For this assignment, you will learn about some of the secrets of being a good public speaker and communicator. You will then write about some of those secrets and describe how you will develop them to become a good (or better) communicator yourself.
You will create and maintain three separate journals as part of your coursework in this program—the Personal Reflection Journal, the TED Style Talk Reflection Journal, and the Capstone Reflection Journal.
TED Talks: Chris
Anderson: TED’s Secret to Great Public Speaking Transcript
Chris Anderson: Some people think that there’s a TED
Talk formula. Give a talk on a round, red rug. Share a childhood story. Divulge
a personal secret. End with an inspiring call to action.
No. That’s not how to
think of a TED Talk. In fact, if you overuse those devices, you’re just going
to come across as clichéd or emotionally manipulative.
But there is one thing
that all great TED Talks have in common, and I would like to share that thing
with you, because over the past 12 years, I’ve had a ringside seat, listening
to many hundreds of amazing TED speakers, like these. I’ve helped them prepare
their talks for prime time, and learned directly from them their secrets of
what makes for a great talk.
Even though these
speakers and their topics all seem completely different, they actually do have
one key common ingredient. It’s this: Your number one task as a speaker
is to transfer into your listeners’ minds an extraordinary gift: a strange
and beautiful object that we call an idea.
Let me show you what I
mean. Here’s Haley. She is about to give a TED Talk and frankly, she’s
terrified.
Speaker 2: Haley Van Dyck.
Chris Anderson: Over the course of 18 minutes, 1,200
people, many of whom have never seen each other before, are finding that their
brains are starting to sync with Haley’s brain and with each other. They’re
literally beginning to exhibit the same brain-wave patterns. I don’t just mean
they’re feeling the same emotions. There’s something even more startling
happening.
Let’s take a look inside
Haley’s brain for a moment. There are billions of interconnected neurons in an
impossible tangle. But look here, right here, a few million of them are linked
to each other in a way which represents a single idea. Incredibly, this exact
pattern is being recreated in real time inside the minds of everyone listening.
That’s right. In just a few minutes, a pattern involving millions of neurons is
being teleported into 1,200 minds, just by people listening to a voice and
watching a face.
But wait. What is an
idea anyway? Well, you can think of it as a pattern of information that helps
you understand and navigate the world. Ideas come in all shapes and sizes, from
the complex and analytical to the simple and aesthetic.
Now, here are just a few
examples shared from the TED stage. Sir Ken Robinson, creativity is key to our
kids’ future.
Ken Robinson: My contention is that creativity now
is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same
status.
Chris Anderson: Elora Hardy, building from bamboo is
beautiful.
Elora Hardy: It is growing all around us, it’s
strong, it’s elegant, it’s earthquake-resistant.
Chris Anderson: Chimamanda Adichie, people are more
than a single identity.
Chimamanda A.: The single story creates
stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but
that they are incomplete.
Chris Anderson: Your mind is teeming with ideas, and
not just randomly. They’re carefully linked together. Collectively they form an
amazingly complex structure that is your personal worldview. It’s your brain’s
operating system. It’s how you navigate the world. It is built up out of
millions of individual ideas.
So, for example, if one
little component of your worldview is the idea that kittens are adorable, then
when you see this, you’ll react like this. But if another component of your
worldview is the idea that leopards are dangerous, then when you see this, you’ll
react a little bit differently. So, it’s pretty obvious why the ideas that make
up your worldview are crucial. You need them to be as reliable as possible, a
guide to the scary but wonderful real world out there.
Now, different people’s
worldviews can be dramatically different. For example, how does your worldview
react when you see this image?
Speaker 6: What do you think when you look at
me? A woman of faith, an expert, maybe even a sister? Or oppressed,
brainwashed, a terrorist?
Chris Anderson: Whatever your answer, there are
millions of people out there who would react very differently. That’s why ideas
really matter. If communicated properly, they’re capable of changing, forever,
how someone thinks about the world, and shaping their actions both now and well
into the future. Ideas are the most powerful force shaping human culture.
