If you’ve never heard Sir Ken Robinson speak, and you care about children, creativity or education, you owe it to yourself to go to TED.com and cue him up:  http://tinyurl.com/5gsyph. 

In 20 minutes, Sir Ken makes an unforgettable impression and an impassioned plea for changing the way we teach our children – all without raising his voice or breaking into a sweat.  His basic argument is that schools kill creativity by pushing one kind of learning down the throats of students, who are little polymaths who need to have the chance to try many different things to find what they’re actually good at. 

His evident compassion and his ironic wit combine to hold his audience spellbound until his close, at which point the entire group gets to its feet and starts applauding.  It’s a sign of a job well done.

What makes Sir Ken so successful?

First, he’s conversational.  He walks out to the center of the stage, and simply starts talking to the audience as if he was chatting with a friend over a cuppa.  Working with clients, over and over again I find myself telling them that the rules of public speaking that they’ve learned somewhere in the past just don’t apply.  Make it conversational.  Talk to us like you’re talking to friends.  We’ll respond. 

Second, he keeps his body language — but not his passion — to a minimum.  Many speakers have ‘happy feet’ – that annoying tendency to wander all over the stage when adrenaline grips your system.  It’s distracting, and the speaker is not usually aware of it.  I find with clients that it takes video to prove to them that they’ve been wandering. 

Random motion is simply not effective.  Purposeful motion is highly effective, but the next best thing is not to move at all.  In Sir Ken’s case, he has a pronounced limp, which he refers to obliquely at one point in his talk.  He’s talking about a dancer, and refers to himself with self-deprecatory wit.  It’s elegant and affecting at the same time. 

It’s not that every speaker is better standing still; in fact, were Robinson to do so for an hour, it would be off-putting.  But most speakers err on the side of too much random motion, so Robinson’s stillness is powerful.

Importantly, it's stillness combined with passion.  Some speakers lose all their affect when they speak, becoming automatons.  That's not interesting at all.  If you're going to stand as still as Robinson you must convey passion through the rest of your non-verbal delivery and through your eloquence. 

Third, he focuses on the audience.  What’s most powerful about Robinson’s delivery is that he focuses on the audience, both verbally and non-verbally.  He asks many rhetorical questions, and addresses the audience directly many times, but each time that he does he waits to see ‘the point land’ so that the audience feels that it has been listened to.  That quality of listening to an audience is a rare gift, and the secret of charisma.  I talk about it in much more depth in Trust Me:  Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma.  The bottom line is that you can learn to be as charismatic as Sir Ken Robinson if you will only focus on things you’re truly passionate about and learn to listen closely to your audience.