Transcripts
1. Intro to Public Speaking: It's common knowledge that most people would rather be in the coffin than the person giving the eulogy. There's really no reason for all this fear. Public speaking is really simple once you know how to prep your talk and how to set yourself up for success. You don't have to be that one person up there holding their cheat sheet and figuring out what to say next, stopping every 10 seconds to reread the notes and go back to what you were trying to say. In the meantime, losing the audience, you don't have to be that person. My name is Nick Armstrong. I am not a public speaker. I am not incredibly charismatic. I am not any of the things that you would traditionally associate with a good public speaker, but I am a good public speaker. The reason is, because I found out how to do it the correct way. In this course, I'm going to teach you everything that I know about how to create a good five-minute talk. Wi-Fi minutes? Well. Five minutes is about the same time as it takes to give an Ignite talk or Chaka Chia, or a TEDx talk. You can do any of these formats after you watch this class, you're going to be more than capable of delivering a speech on any one of those stages. It'll take a little bit of practice, but you'll get there. What are we going to learn? We will learning how to outline your talk. We will learn what needs to go into your talk in order to make it effective. We're going to talk about how to properly outline it so you set yourself up for success. You won't be scrambling for statistic or a pithy saying or something else that you'll want to use crib notes for. We're going to talk about how to completely avoid using crib notes. We're going to talk about how to build a great deck, where to find images, how to safely source those images. We're going to talk about how to prepare your slides so that you don't end up forgetting something when you're really searching for something that you wanted to say and you couldn't quite come up with it. We're also going to talk about how to prepare your talk and how did it go about practicing? We're going to talk about how to recover when you have issues and you want to try saying something over again or if you stumbled during your talk and you weren't quite clear how to get back on track. We're going to talk about stage presence and how to connect with your audience and why it's so important that you go in without fear. The fear is all just in your head. There's really no reason to be so afraid of public speaking. I hope by the end of this class that you'll learn that and you'll be confident on stage. Let's get started.
2. Stop Being Afraid: Take a deep breath and think about what it was like the very first time you tried to do any sort of Public talk. Maybe you haven't yet. I remember what it was like for me. I was on Twitter back in 2008 or so and I saw this really funny Twitter ad for Ignite Fort Collins. I'd never done public speaking. I had taken some in college and I had done a little bit of work on FBLA or at Decca class at one point back in high school. But I never really like got in front of people and gave a talk. So when I walked into this venue, I was accepted as a speaker. Of course, I did all the rookie mistakes that you do when you pitch a talk. You were overly self-promotional. I was overly self-promotional. I wanted to talk about the things that I was trying to sell people and that just wasn't a good thing. I had just been, I think, laid off and I was looking to recruit clients into my practice. I had the wrong mentality from the get-go. Yet I wasn't super afraid. The reason is because I knew that if I got up there and bombed, the worst that could happen is that those 100 or so people would have one bad memory of me and we'd be able to laugh it off later. An unemployed web programmer who love social media, podcasting and vlogging. He's going to talk to us about Digital Frontiers. My my name is Nick Armstrong and I'm here to talk to you about Digital Frontiers. That's really the crux of it, is that the speech that you give. There's really no reason to be afraid of getting up there in front of people because those folks who were there in the audience weren't necessarily curated by you. Maybe you have some friends to help you support, or maybe have family or something like that in the audience, but those folks aren't there to chastise you. So what does that make us? [inaudible] It makes us Visual messengers because you have to be the change that you want to see in social media world because it's all about people interacting with other people. [inaudible] I'm not going to look really cool with [inaudible] They're there because they're listening to all of the speakers. They're there to hear new ideas. They are there to hear you speak. They're not going to be disappointed when you go up there on stage and do your best. As long as you go in with honest intent. If you're trying to sell them something, it's going to go horribly wrong. We'll talk about how I corrected that before I went on stage. Even in the prep, I corrected all of that. When it comes down to it, the issue of fear is really about not feeling like you belong on that stage and not feeling like you've earned your place. It's Imposter syndrome. It really shouldn't bog you down. You should feel like you are responsible for conveying your message and if you don't, then the only thing that should be disappointed in you is the idea, right? Because you didn't convey it well. You can go back and try again. It's not like if you give a bad talk, you'll never be invited back again. That happens all the time. Speakers get second chances. Speakers have bad days. Speakers get colds. Speakers, kids have issues or fail out of a class and then they're just not in the right mind space when they go in to give a talk. We'll talk about some of those things, environmental factors a little bit later. But for now, the thing that you need to do to get rid of that fear, you don't have to imagine the audience in their underwear. That's silly. When you step up to give a talk, realize that you have stepped up to give a talk because you have some area of expertise that you want to share. It's that area of expertise that the folks that are listening to you want to hear about. They're not there to see you bomb. They're not there to heckle you. They're not there to make fun of you. They are there simply to hear you convey an idea and that is what gets rid of that fear. They are there to listen to you and all you have to do is show up. That's the only thing you need to do. We can write [inaudible]. By the way, my nerve centers [inaudible] on Facebook. Isn't that so much more of a lighter feeling? Then I have to go and I have to convince them of the thing and I have to get them to take action. I have to do this. No. All you have to do is put sound in their ears. Now hopefully it's not like high pitch preaching the entire time. But if you put words together in a semi coherent manner, then I think that your audience is going to be pleased. That should take off a lot of pressure from you, right? They're just there to listen to you. That's all. They are there to listen to you. Isn't that a great feeling? That's so much better than dread or fear. They're there to listen to you and that makes you feel good. So in the next lesson, we're going to cover how to pick a topic and how to outline it effectively.
