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

24 Aug 2015 · 3 min

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2:48

TJ Walker answers a student question about the best way to structure a story for a TED Talk. He outlines a simple, audience-focused story template (introduce a character, set the scene, include dialogue, state the problem, convey feelings, show resolution), emphasizes relevance and a larger societal point for TED, and offers practical presentation tips (be interesting, avoid long talks/slides, aim for ~18 minutes).

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So what is the best structure of a story in a TED Talk? Sophia writes in. She's one of my online students for my how to Give a TED Talk presentation. And she asked tj, what is the best way to structure a story for a TED Talk? Well. Well, Sophia, I'm glad you're interested in speaking like the speakers at ted, but let me tear down some of the curtains here, the veils of mystery. I'm a big fan of ted. I think they do a great job. I watch their speeches for fun, for entertainment, to learn. I prescribe them to clients. But here's the thing about TED talks. They're no different from any other good presentation. What they've done at TED is simply strip away the horrible, boring parts of almost any speech. When it comes to a story, for the most part, a story is a story. The structure of a story is you introduce a character, someone you've had an actual conversation with. You describe where you were, what they said to you, you bring in the dialogue, what they said back, what the problem was, how you felt, how it was resolved, how you overcame a problem. That's all the story is. Every great novel has them, every bad novel has them. And the way to make the story effective is to make sure it's completely relevant to your audience, interesting to your audience, and contains some larger truth that's important to people. Now, the thing that's different about TED is it can't just be a story about why your company is great, why people need to hire you. It can't be about just something that's narrowly self serving and narrow commercial interest. It has to be about an issue that affects larger elements of society. But beyond that, that's about it. So, Sophia, I urge you, keep watching TED presentations, but realize there's nothing that goes on in these presentations that you can't be doing now for your next TED Talk. For that matter, for, for any business presentation, for any speech talk you've got to give, you can give it like a TED Talk. All that means is be interesting. Don't drone on and on and on longer than 18 minutes. Don't show slides with bullet points and text and illustrate every key point with an interesting, relevant story. Do that and you'll be in great shape and your structure will be perfectly fine for your stories.