TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking

by Chris J. Anderson

If you have dreams of being a rock-star public speaker, pumping up an audience as you stride the stage and proclaim your brilliance, I beg you to reconsider. Don’t dream of that. Dream of something much bigger than you are. Go and work on that dream as long as it takes to achieve something worthwhile. And then humbly come and share what you’ve learned. Inspiration can’t be performed. It’s an audience response to authenticity, courage, selfless work, and genuine wisdom. Bring those qualities to your talk, and you may be amazed at what happens.

The point of a talk is . . . to say something meaningful. But it’s amazing how many talks never quite do that.

The number-one reason for this tragedy is that the speaker never had a proper plan for the talk as a whole.

There’s a helpful word used to analyze plays, movies, and novels; it applies to talks too. It is throughline, the connecting theme that ties together each narrative element. Every talk should have one.

It just means that all the pieces need to connect.

A good exercise is to try to encapsulate your throughline in no more than fifteen words. And those fifteen words need to provide robust content. It’s not enough to think of your goal as, “I want to inspire the audience” or “I want to win support for my work.” It has to be more focused than that. What is the precise idea you want to build inside your listeners? What is their takeaway?

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Many speakers have fallen in love with their ideas and find it hard to imagine what is complicated about them to people who are not already immersed. The key is to present just one idea—as thoroughly and completely as you can in the limited time period. What is it that you want your audience to have an unambiguous understanding of after you’re done?

My advice to speakers would be to look for a single big idea that is larger than you or your organization, but at the same time to leverage your experience to show that it isn’t just empty speculation.

Instead of planning to speak about the four main projects you’ve recently been working on, how about structuring it around just three of the projects that happen to have a surprising connection?

Not every talk has to state its throughline explicitly up front like this. As we’ll see, there are many other ways to intrigue people and invite them to join you on your journey. But when the audience knows where you’re headed, it’s much easier for them to follow.

Many people approach a talk thinking they will just outline their work or describe their organization or explore an issue. That’s not a great plan. The talk is likely to end up unfocused and without much impact.

The first step is to find out as much as you can about the audience.

You can only gift an idea to minds that are ready to receive that type of idea.

But the biggest obstacle in identifying a throughline is expressed in every speaker’s primal scream:

So let’s accept that creating a great talk to fit a limited time period is going to take real effort. But there’s a right way and a wrong way to go about it.

THE WRONG WAY The wrong way to condense your talk is to include all the things that you think you need to say, and simply cut them all back to make them a lot shorter. Funnily enough, you may well be able to create a script that achieves this.

But throughlines that connect large numbers of concepts don’t work. There’s a drastic consequence when you rush through multiple topics in summary form. They don’t land with any force.

To say something interesting you have to take the time to do at least two things: Show why it matters . . . what’s the question you’re trying to answer, the problem you’re trying to solve, the experience you’re trying to share? Flesh out each point you make with real examples, stories, facts.

THE RIGHT WAY To provide an effective talk, you must slash back the range of topics you will cover to a single, connected thread—a throughline that can be properly developed.

You will only cover as much ground as you can dive into in sufficient depth to be compelling.

And this is where the concept of a throughline really helps. By choosing a throughline you will automatically filter out much of what you might otherwise say.

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.

FROM THROUGHLINE TO STRUCTURE Let’s pause for a moment on that word structure. It’s critical. Different talks can have very different structures tied onto that central throughline.

You can picture the structure of that talk as like a tree. There’s a central throughline, rising vertically, with branches attached to it, each of which represents an expansion of the main narrative:

He told me that most of his talks follow this simple structure: A. Introduction—getting settled, what will be covered B. Context—why this issue matters C. Main Concepts D. Practical Implications E. Conclusion

TACKLING TOUGH TOPICS Your throughline needs handling with special care if you have to speak on a heavy subject.

The structure of these talks is typically to lay out a series of facts that illustrate how awful a situation is and why something must be done to fix it.

The trouble is that if an audience sits through too many talks like this, it will get emotionally exhausted and will start to switch off. Compassion fatigue sets in. If that happens before your talk is done, you’ll have no impact.

An issue-based talk leads with morality. An idea-based talk leads with curiosity. An issue exposes a problem. An idea proposes a solution. An issue says, “Isn’t this terrible?” An idea says, “Isn’t this interesting?”

THE CHECKLIST As you work on developing your throughline, here’s a simple checklist: Is this a topic I’m passionate about? Does it inspire curiosity?

Will it make a difference to the audience to have this knowledge? Is my talk a gift or an ask? Is the information fresh, or is it already out there? Can I truly explain the topic in the time slot allocated, complete with necessary examples?

Do I know enough about this to make a talk worth the audience’s time? Do I have the credibility to take on this topic? What are the fifteen words that encapsulate my talk? Would those fifteen words per...

“Choose a human being—an actual human being in your life—and prepare your talk as if you will be delivering it to that one person only. Choose someone who is not in your field, but who is generally an intelligent, curious, engaged, worldly person—and someone whom you really like. This will bring a warmth of spirit and heart to your talk.

be sure you are actually speaking to one person, and not to a demographic

Once you have your throughline, you’re ready to plan what you’ll attach to it. There are many ways to build ideas. Over the next five chapters we’ll look at five core tools that speakers use: Connection Narration Explanation Persuasion Revelation They can be mixed and matched. Some

Knowledge can’t be pushed into a brain. It has to be pulled in. Before you can build an idea in someone else’s mind, you need their permission. People are naturally cautious about opening up their minds—the most precious thing they own—to complete strangers. You need to find a way to overcome that caution. And the way you do that is to make visible the human being cowering inside you.

Not at all. It’s the person delivering the words. To make an impact, there has to be a human connection.

People aren’t computers. They’re social creatures with all manner of ingenious quirks. They have evolved weapons to protect against dangerous knowledge polluting the worldview they depend on. Those weapons have names: skepticism, mistrust, dislike, boredom, incomprehension.

So your very first job as a speaker is to find a way to disarm those weapons and build a trusting human bond with the audience so that they’re willing—delighted, even—to offer you full access to their minds for a few minutes.

MAKE EYE CONTACT, RIGHT FROM THE START

But one thing we can all do is make eye contact with audience members and smile a little. It makes a huge difference.

There’s a reason for this. Humans have evolved a sophisticated ability to read other people by looking at their eyes. We can subconsciously detect the tiniest movement of eye muscles in someone’s face and use it to judge not just how they are feeling, but whether we can trust them. (And while we’re doing that, they’re doing the same to us.)

Eye contact, backed by an occasional warm smile, is an amazing technology that can transform how a talk is received.

At TED, our number-one advice to speakers on the day of their talk is to make regular eye contact with members of the audience. Be warm. Be real. Be you. It opens the door to them trusting you, liking you, and beginning to share your passion.

When you walk onto the stage, you should be thinking about one thing: your true excitement at the chance to share your passion with the people sitting right there a few feet from you. Don’t rush in with your opening sentence. Walk into the light, pick out a couple of people, look them in the eye, nod a greeting, and smile. Then you’re on your way.

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