Lessons from my Journey to a TEDx Talk

Ever since I first got hooked on TED talks many years ago, it has always been a dream of mine to speak on the TED platform,

So when I received an invitation to talk at Royal Holloway University for their TEDx last September, I was really humbled.

But it wasn’t a straightforward journey. And I know there are a lot of people out there who are interested in becoming a speaker on the prestigious TED platform, so I thought I’d write this article to give you a peek behind the curtains on some of the steps I personally took to end up speaking on the stage at TEDx.

It all started with a mentee of mine who received an email asking if he knew of any good speakers. This led on to me being suggested and introduced to the TEDx Royal Holloway organisers.

The first steps were to understand the theme of the event. In this case, it was ‘Ctrl Alt Del’. This theme of rebooting worked nicely with the concepts of The Unfair Advantage which is all about rebooting your mindset and looking at the world of success with a different lens.

The organisers wanted a brief application form filled in, which then led to another shortlist to provide a proposal, which then led to a couple of phone calls and I was invited! Yippee.

The idea of TED is to share ideas in less than 18 minutes. I was given a speaking coach with 6 weeks to go to the big day.

I decided that it was time to make my talk really tight and to the point, I opted for a 10min slot but ended up at 11mins in my rehearsal. I knew that TED is notoriously strict on timing, so I thought I need to tighten it up, but thankfully, they actually really loved my talk and wanted me to fill more time. They gave me up to 15mins, which I ended using 12 mins of on the day.

What I learned from this process is: Condensing a lot of content into a short speech is very hard.

In fact, a good rule of thumb I’ve heard is that for every minute of the speech, it roughly takes 1 hour of preparation. However, when you have a lot of content to relay, shorter talks always seem to be harder to deliver in my experience.

My preparation included:

Once I locked down my flow and timing, it was time to practice.

After rehearsal day (a whole day with the TED team and other speakers), I realised I needed some tweaks.

Firstly I added more slides, and an icebreaker, and wanted to relax into my personal style (which is very down-to-earth with a light-hearted tone).

I then met some colleagues in my network who had already done TEDx talks over dinner, and they gave me further pointers to watch out for (to make sure your slides in keynote work in powerpoint, don’t over-rehearse etc). All good advice.

One week before the talk, I had fully internalised my talk. I knew I could say it on demand if required, the key is always pace, passion and clarity.

On the day I saw other speakers in the speakers’ room, still practising, listening back to their talks. Understandably, some of us were nervous. Once I internalised my talk, I felt confident enough to deliver anytime, anywhere :-)

I am quite a kinetic person, with high energy and what I realised was that just before I walk onto that red spot, I should do some shadow boxing to loosen up and bring up my energy and it really helped me get ready.

The response to my talk “How to find your Unfair Advantage” was fascinating. They were intrigued, loved the MILES framework and the questions I got after were also fun to answer during the networking.

I have now ticked another thing off my bucket list and also managed not step out of that red spot on stage! The video of the talk is out next month.

In the meantime, you can watch my behind the scenes footage and run up to TEDx video below.

If you hire speakers, or are looking for someone to inspire and speak with passion at your startup, marketing or business event or conference, feel free to drop me a line. Look forward to speaking :-)

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