1.

Unleash the master within.Passion leads to mastery and mastery forms the foundation of an extraordinary
presentation. You cannot inspire others unless you are inspired yourself. You stand a much greater chance of persuading
and inspiring your listeners if you express an enthusiastic, passionate, and meaningful connection to your topic.

2.

Tell three stories. Tell stories to reach peoples hearts and minds. Brain scans reveal that stories stimulate and
engage the human brain, helping the speaker connect with the audience and making it much more likely that the
audience will agree with the speakers point of view. Recently I wrote this column about FacebookCOO Sheryl Sandberg.
Her original TED talk was going to be chock full of facts and figures, and nothing personal. Instead she told three
stories and ignited a movement. Stories connect us. Tell more of them.

3.

Practice relentlessly. Harvard brain researcher Dr. Jill Bolte-Taylor had this stroke of insight that has been
viewed 15 million times on TED.com. Dr. Jill rehearsed her presentation 200 times before she delivered it live. Practice
relentlessly and internalize your content so that you can deliver the presentation as comfortably as having a
conversation with a close friend.

4.

Teach your audience something new. The human brain loves novelty. An unfamiliar, unusual, or unexpected
element in a presentation jolts the audience out of their preconceived notions, and quickly gives them a new way of
looking at the world. Robert Ballard is an explorer who discovered Titanic in 1985. He told me, Your mission in any
presentation is to inform, educate, and inspire. You can only inspire when you give people a new way of looking at the
world in which they live.

5.

Deliver jaw-dropping moments. The jaw-dropping momentscientists call it an emotionally competent

6.

Use humor without telling a joke. Humor lowers defenses, making your audience more receptive to your
message. It also makes you seem more likable, and people are more willing to do business with or support someone they
like. The funny thing about humor is that you dont need to tell a joke to get a laugh. Educator Sir Ken Robinson
educated and amused his audience in the most popular TED talk of all time: How Schools Kill Creativity. Robinson
makes humorous, often self-deprecating, observations about his chosen field, education. If youre at a dinner party and
you say you work in educationactually, youre not often at dinner parties, frankly, if you work in education
Robinson makes very strong, provocative observations about nurturing creativity in children, and he packages the
material around humorous anecdotes and asides that endear him to the audience. Lighten up. Dont take yourself (or
your topic) too seriously.

7.

Stick to the 18-minute rule. A TED presentation can be no longer than 18 minutes. Eighteen minutes is the
ideal length of time to get your point across. Researchers have discovered that cognitive backlog, too much
information, prevents the successful transmission of ideas. TED curator Chris Anderson has been quoted as saying that
18 minutes is long enough to be serious and short enough to hold peoples attention.

8.

Favor pictures over text. PowerPoint is not the enemy. Bullet points are. Some of the best TED presentations
are designed in PowerPoint. Others use Apple AAPL -0.41% Keynote or Prezi. Regardless of the software, there are no bullet
points on the slides of the best TED presentations. There are pictures, animations, and limited amounts of textbut no
slides cluttered with line after line of bullet points. This technique is called picture superiority. It simply means we are
much more likely to recall an idea when a picture complements it.

9.

Stay in your lane. The most inspiring TED speakers are open, authentic, and, at times, vulnerable. Researcher
Bren Brown even gave a TED talk on the topic of vulnerability and how her own research led to her personal journey to
know herself. Opening up paid off for Brown in a big way. Oprah discovered Brown on TED, invited Brown to be on her
show, and today Brown is a bestselling author and regular contributor to O, The Oprah Magazine.