How to Give a Great Talk

How to Give a Great Talk

1. Why a Talk?

Let's say you've been asked to give a talk. It's worth considering, why a talk? Why not write an essay, instead, or delivery the idea as a speech?

All forms of delivery have certain inherent strengths and weaknesses. You want to be aware of these so you can choose the form that's best for your content and tune the content to take advantage of the form.

The primary distinguishing benefit of a talk, which we might think of as the competitive advantage of a talk, is the possibility of an immediate, shared, emotional connection with the audience. So if you want to move the audience to take action not just because of what you said, but also because you're the one who said it, a talk is likely the way to go. If mostly what you want is to inform, an essay is probably better. If mostly what you want is to persuade, consider a speech.

What are some other differences? A talk tends to be more open-ended than a speech. A talk has a broader range of possibilities; a speech is more limited, possibly even binary ("You should vote for Candidate X, You should vote for Candidate Y"). A talk feels more like sharing; a speech feels more like argument. A talk feels more like exploration; a speech feels more like overt persuasion. A talk tends to feel casual, informal, spontaneous; a speech, formal, rehearsed. A talk feels more like you're talking with the audience; a speech feels like you're talking to it.

How about an essay? Lacking the immediacy and physical presence that enable talks to create an emotional bond between the speaker and the audience, an essay needs to use other tools to persuade - primarily, additional data and argument. And essays lend themselves well to additional data and argument: in an essay, readers can absorb things at their own pace, reread, jump around, pause to consider, etc. None of this is feasible during a live performance, so a talk should be a more streamlined format than an essay; an essay, more data-heavy than a talk. Many people don't understand this difference, and think their talk should mean either reading an essay aloud or doing the equivalent using text-heavy PowerPoint slides, which is a common way of creating the bizarre outcome of the audience simultaneously reading an essay on screen while you read it aloud. This approach is rightly known as "Death by PowerPoint," and we'll return to it shortly.

Ask yourself: why am I communicating these ideas in a talk in front of an audience, rather than in a speech or an essay? There should be something in the nature of your talk that makes the subject particularly amenable to be delivered as a talk. And you should hone the presentation of your material to take advantage of the strengths of a talk as a form. Otherwise, how can you justify asking hundreds of people to take the time to show up and listen to you?

(Parenthetical thought: this question is also worth asking of novels and screenplays. That is: why are you using a novel to tell your story? Why not a screenplay (or a stage play, or graphic novel, etc)? Or vice versa. The different forms have different tendencies, and if you don't have a good reason for favoring the one you're using for this particular story, your delivery will probably be not as strong as it could be.)

2. Content

Reverse Engineer It

When choosing the content of your talk, you have to ask, what does the audience want out of this? What do they expect? Why are these people taking time out of their busy day to listen to me? A related -- but not identical question -- is, what do *I* want the audience to get out of this?

Nothing is more important to the content of your talk than reverse engineering it by starting with what the audience is there for. I once gave a talk at a seminar on entrepreneurship (and here's the essay I wrote based on that talk. A lot of the information is the same, but the presentation is different -- because one was a talk, the other is an essay). One of the speakers gave a death-by-PowerPoint presentation that would have been crushingly boring even if it had been delivered to the audience for whom it was designed: investors. That's right, this guy gave so little thought to what his current audience was there for (to learn lessons about entrepreneurship) that he just ran through the same slides about his startup that he used to try to extract money from investors. It was a complete waste of time, disrespectful to the audience, and made the presenter look like a fool.

(Parenthetical thought: is this not true for everything? All your means should be reverse engineered from your ends. How can you choose a tool if you don't know what you're trying to use it for? How can you choose an appropriate vehicle if you don't know your destination?)

Your Talk is a Story

Think of your talk as a story. That's how I approach a talk, both the creation and the delivery, and it always seems to work. I think people naturally respond to stories (I certainly want to think it, anyway, making a living by writing novels, as I do), and it makes sense to deliver your talk in a form to which people are naturally receptive. Even when I taught technology licensing at Santa Clara Law School back in my lawyering days, I taught my students that a contract is a kind of story -- the story of a relationship that hasn't happened yet. (A litigation brief, by the way, can be thought of as the story of a relationship that has happened, and hasn't ended well). People love stories! Why not tell them one?

