Drew Dudley’s TED Talk ‘Everyday leadership’ is a great example of a speaker harnessing the power of storytelling to engage an audience. Dudley uses a funny, personal story to make a point about the effect of our everyday actions on the lives of other people. Sharing facts and ideas in a way that is interesting and compelling enough to leave the audience feeling connected to the idea is a major goal for most presentations … but it can be tricky to do. As TED-Ed Club Members hone in on their passions and presentation topics, TED-Ed invited Dudley to host a workshop on how to find and tell the story behind a great idea.

TED-Ed Club participants from around the world joined this interactive workshop to get help finding the story within their presentation topic. Working with TED-Ed Club presentation topics that ranged from military simulations to dragons to the idea of offering free energy to homes, Drew workshopped and shared tips designed to help find the stories underneath each topic that might better engage an audience.

Drew provided some strategies to help tell these stories:

• Find the problem your topic can solve.
• Tell the story of how you came to know or care about the problem.
• Talk about what has happened, what will or could happen, and then what should happen.
• Make sure the audience understands why it matters to them.
• Find the structure that is most interesting; not all stories start at the beginning!

The primary thing to consider? Remember, the point of giving a talk is to impact people and to share something that you care about.

For more help on finding the story about a presentation topic, watch the full workshop here: