Body language on BBC Radio 4's 'Word of Mouth' (17 August, 2010)

If you missed my appearance on BBC Radio 4's Word of Mouth programme on body language earlier this week, you can listen to it again on the BBC website for a few more days - after which you'll still be able to hear it below (I come on after about 12 minutes).

For what it's worth, I thought that the American body language 'expert' was dead right in referring to some of his own words of wisdom (at least twice) as "ludicrous over-generalizations" - but it did leave me wondering why, if he knows that, he's so willing to trot them out so authoritatively to anyone who happens to be listening.

With social psychologists like that on the loose, is it any wonder that so many false and misleading claims about non-verbal behavior have become embedded in the mythology of management training?


Other posts on body language & non-verbal communication:

Fact & fiction about body language 3: Do movement & gestures distract?

Thanks - and an apology to the BBC!
An hour or two ago, I was one of those interviewed on a BBC Radio 4 'Word of Mouth' programme on body language - which can now be heard (for the next 7 days) HERE.

As the interview I did with Chris Ledgard lasted for twice as long as the whole programme, it was obvious that whatever I said would be heavily edited.

This, coupled with the fact that the main guest advertised in the BBC's advance publicity is a body language expert, made me start worrying that my position on the subject wouldn't get get as full a hearing as I'd like. So, to put the record straight, I decided to post a series of extracts from Chapter 11 ('Body Language: Fact and Fiction') of my book Lend Me Your Ears: All You Need to Know about Public Speaking and Presentation.

However, I needn't have bothered, because within the constraints of a half-hour radio show, I thought that Chris Ledgard and his producer, Beatrice Fenton, gave me as full and fair a hearing as I could have hoped for. I would therefore like to thank them for doing such a good job and to apologise for suggesting that I might need to set the record straight.

However, having started the series, I might as well complete it - especially as the programme may have brought some new visitors to the blog (to whom welcome) who might be curious to know more...


1. Does movement distract?
I once worked with a presentation skills trainer who taught that speakers should not only stand still, but that there was a correct stance for presentation that involved placing one foot slightly in front of the other. After the lecture that included this advice, delegates regularly came to me pointing out a glaring inconsistency between what they had just heard and what they had just seen. While recommending them not to move about when they were speaking, he had spent most of the lecture wandering about the conference room.

When asked if this worried or distracted them, delegates invariably said “no”. Most went further, adding that it helped to hold their interest and came across as lively and enthusiastic. This positive reaction to movement is in fact typical of how members of audiences tend to react when commenting on each other’s presentations. Movement features in their plus columns much more frequently than in their minus columns, which suggests that the best advice for the vast majority of people is that, if they feel like moving about, they should do so.

There is, however, a small minority of cases where speakers’ movements do get a negative rating from audience members, such as when someone continually sways from side to side, or takes a few steps forwards and a few steps back, over and over again. What these negatively rated movements have in common is a relentless repetitiveness that is at best a distraction, and at worst a source of irritation to audiences.

It may well be an awareness of this that leads some trainers to recommend that no one should ever move around at all while speaking. But the trouble with adopting such a blanket solution to solve what is a relatively rare problem is that it is likely to deter the vast majority of people from doing something that will have a positive impact on their audiences. Movement also has positive benefits for speakers themselves, as it helps to disperse adrenalin and reduce tension.

As for how to find out if you are one of the minority whose movements are likely to distract, the best way is through a simple practical experiment. The next time you make a speech or presentation, forget about standing still and move around in any way that comes naturally to you: then check on people’s reactions afterwards. This is much more reliable than watching yourself on video, as we tend to be far too critical of our own individual performances. Many are the times that I have heard people denounce the way they move when they see themselves on tape, only to be contradicted by those who had been in the audience at the time. If one accepts that the audience is always right, the safest bet is to listen to what they have to say.

