The public speaking lesson you never had | DK . | TEDxNelson

foreign [Music] how would you feel if I invited you to stand in front of a hundred people that you don't know and try to share personal and professional stories to create and ignite and Inspire creative action is that a proposal that you would run towards that's something you go yes that's full of promise for me and potential or would you like to push me over and Run to the Hills probably the latter a lot of you were thinking great public speaking I kind of do a little bit of that but it's not my favorite thing

ever to do for the last 10 years I've been running the tedx Wellington down obviously in the capital city of New Zealand and asking people to do just that the stand and share their story stand in their voice but for the last six years I've been coaching leaders and ex all blacks and kind of CEOs of big companies and a Dame thrown into the mix to do that as well however I've got about 60 news of public speaking experience myself I've been really lucky to speak to small audiences as well as larger audiences on five

continents around the globe on different topics and I spend my time really trying to help people find and have their voice and today with total humility I gotta say I'm gonna give you the public speaking lesson that you should have got when you were a kid or at least when you started work let's be honest cool so this is me born in The Valleys of Camry South Wales ah look at that not a lot of people can put off the stripy sock flouncy shirt with a short and kind of vest top like that it was

the 70s so forgive me for that man you Jillian so there I am beautiful little kid runt of the letter I got two older brothers they remind me I'm the runt so that's kind of cool I was born with a hearing impairment that was very quickly picked up and then through my formative years I had to have a lot of speech therapy if you know anybody with a speech impediment uh issues need to do with their sharing but sometimes not but as a kid I couldn't cheer the sounds to then save the sounds so I

remember from time I was about five time I was about eight or nine every week going with my mom to the speech therapist office and I had a couple of doctors there who teach me to listen and then in listening pronounce the words back or at least certain consonants and and groups of consonants as well by the time in my teens I was in and out of hospital with evasive surgeries to do with my children perforated eardrums that's always fun skin grafts mastoidectomies that's a big word for cutting little bones out in the middle ear

so you lose a lot of the kind of functionality in your ear and polyps removing from eustachian tubes very big words for okay he's had a lot of stuff done with his ears so I'm left with a deficiency however fast forward I'm now speaking to you about speaking which is kind of ironic but cool right how we turn these superheroes or always have uh as many kind of flaws as they do superhero skills as well so I've turned listening into my speaking skill in terms of what I get to to in a little bit how

speaking can really be more about listen listening than it is about talking so in my history of speaking this is my favorite ever speaking gig you'll see me hopefully looking cool and calm and Collective speaking at a conference called The Sandbox Summit it was in Boston at MIT if you know that that's a big cool big deal it was the closing keynote always go on last or towards the last people remember you much more then so that's cool and that was the first time I really stepped into my vulnerability as the speaker back in 2015

I was speaking a lot but I really stepped into the idea of revealing who I am talked about me hearing the difficulties but my my creative insights and things like that and the impact of that is that I got 300 people to dance with me seriously this is me dancing with 300 people and just to prove it I come up in a minute spot the bad white boy dancing right there see cool and I suddenly don't know me that if you get the right components together you can move physically people into dancing with you so

what are those components well with a big Jedi mind trick and three other elements I'm gonna now give them to you you only need three things to Great deliver a great talk and they are Grace credibility and resonance let's go through them very very quickly Grace it's not what you're saying it's how you were saying it credibility that's the stuff coming out your mouth now that's the stories you choose to tell and the way in which you choose to tell them cool story models Frameworks blah blah blah resonance that's the audience's role in your talk

what are you leaving them feeling right the great Maya Angelou paraphrasing her here said that obviously people will remind me how you made them feel a lot longer than what you told them or what you did so let's take them one by one chapter by chapter if you like and now I'm gonna show you stuff that you can't unsee and I apologize for that kind of because once I reveal things to you you're gonna go see other people speaking and going ah DK told me about that that's cool so let's start with my favorite thing

to work on with clients which is Grace remember that's not what to say what they're saying that's how they are saying it their whole physicality my favorite thing with clients is to stop them walking too much stop them moving in a weird wonderful way so I'm going to show you all the weird and wonderful ways in which people tell me other things about themselves first let's start with your feet okay I'm quite solid up here I don't mind walking and coming forward and now and again and then stepping back gently when I feel like I've

made my point and situating myself here some people do a couple of different things one called a hip Bop and the other is called one-legged walk-in again I'm sorry I'm gonna show you this stuff you can't and see it but the hip-hop is obviously they sit on the hip then they transfer their weight onto the other hip now some people every sentence is this and in another sentence comes off and another sentence and if it was a beat going on in the back you've got a hip bot movement right they're just dancing up here great

