TJ WALKER - THE HABIT INFLUENCER - Personal Development | LIVE STREAM

So what is so special about a TED Talk? Here's the secret. Absolutely nothing. Now, I realize some of you are thinking, wait a second, TJ, I paid good money to attend this 2015 outstanding presentations workshop. I signed up to learn about what's special about a TED Talk, and you're telling me nothing? Here's what I mean by that. There's nothing special about a TED Talk versus any other good presentation. Now, the reason TED Talks stand out as good, as interesting, as more powerful is because most presentations in the world are awful. I give a lot of credit to the TED organizers, but they really only did one thing. They looked at what the typical speech, business presentation, university lecture has, and they just scratched off all the boring stuff. And they told their presenters, you got to give the good stuff and scratch off all the boring stuff. That's really it. Now, I'm going to go through in more detail and show you how you can do this for your own presentations. But I do want to demystify this process a little. There is this sense that there's something unique and magical about ted, and it only happens when you're on the TED stuff stage. No, you can give a speech Monday morning to your staff meeting, and it can be as good as any TED speech. And I'm going to teach you some of the techniques that I teach my clients. I have a lot of clients who do speak at TED Conferences, TED Proper, and the TEDx conferences all over the world. I'm going to share with you exactly how I prepare them and give you the techniques you need so that you can prepare for your own speech, whether you're speaking at ted, whether you're applying to speak to ted, you're helping others, or you just want to be a TED quality speaker every single time you speak, which I hope is your goal. So for starters, the first big thing you got to do if you want to give a TED speech and not just a regular boring speech, you've got to really narrow down what it is you're trying to communicate to a handful of ideas. Now, I've been doing presentation training for 30 years. The first question I ask all of my clients, whether they're preparing for a TED speech or any other speech, is, think of the best speaker you've seen in the last year, the last five years, maybe your whole career. Now, tell me, how many actual messages do you remember from that speech? I don't mean their style, they used their hands or had good eye contact and were funny or walked around the. I don't mean those things. I mean actual content, messages, substance, what can you remember? I don't go around the room. Sally, how many do you remember? I can't really remember anything. Jim? Oh yeah, I remember this one guy. There was this one idea I do remember. Bill can't remember anything. We go around like this for a while and often it's zero. Sometimes 1, 2, occasionally 3 every so often, 4 points. Once every six months, I'll have someone remember five ideas from the best presentation they've seen in the last year, five years, maybe their lifetime. Now, in all those years, I've never had anyone remember more than five ideas of substance from the best speaker they've seen. So what I draw from that is that it's really hard to communicate ideas in a speech. A speech can be powerful. It can motivate people to do things, it can put a spotlight on on important ideas. But it's really not a good way to convey lots and lots of data points. Unless you're in a classroom and you're going to be testing people and giving them A's or F's and you're with them for a whole semester, that's different. So that's a real starting point. And the TED organizers understand that. That's why when you see a TED speech, it's not someone listing fact after fact. You certainly don't see bullet points up there. They focus their ideas and they really narrow it down to just a handful. The next point is they illustrate each one with a story and we'll certainly cover that in more detail. When they use PowerPoint, they don't use text. Now I know you've heard from a lot of world class PowerPoint experts in in this whole series as a part of the 2015 Outstanding Presentations Workshop. And there certainly are people who know all the latest and greatest tools and techniques for creating great PowerPoint. But let me summarize. Really everything you need to know, whether it's for a TED speech or any other speech, and that is don't use text. It's very rare that you'll see a PowerPoint slide with text on the TED platform, the TED proper platform, the Ted.com platform. Now the TedX speeches, those are a lot less selective. You will see text. Now, am I anti text? No, I like text. I write text every day. I've written half a dozen books. In fact, I'm going to give you a copy of my book later on at no charge. Not selling anything today. So I like text. The problem is I don't have any evidence that putting text up On a screen while you are talking and people are in a room with you. I don't have any evidence that that's effective. What I do have evidence on is if you put a picture and that picture makes the idea come alive, more interesting, more understandable, more memorable than you simply saying words. Well, that works. You can test it and it actually works. So what else is different about a TED speech? Let's just start at the beginning. You see someone walk out to give a TED speech, the very first thing, what do they do? They grab their hands behind a lectern and head down and start. No, that's not what they do. That's what people do. At 99% of boring presentations, whether it's academic conferences, business conventions, business meetings. So 10 wisely got rid of the lectern. You don't need it. The only reason you should need a