3. Picking A Topic: The thing that usually made me most nervous when I was giving my talks, the very first one I gave in 2008. I went into it with the wrong mentality. Picking your topic for your talk. Because one of the most tricky things that you can do. Everything else once you've got the title down and the topic is really super easy. Figuring out the right topic, the right angle to attack a topic with is pretty tricky for a lot of people and it takes the right mentality. When I talk about mentality, what do I mean? Well, the audience for different types of events is there for different reasons. If you are at Startup Week, for instance, you are giving a talk to people who are your peers most likely who are there to learn a thing. They want something actionable. Your talk had better attack the topic from an actionable standpoint. You want them to walk away with something to try or something new to consider. Some information that they didn't have before. That's a really valuable thing in that setting, that topic with that context is going to be really valuable. The environmental factors are really important. Startup week, may be actionable, ignite, or [inaudible] shop. They're there to be entertained. They are there to hear something new, something novel, something in a different way than they've heard it before or they are there to learn a backstory about something that they didn't know before. That's where you want to go with those talks. They're not actionable necessarily unless their advocacy talks in which case, you're trying to get somebody to do something. Sometimes those don't go so well, it ignites in pouches. For TED X, you're absolutely inciting and action. You're trying to get somebody to do something. You want them to take that actionable, a carnal of an idea and then connect with their fellow thinkers and create something new out of that. That's what you're after. Going to present it, a Comic-Con or a convention, giving a lecture, those types of things. You're teaching someone how to do something giving them the resources, the step-by-step guide of what to do next, and as you do that, the more you give them resources and outline the steps, the happier they will be moving forward from that talk. When picking a topic and figuring out the right angle for the talk, identify the context that you're in. What is the audience there to hear about? What are they expecting when they walk away? Are they expecting action? Are they trying to get something done or they trying to solve a problem or they trying to learn more about the environment that they're in or are they there to be entertained and hear a story? Are they there to learn the broad implications of the topic? Are they there for some other reason? Are they just there for you? Those are all different types of talks and they require different types of topics. Always consider your audience and their needs and the environment that you're in. If you can put humor into an environment where it will fit, if you can put emotion and contextual emotion so you want them to connect to the story into a talk, that's always a good idea. If you can bring yourself and your quirks into the talk, that's also a good idea. Connecting with you as a speaker is something that the audience has to look at. They are there to engage with you. It's your job to give them something to engage with a little hook or platform that they can jump up there with you, and that happens through a good topic in the right context with the right end goal in that. In the next lesson, we're going to talk about how to outline your topic.
