Edith Poor, Communications Consultant » The Power of Gesture

“What do I do with my hands?” This is the question every speaker must find an answer to, in order to feel comfortable standing in front of people. In my seminars and coaching sessions, I help people see that gestures can sharpen both thinking and speaking.

I believe that effective gestures happen just before speech, just before the words get formulated in the speaker’s mind. There’s tremendous power in learning how to use them well. They work in three ways:

• to indicate the relationship between objects or between ideas
• to stress the importance of words or phrases
• to reveal the speaker’s attitude toward the topic, or toward the audience

I use video extensively to help speakers enlarge their repertoire of
gestures and gain greater comfort in using them.

Image credit:

• “A Lawyer”
• Chaucer Coloring Book (Bellerophon Books,
  1997)