Remix is so fortunate to have Joanne Mathews on our team. She is a gifted speaker trainer who works one-on-one with leaders who want to communicate in a way that brings about real change. Joanne helps our clients with presentations from content development through individual coaching, customized to your needs.

1. You’ve coached a lot of TED speakers. What techniques can all speakers learn from TED?

There are 3 TED Talk best practices that every speaker can implement:

1) Whatever you present, love every sentence. If there are parts that you find yourself getting through to get to the good stuff, rethink them. If you’re getting bored, imagine how your audience is feeling.

2) Rehearse! The more important your speaking opportunity, the more rehearsing there is to do. Some of the most successful TED talkers rehearsed their talks 100s of times before going on stage.

3) TED talkers are assigned coaches to help them from talk strategy to delivery. Find a few supportive people in your personal or professional life that will provide you with honest feedback along the way. While public speaking is definitely something that you must do by yourself, you should never do it alone!

2. You talk about the audience giving the speaker the gift of their time. Tell us more about that and why it’s important.

During my career at Charles Schwab I had the opportunity to regularly present to large groups of clients and employees. One day I was about to go on stage and thought it would be interesting to add up the value of the time the audience was giving us by joining our event. The number was huge – close to $100,000 – and caused an epiphany of sorts for me. Everyone in the room was giving up some other important use of their time to be with us. They had given us a gift, and they deserved a gift from us in return. At that moment it was no longer ok to just be interesting and entertaining; something real had to happen with the time we had together.

3. If you could give just one tip to a speaker, what would it be?

That’s easy… have a point and have a goal. If you don’t have a goal, don’t get on stage. And, once you have your point don’t dilute it with a bunch of unneeded, often uninteresting context.