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Category Archives: Story Telling

5 Lessons From Monica Lewinsky’s TED Talk Speech

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The best person to tell your story, is of course yourself.

Monica Lewinsky, now in her 40s, has begun hitting the speaking circuit to tell the story of her youthful mistake of falling in love with the President of the United States. But she is using her personal story to raise awareness of a growing and troubling issue of public shaming, which has exploded in frequency and volume in the post-Internet era.

On a recent flight I watched her March 2015 TED Talk speech “The Price of Shame,” and was moved by both her candor and ability to turn a tabloid-like personal story into a very powerful warning and call to action to use compassion to fight public shaming.

Take 20 minutes and watch the video and see of you agree with me.

As I watched the video, what I also saw were several lessons that any public speaker can learn from. Lewinsky is not yet a professional speaker, but what you see from her talk is that you don’t need to be a great speaker to deliver a great talk – what’s needed is a great story, passion and emotion. These and other traits can be far more important than being a polished presenter.

Here are five lessons and reminders for all speakers that I took away after watching Lewinsky’s TED Talk:

1. The Opening: Lewinsky opened her talk with a compelling combination of humor, honesty and of course aspects of her well-known romance with Bill Clinton. Her candor immediately let the audience know her talk was going to have a very serious and honest tone to it. But her self-deprecating humor also let us know that she was not afraid to be human and very real. 

As a viewer, I didn’t really know where she was going to take her talk, but within a very few minutes she pulled you in wanting to find out the path she was going to take you down. It was a great and powerful opening to her talk. After the first few minutes you wanted to hear more. A lot more.

Lesson: The first few minutes of your presentation set the tone for what is to come later. It can either grab the audience and have them lean forward in their chairs or quickly send them to checking email on their smart phones.

Resist the temptation to open with your background, company information or your agenda but instead open with a story, anecdote or something fun. The administrative aspect of your presentation can come after you’ve hooked the audience – don’t waste those most valuable opening few minutes of your talk on content that doesn’t set up your story.

2. The Transition: Perhaps the most important lesson from Lewinsky’s speech was her transition from her personal story to that of the larger message around the troubling growth of public shaming in the Internet era. 

She spoke of Tyler Clementi, the 18 year-old college student who committed suicide after discovering that a Webcam had captured him kissing another male and was subsequently widely talked about on Twitter. Lewinsky told of a phone conversation with her mother, who was devastated by the Clementi incident, as it recalled her daughter’s public shaming.

It was a masterful method of transitioning her own story in a very personal way into her much broader message and focus of her talk.

Lesson: All good presentations should have a transition from the opening set up of the problem or challenge, into the solution or resolution. The transition should convince the audience that they need to care about what comes next. It is like the point in a play or movie where the plot becomes clear and shifts into full gear.

Personal stories, powerful visuals or videos or even compelling statistics can do the trick, but it should be very clear to the audience that you’ve moved to the next stage of your presentation.

3. Emotion: Most experienced speakers will not hide behind a podium, but instead move around the stage to better engage the audience. They might use physical movement and voice inflection to emphasize specific points or words. Lewinsky, clearly not yet comfortable with that approach or able to remember everything she wanted to say – stood behind a music stand with her notes. But, while she didn’t leave that stand (until the very end), she used facial expressions to convey her deep emotion and passion.

At the end of her talk, she finally stepped away from the music stand to signal to the audience that she was wrapping up and that these, her final words, were what the audience needed to remember. The simple action of moving away from the music stand visually told the audience: “Pay attention, this is what I want you to take away.”

Lesson: Audiences want to be moved. While everyone loves to hear a polished and entertaining speaker, what most audience members really want is a speaker that opens their eyes, drives them to change. That may be something life changing like how to cope with depression or something as simple as how to improve your website’s search engine rankings.

An inexperienced speaker won’t have the polish of someone who has been speaking for years, so learn from Lewinsky and focus your efforts not on your stage presence but rather bringing your topic to life through passion, emotion and stories – including those that are personal when appropriate.

4. No Slides: Most people who speak as part of their job or career rely on the visuals on their slides, whether it is a video, funny cat image or screenshot of a poorly-designed website. We rely on these images to bring our story to life and to show real-life examples the audience can relate to.

