Gary Genard's

Speak for Success!

"Be a voice not an echo." - Albert Einstein

The Body Language Factor: Moving Audiences to "Wow!"

Are you missing a key element of giving dynamic speeches and presentations? If you’re not using body language consciously to improve your physical expressiveness, you most certainly are. 

Physical expressiveness. That may be a term you haven’t run across before. Think about it for just a minute, though, and you’ll understand what a critical factor it is in literally embodying your message. 

Body language plays a huge part in how people perceive you. From job interviews to presentations to speaking via video, your audience is reacting strongly to what you’re showing them.  To appear at your best, download my free cheat sheet, 5 Secrets of Powerful Body Language

Is it important to embody your message? In all of our interest in interpreting other people’s body language, we may forget what an essential tool physical expression is in our own public speaking. After all, as Sir Ken Robinson says in his famous TED Talk “How Schools Kill Creativity,” your body isn’t just a vehicle to get your head to the next meeting.[1] 

So what I’d like to do in today’s blog is to get you to think both strategically and practically about what I call “The Body Language Factor.” It’s one of the best implements in your speaker’s toolbox to help bring your audiences to a “Wow!” response to your speeches and presentations. 

Body Language Is the Physical Expression of Your Message 

Let’s imagine for a moment that you and I are having a conversation somewhere in East Africa, say 100,000 years ago. That’s well after our species Homo sapiens began to evolve, but a good 50,000 years or so before language will develop. So how are we “conversing” and getting our points across? 

We’re using gestures, facial expressions, and movement, of course. In addition, we’re almost certainly employing another essential communication tool: vocal expressiveness. That is, not the verbal content of words, but the physical sounds our developing voice boxes are capable of producing at this stage in the development of our species. 

The stronger or more urgent our message, the more likely we’re depending upon those aspects of physical expression to get that message across. Later, when we add language to our communication repertoire, the argument you or I are able to deliver will grow exponentially in power and beauty. But the physical component of our communication with others won’t be diminished. 

That continues to be true today, of course. So the conclusion is inescapable: Live only in your head as you prepare and deliver presentations, and your talks as well as your audience will be the poorer for it. In other words, don’t allow your brilliantly expressive body to leave the room when you speak! 

For more on using body language to be a powerful speaker, discover the body language secrets every presenter needs to know. 

Body Language Excites You and Your Audience! 

Now let’s add some excitement to the mix. Picture the keynote at the last conference you attended. What you most likely saw was a speaker in a static pose behind a lectern. But formal speech occasions aside (in which a manuscript is read), why is this still our keynote default setting? Lapel mics and a TED-style approach can free any speaker from being trapped behind the physical barrier of the lectern. 

One of my clients, a physician-administrator at a large medical provider, demonstrates in all of his conference speeches how it should be done. One speaker after another at these events turns themselves into a statue-behind-the-lectern. But his entrance involves striding to center stage, where he delivers his entire talk using body language where all can see it. As many times as I’ve watched him speak, it remains literally an eye-opening experience concerning the language of the body. 

So find a way to physically express your message. You do it day in and day out when you share exciting information with colleagues, when you joke with friends, or express your anger. Why not let that person show up at your presentations? 

Need to boost your confidence and self-control? Here’s how to use power poses to achieve amazing presence when you speak.

 

Body Language Is Key to These Performances 

Body language and performance are more closely linked than we may realize. From the animal world to our world, the body helps us get our messages across with immediacy and power. Consider the octopus that spreads its tentacles wide and displays the large dark spot around its eye when it senses danger, seeming to grow larger in the face of  an aggressor. Or South America’s poison dart frog, whose brightly colored body warns off predators in its own form of  body “language.” 

Perhaps the best examples of the power of human physical expressiveness are the performances we see onstage or in films. 

It’s a pair of characterizations by the great British actor Ian McKellen (Gandolf in The Lord of the Rings films), in the Ibsen play The Pillars of Society with the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1977, where his first entrance onstage was electric; and as Macbeth with Judi Dench in London the previous year, rolling up one sleeve at a time, slowly, as he prepared to enter King Duncan’s bedroom to assassinate him. 

It’s Marlon Brando in the opening scene of The Godfather in 1972, gently stroking the cat in his lap as he discusses revenge with the undertaker whose daughter has been mercilessly beaten (what a contrast!).

It’s Christopher Plummer, ten years later as Iago in Othello at Broadway’s Winter Garden Theater, where he stole the show from James Earl Jones in the title role. The Christian Science Monitor’s critic called it a “bristling performance.”[2] And all these years later, I still recall one of Iago’s soliloquies, when Plummer, using theater-sized gestures, stirred, stirred an imaginary pot in which he was brewing his invisible villainies. 

And it’s Kate Winslet as Rose in the famous scene from Titanic. “I’m flying!” she cries, perched on the prow with arms outstretched as the great ship speeds toward its doom. 

Would any of these performances have worked as well without the physical expressiveness that made them memorable? Of course not!

That’s The Body Language Factor in action—a crucial part of moving your audience to “Wow!”

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[1] Sir Ken Robinson, “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” TED Talk, February 2006.

[2] John Beaufort, “Plummer’s Bristling Iago Key to Broadway’s New Othello. The Christian Science Monitor, February 9, 1982. Accessed at http://www.csmonitor.com/1982/0209/020900.html

Tags: public speaking training,presentation skills,body language,natural gestures,presence,acting techniques

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