How to Deliver a Great TED Talk: Presentation Secrets of the World's Best Speakers (How to Give a TED Talk) (5 page)

In his book,
World Class Speaking,
Craig Valentine talks about the EDGE Benefits. He classifies the different types of benefits that motivate audience members into the acronym EDGE, which stands for:

• Esteem:
  More confidence
  
• Do More:
  Doing more in less time, achieving more
  
• Gain More:
  Gaining more money, gaining more time
  
• Enjoy More:
  Having more pleasure, more fun, more enjoyment, more happiness
  

If you can include at least one benefit from each of the EDGE elements, you’re likely to have covered the needs of all your audience members.

• Make Your Benefits Specific:
  Make your benefits as specific as possible. Instead of saying, “You’ll sell more,” say, “You’ll double your sales.” Instead of saying, “You’ll be a better speaker,” say, “You’ll become twice as good as when you first came in.” Instead of saying, “You’ll lose weight and look great,” say, “You’ll melt away all the fat and have washboard abs.” Specifics create excitement because they paint a clear picture of the benefits in your audience’s minds.
  
• Make Sure You Can Deliver on Your Big Promise:
  Make sure you don’t make any Empty Promises, otherwise your audience will feel cheated and manipulated. I once saw a speaker who, at the beginning of his presentation, promised that he would reveal to us a formula that would guarantee that we would win more than 95% of the time when playing poker against our friends. As a poker player, I was tremendously excited to hear this formula. Maybe it was a new mathematical strategy that would help me win more money? Unfortunately, later on during the presentation, the speaker said: “There is no formula that will win 95% of the time.” It was a huge disappointment and I felt cheated. Although the speaker did make some other very good points about how to calculate poker odds, I walked away from the speech feeling manipulated and disappointed.
  

Note:
Your Big Promise doesn’t always have to be explicit. It can be implicit. Let me explain. Consider
Simon Sinek’s TED talk
opening again:

“How do you explain when things don’t go as we assume? Or better, how do you explain when others are able to achieve things that seem to defy all of the assumptions? For example: Why is Apple so innovative? Year after year, after year, after year, they’re more innovative than all their competition.”

Simon doesn’t state explicitly that his audience will learn why some people and companies seem to achieve success when others do not. Instead, it is
implied
through the questions he asks.

If you’re unable to make an explicit Big Promise, use questions to make an implicit Big Promise to make the audience curious and hungry for your information.

INLCUDE A PAIN STATEMENT

People are motivated by two things:

• Gaining Pleasure
  (i.e. Benefits): People take action because they gain some benefit out of the action. They gain happiness, confidence, wealth, etc. In your presentation, the Big Promise provides your audience members with compelling benefits that motivate your audience members to listen to you.
  
• Avoiding Pain and Loss
  : People are motivated by avoiding pain and loss. In fact, research shows that people are more motivated to avoid loss than they are to gain benefit of an equal amount.
  

Thus, apart from the Big Promise, your presentation opening also needs to highlight the pain your audience members currently are suffering from. You need to insert a short Pain Statement after your Big Promise to motivate your audience to listen to you by pointing out what they currently are losing out on.

For example, let’s take some Big Promises and attach short Pain Statements
(in italics)
to each one to see how they would look:

“Over the next 15 minutes, we’re going to discuss ways our business can tap into an untapped market that could increase our revenue by 500%!
By ignoring this untapped market, we’re losing out on $400 million worth of annual revenue!
”

Here’s another example:

“Over the next 20 minutes, you’re going to pick up tools on how to double your sales and triple your revenue.
Every day that you’re not using these techniques, you’re losing out on thousands of dollars in income
.”

In my communication skills workshops and seminars, I magnify the pain by asking audience members to think about the opportunities that they’ve missed out on:

“Great communication skills are essential to your success in business. Think about it:
How many times has your big idea been shot down because you lacked the tools to persuade the key decision makers? How often have you seen other colleagues get promoted up the corporate ladder faster than you – not because they were better businesspeople, but because they were more confident and eloquent speakers? How much potential income have you lost out on because you lacked the skills to close the sale?”