lectern, and by the way, that's what people, people call it a podium. A podium isn't actually that thing you stand behind, it's what you stand on. A lectern is the thing that people put their notes on. The only reason you should ever need a lectern is because you think you're going to be so awful and so boring that the audience is going to start throwing rotten vegetables and fruit and you need a duck down here and hide. Well, why would you give a presentation if you thought you were going to be that awful? So that's the first thing. Just stylistically, the speaker comes out and you can see them from head to toe. That's sending a very real signal. I'm not here to just go through written text that some speechwriter wrote for me six months ago or the marketing department gave me. So right away, a TED speech is signaling I'm here to share with you expertise. I'm not here to just go through a bunch of bullet points or a bunch of slides. So that's the first big thing of massive significance that the TED organizers do. The next thing is with very rare acceptance. You don't see anything in people's hands. And that means you can just talk to someone or appear to be talking and having a conversation. When someone starts a TED speech and you're watching it online, which is how most people consume TED speeches, does the TED speaker come out and say, oh my gosh, it's just such an honor to be here at TED today. I've loved TED for so many years and I'm not worthy and you know, my mother is impressed and I just want to tell you how happy I am to be. Is that how anyone starts a TED speech? No. Guess what? You should never start any speech that way. It's boring, nobody cares about you, or you're honored. The way most good TED speakers start is they launch right in to something interesting to the audience. It doesn't have to be funny, it doesn't have to be overly dramatic, but they start by just saying something interesting to the audience. Now, the best way to quite often is to launch right into the story and make sure it's a story relevant to the topic at hand and that people can figure out exactly why you are talking about it. That's so much more interesting than the way most people start speeches, by thanking the audience, saying they're happy to be there, reminding people of what their name is, telling people their title, and then outlining what they're going to say, and then talking about, well, I'll have to speak quickly because I don't have a lot of time. That's wasted time. Nobody at TED has a lot of time. But you don't find them wasting time talking about the fact that they don't have a lot of time, do you? So please, please keep that in mind. The final really big thing that TED does with all of its people is it asks people to rehearse and practice on video. And they're really good about helping people do that, asking them to come for rehearsal the day before. It's not just, oh, you're busy, I know, just show up five minutes before. No, they take speaking seriously, and that's what makes it good. And let me tell you, really, the most important part of being a great TED speaker or any other speaker, it's practicing on video. But it's doing it in a certain way. And you've heard this before. Many, many books say, well, if possible, practice on video. Or, hey, after you've finished all your slides, be sure to practice once on video. I think this really misses the point. Here's the thing. If you practice on video once and look at it and figure out what you like and don't like, that can actually make you worse. That can actually destroy your confidence. In my opinion, just practicing on video once and looking at it doesn't do any good. It only helps if you practice it on video. Watch it, figure out what you like, figure out what you don't like, do it again. Do more of what you like, do less of what you don't like. Do it again. Keep doing it again and again and again until you love what you see. Here's the Thing. You have a lifetime of experience of seeing lousy speakers. You had teachers in grade school, high school, college, in your organization, in your business. You've been to conferences and you've seen lousy, boring speakers, right? So you have tremendous experience of spotting what's boring, what's awful, what doesn't work. Use that to your advantage. Watch yourself. If you think your TED Talk or your business presentation or your new business pitch is boring, guess what? You are right. It is boring. It is awful. The secret isn't to visualize the audience in their underwear or visualize a standing ovation, or to drink green tea. Now, if you like green tea, by all means, go ahead, but that's not the solution to creating a TED quality speech. The solution is keep practicing it on video until you can look at it and say, wow, that guy, that woman. That's fantastic. If I can be half as good as she is, I'll be the star of the next TED conference. Or of your own industry. And you're pointing to a video of yourself if you take away nothing else today on how to prepare for a TED speech, I beg you, I urge you to do that. Most people are too lazy. They'll come up with all these, oh, I love to practice, TJ, but we just finished the PowerPoint slides at 8:00am and the presentation's at 8:30. So there's no time. BS. There's always time for anything that's important. And what the TED speakers realize is that the final draft of a speech isn't the PowerPoint deck. And apologies, I'm not in any way denigrating our experts who presented in this workshop series on PowerPoint. But the final presentation, the final draft of the presentation is you literally speaking. It's not the text on a piece of paper. It's not the slides that appear. It is you speaking. So if you want to look at, improve, revise, edit, tweak