TJ Walker (presenter) discusses how people perceive hand gestures when speaking: observers often admire others' hand movement but feel their own gestures look foolish on video. He argues humans are poor judges of their own hand gestures, recommends soliciting external feedback, and advises against constraining or over-controlling hands—encouraging natural movement and avoiding freezing when uncomfortable.
Chapters
What do you do with these when you're speaking? You may have seen other people and thought to yourself, wow, I really like the way he uses his hands. I really like the way she's using her hands when speaking. But then you do a practice. You record yourself on video and you look at your hands and you think, oh, my God, it looks stupid. I look like Will Ferrell in Talladega Nights. It looks ridiculous. What do I do? Do I hold them? Here's what I've observed in working with tens of thousands of people around the globe. It's universal. People like it when they see other people moving their hands conveys confidence and authority. But when people watch a video of themselves moving their hands, all of a sudden it looks weird. They think, oh my God, I look like a fool. I look like an idiot. I sure am glad I watched a video of myself. Now I know I don't move my hands right. I need to hold my hands down, get them controlled so I don't look foolish. Wrong, wrong, wrong. In general, it's great to watch yourself and analyze what you like and don't like. But I have found that humans universally are poor judges of their own hand gestures. When you watch video of yourself moving your hands, even if everyone else thinks you look comfortable, confident, relaxed, authoritative, there's something about watching your own hands move that makes people think, that looks ridiculous. Can you look? Can you believe this fool here? I feel sorry for this person. There's just something about seeing yourself do it. You're going to have to learn to disregard it. I do recommend that you try to get feedback from other people because quite often you think your hand gestures were awful, distracting, weird. You talk to five other people in the room and ask them, what do you think of the presentation. They may tell you specific things they liked about your style, your comfort, and your messages. Most important. And then if you ask them, what were my hands distracting? They might say, I didn't notice anything about it. That has been my experience working with tens of thousands of people around the globe. Other people will think your hands were perfectly fine when you're moving, even if you think they are weird. So the main thing is you don't want to constrain your hands. You don't want to be thinking about, well, now I'm raising my right hand to seem authoritative. And now I'm going to do this and I'm going to put my three fingers up to denote three. Now it shouldn't seem like there is a puppet master controlling you. And these things are going up and down when what you want is natural hand movement. All of us are programmed from birth to move our hands when we're speaking or even crying. So you don't have to learn how to move your hands when you speak. What you have to learn is how not to freeze your hands when you're uncomfortable. That's the difference.
