Draw Pictures In The Air

Draw pictures in the air to bring your presentation to life and help your audience to visualize what you are saying.  




This is something most of us do naturally when we are talking to others in our family, social  or business circle -- even with complete strangers we meet on the street. We use this technique to emphasize what we are saying  or help others to visualize what we are talking about.  But when we are more tense up on the stage talking to larger groups  we sometimes freeze up leaving our hands dangling by our sides, clutching the lectrum in front of us throughout our presentation and we are safely off the stage reducing ourselves to a talking head.


You can overcome this by marking up a copy of your speech or presentation with reminders to emphasize or illustrate a point with either those emphatic or descriptive gestures and then practice until you can incorporate gestures at these points smoothly into your material -- the same way script writer write down stage directions for plays and movie scenes.


Such a direction might say something like: "Emphasize each point with vertical finger gesture"  or "Use descriptive gesture to show height or dimensions".


Then, practice, practice, practice until it all comes off naturally.


This all works fine until you are more relaxed on the stage then you will find that in most cases you don't even have to use such directions anymore. Gestures will come as naturally as they do when you are talking to a close friend or group of friends -- which your audience will become if you are picking out individuals in the audience whenever possible and speaking to them for a few seconds at a time.  


And then really get  into your material, thinking not of words but visualizing your main ideas as visually as possible.  This is where Mind Mapping and Clustering can be a big aid.


These two things: (1) always making your presentation a discussion with friends and (2) making your material as graphically vivid as possible will help you to overcome any problem you have with using gestures -- those pictures in the air that can help you to emphasize important points as well as visualize and remember  what you are talking about.