your speech, there is literally no way of doing it without video recording yourself. The speech is you speaking. Now, I can tell you I've trained more than 10,000 clients from six continents for 31 years now, and 99.99% of people don't do it. And there was a time when you could say, well, tj, it's too expensive, too difficult. I don't want to hire a TV crew and spend $20,000. Guess what? Just pull out your cell phone and talk to your cell phone and record it on video. Every smartphone has a video recorder these days. Every laptop has a webcam. Most computers have webcams so when you tell me that you can't video record your speech, you're lying. It's like me telling my wife, I want to clean the garage. I really do, but you know, I don't have the right tools. I don't really have time. That's a lie. I wanted a completely clean garage. It's very simple. I have to go in, roll up my sleeves, start taking stuff out, putting things in piles. Here's a stash I haven't used in a year. I'm going to throw it away or give it away. I can have a clean garage today if I just decide I want to do it. You can have a great presentation today if you just decide you're going to do the hard work. And the work is practicing your speech on video, watching it and taking careful notes. What do you like, what's interesting, what is memorable and what isn't. And the first time you do it, if you're anything like most of my clients, the list of things you like going to be like that big. It's going to be a short list. The things you don't like is going to be a long, long list. I don't care who you are. I remember the first time I was over in Eastern Europe. This was many, many years ago. I was training a prime minister who was giving a major speech to his parliament. And he said to me, tj, I want to practice this speech to you. Mind if I practice in my native language? He spoke English, but he wanted to speak in his Slovenian language. I said, okay. I'm looking around the room. We're actually in a former dictator's palace. We're in a remote place outside of the main city. I'm surrounded by his bodyguards. They're all with machine guns. And I'm feeling a little intimidated. The war with the Soviet Union and the whole Soviet bloc, former Soviet bloc, hadn't been over that long. I didn't know where the nearest embassy was. I was a little tense. He stood up, he gave his speech in his native language, and he read it. He read it head down. I didn't know what he was saying, but he's just head down, reading his speech. And I recorded it. We watched it. He turned to me and said, so, tj, what did you think of this speech? I'm thinking, what do I say? I don't. It was awful. I thought it was boring. I don't know what he said, but what do I say? All these people have machine guns. Nobody really knows where I am. My family doesn't know where I am. I don't want to anger the guy, but I finally thought, you know what? He's paying me a bunch of money to give him honest feedback. I should just tell him. So I said, with all due respect, Mr. Prime Minister, I don't know what you said, but you bored the hell out of me. He looked a little shocked, narrowed his eyes a little, I thought, angry. Looked at his armed guards, then looked back at the tv and he said, you're right, tj. It was boring as hell. And at that moment, we took the speech, we tore it up, threw it on the ground, and we did what I do with almost all my clients and what I've done ever since. We got a clean sheet of paper out. We brainstorm on all the ideas we want to communicate in that presentation, that speech, or a TED Talk, if that's the case. We come up with as many ideas as possible. We narrow it down to the top five, and now we have an outline. Then we come up with a word or two or three to remind him of a story that illustrates every point. So we did that. Came up with a nice simple outline. He stood up, gave the speech. This time, since it was just a simple outline, he was able to look out at the guards and me. He was able to have a little animation on his face. His voice came back to a conversational up and down, fast and slow, and some variety to it. He was having a lot more fun with the speech. I video recorded it, we played it back, and this time, he didn't even ask me what I thought. He said, dj, it's a thousand times better. You're a genius. Well, there's no genius on my part. Anyone can do that. You can do that. All you have to do is practice your speech on video and look at it. If you think you're awful, boring, tedious, guess what? You are if you love your own speech. And in my experience, most people are much harsher critics of themselves than other people are. But if you get to the point where you actually love your speech, chances are it's pretty good. Number one. Number two, you're going to be filled with confidence because you know you're coming across the way you want. Right now, I'm very. Don't mean to sound small. I'm confident not because I think all of you love me. Maybe 20% of you don't like my presentation at all. But I'm not feeling nervous or uncomfortable now because I know this is the best I can do. This is what I want to say, this is how I want to say it. This is the best I could do. So I'm as relaxed now as if I were talking to my best friend about a basketball game over a beer. That's where you need to be when you're giving presentations. You need to know you're coming across your very best. Well, the only way to do that is to see yourself on video. Now, I know a lot of you, as professional communicators, are writers. Let me ask you, how often would you dictate press release or an important memo and tell an assistant, okay, send it out to the world. Now, don't spell check it, edit it, or review it. Just send it out to the world as