Kenapa Tubuh Bergetar Sendiri saat Gugup dan Cemas - You’re wearing your perfect navy suit, those sleeves rolled up like a badass and the black heels that just makes you feel lucky to be born a woman. Everything is perfect.

Nothing could ruin this big presentation. Wait… you’re suppose to already start by now, but nothings coming out. Just clumsy stutters and your body’s shaky, too shaky to even clench your palms. This has, I guarantee it, probably happened to the majority of us at some point in our lives.

Not the best experience of course, to some it may even be quite traumatic, but shaky nerves are normal. Just as how we would cup our hands when asking for something, shivering is another ones of those instinctive body response.

Lets break it down. A million eyes on you makes you feel nervous, sacred or threatened, the same feeling when a prey is being chased by their predator.

As a result, your mind and body falls into a flight or fight response, , which is basically when your heart rate fasten and adrenaline is being pumped. All that hormone is what makes you shiver like a wet duck on the podium.

Here’s the great news! That principal of body language and gestures can be used to manage that same fear.

Head shoulders knees and toes...

Gestures. They are often unrecognized but play a critical part in our day-to-day communication. You’ve probably heard the saying that “body language can reveal our inner thoughts”.

Take the concept of detecting liars, for example. It is done by observing the unconscious gestures of that person.

It is more deep-rooted than you may think. Even as infants, gestures were the first ways we could communicate.

That’s why if a child fails to produce these gesture-word combinations, it could be a sign of impaired language. If so, it should be intervened before escalating.

A finding by James Trijillo and his colleagues from the Institute of Psycholinguistics in Netherlands shows that in loud areas we accentuate and elaborate our gestures as we raise our voice.

This is a prime example of how we use gestures as a complementary communication. Just how effective or beneficial is it?

Gestures and the mind

There are several experiments that show gesturing helps lighten our cognitive load and enhance learning or memorizing.

The maths teacher experiment

A maths teacher was asked to teach a group of students, one using gestures when explaining and the other without. As expected, the students taught with more body engagement followed and focused on the teacher’s pointers and when tested at the end, understood far more. . It goes to prove that gestures help learners focus and get more meaning from what they consume.

Multitasking experiment

A study was conducted where adults had to multitask a series of activities, like explaining and memorizing, both numerical and alphabetical information.

While you’d expect that gesturing and talking at the same time required more brain power, the results proved otherwise. Adults who explained or recited whatever they were asked to with gestures performed better.

Instead of burdening our cognitive load, it seems to make thinking easier.

Researchers suggest an explanation for this: it helps externalize ideas and put them in a spatial setting or make us abstract away from the details of the problem and think more deeply about it.

Similarly, both allow us to organize and structure our thoughts, which leaves us more room to think deeper or make information more memorable.

Loci Method

The explanation above is quite comparable to the “Loci Method”, which involves putting each item in a different location in your mind and then imagining a journey through those sites to help you remember them. Though this hasn’t been officially tested.

Back to Stage

That was the science of gestures, what can we take back from this? Well, for starters we now know the problem in our approach with public speaking.

Freezing up is because we are overwhelmed by all the thoughts of what we have to say, plus the fear. The solution is to let loose, How? By using your body. Start of strong, not like a constipated statue.

“Well Begun is half done”

Aristotle

A lively and engaging start can set you up for success. It helps you keep your thoughts outward and accessible for later organization and retrieval. Imagine this: you step on stage,

the crowd cheers, and you say with open arms, “How are you all feeling today?”

Second method is to tackle it during practice. What was just reciting your notes back and forth, should now be you envisioning the podium and lot and lots of hand gestures for every point you want to make.

Try it and repeat until it feels natural to say something with a certain gesture.

Caution to Technology!

Speakers nowadays tend to bring digital keynotes or have their whole PowerPoint operating from the luxury of the their small screens as they’re presenting.

Don’t do this! Holding technology can partially block or entirely make us miss gestures, whether that maybe ourselves or when we’re reading our audience’s reaction.

Once we lose focus, we forget, we panic and go blank. So it is better to not take shortcuts and just memorize the points.

As for the presentation, you can always let somebody handle the transitions, this would also so force you to be speak in the moment.