EP10: What Do I Do with My Hands?

Speaker Dynamics - Own The Room

“Body language can be tricky when you are presenting. Sometimes, you just don't know what to do with yourself, but your body is always speaking,” says Karin Reed. “How do you ensure that your body is saying what you want it to?” she asks. In this episode, Karin explains the critical role of body language during presentations. She opens with a common dilemma faced by speakers—what to do with their hands—and shares insights from her coaching experiences. She challenges the advice of keeping hands at one’s sides, advocating instead for natural gestures that complement and reinforce the speaker’s message.

Karin emphasizes the importance of not overthinking gestures, noting that focusing on the presentation content will naturally lead to appropriate hand movements. She discusses how forced or unnatural gestures can distract the audience and detract from the message.

Discussing the use of space, Karin provides actionable advice on adapting gestures for different settings—from virtual presentations, where the camera frames the speaker, to larger, in-person stages. She explains how strategic movement can be used effectively to transition between topics, while recommending that speakers remain still during the delivery of critical points to emphasize their importance.

Karin also addresses how to interact with presentation slides effectively. She advises against the distracting use of laser pointers and suggests ways to integrate slides seamlessly into a presentation, ensuring they support rather than overshadow the spoken content.

Quotes

• “You should not be thinking about what you’re doing with your hands. You should be thinking about what you’re saying because if you are thinking about your message, guess what? Your body is going to respond the way it's supposed to do in a supportive sort of way. Your gestures should be natural. They should not be contrived. They should not be planned out.” (02:16 | Karin Reed)
• “Allow yourself to be loose enough to gesture, to allow yourself to be supportive in your body language of what is coming out of your mouth. If you hold yourself stiff, it’s going to have an all over detrimental impact on the way you communicate because we communicate not just with our voice, not just with our words, we communicate with our entire bodies. And if you try to muzzle any aspect of that, it’s going to make you overall a less authentic communicator and then a less effective communicator as a whole.” (04:48 | Karin Reed)
• “The key to gesturing whenever you are presenting, whether it be on camera or off, is to allow yourself to do it. Allow yourself to gesture the way you would naturally, and that’s going to come across best for you and also be supportive of your verbal.” (05:29 | Karin Reed)

Links

Connect with Karin Reed:

Website: www.speakerdynamics.com

Speaker Dynamics University: https://university.speakerdynamics.com/

Speaker Dynamics on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/speakerdynamics/

Karin Reed on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karin-reed/

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