Are you a fiddler on the hoof?

How should I hold my hands?  What do I do with my feet?

These are strange questions.  We don’t normally give thought to our extremities.  It’s enough that they stay attached and do what they’re supposed to do.

But presentation nerves can put a sudden and unwelcome spotlight on them.

They become an unexpected source of embarrassment, like Grandma whipping her clothes off at your dinner party.  They intrude into the proceedings, demanding attention at a time when we've plenty else to think about.

"What do I do with these things?  Put them in my pockets?  Hold them stiffly down my sides like a guardsman? Play with my hair?  Pick up a pen and see how quickly I can click it?  Or perhaps hold them up casually behind my head, displaying the evidence of my nerves, in two saturated patches around my armpits?"

"And what about these other things? I don't want to look frozen.  So perhaps I'll sway from side to side.  Or pad about like a caged panther.  Or maybe stand on one leg? And now on the other.  Whoops, I’ve fallen over."

There's only one thing worse than fidgeting and being painfully conscious of it.  And that's fidgeting and being painfully unconscious of it.

Why? Because you can bet that your audience will be aware of it.  After all, they've got nothing better to watch.  And as they become fascinated by your erratic motion, they will cease to regard you as a source of information and start to see you as a source of entertainment, however appalling.  Which of course destroys your credibility, let alone distracting the audience from your message.

Happily, there's a simple rule here.  The only movement on-stage or on-screen that does not distract an audience is movement with purpose.

So if you use your hands in normal conversation, use them in the interview or presentation. If you don't, then put them behind your back. What's natural for you, works for you.  If your hands become a visual aid to support what you're saying, that's movement with purpose.

Similarly, if there's a good reason to walk from one part of the stage to another, such as to change a slide, that's movement with purpose.  If someone on the other side of the audience asks you a question, walking towards them is movement with purpose.

Pacing about just for the sake of it is distracting and irritating.  A bit like a film director trying to make a scene more interesting by getting the cameraman to shake the camera.

Pointless movement makes you look uncomfortable and unconfident, as if you're trying to escape.  When it comes to stance, the key is to stand still.  Let all movement be from stillness and return to stillness.

Here's something that may help you remember what to do with your hands and feet.  Think of a tree.

Trees do not move about the terrain, occupying one spot today and a different one tomorrow.  They are rooted in the ground.  But only dead trees are motionless.  Living trees have branches that move with the wind.

So unless you're moving with purpose, keep your feet rooted to the ground.  But allow your upper body - shoulders, arms and hands - to move naturally.

Be like a tree.

Cliché. An imperfect storm, going sideways.

Yes, I know.

It's a cliché to use a cliché to attack cliché.

But not all clichés are devil's spawn (whoops).  Some are useful.  For example, is there a more concise way of expressing the proverb 'old dog, new tricks'?  Or a more graphic way of describing the idea of 's**t hitting the fan'?

Just because a word or phrase is widely-used doesn't make it a cliché.  The word 'yes', for instance.  Or indeed the most frequently-occurring word in English: 'the'.

Few of us, I imagine, pull our hair out (whoops again) when we hear the word 'the'.  But if you google 'cliché', you'll be surprised at the diversity of the phrases that drive people up the wall (oh dear).

My personal hate is the term 'going forward', which I'm pleased to see is starting to lose traction (help).

I once worked with someone who used it all the time when talking about the business.  Going forward this, going forward that.  I suspect he was trying to persuade himself the business was going forward.  We all knew it was going backwards.

What really gets my goat (enough, now) is US corporate-speak.  Phrases borrowed from middle-management somewhere in America and brought over here in slavish imitation.

'Going forward' is of course an example, as are 'heads-up', 'perfect storm', 'reach out', 'hard-stop', 'above my pay-grade' and so on.  Don't get me started.

I have nothing against American English.  I think it injects vitality into the language.  It's the liaison between the lady of the house and the game-keeper that restores jut to the receding chin of an aristocratic blood-line.

But as someone with a professional interest in communication, I have long given thought to precisely why cliché is dangerous.  I did have three good reasons, but to avoid that old chestnut, I have reduced them to two.

Non-communication.  Using cliché is not just poor communication, it's non-communication. If you use jargon, your audience will blank it out.  You're effectively stripping out meaning: you might as well replace the phrase with blah-blah-blah.  'In today's competitive market, bleeding-edge businesses seeking to maximise returns need scalable solutions that empower the C-suite to define core competencies...'.  Snore.

Second-hand thinking.  Using a second-hand phrase to express a big idea is even more dangerous, because it signals the idea itself is second-hand.  And therefore your thinking.  If it matters that you come across as original, then use original language.

Only use a cliché if you can give it an original twist.  Don't boil the ocean.  Steam a puddle.

It ain't what you say. It's way say that you it the.

It was in 1955 that the brilliant Noam Chomsky, famed as the father of modern linguistics, coined the following nonsense:

'Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.'

He was seeking to demonstrate that a sentence can be at once perfectly correct and perfectly meaningless.

