Ikigai is a Japanese concept that means “a reason for being.” Ikigai is the intersection between what you love, what you are good at, what you can be paid for and what the world needs. If you ever want to speak at TED or TEDx event, you should find the ikigai of your presentation. It should be at the intersection of: What you love, or in the context of a presentation, what you really care about.
I write this on the first full day of the 46th President of the United States Joseph Biden’s tenure in the White House. After 4 exhausting years for America and the wider world, the page has turned from the failings of an introspective, corrosive and divisive mandate into a bold, courageous and reactive new era, acknowledging first the gravity of America’s collective problems and seeking to solve them through consensus and action.
Zoom has become one of those tools that most people use, but how many of us have actually followed a training course on how to use Zoom properly? Not so many. At Ideas on Stage we have been using Zoom for years, so when the 2020 pandemic hit, we didn’t discover Zoom, but we did start to discover new features: some that we hadn’t needed before, and some that Zoom introduced as its usage exploded.
The COVID 19 pandemic has forced all of us to adjust and has pushed roughly 35% of the workforce to an exclusively online existence. While this is fortunate and frankly would have been impossible 15 years ago it doesn’t come without its challenges. As we struggle to maintain our routines, stay connected with our co-workers we have to continue the regular meetings attendance, trainings and webinars and we often have to give them ourselves.
Many of us are starting to approach presentations in the right way, taking the time to fix our objectives, analyze the audience, study the context, put together some coherent arguments, good visuals and even find the time to rehearse. Just as we are now spending longer to prepare our presentations properly, in a world of ever-increasing social media and ever-dwindling attention spans, our presentations are getting shorter in order to be more effective.
A battle still rages for hearts and minds in the city built on speeches. Let the US election of 2020 be a lesson to all leaders of tomorrow. I am a frequent visitor to Washington DC. Having a key client on Pennsylvania Avenue, I have had the pleasure of getting to know the city and its people, working the day and socializing the night, breathing the atmosphere and drinking its politics.
If you ever talked with me about my favorite TEDx talks, then I am sure I mentioned the late Hans Rösling, one of my all-time favorite TED speakers. On paper, he didn’t really start with an advantage; he spoke English with a strong foreign accent, and his key topic was statistics and demographics, something most of us associate with good sleep, not with great presentations. Yet, Hans’ enthusiasm and passion on stage, combined with his unique way to use numbers to tell meaningful stories, meant that his presentations were always a high point of any TED conference.
Some people think that to make a great TEDx presentation, they should learn their text by heart. Our collective experience as coaches shows that it’s a good solution only IF: You like to know your speech word for word and it fits your personal style and you know how to do it properly. If you don’t meet one of these conditions, then it’s best to avoid learning your text by heart.