my one-legged walk-in is kind of fun because you'll see this a lot is people stand and for some reason when we know why this wants to leave thank you very much it just wants to leave obviously their body is going run there's 100 eyeballs on you your food or you're in trouble with the tribe that's your lizard brain but for some reason this leg wants to leave but you know you got to Stand and Deliver so that's a big issue right because if then we have some people wandering around and feeling a little bit off

they kind of throw their focus down here so those two issues can be solved with one solution I call it the soft rock star pose I made this up all right we know Rockstar poses this you know you got an ax a guitar and you're rocking out to something hard cool that's rock star pose cool soft rock star poses when you get up to speak don't speak until you're standing strong and firm this is not standing like that where I can one-legged walk or I can hip-hop okay this is strong and firm now the haptic

feedback if I try to move I can't do the hip thing because the way I'm built but if I can do the one-legged walking I can't because I'm all over the place stand first before you speak just your feet let's move on up some people are swivelers I like swivelers you're swiveling you don't realize you're swiveling but bless them is swiveling that's cool and they don't realize it and that's the one big thing you gotta do as friends and colleagues is tell people if they don't know what they're doing please when they're not there because

they don't realize they're doing that so let's move a little bit higher up to the hands and he gesticulate those in the crowd I'm one of those thank you very much I don't mind stressing things like that and openstandial making things small when I need to hands are good for reasons however some people have a gestural cue and every point they make or every sentence or every International point they make is joined with a hand gestural cue you might know some of these people and you just think why are they doing that every point they

make and they don't know that they're doing that again or maybe they're shaking yeah we all get the shakes and the nerves well if they're shaking give their hands something to do like holding a clicker and hold it by the side or put a hanky in their hand of stick it in their pocket where the tedxb goes really shook like that that's what we did put our hand in a pocket with a hanky so she could squeeze and then she looked calm up there but if you looked at her forearms you were popping okay that's

where that's where the strength lies oh scary stuff now I mentioned shaken now shaking is really interesting when it comes to hands because a lot of people will just started well surely you need a script to start to speak now I'm going to come back to scripts in a minute the reason why you should never use a script there's a couple of reasons I'm going to illustrate it with this lovely strategically placed piece of paper thank you very much A lot of people use scripts when they publicly speak in and we are professionals now so

we don't use scripts right you joining me in that kind of yeah change the world no more scraps evil scraps because when I see people with a script what I usually see is people shaking with a script not just with a script and especially if it's a piece of paper and you're standing trying to present now the paper will rock for you yeah you've all seen this happening and what happens then is that as the speaker I'm looking down and seeing this paper shaking so now I'm aware that I'm scared and you can see that

I'm scared now it's amplifying now I try to do some funky stuff like hold it with my hip or something and try to fold it over and hold it down there and just bring it up now and again and it's a whole bag of worms right there right so let's what happens when you get rid of the script right people go if you don't have a script how can I practice my talk just didn't go anywhere you can't practice public speaking they're out loud you can only prepare for how you're going to feel when you

stand on the stage with 100 people that you don't know and you're trying to impress them because most people practice wrong they write the script and by the way we write differently than we read just straight away there's a deficit in communication there is reasons why there are speech writers and scriptwriters out there it's a really hard to write dialogue we speak differently than we write so now if you start with a script what you then do is condense it down bullet points and those bullet points become what you say and the stories you tell

which I'll get on to in a minute but practicing right which means not practicing with a script means then you're not at home practicing with your cat your dog your kids or your spouse who goes that's brilliant darling you're going to do great and then when you get up you don't do great because suddenly there's lights I can hear myself back now this matters now there are people I don't know looking at me if the conditions change so you have to prepare differently you have to prepare for your physiological responses which I'll get to at

the end because that's the elephant in the room room in the Jedi mind trick I'm going to play on you but that was Grace let's move on to credibility the second chapter of our little thing here so credibility is interesting because the stuff coming out of your mouth no no this is where Ted has got a lot to blame for I seriously I point the tear into a bad Teddy you know bad head because Ted as we all know is this big beer moth of this is brilliant presenting I would say this has had a

negative effect on the expectations of the audience because this raised your literacy so now anybody standing here has to match what you've seen in the past and you've probably seen good presenters right to your level of literacy is ranged even in as raised sorry even in work now when you see in people present you want this level of expertise and delivery right as a speaker that means I got up my game as a creative producer who books other speakers I'm now finding people who hold themselves very well can communicate complex problems in a simple way

but give of themselves as well usually that's not the CEO who gets handed their script and presentation when they turn up because they're far too busy to do it themselves right so let's think about well how do you craft a great story I'm going to take a quote from this Old Gentleman Woodrow Wilson one of the okayish presidents in the past and he said this [Music] brevity is tough to do and we've all been in a situations where the boss says yeah I'll just speak for two minutes and 10 minutes later you're thinking have you