By using these Pain Questions and Pain Statements, you make your audiences temporarily uncomfortable with the situation they’re currently in … and when they get uncomfortable, they start looking for solutions to alleviate the pain. All you have to do in your presentation is to package your solution/idea as one that will help your audience remove that pain while moving them closer to their goals and dreams.

Now, some of you may be reading this and thinking, “I can’t say that in my presentation! My boss would think me arrogant. This technique would never work for me.”

It’s true that it may not always be wise to include such an explicit pain statement. However, again, it is possible to include an
implicit
pain statement.

For example, Nick, a lawyer, came to me for presentation coaching because he had to give a talk to a group of bankers explaining the importance of following a new piece of banking legislation in Hong Kong. The bankers he was going to present to were busy people who were being forced by their bosses to attend Nick’s talk. In other words, they were not interested in learning about the legislation because they didn’t think it was important to their careers.

To grab the audience’s attention and interest, Nick and I decided that it would be best to open with a short story which would highlight the pain the bankers would face if they
didn’t
follow the legislation. So Nick began his presentation with a story of how a major bank in the U.S. had ignored a similar piece of legislation and as a result was fined hundreds of millions of dollars. Some of the organization’s senior bankers were fired for not following the regulation.

With this opening, Nick had the full attention of all the bankers in the room because the story served as an implicit pain statement. It implicitly highlighted the consequences the audience would face if they didn’t listen to him. Nick then softened his approach and carried on the talk with, “In this presentation, we’re going to discuss how we can avoid a similar fate and make sure we comply with the regulation.”

INCLUDE A ROADMAP

Your presentation needs to provide your audience members with a Roadmap that shows exactly where they will be going and how they will be getting there.

For example, during my public speaking seminars, I say:

“During the workshop, you will first pick up three ways on how to create great content that keeps your audience wanting more. Next, you will discover three very specific formulas you can use to logically structure your speech for maximum impact. Finally, you will learn three delivery techniques you can use to bring your presentation alive for your audience!”

The above Roadmap lets my audience know that the workshop is split into three parts: Content, Structure and Delivery. What this does is create three mental folders in my audience’s minds, one for each section of the seminar. Thus, audience members file the points for each section under the appropriate mental folders. This makes the presentation easier for audience members to follow and remember.

In his brilliant
Commencement Address at Stanford University
, Steve Jobs gave a brief roadmap of his speech:

“I will be sharing with you three stories. That’s all. Just three stories.”

The lesson here is that you should include a short roadmap as part of your opening to let audience members know how your presentation is structured.

IN A NUTSHELL

• Do not open with a boring “me-focused” opening, a “thank you” or a joke
  
• Open with one or a combination of the following five gambits:
  
  • Story
    
  • Question
    
  • Quotation
    
  • Interesting/Startling statement
    
  • Callback
    
• Include a big promise (explicit or implicit)
  
• Use pain statements (explicit or implicit)
  
• Provide a roadmap
  

Spend plenty of time writing and re-writing your opening. Rehearse your opening. Get feedback regarding the start and ending of your speech from friends and colleagues. All the time you invest in perfecting the opening of your presentation will be worth it.

CHAPTER FIVE

Building the Body of Your Presentation

The body of the speech is where you begin building the main points and arguments. Armed with your core message, you can build your argument logically and support your points using stories, statistics, analogies, activities, etc.

The key thing to keep in mind is that every time you make a point, you need to tie your point to an anchor.

What is an anchor?

An anchor is a device that you use to hook your point to your listeners’ memories. You can use several types of anchors to support your main points.

10 ANCHORS TO MAKE YOUR POINTS MEMORABLE

Every time you make a point, you need to “tie it down” with an anchor. The mistake most presenters make is that they give too many points and don’t use anchors to make their points stick. As a result, their points are forgotten.

You can choose any one of the following eight anchors to hook your points to your listeners’ memory:

1. ANECDOTES (STORIES)

Tell a story that illustrates your main point. A well-told story acts like a memorable testimonial.

Now, for a second, imagine that you’re a politician. Imagine that you’re presented with the biggest opportunity of your life – the opportunity to speak at a large national convention, in front of thousands of people and millions more watching on TV. You’re well known locally, but relatively unknown on the national stage. How would you begin that address?

