Top Highlights

• Fourth, we must listen deeply to what others are saying (and perhaps not saying) while also tuning in to our own internal voice and intuition. Fifth, we must leverage story structure to make our ideas more intelligible, sharper, and more compelling than they might otherwise have been. And sixth, we must focus audiences as much as possible on the es...
• TED Talks are heavily scripted and sometimes even edited. Leaders like Jobs and Obama spend months practicing and refining their presentations.
• Rather than aiming for perfection, as we might do in our presentations, we should instead embrace imperfection and focus on how we might best engage in the moment. By training ourselves to quiet down our critical evaluation, we can lower our stress levels and better accomplish our communication goals.
• In truth, striving to get our communication “right” only increases the odds that we’ll communicate poorly. If we try to memorize our way to success or fixate on one way of speaking, we’ll focus so much on trying to remember what we’ve worked on that we’ll likely freeze up in the moment and fail to tune in to what’s happening around us. We’ll lose o...
• We must cue in quickly and accurately to our environment. We must gauge our audience’s needs. We must adapt what we’re saying to those needs. And we must manage our fears so they don’t limit us.