Public Speaking Lessons Learned from TED Talks
March 2014 marks the 30th anniversary of TED, talks that challenge fascinating people to give the speech of their lives in 18 minutes or less. (TED stands for technology, entertainment, and design.) While TED began as a conference, the Internet now allows anyone to access these thought-provoking works of public-speaking art — from Bono discussing why eradicating extreme poverty doesn’t have to be a dream to Ken Robinson explaining how schools kill creativity.
It is not just the subject matter, however, that is informative. Seeing how great speakers construct their presentations can provide assistance for anyone looking to improve his or her own ability.
In Talk Like TED: The 9 Public-Speaking Secrets of the World’s Top Minds, communications coach Carmine Gallo (who studied more than 500 TED talks for this book) discusses how the most engaging presentations are emotional (they touch my heart), novel (they teach me something new), and memorable (they present content in a way I’ll never forget). Evaluating your own speeches for these qualities can improve the odds that your audience will listen and remember your points.
Gallo also found that the most popular talks almost always began with personal stories. In fact, stories comprised a whopping 65 percent of the speech given by civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson – the TED talk holding the honor for longest standing ovation. He spoke for five minutes before introducing his first statistic. As Gallo notes, “Brain scans reveal that stories stimulate and engage the human brain, helping the speaker connect with the audience and making it much more likely that the audience will agree with the speaker’s point of view.”
So the next time you’re tempted to throw in a few more statistics to drive your point home, you might want to consider a different route – engaging hearts as well as heads.