PDF Summary:Talk Like TED, by Carmine Gallo

Being a strong public speaker is one of the most powerful talents you can possess. Effective speakers can captivate their audience with new ideas and revolutionary concepts, inspire people to try new things, and even influence people’s opinions. According to communications coach Carmine Gallo, the key to becoming a good public speaker is applying nine key principles, including speaking with passion, incorporating a shocking moment, and presenting something new to your audience. Gallo formulated these principles after watching hundreds of successful TED talks.

In Talk Like TED, learn how long your speeches and presentations should be; how to use humor to make your audience like you; and how one TED speaker successfully used a real human brain as a prop.

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1. Bring an unusual prop to your talk. For example, Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor brought a real human brain to her TED talk about neuroscience, which disgusted her audience. However, the brain’s presence also grabbed their attention.
2. Give a demonstration. This method is particularly useful if you’re presenting a product. Showcase the item’s unique selling points. Your audience will hopefully be shocked by how impressive it is.
3. Include startling statistics. For example, when giving a TED talk on psychopathy, author and journalist Jon Ronson revealed that one in every hundred people is a psychopath—a shockingly high statistic that grabbed his audience’s attention.
4. Display a shocking photo or video. For instance, if you’re discussing the horrors of war, you could include images of war-torn communities to shock your audience into recognizing the pain that conflict causes.
5. Create a sound bite and use it in your presentation. A sound bite distills your main argument into a short, snappy, and memorable sentence. You can transform your sound bite into a shocking moment by making it particularly emotionally charged.
6. Tell a surprising story. Stories that are particularly dramatic are effective at shocking listeners.

Principle #5: Use Humor

At some point in your presentation, try to make your audience laugh (or at least smile). Incorporating humor into public speaking is important because, according to research, it increases your likability. Ultimately, the more your audience likes you, the more likely they are to listen to and support what you have to say.

Types of Humor to Use (and Avoid)

Incorporate these four types of humor into your speeches and presentations:

1. Sharing an anecdote: a short, amusing story about an experience you—or possibly someone else—had
2. Making an analogy: humorously drawing attention to the ways in which two different things are similar (for example, “Attempting to run Congress without encouraging social relationships between its members is like trying to drive a car that doesn’t have any motor oil!”)
3. Quoting someone else’s funny comment: anyone from a friend to a famous person
4. Showing the audience a funny video or picture: one you’ve produced yourself, or one produced by someone else

Meanwhile, avoid doing these four things when trying to make a talk humorous:

1. Making your humor crass, lewd, mean-spirited, or discriminatory. Many people find this type of humor inappropriate, if not outright offensive.
2. Trying too hard to be funny—for instance, telling a relentless stream of jokes. You’re there to inform or persuade your audience, not entertain them like a stand-up comedian.
3. Including humor that people have heard before. If you fail to be original with your humor, you’ll quickly bore your audience.
4. Aiming to get a huge laugh as soon as you start your talk. If you fail, your confidence will be shattered for the rest of your time on stage.

Principle #6: Present Content That Triggers Multiple Senses

Aim to trigger a combination of the senses of hearing, sight, and touch when making a speech or presentation. It’ll help your audience to remember what you’ve said: Research has shown that multisensory experiences are much more memorable than single-sense experiences.

Hearing

While you may assume that you can trigger this sense simply by talking to people, remember that just because you’re talking doesn’t mean that people will actually listen. To truly trigger your audience’s sense of hearing, you need to make your speech interesting enough to grab their attention. There are three ways to do this:

Method #1: Be highly descriptive. For instance, if you’re talking about how you created a product, discuss every detail about the moment you came up with the idea—where you were, who you were with, even what the weather was like that day. By painting a vivid picture with your words, you’ll immerse your audience in your topic and pique their interest.

Method #2: Repeat key points multiple times. For example, if the main argument of your talk is that “your product is unique,” make this point in almost every sentence you speak. The repetition will signal to the audience that you’re making an important point, thus encouraging them to listen to what you have to say.

Method #3: Incorporate other people’s voices into your speech or presentation. For instance, if you’re making a sales pitch, play a video in which happy customers give verbal testimonials. The brain starts to lose interest and “switch off” when it hears the same person’s voice for a long period of time. Incorporating other people’s voices into your talk, even briefly, circumvents this issue and keeps your audience engaged.

Sight

The easiest way to trigger this sense during a presentation is to create a visual aid to accompany your spoken words: in other words, presentation slides. When creating slides, minimize the amount of text you include. Your audience will struggle to both read a block of text on a slide and listen to you speak, meaning they won’t fully take in your ideas.

A better approach is using a combination of short phrases and pictures on your slides. Research has demonstrated that people are more likely to recall visual information if it’s presented in this way, rather than just in written form. Likewise, other studies have shown that people will remember 65% of the information presented to them if they both listen to it and see a related image at the same, compared to just 10% of the information if they only hear it.

