When you think about public speaking, you probably have these questions on your mind

• What should I say?
• How should I structure my presentation?
• What if someone asks me a difficult question?

Then you stand up in front of a room and realise there is another aspect that you have not considered: What are you doing with your hands? Where are you looking? Are you standing still? Are you moving too much? Does your face show what you are trying to communicate?

Focusing on body language is as important as on what you want to say for public speaking situations. This does not mean finding one “perfect” posture and holding it throughout a presentation. What looks natural in one situation can feel completely out of place in another.

A speaker addressing ten college classmates, presenting a project to team members, or conducting a formal seminar may need to make different about what and how they want to present.

Your goal, therefore, should be to become aware of your physical behaviour and learn how to adapt it to the audience and situation.

Below are a few of the most common questions we get asked on body language when it comes to public speaking situations.

How Do I Stop My Hands From Shaking When Speaking in Public?

Shaking is one of the most noticeable signs of nervousness – at least to the person experiencing it.

You may be holding your notes and suddenly become very aware of them moving. You may grip the lectern tightly or keep your hands in your pockets because you don’t know what else to do.

The first thing to understand is that trying desperately to hide nervousness can sometimes make you more conscious of it.

Instead, think about what your hands are doing when you are communicating an idea.

When you explain something naturally to a friend, your hands probably move without you planning each gesture. During a presentation, that natural movement can disappear if your attentions in on “Am I doing this correctly?”

One useful exercise is to record yourself explaining a familiar topic without trying to control your hands. Watch the recording afterwards and notice what happens when you become more engaged, uncertain or excited.

You may discover that your hands are not actually the problem. You may simply need to become more comfortable speaking while being observed.

How Do I Look Confident While Speaking in Public?

Looking confident does not require that you standing rigidly, smile continuously or make dramatic gestures. In fact, trying to look confident can sometimes make your body language appear less natural.

A more useful question you want to consider is: Does my physical behaviour support what I am saying? If you’re making an important point but looking down at the floor, your physical behaviour and your words are sending different signals. If you’re explaining something casually but standing completely rigid with your arms locked by your sides, the delivery may feel disconnected from the content.

Confidence in body language often comes by being familiar with your topic, being well prepared, and learning good body language techniques in general. For e.g. standing in front of the audience rather than behind the table or dias makes you appear open and well connected. Using hand gestures instead of keeping hands in pockets makes you appear ready to engage as a speaker.

How the audience will “see” your confidence is from congruence of words and body language. This means whether your posture, facial expression, movement and voice working reasonably well with the message and nature of audience. For e.g. a speaker addressing a small, familiar group may naturally be more animated. A formal presentation to senior people may call for more controlled movement.

Thinking through these scenarios enough can help you be prepared, and this preparation will help you to be naturally more confident.

Where Should I Look When Speaking in Public?

Eye contact can feel particularly uncomfortable when you’re nervous. Some speakers look at the floor. Others look over everyone’s heads. Some fix their attention on one friendly face and stay there for most of the presentation. None of these extremes is particularly helpful.

The purpose of looking at your audience isn’t to prove that you are confident. It is part of connecting your communication to the people receiving it.

Imagine you’re explaining an important point to a group. If you are constantly looking at your laptop or screen, it becomes harder to notice whether people are following you. On the other hand, staring intensely at one person can feel uncomfortable for both of you.

So rather than thinking, “How many seconds of eye contact should I make?”, start noticing the audience as a group and allow your gaze to move naturally between people and sections of the room.

If “looking” at people makes you nervous, look at objects right behind the audience or in between the passages etc. When the audience is large, like in public speaking situations, the audience cannot really see if you are looking at them or spaces around them. For a smaller audience, if eye contact makes you nervous, try looking just above the eyes when you connect with faces of individuals – again this will make you feel less nervous.

Maintaining eye contact is something that becomes easier when you practise in front of different audiences. You begin to understand what natural eye contact feels like rather than trying to follow a number in your head.

What Should I Do With My Hands While Speaking on Stage?

This is probably one of the most common body-language questions because hands suddenly become very noticeable when you are standing in front of people.

• Should they stay by your sides?
• Should you hold them together?
• Should you gesture?

There is no single position you need to maintain throughout a presentation.

Your gestures should have some relationship to what you are saying. For e.g. if you are describing three stages in a process, your hand movement might naturally help distinguish those stages. If you’re talking about something small or precise, a smaller gesture may feel more appropriate than a large sweeping movement.

The mistake is to think that you need to “perform” with hand gestures. You don’t need to add a hand movement every time you say something important. Instead, become aware of the gestures you already use and gradually learn to make them more purposeful.

A useful starting exercise is to watch a recording of yourself with the sound turned off. What do your hands communicate when you can’t hear your words? Sometimes the answer is surprisingly different from what you imagined.

How Should I Stand While Speaking in Public?

Many people read advice about maintaining “good posture” in public and think this means standing completely straight and still.

But a speaker is not a mannequin. A comfortable stance gives you enough stability to move naturally while speaking. If you lock your knees, pull your shoulders back unnaturally or keep your body frozen, you may actually become more conscious of your posture throughout the presentation.

Think instead about whether your body allows you to breathe, speak and move comfortably.

Your starting position matters, particularly when you first walk up to speak. If you arrive at the front, immediately look down at your notes and begin talking while adjusting your position, the opening can feel rushed.

Taking a moment to settle before you begin can make the transition into speaking much smoother. And if comfortable for you, try to stand a bit close to the audience to appear open to engage. So remove objects between yourself and your audience so that you directly face them. This will help to connect with them and for them to trust you.

Your posture should support your communication rather than becoming another thing you have to constantly monitor.