If you accept that your
number one task as a speaker is to build an idea inside the minds of your
audience, here are four guidelines for how you should go about that task.
One, limit your talk to
just one major idea. Ideas are complex things. You need to slash back your
content so that you can focus on the single idea you’re most passionate about,
and give yourself a chance to explain that one thing properly. You have to give
context, share examples, make it vivid. So, pick one idea, and make it the
through-line running through your entire talk, so that everything you say links
back to it in some way.
Two, give your listeners
a reason to care. Before you can start building things inside the minds of your
audience, you have to get their permission to welcome you in. The main tool to
achieve that? Curiosity. Stir your audience’s curiosity. Use intriguing,
provocative questions to identify why something doesn’t make sense and needs
explaining. If you can reveal a disconnection in someone’s worldview, they’ll
feel the need to bridge that knowledge gap. Once you’ve sparked that desire, it
will be so much easier to start building your idea.
Three, build your idea,
piece by piece, out of concepts that your audience already understands. You use
the power of language to weave together concepts that already exist in your
listeners’ minds. But not your language, their language. You start where they
are. The speakers often forget that many of the terms and concepts they live
with are completely unfamiliar to their audiences. Now, metaphors can play a
crucial role in showing how the pieces fit together, because they reveal the
desired shape of the pattern, based on an idea that the listener already
understands.
For example, when
Jennifer Kahn wanted to explain the incredible new biotechnology called CRISPR,
she said, “It’s as if, for the first time, you had a word processor to
edit DNA. CRISPR allows you to cut and paste genetic information really easily.”
Now, a vivid explanation like that delivers a satisfying aha moment as it snaps
into place in our minds. It’s important, therefore, to test your talk on
trusted friends, and find out which parts they get confused by.
Four, here’s the final
tip. Make your idea worth sharing. By that I mean, ask yourself the question:
“Who does this idea benefit?” I need you to be honest with the
answer. If the idea only serves you or your organization, then, I’m sorry to
say, it’s probably not worth sharing. The audience will see right through you.
But if you believe that the idea has the potential to brighten up someone
else’s day or change someone else’s perspective for the better or inspire
someone to do something differently, then you have the core ingredient to a
truly great talk, one that can be a gift to them and to all of us.
Nancy Duarte Uncovers
Common Structure of Greatest Communicators Transcript
It’s really, really
great to be here. You have the power to change the world. I’m not saying that
to be cliché. You really have the power to change the world. Deep inside of you
every single one of you has the most powerful device known to man, and that’s
an idea.
A single idea from the
human mind, it can start a groundswell. It could be a flash point for a
movement. And it can actually rewrite our future. But, an idea is powerless if
it stays inside of you. If you never pull that idea out for others to contend
with, it will die with you. Now maybe some of you guys have tried to convey
your idea, and it wasn’t adopted. It was rejected, and some other mediocre or
average idea was adopted, and the only difference between those two is in the
way it was communicated. Because if you communicate an idea in a way that
resonates, change will happen, and you can change the world.
So my family, we collect
these vintage European posters. Every time we go to Maui, we go to the dealer
there, and he turns these great big posters … I love them. They all have one
idea and one really clear visual that conveys the idea. They’re about the size
of a mattress. They’re really big. They’re not as thick as a mattress, but
they’re big. And the guy will tell the story as he turns the pages. This one
time, I was flanked by my two kids, and he turns the page, and there’s posters
underneath, and right when I lean forward and say, “Oh, my God! I love
this poster.” Both my kids jump back, and they’re like, “Oh, my God,
mom, it’s you.” And this is the poster. See, I like, fired up. The thing I
loved about this poster was the irony. Here’s this chick, all fired up, headed
into battle as the standard bearer, and she’s holding these little Suavitos
baking spices. Like something so seemingly insignificant, although she’s
willing to risk life and limb to promote this thing.
So if you just swap out
those little Suavitos baking spices with a presentation, yeah, it’s me. Pretty
fired up. I was fired up about presentations back when it wasn’t cool to be
fired up about presentations. I really think they have the power to change the
world when you communicate effectively through them.
