How to Deliver a Great TED Talk: Presentation Secrets of the World's Best Speakers (How to Give a TED Talk) (11 page)

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Use Compelling Visuals

Visuals can be a powerful way of arousing people’s emotions. If you will be using a PowerPoint presentation, avoid filling your slides with boring, dry text – instead, fill your slides with large, visually stunning images that arouse strong emotions in your audience.

For example, if you are telling a story about rape victims in India, you might consider including a picture of a rape victim who has clearly been beaten and hurt. The pain in her eyes, the tears on her cheeks and the expression on her face will arouse strong emotions in your audience. That picture will affect people in a way that your words simply cannot.

Pictures are also a great way to increase the memorability of a presentation. According to research, three days after a presentation, most people only remember 10% of what they heard. However, if you add a picture, recall shoots up to 65%.

However, before you dive into creating your own PowerPoint presentation, ask yourself, “Is a PowerPoint really necessary?” Is the PowerPoint really going to aid your audiences’ understanding of the message or are you simply using it as a crutch to remember what you have to say next? The only reason to use PowerPoint is if you have a lot of visuals – pictures, photos, charts and graphs you need to display. For example, in his TED talk, when describing an experiment,
Dan Pink
displayed an image that showed the experiment set-up:

Suppose I’m the experimenter. I bring you into a room. I give you a candle, some thumbtacks and some matches. And I say to you, “Your job is to attach the candle to the wall so the wax doesn’t drip onto the table.” Now what would you do?
[PowerPoint shows picture of candle, thumbtacks and a box of matches on a table next to the wall]

In this case, the visual aids the understanding of the message because seeing the experiment set-up makes it clearer how it works.

Similarly, in her
TED talk about escaping poverty
, Jacqueline Novogratz displays photos of a slum she visited in Kenya. The photos make the situation much more real for the audience and help them understand the poverty in Kenya because they can see proof of it.

If you do indeed determine that using PowerPoint will increase the effectiveness of your presentation, here are some guidelines to keep in mind when designing your slides:

1. LARGE PICTURES

One of the mistakes many presenters make is that they fill up their PowerPoint slides with too much text and too many bullets. They end up creating slideuments – a cross between a Word document and a Powerpoint presentation.

Having a lot of text on a slide quickly tires your audience’s eyes and sends them to sleep. Furthermore, if your slides contain a lot of text, it’s very difficult for even experienced presenters to avoid reading the text word for word. Finally, if your PowerPoint makes complete sense without you having to explain it, you’re not needed ... you might as well email your PowerPoint to your audience and cancel the presentation. As speech coach Craig Valentine puts it, “If you and your PowerPoint are saying the same exact thing, one of you is not needed.”

The solution to this is to have no text or a minimum amount of text on your slides. Instead, fill up your slides with large, visually stunning images that complement what you are saying. For example, if you are talking about the impact of global warming, have a large picture that
shows
a glacier melting. This is much more powerful than having a slide filled with bullet points about melting glaciers.

No matter what your presentation is about, it’s possible to turn it into a powerful visual which helps solidify your content. For an example of how to turn almost any concept into a visual,
check out this PowerPoint presentation on Slideshare
that walks you through the entire process.

2. LARGE FONTS

If you do need to have some text on the screen – perhaps a quote or some keywords – make sure you use large fonts. Design your presentation for the person sitting at the back of the room. I advise that the text size of your font should be at least 30 points. This ensures that everyone in the room will be able to read the text and forces you to limit the amount of text on your slides.

3. ONE IDEA PER SLIDE

Don’t overwhelm your audience with too many ideas on one slide. Use as many slides as you need, but stick to the rule of one idea per slide. This will keep your slides clutter-free. For example, if we go back to your presentation on the impact of global warming, instead of listing all the consequences of global warming on one bullet-filled slide, have a slide for each consequence and display a visually stunning photo, chart or image that shows the consequence.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of how to use PowerPoint effectively, but I believe that following the above three guidelines will ensure that you avoid many of the mistakes most presenters make when using PowerPoint. I realize that it would be helpful for you to have samples of effective PowerPoint slides, so I have created
this Slideshare presentation that features some of the best PowerPoint slides
I have seen. I think you’ll find it helpful.

IN A NUTSHELL

• Use a PowerPoint presentation only if you have lots of visuals to display
  
• If you and your PowerPoint are saying the same thing, one of you is not needed
  
• Use large, visually stunning pictures
  
• Use large fonts
  
• Only one idea per slide
  

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Arouse Their Curiosity

This tool has been used to influence you countless of times –
and you may not even realize it!
It’s been used to keep you up late at night. It’s been used to influence your choices about what to watch. It’s been used to keep you glued to your TV screen.

Have you ever found yourself stuck between doing some work and watching a TV show? “I’ll just watch it till they cut to the commercials, and then I’ll get started working,” you tell yourself.

If you happened to be watching Larry King’s “
25
^th
Anniversary Special
,” then this is what you would have heard Larry King say right before they cut for commercials:

“Bette Davis, Bill Cosby, the Beatles, Sinatra. You don’t want to miss this. It’s all coming up on LARRY KING LIVE 25.”

You don’t want to miss it because the next segment sounds exciting. So you keep watching – and watching …

Oprah, Ellen and Larry King all use tantalizing teasers to keep you hooked to their shows. A tantalizing teaser is a sentence or two that tells you how great the next segment of the show will be, and as a result, you keep coming back after the commercial breaks.

