How To Embed Credibility and Authority in Your TEDx Talk
By Bilyana Georgieva, TEDx Coach, Digital Nerd and Multi-Award Winning Professional Speaker, founder of The ‘Red Dot Speaker Star’ (formerly ‘Soon-To-Be a TEDx Speaker’) Program.
The ‘Red Dot Speaker Star’ newsletter gives you tips, tricks and hacks for your successful TEDx Journey. Make sure you follow me on Medium and click the 🔔 button on my profile to be notified when I share them.
Unlike other public stages TED does not allow
❌ name dropping,
❌ pitching,
❌ books mentioning,
❌ requests for funding,
❌ self-promotion,
❌ any commercial agendas and
❌ motivational talks.
❌ It is also not recommended for speakers mentioning what they do and describe the businesses that they’re in.
So what’s left, if you have all these restrictions??
As people do indeed embed their Credibility and Authority in TEDx talks. How they do it?
Here is how ..
You can only demonstrate your Credibility and Authority through your story and wisdom
However, we live in the 21st century, where attention span dropped to 8 seconds (according a Microsoft study in 2021)
Not only that, but because of the busy life we all have nowadays, people struggle to remember people’s names or talk titles.
It’s a vicious circle ⭕️ which, as a TEDx speaker, you need to tackle somehow, if you want to create a memorable TEDx talk, so you can get to your final destination — establish yourself as an authority and gain worldwide credibility for what you do.
Of course, there are 2 questions:
How to create a memorable story and wisdom?
and
What’s the most intelligent way to embed your authority and credibility?
The answer to both is actually one and it’s simple!
I’ve studied hundreds of TEDx talks to understand what makes a talk not just inspiring but powerful and memorable, so when people chat about it they can give the essence in a short sentence.
Turned out that talks, where the wisdom is condensed in a short, snappy, memorable sentence, which I call
a KEY PHRASE,
always turns the entire TEDx talk into success.
Simply, because the speaker made it easier to the audience to:
- tell them in short what wisdom they should remember
- and repeated it throughout the speech as many times as possible, so the Key Phrase was stored in the long-term memory of people’s brain
Think about:
“People don’t buy what you do, people buy why you do it”
He repeated his memorable Key Phrase SEVEN times in an 18 min speech!
What’s amazing is that now people use his Key Phrase to quote him and to search him on Google.
There are not many people remembering the talk’s title, but they remember his Key Phrase. There are also people who knows the phrase, but don’t remember Simon’s name ..
Here are examples of Key Phrases from TEDx talks I helped:
Dr Khurram Sadiq’s 3rd TEDx talk — The Superhumans That Exist Amongst Us
“It’s not about knowing Autism, it’s about understanding Autism.”
Dr Khurram Sadiq’s 4th TEDx talk — When A Video Game Becomes An Addiction
“Keep the fantasy and reality in balance”
Magdalene Adenaike — Why we must all be leaders?
“Real leaders embrace the superpowers of others”
Jessy Gomez — Your Job Does Not Define Your Worth
“Your job does not define your worth”
Maria Guimaraez — You Should Not Exist
“Suffering is the struggle that make us mentally strong”
Alina Timofeeva — Fail But Never Give Up
“Failure is an opportunity to grow”
Of course, there are TEDx speakers I worked with who haven’t use a repetitive Key Phrase as it feels for them “too much” to repeat the same wisdom sentence. Instead, they used the traditional approach to say their wisdom at the end of their speech.
My personal opinion is that:
a. Saying your wisdom message only once will not help people to remember it, therefore it wont position you on a long term, and
b. Doing it at the end of your speech means that those who haven’t watched till the end missed it
Sooo (🥁 TEDx traditional style for closing a speech 🥁 )
Remember this today:
If you want to set yourself for Success, Credibility and Authority straight from the beginning embed them in your story AND in a Key phrase throughout your script. That will make your TEDx talk Powerful and Memorable
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Sending you love and energy!
Yours,
Bilyana