Changing the world is
hard. It won’t happen with just one person with one single idea. That idea has
got to spread, or it won’t be effective, so it has to come out of you and out
into the open for people to see. The way that ideas are conveyed the most effectively
is through story. For thousands of years, illiterate generations would pass on
their values and their culture from generation to generation, and they would
stay intact. So, there’s something kind of magical about a story structure that
makes it so when it’s assembled, it can be ingested and then recalled by the
person who’s receiving it.
So, basically, a story.
You get a physical reaction. Your heart can race. Your eyes can dilate. You
could talk about, “Oh, I got a chill down my spine,” or “I could
feel it in the pit of my stomach.” We actually physically react when someone’s
telling us a story. Even though the stage is the same, a story can be told. But
once a presentation’s told, it completely flatlines, and I wanted to figure out
why. Why is it that we physically sit with rapt attention during a story, but
it just dies for a presentation. So I wanted to figure out how do you
incorporate story into presentation.
We’ve had thousands of
presentations back at the shop. Hundreds of thousands of presentations,
actually, so I knew the context of a really bad presentation. I decided to
study cinema and literature, and really dig in and figure out what was going on
and why it was broken. So, I want to show you some of the findings that led up
to what I think I’ve uncovered as a presentation form.
It was obvious to start
with Aristotle. He had a three act structure, a beginning, a middle, and an
end. We studied poetics and rhetoric. A lot of presentations don’t even have
that in its most simple form. When I moved on to studying hero archetypes, I thought,
“Okay, the presenter’s the hero, they’re up on stage. They’re the star of
the show.” It’s really easy to feel that way as the presenter, that you’re
the star of the show. Well, I realized right away, that that’s really broken,
because I have an idea, I can put it out there, but if you guys don’t grab that
idea and hold it as dear, that idea goes nowhere and the world is never
changed. So, in reality, the presenter isn’t the hero. The audience is the hero
of our idea.
If you look at Joseph
Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, just at the front part, there were some really
interesting insights there. There’s this likable hero in an ordinary world, and
they get this call to adventure, so the world is kind of brought out of balance.
At first they’re resistant. They’re like, “I don’t know if I want to jump
into this.” And then a mentor comes along and helps them move from their
ordinary world into a special world, and that’s the role of the presenter is to
be the mentor. You’re not Luke Skywalker. You’re Yoda. You’re the one that
actually helps the audience move from one thing and into your new special idea,
and that’s the power of the story.
So, in its most simple
structure, it’s a three-part structure of a story. You have a likable hero who
has a desire, and they encounter a roadblock, and ultimately, they emerge
transformed. That’s the basic structure. But it wasn’t until I came across a Gustav
Freytag’s pyramid … He drew this shape in 1863. He was a German dramatist …
[inaudible 00:05:23] click. He’s a German dramatist and he believed there was a
five act structure, which has an exposition, a rising action, a climax, a
falling action, and a denouement, which is the unraveling or the resolution of
the story. I love this shape. So we talk about shape. Story has an arc. Well,
an arc is a shape. We talk about classical music having shapeliness to it.
So, I thought, hey, if
presentations had a shape, what would that shape be? And how do the greatest
communicators use that shape, or do they use a shape? So, I’ll never forget. It
was a Saturday morning. After all this study, it was a couple years of study, I
drew a shape. And I was like, “Oh, my gosh. If this shape is real, I
should be able to take two completely different presentations, and overlay it,
and it should be true. So I took the obvious. I took Martin Luther King’s I
Have a Dream speech, and I took Steve Jobs’ 2007 iPhone launch speech, I
overlaid it over it, and it worked. I sat in my office, just astounded. I
actually cried a little, because it was like, I’ve been given this gift and
here it is. This is the shape of a great presentation. Isn’t it amazing?
[inaudible 00:06:29].
So, I want to walk you
through it, because it’s actually pretty astounding. There is a beginning, a
middle, and an end, and I want to walk you through it. Because the greatest
communicators of all time … I went through speeches, everything. Actually, I
can overlay this shape. Even the Gettysburg Address follows the shape. So, the
beginning of any presentation, you need to establish what is. Here’s the status
quo. Here’s what’s going on. Then you need to compare that to what could be.
