Talk Like TED: The 9 Public-Speaking Secrets of the World's Top Minds

by Carmine Gallo

“The brain areas involved in language—the areas that help you talk and explain ideas more clearly—these brain areas become more activated and more efficient the more they are used. The more you speak in public, the more the actual structure of the brain changes. If you speak a lot in public, language areas of the brain become more developed.”

Bryan Stevenson, the speaker who earned the longest standing ovation in TED history, spent 65 percent of his presentation telling stories. 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.

Inspiring communicators and the best TED presenters stick to one of three types of stories. The first are personal stories that relate directly to the theme of the conversation or presentation; second are stories about other people who have learned a lesson the audience can relate to; third are stories involving the success or failure of products or brands.

“The most basic way to get someone’s attention is this: Break a pattern.”

“Curiosity, he says, happens when we feel a gap in our knowledge … gaps cause pain. When we want to know something but don’t, it’s like having an itch that we need to scratch.

Abstractions are difficult for most people to process. Stories turn abstract concepts into tangible, emotional, and memorable ideas.

Jonah Sachs offers this definition in Winning the Story Wars: “Stories are a particular type of human communication designed to persuade an audience of a storyteller’s worldview. The storyteller does this by placing characters, real or fictional, onto a stage and showing what happens to these characters over a period of time. Each character pursues some type of goal in accordance with his or her values, facing difficulty along the way, and either succeeds or fails according to the storyteller’s view of how the world works.”

“Great leaders have an air of confidence,” he replied. “Subordinates need to look up to somebody who is still standing strong, like an oak, regardless of events around them. You need to convey a feeling that you will always be in control despite the circumstances, even if you don’t have an immediate solution … someone who doesn’t lose focus, doesn’t cower, doesn’t waffle. The air of confidence must come out.”

Humor lowers defenses, making your audience more receptive to your message. It also makes you seem more likable, and people are more willing to do business with or support someone they like.

In The Psychology of Humor, Martin argues that humor is used as an “ingratiation tactic,” making it easier to be accepted in a group. This explains why so many famous comedians have experienced difficult childhoods or have gone through a period when they felt like outcasts. They used humor to ingratiate themselves to the group, and they used it so often that they refined it to the point where they could make a living at it.

Studies have shown that humorous people are seen as friendly, extroverted, considerate, pleasant, interesting, imaginative, intelligent, perceptive, and emotionally stable.

Often, making a simple analogy can bring a smile to your listener.

An easy way to get a laugh without being a comedian or telling a joke is to quote somebody else who said something funny.

Video, however, is a very effective way of bringing humor into a presentation: it takes the pressure off you to be funny.

Always try to inject some humor when you are trying to help people wrap their heads around a complex subject, especially if they are new to the topic or have a low level of understanding about it.

If given a choice, most graduate students would rather attend a single three-hour class than three 50-minute classes. When King taught his class once a week, he found that the students returned for the next class having lost most of the information they had learned the prior week. King discovered the “better practice” was to schedule the same content on three separate occasions, such as Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. King said that despite objections, when he made the class mandatory across three shorter segments his students scored better and exhibited a better retention of the complex material.

The rule of three simply means that people can remember three pieces of information really well; add more items and retention falls off considerably.

In Mayer’s experiments, students who were exposed to multisensory environments—text, pictures, animation, and video—always, not sometimes, always had much more accurate recall of the information than those students who only heard or read the information. Mayer said the principle should not be surprising. When the brain is allowed to build two mental representations of an explanation—a verbal model and a visual model—the mental connections are not just a little stronger. They are much, much stronger. Add touch and you’ve got a winner! The differences between two types of learning (auditory and visual) were even more striking when the “audience,” the people learning the information, lacked prior knowledge of the material. Students with high prior knowledge of the content can generate their own mental images while simply listening or reading.

Your audience is far more likely to recall information when it’s delivered in a combination of pictures and text rather than text alone.

Scientists have produced a mountain of evidence showing that concepts presented as pictures instead of words are more likely to be recalled.