Teasing Out the Ideas

If I'm having trouble designing the talk, I do a few things. First, I drink coffee. Kidding. Well, sort of. No, first, I need to move. I think better when I'm moving, so I like to get outside and take a walk, someplace quiet, without too many people, without distractions, just landscape slowly rolling past. And I talk to myself -- really talk to myself, as though I'm two people.

"So, Barry, what's this talk about?"

"Well, it's about X."

"You think the audience will care about that? Why would they?"

"Well, because..."

"Okay, so what's your main point?"

Etc.

Sometimes the best way to design a talk is to forget it's a "talk." Just start rambling, answering imaginary questions, having an imaginary conversation, expressing whatever comes to mind. I carry a dictaphone to capture the good stuff so I can write it up later.

That last point is worth emphasizing. It's been my experience that the most unexpected, inspired ideas are also the most fleeting. My theory is that when your unconscious is serving up the good stuff, you're in a dream-like state. And, just like when you wake from a dream, what your unconscious serves up can't be held long by your conscious mind. Unless, that is, you write it down. So don't assume you'll remember those inspired ideas later -- if you're like me, you won't, unless you use notes or a dictaphone. Don't let those wonderful gifts from your unconscious slip away! It's too much of a loss, and who knows, if you ignore the bounty your unconscious presents you, maybe after a while your unconscious will decide not to bother. Treat those ideas like the precious gifts they are: save them, and use them.

3. Preparation

The Secret of "Memorizing" Your Talk

I know a lot of people are intimidated by the idea of not using notes because they feel like they won't be able to remember their material otherwise. But the thing is, you don't want to remember your material. Or rather, you don't want it memorized (and notes are just a form of external memorization). Memorization inhibits spontaneous delivery. A memorized talk is probably a speech. Nothing wrong with a speech; it's just not a talk.

No, you don't need to remember the whole talk; you just need to remember the skeleton. And this is where not using notes offers multiple benefits. While I'm preparing, I try to extract the main takeaways -- that is, the most important points of my talk, the points I most want the audience to remember. Those points will form the talk's skeleton. By not using notes, you force yourself to understand your takeaways very clearly. The reason you have to be so clear on them is that if you don't know what they are, your talk will have no structure, and you'll have a hard time remembering it when you do it live.

So not using notes first enables you -- forces you, really -- to clarify the structure of your talk. And then that clarified structure enables you to give the talk without notes. You don't need (or, again, want) to remember every single thing; just the main bullet points, so to speak, each of which will cue you about a supporting point. More on this below.

Even people with good memories aren't so good without structure. In fact, I have a feeling what makes for a good memory is an understanding, intuitive or otherwise, of the importance of structure. I read somewhere once that a grandmaster chess player can play 50 boards simultaneously from memory. Incredible, right? But if you arrange the pieces on a board at random, without regard to the rules -- that is, without structure -- the grandmaster's recollection of the placement of pieces is only slightly better than that of a non-player. In this sense, notes can actually be dangerous, because your reliance on them can enable you to avoid the hard but critical work of ruthlessly clarifying your talk's structure.

Another benefit of knowing your structure, by the way, is that structure helps you manage your time on the fly. If you have three main points you want to make and 12 minutes in which to make them, you know at four minutes (assuming the sections are more or less equal) that you need to move on to point #2.

At my recent TEDx talk, for example, there were three points I wanted to make:

First was that ideas come when we indulge our passions. If there's something you wish you had more time to do everyday, find a way to do it! And ideas will come.

Second, which was folded into the first because I only had 12 minutes, was that you nurture those ideas by asking who, what, where, when, why, and how.

Third was that inspiration is just the beginning; you also need perspiration. How can you find the discipline to work at your idea until it's something real? By listening to messages from your future self. Every time you're faced with a decision about what to do today, imagine how you (your future self) will feel about the decision tomorrow. This is a kind of time travel. We can receive messages from the future through the power of our imaginations -- how cool is that?

Summary: indulge your passions and ideas will come; nurture the ideas with the six key questions; always ask, "How will I feel about this when I look back?" to give yourself the discipline to develop your idea into concrete things.