Now, you need to make that gap as big as possible, because there’s the
commonplace of the status quo, and you need to contrast that with the loftiness
of your idea. So it’s like, you know, here’s the past, here’s the present, but
look at our future. Here’s a problem, but look at that problem removed. Here’s
a roadblock. Let’s annihilate the roadblock. You need to really amplify that
gap.
This would be like the
inciting incident in a movie. It’s when suddenly the audience has to contend
with what you just put out there and they have to say, “Wow, do I want to
agree with this and align with it or not?” And the rest of your presentation
should support that.
So, the middle goes back
and forth. It traverses between what is and what could be, what is and what
could be. Because what you’re trying to do is make the status quo and the
normal unappealing, and you’re wanting to draw them towards what could be in the
future with your idea adopted. Now, on your way to change the world, people are
going to resist. They’re not going to be excited. They may love the world the
way it is. So, you’ll encounter resistance. That’s why you have to move back
and forth.
It’s similar to sailing.
When you’re sailing against the wind, and there’s wind resistance, you have to
move your boat back and forth and back and forth. That’s so you can capture the
wind. You have to actually capture the resistance coming against you when
you’re sailing. Now, interesting. If you capture the wind just right and you
set your sail just right, your ship will actually sail faster than the wind
itself. It’s a physics phenomenon. So, by planting in there the way they’re
going to resist between what is and what can be, it’s actually going to draw
them towards your idea quicker than should you not do that.
So, after you’ve moved
back and forth between what is and what could be, the last turning point is a
call to action, which every presentation should have, but at the very end, you
need to describe the world as a new bliss. This is utopia with my idea adopted.
This is the way the world is going to look when we join together and we solve
this big problem. So, you need to use that as your ending in a very poetic and
a dramatic way.
Interestingly, when I
was done, I was like, “You know what? I could use this as an analysis
tool.” I actually transcribed speeches and I would actually map out how
much they mapped this tool. I want to show you some of that today and I want to
start with the very two people that I used when I first did it. Here’s Mr.
Jobs. Completely has changed the world. Changed the world of personal
computing. He’s changed the music industry. Now he’s on his way to changing the
mobile device industry. So, he’s definitely changed the world. This is shape of
his iPhone launch 2007, when he launched his iPhone. It’s a 90 minute talk. You
can see he starts with what is, traverses back and forth, and ends with what
could be.
I want to zoom in on
this. The white line is him speaking. He’s talking. The next color line you’ll
see popped up there, that’s when he cuts to video, so he’s adding some variety,
and he cuts to demo. So, it’s not just him talking the whole time, and these
lines are representative there. Towards the end, you’ll see a blue line, which
will be the guest speaker. This is where it gets kind of interesting. Every
tick mark here is when he made them laugh, and every tick mark here is where he
made them clap. They are so involved physically. They are physically reacting
to what he is saying, which is actually fantastic, because then you know you
have the audience in your hand.
So, he kicks off what
could be with, “This is a day that I’ve been looking forward to for two
and a half years.” He’s launching a product that he’s known about already
for a couple years. This is not a new product to him. But look at this. He does
this other thing. He marvels. He marvels at his own product. He marvels himself
more than the audience laughs or claps. He’s like, “Isn’t it awesome?
Isn’t this beautiful?” And he’s modeling for the audience what he wants
them to feel. He is actually doing a job of compelling them to feel a certain
way.
He kicks off with what
could be with, “Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along
that changes everything.” He starts to kick in and talk about his new
product. At the beginning of it, he actually keeps the phone off. You’ll see
that the line is pretty white up until this point. So, he goes off between
here’s this new phone and here’s the sucky competitors, and here’s this new,
new phone and here’s the sucky competitors. Then, right about here, he has a
star moment, and that’s something we’ll always remember. What he does, he turns
the phone on. The audience sees scrolling for the first time. You can hear the
oxygen sucked out of the room. They gasped. You can actually hear it. He
creates a moment that they’ll always remember.
