HOW TO EVALUATE...

A SPEAKER’S NONVERBAL COMMUNICATION

While your voice is transmitting a verbal message, a vast amount of information is being conveyed visually

by your appearance, your manner and your physical presentation. Actions speak louder than words.

Skill or Technique / + / - / Why?

Gestures

  • Purposeful
  • Visible
  • Meaningful
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  • Why gesture? Gestures are probably the most evocative form of nonverbal communication a speaker can employ. No other kind of physical action can enhance your speeches in as many ways as gestures.
oThey clarify and support your words. Gestures strengthen the audience’s understanding of your verbal message.
oThey dramatize your ideas. Together with what you say, gestures help paint vivid pictures in your listeners’ minds.
oThey lend emphasis and vitality to the spoken word. Gestures convey your feelings and attitudes more clearly than what you say.
oThey help dissipate nervous tension. Purposeful gestures are a good outlet for the nervous energy inherent in the speaking situation.
oThey function as visual aids. Gestures enhance audience attentiveness and retention.
oThey stimulate audience participation. Gestures help you indicate the response you seek from your listeners.
oThey are highly visible. Gestures provide visual support when you address a large audience, where many people can’t see your eyes and facial expressions.
  • Purposeful, Visible, Meaningful: To be effective, a speaker’s gestures must be purposeful, even if they’re performed unconsciously. They must be visible to the audience. They must mean the same thing to the audience that they mean to the speaker. And they must reflect what’s being said, as well as the total personality behind the message.

Major
Categories of Gestures:
  • Descriptive
  • Emphatic
  • Suggestive
  • Prompting
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  • Descriptive gestures are used to clarify or enhance a verbal message. They help the audience to understand comparisons and contrasts, and to visualize the size, shape, movement, location, function and number of objects.
  • Emphatic gestures are used to underscore what’s being said. They indicate earnestness and conviction. For example, a clenched fist suggests strong feelings, such as anger or determination.
  • Suggestive gestures are symbols of ideas and emotions. they help a speaker to create a desire mood or express a particular thought. An open palm suggests giving or receiving, usually of an idea, while a shrug of the shoulders indicates ignorance, perplexity or irony.
  • Prompting gestures are used to help evoke a desired response from the audience. If you want your listeners to raise their hands, applaud or perform some specific action, you’ll enhance the response by doing it yourself as an example.

Level of Gestures

  • Above the shoulder
  • Below the shoulder
  • At or near the shoulder
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  • Above the shoulder: Gestures made above the shoulder level tend to suggest physical height, inspiration, uplift or emotional exultation.
  • Below the shoulder: Gestures made below the shoulder level indicate lowness, rejection, apathy or condemnation.
  • At or near the shoulder: Gestures made at or near the shoulder level tend to suggest calmness, serenity or anything not implying height or lowness in physical, mental or emotional degrees.

Hands

  • Held at sides until needed for a gesture.
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  • Every hand gesture should be a total body movement that starts from the shoulder, never from the elbow. Move your entire arm outward from your body freely easily. Keep your wrists and fingers supple, rather than stiff or tense. It carries energy, power & authority.
  • Movement without meaning broadcasts lack of authority. Thus, avoid extraneous and repetition hand motion (e.g. rubbing hands, twisting a ring or watch, putting hand in pocket.

Use of Palms

  • Upward
  • Downward
  • Outward to the audience
  • Perpendicular to the speaker
/ The most frequently used gestures involve an open palm held outward toward the audience. The meaning of this type of gestures depends on the position of the palm.
  • Upward: A palm held upward implies giving or receiving, although the gestures is sometimes used as an unconscious movement with no specific intended meaning.
  • Downward: A palm held downward expresses suppression, secrecy, completion, stability or a covering over.
  • Outward toward the audience: suggests halting, repulsion, negation or abhorrence.
  • Held perpendicular to the speaker’s body: tends to imply measurement, limits in space or time, comparisons or contrasts.

Effective Gestures

  • Natural
  • Genuine
  • Spontaneous
  • Animated
  • Lively
  • Distinct
  • Vigorous
  • Enhanced verbal message
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  • Natural: Gestures respond naturally to what you think, feel and say. When yo present a speech, it’s natural for you to gesture and unnatural for you not to gestures. You have a natural impulse to punctuate and strengthen your words with gestures. If you inhibit your natural impulse to gesture, you’ll probably become tense.
  • Genuine & Spontaneous: Don’t get gestures out of a book or from another speaker. Be genuinely and spontaneously yourself. If you impose artificial gestures onto your natural style, your audience will sense it and label you a phony.
  • Animated: Some people are naturally animate, while others are naturally reserved. If it’s natural for you to use your hands freely when you converse informally, use them freely when you give a speech. If you’re by nature a reserved, low-key person, don’t change your personality just to suit public speaking situations.
  • Lively & Distinct: Your gestu5res should be lively and distinct if they are to convey the intended impression. A gesture performed in a half-hearted manner suggests that the speaker lacks conviction and earnestness.
  • Vigorous: Effective gestures are vigorous enough to be convincing yet slow enough and broad enough to be clearly visible. Your gestures should be distinct, but not jerky, and they should never follow a set pattern.
  • To improve: practice gesturing while speaking informally to friends, family members or coworkers. Relax your inhibitions, gesture when you feel like i, and let yourself respond naturally to what you think, feel and say. Through awareness and practice, you can make appropriate gesturing a part of your habitual behavior.

