5 tips to prepare for your TEDx talk

For many years, I have been a huge fan of TED and TEDx. I found many inspiring talks, and I learned and shared the ideas the speakers have been sharing. So, I considered it a great honor when I was asked to speak at TEDxZemun. It was an opportunity to share my idea. For six months, I was preparing myself. I knew I had to create a concise story that made sense. There is so much to talk about, but only 18 minutes of time, and that is a challenge on its own. Putting into words what I feel and what I learned from my life, was a whole other challenge. So I created some ground rules to make sure that I would be able to deliver the best talk that I could.

Here I would like to share those rules with you and explain how you can benefit from them too while preparing for your Tedx talk.

1. Be brutally honest.

I wanted to really make an impact, and soon enough I realized I would need to be brutally honest with myself, and with everybody. Honesty enables self-improvement and I knew that the key to getting my message heard was to be honest about what I needed to change and how I worked on changing it. People will find it easier to relate to your story and it will help them understand that everyone must overcome their own challenges.

2. Be super disciplined

TED provides a list of tips for speakers to prepare themselves. One of those tips is about practice. Their tip is to practice so much that it becomes natural to share the story. As a coach, I have learned to freestyle depending on the needs of my clients and audience. That made it difficult to stick to a strict script for TEDx. But it made a lot of sense, because if I had only 18 minutes, then each word needed to make an impact. So I needed to be super disciplined in my preparation, learn everything by heart and then some.

3. Be self-confident

One of my challenges during public speaking had been that I needed a bit of time to get into the flow. With only 18 minutes on the clock, I decided I needed to make an impact from the first second. This meant I needed the right mindset from the moment I walked onto the stage until I walked back off. So I made sure I created a ritual for myself that would put me in that mindset so all I had to do that day was perform the ritual and keep my focus.

4. Do it for others

My story was going to be a very personal one, so I knew I had to keep in mind that what I was going to share was for others to benefit, and not for me to share my story. That meant that every part of the story needed to have a deeper meaning for the people who would listen to it.

5. Learn from your experience

Doing something like speaking at TEDx, knowing how much I admire the people that shared their talks before and after me, I knew it was going to be a challenge, and for me, that equals an opportunity to learn and grow. So I set specific goals for myself and was willing to take on the feeling of discomfort as I was moving out of my comfort zone. This mindset allowed me to go around in a huge learning zone instead of being in a panic mode.

In the end, don’t forget to enjoy. Whenever I had set big goals in my life, I had experienced a tendency to go all in, and when I would achieve my goals I was exhausted and needed to recover. This was taking the joy away from the preparation, the experience and the joy of achieving my goal. That is why I decided to set a goal to enjoy the whole experience, I enjoyed the preparations, made fun of myself, ran around and enjoyed every step of the way. That does definitely not mean it was easy, but you can enjoy challenge if you have the right mindset…

I hope that experiences I shared with you today will help you prepare for your TEDx speech. In the meantime, check out my video and get inspired! Feel free to share, like and comment! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syrWtjTpT0M