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Shadowing practice: TED's Secret to Great Public Speaking - Chris Anderson

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  1. Some people think that there's a TED Talk formula.0:11
  2. Give a talk on a round red rug.0:15
  3. Share a childhood story.0:17
  4. Dive -olge a personal secret.0:18
  5. End with an inspiring core to action.0:20
  6. No.0:23
  7. That's not how to think of a TED Talk.0:24
  8. In fact, if you overuse those devices, you're just going to come across as cliched or emotionally manipulative.0:26
  9. But there is one thing that all great TED Talks have in common, and I would like to share that thing with you.0:32
  10. Because over the past 12 years, I've had a ringside seat listening to many hundreds of amazing TED speakers like these.0:39
  11. I've helped them prepare their talks for primetime and learned directly from them their secrets of what makes for a great talk.0:46
  12. And even though these speakers and their topics all seem completely different, they actually do have one key common ingredient.0:53
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  1. And it's this.1:01
  2. Your number one task as a speaker is to transfer into your listener's minds an extraordinary gift, a strange and beautiful object that we call an idea.1:03
  3. Let me show you what I mean.1:15
  4. Here's Hailey.1:17
  5. She is about to give a TED Talk, and frankly, she's terrified.1:18
  6. Over the course of 18 minutes, 1200 people, many of whom have never seen each other before, are finding that their brains are starting to sync with Hailey's brain and1:26
  7. with each other.1:40
  8. They're literally beginning to exhibit the same brainwave patterns.1:41
  9. And I don't just mean that they're feeling the same emotions.1:45
  10. There's something even more startling happening.1:47
  11. Let's take a look inside Hailey's brain for a moment.1:50
  12. There are billions of interconnected neurons at an impossible tangle.1:54
  13. But look here, right here, a few million of them are linked to each other in a way which represents a single idea.1:58
  14. And incredibly, this exact pattern is being recreated in real time inside the minds of everyone listening.2:06
  15. That's right.2:13
  16. In just a few minutes, a pattern involving millions of neurons is being teleported into 1200 minds just by people listening to a voice and watching a face.2:14
  17. But wait, what is an idea anyway?2:24
  18. Well, you can think of it as a pattern of information that helps you understand and navigate the world.2:27
  19. Ideas come in all shapes and sizes from the complex and analytical to the simple and aesthetic.2:34
  20. And here are just a few examples shared from the Ted stage.2:40
  21. Sir Ken Robinson, creativity is key to our kids' future.2:44
  22. My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy.2:47
  23. And we should treat it with the same status.2:53
  24. Elora Hardy, building from bamboo, is beautiful.2:56
  25. It is growing all around us.2:59
  26. It's strong.3:01
  27. It's elegant.3:02
  28. It's earthquake resistant.3:04
  29. Shimamanda Adichie, people are more than a single identity.3:05
  30. The single story creates stereotypes.3:09
  31. And the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete.3:12
  32. Your mind is teeming with ideas, and not just randomly.3:19
  33. They're carefully linked together.3:23
  34. Collectively, they form an amazingly complex structure that is your personal worldview.3:25
  35. It's your brain's operating system.3:30
  36. It's how you navigate the world.3:32
  37. And it is built up out of millions of individual ideas.3:34
  38. So for example, if one little component of your worldview is the idea that kittens are adorable, then when you see this, you'll react like this.3:38
  39. But if another component of your worldview is the idea that leopards are dangerous, then when you see this, you'll react a little bit differently.3:48
  40. So it's pretty obvious why the ideas that make up your worldview are crucial.3:57
  41. You need them to be as reliable as possible a guide to the scary but wonderful real world out there.4:02
  42. Now, different people's worldviews can be dramatically different.4:09
  43. For example, how does your worldview react when you see this image?4:14
  44. Whatever your answer, there are millions of people out there who would react very differently.4:30
  45. So that's why ideas really matter.4:38
  46. If communicated properly, they're capable of changing forever how someone thinks about the world and shaping their actions both now and well into the future.4:40
  47. Ideas are the most powerful force shaping human culture.4:51
  48. So if you accept that your number one task as a speaker is to build an idea inside the minds of your audience, here are four guidelines for how you4:55
  49. should go about that task.5:03
  50. One, limit your talk to just one major idea.5:04
  51. Ideas are complex things.5:09
  52. You need to slash back your content so that you can focus on the single idea you're most passionate about and give yourself a chance to explain that one thing5:11
  53. properly.5:19
  54. You have to give context, share examples, make it vivid.5:20
  55. So pick one idea and make it the through line running through your entire talk so that everything you say links back to it in some way.5:24
  56. Two, give your listeners a reason to care.5:33
  57. Before you can start building things inside the minds of your audience, you have to get their permission to welcome you in and the main tool to achieve that, curiosity.5:37
  58. Stir your audience's curiosity.5:47
  59. Use intriguing provocative questions to identify why something doesn't make sense and needs explaining.5:49
  60. If you can reveal a disconnection in someone's worldview, they'll feel the need to bridge that knowledge gap.5:56
  61. And once you've sparked that desire, it will be so much easier to start building your idea.6:04
  62. Three, build your idea piece by piece out of concepts that your audience already understands.6:10
  63. You use the power of language to weave together concepts that already exist in your listeners minds, but not your language, their language.6:17
  64. You start where they are.6:25
  65. But speakers often forget that many of the terms and concepts they live with are completely unfamiliar to their audiences.6:27
  66. Now metaphors can play a crucial role in showing how the pieces fit together because they reveal the desired shape of the pattern based on an idea that the listener6:33
  67. already understands.6:44
  68. For example, when Jennifer Kahn wanted to explain the incredible new biotechnology called CRISPR, she said, It's as if for the first time you had a word processor to edit6:46
  69. DNA.6:55
  70. CRISPR allows you to cut and paste genetic information really easily.6:56
  71. Now, a vivid explanation like that delivers a satisfying aha moment as it snaps into place in our minds.7:02
  72. It's important therefore to test your talk on trusted friends and find out which parts they get confused by.7:08
  73. Four, here's the final tip.7:15
  74. Make your idea worth sharing.7:17
  75. By that I mean ask yourself the question, who does this idea benefit?7:20
  76. And I need you to be honest with the answer.7:26
  77. If the idea only serves you or your organization, then I'm sorry to say it's probably not worth sharing.7:29
  78. The audience will see right through you.7:35
  79. But if you believe that the idea has the potential to brighten up someone else's day or change someone else's perspective for the better or inspire someone to do something7:37
  80. differently, then you have the core ingredient to a truly great talk, one that can be a gift to them and to all of us.7:46

