What should I do with my hands?

When you’re on stage, what do you do with your hands?

It’s one of the most common questions we get. Personally, I suspect you already know what to do with your hands, but the best answer is actually kind of zen, so we reserve it for more advanced courses. In the meantime, here are two quick tips to get you started…

First, hold them up to the sky and start praying.

Just kidding.

Seriously:

First, bend your elbows and hold your hands close together. Don’t raise your hands so high you touch your nose, just hold them a little higher than your elbows, kind of like you’re discreetly praying. Be careful about clasping your hands — once you get up on stage, you might get really nervous, and your hands will end up desperately holding onto each other, and that tightness will spread through your body.

Here’s the second tip:

Drop your hands to your sides. Touch your index fingers to your thumbs.

And here’s a third, bonus tip. Perhaps it’s the best tip of all, the start of all that is good:

Hold your hands in front of you, about belly height, and face your palms up. In almost all countries, this is a gesture of openness, of invitation. It invites your audience to participate in your speech, not just listen to it.

Combine that last gesture with some eye contact, and you’re golden. Your audience will be eating out of your palm (no pun intended).

Why is that the start of all that is good? Well, that’s a more complicated issue, and so we reserve it for more advanced courses.

Related Posts

Slides are a crutch

Slides are a crutch

It was the most important presentation of her life. Not just of HER life. Of the lives of every single one of the people who worked for her, too. After all, their jobs at her company were how they put food on the table to feed their children. But they weren't going to...

Don’t feed the monster

Don’t feed the monster

Don't feed the monster. Kill it. You don't need prettier slides. You don't need fancy animations or most of the bells and whistles that are built into PowerPoint. You probably don't need to spend hours and hours preparing, if you're already an expert on the subject....

You don’t need more noise

You don’t need more noise

Slides are noise. There are 30 million new slides made every day. No one wakes up in the morning and says, "You know what I need more of in my life? PowerPoint slides." What the world needs more of is the ability to take a one-hour idea and crush it down into 3 or 4...