TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking

So how do all these different people do it, the scientists who are more used to laboratories than lecterns, for example? Computer programmers who know their bits from their bytes, but who might not have a clue how to tell a story. Or, politicians who speak publicly so often that they struggle to find something new to say. How do they overcome their fears about public speaking, or convey their ideas so that they really hit home?

That's what this book sets out to explain. It looks back through more than a decade of TED presentations to show how inspiring carefully-crafted short talks can be. It draws out the techniques, tips and tricks that worked for people who've spoken from a TED stage, to help you to give public speaking your very best shot.

Whether you're an entrepreneur, a teacher, a paleontologist, or a jazz musician, if you want to inform, explain, inspire, or persuade with your ideas, this book can help you do it.

In "TED Talks," we learn about the mechanics of giving a talk. We get taken through the essential elements for building connections with an audience. We learn how to craft a talk's content and what tools are available to us. We find out how to prepare, and how to behave when we're on stage. We're even asked to consider how increasingly important public speaking is becoming, and to think about it in a new, globally interconnected way.

What this book doesn't do is give you a formula for success, or any rigid paint-by-numbers processes. Anderson asks us to think of "TED Talks" not as a rulebook, but as "a set of tools designed to encourage variety." While he identifies some elements that are common to all great talks, his emphasis throughout is on crafting an approach that works for you.

All this advice comes directly from TED itself, which has probably developed, watched, and assessed more public speakers than any other organization. It's this pedigree that distinguishes this book from the hundreds of others you can buy about public speaking.

Anderson has been the president and head curator at TED since 2001. After taking over, he expanded the scope of TED from its original focus on technology, entertainment and design to cover an enormous range of topics.

In 2006, he launched TED online, which uses the power of online video to spread ideas, and, nine years later, the organization uploaded its 2,000th talk. Anderson has worked with many of those speakers personally, helping to fine-tune their content and develop their public-speaking skills.

So keep listening to hear what's in the public speaker's toolkit, to find out the best ways to prepare for a talk, and to learn how visuals can make or break a presentation.

"TED Talks" is divided into 21 chapters and five parts. The first four parts deal with the different stages of delivering a talk – laying the foundation, selecting the right tools, preparing the content of your talk, and delivering it. The last part of the book is called "Reflection." This is where the author considers how interconnected we are in the modern world, and how powerful and important it is to share our knowledge and ideas with one another as a result.

The book starts reassuringly. Chapter one acknowledges how terrifying it can be to step onto a public stage. But it argues that if we have the ability to hold a conversation with a group of people over dinner, or tell a story around a campfire, then we're capable of giving a good public talk.

The author drops in a few famous names to convince us that plenty of people have done what he's pushing us to do. Eleanor Roosevelt, Monica Lewinsky, Warren Buffett, Princess Diana – these are all people who took on their lack of confidence and fear of being in the spotlight, and found their own unique ways to speak in public. Anderson's message is that if they can do it, so can we. We don't need to be like Winston Churchill, Nelson Mandela or Abraham Lincoln, who seemed to find it easy. We just need to be ourselves.

The next few chapters introduce us to the two central themes of the book. First, we learn that public speaking is really just about having an idea that's worth sharing, and transmitting that idea to your listeners' minds so they can feel charged, moved or enriched by it. This is your number one goal as a speaker, your reason for being on that stage.

For this to happen, your idea needs depth and meaning. It needs to be engaging – something that will inspire curiosity. For this reason, the author encourages you to emphasize the substance, rather than the style, of your talk. So you should choose the right language and assumptions for the audience, and be sure of the value that you're providing – or, as the author puts it, the "gift" that you're giving. Whilst your body language is important, and your emotion and tone of voice play their part, it's the words that matter most.

A little further on we're introduced to the concept of the "throughline." This is a theme that runs through a talk from start to finish, connecting and tying together each narrative element. It's what gives your talk its point, its reason for being. It's what helps you carry your listeners along with you on a journey of discovery.

We learn that many public speakers plan their talks meticulously, but fail to construct them around a throughline. With no overall arc connecting the different parts of a talk, listeners end up struggling to see how each point relates to the others, or to understand what the main point is.

Good throughlines don't just connect the different parts of a talk. They also offer something unexpected that intrigues listeners – something counterintuitive or surprising. Examples of great throughlines are "More choice actually makes us less happy" and "Vulnerability is something to be treasured rather than hidden."

The author moves on to look at the five core tools that speakers use as they plan the content of their talks – connection, narration, explanation, persuasion, and revelation.