For each of the three points, I had lots of supporting thoughts and anecdotes (for Point #1, for example, everything I was doing (martial arts, CIA, politics, Tokyo, etc.) that led to the birth of John Rain). All of which came easily and naturally during the talk because: (i) they fit logically into the structure; and (ii) I had practiced them.

(Speaking of my TEDx talk, it was taped, so when the video is up, I'll send around the URL).

You Can't Be Natural if You Don't Practice

So you've memorized the top bullet points and know your structure cold. Now you want those bullet points to naturally trigger supporting points. The way to achieve this is through practice.

Go through your talk again and again. Out loud. Start with notes if you need them, but wean yourself as quickly as you can. Get to the point where you're doing the talk as nearly as possible to the way you'll be doing it for real. Ideally, you'll even get to do a dress rehearsal, so to speak in the actual room. Stand where you'll be standing when you give the talk for real, look out at where the audience will be, do your talk from there. Try to imagine what it'll feel like to give the talk for real, and then try to make yourself feel that way while you're practicing. This is a form of adrenal stress scenario training -- the same way Federal Air Marshals and special ops solders prepare for combat. It works.

(Parenthetical thought: in one of my books, John Rain observes that "gearing up calms you down." In other words, when you've trained for an event and then experienced the event, you start to develop confidence in the training. After that, just doing the things you do to prepare, like you do every time, is wonderfully relaxing, calming, and confidence-instilling. "I've done this stuff before. It worked before. It'll work this time. This is great.")

Don't try to practice your talk the same way every time. Again, the goal isn't rote memorization; it's familiarity with structure and underlying points sufficient to enable you to talk naturally. Know in advance that when you do a talk without notes, you will almost certainly forget one or even several of your underlying points. This is fine. It's a very small price to pay for a natural delivery. I don't think I've ever given a talk without realizing after that I'd forgotten one or more of my underlying points. So what? You hit the main points and supported them well enough. If you're obsessed with ruthlessly hitting every single supporting argument, write an essay. When you're giving a talk, the connection with the audience is far more important than an exhaustive examination of the data.

Attitude!

Attitude is important, too. Giving a talk is an opportunity! You have an idea worth spreading (hat-tip, TED), right? Aren't you completely pumped up about the subject of your talk, aren't you just busting to share it? That's how I always feel. A sale is a kind of enthusiasm infection, and your talk is in a sense a sale, no? As a medium of expression, a talk is ideally suited for infecting people with your enthusiasm. Just thinking about how enthusiastic the audience is going to be makes me more enthusiastic!

4. Delivery

Okay, you've figured out the content, you've practiced and prepared, and now it's show time! What do you need to do?

Warming Up The Audience

Probably the most powerful trick I've learned about giving a great talk is meeting the audience beforehand. I learned this one from a guy named Roger Dawson, who wrote one of the best books I've ever read: "You Can Get Anything You Want in Life, But You Have To Do More Than Ask." Dawson is a master negotiator and phenomenal motivational speaker -- read the book and listen to his tape series, "Secrets of Power Negotiating." Amazing, amazing guy.

I don't like to step on stage cold. All audiences have to be warmed up a little, and it's suboptimal to have to spend the first few minutes of your talk trying to accomplish that baseline goal. This is why the main comedy act is always preceded by a warmup. By the time the main act takes the stage, the audience is already in a laughing mood. Likewise for concerts. Plays are preceded by music, movies by previews and credits, books with epigraphs... for all audiences, you have to start by "shaping the battlefield" to some extent, and for a talk, chatting with individuals is a great way to do it. You get to shake hands, look people in the eye, learn a little about who they are and why they're there. By the time you start your actual talk, everyone you've met is excited and on your side. They're less afraid of making eye contact, they're smiling at you from the audience, they want you to succeed. And you in turn feel less like you're talking to a room full of strangers and more like you're just chatting with a room full of friends. A positive cycle results, with your good mood and good will infecting the audience, the audience feeding that back to you, etc., etc.

