in front of a larger group. That’s because a common reaction to being on show in front of a group is to freeze and become stiff - it’s a symptom of nervousness.

It’s not what what you think

And it does matter. But not for the reason you may think.

It is not because your gestures help the audience understand what you’re saying. You may have heard that 55% of the meaning of your presentation comes from your facial expression and gestures, 38% from your tone of voice and 7% from your words. This is bunkum and arises from a huge misinterpretation of a research study by Albert Mehrabian. Click here for an enlightening discussion of the Mehrabian myth.

The three reasons why gesturing is helpful

First, gesturing helps you be fluent and articulate. There is a large body of scientific evidence to support this. In an interesting study, three groups of subjects were asked to speak under different conditions. One group had both arms immobilised, the second group had one arm immobilised and the third group was free to gesture. The experimenters found that disfluency increased as gesture was restricted. In addition, research shows that restricting hand gestures makes it more difficult to find the right words.

Robert Krauss from Columbia University has published many papers on this topic. He concludes one of his papers with this story:

Many years ago, my maternal grandfather told me a story about two men in his hometown, Vitebsk, Belorussia, walking down a road on a bitterly cold winter day. One man chattered away animatedly, while other nodded from time to time, but said nothing. Finally, the man who was talking turned to his friend and said: “So, nu, Shmuel, why aren’t you saying anything?” “Because,” replied Shmuel, “I forgot my gloves.” At the time, I didn’t see the point of the story. Half a century later it has become a primary focus of my research.

So by gesturing you not only unfreeze your body you unfreeze your mind.

Secondly, gesturing conveys enthusiasm and energy to your audience. Surveys of what people like and dislike about presentations consistently report that people what presenters to show passion and enthusiasm.

Thirdly, when the audience sees you gesturing they will think that you look confident. That’s because nervous speakers are often frozen and stiff. Not only that but you may also fool your mind into thinking you are confident. You’ll realise that you’re speaking in a confident, conversational manner and start to feel that way too.

So what to do with your hands?

Unclasp them (or take them out of your pockets) and let them be free. To begin with they may just hang by your sides - that’s OK. Although it feels awkward it looks fine. As you get into the flow of your talk - your hands will join in. Because gesturing is a natural part of speaking.

Go well with your next presentation. If you found this post useful, subscribe to my RSS feed.

Claim your Space

Lisa Braithwaite from Speak Schmeak has commented on my post about the attention-getting myth. I started responding to her comment, but my response got so long I decided it was worth a blogpost in its own right.

The issue is how to best help nervous speakers at the start of a presentation . Lisa suggested that:

Using an opening that immediately involves the audience, for example, through asking questions, engages them while also immediately taking pressure off the speaker to perform.

When the audience is allowed to participate and share their own knowledge and life experience, they are more engaged. The presentation becomes about them, not the nervous speaker.

My take on it is different. Nervous speakers are generally at their most nervous at the start of a presentation. As they get into their stride and realise that the presentation might just go OK their nervousness often reduces. So my approach is to help the nervous speaker get into their stride with as little risk as possible.

And I think asking questions is risky. It can easily go wrong. For example, you might get no responses - or you might have a garrulous member of the audience who takes over. This leaves the nervous speaker in an even more difficult situation. Asking an effective question that elicits the type of response you want and then handling the responses you get is a skill that requires practice, confidence and experience.

In fact, I don’t recommend asking questions right at the beginning for any presenter. During a presentation, the presenter is the leader. And leaders should start by leading. A leader can become more democratic once they’ve established their authority and credibility as a leader. So at the beginning of a presentation, the presenter should “Claim their Space”. Once you’ve claimed your space, which could be as little as two minutes, then it can be an effective strategy to involve the audience by asking questions.

Finally - does asking questions and getting the audience to respond mean that people are more engaged? Not necessarily. Audience participation has to be well-managed for it to be engaging for everybody. I might be more engaged in the moment that I’m offering my own opinion - but listening to other people make unprepared and often waffly comments isn’t what I’m there for. In that situation, I would rather hear from the speaker who has (hopefully) thought about and prepared what they want to say.