If we move along this
model, you can see the blue where the external speakers are going, and then
over towards the bottom right, the line breaks. That’s because his clicker
broke. So what does he do? He wants to keep this heightened sense of
excitement. He tells a personal story, right there where the technology didn’t
work. He was a master communicator and he turns to story to keep the audience
involved. The top right, he ends with the new bliss. He leaves them with a
promise that Apple will continue to build revolutionary new products, and he
says, “There’s an old Wayne Gretzky quote that I love: ‘I skate to where
the puck is going to be, not to where it’s been.’ We’ve always tried to do that
at Apple from the very, very beginning, and we always will.” So, he ends
with the new bliss.
Let’s look at Mr. King.
He was an amazing visionary. He’s a clergyman who spent his life working hard
for equality, and this is the shape of the I Have a Dream speech. You can see
he starts with what is, moves back and forth between what is and what could be,
and ends with a very poetic new bliss, which is the very famous part that we
all know. So, I’m going to spread it out a little bit here, stretch it for you.
What I’ve done here is I’ve put the actual transcript there along with the
text. I know you can’t read it, but at the end of every line break, I broke the
line there because he took a breath and he paused. Now, he was a Southern
Baptist preacher. Most people hadn’t heard that, so he had a real cadence and a
rhythm that was really new for the people there.
I’m going to cover up
these lines of text with a bar, because I want to use this bar as an
information device, here. Let’s walk through how he actually spoke to the
people. The blue bars here are going to be when he used the actual rhetorical
device of repetition. He was repeating himself. He was using the same words and
phrases so people could remember and recall them. Then, he also used a lot of
metaphors and visual words. This was a way to take really complicated ideas and
make them memorable and knowledgeable so people got it. He actually created
almost like scenes with his words to make it so they could envision what he was
saying. Then there was also lot of familiar songs and scriptures that he used.
This is just the front end of it that you’re seeing, and then he also made a
lot of political references of the promises that were made to the people.
So, if we look at the
very end of what is, at the very end of what is was the very first time that
people actually clapped and roared really loud. At the end of what is, what he
did is, he said, “America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check
which has come back marked insufficient funds.” Well, everyone knows what
it’s like to not have money in our account, so he used a metaphor people were
very familiar with. But when they really charged up, the very first time they
really, really screamed was, “So we have come to cash this check, a check
that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of
justice.” That’s when they really clapped. It was when he compared what
currently is to what could be.
When we move along a
little farther in the model, you’ll see it goes back and forth at a more
frenzied pace. This is when he goes back and forth and back and forth. Now, the
audience was in a frenzy. They were all excited, and so you can actually do
this to keep them in a heightened sense of excitement. So he says, “I have
a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the meaning of its
creed, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created
equal.'” So you can see he uses a little orange text there to remind him
of the promise that the politicians had made to him or that this country had
made.
Then he moves back and
forth between I have a dream that one day, I have a dream that one day, I have
a dream that one day, and then at the end, it gets really interesting here,
because he uses … You can look at the four shades of green. There’s a lot of
blue there, which was a lot of repetition. He had a heightened sense of
repetition, and the green was a heightened sense of songs and scriptures. So,
the first batch of green was an actual scripture from the Book of Isaiah, the
second batch of green was My Country ‘Tis of Thee. Now, that’s a familiar song
that was specifically very significant for the black people at the time,
because this song was the song they chose to change the words to as an outcry,
saying the promises had not been kept. The third batch of green was actually a
stanza from My Country ‘Tis of Thee, and then the fourth was a Negro spiritual,
“Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, I’m free at last.”
What he did is he
actually reached inside of the hearts of the audience. He pulled from
scripture, which was important to them. He pulled from songs that they’d sung
together as an outcry against this outrage, and he used those as a device to
connect and resonate with the audience. Ending, painting a picture of this new
bliss using the very things inside of them that they already held as sacred.
