A Game-Changing Formula for How to Create and Deliver a Talk that ROCKS!

By Laura Penn, Ph.D.

To Create Your Content… STEP 1 - Walk and Talk

When creating your talk, walk.  Instead of sitting down and facing your blank computer screen, hunkering down and straining to figure out what you are going to say in your talk, get up and walk. Walk around your room or your house…even better, go outside and walk there. Let the fresh air and the blood moving through your body, make your words come alive.  Take a recording device like your smartphone with you, and record yourself waxing poetic about your subject. Answer questions, define things, go all in!

Once you have captured your content this way, go back to your computer and transcribe what you have said.  Play it back and type it out, word for word.  Be careful not to edit yourself at this stage. Don’t change any grammar or wording, keep your transcription pure and authentic, the way you actually said it.  

Once your transcription is done, now you can edit it. Add more ideas and shape and change things as needed, but aim to keep as much of your original content as possible. 

When you are finished with the walking and talking and with the editing process, you will have a script that is fleshy and living and which sounds like you are speaking as yourself.

To Make Your Text Come Alive… STEP 2 - Play with Words

Now that your content has been created, it is time to bring your words to life.

Words on their own are static, ink on paper. Your job as a speaker is to breathe life into your words so that they can float into the hearts and minds of your audience.

In order to make this happen, you need to have a willingness to play, to let yourself go, when you start speaking your words. When you play with your words, you avoid sounding like you are just reading text, which sounds robotic, dull and boring. 

When you play with your words, you add oomph!, sparkle and color to how you speak.

One really great way to begin to play with your words is to “POP” them. Popping words, like popping popcorn, lifts words, emphasizing them so that they stand out and take up more space.

For example, read the following sentence aloud: “It was the happiest day of my life.”

Hopefully, your intuition should be telling you that there is a word in that sentence that needs to pop.

Which word is it? Say it out loud. Now say the entire sentence, popping the word “happiest”: “It was the HAPPIEST day of my life!”

Didn’t that feel good when you said it? 

That is how you can create emphasis and melody in your text. You underline words that need to pop with a colorful pen throughout your script so that you pop them every time you rehearse.

You can also play with things like pauses, an extremely powerful oratory tool, which helps the audience to absorb what you are saying. You can play with speed, how fast or how slow you speak. You can play with loudness and softness. All of these techniques help to shape your text so that when you say your words, you sound like a living, vibrant person who has an emotional connection to what you are saying.

To Connect Your Body With Your Message… STEP 3 - Move with Purpose

Now that you have created your script and you have played with words, it is time to bring your body into the mix.

This step is all about figuring out where you need to be on stage, because in a great talk, movement is never random, it has been staged to support the message. 

You may have seen speakers who walk aimlessly all over the place, leaking energy from their feet and from their legs and arms as they speak. They are a whirlwind of movement and as the audience, it is difficult to keep track of where they are going, why they are moving there and what their movement has to do with their message. 

Have you ever seen speakers like this?

What you need to do, in order to avoid leaking all over the place, making your message slip out of the room, is learn how to move with purpose.

To do this, you need to know that a stage (which is any area where you are standing and speaking to an audience) has different positions with different levels of power (Figure 1). The centre point of the stage is a great place to start and to end your talk (3). It also a great place to return to if you have been away from there for a while. The area at the very front is called “down-stage”, where there are three positions. This is the “power-line” because these three positions are the closest to the audience and your presence there is felt more intensely by them. If you want to create an intimate effect, move down-stage and come closer to the audience (2),(2). If you want to grab the audiences’ attention and “own” the stage, use the down-stage centre “power position” (1). This is a great place to sprinkle your magic dust, your call to action and your big take-away message.

Figure 1 - A nine-square grid of a common stage. Position number 3 is centre-stage and positions 1 and 2 are down-stage (closest to the audience).

To Be The Best Version Of Yourself... STEP 4 - Hang Out in Your Living Room

Before we move on, let’s briefly re-cap the steps so far: The first step is about creating content that represents how you speak, harvested from a recording; the second step is about playing with your words so that they come alive; the third step is about using the stage and moving with purpose so that your message stays in the room; and this last step, is the glue that binds all of the pieces together. It is an attitude, a mindset and a state of being which should ideally flow through your entire speech preparation process, from beginning to end. The step is called: “hanging out in your living room”…Why?

Because it is when you are doing exactly that, hanging out in your living room with your favorite people, that you are the best version of yourself. Where you are real, relaxed and authentic. 

When you put yourself into this living room state, while you rehearse and just before you go on stage to perform, you glow and connect better with your audience. You have done warm-up exercises to make your knees, hips, shoulders, neck, face and tongue loose. You have figured out how to relax yourself so that you get into this state instead of appearing nervous or uptight, holding your breath and your shoulders with tension. Ideally, you should appear relaxed on stage, breathing…feeling connected to the floor, to your body, to the audience and to your message.

There we are…Four game-changing steps to help you to create and deliver a talk that ROCKS!

The secret to making these steps work is that you:

Number 1 - Have a lot of time to do them. Be generous with your time when you plan for this process, give yourself more time than you think that you will need.

Number 2 - That you need to rehearse…A LOT! Do it until your speech feels like it is a part of your DNA and it just pours out of you.

The above article is based on a recent TEDx talk. To see the talk, click HERE.

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Laura Penn, Ph.D. is a three-time TEDx Speaker, Professional Speaker Coach and the Founding Director of The Public Speaking School, which aims to help speakers “enthuse, inspire and feel good whenever they speak in public".