4. Outlining Your Talk: I'm going to show you my secret for outlining a talk and it's going to seem really silly at first. Every slide that I create will have one tweet worth of information; that's it. I want you to consider your talk. If it's an Ignite talk, it's 20 slides. If it's a [inaudible] it's also 20 slides, but each slide gets 20 seconds rather than the 15 for Ignite. If it's a TEDx, you might have a few more slides, a few less slides. Typically I like the Ignite or [inaudible] formats just to keep me on track and on time with my ideas. Because I know, internally, after practicing for so long, how long 15 seconds is, how long 20 seconds is. It gives me enough time to get about two to three maybe four sentences out. I go to Twitter and I start typing, and I create the idea that I want to espouse on that slide, and I might have a couple of these ideas. I might have quite a few in fact. If my topic is really broad, I might need to narrow it down a little bit and redefine my topic as I go. But in order to outline properly, you have to know what type of narrative I'm going to weave; and so in each tweet, I tried to put a can of truth and idea, something to connect us to where we've been, where we're going. The more than I can do that, the easier the audience is going to be able to follow my talk and the easier I'll be able to remember where I'm going and where I've been. Geeks together work very well and we see this in Star Trek. You've got scientists, and engineers, and Vulcans, and medical doctors, and the captain, and communications officers, and so if I were the one to assemble a team, I would base it off of Star Trek. Consolidating your idea, your talk, down to a series of tweets is one of the easiest ways to memorize where you're going, and you don't necessarily need to memorize your talk, you just need to memorize the key point that you wanted to get to. If you only have a 140 characters to remember, you're going to get there a lot faster than if you had written paragraphs after paragraph, after paragraph, after paragraph of outline or even if you wrote verbatim exactly what you wanted to say. We're not talking about speech writing. We're talking about giving a talk that is actionable or emotional or humorous or storytelling or educational; getting to the point and how you do that. How you outline that talk is you write down a series of tweets, one tweet per slide that you want to emphasize, and then you fill in the details around it as you're giving the talk. As you practice, you'll naturally have a couple more sentences then you can get into a 140 characters. But the key point remains that a 140 character core for each slide and you can get that done really easily. The best way to outline a complex idea, break it down into tweets, put all those tweets together and then cut. You don't need every single tweet. Figure out which ones can still fit the narrative, which ones are maybe other topics or talk for another day, and once you're down to your 20 or so, you've got your talk. Now you can start figuring out what to do next, practicing or figuring out stats to go along with each of those things. In the next lesson, we're going to talk about how to build a slide deck now that you've got your talk.
5. Building Your Deck: Have you ever been to a talk where the slides don't work well and speaker is hemming and hiring or forgets where they're at and maybe blames the computer may be blames the slide deck? What happened as an audience member when that happened? Were you nervous? What did you feel bad for the speaker? It's kind of "Oh, that's a bummer," like, "Okay. Well, let's move on with our day." You weren't like, totally engaged with the talk at that point. Same thing is true if the images steal the show from the speaker, you don't want that to happen to you during your talk. So how do you pick images that are appropriate? Well, there's a number of different ways. The first things you need to consider is legality. Are you legally able to use the image in question? For most images, the answer is no. Unless they are licensed, Creative Commons or public domain, you aren't able to use those images, unless you took the image yourself. I don't mean take as in, you downloaded it from Google yourself. I mean, you click the camera, you took the picture. That was the thing that you did. You are the author of that work and that point, yes, you are able to use the picture. There are a number of different search engines that allow you to find Creative Commons or public domain images. Search.creativecommons.org is one, Pixabay is another, and there are a slew of different really high-quality photography websites, such as unsplash.com and others that can help you get to where you're going with your presentation. Now that you have your outline from your last lesson, what you might be able to do is find the core message from each of those tweets and line up an image that resonates or is funny or highlights a particular point that you're trying to make and sometimes you can even go without images at all. If you just had one word on screen or if you had one number on screen. The number that you needed to remember, for instance, or the date that you needed to remember, or the person's name who you needed to remember. Sometimes those things can be really effective. The problems that we face as a society are not single-player problems. They are massively multi-player, big, hairy problems that require us all to come together to play and try and solve them. As you're building your deck, there are different types of deck software out there that can help you. Haiku Deck is one of those that actually automatically pulls creative commons images and does the attribution work for you. Most creative commons images, by the way, have to be attributed back to the author. Copyright law and fair use means that you can't use most commercial images unless you've bought them or paid a license to use them, this can be tricky if you are trying to talk about Star Wars or Disney, for instance. Talk to your organizer and see if there is a method of getting around this. Sometimes you can claim fair use if you're educating about the topic at hand, and you absolutely cannot educate about Sebastian unless you have a picture of him. Those types of images can qualify as fair use. But they tend to make organizers nervous, double-check with your organizer before you finalize your slide deck. In some cases like Ignite or Pechakucha, you know that you need 20 slides, for a TEDx or something similar, you might not know that. Roughly, 20 seconds or so is two to three sentences and it's a good amount of time to get around an idea. Finding the right image for that can be tricky. Finding a word for that. What you don't want to do though, is you don't want to overload your audience with text. You don't want to overload them with something that they can't read in time or something that will distract them and make them read the slide