Both of the Ted Talks are meaningful, especially for us, who will need to to present our ideas to clients in our future career.
In Chris Anderson’s speech, he explained to us what made a good speech. I strongly agreed with his speech that one of the most important things we wanted to do was to connect with our audience. Curiosity is what makes our audience want to stay focused on a talk. Once the audience finds that the topics are related to them, then it means they are connected to the speaker so the speaker can start building ideas to the audience. Another thing Anderson pointed out was we should focus on one major idea in the entire speech. To focus on one idea does not mean we just repeat one topic over and over again. In order to focus on one idea, we should make examples that are vivid. This idea should be a theme throughout the talk. I was also impressed by the last point he mentioned in the speech, which was making the idea worth sharing. In this case, we have to understand our audience because if the topic was not beneficial to our audience they would lose interest in our speech.
In Amy Cuddy’s speech, “Your Body Language May Shape Who You are,” she explained how important our body language is. We are always so fascinated by human body language, because body language helps us to express ideas, emotion and also give others a sense of who we are. However, Ms. Cuddy’s speech was more than that. Ms. Cuddy used different examples and experiment results to prove that body language could also shape our personality. She also stated at the end of the speech that “Fake it until you become it.” I agree with the whole speech she gave, and I think I learned a lot from the speech. I remember when I was taking the public speaking class, our instructor kept asking us to stand straight while we were giving a speech. From the moment that she tapped my back to remind me to stand straight, I immediately felt more confident than a second before. During Ms. Cuddy’s speech, there were a lot of scenes that appeared in my brain which I related to the topic that she focused on. When I started my college life, I always sat in the back and listened to my instructor, but I never raised my hand or asked questions during the lecture. At that time, attending classes was boring to me. I talked to my life coach(also my elder sister) and she told me that I have to try to participate in class, by this way, I could get engaged with the class topic. So I started to push myself during classes, I pretended I didn’t care about how other students thought about me, I also pretended I was not nervous. It was a hard time for me to adapt to this way of acting, but this actually worked. Now, I always ask questions during class to make sure I understand the content and the requirements which also increase my grade. All I did was force myself to ask questions one or two times in the class and now I adapted this way and I also get more confidence when showing my own work to the class.
