We love helping our speakers tell great stories, but part of our mission is to help you do it too, whether it’s for speaking at work or for fun with your friends.

I’m Scott Berkun, former emcee, 7-time Ignite Seattle speaker and head coach for Ignite Seattle. Before I joined the Ignite Seattle team I wrote a popular book of public speaking advice. Since then I’ve learned even more from coaching hundreds of speakers for Ignite and many other events. Here’s my simplest and best advice for you. 

1. You must set clear stakes 

A good story has something at stake, or at risk, for the main character (typically that’s you!). As a speaker it is your job to establish the stakes for your audience. Why should they care? In our talk submissions, we’re hoping for talk titles that make the stakes clear in just one sentence. There is a big difference in stakes between a story titled “I went to Pike Place Market” and one called “How the gum wall nearly killed me.” The former is a fact, the latter is a story. Which talk would you rather hear? 

Boring stories are just a series of events. “I went here, I did this, then I went there, blah blah blah.” Even if those are amazing places or achievements, they don’t mean much without stakes. Alternatively, a good story makes you care about what’s happening. You feel personally invested. Good storytellers achieve this by working hard to think about the stakes and making them interesting to the audience. 

Stakes can be simple but they must be powerful. Everyone has been in love, or has had their heart broken. Everyone has a wish, or a fear, or a secret they’ve never told anyone. We coach our speakers to think about the biggest feelings in their story. What was the moment they were most afraid? Excited? Sad? Shocked? That’s where to slow the story down and tell us about that feeling.  Stakes are more emotional than logical, which means a great story can be about an ordinary daily experience if the stakes are high enough. 

Stakes can also be surprising. We love talks that surprise us by making us interested in topics or situations we would never have found interesting if not for the way the speaker has told the story.

Good examples from our stage include Why I Wish I Met My Mom’s Gynecologist and Why The Abacus Still Adds Up.

2. Overcome fear the smart way 

Most advice on speaking fear is terrible. Please do not listen to it. Do not imagine the audience naked or practice in front of a mirror. Instead we teach people a simple fact: when you feel nervous your body is simply giving you energy to do a good job. It means you are doing something you care about, which is good. What you do with that energy is up to you and that’s what we coach speakers to focus on.

The truth is all performers feel nervous energy before they perform. This is true for star athletes and rock stars too. The reason is our brains evolved to worry when standing alone in front of many other creatures. Eons ago, before civilization and polite manners, standing alone usually meant you were about to get eaten. Our brains simply do not understand theaters, stadiums or classrooms, at least not yet. Instead of nervous energy, call it performance energy. Your body wants you to perform well. Isn’t that nice? 

In other words, you overcome speaking fear by framing what you’re feeling in a better way. Being nervous is not a sign you are a bad speaker. Or that your story isn’t good. It’s just your brain doing it’s job keeping you alive. So embrace your body. Use that energy to practice more, or to make sure you get to wherever you are speaking early so your body can learn to feel safe in that space.

[You can watch my live talk about overcoming speaking fears and yes I felt nervous while doing it – in part because this room at Google’s HQ was right next to a noisy cafeteria at lunchtime! Extra challenging!]

3. Have beats and a rhythm 

Since Ignite talks are only five minutes long it’s natural that we treat every second as precious. But everyone should care about time. Why?  Attention spans are short! And it’s rhythm that makes it easy for for people to pay attention. In all music it’s the beat that helps you anticipate and trust what comes next. And storytelling is as much about rhythm as it is about melody. 

A beat means a major event in the story. Every good story has a series of clear beats. We coach speakers to have one beat per minute as a rough guide. The first beat is typically for setting the stakes. If they establish the stakes later… it’s too late! More than a minute usually means they’ve spent too much time setting up the story and not enough telling it. Good storytellers get to the heart of the story quickly which takes effort. You have to be willing to edit and cut things down to the bone. 

Two good examples of pacing include How to Dodge a Cringy First Date Disaster by Alisa Eddy, and Fix Evy-Thing by Evy Haroldson.    

4. Make the world seem interesting 

One common shortcoming in everyday storytelling is people who think they have an interesting story, but haven’t yet filtered out all of the not very interesting parts. Good storytellers do the hard work for the listeners. They eliminate all of the unnecessary details and facts and provide a compelling way to see what happened. Or they make profound choices that are irresistibly  interesting.  

For example, Linnea Westerlind visited every single public park in Seattle. She told us she wanted to do a talk about the experience and what she learned. It was easy to accept it because she had already done something unusual and interesting. Her story had naturally high stakes: who makes a commitment like this (it took years)? What motivated her? What did she learn? You can watch her talk here.  

Similar talks in this style include Cut My Life Into Pizzas by Tricia Aung and How Death Becomes Us  by Nicole Van Borkulo.

5. Practice is your friend

I’ve coached hundreds of speakers, and given hundreds of talks, and I promise you no one tells a good story without doing the work. It’s the people who do the work that typically do the best on any stage. Half the effort is thinking about the story (setting clear stakes and thinking about beats). The other half is in refining the performance of the talk through practice.

We strongly encourage speakers to talk their way through their material. To start practicing a rough version of it right away. At coaching sessions we have speakers improvise their story for two minutes and see what happens. We give them feedback on what to keep and what to reduce and have them do it again. And again. it’s this process of practicing and refining that has led to many of the best talks you’ve seen on our stage. 

Some speakers prefer planning and writing first, which is OK. The danger is the trap of rehearsing and memorizing. You are not doing Shakespeare where the audience knows all the lines. You are also not a trained actor. This means that rehearsing and memorizing will likely make you sound more like a robot and less like yourself. You’re trying to be perfect for no good reason. 

No one in the audience wants perfection. What they do want is to hear a good, thoughtful story from an interesting person. That’s it. Even worse, trying to be perfect makes most people more nervous, not less. Instead be OK with saying things a little differently each time. Be OK with taking some breaths, and some pauses, like a normal human being does. It’s OK to make little mistakes or to repeat parts. Even the best speakers do this sometimes. If you want to obsess, focus on having quality stakes and beats. If you get those right you’ll do well and you’ll sound less like a robot and more like yourself. 

Learn by example: come to our next show

You can find me at our next event this month. Come up and say Hi! I’ll even answer your public speaking questions if I’m not too busy helping speakers prepare.

• Thursday May 22nd, at Town Hall Seattle 
• Doors open at 6:30pm. Get there early for a pre-show activity
• Show starts at 7:30pm
• Show will end around 9:30pm, followed by an after-party

Get your tickets here. Hope to see you.