Body Movement

  • Graceful
  • Purposeful
  • Enhance attentiveness to speech
  • Enhance understanding of message
  • Fluid / Natural / Smooth
/ Benefits: Body movement is changing your position or location during a speech; it is the broadest, most highly visible kind of physical action you can perform. Because of this it can be a tremendous asset or a tremendous liability to your delivery. You can benefit 3 ways by moving your entire body in a controlled, purposeful manner:
  • It can support and reinforce what you say,
  • It almost always attracts an audience’s attention, and
  • It’s the fastest, most effective means of burning up nervous energy and relieving physical tension.
Purposeful: If there is one rule for making body movement your ally and not your enemy, it’s this: Never move without a reason. Just as purposeful movements beckon for attention, so do random movement. The body will do almost anything to rid itself of tension. Inexperienced speakers commonly perform such body movements as rocking, swaying, and pacing, without being aware of what they’re doing. If speaking makes you nervous and tense, try to incorporate enough purposeful body movement into your speeches so your body won’t unconsciously indulge in distracting mannerism.
Enhance Attentiveness: The eye is inevitably attracted to any moving object. So, any whole body movement you make invites attention. By moving for a reason, which is in a line with your verbal message, you can stimulate the alertness and attentiveness of your audience while simultaneously enhancing what you say.
Enhance Understanding: The meanings suggested by most types of body movement are less precise than those aroused by individual gestures, but body movement can still be an effective visual complement to your spoken words.
  • Stepping forward during a speech suggests you are arriving at an important point.
  • A step or two backward indicates you’ve concluded an idea and are willing to let the audience relax for a moment and digest what you’ve just said.
  • A lateral movement implies a transition; that you’re leaving one thought and taking up another.
  • Dramatize a specific point: In some instances, you can use body movement to illustrate or dramatize a specific point. For example, if you’re describing a physical action, such as throwing a ball or a runner straining to break the tape and win a close race, you can help your listeners to clearly visualize what you’re saying by acting out your description.
  • Fluid / Natural / Smooth: In almost every speaking situation, you must walk to and from the point where you deliver your speech. If you incorporate visual aids, you must move your entire body when you use them. The key to moving effectively lies in making your movements easy, natural and smooth. You should always lead with the foot nearest your destination. If you’re going to step to your left, lead with your left foot. Never cross one foot over the other when you begin a movement.

Facial Expression

  • Friendly
  • Natural / genuine
  • Animated
  • Appropriate to speech content
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  • Friendly, Natural / Genuine: There are no rules governing the use of specific expressions. If you relax your inhibitions and allow yourself to respond naturally to your thoughts, attitudes and emotions, your facial expressions will be appropriate and will project sincerity, conviction and credibility.
  • Animate the face: Facial expressions are often the key determinant of the meaning behind a message. When you speak your face communicates to others your attitudes, feelings & emotions. Examples: Tighten or relax the jaw, squint your eyes, raise your eyebrows.
  • Facial Expressions not matching the content: An audience tends to mirror a speaker’s facial expressions. A smile from you will usually bring smiles from your audience. If you frown, even unintentionally, your listeners will tend to frown back at you. If your expression is blank or static, they will sense that you’re cold and indifferent and they will probably reflect their feelings of indifference toward you and your message. So, let you your audience be your barometer for what’s happening on your face, you may be surprised by what you see.
  • Keep face toward the audience: Practice enough that you can write a little bit on a board or read a little bit and look up.

Eye Contact

  • Established bonds with listeners
  • No set pattern
  • Natural / Smooth
/ Established bonds with listeners:
  • Eye contact is the cement that binds together a speaker and an audience. When you speak, it is with your eyes that involve the audience. Make it direct, personal and conversational. Conversely, there is no better way to break the communication bond than by failing to look at your audience.
  • In most cultures, the act of looking someone directly in the eyes is a symbol of sincerity. Failure to meet another person’s gaze when speaking implies disinterest, lack of confidence, insincerity and shiftiness. However, speakers who do establish eye contact were judged more truthful, honest, credible, friendly and skillful than those who did not. Only looking at your listeners as individuals can you convince them that you are sincere, that you are interested in them, and that you care whether or not they accept your message.
No set pattern:
  • Making effective eye contact means more than passing your gaze throughout the room; it means focusing on individual listeners and creating person-to-person relationships with them. Begin by selecting one person and talking to them personally. Hold that person’s eyes long enough to establish a visual bond—perhaps 5 – 10 seconds, or the time it takes to say a sentence or share one thought. Then shift your gaze to another person.
  • Don’t wag your head from side to side, or move it slowly back and forth like an oscillating fan. Your eyes should not follow any set pattern as they move from one person to the next.

Natural / Smooth – How?

  • Know your Material: Having control over your verbal message is a prerequisite for establishing effective eye contact with your audience. So, know your speech well.
  • If you can speak without notes, by all means do so. It is possible to use your eyes effectively while using notes, but this requires practice and conscious effort. Don’t let notes be a substitute for preparation and rehearsal.

Posture

  • Poised
  • Confident
  • Comfortable
  • Erect
  • Relaxed
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  • Distribute weight equally on each foot. This gives you balance, a good foundation to stand on, ready to move. It enables to execute a deliberate planned movement without tripping over your own feet.
  • Hips reflect the weight distribution and movement of the feet (if you notice hips it is probably because of foot movement). It’s the “cool” factor—stand on one foot and the hand in the pocket. By balancing your weight equally on each foot, it gives you an authoritative look.

Resource for further learning: “Gestures: Your Body Speaks,” a manual included in the New Member Kit. The last page contains “Evaluating Your Body’s Spoken Image” evaluation form--a useful tool in preparing to evaluate speaker’s body movements.

A Checklist from Caren’s Cool Collection

Revised for 6/26/04 “Evaluate to Motivate—The Soul of Toastmasters” presentation by Caren M. Borowski, ATMS