Recently, a client of mine, who is also a childhood friend, left me a voice mail saying that he did not think my short article on the power of gesture to create emotion was appropriate for the market I serve.… Read More »Speaking Anxiety: The Mind/Body Toggle
Science, like the rest of us, advances through trial and error, better known as dumb luck. One summer day in 1991, neuroscientists in a lab at Parma University wired up a monkey’s brain for a simple experiment. They wanted to… Read More »Public Speaking Skills: Mind Maps of Gesture
A friend of mine, who is a very successful consultant, told me that she has lost her confidence as a speaker. For twenty years she has been speaking to large groups of clients and potential clients with success. Now she feels very unsure of… Read More »Speaking Anxiety: A Loss of Confidence
Trying to master a mental task? Acting it out can help. In a study reported in Cognition, when kids were told to use gestures as they learned to do a type of math problem, the lesson stuck. Embodiment gives you–literally–another… Read More »Speaking Anxiety: Gestures Help You Think
Traveling to a foreign country, we will have trouble communicating with the locals if we don’t speak their language. We may also have trouble reading their facial expressions. Hillary Elfenbein of the University of California at Berkeley has done a study… Read More »Communication Skills Training: Facial Dialects