The Fundamentals of Public Speaking: Purposeful Hand Gestures
Big purposeful gestures help you stand out and are immediately memorable It has been five years since we posted the article, "Fundamentals of Public Speaking: Using Nonverbal Cues," so it is overdue for us to drill a little deeper into the idea of purposeful hand gestures. In that article, we encouraged presenters to use their hands to reinforce their ideas. In the same way that a picture can help to quickly explain what otherwise might be an overly complex idea, meaningful gestures can serve as visual aids to help the audience understand and remember important points in a story. We are careful to describe these gestures as purposeful to distinguish them from gestures that lack purpose. Since public speaking inherently puts us outside our usual comfort zone, many speakers lapse into self-destructive bad habits that make them feel a bit …