Chris Anderson on the TED formula: english listening practice at B2

This is english listening practice on prepared public speaking, delivered by the man who runs the conference. The accent is American, the level is B2, and the pace is 180 words per minute, faster than 44 percent of our catalogue. Lines arrive quickly, but the phrasing is deliberate: Anderson pauses where he wants you to think, and those pauses are audible. The clip carries 92 lines.

What is happening in it is an argument with a demonstration attached. He opens by knocking down the idea that a great talk follows a recipe, lists the devices people copy, and refuses them outright. Then he shifts. A speaker called Hailey walks on stage, and he takes you inside her brain and the brains of the 1200 people listening to her. That shift, from flat rebuttal to something almost storytelling, is why this recording is good material to shadow. You get two very different deliveries from one voice inside a few minutes.

It is also speech written to be heard rather than read, so the sentences sit naturally in a learner's mouth. Nothing here is a book sentence you would never say out loud.

The stress patterns in Anderson's opening: american accent training on stage delivery

Useful american accent training comes from lines that carry stress, not from word lists, and the opening of this talk is built almost entirely on contrast. Three lines to work on:

  • "Some people think that there's a TED Talk formula." The weight lands on the last word. Everything before it flattens out, and "there's" is one beat rather than two, which is the single most common thing learners get wrong here.
  • "That's not how to think of a TED Talk." A correction, and it only sounds like one if the pitch lifts on "not" and the rest of the line falls away. Say it evenly and the sentence stops arguing with anything.
  • "a strange and beautiful object that we call an idea" Three peaks, on strange, beautiful and idea, with the words between them spoken fast to keep the peaks apart. This is the line to use if you want to hear how an American speaker paces a list.

Working through the Hailey passage: a practice order for this TED talk

Treat this talk as english speaking practice rather than a listen, and do not start at line one. Start where the delivery changes, then work outwards. Each step below is one line of this recording.

  • Begin with "Let me show you what I mean." Short, low, five words. It is the hinge of the whole clip and it teaches you his baseline speed before you meet a long line.
  • Move to "She is about to give a TED Talk, and frankly, she's terrified." Practise the comma before "frankly" as a real stop. Record yourself, compare, repeat five times.
  • Then take "But wait, what is an idea anyway?" He drops out of lecture register into everyday english here. The question word order is plain, the tone is not.
  • Only now attempt line 28, the long one about a pattern being teleported into 1200 minds. Split it at the comma first, join it after.
  • Finish by running the four lines back to back at his speed. If you lose the last one, you took the first three too fast.
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