Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Using Gestures to Add Power to Public Speaking

70 handshake demoWritten by Anett Grant for Fast Company

Grant is the president and founder of Executive Speaking, Inc. She has coached top executives for over 36 years, with clients including PepsiCo, Toyota, 3M, Hewlett-Packard, Medtronic, Novartis, Wal-Mart, Bank of America, and General Electric.

For many people, public speaking is so fraught with anxiety that they give little thought to how they should gesture to help get their point across.

While it’s true that gestures can add power to your speaking, you must use them purposefully in order to maximize that power. Having worked with hundreds of leaders on their gestures, I’d like to share insights that will help you answer the most basic question—what should you do with your hands?

I’ll explain why effective gesturing requires you to “Flow,” (use your whole body) “Zoom,” (think about where you want your audience to focus) and “Imagine” (an image of the concept you’re talking about).

FLOW: WHOLE BODY MOVEMENT

One of the challenges you face when gesturing is that you need to think about the flow of your entire body. You have to get your body involved with your gestures; you can’t just move your hands limply from your wrists.

Just as you need to get your entire body involved when swinging a golf club, a tennis racket, or a baseball bat, you need to get your whole body involved when making effective gestures. Think of your gestures as hitting your ideas—the more you control the movement, the more precision you’ll have in terms of how you target your message.

ZOOM: THE AUDIENCE’S FOCAL POINT

For gestures to increase your impact, you must keep in mind the focus of your audience. Whenever you watch someone speak, you are watching from a particular perspective. If the speaker is absolutely still, the audience will focus on the face. If the speaker’s face is particularly still, the audience will focus on the eyes. It’s like your audience’s brain is a camera zooming in and out, focusing on the most dynamic source of visual stimuli.

So where do you want the audience to focus? If you gesture, the audience will zoom out to either a chest shot or a whole body shot, depending on how big your gesture is. On the other hand, if you want your audience to be close up, laser-focused on your message, you should be still. The most effective presenters are able to maximize their audience’s attention by adjusting those focal points. By juxtaposing gestures and stillness, you can orchestrate the audience’s attention and add tremendous power to your speaking.

IMAGINE: THE IMAGE IN YOUR MIND

Finally, you’ll maximize the impact of your gestures by thinking about an image of the concept you’re trying to communicate. By focusing on this mental image, you will naturally gesture with power and purpose.

For example, as you discuss shrinking your sales cycle, think about a mental image of shrinking. With the right level of concentration, you will naturally place your hands far apart, and slowly bring them closer together. The key here is for this movement to happen naturally, not mechanically.

When I teach my clients how to gesture, I’m really teaching them how to imagine pictures of their ideas and to focus on those pictures, as opposed to where to put their hands. The more I help my clients focus on their mental pictures, the better their gestures become.

What’s best about this approach is that not only do you develop powerful gestures, you will have lively, spontaneous expressions and you will begin speaking in a conversational style, keeping your audiences more engaged.

By capitalizing on the power of Flow, Zoom, and Imagine—in meetings, in the client’s office, and in the boardroom—you will truly be able to use gestures to power up your speaking.

For more on gestures and public speaking, take a look at this past blog post!

Can you Spot the Microexpression?

We teach our teens to stay out of danger, but what about when they see someone else in danger? Would your child know what to do if they witnessed what looks like a teen boy trying to take an inappropriate picture of a teen girl?

Can you spot the microexpression that occurs around 5:20?

We Can Look More Trustworthy, But Not More Competent

93684_web

Image courtesy of Jonathan Freeman and Eric Hehman.

We can alter our facial features in ways that make us look more trustworthy, but don’t have the same ability to appear more competent, a team of New York University psychology researchers has found.

The study, which appears in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, a SAGE journal, points to both the limits and potential we have in visually representing ourselves–from dating and career-networking sites to social media posts.

“Our findings show that facial cues conveying trustworthiness are malleable while facial cues conveying competence and ability are significantly less so,” explains Jonathan Freeman, an assistant professor in NYU’s Department of Psychology and the study’s senior author. “The results suggest you can influence to an extent how trustworthy others perceive you to be in a facial photo, but perceptions of your competence or ability are considerably less able to be changed.”

This distinction is due to the fact that judgments of trustworthiness are based on the face’s dynamic musculature that can be slightly altered, with a neutral face resembling a happy expression likely to be seen as trustworthy and a neutral face resembling an angry expression likely to be seen as untrustworthy–even when faces aren’t overtly smiling or angered. But perceptions of ability are drawn from a face’s skeletal structure, which cannot be changed.

The study, whose other authors included Eric Hehman, an NYU post-doctoral researcher, and Jessica Flake, a doctoral candidate at the University of Connecticut, employed four experiments in which female and male subjects examined both photos and computer-generated images of adult males.

In the first, subjects looked at five distinct photos of 10 adult males of different ethnicities. Here, subjects’ perceptions of trustworthiness of those pictured varied significantly, with happier-looking faces seen as more trustworthy and angrier-looking faces seen as more untrustworthy. However, the subjects’ perceptions of ability, or competence, remained static–judgments were the same no matter which photo of the individual was being judged.

A second experiment replicated the first, but here, subjects evaluated 40 computer-generated faces that slowly evolved from “slightly happy” to “slightly angry,” resulting in 20 different neutral instances of each individual face that slightly resembled a happy or angry expression. As with the first experiment, the subjects’ perceptions of trustworthiness paralleled the emotion of the faces–the slightly happier the face appeared, the more likely he was seen to be trustworthy and vice versa for faces appearing slightly angrier. However, once again, perceptions of ability remained unchanged.

In the third experiment, the researchers implemented a real-world scenario. Here, subjects were shown an array of computer-generated faces and were asked one of two questions: which face they would choose to be their financial advisor (trustworthiness) and which they thought would be most likely to win a weightlifting competition (ability). Under this condition, the subjects were significantly more likely to choose as their financial advisor the faces resembling more positive, or happy, expressions. By contrast, emotional resemblance made no difference in subjects’ selection of successful weightlifters; rather, they were more likely to choose faces with a particular form: those with a comparatively wider facial structure, which prior studies have associated with physical ability and testosterone.

In the fourth experiment, the researchers used a “reverse correlation” technique to uncover how subjects visually represent a trustworthy or competent face and how they visually represent the face of a trusted financial advisor or competent weightlifting champion. This technique allowed the researchers to determine which of all possible facial cues drive these distinct perceptions without specifying any cues in advance.

Here, resemblance to happy and angry expressions conveyed trustworthiness and was more prevalent in the faces of an imagined financial advisor while wider facial structure conveyed ability and was more prevalent in the faces of an imagined weightlifting champion.

These results confirmed the findings of the previous three experiments, further cementing the researchers’ conclusion that perceptions of trustworthiness are malleable while those for competence or ability are immutable.