TED Talks Part 2

TED Talks

Part 2 Talk Tools

Our first idea building tool is connection. According to Anderson, author of TED Talks, to make a connection as a speaker we have to go to where the audience is and win them over. We do this by not rushing into our speech, but by taking a moment to smile and make eye contact. It also helps to show a little vulnerability. It’s okay to be nervous. The audience will see our humanity and root for us to succeed. Our nervousness pushes their empathy buttons. Also, let’s try to make them laugh at least once. But no corny jokes. Laughing breaks the tension and makes everyone feel like they are on the same side. Laughter is a great tool for connecting and gets everyone to listen closer to us.

Narration is our second idea building tool. Narration is simply a good story. So, let’s tell a good story. Anthropologist and professor Wiessner shares that ancient campfire stories played a crucial role in helping expand people’s abilities to imagine, dream, and understand the minds of others. Basically, our minds co-evolved through storytelling over many, many campfires. We can’t help but like stories. It’s in our DNA. And every one of us gets something out of stories because every one of us has some level of understanding, regardless of where we are on the age spectrum, experience spectrum, or intelligence spectrum. There is something for everyone in a good story.

Telling our own stories is the simplest talk to give. But, beware. According to Anderson, there is a danger to taking this simpler road. The majority of talks that TED Talks turns down are talks people have about themselves because they lack a central idea that ties the narrative together. Remember the take-away has to be obvious for everyone in the crowd.

Overcoming the curse of knowledge may be one of the most important things we can do as speakers. Making the speech as simple as it can be, but no simpler is how the best speakers use the third tool of building ideas through explanations. For the explanation method to be effective it has to start where the audience is. Build curiosity. And it has to be delivered piece by piece with metaphors built in to show how it all fits together with clear and easy to follow examples.

The best explainers say just enough to let people feel like they’re coming up with the idea themselves. The best speakers bring in new concepts and describe them just enough so that the prepared minds of the audience can slide these concepts together into place for themselves. This strategy is time efficient for speakers doing the short 18 minute TED Talk, and it’s deeply satisfying for the audience members who like to feel clever.

One more thought on explanations. According to Anderson, sometimes it helps to clear the muddy water by beginning our talks with what it isn’t. By sharing what it isn’t with our audience we make it easier for them to close in on what we have in our mind of what it is.

Our fourth tool for speakers to build ideas in others’ heads is persuasion. Persuasion is the act of replacing someone’s world view with something a little better. This won’t be an easy thing to do, however. People cling to what they think they know because it’s the only way they know how to make sense of their world at the moment. No one wants to live in a senseless world turned upside down. To be effective in the art of persuasion, a speaker has to have the element of reason as a central building block of their persuasive speech. Reason is best accomplished through intuition pumps or a detective story approach. Adding some humor early on, adding an anecdote, offering vivid examples, using 3^rd party validation, using powerful visuals and other plausible priming devices helps one persuade others to their vision of a better world.

The fifth talk tool of a speaker trying to build ideas is the revelation. The revelation is the most direct way of gifting an idea to an audience because it just simply shows something new to them. However, let’s not simply just walk our audience through bullets in a power-point presentation. That’s boring. Instead, let’s figure out a way that engages, intrigues and enlightens our audience. This route will bring some wonder and delight. Some of TED Talk speakers have achieved this wonder and delight through “Wonder Walks”. Others have done it through Dynamic Demos. Some have even done it through “Dreamscapes”. Ultimately, what we want to do as speakers is to paint a bold picture of the future. And we want to do this in a way that will make them desire that future!

Dan Blanchard is an award-winning author, speaker and educator. To learn more about Dan please visit his website at: www.DanBlanchard.net. Thanks.

Managing your passwords

I am continuing my series of posts on security topics of primary interest to businesses, as I mentioned in my first post on this blog. In this post, I focus on making sure you manage your online passwords carefully.

If you spend any time online, you will probably encounter many websites that require some kind of username and password in order to log into the website. This includes websites for e-commerce, financial institutions, social media, blogs, and other websites that require credentials in order to protect the data contained within and/or identify you in order to complete some kind of transaction. 

Your username is usually pretty easy to determine:  most websites use your email address as the username. What's not so easy, or at least it shouldn't be, is determining your password. If someone else knows your password with your username / email address, they can gain access to a website and potentially cause havoc. So, managing passwords carefully is one of the most important things we can do for personal and business security.

What's your password?

For several years, reports have been published each year about the worst passwords of the previous year. This data is mostly collected from data breaches and other leaked password information. The amount of this leaked data now totals around 2 million passwords. Out of this data, the top 25 common and insecure passwords are noted. As you might imagine, the top two bad passwords of the list for many years have been "123456" and "password". These are obviously not very secure as anyone can guess these passwords. You can read of the reports yourself: top 25 worst passwords of 2015.

Obviously, if any of your passwords are similar to what's on the list, you need to change them immediately. We understand passwords are necessary, but there are complaints about using them as well.

One of the biggest complaints about passwords is they are not easy to remember if we try to make them secure. Easy passwords are easy to guess or look up in dictionaries or online encyclopedia articles (think Wikipedia). This includes passwords with substituted numbers for letters (think "passw0rd" or "s3cr3t" (instead of "secret"), for example) or well known sentences or phrases from books or articles. Many books and articles are online now so it would be easy for an attacker to check possible passwords and password sentences from those resources.

Another complaint is because it is hard to remember a lot of passwords, most people use one password in many places. This introduces the problem that if one website is compromised and passwords are obtained, the attacker would know your password (and probably username = email) at all of your other websites, including, perhaps, your bank. So, what can we do?

