Effective Body Language in Front of a Crowd

Standing in front of a group, on stage, or leading a workshop, requires not just language to be commanding. It also requires a presence. It requires the command of the room. It requires body language.

 Here are some tips for effective speaking in front of others, but not with your voice, but rather with what you are conveying with your body:

Use your gestures.

 Begin with a neutral position of standing tall with your hands at your sides. When you think about hand placement it will start to feel unnatural and strange, but just let them hang at your sides to begin with. Keep yourself open to the audience, don’t turn your back to them to view a slide. Keep your shoulders at a straight or very narrow angle to the back wall of the room. Make sure that the gestures you use are sparing, and defined. Think of how many presidents comedians can imitate just using the hand gestures that the president favored. That definition and decisive gesture can drive home the impact of your words. If you are a natural “hand-talker” (someone who illustrates their conversation with many hand gestures) don’t try to fight your nature and keep your hands still, because you will look unnatural, but do try to pare it down to the core gestures you use to make your point.

Manage your stress.

No one likes speaking to a crowd, but those that do it professional have learned to turn it into energy. To funnel the nervousness and loop it around into exhilaration. Energy is a good thing and keeps your presentation alive and engaging, but letting stress get the best of you will lead to vocal tics and other nonverbal behaviors that might undermine your words. Sports players are often known for jumping a little in place before going out to field, stadium, or court, and turning nervousness into excitement. Clench and release your fists to relieve tension, bounce a little on your toes, breathe deeply from your belly, look at a wall straight ahead of you. Exhale slowly and feel all of your muscles relax in a wave. Concentrate on your toes, then your feet, then your ankles, and relax your muscles with your mind all the way up your body. Think about being excited rather than nervous.

Use your space.

Ditch the podium, forget the chair. Walk around the stage and fill it with your presence. Don’t pace around in circles, but do use what you have to keep the energy going and to keep eyes following you. Humans are drawn to movement and are more likely to be engaged with you if you use the space you have. But when you key to a key point, stop and face the audience, stand still and possessively, and really drive your point home.

Power poses.

The most viewed TED Talk of all time is Amy Cuddy’s TED Talk about body language. It talked about how body language doesn’t just shape how other people perceive you, it can also shape you you perceive yourself. Puting energy and dynamic movement into posing and standing in a way that can convey power doesn’t just make others look at you differently, it can make you actually feel more powerful.

Watch the video here:

Shifting Your Perspective

Part of being a creative problem solver, and effective communicator, and a revolutionary thinker, is being able to shift your perspective from your own current perspective. But how do you get out from underneath your current mentality and into a new perspective? How to do instigate inspiration?

Literally shift your perspective.

Is there a chair in your home you never sit in? Do you stand on the same spot on the platform every day because you know where the doors to the train car will be? Have you spent your last eight days off  from work running errands in the city? Change your view. Seeing your home, your commute, your city differently can refresh your brain. We grow stale with time and repetition, and getting out into nature, taking a different route home in your car, or shopping at a different grocery store can liven up your brain, and introduce you to new experiences.

Widen your scope.

In a story of animal abuse, a puppy was thrown from a moving car, to what one can only assume was it’s death. Looking at the event in a small scale focuses on the precipitating event, which is mired in cruelty towards an animal. Looking at the event from a larger scale, instead of seeing the violence of the act, you see motorists stopping other cars for safety, someone going onto the highway to wrap the puppy up safely, and taking it to a humane shelter where a volunteer veterinarian patched it up for free. From this perspective you see the work of many, the selflessness of the story, and how each individual act of kindness far outweighs the one singular act of cruelty. The stock market is a wonderful place to get a shift in perspective as well. Commodities of pork bellies don’t just raise in price overnight. When you trace the product, you find that too much rain made the grain moldy and the moldy grain meant the pigs were underweight, and the underweight pigs didn’t bear any piglets, and the next generation of pigs is a greatly reduced population, raising the scarcity. The further back you trace the reasoning, the bigger the scope gets.

Your thoughts don’t define you, your behavior does.

Being in a rut of unique thought or a spiral of thinking negative things does not discount your creativity or ingenuity or the good thoughts that you think. We all have thoughts we wish we didn’t have, but the actions that we take with those thoughts is what defines us.

From the book The Art of Happiness: “Once there was a disciple of a Greek philosopher who was commanded by his Master for three years to give money to everyone who insulted him. When this period of trial was over the Master said to him, “Now you can go to Athens and learn Wisdom.” When the disciple was entering Athens, he met a certain wise man who sat at the gate insulting everybody who came and went. He also insulted the disciple, who burst out laughing. “Why do you laugh when I insult you?” said the wise man. “Because,” said the disciple, “for three years I have been paying for this kind of thing and now you give it to me for nothing.” “Enter the city,” said the wise man, “it is all yours…”