TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking - By Chris Anderson
Date read: 2018-05-12How strongly I recommend it: 9/10
(See my list of 150+ books, for more.)
Go to the Amazon page for details and reviews.
Great advice on the best way to provide great presentations and speeches. Great examples of different techniques from TED Talks and a great book for anyone interested in improving their public speaking skills.
Contents:
My Notes
There is no one way to give a great talk.
Your only real job in giving a talk is to have something valuable to say, and to say it authentically in your own unique way.
Your goal is not to be Winston Churchill or Nelson Mandela. It’s to be you.
Your number-one mission as a speaker is to take something that matters deeply to you and to rebuild it inside the minds of your listeners.
The only thing that truly matters in public speaking is not confidence, stage presence, or smooth talking. It’s having something worth saying.
An idea is anything that can change how people see the world. If you can conjure up a compelling idea in people’s minds, you have done something wondrous. You have given them a gift of incalculable value. In a very real sense, a little piece of you has become part of them.
Many of the best talks are simply based on a personal story and a simple lesson to be drawn from it.
You can only use the tools that your audience has access to. If you start only with your language, your concepts, your assumptions, your values, you will fail. So instead, start with theirs. It’s only from that common ground that they can begin to build your idea inside their minds.
The connecting theme that ties together each narrative element. Every talk should have one.
A good exercise is to try to encapsulate your throughline in no more than fifteen words. And those fifteen words need to provide robust content. It’s not enough to think of your goal as, “I want to inspire the audience” or “I want to win support for my work.” It has to be more focused than that. What is the precise idea you want to build inside your listeners? What is their takeaway?
To say something interesting you have to take the time to do at least two things: Show why it matters...what’s the question you’re trying to answer, the problem you’re trying to solve, the experience you’re trying to share? Flesh out each point you make with real examples, stories, facts.
Connection - make eye contact with audience members and smile a little. If you’re on stage and feeling disconnected, it’s OK to ask for the house lights to be raised or the stage lights dimmed a little.
One of the best ways to disarm an audience is to first reveal your own vulnerability. But don’t share parts of yourself that you haven’t yet worked through.
We need to have owned our stories before sharing them is experienced as a gift. A story is only ready to share when the presenter’s healing and growth is not dependent on the audience’s response to it.
Be yourself. The worst talks are the ones where someone is trying to be someone they aren’t. If you are generally goofy, then be goofy. If you are emotional, then be emotional. The one exception to that is if you are arrogant and self-centered. Then you should definitely pretend to be someone else.
Narration - when it comes to sharing a story from the stage, remember to emphasize four key things:
Explanation
Before you try to build your idea, consider making clear what it isn’t.
Superb TED Talk explainers include Hans Rosling (revelatory animated charts), David Deutsch (outside-the-box scientific thinking), Nancy Kanwisher (accessible neuroscience), Steven Johnson (where ideas come from), and David Christian (history on a grand canvas).
Persuasion - here’s a more attractive way to build a case. At TED, we call it the detective story. You start with the big mystery, then travel the world of ideas in search of possible solutions to it, ruling them out one by one, until there’s only one viable solution that survives.
Inject some humor early on and add an anecdote.
Offer vivid examples and recruit third-party validation.
Use powerful visuals.
Revelation - you reveal your work to the audience in a way that delights and inspires.
For example:
Many talks given within companies could be improved if they were thought of as wonder walks. Presentations that plod through your department’s recent work bullet point by bullet point can quickly get boring. Suppose, instead, an effort were made to ask: How can we link these projects together to build excitement? How can we communicate what is delightful, unexpected, or humorous about them? How can we switch the tone from “look what we’ve achieved” to “look how intriguing this is”? Suppose, instead of a series of bullet points, there was an attempt to pair each step of the walk with an intriguing image? Suppose there was a real effort to figure out what unique and shareable idea you’ve uncovered that others in the company could benefit from?
Visuals - if the core of your talk is intensely personal, or if you have other devices for livening up your talk—like humor or vivid stories—then you may do better to forget the visuals and just focus on speaking personally to the audience.
Having no slides at all is better than bad slides.
Limit each slide to a single core idea.
It doesn’t make sense to leave a slide onscreen once you’ve finished talking about it. Just go to a blank, black slide and then the audience will get a vacation from images and pay more attention to your words.
Instead of a slide that reads: A black hole is an object so massive that no light can escape from it, you’d do better with one that reads: How black is a black hole? Then you’d give the information from that original slide in spoken form. That way, the slide teases the audience’s curiosity and makes your words more interesting, not less.
Cut and dissolve slide transitions even have two subconscious meanings: With cut you’re shifting to a new idea, and with dissolve the two slides are related in some way.
Scripting - You haven’t really memorized your talk thoroughly until you can do an entire other activity that requires mental energy while giving your talk. Can you give your talk while measuring out the ingredients to make brownies? Can you give your talk while filing all the messy papers on your desk into a file cabinet? If you can give your talk while the cognitive load is that high on your system, you can give it well while focused on stage.
The key is to be able to recite the talk at double speed. When you can do that comfortably, giving the talk at normal speed will be automatic and you can focus 100 percent on meaning.
Practice doesn’t make perfect. Practice makes imperfection livable. Because when you know something inside out, you can PLAY with what comes your way, rather than shut it out.
Rehearse. Repeatedly.
Four Ways to Start Strong:
Ask a question. But not just any question. A surprising question.
Seven Ways to End With Power:
Wear something that boosts your confidence.
Breathe deeply, meditation style.
Five minutes before you go on, try to drink a third of a bottle of water. It’ll help stop your mouth from getting dry.
An empty stomach can exacerbate anxiety. Get some healthy food into your body an hour or so before you’re on, and/or have a protein bar handy.
If a speaker stays distant and safe, the audience will too.
A talk given in front of an audience with no lectern in the way is the best approach.
I thoroughly recommend a TED Talk by Julian Treasure called, “How to speak so that people want to listen.” He not only explains what’s needed, he offers exercises that help you get your own voice ready.
For more great examples of the right use of voice, check out talks by Kelly McGonigal, Jon Ronson, Amy Cuddy, Hans Rosling, and the incomparable Sir Ken Robinson.
Law professor Lawrence Lessig has pioneered a unique style of presentation, a kind of PowerPoint on steroids. Every sentence and almost every significant word is accompanied by a new visual, whether just a word, a photograph, an illustration, or a visual pun.