Managing your passwords

There are a couple of good recommendations for managing passwords. One recommendation is to use what's called a "passphrase" that is made up of mixed words not usually found together. This kind of password provides enough characters in order not to be easily guessed and it is not easily found in dictionaries or online encyclopedia articles. Here are some examples:

FishWearsBrownShoes3%

or

ElephantJumpsBluePaper#5

Here, I take words you would never suspect or imagine to be together and put them together in something easy enough to remember (mainly because they are silly - we tend to remember the silly things!). I included the "3%" and "#5" to match a password policy you may see sometimes that require passwords to contain: a capital letter, a lower case letter, a symbol, and a number. You could come up with several of these pass phrases with variations of words and symbols and numbers - the possibilities are nearly endless! Be creative!

Another recommendation is to use what's called a "password manager". These are applications allowing you to create one password which in turn unlocks all the generated passwords you may have and can use with different websites. All the generated passwords are considered to be secure - all you need to do is remember the original one password to unlock the password manager vault of passwords. Generally, this method is considered to be the safest way to keep track of the many passwords you may use. There are lots of options for password managers. You have to evaluate each company to determine how they are storing your passwords (on your machine or somewhere in the "cloud"), how or if they track when you are re-using passwords or keeping the same password for a long time, and price (most passwords managers are not free). One example of a password manager is 1Password.

Next steps

Whatever method you use, think carefully about how you manage passwords. They really are one of the most important security tools you use on the internet today. Give it some thought and consider one of the recommendations above to better secure your own passwords and password usage. 

Next month, I will continue to talk about the kinds of policies your company should use for passwords as well as how two-factor authentication can be used for further increased password security. If I can be of help in setting up your own password policy, or evaluating it, please get in touch. If you have any general questions about passwords, please let me know below.


About Robert Hurlbut

Robert Hurlbut, owner of Robert Hurlbut Consulting Services, based in Enfield, CT, provides software security consulting, architecture, and training. This includes software development, threat modeling, secure code reviews, and other kinds of security audits for your company. If Robert can be of assistance to your company, please get in touch through the below contacts.

Web: https://roberthurlbut.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/roberthurlbut
Twitter: @RobertHurlbut

Presentation Hack

Want a quick way to develop a presentation? Need a tool to be prepared if you're ever asked to speak on a topic of your expertise? Here's a great presentation hack to keep in your "back pocket" for any occasion. 

I call it the PREP formula for speaking. The P stands for POINT, the R stands for REASON, the E stands for EXAMPLE, and the final P stands for POINT. This formula can be used for a one-minute talk, a 90-minute keynote, or for an all day training.

You begin by stating the point you want to make to your audience or your listener(s). You then back that point up with one or more reasons as to WHY you're making that point. Your next step is to provide one or more examples to support each of your reasons. And your final close to your presentation is to restate the point you started out with, in a way that will motivate, inspire or entertain your audience.

So, the next time you're asked to give the toast at a wedding, provide a blessing for a meal, give a project update at work, or give your elevator speech at a networking group, you have a speaking hack that works every time. I even use it to build my training presentations for the work that I do.


Bill Corbett is the founder of the HARTFORD SPRINGFIELD SPEAKER'S NETWORK and an award winning professional speaker who has been speaking since 1995. He has been on stages across the U.S. for everything from brief lectures to keynote speeches to multi-day training events, and was the featured speaker at a conference in The Netherlands in the Fall of 2015. He is a regular contributor to network television affiliates and provides one-on-one speaker coaching for business professionals. Learn more about him and his top-selling Amazon books.

10 Things to do with Every Business Email You Receive

CHECK OUT THEIR PROFILE ON LINKEDIN to learn more about them. Do this to determine if there is something you can do to help them first, then determine if they can help you.

SEND THEM A CONNECTION REQUEST if you're not already connected. At the very least they could possibly see your WHAT'S HAPPENING updates.

ASK THEM FOR A RECOMMENDATION on Linkedin. Use their experience with you and what you do to give something to your prospects to see.

WRITE THEM A RECOMMEND ON LINKEDIN if you're familiar with their work and you feel comfortable endorsing them.

INVITE THEM to your Facebook, Youtube and/or Pinterest business page if you have one. It plugs them even further into your network.

ADD THEM TO A GOOGLE+ CIRCLE and/or find and follow them on Twitter. If you don't have a Twitter account, open one today.

INVITE THEM TO JOIN A LINKEDIN DISCUSSION GROUP you moderate or are active in. If you don't moderate a discussion group, consider starting one now based on your subject matter expertise.

CONNECT THEM WITH SOMEONE IN YOUR NETWORK who may be able to help them in some aspect of growing their business, and do it via email.

ASK FOR THEIR PERMISSION TO ADD THEIR NAME TO YOUR MAILING LIST. Doing it without asking them is bad business.

SEND THE ORIGINAL EMAIL TO YOURSELF MARKED AS AN ACTION ITEM if something further is needed before you delete it.

Bill Corbett is the founder and organizer of the HARTFORD SPRINGFIELD SPEAKER'S NETWORK and an award winning professional speaker who has been speaking since 1995. He has been on stages across the U.S. for everything from brief lectures to keynote speeches to multi-day training events, and will be the featured speaker at a conference in The Netherlands this Fall. He is a regular contributor to network television affiliates and provides one-on-one speaker coaching for business professionals. Learn more about him and his top-selling Amazon books.