How To Prepare An Amazing TED Talk In One Week | Susan Cain

TED Talks have become a viral sensation I'm here with one of the most popular Ted speakers Susan Kane to talk about how she prepared for the big day Susan

first of all how did you get selected to speak for Ted oh gosh um well I sent Ted I was selected to speak for Ted before my book came out it came out about a month before the Ted conference but during the year before that I sent Ted information about my book um a tape of me speaking just any information that I thought might be of interest to them and I was really excited they got right away what an important topic it was going to be and so they invited me to speak um which of course prompted in me a grand mixture of excitement and Terror and how

did you prepare for the big day well um part of it was just sitting down and writing my talk as well as I could but I also I actually spent the week before the conference working one-on-one with a coach and that process was incredibly help you know it's funny that you say that because in my perfect world it would have been way before that but my book had come out um gosh I don't know let's say it was six weeks before or eight weeks before the conference and so I was in this Vortex of publicity at that time I was just traveling around everywhere so I couldn't even think about my TED talk until a week before so that was actually a little bit nerve-racking yeah I mean I had notes and I had drafted a talk but it wasn't really finished until a week before um during that week I was still editing it like crazy I was making changes to it 24 hours before I gave the speech and then having to me um rememorize the changes so it was a little nerve-wracking yeah that's a lot of pressure how did you psych yourself up in your self-described introvert how

did you Su yourself up to get on the stage um well there's sort of like the long-term answer and the short-term so the long-term answer is before Ted I had spent the previous year doing what I called my year of speaking dangerously which was um going out and practicing public speaking so that I could overcome what had been for me a lifelong fear of it um and I had done that not just for Ted but because my book was coming out and I wanted to be able to go out and talk about it in the very short term you know like right before I went on stage I was really lucky um my old high school friend Bill bran is the musical curator at Ted and he brings in these great musical acts and he brought in a band called red Barat uh that played right before I went on and they were so fantastic that it just kind of loosened me up and I felt like okay I could do this and I don't know if that band hadn't been on there I think I would have been a lot more tense and Bill Gates said that your talk was his favorite of all time is that a lot of pressure uh no because I didn't know it at the time I you know I found that out months later and um of all the exciting things that happened in the wake of the book coming out and the Ted Talk I think Bill Gates saying that was for me the best of all