is. Send it to the media. Send it to all of our investors. Send it to the board of directors and all of our employees. How often have you done that? How often would you do that? I'm willing to bet you're saying, teacher, that's a stupid question. Why would anybody do that? That's crazy talk. Why would. That's stupid. Well, here's my challenge to you. If you have ever once given a speech, a ted speech, a PowerPoint presentation, and you have not practiced on video, you're essentially doing the same thing. You're throwing out your rough trap. You don't trust yourself to dictate a press release and send it out unedited, no spell check, no grammar check, because you're afraid you're going to get some things wrong in the first draft. You're afraid there'll be typos, spelling errors, a misplaced comma. You want to review it first before you expose yourself to the world. I understand that. But if you've ever given a speech and you haven't practiced on video to review it, you're sending out your rough draft speech to the world. Your speech is you speaking. It's not the text. Why would you do that? Rough drafts, by definition, are rough. That's why you don't want to give your rough crap to your audience. You want to have practiced it on video. Now, let's go to the next step that TED does such a great job with. They force their speakers to narrow their messages down to a handful to have stories to illustrate. But what about slides? We're visual. This is tv. Let's use slides. Ted's fine with slides. But if you look at how they use it, they follow a few basic principles. Generally, when someone is using a slide feature on ted, they're using a picture. And the picture helps bring home one idea and makes that idea more memorable, more interesting, and more understandable to the audience than simply saying it. So if Al Gore is talking about global warming, he'll show a picture of what a Glacier looked like 25 years ago. One picture and you see it's completely covered with snow and ice. Big. And then he says, but things have gotten worse. How bad? He puts up another picture and you see a lot of brown, a lot of green trees. You see dramatically less ice, and it drives home the point that glaciers are melting. We're not here to talk about politics today. You may find his presentation compelling, or you might not, but you really can't disagree that the way he presented it was effective to the audience he was trying to reach. Which, by the way, his slide deck changed dramatically over the years. I saw him give that presentation in person in the year 2000. A lot more text, a lot more bullet points, a lot of complexity to it. By the time it came out in his TED Talk and his movie, Simplified by and large, one image per screen. Now, I realize that There are some PowerPoint experts as a part of this workshop and in the audience who said, wait a minute. We do focus group testing and our tests show that if you put this image versus this image, this font works best and these PowerPoint, these bullet points work best. And three is better than 10. I gotta tell you, I think many of you are losing the point. The point of text and a slide is to help communicate an idea. It's not to win an award for someone looking at it in isolation. So here's what I believe you should do. For every single PowerPoint slide you're using, whether it's for a TED talk or a new business pitch or any other presentation, I think you should test whether it's effective. And I think you should be highly, highly skeptical of any so called expert, including me. Don't take my advice on what the most effective PowerPoint slide is, but you really shouldn't take other experts advice. There's only one person or group of persons you should really respect when it comes to your PowerPoint slides. Your audience. And I believe with all my heart that you should test your PowerPoint slide. What do I mean by that? You're giving a PowerPoint presentation to 40 business prospects on Thursday. On Tuesday, get two of your colleagues together at lunch. Give them your PowerPoint presentation. When you are done, ask them every slide they remember. Any slide they don't remember. Great. Take that slide, tear it up and throw it in the trash can. You now have empirical evidence that that Slide is completely worthless. Please throw it away. Or if nothing else, give it as a handout, email it to someone. But simply projecting it up there, going through the motions, that's a horrible, horrible thing to do. Do not do it. Here's what I believe is true for any single PowerPoint presentation slide test you should go through. Ask yourself one does this make an idea that's important to me and important to the audience more understandable than me just saying it? Does this slide make the idea that's important to me and important to the audience more memorable than me just saying it? And really think about that, Test it. If the answer is not yes to both of those things, throw the slide away. It is wasting time. It is distracting. It is utterly worthless. Yeah, yeah, but T.J. but how am I going to remember what to say if I don't have all my bullet points up? I've got a foolproof system for helping you remember what to say at all times. And it doesn't matter if you're using 50 slides, although I don't recommend you use 50 slides. You don't have to be looking at your slides for your notes. You don't have to memorize anything either. There is something else. There's another form of technology. It's wildly expensive, but hey, you're rich enough to be here. So I'm going to sell this to you and for you. It's only 500,000. No, it's not anything. It's 2 cents. What I'm talking about is a piece of paper. Put your notes on a single sheet of paper. Fold it over. Use big bold letters, at least