But, the audience doesn’t come to see your slides, they want to hear you enlighten them with stories and great insight. Slides are merely supporting elements to help bring your talk to life.

But if you stop and think about the best speeches you have heard in your life, I bet that few of them included slides.

Lewinsky could have used slides that showed her in the beret, photos of her with Clinton, headlines in the newspapers about her, social media images and headlines on the Tyler Clementi story and a bunch of statistics about cyber bullying. But for audience members, those images might have lessened the impact of her talk. What made her presentation powerful were the expressions on her face, the passion in her voice and the words she was conveying. Anything that distracted from that would likely have diminished the power and impact of her presentation.

Lesson: For most speakers, slides will remain the foundation of your presentations as images and screenshots help you tell your story. Examples and case studies provide great value and provide “proof” to the audience.

But don’t over rely on slides when spoken words, facial expressions, body movement and simple compelling stories will do a better job. The primary focus of your presentation should not be the words on your slides, but instead, the words that will come out of your mouth.

5.  Point A to Point B: As you watch the audience throughout Lewinsky’s talk, they go from laughing with Monica as she tells self-deprecating stories, to tearing up as they feel her pain, to being completely riveted and moved as she paints a serious issue on public shaming … and ending in a standing ovation.

Lesson: The ultimate lesson from Lewinsky’s TED Talk presentation is that she succeeds because she is able to bring a serious issue to life through compassionate story telling. She pulls you in to her talk through her own well-known story but then moves us to watery eyes or tears by sharing the aspects of her life that we don’t know. But finally, she uses that simply as a set up to tell the larger and more important story of public shaming. She does what the best speakers do – they get you to care about something and move us intellectually or emotional from point A to point B.

Your presentation at a human resources conference on hiring and retaining millennials may not have an impact on society or stir emotion like the topic of public shaming, but your goal and responsibility as a speaker is no less important. You need to convince your audience that what you are talking about is important to THEM and they should walk away with a different perspective than when you began your presentation.

At the time of this TED Talk, Lewinsky was clearly not yet a truly polished speaker. But it didn’t matter. It doesn’t take a great and experienced presenter to deliver an awesome speech – what it does take is a great story, flow and passion that oozes so much that the audience can feel it in their bones.

Dealing With The Speaker Presentation “Inheritance Tax”

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Oh the dreaded speaker “inheritance tax.”

If the company you work for, whether small or large, has a group of folks who typically deliver your organization’s presentations, the day will come when you will have to fill in for someone else.

Ugh. There is nothing worse than having to present someone else’s topic and presentation.

So don’t.

A truly last-minute request to fill in for a co-worker.

A truly last-minute request to fill in for a co-worker.

You’ve been asked a few days or hopefully at least a few weeks before the presentation date to fill in because a co-worker got sick, had a family emergency or maybe even left the organization. You can’t say no and it is likely too late to change the title and topic of the presentation to something of your own choice.

So what do you do? You do everything you can in the time that you have to revise the presentation to “make it your own” and in a way that boosts your confidence. If this means staying up most of the night revising the slides, then that’s what you must do.

Here are some dos and don’ts for this situation:

1. Don’t accept it – if you really don’t want to do it.

Assuming you have a choice, if you aren’t comfortable with the topic or are overwhelmed with work, don’t say yes to doing the presentation just to be a hero.

If the topic is not in your area of expertise or you can’t get behind it, do the smart thing and say no. Taking on a presentation that you don’t want to do ultimately won’t be a great experience for your audience or a good result for your employer and/or personal brand.

2. Don’t panic.

You’ve got this thing. Turn a stressful situation into something fun. You are a mini hero after all as you are coming to the rescue of a your employer and a co-worker, peer or boss. Take the added stress and channel it into an opportunity for you to shine or tackle a new opportunity.

3. Don’t simply deliver your co-worker’s presentation. 

A key tenant of good presenting is to thoroughly and completely own your topic and presentation, including inherited ones. While a lack of time may not allow you to create a brand new presentation of your own, do add as much of your own material, stories and content as possible and appropriate.

