I talk about openness with clients all the time.  Why is it so important, and what does it achieve?  And what does it look like?

We humans signal our receptivity to people, ideas and events through our body language.  And of course, we have an enormous range of possible responses.  For some of us, for example, meeting a new person is easy and fun.  For others, it’s an ordeal to be prepared for extensively and processed obsessively after the fact.

In public speaking, the speaker is in effect meeting whole groups of new people all at once, in giant batches, with minimal opportunity for personalization.  As such, the general body language messages the speaker sends out are extraordinarily important for setting the tone of the occasion and for determining how most of the audience will feel about the speaker.  And those feelings will largely determine the success or failure of the speech.

So, the speaker’s body language starts the conversation, and affects how the audience receives everything that follows.  Now, it’s natural to feel exposed, on display, and uncomfortable when you’re in a room filled with, say, 700 people, and all of them are looking at you.  Your natural instinct is to protect yourself, and in body language terms, that translates into bringing your hands in front of your torso, ready for flight or fright (or freeze).

That closed posture feels safe and (unfortunately) signals to the audience that there is danger in the room.  As a result, the audience becomes a bit nervous and starts to wonder how long the ordeal (created by the heightened awareness started by your closed body language) will continue.

These feelings mean that a presentation by a typical speaker is a low-level ordeal to be survived, not a cool chance to meet and hear from someone exciting.

How can you turn this incipient body language failure around and make it successful?  Indeed, how can you take the unconscious language of the human body and make it tell the story that you want to meet those 700 people all at once?

Start with your torso.  Fundamentally, the closer and more directly oriented your torso is toward the audience, the more open that audience will determine you to be.  So don’t pace the stage like a caged tiger looking for a weak link in the fence.  And don’t back up, away from the audience.  Rather, always be standing still or moving toward one portion of the audience or another.

Next, what about the hands that you’ve raised in defense, to fight off all those people in front of you?  Reach toward the audience, move toward an open stance, make like you want to hug the audience as much as is humanly practical.  Try to keep the hands symmetrical in movement, since that’s the norm of human conversation, with rare exceptions when we’re really hammering a point home, for example.

Then look at your hands themselves.  What are they doing?  Are they clenched, or nervously kneading the other hand?  Are the twitchy or hiding in a pocket?  Hands are always busy, often closed, and sometimes hiding something.  Try to keep them open as well, and don’t make fists, or point fingers.  We don’t appreciate either gesture.

Keep your hands and arms open, stay oriented toward the audience, and let your body say you’re delighted to be there, rather than the alternative.  That will go a long way toward connecting to audience of hundreds of people meeting you for the first time.