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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.
As a leader — or as an advocate — public speaking is the key to unlocking empathy, stirring excitement, sharing knowledge and insights, and promoting a shared dream.
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. We’ll call that something an idea. A mental construct that they can hold on to, walk away with, value, and in some sense be changed by.
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.
Style without substance is awful.
“When people sit in a room to listen to a speaker, they are offering her something extremely precious, something that isn’t recoverable once given: a few minutes of their time and of their attention. Her task is to use that time as well as possible.”
So a throughline requires you first to identify an idea that can be properly unpacked in the time you have available. You should then build a structure so that every element in your talk is somehow linked to this idea.
The most viewed TED speaker at the time of writing this book is Sir Ken Robinson. He told me that most of his talks follow this simple structure: Introduction — getting settled, what will be covered Context — why this issue matters Main Concepts Practical Implications Conclusion He said, “There’s an old formula for writing essays that says a good essay answers three questions: What? So What? Now What? It’s a bit like that.”
In most settings all that matters is that you wear something you feel great in.
wearing something that makes you feel good will help you project relaxed confidence.