as opposed to paying attention to you. What makes for a good slide deck is that it supplements, it compliments your talk. It doesn't overwhelm it. It doesn't overwhelm your presence on stage. It compliments. If you can figure out how to engage with the audience through your slides as well as your talk, then you are starting to really grow as a speaker. Now, Steve is really excited to have me give this talk because he said, "Nick, I've never seen you give a serious talk." So here goes. The American worker is getting totally humped. Advanced techniques include sometimes just using no slide at all, nothing on your slides. A completely black slide or completely white slide. Even if you're not speaking in an event that has a lot of rules like an Ignite or a PechaKucha, where every slide, you get 20 slides in a talk, and every slide advances every 15 or 20 seconds. You can still use that as a constraint. Constraints are really helpful when you're learning a new skill. You don't want to go outside the lines when you're learning to color in a coloring book. These lines can actually help you create a better, more impactful talk. Just by limiting you from going 20 minutes, 30 minutes on a particular topic. There's no reason to when he can get the same information through in five or at least the main points. So if you can, try to limit yourself to 20 seconds per slide, set your slides to auto advance automatically, and that will really help you learn the timing and the dynamics of timing. What if you have a really complex idea that just can't be explained in 20 seconds. You can use copies of the same slide, just modified a little bit differently. Your first slide would have three little dots. Your next slide and the series would have two little dots. Your final site in the series would have one little dot. Burn marks can really be useful if you have a really complex topic. Building your deck should be a complimentary exercise to the talk that you are giving. You don't want to overwhelm your audience with a new different idea. You want to keep them in the same moment with you on the same page and hopefully highlighting or enhancing the moments that you have in your talk with really good imagery. In the next lesson, we're going to be talking about stage presence.
6. Stage Presence: Stage presence can be a tricky thing, especially if you've never given a public talk before. In front of a large audience it could be even trickier. You don't want very many verbal tics, or physical tics, or mental tics where you take a little extra time to figure out what it is you're trying to say next. When you are going to give a talk, it's pretty vital that you at least record yourself once giving that talk. That's not a bad thing necessarily because that slide was up there for too long. That's not a bad thing necessarily because geek term is progressional, because we get it all the time, because many cultures would go extinct not for the geek like the people who asked us to fix their computers. Recording yourself allows you to find those errors in your physicality that you wouldn't want the audience to really pay attention to. Same thing is true with verbal tics, um's, uh's, and you've heard me say it a few times, so I record myself when I give these lessons and I watch them back and then I make notes about the things that I've said and things that really bother me, don't make it into the next videos. What can we do if we hear ourselves saying; um, so, uh or any other thing that you might say. When I was a deejay on KCSU, I used to say "all right" after every break, it gets the audience irritated and makes them tune out. Instead of when you feel like saying; um, uh, all right, so, now, whatever your verbal tic is, be aware of where they come up, pause yourself, try and relax your shoulders if you can and take a breath. Be aware of where they come up, pause yourself trying to relax your shoulders if you can, and take a breath and it doesn't have to be that obvious. You can just take a micro breath if you want to although sometimes, especially if you're holding a microphone up to your mouth, that can sound like a gasp and we don't want to gasp, okay that freaks people out. People will walk away from your talk anxious. Instead just take a moment, let the moment land, silence is okay. Be comfortable with a momentary lapse so that your brain can catch up to what your mouth is saying and your mouth can catch up to your brain. You might have dealt wildly off track and we'll talk about recovery in another video. But for now, understand that the things you do physically and the things you say, when they become repetitive, they can detract from your talk and the best way to catch those is to record yourself giving your talk. Eye contact is important. So right now, I'm looking at you. I am looking not necessarily at you technically while I am recording this though, I'm looking at a camera lens and it's not very personable. I used to when I was on KCSU, I needed to learn how to speak to one person that one person who's watching you, "hello". I used to have a stuffed animal that would keep on my desk so I could talk to that stuffed animal, that person knowing your audience of 100, 200, 300 people, 2,000. It can be really hard to make eye contact with all of them. So it's critical to pick a few people and really make an engagement with them across the audience, you can scan your audience and as you're making points, just look at their eyes especially when you end a particular sentence, you want to make a connection with them, let a moment land, you're looking at them. Where you don't want to be looking notes, you don't need notes anyway because your talk is comprised of tweets, why do you need notes? You don't need to remember what the date was on your slides because sometimes you'll have a confidence monitor in front of you and you'll be able to see your slides. Don't stare at that the entire time, don't look back at your slides, there's no reason to do that. You have a talk comprised of tweets, you have slides that don't have a ton of information on them. You don't have to read them back to the audience. There's nothing more annoying than that. If you are engaging with them, telling them a story, having conversation that is a much more engaging talk. Then hemming and hind paying attention your notes, looking back at the slides, looking at your shoes the entire time, there are stick moments that you can get away with that. Knowledge of geek jokes is very important to attracting a geek. Here we have sharp objects, programming language, show. The Godfather played out with sugar cookies in real life photoshop. Really, if you're trying to convey a message, get somebody to believe in something that hero story connect with you. You want to be looking at their eyes. In my case, going to be looking at the camera lens. The next lesson we're going to be talking about how to practice your talk and how much time you really need to do it.
