22 minutes
Here, we’ll break down Anderson’s most valuable tips for structuring your talk and share advice from Acumen Academy’s accomplished TED speakers on how they overcame any fears of public speaking.
“Courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is the ability to look fear in the face and continue to walk forward....Only by nurturing our courage will we prevent our fears from making and then keeping us small.”
This guide will help you stop your fears from keeping your message small. You’ll learn how to overcome the fear of public speaking in order to:
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Once you’ve mustered the courage to get started, how will you craft a presentation that sparks the interest of your audience? How will your ideas come together to create value and evoke change?
It starts by defining what you’re passionate about and communicating that passion with an authentic voice.
What really matters is that you, the authentic you, speaks. That there’s no artifice in this. That it’s you, taking something you’re passionate about, finding the right tools and using them to communicate that idea as powerfully as possible.
Chris Anderson
Curator of TED
Saad Hamid is a technology entrepreneur and digital ecosystem builder. He is currently serving as CEO of SkillsFirst through which he aims to empower 10 million young people in Pakistan through digital skills. Saad with TED, WEF, IDEO, UNICEF, UNDP, Upwork, World Bank, UKAid, Telenor and Mobilink on various projects and initiatives related to community...
Noeline is a family therapist by training and a social entrepreneur by design. She is the Founder and Executive Director of Kyusa, a nonprofit that addresses youth unemployment in Uganda’s slums by empowering school dropouts to turn their passions into sustainable careers. Noeline is also the Director of the New Generation Mentoring Program, an intensive...
Doreen is Chief Operations Officer at Ubongo Learning, a social enterprise that creates edutainment content for primary school aged learners in Africa. Based in Tanzania, she leads the distribution of Ubongo’s content and finds innovative ways to continually deliver fun learning to more than 6.4 million families in East Africa. As an education...
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Kelvin is CEO of Clean Team Ghana (CTG). CTG is a social business delivering household sanitation services to low income homes to save households money. Prior to CTG, Kelvin ran Future First Global, a charity leveraging alumni for systems change in global education. Kelvin has also worked at Unilever, developing social businesses for low income ...
To become a better public speaker you must gradually replace fear with excitement. This requires practice, discipline, and endurance. But what awaits on the other side is an opportunity to share your vision and grow your impact.
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We’re talking about really powerful skills that involve human to human connection through the way that we look at people, and through body language, and tone of voice and so forth.
Chris Anderson
Curator at TED
Plan your talk. Then cut it by half. Once you’ve grieved the loss of half your talk, cut it by another 50 percent. It’s seductive to think about how much you can fit into 18 minutes. The better question for me is, ‘What can you unpack in a meaningful way in 18 minutes?'
Brené Brown
Quoted in TED Talks by Chris Anderson
After I had done the writing, I kind of felt like I knew it. Then towards the end the pressure began to mount up. So if I was to do anything differently I would have put more hours of practice right from the start.
Noeline Kirabo, Acumen East Africa Fellow
Founder and Executive Director at Kyusa
Mastering public speaking and effective communication skills can help you meet your fundraising goals. Once you’ve practiced and overcome the fear of public speaking, you can use your new skills to impress potential funders with your story and secure funding to scale.
Acumen Academy’s free Nonprofit Fundraising Essentials Course dives into the strategic approaches nonprofits can adopt to communicate and fundraise more effectively.
Regardless of your organization’s legal structure, for now here are a few suggestions to get you to deploy your new confidence speaking in the world of fundraising.
Yogesh is CEO and Founder of Even Cargo, a social enterprise that trains women from resource-poor communities for employment opportunities with major e-commerce companies. Even Cargo increases the participation of women in the labor market by overcoming barriers of unemployment through skill development. Yogesh is an engineering graduate with three...
The power to grow your impact is greater than the fear that’s holding you back from public speaking. If you adopt the right tools and change your mindset, you can use your new communication skills to grow your network and opportunities.
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Change happens when a group of people come to share the same vision so that they can act together.
Chris Anderson
Curator of TED