How Positive Body Language Can Help You Speak in Public

There’s more to public speaking than just how you say your words. Body language is people’s unconscious cues from your stance, movements, and facial emotions. It is an important skill to learn.

In public speaking, body language is very important because it greatly affects how the audience understands the speaker and what they say. A speaker can hold an audience’s attention and make their speech more powerful by using body language that shows confidence and trustworthiness. Negative body language can make it hard to get their point across and make people tune out or lose interest.

In this post, we’ll examine some body language strategies you may use to enhance your public speaking and tips on engaging the audience that can boost your self-assurance. Using these techniques, you may provide a persuasive and fascinating presentation that leaves an impact.

1. Practicing makes perfect:

There is a wealth of sound advice on engaging an audience via body language. Maintaining eye contact, maintaining an open stance, and being as near to your audience as possible are all keys.

Even if employing these body language clues is beneficial, there is surely a catch.

According to Psychology Today’s Nick Morgan, pupils who learned while working on arithmetic problems outscored those who sat up straight. Researchers discovered that more relaxed students utilized more brain cycles than those who sat straight.

“This research suggests that paying attention to your body language with your conscious mind may take some brain cycles away from thinking about the content of your speech,” Morgan says.

“Your aware mind can handle information at about 40 bits per second (bps). That’s not much, so most of the important work of keeping you moving, walking, talking, and chewing gum is done by your unconscious mind, which can handle about 11 million bits per second. If your unconscious mind put you in a certain position before you spoke and kept you in that position while you spoke, you wouldn’t have to think about it (consciously). This would make public speaking a little easier.

These results show that you must practice naturally adding good body posture and movement to your talks. If you want to use good body language in your talks, you need to practice where you can move around easily, just like you would on stage. This means finding a place to move around and make movements like you would in a real show.

You’ll feel more confident and at ease with moving around the stage with practice. This will give you more time to focus on the content and delivery of your talk.

2. Expressions on the face

Pay attention to your facial expressions as you add particular body language cues into your presentations. Your face is your most powerful tool for conveying passion and sincerity in your message. By studying your facial expressions, the audience can better grasp the tone of your speech and emotionally react to the material.

It’s vital to keep an eye on your facial expressions when speaking. Your listeners may find your discourse dull or uninteresting if you look monotonous or indifferent. A very expressive or dramatic expression, on the other hand, may seem forced or forcedly honest.

Making movies of oneself while practicing facial expressions is one method for improving. Consequently, you’ll have a better idea of how you seem to your audience and will be able to adjust your facial expressions appropriately.

Throughout the presentation, try to keep eye contact with different audience members and alter your facial expressions to fit the tone of your speech. When expressing a serious message, use a serious expression, and when telling a humorous story, attempt to smile or create a cheerful approach.

3. Powerful poses

People often use power poses to improve their body language. Power poses are ways of standing or sitting in certain ways that boost confidence, boldness, and authority.

The idea of power poses became well known after social scientist Amy Cuddy gave a TED Talk about them in 2012. Cuddy said that taking a power pose before a difficult event, like a job interview or presentation, could raise testosterone levels, drop cortisol levels, and improve performance. Since other experts couldn’t find the same results as Cuddy, they finally questioned her claims.

This disagreement led to a heated talk about how useful power poses are. Even though there is conflicting scientific proof about power poses, many people still think they help boost confidence and calm nerves before public speaking.

You might want to try some power moves to see if they work for you. There are many different power poses, like the Wonder Woman stance, the Superman pose, and the Victory pose.

Choose easy and natural poses for you, and see if that makes you feel more confident. If your confidence grows, you might use these positions before and during your talk.