David JP Phillips is an international speaker, author, and coach in Modern Presentation Skills. His TEDx Talks have over 14 million views, including his signature talk “How to Avoid Death By PowerPoint.” He’s got expert advice on storytelling, body language, overcoming anxiety, and captivating an audience of one, or 1,000.

Why are so many people afraid of public speaking:

“I think it’s just become a cultural thing. If you have a friend who constantly tells you, ‘I hate public speaking,’ then you won’t love public speaking. And if you have a family member who constantly tells you that public speaking is the worst, that won’t help you. And if you have an entire town telling you that public speaking is the worst, it won’t help you either. They just instill this limiting belief in you that it is horrible.

But people who don’t get that limiting belief from their parents, where their parents, instead, say, ‘Public speaking is amazing. Public speaking is the best. We love public speaking.’ Their kids grow up to believe that. So, I genuinely believe that it is simply a cultural behavior where we instill this in others, and we create this limiting belief that it is horrible.

But if you were given the skills to do proper public speaking, it’s the best thing in the world to stand up and to get your voice heard, your ideas heard.”

His first TEDx Talk about Death By PowerPoint:

“Well, I had no idea that was going to be the defining moment of my entire career. But it became that very defining moment. I guess I would’ve been more nervous if that would’ve been the case, but I wasn’t. I’ve always believed in delivering value and as long as the value is high enough, people will listen.

And in that talk, I knew the value was sky high because how many people haven’t been killed by PowerPoints? You know, and I love the science part of it, how I cognitively describe how to build better PowerPoints. But I think the greatest takeaway from anyone looking at that is one single thing, is that you are the presentation. Your PowerPoint is never the presentation. Never get that wrong.

People buy you your voice, your facial expressions, your eye contact, your words, the way you put those words together. That is what people buy, not your PowerPoint. So don’t confuse these two things to be the same.”

Why storytelling is so important:

“It’s because we perceive the world from stories. We perceive the world from narratives. So, if we’re out driving our car, our brain is constantly going. It’s playing small, small narratives into the future. Can I overtake here, or shall I overtake further on, or shall I wait a bit more and overtake it over there and shall I stop for a pause here, or shall I stop for a pause there?

We’re constantly creating these small, small narratives of us doing these things. We also do it for the past. Like how many times have you, just today, thought about what’s happened in the past?

Our brain is a narrative engine, so when we tell people stories people can tap into that. It’s like one-on-one communication, but if we don’t tell the story, they have to kind of invent a story based on what you just said, because we perceive everything in story. So, we’re narrative machines. That’s why stories are so imperative.”

What is the common denominator of all great public speakers:

“I think the really great ones have very high synchronicity. When I did that study of 7,000 speakers over those five years, I found that we have five layers of communication: face, facial expressions, words, body language, and gestures.

And when we say something like, ‘I love you’ and we say it with our voice, and we show it in our face, and we show it with our body language, and all those five say the same things, then we believe people. But, I think people listening to this can relate to this as well, you know when you walk up to somebody in a room, and you don’t like them.

Why don’t we like them? Well, most commonly their synchronicities are off. Maybe they’ll say, ‘Hi, it’s good to see you,’ but you can hear that they don’t mean it. Or you can see that they don’t mean it. While at the same time when you meet people, you sometimes just fall in love with them immediately. I assure you that they have five levels of synchronization.”