about 20 font, 20 point size, so that you don't have to stop every two seconds. Make it large font, two or three words across, number it going down. And that's what you use for your notes. Do not use the PowerPoint for your notes. You don't see TED speakers using the PowerPoint slides as their notes. You do see horrible business speakers, conference speakers every day in the real world using their PowerPoint slides as their notes. It's a huge, huge, huge blunder. Slides aren't for you. Let me give you a tip. Nobody cares about you. Nobody cares about me when you're watching me. I really don't think you think. Oh boy. I sure hope this presentation goes well for tj. No. When you are watching this video, when you're watching any speech, the only thing you're thinking about is this clown. TJ better say something interesting and useful and helpful or boom, I'm going to Go to another webpage or I'm going to do something more useful and check my email. That's the only thing going on in the mind of an audience member. And that's why it's critical that everything you do be in their interest, not your interest. That's why you don't grab lecterns. That's why you don't read. That's why you don't put, yes, your notes up for the audience. Everything you do has got to be about what is helping your audience. It's a mindset shift. And that's why it's critically important, I believe, whether you're giving a TED speech or any other speech, to not tell yourself you're giving a PowerPoint presentation. Now, I'm not anti PowerPoint. I'm actually not using it today to make a point, But I use PowerPoint all the time. There are some weeks when I give a PowerPoint six days in that week. But here's the thing. I don't ever give a PowerPoint presentation. And you know what? You don't ever give a PowerPoint presentation. Why is that? It's because fundamentally, there is no such thing as a PowerPoint presentation, in my view. There's no such thing as a PowerPoint presentation. There's no such thing as a formal presentation. There's no such thing as a TED presentation. Really. There's certainly no such thing as a financial presentation. What do I mean by that? What I really mean is there are only two types of presentations in the entire world. Do you know what they are? That's right. It's either a good presentation or it's a bad one. It's either interesting to you and you're paying attention. It's a good idea. Let me take a note or two. Let me pay attention. Or it's a boring presentation, a bad presentation, and you tune out and you think, you know this clown Walker. He's just saying the same old stuff. Let me catch up on my email and send a text and figure out, hey, where are you going for dinner? That is the only thing that ever goes on in the mind of an audience member. So great speakers understand that. That's why you don't see a great presentation starting with, well, today in my presentation, what I'd like to talk to you about today. Boring. That's me, me, me, me. Don't ever talk about your presentation. Just talk. Don't ever make excuses for, well, I'm out of time and I'm going to have to speak quickly. Don't talk about Your presentation, just speak. And that's one of the things TED is good at. They're good at weeding out this extraneous stuff. Oh, I know I'm only allowed to speak for 19 minutes, so I better speak really quickly. And I'll have to speak twice as fast, so you'll have to wait. Watch this again. No, no, no. Just speak. 19 minutes, 17 minutes. However long your TED speech is, or for that matter, however long your Monday morning staff meeting is, is plenty of time if you're interesting and memorable. The Gettysburg Address was only a few minutes long. People are still talking about it. The guy who spoke after Lincoln spoke for more than an hour. Nobody remembers what he said. Now, that doesn't mean shorter is always better. It just means use the time you have and use it for maximum effectiveness. Now, one of the things the TED folks do that is so good is they put fear in people like, hey, your video could be seen by millions and millions of people. You better make this great. Now, they don't necessarily use my stuff, but that's essentially what they're telling. They want to see drafts of not only the written thing, but they want to see video of you, and they want you to get there the day before to rehearse on video. Well, guess what? There is not a business in the world. There is not a trade industry. There's not a convention in the world. There's that couldn't do the same thing, but we don't, because people are lazy and people are insecure. Oh, I don't want to see myself on video. Oh, no, I don't want to do that. People say, well, guess what? If you're really boring and awful and you don't see yourself on video, maybe you feel better about it. But if I didn't look in a mirror today and I had grape jelly all over my shirt and I forgot to shave half of my face, well, let's imagine I had a bunch of hair and one side was sticking right up. If I didn't look in the mirror, I wouldn't know. Maybe I'm confident. But the whole time, you're incredibly distracted by me looking like a slob. So, so much of what I do to help my clients get ready for a TED speech is frankly, something they shouldn't have to pay me for, but they won't do it otherwise. It's kind of like professional organizers. If any of you have ever met someone as a professional organizer, it's not that what they're doing requires such genius. It's just that if someone has paid several thousand dollars for a professional organizer to come to their house and they've shown up and the organizer says, okay, let's pull everything out of your closet and create stacks of anything we haven't used in the last hour. By that point, if someone's