And what about establishing trust non-verbally?  This is full, rich, and interesting topic that I can only sketch out here.  I go into much more detail in my next book, Trust Me:  Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma, due out from Jossey-Bass in December. 

So let’s talk about a couple of the most important things.  First of all, you must be open to your audience.  If you send out a non-verbal message that is anything but open, your audience will shut down too, and it will be impossible to establish trust.  That’s so important that I’ll say it again:  without openness there can be no trust. 

The bad news is that speakers can find an astonishing number of ways to signal that they feel a bit exposed in front of an audience.  This feeling is completely natural and understandable, but you’ ve got to fight it. 

Practice being open, and you’ll gradually lose the self-consciousness.  How do you practice being open?  There are two ways.  Either work from the outside in, or the inside out.  Try both, and see which works best for you.  Or try a mixture of the two. 

The outside-in method is to force yourself to keep your arms away from your body, using them to gesture toward the audience, but never (or at least hardly ever) folding them in front of your body in some way.  As I said, the possibilities for self-protection are endless.  People keep their elbows close to their sides and just wave their forearms and hands, like a penguin.  People hold their arms parallel in front of their bodies, making chopping gestures (the first President Bush did this).  People put their fingertips together in the spider-doing-pushups-in-the-mirror gesture.  And so on and on.  All of these are closed gestures and all of them prevent trust from developing between you and the audience. 

The inside-out method is to focus on the intent to be open.  Feel it, and then watch your gestures follow suit if you’ve been successful.  Like I say, try both and see what works for you.

Second, since you’re trying to present authority to the audience, they won’t trust you if you’re too fidgety.  A little nervous movement at the beginning of a speech is natural, and forgivable.  But if you don’t settle down, we won’t trust you.

Once again, fidgeting shows up in a myriad of ways.  One of the most common is ‘happy feet’.  That’s the condition where the speaker wanders all over the stage, never coming to a full stop, pacing like a caged tiger or a lost professor.  You’ve got to plant your feet and make your points if you want your audience to trust you.