How to start a speech | Simon Lancaster | TEDxUniversityofHertfordshire

Who wants to get high? Yes, you fancy something. Are we really going to

start

this party? Are you in the mood? Excellent. I have tons. You are willing to do it. And there are lots. Look at this. I have cocaine, ecstasy. speed, yes, but mine are all Fairtrade organic and 100% legal. Ted approves, I checked, so don't worry, today I'm going to talk about how to

start

a

speech

and this is how every speaker should start their

speech

by lifting up the audience because let's face it when most speeches start off delighted to be here. forward groups our heart sings for the love of God studies of students at universities show that their levels of brain activity during lectures are actually lower than when they are asleep lower is actually not the same as or a little higher in reality lower and no speaker wants we want a speaker to be high and not low from the beginning and we want to lift his heart from the beginning so today I'm going to lay out three ways you can start your speech.

Different drugs you can handle depending on how you want your audience to feel. The first drug we can handle is dopamine. This is the one we want to use if we want our audience to feel that drug. Dopamine is the drug of pleasure. it makes us feel strong, satisfied, wonderful, it's the drug that is naturally released when we finish a Sudoku or start checking things off a list, so how do we make that happen in a speech? Simple, we start with a joke, there are tons of websites and books full of one. -phrases and anecdotes waiting to be reused and recycled, most speakers have one or two of these up their sleeve that are ready to use anytime they want and it doesn't matter if it's an old shaggy dog ​​story. or a Churchill anecdote or a Seinfeld line, as long as it makes people laugh, that's all that matters, so my own joke, if I can prove it to you, is one about Einstein, so Einstein during the 1920 he was basically going all over Europe giving the same speech over and over again about the theory of relativity, on one of these occasions his driver was taking him there and his driver said: Oh, for the love of God, you're doing the same thing again today. same damn speech.

I swear I'll do this. many times now I could say it myself word for word and Einstein, who had a mischievous sense of humor, would say: okay, so I have an idea, why don't I dress up as the driver and get behind the wheel? Come out and you're going to give my lecture and we'll see how the gate drivers' rights act would try. Try it and Einstein stood at the back of the room and watched in amazement as his driver delivered this incredibly complicated lecture. Absolutely WordPerfect, but then someone in the audience asked a question so complicated that no layman could have dared to understand it, but the host didn't miss a beat and said very good question and of course it sounds very complicated, but the answer.

It's so simple that even my driver can tell it to you so anyone can learn a joke like that, but it's also worth having a few one-liners up your sleeve just in case something goes wrong at the beginning, as it always does, to make someone laugh. Greetings. embarrassingly loud, I'm so glad you came, mom, a phone rings in the middle of your speech, can you tell Barak that I'm busy right now, but I'll call him right away? There is a noise in the back of the room. Look, I don't mind people checking their sights when I get up to speak, make objects when they collapse to the ground or technology fails, since it happens variably and you can always use the last alternate line of all types.

I'm so sorry this never happened to me before the power of self. -Derogatory humor is immense, it brings down even the most pompous speaker and elevates the audience by making them feel superior, which is why, of course, they love it. It is also a sign of supreme confidence on the part of the speaker and therefore of the late comedian, the late great. Bob Monkhouse was a master at this, everyone laughed when I said I wanted to be a comedian, you're not laughing anymore are you? I saw a businessman start his speech the other day where he opened up, remember in this conversation he had with his wife at the breakfast table this morning, where he turned her around and said, have you ever in your wildest dreams Did you imagine that one day I would be running one of the largest companies on the planet?

To which she replied, honey, you never appeared in any of my wildest dreams. dreams or the politician I saw give his speech the other day where he talked about sin last week. I dreamed that I was given a speech in the House of Lords and then I woke up to find that I had actually been given a speech in the House of Lords, so these are the kind of forms we want to open if we want our audience to look like that, but we don't always want our audience to look like that, sometimes we want our audience to look a little like that, if that's the case, the drug we market is oxytocin.

Oxytocin is the drug of empathy, the drug of love, it makes us feel warm, fuzzy and clingy, it is the same hormone that is released naturally when mothers breastfeed, when we hold hands and hug while making love or when We hear a great speech because there are great speeches. always include stories that you think about any of the big speeches that you've seen over the last year and I'm thinking about what / Winfrey pink Michelle Obama Emma Watson people like this, they all tell stories and you see this is what there is a myth about speeches is that you tell them what you're going to tell them, then you tell them and then you tell them what you just told them and that's like telling your audience that you're going to be boring, then being boring and then telling your audience that you've been boring, that you can't stamp a dot on someone's head and, in fact, the only reaction you're likely to get is that it will make them want to stamp you on the hitch in exchange for simply a certain For the audience, something like our values ​​matter, our corporate values ​​matter, it has no persuasive value, so what you will find the best speakers will do is make their points, but they will be involved in a story and I am in a good story like a movie or novel where you have a strong hero, antagonists terrifying and a big goal, the story can be metaphorical like Churchill's Iron Curtain or Hillary Clinton breaking the glass ceiling or Donald Trump draining the swamp the story can be historical of someone we admire like From Cleopatra to Confucius, by Malala to Mandela, from Jane Austen to John Lennon, but for me the best stories are the personal ones, so I will tell you that I understood the truth when I came here today.