telling you to do it and you've paid them a bunch of money, it's now too painful to ignore their advice. You just do it. It's the same thing when someone hires me and spends a lot of money to help them get ready for their TED speech. If I show up and I say, okay, my camera's on, I need you to stand up and speak and give that speech, and we're going to record it and watch it, they really don't have a choice. They can't get out of it at that point. But it really shouldn't require hiring me and spending a small fortune on that. It's something you can do yourself. When I started in this business in 1984, 31 years ago, TV cameras were rare and they were big and hiring a TV crew was expensive. So you kind of had an excuse back then, but nobody has an excuse anymore. Everybody is completely surrounded by video. So that's why the TED speakers are so good. The TED folks order them to practice on video and they make them show up for video rehearsal. You can do the same thing if you have to give a three minute presentation at a quarterly board meeting. You can practice talking to your own cell phone out in the hallway if you need to, and watch it again. The key is not practicing on video and watching it. The key is you have to do it again and again, again, until you've eliminated the things you don't like, the defects, and you've increased the things you do like again, of the things you have control over. Everybody can look at video of themselves and see something they don't like. I can look at a video right now. In fact, I can see myself and I cannot like the fact that I don't have any hair. I looked a thousand times better when I was 20. Believe me, I can look at it and think, wow, I don't like my beady eyes or that I have a double chin, there's all sorts of things. I could point out that in a perfect world I would look different or sound better. But when I do look at a video of myself and I don't hold it up to some standard of perfection of physical looks, but just by the standard of, am I communicating what I want to communicate? Am I coming across the way I want, then the answer is yes. So that's what gives me a comfort level and a confidence level so that I know I'm coming across the best I can. That's what you need. And that's what pretty much every TED speaker that you see, whether you're in person or@ted.com or on YouTube, they're exuding that because typically they've practiced, they have rehearsed. You don't have to wait for a TED speech to rehearse. You can rehearse every single speech. Winston Churchill was notorious for sitting in his bathtub all morning long, speaking out loud so loudly that his servants would come running and say, is everything okay? And Churchill would say, it's fine. I was just addressing the House of Commons. Of course, what he meant is he was practicing his speech out loud before the House of Commons while he was still home in his bathtub. Now, he didn't have the advantage of video cameras everywhere you do, and that's why you need to use that if you want a TED quality speech. Now, the final thing that I haven't addressed that is a little bit trickier. The thing that makes TED speeches stand out is people have to have a topic that is interesting, that doesn't just sound like something people have heard a thousand times. And that isn't just about promoting a particular business or a sales pitch or a fundraising pitch. They position it so that if you want to talk at TED, or certainly TED Global or the main ted, you have to have an idea that's genuinely interesting and important for society. It can't be just about you. It can't be. Let me tell you why my mutual fund is going to give you 2% higher return on your investment. Even though we're kind of like an index. You'll never see someone give a speech like that. Now you might see someone give a speech on how it's possible to invest exclusively in green companies that deal with solar power and alternative energies sources and it still be profitable. And then in the bio, you see later that the person talking runs a mutual fund. It could be a soft sell like that, but the topic has to be why? What you've always thought about investing and investing in energy and alternative energy isn't quite right, and why there's this new thing here, and if more people did it, the whole world would be better off. That's more of the structure of what you need for a TED speech. The number one problem I see with people who come to me and say, well, dj, I want to Be a TED speaker. I want to give a TED Talk. I want to talk to ted. When I ask them, okay, well what do you want to talk about? They typically don't have anything that interesting to say. What you're not going to see at TED generally is some sort of generic motivational talk. Even when you see someone like an Anthony Robbins, who's famous as a motivational speaker and is a very good speaker, regardless of whether you like his style or his particular positions on self improvement, he's a very good speaker. But when he gives a TED Talk and you can see it@ted.com it is different. It is profoundly different. So what should you really do if you're trying to prepare a TED Talk, and even if it's not to the TED audience, if you want to give a speech that's TED quality and you want people afterwards saying, wow, I realize this is just a cardboard convention container, you know, cardboard container convention. But that speech was so good, you ought to be speaking in ted. If that's the response you want, then you need to follow a few basic principles. For starters, come up with some ideas that you think are different, genuinely interesting and important and that aren't trite, that actually are going to strike people as. I never really thought about it that way before. You've got to