Toastmasters Speech Number 5 (CC5) - Perfecting Gestures

Choose a dramatic and entertaining speech that has a lot of verbs and directions of action. Verbs of action render your body to move with the verb. Highlight the verbs then practice individually each gestures that you want to deploy with each verb. One way of judging whether the gesture is appropriate for the verb is to ask yourself whether the gesture can replace the verb. Can someone understand you to some degree if you gestured that way without speaking?

Know your weakness. Is it no gestures at all or inapproprieate gestures. If you don’t move your hands and body always, the gestures are more pronounced. Moreover for the purpose of this project, any unnecessary movement will be construed as inappropriate gesture. Much like difficult words in project four being called jargon. If you are not gesturing take a stance. A pose. A posture demonstrating poise. Don’t make any unnecessary movements.

Make the speech short, say about 500 words so that you can talk slowly and have time to gesture more deliberately, clearly and obviously where needed.

Facial expressions are part of gestures. They potray the emotion. Use a mirror to practice the facial expressions you want to portray. It will feel ridiculous watching yourself making faces, but you will get used to it after some time.

Once again the full length mirror is a friend of this project.

My attempt at this project can be seen here