Someone forgot to tell this robot to “Stop making distracting hand gestures.” 

If you haven’t met this robot, she’s Pepper, and she’s actually a bit of a dinosaur. She’s been around since 2014. She’s old news.

What’s not old news is her being in residence at the Paris Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie where I saw her last week when I took my kids to an exhibit on robots (and also filmed this guerilla video).

And that’s where she hit me with this gem of dialogue:

“And my humanoid characteristics make it easier to communicate with you. Indeed, I can speak like you and move like you.”

Take a look at the GIF again. Look at those “hands!” (Or better yet, watch the full video to see Pepper talking with her hands as though she were an air traffic controller).

I feel so indebted to this robot! She is my latest recruit in turning the tide against what I think is one of the most antiquated and counterproductive bits of communication coaching I have ever (and still) encounter: “Don’t Make Distracting Hand Gestures.”

I’ve been waving the “Use Your Gestures with Freedom and Ease” banner for decades; I dedicated an entire chapter to the topic in my bestselling book; I developed an exercise called Silent Storytelling precisely to liberate speakers’ gestures (you can learn it here if you like).

But Pepper might help me in my mission more than anything in the above paragraph. Why? She is the profoundest proofpoint. Her builders engineered her to mimic humans in as realistic a way as possible, precisely to make the experience of listening to her a comfortable and familiar one. Notice: they did not engineer her to make rare, dignified, non-distracting hand gestures. She uses her hands the whole time she is talking!

Maybe you should too. There’s a good chance that somewhere along the line you’ve learned that you should constrain your gestures. But that’s not how you talk IRL (“in real life,” for the acronym-allergic). So why would you deprive yourself of a powerful aspect of communication in one of the places it matters most, i.e. in your professional communication?

Take a page out of Pepper’s playbook and unleash your hands. They probably have a story to tell too.

Cheers,
Michael Chad Hoeppner