So, he’s a great man. He had a big, big dream, and there’s a lot of people
here. You guys have really big dreams. You have really big ideas inside of you
that you need to get out. But you know what? We encounter hardships. It’s not
easy to change the world. It’s a big job. His house was bombed. He was stabbed
with a letter opener. Ultimately, he lost his life for what he cared about.
But you know, a lot of
us aren’t going to be required to paint that kind of sacrifice. But what
happens is, it basically is a little bit like that basic story structure life
can be like that, where, you know, you guys are all likable people. You have a
desire. You encounter roadblocks. And we stop there. We’re just like, “You
know, I had his idea. But I’m not going to put it out there. It’s been
rejected.” We self-sabotage our own ideas and we just butt up against the
roadblocks and butt up against the roadblocks instead of choosing to let the
struggle transform us and choosing to go ahead and have a dream and make it
real.
If I can do this,
anybody can do this. I was raised in an economically and emotionally starved
environment. The first time I got to go to camp with my sister, I was abused.
It wasn’t the first time I was abused, though, it was just the most aggressive.
And my mom and dad, they married each other three times. Yeah. That was
tumultuous, and when they weren’t fighting, they were helping sober up some
alcoholic that was living with us, because they were both sober alcoholics. My
mom abandoned us when I was 16 years old, and I took on the role of caretaker
of my home and my siblings. I met a man, fell in love. I went to a year of
college. I did what every single, bright young girl should do. I got married
when I was 18 years old. You know what? I knew. I knew that I was born for more
than this.
Right at that point in
the story of my life, I had a choice. I could let all these things push me
down, and I could let all my ideas die inside of me. I could just say,
“Life is too hard to change the world. It’s just too tough.” But I
chose a different story for my life. Don’t you know it? And so, I feel like
there’s people in this room that you’ve got those little Suavitos baking
spices, and you’re just like, “You know, it’s really not that big a deal.
It’s really not the whole world I can change.” But you know, you can
change your world. You can change your life. You can change the world that you
have control on. You can change your sphere. I want to encourage you to do
that. Because you know what? The future isn’t a place that we’re going to go.
It’s a place that you get to create. I want to thank you. Bless you. God bless
you. Thank you.
LEAD
11 Public Speaking Tips From the Best TED Talks Speakers
Use these techniques
from top TED speakers to take your presentations to the next level.
·
·
·
EXPERT OPINION BY GEOFFREY
JAMES, CONTRIBUTING EDITOR, INC.COM @SALES_SOURCE
JUL 26, 2016
Amy Cuddy, social psychologist, speaks
during Session 8: Talk to Strangers, at TEDGlobal 2012 on Thursday, June 28, in
Edinburgh, Scotland. James Duncan Davidson/TED
There’s no question
about it: TED Talks have raised the bar sky-high
for what’s considered a memorable and compelling business presentation.
That being said, there
are a handful of TED Talks speakers so talented that they
almost make the rest seem dull and uninspired.
What makes them so
special and popular? It’s not just their subject matter, although that
obviously plays a role.
Here’s the secret: what
the truly great TED speakers do differently from the rest can be found in the first few minutes of their presentation.
And that makes sense if
you think about it. It’s during the opening remarks that the audience sits up
and pays attention… or reaches for their iPhones.
With that in mind, here
are five of the most popular TED Talks speakers (as measured by
page views), with the techniques they use to enthrall their audiences.
To see the techniques in
action you need only watch the first two minutes of the TED Talks embedded
below. (Although they’re definitely worth watching in their entirety!)
1. Sir Ken Robinson
TIP No. 1. Use
self-deprecating humor to lower barriers.
Unlike many other TED
Talks speakers, Robinson doesn’t have a dynamic physical presence. Furthermore,
because he’s an academic, he must overcome the perception that he’s
likely to deliver a boring lecture.
He therefore opens by
poking a little fun at himself and at educators in general. By puncturing his
own balloon, he makes everyone feel more comfortable and more likely to listen
to what he has to say.
TIP No. 2. Tie your
experience to the shared experience.
In the midst of his
humor, Robinson relates his personal experience at the conference to that of
the attendees. This further humanizes him and brings him into the
community of the audience.
