My dad came up to me and said, "Son, it's okay. You flunked your exams. You already got arrested." One of the most important things that you need to realize is when you get nervous, you try to cover your vital organs, and that's why you would see a lot of speakers sometimes fold their hands, bring their hands in front of them, and that's a sign of nervousness. Great speakers keep their body open, so there is no barrier between you and me.


Raise your hand if you have a mother. Let me see. Put them all together, you get Mama. Something that when you're starting out, you got to be very conscious about is keeping your body open. Here's tip number two: have your palms open. Do this exercise with me. Take a look at your palms. Turn them around. Take a look at the inside of your palms again. What side relaxes your eye? If you really concentrate, when you look at the inside of your palm, your eye relaxes. A lot of great speakers open their palms towards the audience, showing more openness, and that allows the audience to connect with the speaker better as opposed to showing the back of your hand.


Ladies and gentlemen, today I'm a dreamer, I'm a speaker, and I learned the unfailing quality of unconditional love from my wife. Number three: get comfortable with the stage. When you're comfortable on the stage that you're speaking on, your body is free to move about, use body language. But if you're not comfortable with that stage and if you feel foreign on that stage, what happens is your body language starts to constrict, and you start to cover your body up. And when a son sees a mother cry tears of shame, that's a life-changing moment. She looked at me and said, "Son, I want you to be a better man."


Whatever you do, don't touch the podium. As soon as you do that, you're going to be leaning on it, you're going to be shaking that podium, and you will be doing all sorts of things on the podium. So what you do is you keep a comfortable distance between you and the podium. You can keep your notes on it, but you can use your hands to gesture. Don't rest your hands on the podium. So keep a distance, and you can gesture and use body language as you want from a little distance from the podium.