In 2004, Barack Obama was selected to give the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention (DNC). At the time of the DNC keynote, Obama was an Illinois state senator, but he was relatively unknown on the national stage. The speech he gave turned him into a national star and led to talk about his potential for a future run for the presidency. Less than a minute into his speech at the DNC, Obama launched into a story that supports the main theme of his speech. Putting politics aside, the excerpt below of
Obama’s 2004 DNC speech
is worth studying:

Tonight is a particular honor for me because — let’s face it — my presence on this stage is pretty unlikely. My father was a foreign student, born and raised in a small village in Kenya. He grew up herding goats, went to school in a tin-roof shack. His father — my grandfather — was a cook, a domestic servant to the British.

But my grandfather had larger dreams for his son. Through hard work and perseverance my father got a scholarship to study in a magical place, America, that shone as a beacon of freedom and opportunity to so many who had come before.

While studying here, my father met my mother. She was born in a town on the other side of the world, in Kansas. Her father worked on oil rigs and farms through most of the Depression. The day after Pearl Harbor my grandfather signed up for duty; joined Patton’s army, marched across Europe.

Back home my grandmother raised a baby and went to work on a bomber assembly line. After the war, they studied on the GI Bill, bought a house through FHA and later moved west, all the way to Hawaii in search of opportunity.

And they, too, had big dreams for their daughter. A common dream, born of two continents.

My parents shared not only an improbable love, they shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation. They would give me an African name, Barack, or “blessed,” believing that in a tolerant America your name is no barrier to success. They imagined — They imagined me going to the best schools in the land, even though they weren’t rich, because in a generous America you don’t have to be rich to achieve your potential.

They’re both passed away now. And yet, I know that on this night they look down on me with great pride.

They stand here — And I stand here today, grateful for the diversity of my heritage, aware that my parents’ dreams live on in my two precious daughters. I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story, that I owe a debt to all of those who came before me, and that, in no other country on earth, is my story even possible.

The story anchors the point that America is a great nation where hard work and perseverance pay off. I believe that a story is one of the best anchors you can use. It engages the emotional parts of people’s brains and is one of my most reliable and consistently successful tools when giving a speech.

2. ACRONYMS

Here’s a quick thought experiment. Imagine that you’re in the military. You’re part of the infantry scouts, which means that you’re on the front line. You are in charge of the critical task of locating enemies and secretly reporting their activities. Having undergone military training, you have learned that you need to report the following items to Headquarters to provide the intelligence required to make an informed decision:

• SIZE - Approximately how many troops does the enemy have?
  
• LOCATION of enemy, using map-grid references.
  
• UNIT – What is the identity of the enemy?
  
• ACTIVITY – What sort of activities are being carried out by the enemy?
  
• EQUIPMENT – What equipment and weapons does the enemy have?
  
• TIME – Time and date of sighting.
  

Spend a couple of minutes memorizing the list above in the order provided.

Now, don’t look back at the list. Imagine that you’re on your first mission and you’ve spotted the enemy. Unfortunately, the enemy has spotted you too and you’ve been forced to engage in combat. The enemy opens fire on you – there’s an exchange of bullets, screaming of orders, people hiding and ducking for cover, an explosion of rockets. You’re dazed from the explosion of bombs. You have to write a quick report about the enemy’s activities – to send intelligence back to Headquarters – but it’s hard to think clearly. Under this situation, how well do you think you could remember the items required for reporting?

Granted, it’s difficult to remember anything under those conditions. However, to make it easier for military personnel to remember the reporting requirements, the military has devised the S.A.L.U.T.E. acronym (
S
ituation,
A
ctivity,
L
ocation,
U
nit,
T
ime,
E
quipment). The SALUTE acronym takes the initial letter from each required reporting item and forms them into a word that troops can use to remember the items.

The military regularly uses acronyms to help its troops remember important concepts. For example, the acronym B.R.A.S.S. has been devised to help soldiers remember the techniques to shoot a gun accurately. BRASS stands for
B
reathe,
R
elax,
A
im,
S
lack and
S
queeze. Again, the acronym BRASS does a good job of helping soldiers remember the shooting instructions as opposed to a standard list of instructions.

The military isn’t the only place where acronyms have been used to facilitate learning and recall. Students and teachers all over the world use acronyms to help students pass examinations. You might have used an acronym to help you remember important concepts for an exam.

