You will encounter some experts who advise you to stand still with both feet planted firmly, or to grab the lectern with both hands so that you don’t appear shaky. This is terrible advice!

You are normally better off if you can walk around when you are presenting if you are speaking to a group from 5 to 5000. Obviously, if you are presenting to just one or two people and everyone is seated, you can just stay seated. But if you are standing, then I recommend that you move around the room.

Of course, you don’t have to move. You can stand in one spot for your whole presentation and still be a competent presenter, but you run the risk of making yourself seem ordinary and boring if you do stay in one place.

First, let’s address the issue of the lectern. In my view, a lectern should be seen like a set of training wheels, which is not something to be used by anyone over 5 years old.
Why?

Because the second you get behind a lectern it creates a barrier between you and your audience. It obscures 2/3 of your body. Once you are behind the lectern, you will be tempted to lean on it, hold it or hold your notes. This means you have shut down all of your natural hand movements. The result is you tend to be seen as a frozen and stiff machine that doesn’t move, except for the lips.

When you stand behind a lectern, you run the risk of making your audience feel you are insecure. When you get behind a lectern, it’s as if you were hiding behind a wall because you fear an audience is going to turn on you and start throwing rotten vegetables at you!

Why do we get behind lecterns in the first place? Because the person speaking before us did and the person presenting after us did, so it must be the right thing to do, right? Wrong.

As a foolproof presenter, your goal is to distinguish yourself as better, more confident, more comfortable, more conversational, more interesting and more memorable than all other presenters around you. You can’t do that if you follow the pack. I’m not suggesting that you do anything showy or theatrical, like getting down on bended knee during your presentation. But I have found that audiences respond much better to presenters who don’t stay behind a lectern and, instead, move around the room.

Professional public speakers never use lecterns for this vary reason. Even though you might not aspire to become a full-time professional public speaker, there is no reason why you can’t borrow some of the easy techniques they use. It constantly amazes me, but audiences around the world seem genuinely impressed when a speaker can walk around a room or stage and speak at the same time. All it is is walking and talking at the same time, something most of us master at 4 years old!

But here’s why it works for you as a presenter. Most people have a huge fear of presenting and public speaking; they are afraid they will forget what they are going to say and look like a fool. Therefore when they see you walking around the room talking to them without staring at notes or holding on to a lectern, there is a part of them that says “wow, that presenter is brave, I could never do that!”

When you are moving around the room, there are a few guidelines to keep in mind:
1.    Don’t walk consistently from side to side or back to front. If your movement is consistent, you will appear to be pacing and that will make you seem nervous.
2.    Move naturally, which means inconsistently.
3.    Feel free to stop moving at any time.
4.    Move to show you have finished a thought and need a moment to signify a transition.
5.    Move closer to someone when that person asks a question.
6.    Move to different parts of the room to give different people attention.
7.    Occasionally, move close to people, but don’t stand too close for too long.
8.    When you want to make a really important point, stop moving.
9.    Your movement should not include foot tapping or any other nervous, jerky movement.
10.    Mix it up.

Part of the value of movement is that you are gently but forcefully coercing your audience into moving their head and eyes to follow you. If they are moving their heads, they are less likely to fall asleep. Additionally, you are putting your audience on notice, politely, that you might be close to them at any time. This means they had better think twice about checking out their email in front of you. Conversely, if you stay behind the lectern, audience members feel it is safe for them to read email, doddle, or even chat with people next to them and you won’t even notice.
By walking around the room and getting closer to people, you make yourself a much biggerr presence in the room and therefore harder to ignore.

Why else do people get behind lecterns? That’s often where they store notes. As mentioned in (note to editor, let’s reference the chapter where we talk about notes here), you can still place notes on a lectern in a sideways manner, so that you can look at them without standing directly behind the lectern.

Other times people stand behind the lectern because the microphone is attached to it. Make sure you truly need the microphone. I’ve seen presenters talk to a room with ten people in it for ten minutes and they stood behind a lectern with a mic that was 20 feet away from the audience. In this case, you should just walk right up to the ten people and speak; you won’t need a microphone in that setting.

If you are in front of a large audience and you need the microphone, you can normally bend the mic stand to the side so that you can stand next to the lectern rather than directly behind it. Now, your whole body will be visible.

If you are giving a presentation to a large annual sales conference you should always ask for a wireless microphone so that you won’t have to be stuck behind the lectern. You might not get one, but you won’t know unless you ask for one.
Finally, it’s not the end of the world to speak from behind a lectern or to stand in one spot, but if you can do something that you already do every day, walk and talk at the same time, and have the audience associate you with the skills of highly paid professional speakers, why not do it?