I got a call with my wife where my wife was. tears because this afternoon her sister had a baby and this is absolutely food, so can we give a round of applause to my sister-in-law Zoey? She's really Brie right now and a little bit of my heart is there now because I have two daughters, I have Charlotte, who is nine, and Alice, who is six, and Zoe was with us when those two girls were born and I tell you I remember when Alice was born. Charlotte was born and it was a piece of cake when Alice was born, it was very very difficult, the maternity ward was understaffed and she ended up being born very very quickly and as a result when she was born she was having difficulty breathing so she was admitted to the unit special care for the first nine days of her life and she is absolutely fine now before anyone worries at school today but the thing is this was the worst moment of my life because we didn't know if she was going to make it or not, my wife and I literally will.

I went to the hospital every waking hour and watched her. I was drawing pictures of her because we thought that was all we could have. Know? My mother-in-law came to stay to take care of our oldest daughter, so as if things weren't difficult enough, but what I really remember about this is that the whole time I went to see Alice in the incubator next to her were two twins. and they were the smallest babies I had ever seen. before in my entire life and they were so small that you could hold them in the palm of your hand so it was a miracle that they were alive and the whole time my wife and I went to see Alice no one came in to see these twins, no one, not one only once, and while Alice had her name on her incubator, Alice Elizabeth Lancaster, these twins, the charts marking their progress were simply marked A and B.

I asked the doctor running the ward what the story was and she said Oh, they were born to a teenager from the valleys who had given them up for adoption and, you see, I think about that and I think about how Alice we had everything ready for her, her crib was ready, her room was ready, her sister couldn't wait to play with her. Aunt Zoey couldn't wait to play with her grandparents, she couldn't wait to take her to the park. You know, we knew what school she went to. Everything was settled and for these two little twins, what did they have?

What future awaits them? for them, so if there's one thing I think we should all try to do, it's try to make sure that kids like that have the same opportunities that we would want for our own kids, don't you think? It was more persuasive, excuse me, share the story, but you have to do it to prove what happened and the thing is if we went back now and checked all of your blood levels, what we would find for most of you would be higher levels of oxytocin because I have connected, you have shared my story, you have seen the world through my eyes, not for all of you, on the balance of probabilities, at least six of the people in this room are actually psychopaths and incapable of empathy and, therefore, right, I think I have them, I have them, I know what they are, but for the rest of you you would have higher levels of oxytocin and this is essential.

Neuroscientist Paul Zak has shown that there is a direct correlation between our levels of oxytocin and our susceptibility to persuasion. He has carried out a series of fascinating experiments in this area, including one in which people were asked to lend money to a stranger and discovered that not only could you predict who would give money to strangers based solely on their oxytocin levels, you could even predict how The amount of money they would give them is absolutely extraordinary, so there's the real strength. You know, stories entertain. Stories persuade, but stories attract people. That's why stories are a great way to start your speech if you want your audience to look a little like this, but we don't always want our audience to look like this, sometimes we want our audience to look a little like this, how ?

We do this? How do we do that? How do we make them look like this? Which is the answer? How do we do it? Come on, how do we do it? For the love of God, well, just like that, we ask a question. All your faces are completely right. that this is that this is the university lecture how to wake up your audience and the thing is that when you ask an audience a question like that, they have elevated levels of cortisol cortisol is the stress drug, the fear drug, increases our heartbeat. our attention increases our energy levels, it prepares us to fight or flee very, very instinctively and you get it by asking questions, so asking questions is something you'll see real high-pressure speakers do, like we're evangelists. or salespeople or comedians, if they want to shut up the audience, they just throw it back at them and you see very powerful speakers who do it too, so it could be an emotional question.

You could ask an emotional question. How many of them? You've lost someone you really loved could be a factual question. Did you know that the 46 richest rural people on the planet have the same wealth as the 50% of the poorest people on the planet? double decker bus could be a kind of philosophical question why are we all here today as we meet today not yesterday nor tomorrow but here and now what is it that has brought us together what magical force is it that has brought us together are we here simply to we exchange business cards or we're here because we have something deeper in common the best speakers, even though the best speakers were last, long drawn out questions presented as a moral dilemma and there's a guy I saw do this absolutely amazingly not long ago And then he opened up like this and said, "It's India in 1935 and you're Mahatma Gandhi.

You're running to catch a train just as the train leaves the station and when you get on the train, one of your sandals comes off and falls under the train." train". to the track, what do you do? You get on the train, you continue getting on the train or you return to the platform to get your sandal back. I'd like you to think about that, we'll come back to that at the end which completely baffled us and then he got into the body of his speech where he started talking about leadership, his theories about leadership and it was all stories and questions and jokes and all the time I couldn't get this image of Gandhi out of me.

In my mind, it's absolutely, he got caught in my mind and then he got to the end of his speech and almost as an afterthought he said oh yeah, Gandy, the station, asked for a show of hands, so how manypeople would have uploaded to the program? train just to raise your hand, how many of you would have come back to get your sandal back? Fantastic, let me tell you what Gandhi really did. What he did was take off his remaining sandal and threw it on the track under the Train and when his companion said, why did you do that?

Gandhi answered well, so whoever finds them has a whole pair of sandals to wear. Genius, a question and a story, and that has many points. Don't like about values ​​over compassion? Thinking rationally under pressure you know showing that there is always an alternative to fight everyone or run away, but critically it creates feelings and that's what this is all about about questions, stories, jokes, they create feelings as Mayor Angelou wrote, people will forget what you said , they will forget what you did, but they will never do it. Do you ever forget how you made them feel and this guy made us feel amazing we felt connected we felt like one and this is what great speakers do and this is how they create followers and this is how they build movements with the promise of feelings that make us feel happy make us feel proud make us feel connected make us feel like we belong make us feel part of something bigger than ourselves that's what keeps us coming back and that's what keeps us going because we always crave more and great leaders always make us want more, Which brings me to my final point: How do you end a speech?

Well, there's only one way to do it.