A must read for anyone wanting to up their presentation & public speaking skills. A very well-organized book that goes through the best-practices of over a hundred TED talks filled with great examples and scientific studies to back up their claims.
Contents:
- SECRET #1: UNLEASH THE MASTER WITHIN
- SECRET #2: STORYTELLING
- SECRET #3: HAVE A CONVERSATION
- SECRET #4: TEACH ME SOMETHING NEW
- SECRET #5: DELIVER JAW-DROPPING MOMENTS
- SECRET #6: LIGHTEN UP
- SECRECT #7: STICK TO THE 18-MINUTE RULE
- SECRET #8: PAINT A MENTAL PICTURE WITH MULTISENSORY EXPERIENCES
- SECRECT #9: STAY IN YOUR LANE
show more ▼
My Notes
SECRET #1: UNLEASH THE MASTER WITHIN
Dig deep to identify your unique and meaningful connection to your presentation topic.
Science shows that passion is contagious, literally. You cannot inspire others unless you are inspired yourself. You stand a much greater chance of persuading and inspiring your listeners if you express an enthusiastic, passionate, and meaningful connection to your topic.
People cannot inspire others unless and until they are inspired themselves.
Asking yourself, "What's my product?" isn't nearly as effective as asking yourself, "What business am I really in? What am I truly passionate about?"
Example: Howard Schultz, the founder of Starbucks, once told me he wasn't passionate about coffee as much as he was passionate about "building a third place between work and home, a place where employees would be treated with respect and offer exceptional customer service." Coffee is the product, but Starbucks is in the business of customer service.
WHAT MAKES YOUR HEART SING? Ask yourself, "What makes my heart sing?" Your passion is not a passing interest or even a hobby. A passion is something that is intensely meaningful and core to your identity. Once you identify what your passion is, can you say it influences your daily activities? Can you incorporate it into what you do professionally? Your true passion should be the subject of your communications and will serve to truly inspire your audience.
SECRET #2: STORYTELLING
Stevenson spoke for five minutes before he introduced his first statistics about how many people are incarcerated in U.S. prisons and the percentage of those who are poor and/or African-American.
"You have to get folks to trust you," Stevenson told me. "If you start with something too esoteric and disconnected from the lives of everyday people, it's harder for people to engage."
You need data, facts, and analysis to challenge people, but you also need narrative to get people comfortable enough to care about the community that you are advocating for. Your audience needs to be willing to go with you on a journey.
He believed that persuasion occurs when three components are represented: ethos, logos, and pathos. Ethos is credibility. We tend to agree with people whom we respect for their achievements, title, experience, etc. Logos is the means of persuasion through logic, data, and statistics. Pathos is the act of appealing to emotions.
Inspiring communicators and the best TED presenters stick to one of three types of stories:
- Personal stories that relate directly to the theme of the conversation or presentation.
- Stories about other people who have learned a lesson the audience can relate to.
- Stories involving the success or failure of products or brands.
Tell personal stories, but choose them carefully. A personal experience that led to an unexpected result often makes for a particularly compelling story.
When you tell a story, by all means use metaphors, analogies, and vivid language, but eliminate clichés, buzzwords, and jargon. Your audience will tune out phrases they've heard a million times.
SECRET #3: HAVE A CONVERSATION
Practice relentlessly and internalize your content so that you can deliver the presentation as comfortably as having a conversation with a close friend.
Authenticity doesn't happen naturally. An authentic presentation requires hours of work—digging deeper into your soul than you ever have, choosing the right words that best represent the way you feel about your topic, delivering those words for maximum impact, and making sure that your nonverbal communication—your gestures, facial expressions, and body language—are consistent with your message.
The four elements of verbal delivery are:
- RATE: Speed at which you speak.
- VOLUME: Loudness or softness.
- PITCH: High or low inflections.
- PAUSES: Short pauses to punch key words.
Studies show that 150 to 160 words per minute is the ideal rate of speech for audio books. It seems to be the rate at which most listeners can comfortably hear, absorb, and recall the information.2 Having read my own text for audio books, I can tell you that the ideal pace of dictation is slightly slower than the rate of speech in normal conversation.
If the ideal rate of speech for a face-to-face pitch or conversation is 190 words per minute then it would reasonable to assume that some of the most popular TED speakers communicate 3,400 words in 18 minutes, or very close to that number.
"If you don't believe what you're saying, your movements will be awkward and not natural.
Researchers have found that rigorous thinkers cannot easily stop using gestures, even when they try to keep their hands folded. Using gestures actually frees up their mental capacities, and complex thinkers use complex gestures.
Save your most expansive gestures for key moments in the presentation. Reinforce your key messages with purposeful gestures.
SECRET #4: TEACH ME SOMETHING NEW
Reveal information that's completely new to your audience, packaged differently, or offers a fresh and novel way to solve an old problem.
You'll become a more interesting person if you're interested in learning and sharing ideas from fields that are much different from your own. Great innovators connect ideas from different fields.
If you can't explain your big idea in 140 characters or less, keep working on your message. The discipline brings clarity to your presentation and helps your audience recall the one big idea you're trying to teach them.
The first step to giving a TED-worthy presentation is to ask yourself, What is the one thing I want my audience to know? Make sure it easily fits within a Twitter post, what I call a "Twitter-friendly headline."
SECRET #5: DELIVER JAW-DROPPING MOMENTS
The jaw-dropping moment in a presentation is when the presenter delivers a shocking, impressive, or surprising moment that is so moving and memorable, it grabs the listener's attention and is remembered long after the presentation is over.