If you have a list of points, experiment to see if you can perhaps create an acronym to help your audiences remember your points.

3. ACTIVITIES

If you can create some sort of quick game/role-playing activity that will solidify your point, then be sure to include it.

During my workshops, I use lots of activities to help participants internalize the concepts I am teaching. For example, I use an activity that teaches participants how stressing a particular word can change the meaning of an entire sentence. I get them to read out the following sentences with the stress placed on the word in italics and then ask them how that changes the meaning of the sentence:

• I
  didn’t know she was upset
  
• I
  didn’t
  know she was upset
  
• I didn’t
  know
  she was upset
  
• I didn’t know
  she
  was upset
  
• I didn’t know she was
  upset
  

The point of the activity? What word you stress can completely change the meaning of the sentence.

If you are giving a workshop, seminar or presentation on creativity, you might split audience members into groups and give them an activity to find a creative solution to a problem you’ve given them.

An activity is a great anchor because:

• It gets your audience
  physically moving and doing something.
  If your audience members are physically moving and involved in
  doing
  something (as opposed to just sitting back and listening to you), you can be guaranteed that they’re engaged … and awake!
  
• It
  reinforces your point
  . An activity helps make your point memorable. They might forget what you said, but they won’t forget what they did … and when they remember the activity, they’ll remember the point associated with it.
  

4. ANALOGIES, SIMILES, METAPHORS

One of the best ways to remember or learn something is to link the new topic you’re trying to learn to something that you’re already familiar with. In other words, the best way to learn is to create a bridge between the familiar and the unfamiliar.

Analogies, similes and metaphors compare two unlike objects to one another. They are great anchors because they take a subject that audience members are already familiar with and create a connection or a link between the known and the new information you’re sharing.

For example, here’s an example of an analogy from the book
The Mars and Venus Diet and Exercise Solution
by John Gray:

“Think of your body as an old-fashioned steam engine. You need to feed the fire with coal. When there is no coal available, the stoker slows down so that all the available fuel is not consumed. Likewise, your metabolism slows down for the rest of the day when you don’t eat breakfast.”

5. STATISTICS

Statistics help make your points memorable. For example, the following statistic makes the point about wealth inequality very clear:

“Ninety-nine percent of the world’s wealth is controlled by one percent of the world’s population.”

Here are some other statistics that help make the points memorable because they provide evidence that the point is true.

“One bag of popcorn is as unhealthy as a whole day’s worth of fatty foods!”

You’ll pick up more tools on how to use statistics in your speech in Chapter 7 of this book.

6. ACADEMIC RESEARCH

Using academic studies to back up your point not only anchors your point, but also adds credibility to it. Research studies, if told well, are usually very fascinating because they arouse people’s curiosity. Consider the following portion of
Dan Pink’s TED talk
where he talks about Dan Ariely’s research:

Dan Ariely, one of the great economists of our time, he and three colleagues, did a study of some MIT students. They gave these MIT students a bunch of games, games that involved creativity, and motor skills, and concentration. And the offered them, for performance, three levels of rewards: small reward, medium reward, large reward. If you do really well you get the large reward, on down.

What happened?

As long as the task involved only mechanical skill bonuses worked as they would be expected: the higher the pay, the better the performance. Okay? But one the task called for even rudimentary cognitive skill, a larger reward led to poorer performance.

Research studies by nature try to answer questions. Thus, an explanation of the research study followed by the words “What happened?” raises the audience’s curiosity.

If you are able to use an academic study in your speech to anchor your point, use it. Explain the study in the form of a story, and use rhetorical questions to build people’s curiosity before you reveal the results.

7. CASE STUDIES

Case studies are another method to anchor your points.

For example, if you’re giving a presentation called “Improving Brand Awareness through Social Media,” you might give your audience members a case study of a company that embraced social media to increase its brand awareness. Then, you would work your way through the case study, highlighting the major points and providing insights on why the strategy worked and what could have been done better.

Using case studies is a very common way of teaching MBA classes. In fact, the Harvard Business School MBA course is taught using case studies.

8. PRODUCT DEMONSTRATIONS

If you’re presenting or pitching a product, then a product demonstration is a brilliant way to win your audience’s trust as well as make your points memorable.