Showing your hand

Natalie Powell, Consultant at Bladonmore, explains how hand gestures can enhance communication skills.

‘What should I be doing with my hands?’ – If only I had a pound for every time I get asked this question during presentation coaching and media training.

It is a preoccupation that seems to plague almost everyone, from those giving company-wide town halls at the very top level of business, to those just starting out.

The need for an answer to this question is even more palpable when people have to step in front of a camera – it comes as no surprise that being under the pressure of broadcast media’s spotlight tends to bring out any insecurities and uncertainties over how we come across, physically and verbally, as soon as that red light starts blinking to say: ‘we’re rolling!’

But why? Why does what we do with our hands weigh so heavily on our minds? Perhaps it is because we are subconsciously aware that doing too much or too little could convey the wrong message and the audience is fine-tuned to pick up on our non-verbal cues. Behavioural scientist, Susan Weinshenk, has explored how people read different types of hand gestures. She has found that if all hand gestures are larger than the outlines of your body, you will come across as chaotic or out of control; whereas not using your hands may be perceived as indifference and hiding your hands behind your back makes it hard for an audience to trust you.

Let’s take that last point – appearing untrustworthy. Bestselling author Joe Navarro notes in his book The Dictionary of Body Language that despite millions of years of human evolution, ‘our brains are still hard-wired to engage our hands in accurately communicating our emotions, thoughts and sentiments’.

Navarro, a former FBI agent who spent years reading body language for meaning, says there is a simple experiment that can be done to prove just how great the human need to see hands is. In this experiment, Navarro invites people to hide their hands during the entire length of a conversation and, at the end of it, ask participants what they thought and felt during that conversation. Spoiler alert: it’s not good!

Using gesture in conversation-mode is inherently ingrained in us, it is primitive. Just look at the animal kingdom, chimpanzees use gesture to communicate with one another, and now recent research by St Andrews University has shown that their gestures – or in other words, the way they speak – have the same structure as human conversational interactions, with fast-paced turn-taking and similar length gaps that are left before the next person responds.

Even more eye-opening is research published in 2023 by St Andrews University, its School of Psychology and Neuroscience ran an experiment where over five thousand people were shown short videos of the ten most common gestures used by chimpanzees and bonobos – impressively, the (human) participants correctly identified the meaning of these gestures over fifty percent of the time. The scientists behind this study concluded that: ‘The results suggest that although humans no longer use these gestures, we may have retained an understanding of this ancestral communication system’.

It is human nature – and in some cases animal instinct – to take meaning not only from what we hear, but what we see. So, whether we are presenting to a physical audience, being broadcast out onto televisions or speaking to a virtual audience via our webcams, our hands should be used to enhance what we say.

Like the chimps, we use gestures when we are having a conversation to help get information across, so why should presenting information formally to an audience be any different?

So, here’s that question again: what should you do with your hands? As previously mentioned, placing them behind your back is a no-no if you want your audience to trust you and larger than life hand gestures are too distracting. Hands need to be where we can see them, able to move freely and used to accentuate important points.

If you’re looking for help with presentation delivery skills, get in touch.