Grooming your body language makes a big difference

The way your body speaks makes you stand out from others in public speaking. Your non-verbal cues will influence your audience regarding the reception, comprehension, interpretation and evaluation of your ideas and you as an individual. Even though you convey the best speech in the world, if you aren't lively and vibrant, open or active then your audience will ignore you and your speech.

Grooming your body language makes a big difference to how you present yourself to your audience, and how you feel about public speaking in general. Here are the most important aspects of your body language that will frame how successful your speech is, explaining why they're important and how you can use them to your improvement.

Power posture

In 2011, US social psychologists Amy Cuddy, Dana Carney and Andy Yap proposed that holding a power posture influence people to actually feel more powerful. Their theory suggests that an open posture can elevate testosterone levels and reduce your cortisol levels - ie. Increase your supremacy and lower your anxiety. If you have positive body language and imagine you feel powerful, you're more likely to actually feel it! And, it's the inherent tendency of everyone to be authoritative.

1. Stand straight with your shoulders back and feet shoulder width apart.
2. Imagine your shoulders opening up from one another so that they rest centrally.
3. Place your hands either side of your body so that you can easily make hand gestures when you need to.
4. Face the audience as much as possible. Pose your whole body towards different parts of the audience so that everyone feels important.

Eye contact

Maintaining proper eye contact with your audience builds rapport between you and them and they feel more respected by you. This makes the audience more likely to value and listen to you as they feel important. The concomitant response is that they trust you more because people tend to avoid eye contact when they're lying.

Eye contact helps you to receive feedback from the audience about your speech. You can observe if your audience are listening and read their facial expressions to see if they are interested, bored, angry, happy and so on. You can then modify or change your speech consequently.

Hand gestures

When used appropriately, hand and arm gestures can add to your message and make you seem more confident and relaxed, more genuine and believable. They're an essential element of non-verbal communication in reflecting our feelings, mood, physical status etc.

Hand gestures are one of the distinct non-verbal ways through which we communicate confident body language or nervous body language - and your audience will react more positively to the former.

Facial expressions

People depend on facial expressions to read between the lines the intentions and emotions; so an audience will respond better to you if you are communicative. You have to emphasise your expressions so that everyone in the audience can understand meaning from them.

You could record and visualize your speech and identify artificial or unfriendly facial expressions you make when telling a speech and replace them with more authentic, believable expressions. Try to practice speaking with your face to convey happiness, sadness, anger, and surprise. Your face should reflect the emotions within your speeches.

1. Raise your eyebrows to show shock or confusion.
2. Frown to convey anger or concern.
3. Smile, when you're happy.
4. For sad moments, frown a little and slightly tilt the sides of your lips downwards.

Mannerisms

Mannerisms are the nervous habits most people have in their body language, that detract from your message and can make the audience feel uncomfortable. They are the key aspects in confident body language. you might not be aware of the mannerisms like putting your hands in your pockets, scratching your head, biting nails and excessively using filler words such as 'um,' 'so' and 'like' which distract the audience. To break these habits, know about them and try to avoid them.

Breathing

Even though your breath is not visible, it is a significant factor in describing confident body language. Maintaining a slow, steady breath can reduce your stress levels and make you less likely to slip back to nervous habits, bad posture and excessive movement. Relaxed and deep breath also ensures that you're speaking at the right tempo and your voice can project across the room, which in itself will make you believe and sound more positive.

1. Do deep breathing exercises like inhalation and exhalation, before going to attend public speaking.
2. Maintaining an erect posture help you to expand your lungs fully.

Voice

Your vocal expression is substantial and so your body language has an influence on your voice and can enhance or detract from the message of your speech.

Albert Mehrabian wrote extensively on the relative importance of verbal and non-verbal messages and his findings quote that our words convey 7% of meaning, our tone 38% and our body language makes up 55% of our message in public speaking. When you merge these 3 elements, your audience will be more occupied and connected with you.

1. Watch videos of good and bad speeches to see how they are in tune with their body language.
2. Practice varying your pitch. You can do this with the Virtual Speech app that you gain access to when purchasing the Essential Public Speaking course.

Most of our body language and movement is unintentional so it can be difficult to retrain ourselves away from habits. However, to master the art of public speaking you must also control your body's language too. Of course, you don't want to distract yourself from your speech by consciously thinking how you are standing, where you are looking, and if you're breathing correctly.