“What do I do with my hands when I speak?”
November 7, 2009
I was having an important conversation with my daughter this week when I became very aware that I was not connecting at all with her. We were standing by a car and I couldn’t find a relaxed, comfortable position. So instead of really listening to what she was saying, I was focused on where I should put my arms and how I should stand to be comfortable. In doing so, I felt separate from her and removed from the conversation.
So often when I’m coaching people to be more comfortable when they speaking, they ask me, “what should I do with my hands?”. Interesting that this is such a universal concern! My response is that we can’t choreograph our movements ahead of time and that the most natural neutral stance is with our arms down by our side allowing natural gestures to arise in the moment, while also eliminating distracting, unconscious, repetitive movements.
But focusing on our arms and hands will increase our self-consciousness which, in turn, leads to feeling less confident. It’s really superfluous and not central to what we want to accomplish. Instead, we need to bring our attention back to our core, our center – to be conscious of self as opposed to self-conscious – and to speak from there.
So instead of thinking about what do to with your hands, try these three levels of awareness:
- Feel your feet solidly on the ground. Find your roots.
- From that grounded place bring your awareness to your belly, your core, to center yourself.
- Then become aware of your back body, your spine, as you bring your attention to your audience. This will open you up to an expanded sense of the space around you,your place in it, and the people in your audience.
As you speak, your arms and hands then become like branches in a tree. They are still when there’s no breeze and move gently when the currents of the air (or the subject matter) move them.
Contemplative practices reduce anxiety
April 4, 2009
Several weeks ago, I gave a talk with Dr. Sara Lazar, neuroscientist and researcher at Mass General Hospital, a Harvard teaching hospital. Sara’s research is centered on changes in brain structures that result from meditation and yoga.
Her results are very interesting! Basically they show that regular awareness (or contemplative) practices like yoga and meditation thicken those parts of the brain that have to do with self-awareness, well-being and embodied presence and decrease the size of those parts of the brain that are most active when we feel anxious.
Now, those of us who do any of these practices on a regular basis already know this from experience. Personally, I’ve certainly recognized that after 20 years of meditating, doing yoga and practicing tai chi (another contemplative practice not currently part of Sara’s research), my general state of anxiety has significantly decreased.
This became very clear to me several years ago when I stopped my daily practices for about 3 months because of some health issues. I began to notice that a background level of agitation which had been so present when I was younger was beginning to resurface. It was only then that I realized just how much calmer I had become because of my daily contemplative practices.
A common principle that runs at the core of each of these contemplative practices is “Where we put our attention, that’s where energy flows.” If we become preoccupied with our anxious thoughts, we actually strengthen our anxiety. If, instead, we focus on our breath, the contact we make with the ground, a mantra (a calming phrase), or any other anchor for our attention, we begin to quiet the mind and become more present.
So, how can we apply this understanding to reducing the anxiety that comes from public speaking? I think there are two ways to support ourselves through contemplative practices.
First is to commit to some minimal degree of daily awareness practices. Many of my clients start out with 5 minutes a day of simple meditation (I might do another post some day on developing a meditation practice to support your public speaking). Meditating on a regular basis, even in very short increments like this, can help to calm that sense of floating anxiety that might always be there in the background.
The second is to practice what I call a relational meditation whenever you speak, whether it be at the dinner table with your family, in the check-out line at the grocery store, on a phone call, in a meeting with your colleagues, or in a formal presentation. Rather than focusing on the situational anxiety that can arise in a stressful speaking situation, we focus on our audience, asking ourselves how can we be of service to the people in our audience. In effect, we anchor our attention on the relationship and not on our anxiety. Paradoxically, this can help calm us down, steady us, and help us be more fully present in the moment and responsive to the needs of our audience.
By strengthening our self-awareness through our daily practices, and then regularly anchoring our attention on our audience when we speak , I believe we are actually making changes to the structure of our nervous system that can have a long term impact on our degree of comfort speaking in public.
The power of silence to unite…
March 7, 2009
I recently attended a meeting where after we went around the room and introduced ourselves, we dropped into a period of silence before anyone began to speak. This was not an uncomfortable silence but simply a time for each of us to become present so that the ensuing conversation felt very different than the way an ordinary discussion might go in a typical meeting. When the conversation finally started, it felt as though we were each speaking from a grounded collective as opposed individual separate voices.
Several years ago, the keynote speaker at a conference started his talk with a full minute of silence. This wasn’t a nervous silence but simply one of “arriving”. It seemed to me that as he looked out into the audience in silence, the speaker was inviting us into his world. While the audience was restive to begin with, as the minute passed everyone seemed to calm down and wait with quiet expectancy for him to begin. When the speaker finally did begin to talk, the entire room was with him.
I was on a conference call several months ago where each of us was invited to take a few minutes to check-in. That day one of the participants wasn’t feeling particularly verbal and said so when it was her turn. But instead of passing up the opportunity to take a turn, she simply became quiet allowing the rest of us on the call to drop into a meditative state. It seemed that after her turn, the quality of the call moved from the ordinary busyness of day-to-day conversation to one of deep respect and regard for each other.
These are three examples of how silence can bring people together if we allow ourselves to rest rather than chafe when nothing is being said.
