Understanding how to be the best you can be. Professor Grant Schofield.
The structure of great communication
This is a great TED talk by presentation guru Nancy Duarte. Her ideas about speaking are what you get given when you are invited to do a TED talk. It’s a really powerful and simple analysis of great speeches in history including Martin Luther King’s I have a dream speech and Steve Job’s IPhone launch speech in 2007.
Great communication is of course essential to changing the world. It is essential to any good idea. Without great communication, great ideas are lost. Mediocre ideas can flourish because of great communication. That’s such a shame on both counts. The good news is that this is totally learnable. I did it myself in my TED talk which I’m pretty proud of.
The basic idea is that great speeches all have the same structure – a shape which describes how the world is, and then switches back to how it could be. It always ends with the “new bliss”. It pulls the audience between what is and what could be – the powerful idea you have of “the new bliss”.
I am Grant Schofield, Professor of Public Health at Auckland University of Technology and director of the university's Human Potential Centre (HPC) located at the Millennium Campus in Auckland, New Zealand. My research and teaching interests are in wellbeing and chronic disease prevention especially reducing the risk and eventual mortality and morbidity from obesity, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes. I live by the motto "be the best you can be" and have a strong commitment to peak performance in which I also do consulting work.
I’ve been interested in human health and performance for my whole career. I started in psychology, went into sport and exercise psychology, then into public health, especially physical activity, then obesity. There have been some twists and turns along the way, which are the reasons for why I do what I do – you can read about those in my first blog entry.
I want to know how we can be the best we can be. This crosses disciplines such as biology, medicine, pubic health, and productivity management. The cornerstones are nutrition, exercise, sleep, neuroscience, psychology and wellbeing. In my blog, I cover these topics under the broad heading of the Science of Human Potential.
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