How to Present Like Alain de Botton
I'll be showing you how to present like Alain de Botton on this week's episode of MasterTalk. Visit rockstarcommunicator.com to attend one of my FREE LIVE trainings.
1. Use powerful body language to draw impactful messages from your speech. (1:06)
I usually don’t comment much on body language, but Alain is incredible with the way that uses his non-verbal communication skills to draw out his controversial ideas. His hands move very softly, where he does this with hands, and explains history and his ideas with many soft touches when he says things like “of course we don’t know how to live, that’s why I started the School of Life” but the way he moves his hands is so soft and welcoming that you start agreeing with him and forget that most of what he says, you would probably at least question.
That’s the power of soft body language, but I will admit that it’s very difficult to pull off especially if you’re someone like me that loves to move his hands around, but if you’re someone who’s a bit more shy or introverted, I recommend soft body language and you can follow a lot of Alain’s keynotes to see how he does very flawlessly I would add here. It’s almost as if he’s showering you with love, affection and calmness when in reality, he’s telling you that everything you believe is probably wrong, so watch his videos and learn from the master of body language himself.
2. Sarcastic humor is incredibly difficult to get right, but a powerful way to communicate a message. (2:40)
Alain’s is so good at being funny and sarcastic at the exact same time, in most of his speeches, before giving his own thoughts on the solutions, he mocks the way that we live in current society. For instance, in one of his speeches on love, he mocks this idea of romanticism, where we essentially are lead to believe that love is all about walks in nature and looking at waterfalls, when in reality, most of the people who wrote about this very topic didn’t job and I quote from his speech “large watery expanses and dusk is very important for romantics, that moment when the sun beams and light up the clouds, very special kind of feelings come together. It works really well for him, especially for people who are open to new ideas, because it opens us up to say with a smile, yeah he’s right, what I think is probably wrong, let’s see what solution he has to offer for us.
Alain is unique in the sense that I don’t see many speakers out there who pull it off so well, almost perfectly and this requires an insane amount of confidence to get right. To give you a bit more context here, Alain isn’t very strong as a technical speaker, he uses notes and filler words a lot, but regardless, his confidence is world class, because he knows his subject and studies it quite well. So, even if I have some tips for him like getting rid of the notes, the lesson here is when you understand your subject more than anyone else in a room by a fair amount, it gives you this unfounded confidence you just can’t get anywhere else, so my advice here is if you want to master the art of being sarcastically funny, you need to be so good at your subject that you don’t care if you mess up like he does many times in his speech, even if he’s an incredible speaker.
3. Paint a disastrous picture if audiences make the decision not to follow your advice. (5:02)
This is very risky, but the reason I’m mentioning is because Alain does this in a very playful way, he tells us how we should think about life which as far as he’s concerned is simply saying we’re all broken, so let’s figure it out, but he doesn’t stop it there. He also tells stories about the stubborn people who decide to keep pretending that they’re perfect and the issues they have in life, he uses a dinner date in one of his keynotes to demonstrate this. Well, if 2 people were on a dinner date, and they both talked about how great both of their lives were and everything was just picture perfect, what a bore that date would be, fore instead if both those individuals came to the same date and talked about broken they are or what they don’t understand are still figuring, it creates a union and a sense of saying, I feel that too and I get where you’re coming from as well.
As always, if you enjoyed this week’s episode of MasterTalk, be sure to SMASH that LIKE button and SUBSCRIBE to the YouTube channel as well to see more videos like this and if you know someone that’s a fan of Alain’s work or philosophy, send them this video so that they’ll be one step closer to well I’m not sure, but it’ll be interesting I guess.
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Special thanks to Maison Leporem for letting me use the space.
https://maisonleporem.com/