Why PM Modis body language was all wrong at BRICS summit Narendra Modi is clearly not the man when he speaks to Indian audiences and when he speaks to foreign ones in English. His BRICS summit speech simply failed to impress due to a flawed body language. PM Modi during his speech at the BRICS conference. AFP 23 mins ago By Khyati Bhatt It was somewhat disconcerting to watch Prime Minister Narendra Modis lacklustre performance in the first speech he gave to an international audience during the recent BRICS summit. While one can understand his nervousness on the occasion, but his apparent discomfort and lack of preparedness in making a speech in English showed that he was not the confident politician we saw during the election campaign. It was not the content of this speech, but his non-verbal behaviours that amounted to give his audience an exit ticket. Here are some of the more glaring ones. Lack of eye contact: It is a must for any speaker to look into the audiences eyes to connect with them. Normal eye contact would include looking at any one person in the audience for at least two or three seconds before moving on to another person. A good speaker normally looks around the seated audience, halting every few seconds to make eye contact with any one specific person, and then again moves his eyes around. Modi was so busy reading from his written speech that he barely glanced up for a few milliseconds, spending no time on eye contact whatsoever. This behaviour can get irritating and disengaging for the audience, for they could conclude that the speaker is not actually talking to them. If you must look at your notes, pause, refer to them, look up again and then continue. Shifting feet: Throughout his speech, Modi shifted from one foot to the other, swinging like a pendulum, making it difficult to watch him with a steady gaze. This behaviour suggests his nervousness and perhaps a desire to be elsewhere. A good strategy for avoiding this shifty tendency is to stand with feet slightly apart. Better still would be to shift your position or stepping slightly forward and backward, after every point is completed. Self touching gestures: Any self touching gestures, like....
Posted on: Fri, 18 Jul 2014 06:56:47 +0000
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