Episode #131: Hey, Stop Fidgeting When Presenting

It has never been tougher to be a speaker. We live in the age of hyper distraction, with instant gratification felt to be too slow. In fact, “slow phobia” is rampant everywhere and hand held digital device escape hatches abound. Migrating away from all that distraction, to get people focused on your presentation is hard enough. Things become more desperate though, when our nervousness starts the chemical adrenaline pumping through our veins. We feel the elevation of our breathing rate and we notice our hands starting to shake.

One of the nasty byproducts of all of this internal pressure and nervousness, is we begin to distract our audience by fidgeting. Professor Albert Mehrabian’s famous and usually misquoted research, says that we run into problems when what we are saying and how we are saying it don’t match up. The “how we are saying it” bit is broken into three distinct parts. The actual words, which Mehrabian depressingly found only accounted for seven percent of our communication success. Body language contributed to thirty eight percent of the messaging and finally how we were dressed and how we looked made up the other fifty-five percent. Often these numbers are misquoted. Mehrabian’s important caveat about incongruity is not mentioned. That is to say, when what we say doesn’t match with how we say it, the audience is easily distracted away from the message.

Our words may be painstakingly composed, delivered in a well paced, clear tone. We may be magnificently turned out for the occasion, just dressed to kill. Our fidgeting however, is overwhelming everything else. The message radiating out through the fidgeting body language is contradicting the words coming out of our mouth or at least distracting from them.

One of the main culprits in the fidget field are our legs. We shuffle about aimlessly on the spot. Or we start striding around the stage looking highly strained and nervous. We might well remain anchored to the spot, but we are not content with that. We feel the need to sway our hips about like a mad captain on a rolling pirate ship. We are rocking and rolling from side to side, all the while drawing attention away from our messages.

In the same vein, we also fail in the “looking confident” arena. All of this movement is competing with the words and we don’t want that. That swaying itself is telling the audience “I am not rock solid about what I am saying, I am unsure, I am nervous about it”. Rather, the legs should be kept straight, with just a slight relaxation behind the knees to unlock the joints. Feel like you want the top of your head to push up into the ceiling. This will make you taller, straighter and give you more physical gravitas.

Another favourite of the failing presenters is to shuffle the direction of their feet around. When they want to look at the left side of the audience, they shuffle their feet around in that direction. When they want to look at the right side, they shuffle their feet all the way across to the right. Again, all of this fidgeting, this moving around, is distracting to the audience. Why do it that way? If we want to look left or right, we should keep our feet anchored and just swivel our neck. If we felt the need to go for more engagement, we could turn from the hips and have the upper body facing to the left or right, without moving our feet at all.

When we do move our feet, it should be for a clearly defined purpose. When we are on stage, we can move to the very apron of the stage, closest to the audience. We do this to get physically closer to the front row, to add to our voice and gesture strength with our physical body presence, to underline a point we are making. Now, we shouldn’t stay there too long though, because the proximity will become too intimidating to the person closest to us. They are thinking “psycho axe murderer” as we tower over them. Also, the power of our physical presence starts to dilute very quickly, if it is just held in that same position. So there is no point holding it there for too long.

We should retreat to a more centered, neutral position. From here we can step back and make a more macro point. We do this to engage the entire audience, if the point we want to make is an expansive one. Now that we are standing more toward the rear of the stage, we need to use our arms in a bigger fashion than normal, to signal we are making a macro point. Again we can’t stay there too long because the power wanes. We need to move back to the middle, to the more neutral position. None of this is random or fuelled by nervousness. It is thought through and planned, with the impact on the audience in mind. We are not shuffling about through neglect, nervousness or negligence.

Our hands are another trap. We might be holding them in front of our body, twisting them together because we want to form a protective barrier between us and the audience. We might be tapping our thigh with our hand or even worse slapping it, making a noise. This competes with what we are saying, for the attention of the audience.

Another favourite is using one hand to squeeze the fingers of the other hand, as if we were ringing out a towel. Playing with our tie knot trying to loosen the compression, because we are feeling hot under the lights or to lessen the intrusive gaze of our listeners is another tick.

Thrusting hands in and out of trouser pockets, highlights the conundrum we are facing about what to do with our hands when presenting. Because of the adrenaline, we are unable to even keep them there, so we fidget, thrusting and withdrawing, thrusting and withdrawing, driving our audience crazy.

Shuffling papers on the lectern is a break from our usual rigid gripping of the edges of the furniture. We align the sheets together left and right. We then push the bottom of the pages together, banging them on the lectern, to get them into a more disciplined state. All the while, this is competing with what we are saying and how we are saying it.

Video yourself and you will be shocked by how much you are fidgeting. Instead, choreograph your movements carefully so that nothing is haphazard. You move because that will add to the strength of your message. Your hands are monopolised by considered gestures, to add weight to what you want to say. You stand straight and tall, engaging your audience left and right with minimum distraction. Remember, we want the audience focused solely on our face and our words. These are powerful communication tools to help us isolate out our message. That is the only place we want the attention to be directed.