I always try to spend at least a few minutes before a book signing mingling and chatting with the audience. I never let the bookstore hide me in back until they're ready to formally unveil me. That kind of set-up is like a ditch you have to start by digging out of. Once, I got to a signing early and spent about ten minutes chatting with as many people in the audience as I could. There were over a hundred people there, and by the time I was ready to go, the mood in the room was electric -- I was so psyched to talk to these people, and they were so psyched to hear! Then the store representative used the occasion of her introduction to indulge in a long, tangential exegesis on upcoming talks, the role of indie booksellers, her own connection to bookselling... It went on for about 15 minutes, and by the time she was done, all the energy the audience and I had going had been extinguished, and I had to spend the first five or ten minutes of my talk reestablishing it. I learned from that to do my own introductions. After all, if you've already met the audience on your own, is there really any need for someone else to now formally "introduce" you, anyway?

(Parenthetical thought: only amateur negotiators believe the negotiations begin only once everyone sits down at the conference room table. In fact, the most important negotiating has happened in all the communications that preceded the formal sit-down. Similarly, most of the success or failure of your talk will be determined by what you do beforehand -- not just the formal preparation, but the way you warm up the audience).

Eye Contact

Eye contact is fundamental to the success of your talk. Without eye contact, it's almost impossible to create that immediate, electric connection with the audience which is the primary advantage of the talk as a form. And even if you can get that connection going in spite of the lack of eye contact, it'll never be remotely as strong as it would have been in the presence of eye contact (we can talk on the phone without eye contact, but even the best phone conversation isn't as good as the face-to-face variety). So you want to make one-on-one eye contact with as many audience members as possible.

The importance of eye contact tells you something about notes, doesn't it? If you're reading, you can't make eye contact, or at least you can't make as much. Have you ever talked to someone who wouldn't look you in the eye? Not a great conversation, was it? And if he needed notes to talk to you, what would you make of that? Ever see a comedian using notes? Of course not! It would be impossible to make people laugh while reading notes. Notes are artificial, and artifice inhibits the transmission of emotion. Don't make the mistake of thinking your talk is primarily logical and rational: if it is, you should probably recraft it and deliver it as an essay. A talk is also an opportunity to engage people's emotions, and notes make doing so much more difficult.

If They Can't See You, They Can't Feel You

Once you understand that talks are not just about the words coming out of your mouth, but about various levels of physical interaction, too, a few other important items become clear. Never do your talk from behind a lectern or any other barrier. Don't let anything get between you and the audience -- if it does, it will impede the connection without which your talk will be a failure. The audience should be able to see you head to toe.

Depending on the room and the size of the audience, I sometimes step down off the stage to make sure the audience and I are literally on the same level. Even a stage can create a feeling of separation. And don't give your talk in the dark! It's much harder for the audience to feel a connection with a disembodied voice. They need to see you as well as hear you, so they can be moved not just by your words and tone of voice, but also by your expressions and body language, by the way you move on the stage.

It should be clear at this point why so many talks are lame. To do a good talk, you have to prepare a lot, and you have to be willing to show more of yourself. The first requires work; the second, risk. But if you think about it, the real work, the real risk, is doing a lame talk and then suffering with it after, knowing you could have, *should* have, done better, and wishing you could have another chance. Well, you can't get that second chance, so do the easy thing: get it right the first time!

No Notes! Or At Least As Few As Possible

Back to notes. I know what you're thinking: Can't you just glance down at your notes from time to time? Well, if you have to, yes. But for the reasons above (and below), breaking contact with the audience to steal glances at your notes is not ideal. Also, remember that your talk is also a performance. Doing a talk with no notes is impressive in its own right! And it shows you've worked hard to prepare. The audience will understand this, and feel respected as a result. If people in the audience feel you respect them, they will respect you in turn. Your talk will go much better as a result. Finally, part of what an audience finds persuasive is their evaluation of your expertise on your subject. Someone who can discuss a subject without notes comes off as more of an expert on that subject than does someone who needs notes. It's hard to move an audience if the audience senses on some level that you haven't mastered your brief.

