TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking
Rate it:
Open Preview
56%
Flag icon
Steven Johnson began his talk on where ideas come from by revealing the significance of coffeehouses in industrial Britain.
56%
Flag icon
Brené Brown ended her talk on vulnerability.   This is what I have found: to let ourselves be seen, deeply seen, vulnerably seen; to love with our whole hearts, even though there’s no guarantee . . . to practice gratitude and joy in those moments of terror, when we’re wondering, Can I love you this much? Can I believe in this passionately? Can I be this fierce about this? just to be able to stop . . . and say, “I’m just so grateful, because to feel this vulnerable means I’m alive.” And the last, which I think is probably the most important, is to believe that we’re enough. Because when we work ...more
56%
Flag icon
Bryan Stevenson closed his blockbuster talk on the injustices of the US prison system
58%
Flag icon
Fear triggers our ancient fight-or-flight response. Your body is coiled up chemically, ready to strike or flee. This is measurable physically by a huge rise in adrenaline coursing through your bloodstream.
58%
Flag icon
The single most important one is to breathe. Breathe deeply, meditation style. The oxygen infusion brings calm with it. You can do this even if you’re seated in the audience, waiting to be called up. Just take a deep breath right into your stomach, and let it out slowly. Repeat three times more. If you’re offstage and you’re feeling tension surging through your body, it’s worth trying more vigorous physical exercise.
59%
Flag icon
Ten minutes before the session, I escaped to a backstage corridor and started doing pushups. And I couldn’t stop. I ended up doing 30 percent more than I thought was the most I was capable of. It was all adrenaline, and by burning it that way, calm and confidence returned.
59%
Flag icon
Remember the power of vulnerability. Audiences embrace speakers who are nervous, especially if the speaker can find a way to acknowledge it. If you flub or stutter a little in your opening remarks, it’s fine to say, “Ooops, sorry, a little nervous here.” Or “As you can see, I don’t do a lot of public speaking. But this one mattered too much to turn down.” Your listeners will begin rooting for you even more.
59%
Flag icon
Find “friends” in the audience. Early on in the talk, look out for faces that seem sympathetic. If you can find three or four in different parts of the audience, give the talk to them, moving your gaze from one to the next in turn.
59%
Flag icon
It’s not about you, it’s about the idea you’re passionate about. Your job is to be there in service of that idea, to offer it as a gift. If you can hold that in mind as you walk onto the stage, you’ll find it liberating.
62%
Flag icon
Voice and Presence Give Your Words the Life They Deserve
62%
Flag icon
Here’s a radical question: Why bother to give a talk?
63%
Flag icon
TED Talk by George Monbiot. The text is charming, but not particularly sensational.
63%
Flag icon
TED Talk by Julian Treasure called, “How to speak so that people want to listen.” He not only explains what’s needed, he offers exercises that help you get your own voice ready.
64%
Flag icon
For me, the key takeaway is simply to inject variety into the way you speak, variety based on the meaning you’re trying to convey. So many speakers forget this. They give a talk in which every sentence has the same vocal pattern. A slight rise at the start, and a drop at the end. There are no pauses or changes of pace. What this communicates is that no single part of your talk matters more than any other part. It’s just plodding its way along until it gets to the end. The biological effect of this is hypnotic. That is, it simply puts your audience to sleep.
64%
Flag icon
If your talk is scripted, try this: Find the two or three words in each sentence that carry the most significance, and underline them. Then look for the one word in each paragraph that really matters and underline it twice more. Find the sentence that is lightest in tone in the whole script and run a light wavy pencil line under it. Look for every question mark and highlight them with a yellow highlighter. Find the biggest single aha moment of the talk and inject a great big black blob right before it is revealed. If there’s a funny anecdote somewhere, put little pink dots above it. Now try ...more
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
64%
Flag icon
For more great examples of the right use of voice, check out talks by Kelly McGonigal, Jon Ronson, Amy Cuddy, Hans Rosling, and the incomparable Sir Ken Robinson.
64%
Flag icon
Rory Sutherland, who somehow maintained 17 minutes of hilarious, insightful speech at a rate of 180 words per minute,
64%
Flag icon
gabble.
65%
Flag icon
To address a crowd of any size, speakers would have to slow down, breathe deep, and let rip, with dramatic pauses after each sentence. It’s a style of speaking we recognize today as oration. It’s a speaking style that can sync up crowd emotions and responses in a powerful way.
