Ever noticed which ted talks are boring and which are a treat to watch? Are all the interesting ones the best in the script? Certainly not. It is the way the speaker delivers. A major part of the way they deliver is hand gestures and body language.
Hand gestures are a very important part of presentation delivery. Keeping your hands still makes you look confused or diffident while you deliver your presentation. On the other hand, the right kind of hand gestures can not only make you look confident but also make you feel like more in your comfort zone.
This article aims to introduce you to the hand gesture rules you must follow for your next business presentation.
Four hand gestures that make presenters look confident
Body language is as important as your verbal communication. It tells a lot about your confidence level, mental energy level, and the extent of your preparedness for the communication. Hand gestures are your tool which you can employ to emphasize certain parts of your verbal communication. Common hand gestures which the employees in your firm can learn and apply are as follows:
1. Visualize numbers
Hand gestures can come in handy when you want to emphasize a word in your sentence during the presentation deliverance. If you are mentioning statistics in your presentation, you can signal numbers with your fingers. In the same way, you can signal an increase or decline in something with the help of gestures.
This may catch the attention of the audience members who are not paying attention and are simply look towards the wall behind you.
2. Be natural
The first rule of making an impact is to keep things natural. If you are not habitual of hand gestures, practice them. When you prepare yourself for your presentation, try to use hand gestures. Choose which gestures will suit a certain point in your presentation.
If you want your employees to learn to employ hand and body language gestures naturally, you must give them an opportunity to learn to do so like businesses in the UAE do. If you are there, you can easily get in touch with one of the companies for presentation skills training Dubai so that your employees don’t need to fake the hand gestures.
3. Keep palms open
Open palms make you appear comfortable. When you keep your palms open while delivering a business presentation, you are signaling your audience to sit at ease. Open palms are a signal used all over the world, and they signify that you mean no threat to anyone around you. In a presentation, it shows that you don’t intend aggression.
Keeping palms up impacts the listeners even more than the palms hanging down. They help achieve a higher level of retention rate among the audience.
4. Keep hands in the strike zone
In baseball, the strike zone is defined as the area between hips and shoulders. This region is ideal for keeping your arms there. Keeping your arms there makes your gestures look natural and. If your hands move beyond the strike zone, your body language may appear awkward and may make you feel awkward as well.
How to implement these hand gestures?
Knowing about something is one thing; implementing it to your use is another. If you want the employees in your organization to use such rules of hand gestures when they deliver their next business presentation, you need to empower them.
You need to help them polish their presentation skills. Give them a training opportunity that will enable them to deliver compelling, energetic, and engaging presentations. When they are confident about their presentation skills, they will be able to implement tips with ease, without making it appear as if someone forced them to move their hands while presenting.
Engaging presentations are the key to the success of your business. The key is in your hands if you will. Allow them to learn presentation skills and use them to the benefit of your business.