Robinson establishes
such a strong rapport with the audience that he doesn’t need visuals or
graphics to make his points. This is a testament to how well he manages
to capture and then hold the audience’s attention.
2. Amy Cuddy
TIP No. 3. Get the
audience to take an immediate action.
The point of all public
speaking is to convince the audience to make a decision, which means convincing
them to move (conceptually) from wherever they are now to wherever you’d like
them to be.
Cuddy starts by getting
the audience to move physically, thereby creating the momentum for the
conceptual move she intends them to make. This is a more creative take on the
“show of hands” opening that less-talented speakers use.
TIP No. 4. Create a
sense of suspense.
In her first few
sentences, Cuddy also promises the audience they’ll be learning something
important later in the presentation. This causes the audience to pay attention
lest they miss the promised nugget of wisdom.
Note how
cleverly Cuddy intermingles Tips 4 and 5! The suspenseful
promise lends additional meaning to the movement, while the movement helps
“lock in” the importance of the promise.
3. Tony Robbins
TIP No. 5. Express
passion for your subject matter.
It’s ironic that this
TED Talk should be Robbins’s most-watched YouTube clip because he looks
exhausted and like he slept in his clothes. Normally, Robbins tends to be
meticulously polished, even when dressed casually.
However, the
passion Robbins feels for his material shines through his rumpled
appearance. He’s energetic and focused, obviously committed to providing as
much value as possible in such a short amount of time.
TIP No. 6. Set
appropriate expectations.
More subtly, though,
Robbins spends much of the first two minutes deconstructing the
preconceptions the audience might have about him, while simultaneously
focusing their attention on what they can potentially learn from him.
Unlike Robinson, who
gently creates rapport to lower the barriers between himself and the audience,
Robbins simply blasts through the barriers to get to his point. Either
technique works; use the one that best fits your personality.
4. Brene Brown
TIP No. 7. Begin
with a relevant anecdote.
As Brown mentions in her
opening, she’s a storyteller, and thus she begins (and continues throughout) by
telling stories. Stories have power because human beings are genetically
programmed to arrange thoughts into narratives.
What’s important here,
though, is that her opening anecdote is immediately relevant to
introducing both herself and her message. This is the exact opposite
of the old (bad) advice that you should start your presentation with a joke.
TIP No. 8. Use
body language to signal a segue.
At about 1:30, Brown
segues neatly from her introductory anecdote into the main content of her
Talk. Note how she changes her expression and stance to communicate to the
audience that “now it’s time to get a bit more serious.”
These visual cues help
the audience make sense of the material, much like punctuation in a
sentence. Without them, even a speaker with great ideas can come off like
a droner or a motor-mouth.
5. Dan Gilbert
Tip No. 9: Start
with a startling fact or statistic.
Gilbert introduces his
TED Talk with an unexpected fact that’s immediately relevant to his
overall message, and uses contrast (20 minutes
versus two million years) to frame that fact, thereby making it
seem more vital.
Startling facts grab the
attention of both sides of the brain. The neurons in your left brain
signal “Yay, here’s a fact to remember!” while the neurons
in your right brain signal “wow, that’s really weird!”
TIP No. 10. Use
visually arresting graphics.
Gilbert immediately
reinforces the startling fact with a graphic of two skulls that
reinforces and strengthens both the informational content (for the
left brain) and the emotional content (for the right brain).
By simultaneously
hitting both sides of the brain, Gilbert completely captures the
imagination and interest of the audience, even though he’s only 30 seconds into
the presentation.
TIP No. 11. Simplify,
simplify, simplify.
This is true of
all great TED Talks speakers but particularly true of Gilbert, who is a
master at reducing complex ideas into easily understood chunks of content.
Indeed, if you watch any
great TED Talk, you’ll notice at once that speakers neither “drill
down” into details nor take the proverbial “50,000-foot
view.” Instead, they simplify without ever becoming simplistic.
In this assignment, you will create your first TED Style Talk Reflection Journal entry, and then you will add the journal
