Stop choreographing your gestures like a dance. Instead, identify key moments in your talk and use movement to signal them: step closer for importance, back away for less. Know your natural habits so you can own them or adjust them when they distract.
Chapters
When you think about movement and your body, what we are avoiding is what I— some— it can kind of look like choreography, where like everything is so planned. It's sort of high school speech in a professional context, and it's weird. It's distracting because you're like, that is not real. It's not very conversational. It just looks a little overly polished, and somebody has spent their prep time in the wrong way. Instead, I want you to think about 3 things that I'm hoping is helpful when you think about your body and movement. I want you to find the important moments. First of all, you have to know what the important moments are in your talk. But once you do that, once you find and know the important moments, you're really cueing your audience toward those moments. You're saying, hey, this is important, and we know that by changing something in our delivery. So when we change our delivery in some way, when we change the movement of our bodies in some way, so when we go from standing still to moving, we're pulled in. We notice it's a cue to the audience. Also, where we move on stage is— those are cues for the audience, right? Stepping in closer. You can do this virtually as well. When I move closer, it's more important. When I step back, what does that communicate? Less important. We are using our bodies to underline things for our audience. When it's all aligned, it's not distracting. And then it's really important to know ourselves well enough to know what our tendencies are so we can own them in the appropriate way or fix them if they're distracting in a way that is not good and is not how we want to be known with our brand.