How Do I Stop Pacing or Moving Around Too Much While Speaking?

Movement isn’t automatically bad. A speaker who never moves can appear rigid, while someone who walks continuously can make it difficult for the audience to know what deserves attention.

Think about it like this: Does my movement have a reason? Imagine someone walking back and forth while explaining a complicated concept. The audience may end up following the movement instead of the explanation.

Now imagine that the speaker moves to one side of the room when introducing a new section, stops, explains the idea and then moves again when transitioning to another part. The movement has become part of the presentation itself.

This is where practice becomes particularly valuable. Most people cannot accurately judge their own movement while concentrating on what they are saying. A recording can show you whether you barely move, move continuously, or tend to move at particular moments – especially when you are nervous.

Once you know your pattern, you have something specific to work on.

How Do I Use Facial Expressions When Speaking in Public?

Your face is communicating even when you aren’t deliberately using it. If you’re talking about an exciting development with exactly the same expression you use while explaining a routine process, the audience may not receive the same sense of importance that you intended.

At the same time, exaggerated expressions can feel just as unnatural.

Don’t aim to “perform” emotions. Rather allow your facial expression to reflect the meaning and tone of what you’re saying. Think about how differently you naturally react when telling a friend about something frustrating, surprising or funny. You don’t consciously select a facial expression before each sentence.

Public speaking can become more natural when some of that responsiveness is maintained on the stage as well.

That’s why rehearsing only by silently reading your presentation isn’t enough. You need to experience what happens when you actually say the words aloud and connect them to the meaning behind them.

How Do I Avoid Looking Nervous While Speaking in Public?

If you’re nervous, you may become hyper-aware of every physical detail.

• Am I fidgeting?
• Are my hands shaking?
• Am I looking nervous?

Ironically, constantly checking yourself can make you even less present with the audience.

Instead of trying to eliminate every visible sign of nervousness, identify the behaviours that genuinely interfere with your communication. Perhaps you repeatedly touch your hair. Maybe you shift your weight every few seconds. Perhaps you keep looking at your slides whenever you feel uncertain.

Those are useful things to work on. But you don’t need to become completely motionless to prove that you are confident. A speaker can be nervous and still communicate effectively.

You can’t expect to make your body reveal absolutely nothing. Aim to become comfortable enough that nervousness isn’t everything your body is showing.

Why Does Body Language Change With Different Audiences?

You may have been told to stand confidently, maintain eye contact and use open gestures. But what does “good” body language actually mean if the audience changes?

Consider three situations.

1. You are giving an informal presentation to your college classmates.
2. You are presenting your team’s quarterly results to senior managers.
3. You are conducting a formal workshop for people you have never met.

You would probably behave somewhat differently in each setting. The level of movement, formality, eye contact, facial expression and even physical distance can change depending on the relationship you have with the audience and what the situation requires.

That is why learning a collection of body-language rules has limited value on its own.

The deeper skill is observation and adaptation. You need to notice who you are speaking to, what the situation demands and how your behaviour is being received.

That judgement develops through experience.

How Can I Practise Body Language for Public Speaking?

You can start by practicing alone.

Record yourself giving a two-minute explanation. Watch it once with the sound on, and then again with the sound off. Without the sound, notice your posture, movement, gestures, facial expressions and eye direction.

Then try the same explanation again, changing only one thing – Perhaps you stay more calm and grounded. Perhaps you allow yourself to gesture naturally instead of keeping your hands together. Perhaps you practise looking at different parts of the room rather than staring at one point.

You’re experimenting: What feels natural? What changes the way your message comes across? What works when you’re speaking casually but feels strange in a formal presentation?

And eventually, practise with actual people. This is where the learning becomes much richer because your audience can respond to you in ways a mirror cannot.

You may think a gesture is distracting when it actually makes your explanation clearer. You may think your eye contact is strong when you are mostly looking at one person. You may not realise that you become much more rigid whenever you are asked an unexpected question. These are difficult things to discover without feedback.

Body Language Isn’t a Performance You Memorise

There is a temptation to look for a formula.

1. Stand this way.
2. Move your hands this way.
3. Make eye contact for this long.
4. Smile here.

Those instructions can be useful as starting points, but here’s the final skill: A strong speaker needs to be able to adjust.

If the audience looks confused, you may need to slow down, change your explanation or become more expressive. If a room is very formal, you may naturally become more measured. If you’re presenting something informal to a familiar group, a more relaxed style may work better.

Your body language becomes more effective when you are responding to the situation rather than performing a memorised set of movements. And that is why practice with different people and different situations matters so much.

When you practice, you aren’t simply rehearsing the same presentation until you can repeat it perfectly. You’re learning how your communication changes when the environment changes.

What if you want to teach Public Speaking?

For trainers, this distinction becomes particularly important: When a participant has poor eye contact, telling them “Look at the audience more” may not solve the real problem.

Perhaps they look away because they are trying to remember their next point. Perhaps they feel uncomfortable looking at senior people. Perhaps they are concentrating so hard on their words that they have stopped noticing the audience altogether.

The intervention would be different in each case.

A good public-speaking facilitator therefore isn’t simply demonstrating “correct” body language. They are helping participants notice their own patterns, experiment with alternatives and understand when each approach is appropriate.

That requires the right frameworks, practice, observation and feedback.

At Simply Body Talk Academy, this is an important part of how we approach communication training. Whether you’re a student or young professional looking to become more comfortable presenting, or a trainer looking to develop the ability to facilitate these skills for others, the aim is to move beyond knowing the rules and towards being able to use them naturally.

Because ultimately, good body language in public speaking isn’t about looking confident every second.

It is about being present enough to notice your audience, understand what the situation requires, and let your physical communication support what you are trying to say.