TEDx Workshop 2020

• Introduction and warm up game.
• What is the TED organization? What are TED and TEDx talks and why are they important? What sets them apart from other kinds of talks.
• The three kinds of talks: head, heart, hand (or A, B,C)
• Practice: two minute talks in pairs
• Coming up with your “idea worth spreading”
• Why are YOU the person to deliver this talk?
• Presentation skills, best tips for success
• Powerpoint karaoke exercise
• Practice makes perfect (we all practice giving two minute talks).
• Questions and Answers

Introduction/Practice

Can you introduce yourself in a sentence or two? Can you tell us something about yourselves that people don’t know?

What is TED?

Most popular talks

TEDx

TED-Ed

TED Circles

TED Salons

TED Master Class

Chris Anderson: There’s no formula – your task is to transfer into your listeners’ minds – an idea that they recreate. Ideas can change people’s views of the world and their future behavior. Your task is to focus on one major idea, give it context, tell your story, make it vivid. Give your listeners a reason to care, using curiosity, questions, unanticipated thoughts and connections.  Build your idea out of familiar concepts, metaphors, using the language of your audience. Make your idea worth sharing.

One of our TEDx presentations from last year

TED and TEDx Talks are not intended to teach, to lecture, to pitch, to sell. Rather… 

They can provide an intellectual stimulus (an idea worth thinking about);

An emotional bond (an idea that changes our feelings and empathy);

A call to action (an idea we can do something about)

If you were to give a talk about ‘global warming’, what idea might you share? Which of the three types of talks would you create?

Why are you the person to present your talk?

It’s your idea.

You’ve done something about it.

You’ve researched it, written about it.

It’s your professional area of expertise.

It’s happened to you or to others in your family.

You’ve created a social following/community.

You are passionate about it.

Some TEDx talks don’t make it big because:

1. The idea is not at the center of the talk and it isn’t well articulated and expressed
2. Too much of a lecture, not enough of a talk
3. People prefer to hear big ideas rather than big issues
4. The talk is not focused (i.e., more than one idea)
5. They don’t start strong and to the point
6. They don’t come across as being authentic

-from June Cohen, road map opposite page

General Steps and Tips:

Come up with an idea

Write a 100 word summary

Write 1000 words, with the idea expressed in the first two sentences, an introduction, three examples, and a strong summary

Revise your talk thirty times (ok, maybe not thirty, but at least ten times)

learn it off by heart

tape yourself, video yourself

Give your talk fifty times to family friends and strangers (okay but at least thirty)

know your talk so well that you can ‘forget it’

avoid powerpoint if you can

Own your stage

Deal with nervousness

Beware your ego

Create empathy

Dress and groom comfortably and non-self-consciously

Be your best natural self

Fear is good, make friends with it

Practice you posture and poise, voicing

Mistakes are okay. They make you more human.

with thanks to Chris Anderson:

Three steps:

Preparing your talk

Content

Have you taken a new approach?

Will people be interested? Curious? Moved? Motivated?

Can you express your idea in one intriguing sentence?

Do you start with the idea?

Does your story have a throughline (arc)?

Funny topics for practice presentations:

Streets should be named after living people

Left handed children should have their own schools

Two-thirds of the world’s population are aliens

What we can’t see

You are never too young to drink alcohol

Why most people die on Tuesdays

Using corn flakes in modern day surgery

The advantages of cooking with sand