2. Do gestures distract?
The news from audiences about gestures is very similar to that on movement more generally. On almost every presentation skills course I have ever run, someone will say that they have been on another one where the trainer told them that gestures are distracting, and that speakers should keep their hands motionless during presentations. Meanwhile, it is just as rare for audiences to give negative ratings when they see speakers gesticulating as when they see them moving about. In fact they are much more likely to rate the use of gestures as a definite plus, often referring to it as evidence of expressiveness, individuality and liveliness.

As with the blanket prohibition on moving about while speaking, it may be that some trainers recommend the total suppression of gestures as an insurance policy against the risk that we might belong to the small minority whose hand movements are a source of distraction or irritation to audiences. These tend to be the ones that bear no discernable connection to what the speaker is saying.

For example, a video- tape that I often use in training programmes shows a speaker continuously flapping his hand up and down. Everyone who has seen the tape not only notices it, but is also highly critical of it. Other uses of the hands that attract negative ratings include continuous hair tugging, hand wringing, or fidgeting with some other object (most usually the cap of a felt-tipped pen) or part of the anatomy. Like the randomly flapping hand, what makes these distracting and irritating to audiences is that they do not relate in any obvious way to what the speaker is saying.

The opponents of gestural freedom seem to have missed a number of key points about the use of gestures. One is that, as already mentioned, only a small minority of people, perhaps as few as ten per cent, exhibit any such problems at all. Another is that as skilled an orator as Hitler would hardly have practised his gestures in front of a mirror if they were such a waste of time.

And if it really is a distraction to use gestures, there must be tens of millions of people distracting each other every second of every day. This is for the very obvious reason that gesticulating while speaking is a thoroughly natural and normal part of the way humans communicate with each other. As such, any deliberate or conscious effort to suppress gestures may well impede a speaker’s fluency, and restrict their ability to express themselves. At the same time completely motionless hands look distinctly odd to those who are listening, whether they are in conversation or sitting in an audience.

One of the uses of gestures is as visual aids to illustrate or emphasise what we are talking about. For example, when Winston Churchill spoke of an ‘iron curtain’ descending across Europe, he moved his left hand downwards at the same time. When Bill Clinton said that there was nothing wrong with America that couldn’t be solved by what is right with America, he stabbed the air just before the words ‘wrong’ and ‘right’.

Sometimes speakers move their left hand during one part of a contrast, following it with a similar movement of the right hand during the second part. When listing three items, it’s quite normal for people to count them out on their fingers, or to make three hand movements at the same time. Even very young children have no problem in pointing at the thing they are asking for, or in holding their hands a certain distance apart to show how big something is.

We don’t have to be explicitly taught to do any of these things, and are more or less completely unaware that we are doing them. Nor do we give much thought to the fine degree of precision timing that it takes to get it right, even though words and gestures have to be closely coordinated if they are to come across as natural rather than clumsy or awkward. So the advice on gestures is to do whatever comes naturally, because the chances are that it will make a presentation more expressive and animated than would otherwise be the case.

In fact, different people gesticulate in slightly different ways, which makes it one of those behavioural details that plays a part in conveying a person’s individuality. As such, using gestures is much more likely to help you to get your own personality across to an audience, than adopting a stance that makes you look like a stuffed dummy whose hands have been firmly glued to its sides or behind its back.

Finally, there is a close parallel between the use of gesture and one of the points made about intonation in Chapter 2. This was the observation that the bigger the distance between speaker and audience, the more will changes in tone and emphasis tend to flatten out. In the same way, slight gestures that are perfectly visible at close quarters in a conversation become progressively more difficult for the audience to see as their distance from the speaker increases.

If, as was suggested earlier, you can avoid the problem of monotone by exaggerating your normal conversational patterns of intonation, so too can you make your gestures more visible by exaggerating your normal conversational hand movements. And the bigger the audience, the more expansive and flamboyant you can afford to be.

Other posts on body language & non-verbal communication:

Fact & fiction about body language 2: Does it matter what you wear or where you stand?