65%
Flag icon
We associate it with some of the most influential speeches in literature and history, from Marc Antony’s “Friends, Romans, Countrymen” to Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty, or give me death!”
65%
Flag icon
oration is much slower. Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech was delivered at around 100 words per minute. It was perfectly crafted and delivered for its purpose.
65%
Flag icon
The simplest way to give a talk powerfully is just to stand tall, putting equal weight on both feet, which are positioned comfortably a few inches apart, and use your hands and arms to naturally amplify whatever you’re saying. If the audience seating is curved around the stage a little, you can turn from the waist to address different parts of it. You don’t have to walk around at all. This mode can project calm authority;
66%
Flag icon
Dr. Victor Sidel about the need to continue to fight for nuclear disarmament. I don’t remember the details of what he said. But I will never forget what he did. He took a single BB pellet and held it up. He asked us to imagine that this was a thermonuclear weapon, a hydrogen bomb, one thousand times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. He tossed the pellet into a large metal bucket that had a microphone attached to it. The scratchy ping when it landed and bounced was shockingly loud. Then he said, “And how many thermonuclear warheads do you think there are on Earth today?” He ...more
66%
Flag icon
J. J. Abrams held us riveted by bringing on stage a mystery box his grandfather had given him that he’d never opened (and, of course, he left the stage with it still unopened).
68%
Flag icon
powerful art form emerged from African American communities in the 1970s and ’80s and exploded into popular culture. Spoken word can be thought of as performance poetry; it typically combines storytelling with intricate wordplay. Spoken word artists offer an exciting extension of traditional public speaking. They don’t seek to “explain” or “persuade” in the manner described in this book. Instead, they tap into a use of language that’s more poetic, more primal; language that can energize, move, inform, and inspire.
68%
Flag icon
Law professor Lawrence Lessig has pioneered a unique style of presentation, a kind of PowerPoint on steroids.
70%
Flag icon
at TEDxRíodelaPlata, Cristina Domenech’s talk about poetry in prisons was energized by a live reading from inmate Martín Bustamante, who had been permitted a temporary release to attend.
70%
Flag icon
Edward Snowden to TED in 2014, there was just one problem. He was living in exile in Moscow and couldn’t travel to Vancouver for fear of being arrested.
71%
Flag icon
Renaissance
71%
Flag icon
had become obsessed with making obscure knowledge accessible. This skill helped him drive speakers to find the most interesting angle on their idea, the angle that others outside their fields might enjoy or find relevant.
72%
Flag icon
Aimee Mullins. Aimee had had both her legs amputated at age one, but that hadn’t stopped her from leading a full life. She sat
72%
Flag icon
As Aimee spoke about her surprising successes and embarrassing failures, I sat at the back of the theater, shocked at the tears running down my cheeks. She was so alive, and so full of possibility. She seemed to symbolize something I’d sensed time and again that week. That it was possible to own your future. No matter what life had served you, you could find a way to shape it, and in so doing make a difference for others too.
72%
Flag icon
What finally convinced me to go for it was, believe it or not, a passage in a book I happened to be reading at the time, namely David Deutsch’s The Fabric of Reality. In it he asked a provocative question: Is it really true that knowledge has to become ever more specialized? That the only way we can achieve success is by knowing more and more about less and less? The specialization of every field—medicine, science, art—seemed to suggest this. But Deutsch argued convincingly that we must distinguish knowledge from understanding. Yes, knowledge of specific facts inevitably became specialized. ...more
73%
Flag icon
What are humans for? Humans are for being more human than we’ve ever been. More human in how we work. More human in what we learn. And more human in how we share that knowledge with each other.
74%
Flag icon
Whether you’re a brilliant astrophysicist, a talented stonemason, or just a wise student of life, I don’t need to learn from you everything you know. Of course not. That would take years. What I need to know is how your work connects to everything else. Can you explain the essence of it in a way I can understand? Can you share your work process in layman’s terms? Can you explain why it matters? And why you are passionate about it?
77%
Flag icon
Dennett said this: “The secret of happiness is: find something more important than you are, and dedicate your life to it.”
78%
Flag icon
That is why I deeply believe in Martin Luther King Jr.’s shining statement: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”
78%
Flag icon
The future is not yet written. We are all, collectively, in the process of writing it.
1 2 4 Next »