got a point it's always fun for the listener if you do right get to it in other words so think about brevity as a skill as a condensed distillation skill now the art of anything the craft is always in the editing so when you write your script now you've got to condense and concentrate that down and distill it down into the stories now there are so many narrative forms out there it could be as simple as just tell me where you started where you finished and fill out the lovely little bits in between my favorite

model is get up tell me what you're going to tell me tell me tell me what you told me it's the simplest presentation model out there really simple right there's other more complex ones the Nancy Duarte the shape of great presentation check that out where she establishes what is and what could be what is what could be you go back and forth between those twos and end with a lovely new bless with the annulment and the three-act structure you don't have to get that detailed all you got to do is stand up there and tell

lived experienced stories choose from lived experience not stuff you've read that will resonate with the the people in the room much better what doesn't resonate is bullet points that's a slide to remind me to talk about bullet points see what I've done there yeah it's a good stuff so there are three bullet points on this slide they're just not there because it's pattern seeking creatures if I started with three bullet points in other words any text on a slide you are reading it so what I do is I hold the slide until I'm ready to

talk about the guns don't kill people bullets kill people and bullet points kill attention boom cute yes but you know the point that Megan if I'd started like this you would have been reading and by the time you got to the bottom I would have been reading the first one you would have had to come back with me and join in because you can't listen as well as read you get the point right so if you have complex information make sure it's segmentized or broken up and have it coming in as you're speaking to it

so the listeners can follow the story with you and not ahead of you or trying to decipher or are confused and coming back at the wrong point when they start listening to you again the last one is the resonant now this is where you have a role I guess it's your emotive feeling what am I leaving you feeling as an audience as a group of humans so this is where most people fall over because they write a script based on something that they want to impart with this information now in a realm of a sphere

or atmosphere this is a line so let's talk about it as a spectrum thank you of emotion on the one end you got feared and disgust on the other hand you've got joy inhalation the worst place in given a presentation is in the middle that's the information ma realm m-e-h okay I have no feeling towards that it's just information right I'm not saying don't have information I'm saying humanize that information as much as possible whether it's you in the story whether someone else a user and you know an end experience user of something throw humans

as much as possible into your story and this is where I come back full circle about Grace as well because you will get your emotional cues from me as the speaker I had a client bless him quite senior in the government and he sent me a 40-minute presentation of him speaking in a European conference about something very funky apparently and that was great I could watch the talk and then critique when I met him for the first time and it was very ego very open he was like hit me with everything you got so I

said great my first question is how many times did you smile in a 40-minute talk and he was like I don't know and I had counted and it was twice the first time was thanking the person for introducing him the second time was thanking everybody for listening to him he was gone right we've seen those people who are kind of very stoic in their presentation but what they're saying is freaking awesome apparently but they don't change their face they're very serious about these things and that was my point to him there was no emotional kind

of cues from you as a presenter of the information to understand how as The Listener I should be feeling at certain points in the story if you're serious don't do this okay this is a very serious subject you know or alternately if you need to get a little bit fun with it you know you can play around with this but please recognize that people are going to mirror your emotion so when you get excited and lean and you use your hand you're going to feel a little bit of oh he's coming forward I should be

paying attention to you versus someone going back and obviously a bit scared of you and then start talking like that and and don't have it you can get my point the whole physicality lends itself to the resonance now this is where we get the Jedi mind trick and this is the last piece of information I give you and this is the fun little thing that you can't participate in if you breathe with this expanding and Contracting little visual you will reset your parasympathetic system big words for basically you chill the hell out you might want

to yawn while you do this I do it when I breathe this slow I yawn that's cool and I stood on the side of stages with this as a gift I got it I can send it to you with people and I go let's do this breathing exercise and I see their shoulders drop and they relax and then I give them the beautiful stuff which is you're not nervous you're excited not nervous yet excited and as soon as I clicks into their brain the physiological responses actually had kind of amplify that excitement remember when you

gone to see your favorite ever person in concert or your favorite ever team in whatever Sport and they're just running on you feel that excitement and you're like oh my God I'm here I want to pee this is called cool and that is the same as when you're feeling really really nervous like I don't want to be you need to pee the psychological state is the only thing that's changed so you're not nervous you're excited you're not nervous you're excited it's excited to speak not nervous and that will get you through so many of the

ills that we have when it comes to public speaking so just a recap if you had a little bit of Grace and credibility and resonance with a little bit of a Yoda Jedi mind trick going on you can then speak with a plum and connect to an audience and also whilst you're up here have a little bit of fun thank you for your time and attention really appreciate it