How to Give a Great Ignite Talk

Photo credit: Justin Barber. http://justinbarbin.com/

Last month I spoke at Ignite Chicago, where I debuted my new presentation – ‘Got Mindfulness?’  It was a lot of fun. It also was a lot of hard, but satisfying, work.

For presentation junkies, Ignite is one of the most popular live events. Produced by local volunteers in more than 100 cities around the world, Ignite provides the stage, then it’s up to the speaker to enlighten, stimulate and entertain the audience. Presenters are screened, which keeps the quality high enough to draw a geeky-creative-techy-designer-startup kind of crowd. Think of it as more like SXSW than TED.

Ignite’s motto, ‘enlighten us, but make it quick,’ is the perfect balance of form and function. Ignite speakers get five minutes and 20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds. Speaking at a just-comprehensible clip of 160 words a minute, you get about 40 words per slide for a total of 800 words.

With this kind of verbal economy at play, talk is not cheap.

This may sound simple, but trust me, to someone who usually gives 20-minute talks, the Ignite format was a challenge. The five-minute format forced a ruthless discipline that got me closer to my goal of making mindfulness make sense to a general audience.

Here are some things to keep in mind as you prepare your own Ignite talk:

1.         You must have unassailable faith in the power of focus to carry your story.  Backstory is irrelevant. Jump into the deep end of your story and find a single focal point. Use your five minutes to chisel and polish until it sparkles with a deep, brilliant glow.

2.         Know your audience and speak from their point of view. The Ignite audience is high caliber, driven and focused – and constantly plugged in.  I used technology metaphors to compare and contrast how stress leads to burnout and how my own crash-and-burn experience led me to mindfulness.

3.         Make like Homer and become an oral storyteller.  I used an entirely different creative process to shape ‘Got Mindfulness?’ I set up my video camera and started talking. Talk, watch, more talk. After a few days of this, I had a good sequence and it was enough to put together a PowerPoint. I used high-concept, full-screen images to create visual metaphors that reinforced and supported my presentation.

4.         Don’t underestimate the need to rehearse.  A lot of the success of a short-format presentation rides on performance. My rehearsing time was interrupted by a bout of the stomach flu just three days before Ignite. I resumed rehearsal the day of the event and I was still rehearsing in the ladies’ room at Catalyst Ranch up until the time the program began. I had one small ‘Madonna moment,’ but otherwise everything went smoothly. All in all, I spent about 20 hours rehearsing.

5.         Lead strong. Engage your audience right away. I was the last presenter before the break and followed some very high-energy speakers. I took the stage ad libbing:  ‘Wow, after all that great energy, I’m going to dial it way down.’  Get on the same wavelength with your audience, literally.  Do something to synchronize your mirror neurons.

6.         Finish strong. Start with the end in mind. How do you want to feel at the end of your presentation? How do you want the audience to feel at the end of your presentation? At the end, when I asked everyone to take a nice, deep breath and the collective inhale was loud, I knew my audience was engaged.

7.         Don’t get camera shy. The video will live long after the live event. As soon as you take the stage, look directly into the camera and start talking. From time to time, look directly at the camera as if it’s another member of the audience.

8.         Watch how fast you talk. Many Ignite presenters speak like it’s a race against the clock. Five minutes is enough time to say what you have to say. If it’s not enough time, your presentation needs more work. 160 words a minute is slightly faster than normal speech and a good pace for presenting.

9.         Dress the part. Whatever dressing up is for you, do it. Looking the part enhances your credibility. Determined not to wear black created a sartorial crisis because almost everything I own is black. I tried on and dismissed several outfits before settling on a sleeveless sheath dress the color of stone. I was dressed, not over dressed, and the color actually worked really well on stage.

Versions of this post appeared on Indezine and Built in Chicago.

From good to great: trends in public speaking

Technology have revolutionized the tools we use to communicate, but a few simple truths of persuasion and influence remain the same:

1) Authenticity is Cool.  Presence is more persuasive than polish. Good to great takeaway: It’s not what you say, it’s how you make the audience feel.

2) The Best Story Wins.  Storytelling creates meaning meaning from facts and memorability through emotion.  Good to great takeaway: Stories create the WOW factor that the audience remembers.

3) Get Ready for Your Closeup. The video age is here. Good to great takeaway: Learn the skills to master and leverage technology’s most powerful communication tool, you — up close and personal.

The Best Story Wins: Part II

Among his many accomplishments as a writer, Aaron Sorkin now has an Academy Award for the screenplay “The Social Network”,  a fictionalized movie about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.  “The Social Network” brings into sharp relief the market forces that are driving innovations in business and in business communication — in both form and function.