have something like that. And if you think hard enough and long enough about almost any topic, you can do that. But you've got to come up with at least one idea that will get people to look at a topic, an issue, perhaps even an old topic, a tiresome topic in a new way. That's the first big thing. The next thing you have to do is brainstorm on every possible idea you could say on that subject, put them in priority, narrow it down to the top five. The next thing you need is a particular story to illustrate each one of your points. So, for example, one of my points is it's really, really important to video record yourself to get to the point where you like what you see. I didn't just say that, although I have harped on it a few times. I also gave a story and the story involved. I hope you remember my training session with a prime minister in Eastern Europe and how I felt. The setting is important, how someone feels is important. The problem, the solution and all those elements were there. Now, the story only took a minute or two to say, but generally it helps people remember the point. Your biggest problem when it comes to speech, any speech, is not that your hands are going to shake or move too much or have wildly distracting hands. That's really not a problem for most people. The biggest problem is not. That's really not the biggest problem. By the way, three people I know who say a lot of UHS and UMS. David Letterman, Martha Stewart, Bill O'Reilly. What do they all have in common? They did make or still make $30 million a year talking. So in my opinion, people waste way too much time focusing on the uhs and ums. Fewer the better. More important to have something interesting to say. So focus on these stories that make your ideas come alive. Then, and only then do I believe you should ever even think about a slide. And that slide should be visual. It should convey an idea with an image, not with text. Why do I say that now? Think of the last convention or conference you went to. You met someone, you exchanged business cards, and now three weeks go by, you bump into the same person in the airport in Denver. What are you most likely to remember? Their face or their full name and title on that business card? If you're like most people, you remember the face, you might not even remember the name. You certainly won't remember the first name, middle initial, last name that might have appeared on that business card. That is because our brains are much more image processors than they are word processors, and that's why it's so important to put out images. And if you want to have a traditional PowerPoint with lots and lots of text, fine, be my guest. But email that to people in advance. Give it to them after that. So, for example, I am going to send all of you a copy of my book, Secret to Foolproof Presentations. All you have to do is send me an email tjediatrainingworldwide.com but I'm not going to get up here and sort of read from the book or put up bullet points on the segment on how to use a teleprompter. So while there's something in here that deals with tips on teleprompter, I had to make a choice that that wasn't one of the most important things to talk about during our hour together. So I don't talk about it. But if you want this again, I'm happy to send this to you at no charge. Just send me an email tjediatrainingworldwide.com so I want you to really, really focus on those aspects of, have something interesting to say, come up with an outline of only five points a story for each. And of course, the most important step of all, practice on video until you like what you see. Then and Only then I would suggest you email that video to people you respect. Probably not close family members. They're too likely to say, what did you wear that ugly tie for? And then you say, well, you gave me that tie. Family can be too close. But send it to people who you respect and will give you honest advice. And here's the key. Ask them what do they remember from your presentation. And you can do this face to face, too. If you're at a larger company, get three of your colleagues together at lunch. Give them your PowerPoint presentation. Give them the speech you think think should be seen at ted. When you're done, ask them what messages they remember. I ask people all the time after I speak, what do they remember? And if they say, oh, dj, it was great. You're so professional. You're so commanding. We love your stage presence. You're a real pro. If somebody tells me that, then I know my speech was a complete, utter failure. That's right. I don't want people commenting on my style. I want them remembering the content. People can lie about liking you or not, but they really can't lie about telling you they remember your key messages if they don't. So that's the number one thing you want to ask people when you're testing your speech. Do they remember your message? What else do they remember? Do they remember your stories? That's only good if they also connect it to the message. You want them to remember your stories and messages and ask them what slides do they remember. You want them to remember the slides. If they can't do that, it's big, big trouble. So these are the key concepts. If you want to learn these and even greater depth, I'm going to give you, at no charge, access to my online presentation training course that covers all of these topics with homework in even greater detail. Just go to mediatrainingworldwide.com and sign up for the free online training and I'll send this to you at absolutely no charge. I'd like to thank Ellen for letting me be a part of this. And thanks to all the crew at at the 2015 Outstanding Presentations Workshop. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks a lot.