Perhaps one of the most important is connection, which we learn about in chapter five. When you first step onto a stage to speak, chances are there'll be a certain amount of expectation among the people in front of you. Until you disarm any skepticism, dislike, mistrust, or boredom that's lingering within your audience, you'll not likely to make much of a connection with them.

Anderson offers several strategies for doing this, ranging from making eye contact and showing your vulnerability from the start, to using humor and storytelling. Each of these can help you to get your listeners "on board" from the word go. And when you've made that connection, it's much easier to make a real impact.

A few chapters on we learn about another tool – persuasion, which can be difficult to use. If you're attempting to replace people's existing views with something else, you first have to convince them to abandon their original position. This can be a tall order.

So before you can persuade an audience, you have to prime them. You have to make your point seem reasonable and plausible. To this end, Anderson advises us to use metaphors and other linguistic devices.

He offers violence as an example, and the assumption that the world is becoming more dangerous. The speaker wants to persuade us that the world is actually becoming less violent, so he starts by demolishing our assumptions with stories and facts about how disturbingly violent earlier centuries were. He then primes us, by reminding us how the mass media have an incentive to highlight the more violent and negative events in the news. This opens our minds to the possibility that violence may be over-represented and misunderstood, and makes it easier for the speaker to convince us of his view.

The next part of the book focuses on preparing the specifics of your talk. Chapter 10, for example, is crammed with useful information about visuals – the photographs, illustrations, infographics, animations, and video that appear on screens near the speaker.

The first thing you have to decide is whether your talk would actually benefit from using visuals. Talks can easily be blown off course by slides that are too busy, too distracting, or badly timed. Done right, though, visuals can make the difference between success and failure.

To help us get it right, the author walks us through the three key elements for producing strong visuals. We learn that, for a visual to really dial up the power of a talk, it needs to reveal something, to bring clarity to something that's hard to describe. To give an example, it would be nearly impossible for a watercolor artist to verbally describe a piece of his or her work but, by including a photographic slide in the talk, he or she can let the listeners see exactly what they're referring to.

Visuals also need to explain. They should help communicate the things that language can't do very well, and be as clearly planned and designed as the rest of your talk. Just repeating what you're saying on a slide or, worse, filling slides with bullet points and reading them to your listeners isn't going to add much value. Instead, they should complement what you're saying and help the audience to grasp your point.

Lastly, we learn that visuals should delight an audience. Even if the topic you're speaking about isn't what you could call "beautiful," your visuals should make your talk more esthetically pleasing, and allow your listeners the odd moment of visual indulgence.

So, having worked through the preparation process, what else is there in the book? Well, if you're a dip-in and dip-out kind of reader, the chapters about being on stage may well be the ones you turn to first.

One of the most interesting chapters about this explores on-stage setups. As elsewhere in the book, one of key messages is that you should choose the approach that works best for you. Anderson stresses how important it is to push the edge of your comfort zone, but argues that you shouldn't go so far that you jeopardize the success of your performance.

His favorite mode of public speaking is to talk without using a lectern and to forego teleprompters, confidence monitors and tablets. He argues that you have the best chance of connecting when you open yourself up to your audience and are willing to show your vulnerability on stage. When you let down your own guard, your audience will let down theirs.

But this isn't for everyone. For some speakers, it's a step too far out of their comfort zone. So, Anderson offers a range of "comfort backups," as he calls them, to help you find the stage setup that you'll be most comfortable with – setting prompt notes on a table at the side of the stage or a confidence monitor at the back of the room, for example. These can help you find the sweet spot between being open with your audience and knowing that you've got a safety net in place.

The other chapters about being on stage cover what to wear, how to handle nerves, and how to fine tune your voice and presence for maximum effect. In each chapter, the main takeaway message is to do it in your own way. Be yourself. Be honest. Be authentic.

When you focus on simply being yourself, on providing something of real value, and on letting your passion and your personality shine through, you can craft a talk that informs and excites your listeners.

So, what's our last word on "TED Talks?"

Well, if you're going to be speaking from a stage any time soon, it's an essential book to have on your shelf. If the author's right, and public speaking is going to matter even more in the future than now, we're all going to benefit from the advice he offers here.

The book does concentrate on the author's experience of TED events, and there is some promotion of TED within its pages, but it's not difficult to look past that. There's plenty here that can help you communicate your ideas to an audience clearly and effectively, and that's true whether your stage is at an international conference, your next town hall meeting, or just in the village hall.

"TED Talks," by Chris Anderson, is published by Headline Publishing Group.

That's the end of this episode of Book Insights. Thanks for listening.