Sorkin’s social network story tells a bigger-than-life creation myth.  Facebook was The Big Bang of social networking.  It created an entirely new digital world and a reordered the social contract.  Every creation myth needs a bad guy, too.  The Zuckerberg character that sprung from Sorkin’s imagination is a young man who lost control of his own narrative.

Effective leaders know that the best stories win — people’s hearts, minds and commitment. “The Social Network” is a cautionary tale for a new generation of executives who recognize the need for a compelling narrative and the skills to communicate it across multiple media channels – live and in person, by text, audio, video and interactive social networking dialogue.

You, too, can take an idea from concept to story by following a logical and methodical process:

1.    Start with SOCO. To make an impact, make a point: a single, overriding communications objective. Build your story, develop your story and resolve your story around a SOCO.

2.    Build your story on a classic foundation. It was true in ancient Greece and it’s true today:  Persuasion balances logos, ethos and pathos.

• Logos/logic: your story must be logical and make sense.
• Ethos/credibility: the storyteller must be trustworthy and credible.
• Pathos/emotional: the story must stir people’s emotions and compel them to listen.

3.    Follow the Rule of Three. Why is the three pairing so pervasive in communication? Pattern recognition. Design the progression of your story using the rule of three:

• Your story needs a beginning, middle and end
• Your story should create tension, build tension and resolve tension
• To increase audience retention, recognize, layer and repeat.

4.    Every story needs a good guy and a bad guy. Certain types of stories and their archetypal characters have endured to tell universal truths, to explain how the world works and to reveal us to ourselves.  Archetypal heroes represent social values and the villains represent a problem or a set of problems.  Three well known archetypes lend themselves to business stories:

• The Classic Hero’s SOCO: Save the world.
The Hero meets his destiny. Think Harry Potter or Luke Skywalker.
• The Rebel’s SOCO: Change the world.
The Rebel rejects the status quo. Think Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg.
• The Detective’s SOCO: Make your life better. The Detective thinks outside the box to find the solution to thorny problems.Think Google.

5.    If you must use PowerPoint, use it to enhance storytelling. Storytelling is used to help an audience process information, come to a conclusion or to make a decision. Richard E. Mayer, Ph.D., professor of psychology at the University of California, conducts research around educational psychology.

To design a powerful PowerPoint presentation, follow these principles that emerged from professor Mayer’s research about how people learn:

• Multimedia principle: people learn better from words and pictures than from words alone.
• Coherence principle: people learn better when extraneous material is excluded rather than included.
• Contiguity principle: people learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented at the same time or next to each other on the screen.
• Modality principle: people learn better from animation with spoken text than animation with printed text.
• Signaling principle: people learn better when the material is organized with clear outlines.

The Best Story Wins

Last week I was at a Fortune 50 company working with a group of research and development scientists on authenticity, leadership and communication skills. Navigating a diverse, global multi-stakeholder marketplace is driving a new appreciation for the most basic form of human communication: storytelling.

A new generation of business leaders understands that to build trust and effectively lead, the best stories win — people’s hearts, minds and commitment.

Stories bridge cultures, gender, age and industries. Storytelling is highly effective when your goal is to:

• Present your vision. A story can create a vision of the future, articulate values and build trust.
• Help people make a choice. A story can guide your audience through a decision making process.
• Make abstract ideas a reality. Stories simplify scientific and technical information so that the audience can imagine it as a reality.

2.            To leverage the power of storytelling, it helps to understand:

A good story makes meaning by tapping into universal human experiences. Stories bring abstract ideas to life. Facts don’t speak for themselves, they an interpreter – a storyteller — to place them in context, as this example illustrates.

Facts: The Queen died. The King died a week later.

Story: The Queen died and a week later the King died from a broken heart.

The pain of heartbreak and loss is universal. The emotional power of the King’s grief translates across culture, gender and age.

3.     Emotion is the gatekeeper of the intellect. Emotions filter the human experience, shaping our beliefs and behavior. A good story speaks to what the audience emotionally needs or values. Marketers have long known that people buy on emotion and justify with intellect.

Stories create enduring memories. The audience may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel.

More than sentiment underlies the grip of emotion. Emotions are a complete mind-body event, produced by a secret sauce of hormones, peptides and proteins that creates a chemical imprint on your brain, forming a lasting memory. Strong emotions create vivid memories.

Many thanks to my friend Geetesh Bajaj, one of the world’s leading authorities on Power Point, for running this post on his international blog, Indezine.