7. Practicing Your Talk: You've got your 20 tweets, you've got your 20 slides built out in a deck that auto advances every 15-20 seconds, you've got your talk ready to go, you've got your topic narrowed down for context, and I think that you are ready to practice. What do you say? Let's start with how much time do I need? Typically, I say for every minute of a talk that you're going to give, you need about an hour to practice. So if you're giving a five-minute talk, plan on about five hours of practice. It's not a hard and fast rule, especially if you really know your topic well and can really engage on it, and you have some element of charisma, or not nervous on stage that you have to overcome, and if you're not giving an overly technical talk, but giving a story about yourself that you already know the key points and details to, you might not need an hour, you might need closer to 30 minutes to 45 minutes per minute. I have given speed talks where I created the slide deck, created the talk, created my points that I wanted to say, wrote it all together in one day, practiced it in a two-hour span of driving down to the venue and delivering the talk, was not as good as my normal talks, but it was possible. I didn't die on stage, it was okay, everything turned out all right with it, but it just wasn't me polished as I normally am. You don't want to memorize your talk. You want to memorize the key points that you want to get across, but you don't necessarily need to memorize every single joke or everything word for word. If there's a certain word that you want to use and need to remember, put it on the slide. If there is a certain date or a number or a figure, a state or whatever quote that you need to remember, put it on the slide, although quotes end up taking up a lot of space. So it might not be super useful because your audience will disengage from you and start reading the quote instead. When it comes down to practicing, though, keep practicing through the entire deck. Do not stop your talk in one minute, two minute, three minute increments, don't do that, don't start over, keep going, keep going to the finish, this will make you resilient. The reason that you keep going is that you need to practice recovery. Don't stop when you're two slides in and you have an error, because when you do that, you re-memorize the first two slides, and then when you're on stage and you have that moment again, you're going to have that oops moment, you're going to remember starting over at the first two slides, and you're not going to have that opportunity and you shouldn't abuse the audience with that opportunity to restart your deck. Recovery from an error is so critical when you are on stage, the stage presence, if you've been giving people eye contact, they're going to give you so much wiggle room. If you forget where you're going, if you say, 'uhm' in the middle of your presentation, they'll give you wiggle room because they're there to learn and listen from you. Then in 1950, National Security Council Document 68 was issued by the Truman administration, that said, if the American people want as many defensive options militarily as possible, we have to skim off the top of the GDP, and in order to do that, no American can work in less than an average of eight hours per day, five days a week. It's true, it's scary. Look it up. Error recovery is really simple, if you just keep going while you're practicing. Because your talk is comprised of tweets, and because you only have 20 slides, and you know the timing of those slides because you've set it to 15 or 20 seconds per slide, they're going to auto advance on you every single time you do your talk. You can create moments that you can reconnect to as you are going. You might have forgotten a date, and if that's true, if it's totally outside of your brain at that moment when you're giving the talk, you can say, who cares about dates anyway, we can look it up in a textbook, let's keep going, and you can keep moving on. Have those moments where you can forgive yourself for not being perfect. Say, oops, let's keep going. Mentors who have five-minute presentations that span five-minute, stick with me, that spend five minutes, 15 seconds per slide for 20 slides. Now, we're going to play Never Have I Ever. Never had. That can help you be more resilient on stage, it can help you feel more comfortable in your body, it can help you with conversations that are difficult and can help you with stories that are difficult. If you need a moment, genuinely need a moment, your audience is either laughing, or they are having an emotional reaction to something that you've said on stage, let that moment land. Don't just keep barging through. Take a breath and let the moment land, and let your audience reacts to that. Never have I ever participated in a group hug? If people next to you are sitting hug them, hopefully they're wearing pants. There are all sorts of different recoveries. If something happens on stage, there's a small fire, there's a child crying in the audience and adult coughs or sneezes, they're not doing that because of you, the fire doesn't exist because of you, it exists because it exists and there's something that's just happening at that moment that happens to correspond to the moment that you're giving the talk. Try to be as unflappable as you can. Tell the story, or continue