“How do you feel about movement during a presentation?” a student recently asked me. She continued, “Because I was taught in high school that I needed to stand still, and my teacher took points off any time I moved.” I had to swallow my gut instinct to laugh. As a college professor, sometimes it’s my job to help students rethink the bad public speaking advice they’ve previously been given. Or at least to give them another perspective.
But the underlying question she had is a good one. How much should you move during a presentation? Let me share with you a tip I use with my students. I call it the distraction-addition-distraction nonverbal communication continuum. We’ll also talk about a few other tips for handling movement when you present.
The Distraction-Addition-Distraction Continuum
As with most elements in nonverbal communication, you can have not enough, the right amount, or too much. This is the nonverbal communication distraction-addition-distraction continuum. And it looks like this.
Take eye contact for example. Not enough eye contact can communicate a wide range of things like disinterest or insecurity or disrespect. Too much eye contact might communicate interest or aggression and might come off as rude. But just the right amount of eye contact adds to the communication.
The same goes for movement. If you don’t move enough, the audience might perceive you to be stiff or unapproachable or nervous. If you move too much, they might think you are pacing out of nervousness. Or they could start to notice your movement more than your words, making it distracting. Your goal is to find the sweet spot between not moving enough and moving too much. The ironic thing is, you’ll know you have the amount of movement right when the audience doesn’t notice it. That’s because it has become part of the whole presentation, adding to it’s effectiveness. Because movement is communication. For how movement communicates different things, check out the presentation movement blocking structures Olivia Mitchell has put together in her blog, “9 Ways to Use Space in Communication.”
Other Tips for Movement
Along with this important continuum, there are a few other things to keep in mind. One is that most all of us need variety to stay engaged with something for an extended period of time. So if you tend to sway or make the same arm motion, we’ll notice it. And it will become distracting. In my class we give these types of common repetitive movements names—like “the metronome” or “chopping wood.” So make sure your movement has variety. “Educator and psychologist Annie Murphy Paul says it’s a good rule of thumb to ‘shake things up’ every 15 minutes or so . . . ‘Human beings quickly become habituated to the status quo. When something in our environment shifts, however, we start paying attention again.’”
Also, the amount you move should fit the context of your presentation. Some more formal settings in which you are behind a lectern might require less movement because of the nature of the presentation. So in these settings, your face and arms will need to carry the work of adding to the communication since you need to remain somewhat stationary.
Finally, keep in mind the size of the room in which you are speaking. Typically, the bigger the room, the more you’ll need to move. And the smaller the setting, the less you need to move. If you only have a few members in your audience, you can “reach” all of them with just a few steps side to side. But big, energetic movements in a small room can feel out of place.
If you need help figuring out where you fall on the distraction-addition-distraction continuum, enlist the help of a presentation coach who can give you valuable feedback about whether your movement is adding to your presentation or detracting from it.
At Ethos3, presentations are our business. From design to delivery, we’re here to help.
