As a speaker what do I do with my hands?

What are you asked most as TEDx Licensee? That’s a question I put to Jon Yeo, Licensee holder of TedX Melbourne

ANSWERING COMMON SPEAKING MYTHS AND QUESTIONS

As a speaker coach, by far the most common question I get from aspiring speakers is “what do I do with my hands?” or body language-related questions. The next is regarding nerves or anxiety and finally about slide content. While all good questions, they are the wrong questions.

Could any combination of those things make a great speech? These questions are what I call Phase 3 questions and have to do with performance and delivery. If you don’t have a compelling message, it doesn’t matter what you do with your hands.

THE MOST IMPORTANT QUESTION IN SPEAKING
If you need to get your point across, surely your most important question should be “Is my message clear?”. By clear, I mean, can you summarise your message in a SINGLE COMPELLING SENTENCE? If it is clear in your head, it can be clear in your audience’s head. If it’s not clear in your head, the audience hasn’t got a chance. 98% of people I work with, including experienced speakers, can’t give me a single compelling sentence. This is a Phase 1 question.

Which leads to my Phase 2 question, how do you ADAPT your message to make it compelling to your audience? For my stage speakers, it almost needs to catalyse or polarise an audience to challenge and make them think about your idea. For a corporate meeting, you need to position it in such a way that forces them to consider your idea. That means stating your content in a novel or unique way. For instance, I could say, “Postboxes are red”. It’s a fact but not really a memorable or compelling one. I could also say “Did you know, there’s a historic reason, why Australia Post, chose red, for it’s postboxes?”. Suddenly you are forced to consider the fact about red postboxes. Language, tone and positioning are critical delivery skills over and above your technical expertise or knowledge. In fact, you can google most expertise or knowledge. It’s not enough.

So when you are preparing your talk, think about the audience. What do they need? What do they know? How resistant to your idea are they? What are the political and social implications of your message in their eyes? These are some of the factors we need to think about before we think about our hands. Even 5 minutes of proper thinking and planning can make a massive difference to the impact your message can have.

If you would like to get into the head of Jon Yeo and learn more valuable tips, he will be running a workshop called Design for Impact | 9 November @ 8.45 am AEDT | Live  >>>

Piece written by Jon Yeo. Jon works with Leaders and Changemakers to understand incremental influence.
While leading TEDxMelbourne, he saw the YouTube data for, “what causes someone to pause, rewind or abandon a TED Talk?”.  He combined this data to better understand how to design for empathy, engagement and simplify complexity. Jon has been the Licensee for TEDxMelbourne since 2009 and is a past National President for Professional Speakers Australia

Interview by Charmaine Keegan,  author of over 20 eBooks, is a sought-after guest speaker, panellist, and keynote. She is a Certified Trainer Extended Disc System, of Situational Leadership, of NLP (how we operate), Hypnotherapy (unconscious communication) and Timeline Therapy (recognising your beliefs about sales and money – and recognising that of your customer). She has studied the psychology of human behaviour and is considered an absolute authority and true expert on sales techniques. She has ‘walked the walk‘ so her content, programs and key notes are highly practical and focused on results.

Smarter Selling is sales and mindset coaching for high performing leaders and teams