Talking with your hands alters the perception of your words

I find that I'm able to convince people of things and explain abstract concepts with much more ease than other people. This holds true even if I don't fully understand the idea I'm explaining. Something about being able to "mold" the space in front of me lends another dimension to weave the fabric of language around.

As a personal anecdote: I won the Marconi-Samueli Award for an app I built when I was 14 called MathSuite. It could parse algebraic equations and yield a result, and it did so offline (think Wolfram Alpha). I'd built the thing from scratch, and on the day of presentation, my computer had crashed and I couldn't ship a version of that app that would run.

Somehow, I convinced the judges of the veracity of the screenshots and claims on my presentation poster, and explained to them the potentially huge ramifications of my app, without being able to demonstrate it working. One judge commented that I had a "very expressive and mature style of explanation" — really, I think my hand gestures were a huge part of it.

Naturally, I picked this habit up myself. So, when I speak English, I use hand gestures all over the place -- as if I'm talking my mother tongue. I live in Boston, where I think talking with your hands isn't particularly popular... So in the last couple years I've been trying to lose this habit. My experience thus far has been pretty interesting and challenging. At times, it feels like talking without consonants, because for certain ideas my hand movement doesn't feel any less important than the words themselves.

This has stuck with me my entire life, and I have a very real urge to mimic that behavior in the civilian world when someone begins using their hands during speech. Right or wrong, I don't know (and don't care), but that's the "talking with your hands" story that has been burned in my brain since being an uppity 18 year old.

Internet access at home not being a thing at the time (at least in my country) meant we believed most if not all of that stuff. People are much more skeptical now than a couple of decades ago, to the point that claiming hand gestures slightly improve communication requires full blown studies to back it up. And I'm 100% fine with it.

If I didn’t need hands to type that’s probably how I would also deliver most of my comments here on HN.

In fact, the actual recent study finds a specific lexical stress effect, but this piece mixes it with different research about different movements.

Guess it might have inadvertently helped me. People have always said I’m quite persuasive, maybe this is part of it.

A lot of zoom calls don't show hand gestures. PowerPoint is always turning your attention away from the speaker.

We've tested people in tens of thousands of live performance coaching sessions and discovered that most people can be approximately divided into four body language groups based on which parts of their body "want" to move.

If you try to think about moving body parts that don't "want" to move, you will sound distracted when speaking, and other parts will mostly hold still.

If you think about parts that DO want to move, you will sound expressive, and other parts of your anatomy will join in naturally. E.g. if you are wired for Head, neck and shoulders—what we call zone 1, and think about making faces when speaking, your hands will begin to gesture. But if you think about using your hands, your gestures will be stiff and you will sound distracted.

Actors who perform voice over know that energetic body language is required. Our interactions with and tests of aspiring and experienced actors have been through 78 voice acting events where we record as many at 350 live performance coaching sessions in a day, and through the several group classes we do every week through our business the School of Acting and Voiceover.

In all, my wife Sarah and I have done around 30,000 live coaching sessions.

Our advice to actors is to determine which of the four "zones" you are most wired for, and consciously expand your use of movement in that zone to sound both more expressive, and more authentic.

It's as if you need to tell your subconscious "these are the allowable and expected motions during the upcoming activity" or you will be more tight, anxious and unnatural. The four zones are:

1) Head, neck and shoulders. Common tip: Tilt your head slightly and reposition some part of your face (raised eyebrow, parted lips, etc) before speaking

2) Hands, arms and shoulders. Common tip: Keep your wrists above your elbows at all times to allow natural gestures to occur, as hands are psychologically difficult to lift when they drop below elbows.

3) Body posture. Common tip: Dance a bit before speaking, or, while keeping your feet planted and your head facing forwards, rotate your shoulders 90° left then 90° right.

4) Whole body (everything moves). Common tip: Plan the posture and movements you will use as you begin speaking to consciously set a more expressive starting point.

Most of our training programs are not available publicly. Though we have advertised in the past, most of our students have come through referrals over the last 15 years, partly because we have hired people at all levels of our industry to come be coaches, and they know we base much of our training on how they themselves work with people in the industry.

We currently only train remotely (e.g. via Zoom), though we maintain an in-person training center (currently used mostly for storage). Although SchoolofVoiceover.com has some public learning content, most of our content (about 1,000 articles) is only available through a private, invitation-only forum.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZBKX-6Gz6A

Red flag. That's not science.