Here are a couple of tantalizing teasers you may have heard on TV shows:

“After the break, find out how this woman lost over 200 pounds in two months. Stay tuned and she’ll teach you her foolproof system to losing weight without a sweat!”

“Coming up next we have a man who has spent over 25 years researching the science of happy relationships. He interviewed over two thousand couples, consulted with religious leaders and read through tomes of academic literature on happiness. When we come back, he’ll show you the three most important things you must do if you want to have a happy marriage. And no, they’re not what you think!”

In their book, “
Made to Stick
,” Dan and Chip Heath give a great example of an online video called “
The Girl Effect
” which does a great job of teasing the audience into wanting to know more. The video starts by recounting a list of global problems: AIDS. Hunger. Poverty. War. It then teases you with the following question, “What if there was an unexpected solution to this mess? Would you even know it if you saw it? The solution isn’t the Internet. It’s not science. It’s not government.”

See, aren’t you curious to find out the answer?

Two elements make the tantalizing teaser for “The Girl Effect” so effective. First, it makes great use of questions. The human mind has no choice but to start thinking about potential answers to a question. Second, it challenges you by letting you know what it’s
not:
“It’s not science. It’s not government.” These are solutions that most people would immediately jump to when hearing the questions, so by eliminating those choices, “The Girl Effect” video keeps you intrigued to find out what the correct answer is.

Tantalizing teasers are also used in presentations. Take this example from Darren LaCroix, the 2001 Toastmasters International World Champion of Public Speaking, who used a tantalizing teaser during a workshop on presentation skills:

“For my preparation for the World Championship, I was studying 10 years worth of contest videos. For those of you not familiar with the contest, it starts out with 25,000 contestants and comes down to just 9…and they videotape it every year. I got hold of those video tapes. I watched 10 years of contest videos: 90 world class speeches! I watched every one of them, and then I created a video-tape of just the winners, and I watched it over and over again, because I wanted to see “What was the tiny little difference between the person that came in first and the person who came in second?”
At this point, Darren takes a long pause, and then continues,
“And I have found four things that they have in common that you can do in your very next presentation…”

See, aren’t you just dying to know what those four things are? Darren has
teased
you into listening to the rest of his speech.

In his TED talk, Simon Sinek also uses a tantalizing teaser before giving away his discovery. He teases:

“About three and a half years ago I made a discovery. And this discovery profoundly changed my view of how I thought the world worked, and it even profoundly changed the way in which I operate in it. As it turns out, there’s a pattern. As it turns out, all great and inspiring leaders and organizations in the world - whether it’s Apple or Martin Luther King or the Wright brothers - they all thing, act and communicate the exact same way. And it’s the complete opposite of everyone else. All I did was codify it, and it’s probably the world’s simplest idea...”

If you haven’t
watched Simon’s talk
, I bet you’re curious to find out what Simon’s discovery is. I know I was!

The main job of the tantalizing teaser is to serve as an attention-grabbing transition between your points by conveying the importance of the message that’s going to be given next.

The tantalizing teaser primes your audience to listen. If you want your audience to become excited and curious about what you have to say, tease them first before you tell them!

There are two places you can use tantalizing teasers in your presentation. First, if you are giving a workshop or a seminar, you can use a tantalizing teaser right before the break to keep your audience excited about the coming segment.

Second, you could also use a tantalizing teaser right before making a point. For example, let’s say that you are giving a presentation on three ways to be more productive. Average presenters would remove all the mystery from their presentation by beginning with, “There are three ways to be more productive. First, wake up early. Second, set goals. Finally, go to bed before midnight. Let’s start with the first one ...” This is by no means a
terrible
presentation. At least it has a clear structure. However, it isn’t a good presentation either. It becomes completely predictable and boring because there’s no curiosity factor left. This is one of the reasons why I recommend that presenters shouldn’t show all their bullet points at once because there’s no curiosity left about what’s coming next. Instead, if you have bullet points on your side, use animations to reveal each bullet point as you talk about it.

So, how would a good speaker approach a presentation? First, she would not reveal all her solutions at once. Second, she would tease before revealing her information. For example, for the presentation above, the speaker would say something along the lines of:

“In this presentation, you will pick up three keys you can use to lead a more productive lifestyle. The first key will not only help you achieve twice as much in half the time, it’ll also make you feel happier and energetic. Just imagine, how much more could you achieve if you could be twice as productive? I picked up this first key when...”

The speaker teases the audience by offering the benefits of the information before she offers the point. She also asks a rhetorical question to get the audience to reflect on how they would benefit if the presentation did make them twice as productive. Finally, instead of revealing the information immediately, she dives into an engaging story so that the audience can discover the answer within the story.

Here’s another great example of a tantalizing teaser by researcher Brene Brown during her
TED talk on “The power of vulnerability.”
She teased:

“But here’s what I can tell you that it boils down to - and this may be one of the most important things that I’ve ever learned in the decade of doing research...”

See, you’re burning to know what she learned, aren’t you?

In your presentations and speeches, keep your audience curious by teasing before you tell. Use tantalizing teasers before breaks and before revealing important points.

IN A NUTSHELL

• Don’t take your audience’s curiosity for granted
  
• Tease before you reveal an important point or information
  
• Tease about what’s coming up in the next segment before any breaks in your presentation