The Room

I've mentioned lighting. The other physical attributes of the room are also important. Is it too hot or too cold? Too cold is better, if you have to choose -- too hot makes people either fidgety or sleepy. Is the room too big? I always urge people to come sit up front so that the crowd, whatever size, has a certain density. The ideal is a full room, but even a half empty room can work fine if the people there are densely clustered up front. For whatever reason, the audience isn't just responding emotionally to you; they're also responding emotionally to cues they give each other, and if they're dispersed, those cues tend to propagate more slowly or to die out altogether. Especially don't let a pocket of seats stay empty right in front of you. Those empty seats create a kind of vacuum between you and the audience, and will be in full view of everyone who's listening, making the room feel empty to them as well as to you. Always invite people to come up front -- if you tease and cajole them, they will respond, and the confidence you show in managing the room has a profoundly positive effect on the audience. I once read about a cop who was in the habit of slipping in a rubber teeth guard before breaking up a bar fight. What do you think was the effect of this behavior on anyone who was thinking about getting rowdy? That's right, seeing the cop's relaxed confidence, and recognizing the experience that lay behind it, had a wonderfully calming effect on anyone who was being unruly.

What about the sound -- can everyone hear you? I love to talk without a mic because there's something more immediate about a natural, unamplified voice, but depending on the size of the crowd, on the acoustics of the room, and on your ability to project, un-amplified is often impossible. A little lesson I've learned: if you have reason to doubt, don't just ask, "Can you hear me?" Ask, "Would it better a little louder? A little softer?" People who would otherwise be shy about asking to have the volume turned up will be less shy in response to a leading question.

5. Slides?

Now, a few thoughts about PowerPoint. Because I'm a writer and I'm used to relying only on words to express myself, it's natural for me to give talks without external props like slides. But that's just me. There's no right or wrong answer about whether to use slides; it just depends on what you're trying to accomplish and how you're trying to accomplish it.

Sadly, many people think PowerPoint is necessary for a successful talk. If you are one of them, you have been assimilated by the Borg. People have been giving successful talks since long before PowerPoint began ruining them. For example, here's a hilarious example of The Gettysburg Address done with PowerPoint.

The reason so many people use slides to give talks is because everyone else seems to be doing the same, and people are afraid if they do something different, they might look stupid (fear of looking stupid is one of the most powerful human motivations, but that's a subject for a separate essay). Slides are rarely the result of thought, and so they're rarely used thoughtfully.

(Parenthetical thought: fear of looking stupid also explains the growth of atrocious legalese. Sure, it's opaque, confusing, and hideous, but the partner writes that way, and if I do something different -- no matter how sensible -- I might look stupid. Here's more on legalese and how to combat it)

It's sobering to consider that slides are used poorly about 95% of the time (I made that statistic up, but it's based on extensive experience). So if you're using slides, statistically speaking it's 95% likely you're using them poorly.

The truth is, PowerPoint is like firearms: an otherwise useful tool that becomes unacceptably dangerous when unleashed in the arms of the untrained masses. PowerPoint should function as a supplement to the speaker's talk (after all, the reason people have shown up is to hear the talk, right?); instead, it's typically used as the presentation itself. Don't believe me? How many times have you heard someone say, "Just send me your slides?" If the slides work as a standalone, they're not being used as a supplement. And if they work as a standalone, what's the point of showing up to hear the speaker read them? I could have read them myself, without all the travel and hotels.

So what's wrong with the standalone approach? Nothing, I guess, if you enjoy watching someone read from his notes while you read along with him. Not a bad approach when it comes to close-captioned programming for the hearing impaired, but what about for an audience that has no hearing disability? Displaying and then reading one's notes this way is like putting on your makeup in front of 300 people. What people know about makeup, they forget about PowerPoint: the audience wants to see the product, not the process.

Television sometimes gets used this way -- some people just need to have a TV going in the room even when they have guests over, maybe because they don't think their conversation alone will be sufficiently interesting. But do you want to be one of those people? And if your conversation is so uninteresting it needs assistance from the equivalent of a television in the background, should you be subjecting a whole roomful of people to it?

So don't be one of the thoughtless ones, the fearful ones. Ask yourself whether you need slides to accompany your talk, and if so, why. What do the slides add? If the answer is, "Nothing positive," scrap them. If they do add something positive, could you make them even better?

If you think you need slides and want to learn to use them powerfully and effectively, for God's sake do yourself and your audience a favor and read Presentation Zen, by Garr Reynolds. Drawing on his own extensive experience presenting to Fortune 500 companies, his years in Japan, and the teachings of various other presentation masters like Seth Godin, Steve Jobs, and Guy Kawasaki, Garr guides you through everything you need to know about the preparation, design, and delivery of awesome presentations, most especially ones that involves slides.

Okay, I'm done talking. Now it's your turn!