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June 28, 2023 - March 31, 2024
as automation and artificial intelligence eliminate millions of jobs, the humans who stand out are those who can foster deep, emotional connections with other people.
Great communicators reach your head and touch your heart.
Dig deep to identify your unique and meaningful connection to your presentation topic.
In any language, on any continent, in every country, those speakers who genuinely express their passion and enthusiasm for the topic are the ones who stand apart as inspiring leaders.
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.
If your only goal is to make a sale or to elevate your stature, you might fail to connect with your audience (and you’ll place a lot of pressure on yourself). If, however, your goal is more altruistic—giving your audience information to help them live better lives—you’ll make a deeper connection and feel more comfortable in your role.
Above all, I’ve learned that those who are joyful about their work often make the best public speakers.
ACCEPT HAPPINESS AS A CHOICE. What is one challenge you have been faced with recently? After identifying your challenge, list three reasons why this challenge is an opportunity. You see, happiness is a choice, an attitude that is contagious, and your state of mind will positively affect the way your listeners perceive you.
Cardon says that investors, customers, and other stakeholders are “smart consumers”: they know when a person is displaying genuine passion and when he or she is faking it.
It’s very difficult—nearly impossible—to electrify an audience without feeling an intense, meaningful connection to the content of your presentation.
Cardon believes it’s also a mistake to believe that you can influence and inspire others by speaking about a topic that you don’t love—that is not core to your identity.
If you find your topic fascinating and interesting and wonderful, it’s more than likely your audience will, too.
If the highly charismatic person was happy, the low charismatic would report being happier, too. It did not, however, work the other way around. Charismatic people smiled more and had more energy in their nonverbal body language. They exuded joy and passion.
the behavior of leaders can make a difference in the happiness and well-being of the followers by influencing their emotional lives.”
It’s been said that success doesn’t lead to happiness; happiness creates success.
The first step to inspiring others is to make sure you’re inspired yourself.
If stories trigger brain-to-brain “coupling,” then part of the solution to winning people over to your argument is to tell more stories.
According to the Heaths, “The most basic way to get someone’s attention is this: Break a pattern.”9 Curiosity and mystery are powerful ways to get our attention.
if you want to be quoted, tell a story, and the more personal the better.
Abstractions are difficult for most people to process. Stories turn abstract concepts into tangible, emotional, and memorable ideas.
Avoid overused buzzwords and clichés. Marketers love to use words such as leading, solutions, and ecosystem. These words are empty, meaningless, and used so often they’ve lost whatever punch they may once have had.
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.
PRACTICE IN FRONT OF PEOPLE, RECORD IT, AND WATCH IT BACK. Ask friends and colleagues to watch your presentation and to give open, honest feedback. Use a recording device, too. Set up a smartphone on a tripod or buy a dedicated video camera.
Cuddy believes the opposite is true as well—“our bodies change our minds and our minds can change our behavior, and our behavior can change our outcomes.”
In my journalism career and later, as an executive communication coach, I lost count of how many times I heard, “My topic is boring,” or, “What I do is not that interesting,” or, “They don’t pay attention to my presentation because they’ve heard it before.” Maybe your audience has heard some of the information before, but they don’t know what you know and they might have seen a version of the data or information that just didn’t click. You’ll grab their attention if you can teach them just one thing they didn’t know before.
Only through seeing your own world through a fresh lens will you be able to give your audience a new way of looking at their world.
Neuroscientists have found that only through bombarding the brain with new experiences do we force our minds to look at the world through a new lens. That means you need to get out of the office once in while. Experience new events, people, and places. Most important, incorporate those new experiences into your presentations.
Great conversations or presentations take you to ideas you’d never considered.
when you’ve heard admonitions packaged and delivered the same way time and time again, they lose their punch. They lose their ability to get you to think differently. They lose their ability to inspire.
Pay attention to the stories of your life. If they teach you something new and valuable, there’s a good chance other people will want to hear about it.
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.”
Oftentimes my clients create what’s really a tagline instead of a headline, but it still doesn’t tell me the one thing I need to know. From a well-crafted headline I should be able to identify what the product, service, or cause is as well as what makes it different or unique.
The brain is wired to recall emotionally vivid events and to ignore the ordinary, the mundane. If you want to stand out in a sea of mediocre presentations, you must take emotional charge of your audience.
You see, you can’t tell someone to “be funny” or to tell a joke. If you ask them to do something onstage that they don’t typically do in everyday conversation, you’re setting them up for failure. Often, making a simple analogy can bring a smile to your listener.
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.
Please keep this in mind. 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.
TED speakers do share techniques in common—each person must find his or her own passion about the topic to make an authentic connection with the audience.
