Delivery. As a TED or TEDx speaker your delivery matters as much as the content itself does. One of my coaches is Jean-Louis and he is an incredible theater coach. What he does is watch TEDx talks with the sound off. I love that idea and now I do that all the time as a matter of practice and I even give homework to the speakers I work with to do the same thing. You can, too.
So here's what you do: Look for a TED or TEDx talk that you absolutely love and watch that talk with the sound off. What do you notice about their movement that you love or how they use space within that red circle? Then watch another talk, a TED or TEDx talk that you really aren't connected to very much. Turn the sound off. What do you notice? Are they distracting with their gestures and their movements? Are they predictable with their movements? Something causes you to not like it and it might be just how they're moving their body and it has nothing to do with the content itself.
Your delivery matters in these talks and here are some things to think about:
When you are in that red circle, that is your playground. That is what you have to move within. Be careful of repetitive movements. If I'm doing a movement like this, all you're doing is watching my hands. You're not paying attention to anything I'm saying right now because you can't help but focus on my hands. Similarly, if you get into a pattern of any kind - let's say I speak to this person here and then I'm talking to this person and I'm talking to this person and talking to this person and going back, you will pick up that pattern and it's incredibly distracting. Whether that's conscious or subconscious, you'll notice that as an audience member and you'll feel a little disconnected from me.
TED is really unique in that we are optimizing not only for our live audience but also for video months and years in the future, and so you'll have that connection with people in your live audience, which is great. You'll also, though, want to make sure that you're connecting with people on camera like I'm doing right now, and you want to feel that connection as opposed to feeling that you're kind of looking off and you're only connecting with the live audience. You want to make sure that you're connecting with that virtual audience too, because people will be watching your talks six months from now, a year from now, two years from now, and this all matters.
As you're planning out how you're going to move in that red circle, you should think about how you're going to move. Don't leave that to chance. You wouldn't leave the content of your talk to chance, so don't leave your movement to chance. And for example, maybe you're telling a story in your talk and maybe the story happens in this general area and maybe you have some lessons to teach and those lessons might happen in another area and maybe you want to land a point hard and you want to be right center, right in our face as an audience. You can do that, too.
Experiment and practice with how you're going to move in the circle and what you're going to do with your body, so long as it's not predictable and not repetitive. If you want to look at some different techniques that you can adopt for your own, we have a whole series on this, too. We did Polishing Performance {NEED LINK HERE} and you can look for that series in the video library and train on some of those techniques as well.
The end of the day, just remember your performance matters as much as your content and it's very important that you spend equal time on both.
