Not related to headshot per se, but I also noticed that when the C-level folks are talking on camera or on stage, they do this weird hand pose in which their fingers are touching in almost dove-tail fashion (e.g., https://image.cnbcfm.com/api/v1/image/107010033-166673005906...). I wonder if it's taught to them by professional public speaking trainers.
> I wonder if it's taught to them by professional public speaking trainers.
Totally is, as part of "use your hands more... but not too much more... but also don't rest them at your sides!" stuff. The steeple thing is an improvement for people who aren't good at public speaking, but awkward as hell compared to someone who's actually-good (they may do it too, but you won't notice because it'll seem natural, and they probably won't do it nearly as much)
At this point it may actually have come around such that the awkward-steeple is a desirable signal of some kind, just because every corporations seems to have done the exact same training, so that doing it, even awkwardly, gives off a "this is official" vibe.
>Totally is, as part of "use your hands more... but not too much more... but also don't rest them at your sides!" stuff.
I've had a couple public speaking classes but when I first started shooting some video of myself (long before COVID) and looked at the result I was "Jesus, I wave my hands around a lot. Need to calm things down." It's easier with just upper body video though because you can just drop your hands out of the frame.
Thinking about when I'm on stage, I think it's, in part, a way to calm the motion of your hands without having your arms at your sides which can feel unnatural and make you look stiff.
Salespeople are taught that if the sales prospect makes a pejorative or other remark that absolutely must be be overcome to close a sale, they should steeple their hands, engage the prospect, but never overtly disagree or argue.
It also gives you some time to think. The exec who ran the systems group at IBM when I was an IT industry analyst would, during Q&A, write things down on index cars. Now, for all I know, he was writing "This guy is a moron" which wouldn't have been wrong in many cases. But it made him look engaged and thoughtful and gave him time to compose an answer.
Definitely reminds me of the clip from 30 Rock where Jack Donaghy has to shoot a promotional clip and doesn’t know what to do with his hands, so by the end of the session he is holding a coffee mug in each hand and still spiraling out of control.
I'm not a great public speaker, but what always worried me about something like Toastmasters is you're learning public speaking from other people who are also faking it.
Exactly. Toastmasters is good for bright working class people with limited education who find themselves in competition with college graduates for advancement in corporate settings. This is a very common situation in the U.S. where corporate opportunity is more fluid than in other regions.
It is fairly useless if you’ve already had to give presentations at university, or trade shows.
Honestly, other than being comfortable with your material, I'm not sure you can really prepare for getting up on stage in front of 100s or 1000s of people.
Most of us should probably do proper dress rehearsals more. I always mentally walkthrough a presentation a few times but I often don't do an actual run-through--except those times when I miss switching the video on for a recorded presentation :-) And it really does help. I always make some changes if I'm giving a presentation more than once.
Record yourself. We all have both speech and physical tics.
That said, I've done this a lot. And the bar to getting materially better was probably a bunch of professional voice coaching and speaker training years ago.
Here's a boring 1h video discussing all kinds of hand poses. (I think the channel got a bunch of backlash for pro-colonialism or something like that.) It appears I watched half an hour of it, maybe as a form of induced delirium.