Remember, your task is NOT to deliver your co-worker’s slides, but to inform, educate and entertain the audience. The audience doesn’t know or care who developed the slides or if you completely changed the presentation. The person who created the original slides is not on stage and so you owe them nothing.

4. Do stay consistent with the promised title and topic.

It is generally unacceptable to the attendees and the event organizer to change the topic without any notice. If you are able to get the organizer to change things up and go with your new topic, then great. But just showing up with something different is unfair to attendees who likely chose your session based on the description. Taking a different approach to the presentation is fine as long as you address the essence of what the session title and description promised.

5. Don’t tell the audience you inherited the topic and you are filling in for someone else.

The audience most likely doesn’t know or care that you inherited to topic. An exception of course is if someone else’s name is still listed on the agenda and you are a last minute substitution. But even in that case, just mention you are filling in and move on quickly. Raising too much awareness that you are a replacement may put the audience in a mood of feeling like they got a lesser speaker. You want the audience 100% focused on you and with positive vibes.

6. Do spend time in person or on the phone with your co-worker or whomever created the original slides for the presentation (if slides were in fact developed).

You’ll want to thoroughly understand the slides and the stories behind them. You have to get passionate about the topic. Focus your conversation on the key theme and concept behind the talk. Try to find if there are “fulcrum” slides – those that convey the most critical elements of the talk. If the presentation includes things like case studies, get the details behind what’s on the slides. Determine if a written case study exists.

Find out if part of the presentation based on a white paper, blog or research study? Your goal is NOT to learn the other person’s slides, but to understand the theme and goals and if there is any “must use” content.

7. Do incorporate your “comfort” slides.

If you speak on at least a somewhat regular basis, you probably have a few (or several) slides that you incorporate into every presentation. Unless they simply don’t fit with the topic, try to work these into your inherited presentation. These “go to” slides will increase your confidence, improve your flow and delivery and allow you to more effectively make the same or similar point from the original presentation

8. Do delete “trouble” slides.

After familiarizing yourself with the slides, the single most important thing you can do is delete slides or content within slides that you struggle with in rehearsal or are simply uncomfortable with.

I once inherited a presentation from a co-worker that included a phrase I was uncomfortable with and that was a key theme throughout the presentation. Depending on your frame of mind or reference, the phrase sounded like either a very crude sexual act or the name of a home for seniors.

Perhaps it was my dirty mind but every time I said the phrase I could not help but to think of the similar sounding sexual phrase and assumed many in the audience would as well. I revised it to a different term that had a very similar meaning and was one that I had used in several articles and previous presentations.

I was then able to leverage imagery and slides that I had used in another presentation. And because I had used this term before it gave me additional confidence and a feeling of ownership of a major aspect of the presentation.

9. Do Tweak slides so they include easy to see “triggers.”

Inherited presentations will not be second nature to you so spend time tweaking slides to incorporate numbers, phrases and keywords that will trigger detail or stories on which you can elaborate.

You’ll want to remove sentences, long phrases in smaller fonts that might tempt you to read them. Take a keyword or phrase and blow it up big so when you click to that slide you’ll be able to riff on the content rather than looking too much at the content on the slide itself.

Some slides will likely require more effort to make “yours.” Recreate slides, break them into 2 or 3 slides or just skip that content unless it is critical to the presentation.

10. Do make the opening “yours.”

A key to having confidence and getting into a good rhythm with your inherited presentation is starting off well, especially if you have limited time to make revisions. Even if you have only a few minutes to revise the slides, drop in some of your own “go to” opening slides or create one or two quickly.

Whether you use humor, relate something that happened on your flight to the conference or reference a current event – find a way to immediately get into a groove. If you are relaxed and confident as you transition into the inherited slides you’ll find it easier to think on your feet, make good decisions and ad lib.

11. Do feel free to skip over slides when speaking.

Just because a slide is in a presentation, do not feel compelled to use it or speak to it. If you get to a slide and you aren’t comfortable with it, or have a story to tell – simply skip past it. If you can’t add any value to a slide you aren’t serving anyone’s interest by struggling with it.

