Getting Started
Block regular time on your calendar.
Creative sessions should be long.
Skill-development sessions can be short.
Objective
Know your purpose.
Are you preparing for general skill development or a specific upcoming talk?
Are you building your brand or a key relationship?
Do you want to entertain, educate, or persuade?
What summit are you aiming for?
What tools do you need?What effort will you commit?
The BASIS of Your Foundation
- Big Idea
- Audience Focus
- Solid Structure
- Illustrative Examples
- Stage Presence
Big Idea
Clarify the one thing you want everyone to leave understanding.
Distill it like a proverb: simple, clear, memorable.
As Churchill said, hammer it home.
Audience Focus
Tailor every talk to your specific audience.
“A love letter addressed ‘to whom it may concern’ is a bad love letter.”
Who are they? What do they care about? What problem are they trying to solve?
Design every choice in service of being useful to them.
Solid Structure
Give yourself time to think and research.
Build your first draft out loud using a transcriber.
Capture every relevant thought as it appears.
Use How to Structure What You Say to organize your material.
Shape the talk with deliberate highs and lows and contrasting emotions.
Write and memorize your Big Idea, opening, closing, and structure.
For everything else, play jazz.
Get feedback early and often.
Illustrative Examples
Most of your talk should be examples.
Use analogies, stories, and concrete illustrations to make ideas real.
Use analogies to connect your Big Idea to your audience.
Use analogies to bring numbers to life.
Use stories to animate your ideas.
Great stories are vivid, emotional simulations of specific moments.
Stories often include real people, real places, and real dialogue.
Stage Presence
Isolate your delivery practice.
Run many short reps of 30 seconds to 1 minute.
Between each rep, iterate on one thing.
Seek honest feedback and keep iterating.
Do at least three full run-throughs before the event.
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Ewing School Philosophy
What Makes Us Human
We are Problem Solvers
The Legend of Bob Hoover
A Wager on Our Future
Ganesha’s Gifts
The Science of Public Speaking
The Terror of Being Hunted
The Path to Superhuman Ability
What If You’re Not a Natural?
The Power of Archetypes
Follow Your Curiosity
The Arc of Progress
Mindset Shift to Speaking Excellence
The Reality of Tomorrow
Create Space for Ideas to Emerge
How to Have Really Good Ideas
How to Replace Your Anxiety with Awe
Your Best Tool for Quick Stress Relief
A Quick Way to Calm Your Mind
The Treasure Method
How to Practice
Start Right Now
Parkinson’s Law
The Secret to Success
Traveling to Neverland
Cross the Uncanny Valley
Use AI to Improve Your Public Speaking
Achieving Transformational Growth
How We Get Better
How to Give Useful Feedback
The Changing of the Seasons
What Bryan Caplan Left Out
The Beauty of Being Wrong
The Retention Test
Your Messaging
Your Big Idea
How to Craft a Proverb
Churchill’s Pile Driver
Five Ways to Write with Style
Finding Fallacies in the Wild
How to Communicate Numbers
The Highway Billboard Test
Your Stories
What Makes a Story?
How to Get People to Care
Good Stories are Vivid
Good Stories are Simulations
What’s the Moral of Your Story?
How to Find Good Stories
Create and Use Analogies
Your Structure
How to Open a Talk
How to End a Talk
How to Structure What You Say
Standing on the Shoulders of Thieves
The Shaggy Implication
The Goal is to Play Jazz
The ⅔ Rule
Templates to Consider
The Big Five
The Bo Method
Your Company Explainer
How to Introduce a Speaker
Moderating a Panel
Focusing on Your Audience
Remember You’re Weird Too
To Really Understand a Person
David Brooks and the Illuminators
Validating the Truth Behind the Words
Know, Understand, and Connect with Your Audience
Audience Profile
Your Conversations
The WISER Model
The Conversation Dance
How to Be a Supercommunicator
How to Deal with Disagreeable People
Speak the Language of Your Audience
Be a Conversational Scientist
Your Delivery & Stagecraft
Delivery Principles and Exercises
On Solving a Most Common Problem
How to Improve Your Eye Contact
How to Control Your Voice
The Runaway Train
What You Should Wear
What You Should Wear Part 2
Where Should You Stand on Stage?
More Philosophy
Principles for Effective Leadership
Holidays and Permanent Revolution
Big Cheers to Rutger Bregman
A Dedication to Dan Dennett
Siddhartha: An Appreciation
Principles Applied
This is (Still) Water
Certainty is the Mind Killer
Channel Your Inner Feynman
Paprocki’s Keynote
Klutsey’s Keynote
Reminder on Skill Development
The path to getting better at any skill repeats the same three steps:
- Practice with your full attention.
- Embrace honest feedback from yourself and others.
- Iterate based on the feedback.
Work to give yourself the same honesty and compassion you’d give your best friend. Useful feedback is specific, honest, and compassionate. Do retention tests. Warm up your voice and your body. Do resonant breathing and physiological sighing.
Final Thoughts
Public speaking will only become more important as AI accelerates. Your ideas matter. They deserve to be understood and applied. With sustained effort, you will become skilled, natural, eloquent, and authentic even when distractions, fear, and insecurity show up. Build your listening and speaking skills to spread your ideas and make the world better.
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