Exaggerate to Practice Your Body Language - Inspired by Daniel Coyle's The Little Book of Talent

Daniel Coyle, the New York Times best-selling author of The Talent Code, has written a fascinating and informative new book, The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills, which includes simple, practical tips based on examples and research from the world's greatest talent hotbeds.

In his Tip #31 - To Learn a New Move, Exaggerate It, Coyle suggests that "going too far [exaggeration] helps us understand where the boundaries are." The goal is to "go too far so you can feel the outer edges of the move, and then work on building the skill with precision."

Here are 2 ways to "exaggerate it" when practicing your presentation skills:

1. Exaggerate Your Voice

Go through a whole practice of your presentation just focusing on your voice. Speak louder than usual - don't shout, but breathe fully and project your voice. Exaggerate your enunciation, your pausing and your intonation. Over-emphasize the most important words in each sentence and how you vary your voice to communicate emotion and meaning.

2. Exaggerate Your Gestures

Do another round of practice just exaggerating your gestures. Don't focus on your words, slides, voice or anything else - just make big, dramatic, visible gestures that correspond to what you are saying. Use bold gestures to draw pictures for the audience and to illustrate your content.

After you have practiced the exaggeration and have built the skill, dial back the exaggeration and return to a more heightened sense of "normal," a "new normal" where you are able to incorporate powerful and appropriate voice and gestures to add impact to your presentation.

(A different, though also interesting, means of using exaggeration as a practice technique is to record yourself on video during a normal practice session and then play it back without sound, fast forwarding through it so your gestures and movement are exaggerated. In this exercise, you will be observing the exaggeration, rather than experiencing it directly.)

What To Do With Your Hands When Public Speaking

Research has demonstrated that in everyday, interpersonal communication, people spontaneously generate images via hand gestures to accompany their speech. In this way they help to encode the speech into the listener's memory by utilizing two cognitive aspects: words and images. Although many of these gestures are made unconsciously certain specific gestures can be isolated and defined. By using specific gestures to accompany your speech, with a little practice you can enhance the physical dimensions of your communications. This creates multi representations of meaning and can really make your message more memorable. There are three types of gestures:

Adapters, Emblems and Illustrators.

'Adapters' are habitual movements that are performed with little or no conscious intent to communicate, for example, touching your hair, fiddling with a watchstrap, or pushing your glasses up the bridge of your nose even when they are perfectly positioned.

'Emblems' are gestures that do not depend on speech, as their meaning is clear and culturally agreed, for example, thumbs up, raising the middle finger, or the OK sign.

'Illustrators' are the category we are interested in and which are essential in effective communication. They are created as part of an intended act of communication and constructed together with speech. However there is no general awareness of a codified meaning - unlike emblems. This is because they can reveal or communicate meanings that speech cannot accommodate.

There are four key illustrators:

1. Iconic: These represent shapes of objects or people and movements of objects and people in space. For example, tracing a square in the air with an index finger while saying, "Have you seen a box anywhere around here?" Or, making a walking motion with two fingers while saying, "I'm just going for a walk"

2. Metaphoric: These are gestures made while explaining something. For example, while answering a mathematical problem an individual may make an arcing or pulsing motion with the hand as they describe the numerical route to an answer. Metaphoric gestures are a visual depiction of a process.

3. Deictic: Pointing at objects, places and people indicating temporal or spatial references are deictic gestures. You may even point at something or someone not visible to the listener, for example, pointing behind you while saying "My mother lives in the next street."

There are also two viewpoints from which gestures narrate:

OBJECTIVE: These gestures describe an event from an observer's point of view and depict the elements in a story as items. For example, describing someone running across a road by using the fingers to depict legs in fast motion. The objects and characters in the story are separate from the narrator.

SUBJECTIVE: The narrator acts out the story using gestures as part of a character performance. For example, describing someone running across a road, the gesturer would move his/her arms as if actually running.

By gesturing as if you were the characters and objects in your story you bring energy and life to the spoken word and create more memorable images in the listener's mind. It is also important to consider the elements you wish to describe during a speech or narration. Why not try consciously gesturing as you speak and explore the effects. Though, perhaps you might start practicing with family and friends before you give an important presentation!