on as best you can. If you need to give it a moment, give it a moment. Let's also say that you have some sort of cough or sneezing fit, you can take a cough or a sneeze, and keep going afterwards. They're not going to lose attention if you're giving them eye contact, if you have your stage presence down, you're going to be okay. Recovery is all about remembering what's next, what is next? Do I need to skip this next point in order to get my main point across? Can I hurry up this main point in order to move on? As you practice, if you've given yourself an hour for every minute, then you're going to have enough time to figure out the condensed version of the thing that you want to say. Because when you first start out, 20 seconds will seem like either a really long time or a really short time. Every time your slides advance, they might catch you by surprise until you learn how long 15 seconds feels, or how long 20 seconds feels. You'll get a good idea for it, and as you get better at it, you can start to incorporate things like jokes into the timings of your slides. This is pretty tricky too, because a lot of different computers have slight variances in their timing mechanisms, and also projectors too have a little bit of lag as well going from the computer to the projector. So you've got to account for that. If you've added a joke into your slides, that's a really good technique. But also know that if you can practice on the venue on site, you'll have a much better idea of how the timing will flow. But let's say the computer that's being used to project the slides needs some updates or something on the Windows Updates screen pops up in the middle of your talk, laugh it off, keep going. The audience is there for you. They are not there to read your slides, they're there for you. In the next lesson, we're going to talk about how to find a stage.
8. Finding a Stage: When I gave my first talk, it was at Ignite Fort Collins, having responded to an ad on Twitter about folks who needed to talk about something. I went into that talk with completely the wrong mentality. I went in trying to sell that audience something. I called it psychotic resumes and digital gunslinger, those were my two programs at the time. I was teaching social media and helping people with their resumes. I went in with the wrong idea. I was trying to recruit clients and it's not what the environment was for. Contextually, Ignite is about sharing ideas that are fun. So what did I do? I sent it past the organizer and the organizer sent it back. Now one of my core mentors said, "This is too commercial, you've got to bring this back in, bring it back to something that your audience will find entertaining, first of all, and something that's noble to them. They don't know what digital gunslinging is. They might know what a psychotic resume is, but they don't know what digital gunslinging is." So what I did is, with the guidance from the organizer, I went back, rewrote my talk and created something that was brand new that I then became known for in the community. It was a really interesting lesson to me that, I didn't have to pitch in-order to sell to people. I didn't have to pitch. I gave them actionable information, I made them laugh unintentionally or otherwise. So what does that make us? [inaudible] It makes us, digital gunslingers. Because you have to be the change that you want to see in social media world. Because it's all about people interacting with other people. I don't know [inaudible] I ended up learning that I had some comedic skill on stage, and it really fit well with my personality. The talk went well. Surprisingly, there were about a 100 and some 150 maybe in the audience. As I did more talks, I came back and spoke at Ignite number two. I came back and spoke at Ignite number four. I came back and spoke at 6,7,8 and so on. Then I helped become an organizer for the event. Because my passion then became giving other people a platform to speak. How cool is that? Finding platforms in your area is as simple as looking up at, Ignite at TED x, at PechaKucha or Toastmasters group. You can also look up local chambers of commerce, business symposiums, art symposiums. Start small. If you're new at public speaking, start small. Five minutes on stage is going to feel like an eternity when it's your first time. Ultimately, a five-minute talk is not something that you have to stay attached to forever. In fact, you can start crafting your next talk right after your first one. Finding another stage is as easy as finding a place to go and talk, and give a presentation and doing really well at it. The more you practice, the more you put into it, the more gracious you are for the audience. The more thankful you are to the organizers, the more you will get invited back to speak again. Finding a stage is super easy. [MUSIC]
