In my own experience of having witnessed hundreds of live public talks over the years, at TED and elsewhere, the worst of these foibles is a kind of narcissistic greed on behalf of the speaker - a lack of the core generosity of spirit that lends all true art its power. Anderson goes on to enumerate the most common pitfalls in public speaking and provides strategies for countering them. And it reaches its most intense form on the public stage.īut perhaps because this everyday wonder emanates from our basic humanity, it is also highly susceptible to basic human fallibility.
Human-to-human communication is a true wonder of the world. We do it by standing in front of each other, peering into each other’s eyes, waving our hands and emitting strange sounds from our mouths. But her skills are as potent as any sorcery.Īnts shape each other’s behavior by exchanging chemicals. The woman on the stage is weaving wonder, not witchcraft.
These patterns will remain in those brains for the rest of their lives, potentially impacting their behavior years into the future. Rich, neurologically encoded patterns of information inside the woman’s brain are somehow copied and transferred to the 1,200 brains in the audience. And as they do so, something else happens. A magic spell woven by the woman washes over each person. The 1,200 brains inside the heads of 1,200 independent individuals start to behave very strangely. She clears her throat and starts to speak. A spotlight hits her face, and 1,200 pairs of eyes lock onto hers. A woman, her palms sweating, her legs trembling just a little, steps out onto the stage. Photograph by Bret Hartman / TEDĪnderson paints the backdrop for the uncommon magic of a powerful talk: The architecture of that singular atmosphere is what TED curator Chris Anderson explores in TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking ( public library) - a contemporary counterpart to George Plimptom’s advice on public speaking, drawing on Anderson’s experience in hosting some of the most electrifying, inspiring, and mobilizing idea-packets of our time, delivered from the TED stage to more than a billion people around the world who hunger for intellectual, creative, and spiritual nourishment. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it.” This mutual transformation takes place in a special atmosphere that exists in no other realm of life - one Paul Goodman captured beautifully in his taxonomy of the nine kinds of silence, among which he listed “the silence of listening to another speak, catching the drift and helping him be clear.” “They transform both speaker and hearer they feed energy back and forth and amplify it.
Le Guin wrote in her sublime reflection on telling and listening. “Words are events, they do things, change things,” Ursula K.
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