12. Do use inherited slides as launching pads for “your stories.”

If you don’t have time to revise every slide in the presentation to your style and approach, then simply do so on stage. Use the essence of a slide as a launch pad for you to tell a story or share an example that you can get behind and bring to life.

13. Don’t wait until the last minute if you can avoid it.

We are all busy and finding time to revise an inherited presentation might get pushed toward the bottom of your “to do” list. It is important, however, to early on at least understand the session description and have gone through the slides and spoken with the original creator. This way there should be no or very few last-minute surprises or questions.

Have an idea early on what you want to do with the slides, so even if you wait until the last minute you know what you are up against.

Understand The Context of Your Session

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Not surprisingly, most speakers/presenters spend probably 90+% of their preparation time working on their slides. However, slides are a bit like what a script is to a movie – you still need actors and the set to bring the story to life.

I refer to this totality of your presentation as your “speaker canvas.” Your slides (and audio and video if used) are your paint and multi-media that is applied to your “canvas.”

Think about a film maker and their changing “canvas” today. As a movie watcher your enjoyment of a film can differ widely based on the comfort of the theater, Were there teens texting and talking in the theater?; Did you watch it on a plane on a small poorly lit screen?; On an iPad by the pool?; In 5 sequences over a few weeks on Netflix?; On your big screen at home?; Or after a disappointing restaurant experience or argument with your significant other?

While clearly different from a film viewing experience, presenting also has potentially dozens of variables that can dramatically affect an audiences’ experience with your talk.

These can include:

  • Time of day/Time slot: Are you the last of 4 speakers before an overdue break? Are you the last speaker of the day and standing between either cocktails or people heading into their commute home? Are you following an amazing keynote speaker who had the audience laughing in hysterics for an hour?
  • Keynote or Breakout: Audiences bring very different expectations to a keynote session than they do a breakout session competing with 10 other sessions at the same time.
  • Venue: Are you speaking at a 4- or 5-star resort or dated economy airport hotel? Are attendees relaxed and enjoying the setting for a few days or planning when to leave for their drive home to the suburbs later?
  • Mood: Is the audience in a great mood or is their industry or company under significant competitive, pricing or technology threats? Do they what to laugh, be consoled or energized?
  • The room: Is the room tiny and cozy or laid out for an audience of thousands while you are only speaking to hundreds? Is it wide and short, long and narrow, or square? Are you close to the audience in an intimate setting or do you feel like the Pope speaking to the masses?
  • The stage: Is the stage large enough for a Broadway play or a small riser that if you take 2 steps you will fall off of the stage? Do you have room to prance the stage if that is your style?
  • Screen, sound and lighting: Did the event organizer go cheap and not supply a lavalier microphone forcing you to hold the presentation clicker in one hand and handheld mic in the other? Or worse yet force you to use the podium mic? Is the presentation screen not aligned or is the color washed out? Is it a small screen is the center of the stage or several large screens on each side of the stage? Is the room dark like a movie theater or do the stage lights blind you and you have trouble seeing the audience?
  • Session Title and Description: Did your PR person submit a topic description and title 9 months earlier that you can’t stand and you now intend go in a different direction with your session? What content expectations does the title and description create?
  • Co-Presenter: Are you sharing the stage with a client, partner, competitor or co-worker? Are they inexperienced and deathly nervous, soft spoken, have horrible slides or talk forever?
  • Physical Health/Well Being: Are you dealing with a cold or cough? Did you take a red eye to the event or stay up all night partying or finishing your slides? If you do much speaking you will likely experience at least 2 of these in short order.
  • Familiarity with your presentation/ rehearsal: There will come times in your “speaking career” when you are asked to fill in for someone who had a family emergency; or you were given someone else’s slides and you simply didn’t have or didn’t make the time to “make them yours.”

Some of the above elements that drive your speaking context and available “canvas” are under your control – but many are not. So while you may not have control over the size of the room and layout, your time slot, who speaks before you – you MUST be aware, prepare and respond to these variables as appropriate.

You need to take ownership of the situation and make the best of it or even turn a potential negative situation into a positive. Each one of the above situations may require a different approach or techniques that differ from your original plan for your session. Don’t be unprepared and surprised.

 

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