Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
People believe hands over words
Gestures beat words
Say 'three' while holding up five fingers, or announce 'I have three ideas' with a hand showing five, and it feels horrible. Words are easy to lie with, and people say mismatched things all the time. Gestures are much harder to fake.
Describe a really big idea while holding two fingers an inch apart like a dime, and listeners decide the idea is small. The brain knows to trust the gesture. Some gestures communicate 400% more information than words alone.
Speaking on two tracks
Highly competent speakers work on two tracks, mouth and hands, which signals that they know the content cold. Their hands stay visible, out of pockets and above the desk. They also underline with their hands: showing how big the big idea is, as if it were the size of a beach ball, gives the listener an outline.
Why do people gesture even when unseen?
People gesture while talking on the phone, which shows the movements are tied to speaking itself. The researcher David McNeill has argued that speech and gesture come from the same planning process. In 1998 Jana Iverson and Susan Goldin-Meadow reported in Nature that children who were blind from birth gestured when talking to other blind listeners.
What do mismatched gestures reveal?
Susan Goldin-Meadow and her colleagues studied children explaining how they solved problems, and found that some said one strategy while their hands showed another. Those children were often on the verge of learning, and they were more likely than others to benefit from instruction on the problem. Gestures sometimes carry ideas that the speaker cannot yet put into words. Studies have found that adults watching the children pick up on the strategy shown only in the hands.
More from The Mel Robbins Podcast