9. Recap and Project: Let's recap what we've learned. First, you pick a topic that is in the right context with the type of place that you're going to be speaking. Is your audience there to be entertained, are they there to learn something great about the topic or are they there to learn something about your story? Are they there to be entertained or are they hoping for something actionable that they can take home and figured it out right then and there. Are they tinkering? Those are distinctly different types of talks and all require different types of approaches to the topic that you have at hand. The next thing that you need to do is figure out how to break that talk down into tweets, and the number of tweets that you have is the number of slides that you have. I highly recommend you that you stick to an ignite or Pecha Kucha type format where you have a maximum of 20 slides marks and each slide advances if it's ignite every 15 seconds, or if it's Pecha Kucha every 20 seconds. That format will give you an easy method to practice in. It's going to be something that you're going to feel really comfortable with moving forward, and you can apply it to other mediums like a TEDx. That's actually how I built my TEDx talk. I gave an ignite talk on the TEDx stage using the same format. I used the 15 seconds per slide, 20 slides and I was done in five minutes. My topic fit pretty well to that, and I stayed narrow enough that the audience was engaged with me as I was giving the talk. Next thing to do is figure out how to build your slide deck using legal images, creative commons or public domain, or images that you've taken yourself. An advanced technique is to build emotional resonance into your slides, creating things that you hope, emphasize, or reiterate or even make the audience think. A super advanced techniques is telling a secondary story and weaving it throughout the narrative of your slides, but keeping your slides simple enough that you don't have to read them, the audience doesn't have to read them and at most there is a number, a date, a name or a word that is critical to your talk. That's the only information that would be on a slide, and it's highlighted in a way that the audience won't know that it's a [inaudible]. Finally practice your talk so that you're giving at least an hour for every minute that you're going to be speaking, and if you're using the ignite or Pecha Kucha format, that's 5-6 hours of practice. This 5-6 hours will allow you to be concise with your points, and also practice recovery, which is one of the most important things you can do. If you're going to get into speaking on stage, you need to know how to recover, the way you do that first is by understanding the shorter version of what you were hoping to say, and the core kernel of truth in each of those tweets that you use to outline your talk. But also by practicing your entire talk all the way through every single time you practice it. Don't stop at slide 2, slide 20, slide 13 until the talk is done. Once you've got your talk, finding a stage is pretty easy. You can go to ignites, TEDxs, Pecha Kuchas to find a local stage that you can practice on. In worst case, you can go to a toss masters, or your chamber of commerce, or you can go to any number of different groups, or organizations for your industry. They exist and they are looking for speakers, people who can entertain or put information out there in a new way. Practice, practice, practice by going out and finding places to go and give talks. Don't give up and don't be afraid because the audience is there to hear you. They're not there to be bored, heckle you, or make fun of you, they are there to listen and learn from you, and there's no reason when people are so excited to learn from you to be afraid of that. It's something that's an honor, it's a privilege, and it's a lot of fun. I hope that you've really enjoyed this series of videos, and I hope that you've learned something new. As your lesson, I want you to create a five-minute talk, and to structure it on a topic that's near and dear to you, something that you like. I want you to use your webcam, iPad, video camera, or use whatever you have at hand, or even if you don't have a video, if you have audio, it's just fine too. I want you to create a five-minute talk, and I want you to use the Ignite format, which is 20 slides, and 15 seconds per slide. I want you to pick a topic, outline it with tweets, put that in a Word doc, upload it to the class project section. Then create your slide deck 20 slides that auto advance every 15 seconds, you can use a Haiku deck, PowerPoint for this, or whatever you like as long as it's a deck. Use legal images, don't use copyrighted images, you don't want to get anybody in trouble including you. Upload your slide deck to the projects area, then I want you to record your talk. Practice it, go through the whole like five hour [inaudible] and trying to put it together and record your talk. It doesn't matter if it's on a webcam, or your iPad, and I don't care how it looks. What it looks like, I don't care how it looks, I want you to put it together, give your talk to an audience of one right at the camera. Then you're going to upload it to YouTube, you can put it private if you want to, you can put it up here on the class channel if you want to, I will help give you feedback. The most important thing is to try, I want to see your talk, I want to see what you care about, I want to see what you are passionate about. You can do this, I know you can because I was able to do it too. I went from not having any experience, maybe a class here or there, I didn't know how to talk in front of people now I do, and I took one talk. This is your moment, I want to see what you got. I'm going to like it whether or not you do well, we're going to go through and learn something. Thanks for taking my course, I hope to see you around.