Touch

Sometimes, it’s possible to trigger this sense directly. For example, if you’re pitching a product, you could pass a prototype around your audience.

However, if you’re talking about an idea rather than an object, there may not be a suitable prop for you to hand out. In such cases, you can stimulate the sense of touch by asking people to imagine how it would feel to touch or be touched by something. For example, in a 2011 TED talk on chronic pain, Dr. Elliot Krane asked his audience to imagine how it would feel to have someone touch your skin with a blowtorch.

Logistics

Principle #7: Keep Your Talk Brief

Whenever possible, you should limit your presentations to 18 minutes—the length of a TED talk. Doing so is important for three reasons:

1. It prevents your audience from becoming too tired to listen to you. The brain uses up glucose as it absorbs information. If you talk for too long, you risk depleting your audience’s glucose levels so much that they don’t have the energy to keep listening.
2. It takes the pressure off your listeners. Studies have shown that the longer a speaker talks, the more anxious their audience becomes as they realize just how much information they’re being expected to absorb. Sometimes, this anxiety becomes so overwhelming that the audience disengages entirely. By keeping your talk short, you can avoid this situation.
3. It promotes discipline as you craft your talk. If you know that you only have a limited time to talk, you’ll put more effort into only expressing your key ideas and cutting out “fluff.”

Follow the Rule of Three

One way to keep your presentation brief is to follow the Rule of Three, which states you should only communicate a maximum of three ideas in any one talk.

Following this rule will naturally reduce the time you spend speaking since you’re setting restrictions on the amount of information you’re going to communicate. It’ll also increase the likelihood of your audience absorbing everything you say. Research suggests that the maximum number of ideas that the brain can process at once is three: Add any more ideas than this to your talk, and your audience simply won’t remember them.

Principle #8: Plan and Practice

Make a Plan

Effective planning involves working out exactly how you want your speech or presentation to unfold. Your talk is much more likely to run smoothly if you have a clear idea of what you want to say, rather than making your points up as you go along.

One planning tool you could use is a message map: a one-page summary of everything you want to include in your talk. Creating a message map involves three steps:

• Step 1: At the top of a sheet of paper, draw an oval. In the oval, write a short “headline” that summarizes the main message of your talk.
• Step 2: Draw three arrows pointing down from your headline. At the end of each arrow, write a sub-point that will support your overall argument. For example, if your overall argument is that buying your product will benefit customers, write three reasons why this is the case.
• Step 3: Below each sub-point, write all of the supporting material you’re going to include when discussing it. For example, are you going to tell a story that proves your sub-point is valid?

Practice Again and Again

Once you’ve fully planned your presentation, practice it again and again. If you don’t rehearse before you speak, you won’t know your talk’s structure or content very well. As you present, you’ll spend all of your mental energy contemplating logistical issues such as when to move on to the next slide and what’s actually on the next slide. Consequently, you won’t have the focus required to state your ideas clearly and smoothly.

There are three specific elements of your presentation that you should practice:

1. The speed at which you talk. Keep rehearsing until you’ve perfected talking at a speed of 190 words per minute. This is a conversational rate of speech that seems natural.
2. Confident body language. Examples of confident body language include standing up straight, holding your head high, and making frequent eye contact with your audience. If you fail to appear confident in what you’re saying, your audience will trust you and your opinions less. After all, why would they believe what you’re saying if you don’t seem certain of it yourself?
3. Hand gestures. Use gestures to add emphasis to what you’re saying. For example, if you’re talking about how much a problem has grown in size, create a small circle with your hands and expand it. Studies have shown that making hand gestures will increase the audience’s confidence in you and what you’re saying.

Principle #9: Be Yourself

Let your true personality shine through as you speak. For example, if you’re a naturally enthusiastic presenter, don’t tone down this element of your personality because you feel you need to be “serious” in professional situations.

Being yourself is important because, just as people can tell when you’re faking passion, they can also tell when you’re pretending to be someone you’re not. When they realize that you’re faking, they’ll start to distrust you, and they’ll be less willing to accept your ideas.

Part of being yourself during a speech or presentation is allowing yourself to be emotionally vulnerable: giving yourself permission to express your true emotions as you speak. For example, if you tell a personal story during a speech, be honest about the emotional impact of the events you’re relating.

Many professionals resist doing this. They worry that showing emotion will make them seem “weak” and result in judgment from their audience. However, allowing yourself to be emotionally vulnerable is important because it shows your audience that you’re a human being who has feelings, just like them. Your listeners will relate to the emotions that you express and will feel connected to you. When you develop a connection with your audience, you increase the chances of them listening to and agreeing with what you say.