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The TED Phenomenon is Driving a Presentation Skills Crisis: How To Master a TED Talk

My husband and I have a running joke about the devices in our life that hold the allure of a consuming carnal passion. I accuse him of loving his honey voiced GPSy more than me, but only when we’re in the car. Every once in a while, he complains about the time I spend with my lover, TED.

I’ve had TED on my mind a lot lately.  In case you haven’t noticed, there are two TEDx conferences taking place in Chicago this month (TEDxMidwest and TEDxWindyCity).  Add to the mix a few more business events styled along the lines of the famous TED conference format and my phone is ringing a bit off the hook with appeals for help to master the “TED Talk.”

The 18-minute TED Talk format has generated an amazing amount of attention. TED Talkers are witty, irreverent, passionate, brilliant storytellers.  TED Talks can transport you to another dimension or ignite your ACT NOW button with the power of nuclear fusion. The opportunity to present at the annual TED conference in California has made celebrities of obscure academics and conferred credibility on some we might scoff.

Now that TED Talks are available on a snazzy Internet site, the impact on reputations and ideas is amplified. More than six million viewers have propelled TED Talker Jill Bolte Taylor to the number one position.   A neurological researcher, she delivers a jaw dropping account of reaching nirvana during her own brain stroke. After all the hours I’ve spent on meditation cushions and yoga mats, I thought I had a sense of what nirvana may look like if I ever reached it.  Watching Dr. Bolte Taylor revealed the limits of my imagination.

The TED Talk format has rapidly influenced business, too.  TED has upped the presentation ante, and anxious executives and curious onlookers want to know: how do you do a TED Talk?

These amazing 18-minute presentations appear effortless but actually require a great deal of effort.  TED organizers nurture their speakers along, beginning with The TED Commandments:

• Thou shalt not simply trot out thy usual shtick.
• Thou shalt dream a great dream, or show forth a wondrous new thing, or share something thou hast never shared before.
• Thou shalt reveal thy curiosity and thy passion.
• Thou shalt tell a story.
• Thou shalt freely comment on the utterances of other speakers for the sake of blessed connection and exquisite controversy.
• Thou shalt not flaunt thine Ego. Be thou vulnerable. Speak of thy failure as well as thy success.
• Thou shalt not sell from the stage: Neither thy company, thy goods, thy writings, nor thy desperate need for funding, lest thou be cast aside into outer darkness.
• Thou shalt remember all the while: Laughter is Good.
• Thou shalt not read thy speech.
• Thou shalt not steal the time of them that follow thee.

Legendary Value Investor Warren Buffet Pays Up for Communications Skills

Not many investors would bet against Warren Buffet — with good reason.  Buffet’s ability to spot long term value has earned him great wealth and sincere admiration in equal measure.  He put his legendary reputation on the line in a televised Town Hall meeting with MBA students at his alma mater, Columbia Business School.

During Q&A, a sharp second-year student asked ” . . . what did your Columbia MBA not prepare you for?”

Confessing that he took a Dale Carnegie course after graduating from Columbia, the Oracle of Omaha used an investment calculation to make his point:  ”Right now, I would pay $100,000 for 10% of the future earnings of any of you.  You could improve your value by XX% just in terms of learning communication skills. “

What’s the value of that XX%? Link here to learn how much more Buffet will invest in communication skills.

Jumpstart your career, your impact, your success

Communication ability is the most critical skill needed to stay competitive in your career.  My friend and the founder of Indezine, Geetesh Bajaj and I start off the New Year with a conversation about The Firestarter Experience, an innovative program that will jumpstart your communication and presentation skills.

TEDxUofC: Psychology Student Bruno Cabral on the Life of the Mind Through Sound

The Corner Office: Communication IS Leadership

Container Store CEO Kip Tindell makes an elegant case for communication as the soul of leadership in today’s NYT Sunday Business Corner Office column.  Tindell’s Jesuit education shaped his values, which he applied to building a company that for 11 consecutive years has landed on Fortune’s “100 Best Places to Work.”  The half-billion dollar retailer consistently has generated year-over-year double-digit compounded growth.

Tindell’s leadership playbook reflects his values-based business philosophy:

• Communication IS leadership. Communication and leadership are synonymous.
• Team is the tie that binds. Calling it “… a beautiful human experience…”, Tindell understands the human need to belong.
• Trust yourself.  Your whole self includes the metaphysical, like instincts and intuition.
• No man is an island.  We are mutually interdependent, and we means employees, vendors, community, customers and shareholders.
• Business is not a zero sum game.