Make numbers meaningful, memorable, and jaw-dropping by placing them in a context that the audience can relate to. A statistic doesn't have to be boring. My advice: never leave data dangling. Context matters. If your presentation has a number or data point that is groundbreaking or paramount, think about how you might package it and make it appealing to the listener.
SECRET #6: LIGHTEN UP
Don't take yourself (or your topic) too seriously. The brain loves humor. Give your audience something to smile about.
Don't try to be funny. Avoid telling jokes.
Here are five ways to add just the right amount of humor to your speech or presentation without spending two years developing a joke:
- Anecdotes, Observations, and Personal Stories - If something happened to you and you found the humor in it, there's a good chance others will, too.
Anecdotes and observations are short stories or examples that are intended not to elicit a huge laugh but rather to put a smile on people's faces and endear the speaker to his or her audience.
REMEMBER WHAT WORKED. Think back to anecdotes, stories, observations, or insights that have made you or your colleagues smile in the past. If they worked there and are appropriate to your presentation, weave them into your narrative and practice telling it.
- Analogies and Metaphors - An analogy is a comparison that points out the similarities between two different things. It's an excellent rhetorical technique that helps to explain complex topics.
Example: "Chris Anderson asked me if I could put the last 25 years of antipoverty campaigning into 10 minutes for TED. That's an Englishman asking an Irishman to be succinct."
- Quotes - An easy way to get a laugh without being a comedian or telling a joke is to quote somebody else who said something funny. The quotes can be from famous people, anonymous people, or family and friends.
DO YOUR HOMEWORK ON QUOTES. Search for third-party quotes that lighten up the mood of your presentation or cut through the complexity of your topic. Don't feel that you need to stick with famous quotes. Go off the beaten path. In many cases, quotes from people you know can be quite funny and engaging.
- Video - Very few people use video clips in presentations, even at TED talks. Video, however, is a very effective way of bringing humor into a presentation: it takes the pressure off you to be funny.
- Photos - LIGHTEN UP YOUR PRESENTATION WITH VIDEO AND PHOTOS. Most PowerPoint presentations are dreadful because they have so little—if any—emotional impact. Incorporate a humorous photograph or video clip to lighten the mood.
SECRECT #7: STICK TO THE 18-MINUTE RULE
A TED presentation must not exceed 18 minutes in length.
Eighteen minutes is the ideal length of time for a presentation. If you must create one that's longer, build in soft breaks (stories, videos, demonstrations) every 10 minutes.
Researchers have discovered that "cognitive backlog," too much information, prevents the successful transmission of ideas.
The rule of three simply means that people can remember three pieces of information really well; add more items and retention falls off considerably.
A message map is the visual display of your idea on one page.
Building a message map can help you pitch anything (a product, service, company, or idea) in as little as 15 seconds or to shape the framework for a longer, 18-minute presentation.
Here is the three-step process for using a message map to build a winning pitch:
- Create a Twitter-Friendly Headline - Ask yourself, "What is the single most important thing I want my listener to know about my [product, service, brand, idea]?" Draw a circle at the top of the message map (or page) and insert the answer to this question—this is your headline.
Remember to make sure your headline fits in a Twitter post (no more than 140 characters).
- Support the Headline with Three Key Messages.
- Reinforce the Three Messages with Stories, Statistics, and Examples - Add bullet points to each of the three supporting messages.
SECRET #8: PAINT A MENTAL PICTURE WITH MULTISENSORY EXPERIENCES
Deliver presentations with components that touch more than one of the senses: sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell.
In presentation slides, use pictures instead of text whenever possible. Your audience is far more likely to recall information when it's delivered in a combination of pictures and text rather than text alone.
The one technique that is common to all good presentation design: one theme per slide. When most presenters deliver data, they bombard the audience with an avalanche of numbers and charts, all in one view. Every time Bono delivered a statistic, the number—and that number only—appeared on the slide.
This is the way you want to deliver data: one statistic (or theme) per slide, followed by photographs or images to give the brain a break from the monotony of the graphs, tables, and charts.
VISUALIZE CONTENT. Add images or include background pictures to pie charts, tables, and graphs. I recommend striving for no more than 40 words in the first 10 slides. This will force you to think creatively about telling a memorable and engaging story instead of filling the slide with needless and distracting text. Kill bullet points on most of your slides. The most popular TED presenters deliver slides with no bullet points. Text and bullet points are the least memorable way of transferring information to your audience. You might not be able to achieve this goal with every slide, but it's a good exercise.
Martin Luther King used a public-speaking device called anaphora, repeating the same word or words at the beginning of successive clauses or sentences. "I have a dream..." is repeated in eight successive sentences.
People remember information more vividly when more than one sense is stimulated. The next time you design a presentation, be imaginative about "touching" the five senses through the stories you tell (auditory), the photographs or slides you show (visual), and the props you use (feel).
SECRECT #9: STAY IN YOUR LANE
Be authentic, open, and transparent.
When you deliver a presentation, your goal should not be to "deliver a presentation." It should be to inspire your audience, to move them, and to encourage them to dream bigger. You cannot move people if they don't think you're real. You'll never convince your audience of anything if they don't trust, admire, and genuinely like you.
One way I help clients to be more authentic when they are "on" is to have them present their content to a friend or spouse before they have to present it to the intended audience. They are more likely to let some of their "real" self come out when delivering the information to someone they have a relationship with than to a group of listeners they don't necessarily have a close connection with.
