It’s a few days before your make-or-break presentation. Your slides are ready, and you’re well rehearsed. You know what you need to do to activate this audience. So you feel confident about every aspect of this talk.

Except your body language.

(Body language matters whenever you speak in public! To boost your influence, download my free cheat sheet, "5 Secrets of Powerful Body Language.")

You’ll Be Up There Naked, Turning Around Slowly

Movie actress Rosalind Russell said that about acting and being on display—but you may have the same feeling about public speaking. Lots of speakers do, and one of the main reasons is unease over body language.

You probably know this sensation: you’re perfectly comfortable speaking with a group of friends or colleagues. But stand in front of an audience, and you suddenly feel exposed and vulnerable. Suddenly, your stance, movement and gestures somehow feel artificial and awkward. Your body language has begun to seem like your enemy instead of your friend.

Here are three easy techniques to turn the tables, changing your body language from an exercise in self-consciousness into what it’s meant to be: a powerful tool to make you a more dynamic speaker. Think of it as Body Language 1-2-3:

ONE Gesture for One Idea

Speakers often make one of two mistakes: either they stand statue-like, or they move their hands nonstop. Each misses the point of what gestures are meant to accomplish. (To use body language skillfully instead, take a look at my free cheat sheet, "6 Skills Building Exercises for Effective Body Language.")

Gestures exist to amplify or support what you’re saying. Clearly, they can’t do that if there aren’t any gestures for the audience to see, or you use so many of them that they have no impact. For a gesture to work, it needs to be clean, spare, and stand out in clear relief. In other words, your gestures should be few in number, and used in support of the single thing you’re saying at that moment.

Exercise: Think of something important you'd really like to get across to an audience. Come up with two or three sentences to express the essence of that idea. Now decide where you want to make ONE gesture—better yet, start talking and let the gesture emerge organically on its own. Make the gesture when you can’t not make it any longer, when it compels itself into existence. That gesture will be natural and organic, and your audience will have no doubt about the importance of what you just said.

TWO Tasks You Need to Perform

When you speak in public, the venue has great importance in terms of the audience’s experience. It affects how they receive the message, not only in terms of how well they hear it, but also concerning your relationship to them and the sense of communal space you and they occupy. Consider sitting in a church pew to hear what’s being said versus a police interrogation room and you’ll understand how a space in itself affects an audience’s perceptions.

Exercise: Borrow this theatrical practice: FIRST, visit the place where you’ll be speaking beforehand if possible. If I’m presenting at a conference, for instance, I always go to the venue the night before. Once you see the space, make some strategic decisions as to where you want to be standing when you deliver the most important parts of your message.

SECOND, practice your presentation in that space. Walk through it, not only to become comfortable in the space (as actors always do), but paying attention to sight lines and the sound of your voice. Are there acoustic dead spots you need to avoid? When might you want to get closer to your audience? If you’ll be speaking at a lectern, experiment with whether you’ll be comfortable coming out from behind it, as your audience will almost certainly like it if you do.

Here's another way to prepare to look and feel powerful: Read my article "Body Language and Power Poses: How to Achieve Amazing Presence!"

THREE Positions to Foster Audience Engagement and Retention

Now help your audience in another way, by giving them visuals that will aid their attentiveness and ability to retain what you say. The visuals we’re talking about here have to do with your performance.

Exercise: Let’s say you have three main points in your talk, which is a good idea in itself because a maximum of three points is easy to retain. You now need to use your performance space to strengthen visually what you’re saying verbally. Here’s an easy pattern to use:

• Start in the position theater people call “down-center”: closest to your audience as you deliver the grabber that hooks them.
• Just before Main Point ONE, walk to a spot where you’ll stay as you talk about that item. Gesture naturally, but make that the place you occupy exclusively for that idea.
• Repeat the pattern for Main Point TWO. Whether you take one step or ten simply depends upon the size of your performance space. This new spot is “Story Corner” for that main point. Don’t be afraid to use a diagonal.
• Main point THREE should similarly have its own spot.
• You return to down-center for your closing, delivering your clincher near the audience where your influence is greatest.

Not only has your audience just experienced a presentation that’s visually interesting. Equally important, the “three-ideas-three-locations” pattern makes it much easier for listeners to retain each of your ideas, rather than, say, a speaker who wanders aimlessly or paces back and forth like a caged animal.

Re-cap:

ONE gesture/one idea.

TWO tasks to perform in the venue beforehand.

THREE positions during your speech to keep the audience interested and retentive of your message.

The conclusion is inescapable: Body language for public speaking is as easy as 1-2-3!

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