Body Language For Better Public Speaking

When doing any form of public speaking, your body is your instrument. This article focuses on body language and public speaking by describing the best ways to tune and play your body for better public speaking.

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Whether you're speaking or not, and regardless of what you are or aren't saying, your body is always communicating. It's always communicating messages that are magnified before an audience. For the most effective body language and public speaking experiences, then, it's vital to become conscious of this nonverbal communication you're doing all the time - your body language. And more, to learn how to use your body language with purpose and intent in order to communicate what you want to communicate and not what you don't.

Eyes: Maintaining good eye contact with your audience helps you to regulate the communication flow. It also conveys a sense of intimacy and warmth, showing the audience members that you are genuinely interested in them. Eye contact also increases your credibility. Rather than eyeing the audience in one broad swath, make eye contact with individual members of the audience as you speak, holding one person's attention for several seconds, then moving on to another person. In this way, the effect given is that you're speaking to each member of the audience individually.

Face: Your facial expressions are key when speaking in public. A smile is a tremendously powerful indicator to your audience of warmth, friendliness, happiness, and comfort. Smiling, therefore, is an easy way to ensure that you're perceived as friendly, approachable, receptive, warm, and likable. It's a contagious behavior that will cause others to naturally react to you more favorably. It will make your audience feel more comfortable sitting there listening to you, and more willing, therefore, to continue doing so.

Hands and Arms: Nothing disengages the eye more than static, motionless, rigidity. In order to stimulate and engage the audience, before you use your hands and arms to illustrate and emphasize what you're speaking about. Don't overdo it, of course. You don't want to be so physically animated that you distract from your own speech. Just watch out that you don't come across as stiff, boring, and uninterested either. Capture the audience's attention by remaining lively, and it will make your material seem that much more interesting and easier to follow.

Posture: Continue on the theme of the preceding warning about avoiding stiffness and rigidity, stay loose, flexible, and animated in your body stance and orientation too. Stand up straight to convey confidence in your material. And lean in towards the audience slightly in order to engage them and convey interest, approachability, intimacy, and receptivity. Slouching and looking at the floor or ceiling, by contrast, shows laziness, lack of confidence, disinterestedness, and inaccessibility.

The voice is another element of body language and public speaking that can and must be used with great intention to achieve better public speaking results, so much so that we've devoted an entire article to the subject. For now, just remember that public speaking is not just an auditory experience, for you or the audience. It's also visual. People don't only listen to what you're saying, they're also watching your every move. Give them something to look at that aligns with and amplifies what you're trying to communicate.