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Transcript
What should you do with your hands during a presentation?
I have two recommendations.
First, use open hand positions. Open hand positions are good to build trust with the audience. And it’s important to build trust, so that you can persuade or influence the people that you’re talking to.
Usually when you’re giving a presentation, you want people to think in a different way or act in a different way as a result of your presentation. So building trust is really important.
My second recommendation is to use gestures to support what you’re saying. This helps you to get your message across to the audience and to keep the audience engaged.
Now it doesn’t mean that you have to have a gesture for every single thing that you say. If you have so many gestures and you’re thinking about that and trying to remember, then you’re in your head and you’re not focusing on the audience. So it’s very difficult to build trust.
So keeping open hand positions and using gestures to support what you are saying.
Also, three hand positions that I recommend that you avoid.
The first is the very formal Japanese hand position. So for men it’s the fist with the hand covering and for ladies it’s the flat palms. It could be this way [left over right hand] or this way [right over left hand] depending on the school of etiquette that you particularly follow. And thank you very much to Hiroko Nishide-sensei for helping me out to understand these things as well.
So this kind of formal Japanese hand position is great for formal situations, but in a presentation you want to build a relationship, you want to build rapport, and build trust with your audience. So if you’re like this [with the formal Japanese hand position] the whole time it’s very difficult to do that.
You may start like this [with the formal Japanese hand position], but then quickly go into a more open position to build trust.
The second position to avoid is the hands behind the back. So this comes across as maybe quite a distant or maybe even arrogant type of position.
Sometimes people who take this position actually feel very insecure and they’re just putting this on to attempt to look more confident.
But if people have this kind of arrogant look, it’s very difficult to build a trust relationship.
And the third one that I recommend that you avoid is holding onto yourself. I often see people holding onto their fingers as they’re nervously presenting or maybe holding onto an arm as they’re presenting.
I’ve even seen a gentleman — I think he was presenting for about ten minutes — and he kept fiddling with his open cuff. The button was undone, and he was fiddling the whole time. It was very distracting for the audience.
So if you don’t want to distract your audience, you don’t want them to think that you’re nervous or arrogant or too formal, then I recommend open hand positions and using gestures to support what you’re saying.
So please go out and give this a go. It comes with practice.
And now it’s time to close.