To push home his point, he contrasted it with:

'Furiously sleep ideas green colorless.'

The first sentence is semantic nonsense.  (Ideas don't sleep.  Nothing sleeps furiously. If ideas are colourless, they can't be green.)

But at least it has the decency to follow the rules of grammar.  Whereas the second pokes you in the eye by breaking the rules of syntax, too.

You have two different kinds of nonsense here: content and structural.  It's the structural variety that is the most disruptive to clarity of communication.  Because, worse than nonsense, it's gibberish.

This suggests - and it comes as some relief to me - that it's OK to talk rubbish, so long as you talk rubbish properly.

Now I'm not sure that's how Chomsky would put it.   He was looking at language, not at communication in its wider sense, but I think there's a parallel here.

If clarity depends as much on structure as on content, then the order in which you make your points is as important as the points you're trying to make.  Isn't it?

Human ingenuity can find meaning in nonsense.  But it requires effort to find sense in gibberish.  Who's going to make that effort?

So perhaps it's worth giving at least as much thought to the structure of your communication as to the content of it.  Perhaps even to make structure the starting point for planning it.

For example, I know I'm going to say three things.  Now, what are they?

Or, I'll discuss the problem first and the solution second.  Now, what's the problem and what's the solution?

Or, I'll use a house as a metaphor for my topic.  Now where do I enter, what's downstairs and what's upstairs?

To prove my point about human ingenuity finding meaning in nonsense, here's an entry to a literary competition held by Stanford University in 1985.  Contestants were invited to make sense of Chomsky's sentence in no more than 100 words.  It's by C.M. Street, courtesy of wikipedia.

It can only be the thought of verdure to come, which prompts us in the autumn to buy these dormant white lumps of vegetable matter covered by a brown papery skin, and lovingly to plant them and care for them. It is a marvel to me that under this cover they are labouring unseen at such a rate within to give us the sudden awesome beauty of spring flowering bulbs. While winter reigns the earth reposes but these colourless green ideas sleep furiously.

Keep calm. But don't carry on.

Do you have the Godfather Gene?

When people fail to show you the respect you deserve, do you find yourself wanting to make them offers they can't refuse?  Through gritted teeth, in a rasping Italian-American whisper?  I know I do.

There's an unwritten contract between presenter and audience.  A key clause in this contract is that the audience will give you their full attention during your presentation.  Or at least, have the courtesy of appearing to do so.  Failing to respect this is a breach of contract.

For example, there you are delivering your state-of-the-nation report on why the company needs more coffee machines.  And suddenly Maureen starts fiddling with her mobile phone.

In Maureen's mind, there's a perfectly legitimate reason for this criminal breach.  She's booking a hairdresser's appointment.

(A wise guy might say that, if people are fiddling with their phones, it's your fault for not making your presentation more compelling.  But you and I know that if there were any justice in this world, it would be bed-time for Maureen, with a horse's head to keep her company.)

Here's the point.  As in the streets of Little Italy, so in your presentation.  If someone breaks the contract, you have to be seen to do something about it.  Because if you don't seem to care whether people listen to you, it suggests you have nothing worth saying.  And if you have nothing worth saying, why should anyone listen?

Carrying on regardless is not an option.  When one person starts fiddling, and gets away with it, other people start fiddling.  Pretty soon everyone's fiddling.  You've got to nip it in the bud.

The question is: how?

Option #1: The Sicilian Defence. Have your boys arrange Maureen's withdrawal from the room in a hail of bullets.  Satisfying, yes. But as the smoke clears and the emergency services arrive, you may find it hard to pick up where you left off.

Option #2: Engage Sarcasm. Say something cutting so Maureen gets the point.  'ARE WE TRENDING??!!' you quip in a choked voice, shaking with rage.  No: mobile phone fiddlers seldom get the point.  Your anger will just alienate the audience.  You have to keep calm.

Option #3: Rise Above.  The best thing you can do is to take action so that Maureen's fiddling ceases to be your problem and becomes a problem for her.  And to a lesser extent, for the audience.

A problem for Maureen, because you're about to make her the centre of attention.  A problem for the audience, because her fiddling is holding up proceedings.

To achieve this, all you have to do is (a) gaze at Maureen and (b) stop speaking.  (It helps if you can smile happily while you're doing this.)

The audience will notice the sudden hush and look to you to see what's going on.  They'll see you smiling at Maureen.  Maureen will look up to find all eyes on her.  She'll mutter an apology and put down her phone.  You'll smile graciously, thank her and carry on.  All this can take less than five seconds.  And it requires nothing from you but silence, a look and a smile.

This technique works just as well for other events that threaten to derail your presentation.   People whispering to each other instead of listening to you.  People falling asleep.  People actually snoring.

If you appear unfazed and unflustered, the audience will act as your ally against the offender.  For no other reason than they want you to get the presentation over and done with.

So keep calm, but don't carry on.  Not until you've dealt with the problem.