TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking

by Chris J. Anderson

The purpose of this book is to explain how the miracle of powerful public speaking is achieved, and to equip you to give it your best shot.

There is no one way to give a great talk.

If your talk feels too similar to a talk someone has already heard, it is bound to have less impact.

So you should not think of the advice in this book as rules prescribing a single way to speak. Instead think of it as offering you a set of tools designed to encourage variety.

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.

What is more, we can enhance these skills in ways the ancients could never have imagined: The ability to show—right there in beautiful high-resolution—any image that a human can photograph or imagine. The ability to weave in video and music. The ability to draw on research tools that present the entire body of human knowledge to anyone in reach of a smartphone. The good news is, these skills are teachable.

Almost everyone has experienced the fear of public speaking.

It’s because there’s a lot at stake—not just the experience in the moment, but in our longer-term reputation. How others think of us matters hugely. We are profoundly social animals. We crave each other’s affection, respect, and support. Our future happiness depends on these realities to a shocking degree. And we sense that what happens on a public stage is going to materially affect these social currencies for better or worse.

That’s the power of a single talk. You might not be leading an organization, but a talk can still open new doors or transform a career.

No matter how little confidence you might have today in your ability to speak in public, there are things you can do to turn that around. Facility with public speaking is not a gift granted at birth to a lucky few. It’s a broad-ranging set of skills. There are hundreds of ways to give a talk, and everyone can find an approach that’s right for them and learn the skills necessary to do it well.

Your goal is not to be Winston Churchill or Nelson Mandela. It’s to be you.

Presentation literacy isn’t an optional extra for the few. It’s a core skill for the twenty-first century. It’s the most impactful way to share who you are and what you care about. If you can learn to do it, your self-confidence will flourish, and you may be amazed at the beneficial impact it can have on your success in life, however you might choose to define that. If you commit to being the authentic you, I am certain that you will be capable of tapping into the ancient art that is wired inside us. You simply have to pluck up the courage to try.

Not just the pleasure of listening to her. She gave me an idea that can forever be part of me.

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.

If you’ve picked up this book just because you love the idea of strutting the stage and being a TED Talk star, inspiring audiences with your charisma, please, put it down right now. Instead, go and work on something that is worth sharing. Style without substance is awful.

Many of the best talks are simply based on a personal story and a simple lesson to be drawn from it.

People love stories, and everyone can learn to tell a good story.

You can use the opportunity of public speaking as motivation to dive more deeply into some topic. We all suffer, to a greater or lesser degree, from some form of procrastination or laziness. There’s a lot we’d like to get into in principle, but, you know, that Internet thing just has so many damn distractions. The chance to speak in public may be just the kick you need to commit to a serious research project. Anyone with a computer or a smartphone has access to pretty much all the world’s information. It’s just a matter of digging in and seeing what you can uncover.

So, if you think you might have something but aren’t sure you really know enough yet, why not use your public-speaking opportunity as an incentive to truly find out? Every time you feel your attention flagging, just remember the prospect of standing on stage with hundreds of eyes peering at you. That will get you through the next hour of effort!

For most of the rest of this book, I’m going to assume that you have something you want to talk about, whether it’s a lifelong passion, a topic you’re eager to dive into more deeply, or a project for work that you have to present. In the chapters to come I’ll be focusing on the how, not the what. But in the final chapter we’ll return to the what, because I’m pretty sure that everyone has something important they could and should share with the rest of us.

So, language works its magic only to the extent that it is shared by speaker and listener.

You can only use the tools that your audience has access to. If you start only with your language, your concepts, your assumptions, your values, you will fail. So instead, start with theirs. It’s only from that common ground that they can begin to build your idea inside their minds.

Yes, communicating emotion is important, and for that aspect of a talk, one’s tone of voice and body language do indeed matter a great deal. We

But the whole substance of a talk depends crucially on words.

make a reasoned case, or provide a compelling call to action. So, if you hear someone tell you that body language matters more than verbal language in public speaking, please...

Whether the journey is one of exploration, explanation, or persuasion, the net result is to have brought the audience to a beautiful new place. And that too is a gift. Whichever metaphor you use, focusing on what you will give to your audience is the perfect foundation for preparing your talk.

There are countless ways to build a great talk. But first some essential safety tips. There are ugly talk styles out there, dangerous to both a speaker’s reputation and an audience’s well-being. Here are four to steer clear of at all costs.

THE SALES PITCH Sometimes speakers get it exactly backwards. They plan to take, not give.

Reputation is everything. You want to build a reputation as a generous person, bringing something wonderful to your audiences, not as a tedious self-promoter. It’s boring and frustrating to be pitched to, especially when you’re expecting something else.

The key principle is to remember that the speaker’s job is to give to the audience, not take from them.

Give, don’t take.

THE RAMBLE

Nothing obnoxious. Nothing that was particularly hard to understand. But also no arguments of power. No revelations.

No aha moments. No takeaways. The audience clapped politely. But no one really learned anything.

So many talks are like this. Meandering, no clear direction. A speaker might kid himself that even an unfocused exploration of his brilliant thinking is bound to be fascinating to others.

“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.”

Rambling is not an option.

THE ORG BORE An organization is fascinating to those who work for it—and deeply boring to almost everyone else. Sorry, but it’s true.

It may be interesting to you and your team. But, alas, we don’t work there. Everything changes, though, when you focus on the nature of the work that you’re doing, and the power of the ideas that infuse it, not on the org itself or its products. This can be harder than it sounds.

One mode retains interest. One kills it. One mode is a gift. The other is lazily self-serving.

THE INSPIRATION PERFORMANCE

Absolutely one of the most powerful things you can experience when watching a talk is inspiration. The speaker’s work and words move you and fill you with an expanded sense of possibility and excitement. You want to go out and be a better person. TED’s growth and success have been fueled by the deeply inspirational nature of many of the talks.

I believe in inspiration’s power. But it’s a power that must be handled with great care.

Whether they admit it or not, many public speakers dream of being cheered as they leave the stage, followed by screens full of tweets attesting to their inspirational prowess. And therein lies the trap. The intense appeal of the standing ovation can lead aspiring speakers to do bad things. They may look at talks given by inspirational speakers and seek to copy them . . . but in form only. The result can be awful: the ruthless pursuit of every trick in the book to intellectually and emotionally manipulate the audience.

All style, very little substance.

They make the audience less likely to open up when a genuinely inspiring speaker comes along. And yet, more and more speakers, attracted to the drug of audience adoration, are trying to walk this path.

Here’s the thing about inspiration: It has to be earned.

It’s the same with inspiration. If you try to take the shortcut and win people over purely with your charisma, you may succeed for a moment or two, but soon you’ll be found out, and the audience will flee. In the example above, despite the partial standing ovation, that speaker received terrible audience feedback in our postconference survey, and we never posted the talk. People had felt manipulated. And they were.