Page 340 - Between One and Many The Art and Science of Public Speaking

Chapter 11 Delivery: Engaging Your Audience 307

Tips and Tactics
Guidelines for Posture While Delivering a Speech

• Find your center of balance. Usually this means standing with your feet apart
at about shoulder width.
• Pull your shoulders back, sticking your chest out and holding your stomach in.
• Keep your chin up and off your chest.
• Initially let your arms rest at your sides with palms open, which will allow
you to gesture easily as you speak.

Touch

Touch, which is by far the most intimate and reinforcing of the nonverbal di-
mensions, can affect your delivery in at least two ways. The fi rst involves self- self-adapting
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adapting behaviors, which are distracting touching behaviors that speakers behaviors
engage in unconsciously. Nonverbal behaviors
In arousing situations, people frequently touch their face, hair, or clothes used to cope with ner-
without realizing it. Just as frequently they touch some convenient object. They vousness; for example,
may squeeze the arm of a chair, roll their fi ngers on a tabletop, trace the outside self-touching or grasping
edge of a glass with a fi ngertip, or mistake the top of a lectern for a conga drum. the sides of a lectern with
They do these things unconsciously. hands.
Because public speaking is arousing, it too can provoke these self-adaptive
forms of touch. Further, they can needlessly detract from your delivery. Tugging
at an earlobe, rubbing the outside of your upper arm, or jingling the change in
your pocket won’t help your delivery. Neither will pounding on the lectern with
the palms of your hands or rocking it from side to side.
The second way touch can affect your delivery concerns other people. At
some point it’s likely that your presentations will involve other people. Corpo-
rate trainers spend much of their lives giving informative presentations that in-
volve audience participation. The same can be said for sales managers, teachers,
attorneys, and practitioners of public relations. Touch very often comes into play
in these scenarios. Sometimes it’s as simple but as important as shaking a per-
son’s hand. At other times it may involve guiding someone by the hand, patting
someone on the back, or even giving a more demonstra-
tive tactile sign of approval. At the same time, you must
avoid touch that can be interpreted as inappropriate. For
example, there have been several widely reported cases
of schoolteachers accused of inappropriately touching stu-
dents. Unwelcome touching can, in fact, be grounds for
accusations of sexual harassment.

Time

The fi nal nonverbal dimension to think about relative to
delivery is time. As journalist Michael Ventura writes,

Time is the medium in which we live. There is inner time—our
personal sense of the rhythms of time experienced differently
by each of us; and there is imposed time—the regimented Touching oneself can be a great distraction
time by which society organizes itself, the time of schedules and when speaking.
dead-lines, time structured largely by work and commerce. 20