Body Language for Presentations

Stand up straight. Use your hands. Make eye contact. That is body language for presentations as most people teach it: three instructions, no reasons.

Here are the reasons. Some of the most repeated advice in this area rests on a misunderstanding, and one piece of it is genuinely useful in a way almost nobody mentions — especially if you present in a language that is not your first.

OneThe number you have heard is wrong

Somewhere you have been told that communication is 93 percent nonverbal. Seven percent words, thirty-eight percent tone, fifty-five percent face. It appears on countless slides. It is wrong.

It comes from two studies by Albert Mehrabian and his colleagues, both published in 1967. Look at what they did. People listened to single words — one word, not a sentence, and nothing like a talk — spoken in different tones, and matched them against photographs of faces. The question was narrow and reasonable: when the word and the tone disagree, which one does a listener believe? The samples were small, in the first study all women, and no conversation took place at any point.

Mehrabian has spent decades correcting the way his numbers get used. His position is straightforward: those equations were about communicating feelings and attitudes, and unless a speaker is talking about how they feel, they do not apply.

This matters more to you than to a native speaker. If words are seven percent of a message, then your English hardly counts and the answer to a hard talk is to smile harder. Your words are the presentation. The rest of this page is about what everything else adds.

TwoYour hands work for you before they work for them

In 2001 Susan Goldin-Meadow and her colleagues asked adults and children to hold a list of letters or words in memory while explaining how they had solved a math problem, then compared the explanations given with gestures against the same explanations given without them.

People who gestured remembered more of the list.

Gesturing left more mental room for something else. The hands were taking part of the work.

For a speaker this may be the most useful sentence on this page. When you present you are doing several jobs at once: holding your structure, choosing words, watching the room, managing your nerves. Anything that lowers that load is worth having, and your hands are already there.

It is also why “keep your hands still” is bad advice. Hands in pockets, hands behind your back, hands gripping the sides of a lectern: you have just switched off something that was helping you think.

ThreeWhat your hands do for the audience

That is the speaker’s side. For the listener’s side, in 2011 Autumn Hostetter gathered 63 samples comparing how well people understood a message with gestures against the same message without them. Across all of them, gestures gave a significant, moderate benefit to understanding.

Then she asked when that benefit grows or shrinks. Two of the three answers work against the usual advice.

• Gestures that show a physical action communicate more than gestures about abstract ideas.
• Gestures that simply repeat what the words already said help less. The benefit is largest when the hand carries something the sentence did not.
• Children get more from gestures than adults do. If you are presenting to adults, expect less than the headline.

So the rule is not “use your hands more”. It is narrower and much easier to follow: gesture when you have something to show. A size. A direction. A sequence. Two things being compared. Something rising or falling. If your hand cannot show it, your hand can rest.

FourPower posing: what survived and what did not

You have probably been told to stand in a wide, open posture for two minutes before you speak. That comes from a small 2010 study by Dana Carney, Amy Cuddy and Andy Yap, which reported that two minutes of expansive posture raised testosterone, lowered cortisol, increased risk-taking and made people feel more powerful. It became one of the most repeated pieces of advice in the world. Here is what happened next.

In 2015 Eva Ranehill and colleagues ran it again with a much larger group. The feeling of power appeared again. The hormones did not. The risk-taking did not.

In 2017 Joseph Simmons and Uri Simonsohn examined the 33 studies offered in support, using a method for detecting selective reporting, and concluded that the literature did not show the effect existed. In 2018 Cuddy, Schultz and Fosse answered with a wider body of postural-feedback research and argued that one part of it holds up clearly: posture does change how powerful people report feeling.

FiveThe parts nobody has measured

What about your feet, and where to stand, and when to move? Nothing found at the time of writing supports the standard advice cleanly, so treat this section as craft rather than evidence. It comes from watching speakers, not from a laboratory.

• Have a home position. Feet about hip-width apart, weight even on both. Somewhere to return to, so standing still is a decision rather than a failure.
• Move between points, not inside them. Walking while you deliver a sentence competes with the sentence.
• Do one thing at a time. If you turn to point at a screen, stop talking for that second. Come back, then speak.
• Keep your hands visible, roughly between your waist and your shoulders.

SixEye contact is a longer story

The research on eye contact is more surprising than the advice: one study found that the more time listeners spent looking at a speaker’s eyes, the less their opinions moved. It is covered properly, with the whole finding, in How to Engage an Audience. Until you read that, a simple version will do: one person for one sentence, then somebody else. Not a sweep across the room, and not one friendly face for eleven minutes.

SevenIf English is your second language, your hands are doing more

In 2001 Uri Hadar and colleagues followed speakers using their first language and their second, and translating in both directions. Speaking a second language involves more searching for words, and the large, meaning-carrying gestures clustered around exactly those moments of searching. Their suggestion is that the gesture helps the word arrive.

Be careful with that one. It was five speakers. That is a very small study, and it points in a direction rather than settling anything. But it matches what learners describe constantly: the hand keeps moving while the word is missing. If it is right, three things follow.

• When the word will not come, keep your hand moving. A pause with a moving hand looks like thinking. A pause with frozen hands looks like stopping.
• Do not trap your hands. Pockets, crossed arms, both hands clamped on a lectern — each one removes the help at the moment you need it.
• Practice two or three gestures that carry meaning — the sequence, the comparison, the thing that rises and falls. Those are the ones the research says communicate, and the ones you will reach for when your English is under pressure.

The short version

The 93 percent figure is not real, and your words matter more than anyone told you. Your hands lower your own mental load, which counts double in a second language, and they help your audience most when they show something the words did not. Posture may change how you feel and probably not your hormones. Find a home position, move between your points and stand still inside them.

And when the word disappears, keep your hand moving. It will come.