At some point in your business career, you will be called upon to give a speech. It may be to an audience of one on a sales floor or to a large audience at a national meeting. You already know you need to make a positive first impression, but do you know how to use movement in your presentation? In this section, we’ll examine several strategies for movement and their relative advantages and disadvantages.

Customers and audiences respond well to speakers who are comfortable with themselves. Being comfortable doesn’t mean being overconfident or cocky, and it doesn’t mean being shy or timid. It means that an audience is far more likely to forgive the occasional “umm” or “ahh” or the nonverbal equivalent of a misstep if the speaker is comfortable with themselves and their message.

Let’s start with behaviors to avoid. Who would you rather listen to: a speaker who moves confidently across the stage, hides behind the podium, expresses herself nonverbally with purpose and meaning, or crosses his arms or clings to the lectern?

Audiences are most likely to respond positively to open, dynamic speakers who convey the feeling of being at ease with their bodies. The setting and audience expectations will give a range of movement. You may be expected to stay in one spot if you speak at a formal event or a stationary camera covers you. If the stage allows you to explore, closing the distance between yourself and your audience may prove effective. Rather than focus on a list of behaviors and their relationship to environment and context, emphasize what your audience expects and what you find more engaging instead.

Novice speakers are often told to keep their arms at their sides or restrict their movement to only absolutely necessary. This may hold true if you are in formal training for a military presentation or a forensics (speech and debate) competition. But in business and industry, “whatever works” rules the day. You can’t say that expressive gestures—common among many cultural groups, like arm movement while speaking—are not appropriate when they are, in fact, expected.

The questions are, again, what does your audience consider appropriate, and what do you feel comfortable doing during your presentation? Since the emphasis is always on meeting the needs of the customer, whether it is an audience of one on a sales floor or a large national gathering, you may need to stretch outside your comfort zone. On that same note, don’t stretch too far and move yourself into the uncomfortable range. Finding balance is challenging, but no one ever said giving a speech was easy.

Movement is an important aspect of your speech and requires planning, the same as the words you choose and the visual aids you design. Be natural, but do not shuffle your feet, pace back and forth, or rock on your heels throughout your speech. These behaviors distract your audience from your message and can communicate nervousness, undermining your credibility.

Positions on the Stage

The speaker’s triangle indicates where the speaker starts in the introduction, moves to the second position for the first point, across for the second point, then returns to the original position to make the third point and conclusion. This movement technique can be quite effective in helping you remember each of your main points. It allows you to break down your speech into manageable parts, and putting tape on the floor to indicate position is a common presentation trick. This method is a great way to make eye contact when speaking to an audience and allows you to use the whole floor when delivering your speech. Your movement will demonstrate purpose and reinforce your credibility. Click here to watch a short video on The Speaker’s Triangle Method by Rachid Ryadi.

Gestures

Gestures involve using your arms and hands while communicating. Gestures provide a way to channel your nervous energy into a positive activity that benefits your speech and gives you something to do with your hands. For example, watch people in normal, everyday conversations. They frequently use their hands to express themselves. Do you think they think about how they use their hands? Most people do not. Their arm and hand gestures come naturally as part of their expression, often reflecting what they have learned within their community.

This is also true for professional speakers, but deliberate movement can reinforce, repeat, and even regulate an audience’s response to their verbal and nonverbal messages. You want to come across as comfortable and natural, and your use of your arms and hands contributes to your presentation. We can easily recognize that a well-chosen gesture can help make a point memorable or lead the audience to the next point.

As professional speakers approach a main point, they raise their hand slightly, perhaps waist high, in what is often called an anticipation step. This gesture clearly shows the audience your anticipation of an upcoming point, acting as a nonverbal foreshadowing.

The implementation step, which comes next, involves using your arms and hands above your waist. You signal the point by holding one hand at waist level, pointing outward, and raising it up with your palm forward, as in the “stop” gesture. The nonverbal gesture complements the spoken word, and as students of speech have noted over time, audiences respond to this nonverbal reinforcement. You then slowly lower your hand down past your waistline and away from your body, letting go of the gesture and signaling your transition.

The relaxation step, where the letting go motion complements your residual message, concludes the motion.

Facial Gestures

As you progress as a speaker from gestures and movement, you will need to turn your attention to facial gestures and expressions. Facial gestures involve using your face to display feelings and attitudes nonverbally. They may reinforce or contradict the spoken word, and their impact cannot be underestimated. As we have discussed, people often focus more on how we say something than what we actually say and place more importance on our nonverbal gestures (Mehrabian, A., 1981). As in other body movements, your facial gestures should come naturally, but giving them due thought and consideration can keep you aware of how you communicate the nonverbal message.

Facial gestures should reflect the tone and emotion of your verbal communication. If you use humor in your speech, you will likely smile and wink to complement the amusement expressed in your words. However, smiling will be much less appropriate if your presentation involves a serious subject such as cancer or car accidents. Consider how your audience will feel in response to your message and identify the facial gestures you can use to promote those feelings. Then, practice in front of a mirror so that the gestures come naturally.

The single most important facial gesture (in mainstream U.S. culture) is eye contact (Seiler, W., and Beall, M., 2000). Eye contact refers to the speaker’s gaze that engages the audience members. It can vary in degree and length and, in many cases, is culturally influenced. Both the speaker’s expectations and the audience member’s notion of what is appropriate will influence normative expectations for eye contact. In some cultures, there are understood behavioral expectations for the male gaze directed toward females and vice versa. In a similar way, children may have expectations of when to look their elders in the eye and when to gaze down. Depending on the culture, both may be nonverbal signals of listening. Understanding your audience is critical when it comes to nonverbal expectations.

When giving a presentation, avoid looking over people’s heads, staring at a point on the wall, or letting your eyes dart all over the place. The audience will find these mannerisms unnerving. They will not feel as connected or receptive to your message, and you will reduce your effectiveness. Move your eyes gradually and naturally across the audience, both close to you and toward the back of the room. Try to look for faces that look interested and engaged in your message. Do not focus on only one or two audience members, as audiences may respond negatively to perceived favoritism. Instead, try to give as much eye contact as possible across the audience. Keep it natural, but give it deliberate thought.

Key Takeaway

To use movement strategically in your presentation, keep it natural and consider using the speaker’s triangle, the three-step sequence, facial gestures, and eye contact.

Mehrabian, A. (1981). Silent messages: Implicit communication of emotions and attitudes (2nd ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

Seiler, W., & Beall, M. (2000). Communication: Making connections (4th ed.). Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.

This page titled 11.3: Movement in Your Speech is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Anonymous (LibreTexts Staff), from which source content was edited to the style and standards of the Pressbook platform licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License by Brandi Schur.