Speaker 1: 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? Is that something you go, yes, that's full of promise for me and potential, or would you like to push me over and run through the hills? Probably the latter. A lot of you are 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, to 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 16 years 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 got to say, I'm going to give you the public speaking lesson that you should have got when you were a kid, or at least when you started to work. Let's be honest. Cool. So this is me born in the valleys of Cymru, South Wales. Oh, 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 seventies. So forgive me for that. That's my auntie Jillian. So there I am, beautiful little kid, runt of the litter, 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 impairment, it's usually to do with their hearing, but sometimes not. But as a kid, I couldn't hear 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 would teach me to listen. And then in listening, pronounce the words back or at least certain consonants 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 hearing, perforated eardrums, that's always fun, skin grafts, mastoidectomies, that's a big word for cutting little bones out of 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 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 in a little bit, how speaking can really be more about 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 my hearing difficulties, talked about 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 it suddenly dawned on 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 going to now give them to you. There are only three things that 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 are 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? The great Maya Angelou, paraphrasing here, said that obviously people will remember 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 going to show you stuff that you can't unsee. And I apologize for that, kind of, because once I reveal things to you, you're going to 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. Now 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 every 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 walking. Again, I'm sorry, I'm going to show you this stuff. You can't unsee it. But the hip bop is obviously they sit on the hip, then they transfer their weight onto the other hip. Now, some people, every sentence is this, and then another sentence comes off and another sentence. And if it was a beat going on in the back, you've got a hip bop movement, right? They're just dancing up here. Great. Now, one legged walking is kind of fun because you'll see this a lot is people stand and for some reason, well, we know why this wants to leave. Thank you very much. It just wants to leave. Obviously their body is going, run. There's a hundred 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 rockstar pose. I made this up. All right. We know rockstar pose is this, you know, you've got an ax, a guitar, and you're rocking out to something hard. Cool. That's rockstar pose. Cool. Soft rockstar pose is 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 bop. Okay. This is strong and firm. This is 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 walk in, I can't because I'm all over the place. Stand first before you speak. So that's your feet. Let's move on up. Some people are swivellers. I like swivellers. You're swivelling. You don't realize you're swivelling. But bless them, they're swivelling. That's cool. And they don't realize it. And that's the one big thing you got to 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. Any gesticulators in the crowd? I'm one of those. Thank you very much. I don't mind stressing things like that in an open stance or 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 intonational 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. What about shaking? Yeah. We all get the shakes and the nerves. Well, if they're shaking, give their hand something to do, like holding a clicker and hold it by the side, or put a hanky in their hand and stick it in their pocket. We had a TEDx speaker who was really shook like that. That's what we did. Put a hand in her pocket with a hanky so she could squeeze. And then she looked calm up there. But if you looked at her forearms, they were popping. Okay. That's where the strength lies. Scary stuff. Now, I mentioned shaking. Now, shaking is really interesting when it comes to hands, because a lot of people will just start, 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're publicly speaking. 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 scripts, evil scripts. 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 tried 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 less what happens when you get rid of the script, right? People go, shit, if you don't have a script, how can I practice my talk? It's good, it didn't go anywhere. You can't practice public speaking. So I said it out loud. You can only prepare for how you're going to feel when you stand on the stage with a hundred 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. There's reasons why there are speech writers and script writers out there. So 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 to bullet points and those bullet points become what you say and the stories you tell, which I'll get onto 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. 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 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 this is the stuff coming out of your mouth now. Now this is where Ted has got a lot to blame for. I seriously, I point to Ted and say, bad Teddy, bad Ted. Because Ted, as we all know, is this big behemoth of this is brilliant presenting. I would say this has had a negative effect on the expectations of the audience because it's 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? So your level of literacy has raised even in work now when you're seeing 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 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, Brevity is tough to do. And we've all been in 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 bliss 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 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 the gun 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 I'm making. If I had 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 that 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 is 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, which is information. Now in the realm of a sphere or not sphere, this is a line. So let's talk about it as a spectrum. Thank you. Of emotion. On the one hand, you got fear and disgust. On the other hand, you got joy and elation. The worst place in giving a presentation is in the middle. That's the information meh realm, M-E-H, meh, okay, folks, meh, I have no feeling towards that. It's just information, all 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 it's someone else, a user, 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 he was very eager, 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, and he was gone, right? We've seen those people who are kind of very stoic in their presentation, but what they're saying is fricking 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 this 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, alternatively, 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 in and use your hands, you're going to feel a little bit of, ooh, he's coming forward, I should be paying attention here. Versus someone going back and obviously a bit scared of you, and then start talking like that, and don't have it, you can get my point, the whole physicality lends itself to the resonance. Now, this is where we get into the Jedi mind trick, and this is the last piece of information I'd give you. And this is the fun little thing that you can participate in. If you breathe with this expanding and contracting little visual, you will reset your parasympathetic system. So it's 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 a 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, you're excited. And as soon as that clicks into their brain, the physiological responses actually amplify that excitement. Remember when you've gone to see your favorite ever person in concert, or your favorite ever team in whatever sport, and they're just running on, and you feel that excitement, and you're like, oh my God, I'm here, I want to pee, this is so cool. And that is the same as when you're feeling really, really nervous, like, I don't want to be here, I need to pee. The psychological state is the only thing that's changed. So you're not nervous, you're excited. You're 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 to 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 aplomb, and connect to an audience, and also, once you're up here, have a little bit of fun. Thank you for your time and attention, really appreciate it. Thank you.