Robert M. Krauss, an esteemed psychology professor, shared a joke he heard as a child from his maternal grandfather that would inform the direction of his career, although he didn’t know it at the time.
The joke tells of two Jewish men walking through the frigid roads of Belarus on a particularly uncomfortable day. One of the pair can be seen and heard loudly chatting away, flailing his arms and signalling passionately. The other gentleman was quiet, offering only an occasional nod. Eventually, the talkative partner looked to his friend and asked: “Nu, Shmuel, why don’t you have anything to say?” “Because,” he replied, “I forgot my gloves.”
Talk with your hands
In my research on the science of artful thinking, coming to fully understand how we think with our bodies was a revelation. For years, precisely because I didn’t want to be seen as the caricature captured in this lighthearted joke, I deliberately sought to keep my hands still when speaking in public. I wanted to project a calm dignity that I thought would make me a more impactful communicator. I had no idea that this hang-up was having the opposite effect and actively hampering my ability to communicate optimally.
Krauss was a leading academic voice in challenging the once widely held belief that conversational gestures are designed to serve the listener. That is to say, the improvised hand movements acted out by a speaker were meant to act as visual aids, adding emphasis or clarity, for the benefit of one’s conversational partner. What Krauss sought to prove was that, in fact, gestures helped the speaker. More specifically, moving our hands while we speak helps us to retrieve elusive words from our memory.
How we find the words
Krauss and his colleagues ran a number of different experiments to prove this point. In one, they analysed the differences in gestures employed in spontaneous conversations versus a rehearsed speech. If gesturing was meant to serve the needs of the listener, there shouldn’t be much of a difference. However, if gesturing supported the speaker’s search for the right word, we would see it happening far more frequently in real-time conversations than well-practised speeches. And, indeed, this proved to be the case.
They also found that the timing of our gestures supported their theory. If our hand waving was designed to help us find the right word, it would always occur before we articulated it. If it were for emphasis to a listener, it would occur after. If you start to pay close attention to this phenomenon in your daily life, you’ll see it for yourself. Notice when gesturing occurs in conversation. Be mindful of how timing will signal its purpose. Another thing Krauss noticed was that gesturing was nearly five times more frequent when the desired phrase had “spatial content.” We use physical space to find words that describe things that take up physical space. In their experiments, they found that research participants gestured more when describing visual objects from memory.
Body hacks are better than tech hacks
It’s unfortunate to see that most people’s instinct is to look for technology-based solutions to our most human of problems. When I talk to managers and students who want to improve their conversational skills, they mention AI tools like ChatGPT in voice mode, ELSA Speak, Orai, and Yoodli.ai as their go-to resources. They have little interest in learning more about embodied thinking.
Yet mindfully incorporating more frequent gesturing is the easiest of hacks. As Krauss and his team’s lifetime of research uncovered, gesturing is the path to fluent speech, as it makes it easier to retrieve words from lexical memory. Similarly, resisting the urge to gesture makes finding the right words all the more difficult.
Be mindful of the need to set your hands free, then don’t think about it once you start conversing. Worrying about how your movements while speaking are perceived by those you are talking to is what held me back for years. Trust your body’s wisdom without shame and hear the impressive words that will subsequently be coming out of your mouth.