This afternoon, I'll be appearing on a BBC Radio 4 'Word of Mouth' programme on body language. As the interview I did lasted for twice as long as the whole programme, it's inevitable that whatever I said will be heavily edited.

This, coupled with the fact that the main guest advertised in the BBC's advance publicity is a body language expert, means that there's a fair chance that my position on the subject won't get as full a hearing as I'd like.

So, to put the record straight, I've decided to post a series of extracts from Chapter 11 ('Body Language: Fact and Fiction') of my book
Lend Me Your Ears: All You Need to Know about Public Speaking and Presentation.

The first of these - Folded arms, defensiveness and the Mehrabian Myth - was posted yesterday, and the third extract on whether movement and gestures distract will be posted shortly.


1. Does it matter what you wear?
A few years ago, a delegate on one of my courses reported that, after failing to get promoted, he was told that one of the main reasons for being passed over was that he had worn a green suit at the interview. Unfortunately for him, there were members of the panel who had been informed by an image consultant to be wary of men who wear green suits to business meetings.

Albert Mehrabian may be uncomfortable about self-styled image consultants with very little psychological expertise, but the situation may be even worse than he thinks: some image consultants are quite willing to make definitive-sounding claims without being constrained at all by facts or research. The seriousness of the situation first came to my notice when I was invited to speak on a conference panel with an image consultant, whose company specialises in advising people what they should wear, and what colours suit them best. At a briefing meeting some weeks beforehand, it seemed a wise precaution to check on whether the clothes I was wearing would contradict any of the advice she was planning to present to the audience.

My suit was apparently fine, but my tie was “the tie of a man going nowhere”. Fearing that there might be some hidden reasons for concern about my career prospects, I asked what kind of tie I should be wearing. The answer was that it ought to be bright red with prominent patterns on it. By now, I was beginning to wonder if there were whole new reservoir of scientific data that I ought to know about, so I inquired about the knowledge base on which such claims were based. After a few moments hesitation, she answered “It’s loosely based on the Bauhaus movement in German art in the 1920s.”

When it came to the conference, I followed her professional advice by wearing a bright red tie with yellow arrows running up and down each side of it. On seeing it, the image consultant greeted me with the words, “That’s the tie of a man going somewhere -- but that belt you’re wearing should be buried.”

Ties, it turned out, were at the heart of her presentation, the gist of which was that patterns smaller than a five pence piece were “yesterday’s ties and should be binned.” However, if the pattern was bigger than a fifty pence piece, it was apparently “over the top” and should also not be worn. The key to success was therefore to wear a tie with a pattern somewhere in between the size of the two coins.

What fascinated me most about all this was that, at the end of the session, members of the audience (all of whom were highly qualified professionals) formed long queues to buy her publications on the subject. Some even started to make enquiries about the bringing her into their various companies to advise colleagues.

In effect, what consultants like this have done is to identify and tap into a market that seems to be based mainly on fear and anxiety. There are a lot of men who are so uninterested in fashion and so uncertain about what style of clothes to wear that they are prepared to pay for professional advice and reassurance. It’s a market that has probably also been stimulated by an increase in the number of professional women, who unlike men, have no obvious uniform to wear at work.

2. Appropriate dress
This is not to say that how we dress doesn’t matter at all. For example, after losing a legal dispute with Virgin Atlantic, Lord King, former chairman of British Airways is reputed to have said that he would have taken Virgin boss Richard Branson more seriously if he had worn a suit and tie rather than his customary sweater and open-necked shirt.

Many years ago, while I was being video-taped doing a lecture on a course for new university lecturers, the studio lights were so hot that I took my jacket off. At the feedback session, it became a matter for discussion: the tutor stopped the tape with the words, “Here’s a speaker who really means business.” Though nothing could have been further from the truth, the realisation that some people might see it that way has made jacket removal a routine prelude to almost every lecture I have ever given since then.