Audience participation is a great tool - when managed with skill and at the right moment in the presentation.

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The myth of learning styles

Many presenters have heard about learning styles and want to know how they can take individual learning styles into account when they present. But the learning styles model has no research that backs it up:

“from a neuroscientific point of view [the learning styles approach to teaching] is nonsense”. (Susan Greenfield, specialist in brain physiology, quoted in The Times Educational Supplement, 27 July 2007).

But it still sticks around. Today I was a participant on a course where I was subjected to a “learning styles” test. Here’s just one example.  I was asked when buying a gift did I prefer to buy:

• books
• music; or
• tools and gadgets.

If I ticked the book column - it was coded as visual, music as auditory, and tools and gadgets as kinesthetic. As Susan Greenfield says - this is nonsense.

As a result of the learning styles model, many presenters believe that they need to present information in different ways to suit different people. This idea by itself doesn’t do much harm, as research does show that we all benefit from taking in information both visually and aurally. But many people misunderstand what visual means. They believe that visual includes reading words. And they use this to justify putting wordy bullet-points on their PowerPoint slides.

Just because words enter the brain through our eyes (visually) does not mean that they are processed visually. As Richard Mayer explains, words are processed in the verbal channel of our brain. So if we’re also listening to a speaker, the verbal channel will be overloaded:

John Medina in his book, Brain Rules, has a good section on the difference between text and images “When it comes to memory, researchers have known for more than 100 years that pictures and text follow very different rules.” See more at the book’s website.

So please, don’t use learning styles as an excuse for bullet-point slides.

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Why you don’t need to grab attention

As a relatively new blogger I’m spending a lot of time reading other people’s blogs. I came across this intriguing story from the Washington Post which was blogged by both Seth Godin and Laura Fitton when it was first published last year.

A world-class violinist, Joshua Bell, was asked by the Washington Post to busk during the morning commute at a Washington metro station. The paper wanted to see how people would react to hearing a world-class violinist in such an incongruous setting. If you want to read the full story, click over there now, as I’m about to reveal what happened.

Joshua Bell played for 43 minutes and in that time 1,097 people passed by him. Only a handful of people stopped to listen and then only for a couple of minutes.

I’m intrigued by this story for what it can teach us about getting attention. Joshua Bell got virtually no attention at the metro station. Because of the context - people weren’t expecting a world-class violinist to be paying at the metro station - he needed to grab their attention before they would isten to him. But when he plays with the world’s most famous orchestras in venues where people have paid $100 a ticket - he has rapt attention from the moment he steps on stage. He does not need to grab attention.

It’s all about the context. The people in the concert hall have come to hear him - the commuters have not.

When you’re presenting - you’re like Joshua Bell in  a concert hall - people have come to hear you and the valuable content that you can give them. You don’t have to grab their attention.

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Attention-getting - The Evidence

In my last post I wrote about the attention-getting myth. I argued that the idea that you have to grab attention at the beginning of a presentation is a myth. Here’s the evidence to back that up.

Studies have been done measuring the attention levels of students in university lectures. Here’s the results of a study that asked students for their subjective assessment of their attention at different points in the lecture:

(Reference: Hartley J and Davies I “Note taking: A critical review” Programmed Learning and Educational technology, 1978,15, 207-224 cited by John Medina in Brain Rules).

In another study students were asked to write summaries of the lectures they had attended. The researchers then tallied the bits of information reported according to which half-minute segment of the presentation they had ocurred in. Students recalled the most information from the first five minutes of the presentation. (Reference: Burns R A “Information Impact and Factors Affecting Recall” 1985 cited in Middendorf J and Kalish A “The Change-Up in Lectures” National Teaching and Learning Forum, 1996, 5, 2).

So now you’ve got evidence that you don’t have to wrack your brains to come up with some clever attention-grabber at the start.

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