The point here is not that clothes don’t matter at all, but that we should not be drawn into thinking that there is some scientifically based recipe that is guaranteed to enable us to convey a favourable impression to every member of every audience, regardless of the particular circumstances of the occasion. In my experience, most people get away with it through a combination of common sense and trial and error. There will obviously be times when advice and reassurance will be needed, in which case family and colleagues are likely to be just as helpful as professional image consultants, and certainly a great deal cheaper.

3. Are Lecterns and Tables Barriers to Communication?
The claim that folded arms are ‘defensive’ (see previous post) is partly based on the idea that putting your forearms in front of your chest places a barrier between you and your audience. As such, it’s part of a more general theory to the effect that anything that can be construed as a barrier between speaker and audience is a bad thing.

I spent five of my teenage years at a school where daily attendance at a church service was compulsory. A lectern stood between the person reading the lesson and the congregation, but it never once occurred to me during all those years that it was a barrier, or that it was somehow reducing the effectiveness of the reader’s impact. As far as I know, I was not alone, as I never heard anyone else worrying about it either. Nor do I remember any of us ever complaining about our teachers’ desks being barriers that made it more difficult for them to communicate with us.

Many years later, more and more of those who read lessons in church have taken to standing next to the lectern in full view of the congregation. They then struggle to read the tiny print in the Bible they have brought with them. Often, this is made even more difficult by the fact that they are so nervous that they can’t hold it without it shaking in their hands.

A similar trend is evident in more secular settings, where more and more presenters are reluctant to stand behind tables and lecterns, preferring to move to one side or in front of them. Like readers in church, some of them also have trouble holding their notes in trembling hands, while those who leave them behind on the table have to keep turning awkwardly around to see what comes next, sometimes even losing their place altogether.

Whether or not audiences regard the lectern as a barrier, church architects have known for hundreds of years that it’s an extremely efficient device for making it as easy as possible to read from a text. It positions a Bible with large easy-to-read print at a height and an angle that suits most adults. Readers can glance up at the congregation and down to the text without even having to move their heads, and without fear of losing their place.

By comparison, tables are not such efficient resting places for notes or scripts, as they require speakers to glance up and down through an arc of nearly ninety degrees. But they are nonetheless extremely useful places for resting brief cases, computers, projectors and other paraphernalia associated with making a presentation.

All this raises the question of whether anyone would ever be in the least bit concerned about lecterns and tables if, like my generation of school children, they had never heard anyone describe them as ‘barriers’. The way delegates on courses raise the topic suggests that it’s not a particularly burning issue for them either. They are much more likely to ask generalised questions based on what they’ve heard -- are they really barriers, is it a serious problem? – than to complain that they personally experience lecterns as terrible obstacles to effective rapport between speaker and audience.

This suggests that lecterns and tables are much less of a problem for audiences than is suggested by much of the received wisdom on the subject. The most sensible approach is therefore not to avoid them altogether, but to balance their undoubted practical advantages against the possible risk of giving the audience a negative impression. For example, when speaking without notes, or from notes on cards that are stiff enough not to flap about in trembling hands, speakers have nothing to lose by deserting the lectern or table. At other times, however, the advantage of not losing one’s place while retaining eye contact with the audience will almost always outweigh any disadvantages that might arise from being seen to be standing behind the lectern or table.

If you do decide to use a lectern, it is important to be aware of an ever-present temptation that’s best avoided. Sometimes known as ‘white knuckle syndrome’, it involves speakers gripping on to the sides of the lectern so tightly that the rigidity of their posture, and the nervousness that lies behind it, become visible for all to see. And, once you are locked into this stiff and static stance, there’s almost certain to be a build-up of tension that will reduce the effectiveness of your delivery. This suggestion that immobility may have a negative impact on speakers and audiences runs counter to another modern myth about non-verbal communication, namely that you shouldn’t move about while speaking because it distracts the audience.

Other posts on body language & non-verbal communication: