How to Enter the Red Circle: What it Takes to be a TEDx Speaker
Join Kassi Kincaid in a compelling conversation with Greg Smith, licensee holder for TEDx Youngstown. Journey through Greg’s TEDx experience and learn what it takes to enter the red circle!
Transcript:
Kassi Kincaid (00:01):
Welcome to The Edge of Creativity Podcast. I'm your host, Kassi Kincaid, and joined with me today is Greg Smith, chairman of the board at Compco, professor at Youngstown State University and licensee holder of Youngstown TEDx, soon to be Columbiana TEDx. Greg, thank you so much for being here today.
Greg Smith (00:25):
Oh, my pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Kassi Kincaid (00:27):
I am so excited. So as being a part of TEDx Youngstown in 2024, it was such an incredible experience. I knew that I just had to get you on the podcast today to really just share with our viewers, your TEDx experience and kind of get inside your head as a TEDx licensee holder. It's not something that people experience every day, and I just wanted to share that with our audience. So let's hop right today. Can you share with our listeners where your TEDx journey began and how it's progressed to where you are today.
Greg Smith (01:02):
Not by being turned down as a speaker. In 2013, I applied and was turned down. In 2014 I applied and was turned down. I finally got in in 2015, gave my talk and really without much support. They were a great group of people. They didn't have the infrastructure to give me a coach. If you wanted coaching, you had to do that on your own. I just really got through it. Then vacated the license, and you have to wait, I think one or two years before you can apply once it's been vacated, unless they say that we don't want it anymore. And then I applied for the license, got the license, and we started on our journey in TEDx Youngstown as me being the curator. And the first thing I wanted to do is make sure that we had support for the speakers, because the most speakers, you need a coach. I mean, you just do. I mean, you wouldn't try to win the Olympics without a coach. This is the Olympics of public speaking, and we made sure we had quality coaches coaching our people, and we paid them. We didn't make the speakers pay, and we gave them an experience that basically everyone has been through TEDx Youngstown, it's changed their life. It really has. They've gotten a platform. They've worked for six months on a speech and really curating something that's from the essence of their being, and they share it on stage and it shifts you and it shifts those people listen to you.
Kassi Kincaid (02:31):
Absolutely. When I applied, I had no idea what I was walking into. And I have to say it was one of the most incredible experiences of my life. And so Greg, can you describe what it's like to be a TEDx, to hold a TEDx license to be an organizer? Can you describe your role in all of that?
Greg Smith (02:54):
I think probably the best part is when people autonomously, I mean, in other words, on their own, they're not being forced. This is totally organic for themselves to get out and share something they believe that will make an impact and help other people and make a difference. Our speakers, I mean, one thing that's always asked is people always ask, well, who do you pick? Well, one of the major things is picking is I don't pick somebody that's just doing it so they can promote themselves. There's plenty of places to do that. You don't need TEDx. TEDx is for sharing ideas that make a difference and connecting in a community of shared ideas. And that's what we look for. And really when that comes out and people know their hard work has paid off and it's made a difference, there's just a glow about them that it's not like, oh, it's over. It's like it's a beginning. Most speakers, when they're done, they realize they've just stepped off and they've gone off into a whole different area of their life. It's a 10 x moment.
Kassi Kincaid (04:05):
I agree with that. Although honestly, leading into TED that week, I was super excited, but honestly, I was sad. I was sad because you prep for six months and you know, obviously once it lands on YouTube, that's where the ultimate journey begins. But I was trying to savor the moments of the practicing and everything because I mean, even if you go on to do two or three TED Talks, which some of the speakers have this year's TED Talk, every experience is so different, and I don't think there's anything that really can take the place of your very first TED Talk.
Greg Smith (04:48):
Well, here's how I see it. There's something called the gain in the gap. Dan Sullivan wrote a whole book about it with Benjamin Hardy. But in a nutshell, what it is is if this is your past here and this is where you're at now, and this is your future, the gain is where you were and where you are, that's where you measure yourself. So you have now given a speech, so you right now are better off than you were before. And then there's the gap, which is your ideals, the horizon, what you're chasing, what you're trying to go for, you don't measure there. That's the rope you reach for. If you're swinging on vines, you've got to let go of the one in the past and reach for the one in the future. So you're always reaching and there's always going to be another vine farther out, or there's always going to be a horizon you're chasing.
(05:38):
It's not so much a letdown, it's that you haven't yet scored a new ideal that you want to go for that's going to 10 x you again, you just did a 10 x experience, you 10 xd your life. Now you've got to get another hairy, audacious goal that's going to propel you and get you hungry again. When you're measuring this, when you're measuring the gap and saying, well, I don't have any gap anymore. There's nothing to measure, I reached my goal. You don't look forward to be fulfilled. You look backwards and then you look forward to propel you forward. So that's the difference. And right now you just need a bigger goal for yourself. You need to now say, okay, I got a 10 x again.
Kassi Kincaid (06:21):
Yeah, yeah. That is so true. Wow. And that's such great advice for our listeners today too. Sometimes we hit those big marks in life and then, I mean, we're kind of sad that they're over, but it's easily replaced by something big that we're chasing.
Greg Smith (06:39):
Yeah, I remember there's a baseball player and 3000 hits. He wanted to hit 3000 hits, 3000 hits, and he got his 3000 hit, and then he didn't hit another ball for another 10 games because he had told his mind that, that's it. I'm going to measure my life on 3000. He didn't say, okay, 3,500. Now he misunderstood the gain and the gap, and we get confused sometimes. Once you reach your goals, you've got to set new ones, you got to keep chasing something. You got to keep chasing your future self.
Kassi Kincaid (07:11):
So good. So to dig a little bit deeper in how you select TED speakers, are you the only one that picks? Is there a committee?
Greg Smith (07:21):
No. Well, there used to be a committee and it gets very arduous, and you'll find that you have to take about three months if you're going to do it that way. Now that we've developed and people understand what we're looking for, people will come to me and say, I want to nominate this person. I want to nominate this person. So I'll look at it. I make the ultimate decision. It just simplifies it. And there's definitely, you have to follow the TEDx guidelines. That's number one. Alright, so read the TEDx guidelines. If you're thinking of speaking, read them and understand them because you will not get on a stage and there's no way TED will ever produce your talk if you violate them.
(08:07):
What do you want? I mean, if your want is to come out on the TEDx stage is to propel yourself and make, I want to put that notch in my belt, then don't do it. If you want to share your ideals with people and share because you're excited about it, it's helped you. It's made a difference in your life. You don't want people to go through what you've went through or what you've witnessed or how you've helped people and you want to share that knowledge. Great. Like a Mel Robbins, Simon Sinek. You want to share something that can change people's lives. The second thing is your motive. What's your motive? What's your reason for doing it? That's important. The third thing is you have the ability, do you actually have the ability to communicate? If you're a monotone speaker and you have no excitement in your voice context and content, I mean you have ethos, pathos, and logos.
(08:59):
And for our audience, ethos is emotional. You have to have emotional context and everything. It's not more important than the other things, but it's absolute balance necessary. Logos is the logic. Everybody's so content oriented these days and no context. You're totally, or there's the other opposite, which is you're all context and there's no content. You need both. I need to be balanced. I need to know how you feel to give it meaning. I need to know how you relate to it so I can relate to it. Don't tell me how I should. Tell me how you do. So you have to have that connection, that feeling of what you're sharing. And then the credibility, which is pathos. What's your credibility, what makes you an expert? TED says, you've lived this, you've seen it, you've watched it, you've researched it, it's board certified, or it's something you've done an entire lifetime that you want to share with people and you have experience and you have a track record that says it's there. That's really the justification. And I can do it really by watching a tape. You send in a one minute tape. If I can't see those three things in one minute, then there's no way 12 minutes is going to get you any faster there because people will judge you in the first 10 seconds of your speech.
Kassi Kincaid (10:17):
And I wanted to get a little bit into that because I thought it was so interesting. Youngstown was not the first TEDx I applied to. I was applying across the country, I'm sure as many speakers have. So I came across all kinds of different processes for applications. The ones that are college applications, you have to everything in detail. It was crazy. It took me so long. And then
Greg Smith (10:41):
Do you know why they do that Kassi? Honestly, they do that to weed people out. It just, if you're not willing to put the work in, you don't want it bad enough. We used to take that approach too, where we had literally one year we had 300 applicants. We don't have time. I don't have time to watch that. So we have 'em fill out this arduous form. So if you really want it, you'll fill it out and it cut it down to 50 people. So that's why that's done. It's really, I don't even know that they read them. I really don't, to be honest with you. I don't know. They just do it to see who's left, who wants to do the work.
Kassi Kincaid (11:20):
So why did you guys switch?
Greg Smith (11:22):
We switched because people know people now we got a reputation. So the people that come to us know what they're getting. They know what the demand is. They know it's a six month process. They can't be lazy or you don't get on stage. They're going to work and that's who comes and sees us. They just get it.
Kassi Kincaid (11:39):
So what percentage of people I would say are not cold calls like I, I didn't really have any context with TEDx Youngstown and then people that are recommended or people that know of your TEDx and then apply. What is the percentage that you see?
Greg Smith (11:58):
Wow, really at this point in time, it's a lot of referrals. A lot of referrals. We've had at least one or two from former speakers that say, you've got to see this person. They understand, they get it. We've got probably what, 20, 40, 60, a hundred speakers now in the fold. And those a hundred speakers know how many speakers and if they see somebody, they know, hey, you need to apply to this. This is good. They have an eye for that. So that feeds a lot. And that's been picking up every year what we get from that. And those are usually pretty serious contestants.
(12:34):
We have the speaker coaches themselves. They know people and they work with people. They say, hey, you need to go on the TEDx stage. So that feeds a good 50% of it now that we have a good coaching system. And then the rest is like, I'll be out and about and I'll hear something and I'll say, hey, I go to seminars and work groups all the time and I see somebody that has a great idea that doesn't even know TED exists, and those are the best because they have a gem and they don't even know how to get it out or they even should. And then you share that with them and then they go, oh, and then you explain it to them. And usually about 50% of those people go, yeah, I want to do the work. Now, what's interesting about that is when I've gone to people like that, out of the 50% of it say yes, about 50% of those drop out after they see the work that it has to be put into it. So you're getting about 25% there. So that's really about it. So let's say 50% comes from the coaches, 25% comes from former speakers, and 25% comes from just going out and saying, I want to find somebody is an expert in this. Or you go to a seminar and you listen and you say, that'd be a great TED Talk.
Kassi Kincaid (13:44):
So does everybody have to do a video then even if you say, Hey,
Greg Smith (13:48):
No, not necessarily. Not if I've seen live.
Kassi Kincaid (13:50):
Okay. Yeah,
Greg Smith (13:51):
No, not if a coach says, no, this person's solid and it falls within something we've predetermined. We want a topic we want to hit during our talk. We're really overloaded with the woo woo speeches. And I'm not saying that they're not important, but there's a lot. And you really need, if you want to do a TEDx speech, go on YouTube, go on TED and see who's given talks in that area and see what's missing maybe. Or look at the negative comments. What didn't people like about the talk? Do you fulfill that? What did they leave out? That's same thing when you write a book, look at the books that have been written, figure out what's missing. Do you fill that niche because then that makes you special.
Kassi Kincaid (14:40):
That's so true. And Greg, I want to touch just a little bit on different TEDx events are different and the fact of sometimes they're only looking for 50 miles outside of Asheville was one of those 50 miles. You have to live in that radius. They want mainly local ideas. Although it's an international platform. What was it that you opened up that you don't really have any boundaries or borders as far as your speakers go?
Greg Smith (15:09):
Well, that's Youngstown. Youngstown is very much of a melting pot. We have pretty much every religion, every culture in Youngstown, we all get along. I mean, it was really interesting to me during the whole COVID and all the problems we had, we didn't have, we had demonstrations, but they were very peaceful. They were very much like, I remember the vice president came here, Pence came here and was talking with people and sitting down with people and breaking bread and listening. So we might fight like cats and dogs, but we don't pick up clubs.
(15:42):
And we have each other's back. We really do. And it's very relationship driven, and we bring ideas in and we push 'em out. We have sea turtles all over the place. And so I wanted to go with, that's kind of Youngstown. We bring ideas in and we incorporate them into our own community, and we also push 'em out. Columbiana is going to be different. Columbiana is going to be more rural. We're going to be more farm oriented. We're going to be more, this is suburbia. This isn't city, this is suburbia. So we're going to have to have a different flavor to fit the town. And that's important because then you have, your audience is going to be more apt to show up because it's more in line with how they believe and what they think.
Kassi Kincaid (16:27):
So for next year, are you going to kind of reign in as far as geographically, are you still going to keep it pretty open?
Greg Smith (16:33):
Well, there'll be complimentary talks from outside. If there's something in genetic farming that doesn't violate some of the rules that the local farmers have, what are we doing to not kill bugs, but keep bugs out of our food? If there's something special there, is there a way that farming can change? Is there a way of building homes that's different? It's home ownership. That's different things like that. A growing community, how do we do police and fire different? That might be an idea. And that idea might not come from here unless there's something magical here. But there's definitely advances in how we do services now, how we do governance now in local towns. Those are the kind of things I'll be looking for.
Kassi Kincaid (17:25):
Awesome. No, that's a great sneak peek into next year's. So as far as theme goes, I know the theme for 2024 was emergence. How do you come up with your themes for TED?
Greg Smith (17:37):
I don't.
Kassi Kincaid (17:38):
You don't? Okay.
Greg Smith (17:39):
Yeah, don't, honestly, there's a group of people in our committee that own that one, and I don't step on their toes. They do a very good job and I just say, Hey, what's it going to be? Every suggestion I've made has never been used, so I don't go there. Usually I don't have, why'd you pick that speaker? Why'd you pick that? I don't get that. And I don't get why'd you pick that theme? So we know what we're good at and we give each other feedback, but we don't stop at each other's toes. And I have no idea what it is yet, but I know it's going to be good.
Kassi Kincaid (18:16):
Oh, for sure. What is your favorite part about the live event, right? There's so many details leading up to the day before, which is the live backup recording day and then the live event. What's your favorite part in all of that?
Greg Smith (18:33):
I think just watching, we have Jonathan Alfeld, who is an expert in helping people handle anxiety and getting centered and getting emotionally centered in their talks and watching him work his craft with people that are kind of not inside themselves, not centered. Watching our chiropractor work on people and our massage therapist and our coaches help them center in a very kind, nudging way, not in a old high school, blow the whistle type. Just watching everybody come together and all the support. A speaker gets to go up there. They're not going up there alone. They're going up there with their entire team and they're able to do their talk. It's just how all the parts move. And I'm fascinated how Bob Bachinger works that production and Zach works, the audio visual and all the people that just really have specialized, and then we don't have one person wear a bunch of hats. We have people that wear one hat and understand what else has to happen for that to happen and ask for help when they need it. So we've really made this a very strong organism where with your body, your liver and your heart do different things, but they need each other. That's where we're at. And seeing all that all come together and everybody in their moment and doing what they do best really makes me happy.
Kassi Kincaid (20:04):
What have you experienced as far as just watching the speakers get ready to take the stage and then coming off the stage?
Greg Smith (20:10):
Well, there's a great quote from a movie called with Sean Connery. It's called The Last Night. It's about King Arthur, and he says, A man who fears nothing is a man who loves nothing, and therefore there's no joy in his life. And any speaker goes up there and says, there's no fear in them that means they don't love it and they're not going to get joy out of it. I've never seen that, now some people hide it better than others, but if you don't have a little bit of fear, if you're not pushing yourself a little bit, then you're probably on the wrong stage. And I really haven't witnessed where there's no care at all. There's a care for whatever it is, but whatever level it is, whether it's an enlightenment level, a loving level, a caring level, I don't want to embarrass myself level, but there's a level, enlightened being the highest.
(21:07):
However you want to make sure that you say it in a way that is most accepting and understanding and people could put their head around it and co-create with you. And that's a big word, co-create. A lot of people want to run through content and think content's going to do it. And it's not that the periods and the commas are where the emotions land. The periods in the commas are where people think process and co-create with you when you're trying to persuade people. The biggest mistake people make is I've got to convince them. No, you don't. You have to convince people you're convinced. That's the secret. And especially in America, you don't tell Americans what to do. You can tell Canadians what to do, but you can't tell Americans what to do. They don't like it. However, you can tell 'em what you did and let them make their own decision. And that's huge. And I would say being a little uncomfortable up there is important, but having the courage to push through it, that's what I would say is important. And at some level, everybody should have that.
Kassi Kincaid (22:12):
Absolutely. Yeah, I definitely agree with that. There's a level of like, oh my word, I'm getting ready to do this a big life moment. But yeah, it was interesting too as like you were saying, kind of seeing everybody in their zone in the green room as far as some people had their in ears. I mean, it literally looked like they were about to go, I mean the Olympics of speaking, but I was like, that looks like they're getting psyched up to go in the swimming zone or whatever, the Olympics. It was kind of cool. Everybody kind of doing their thing.
Greg Smith (22:48):
Yes.Yeah. And honestly, this is not, TEDx is not for the procrastinator. If you get up there and you haven't put your time in, if you don't know that, talk a month before you're doing it. I mean, know that talk a month before you're doing it. It's not going to be a good experience for you. It's just not. No matter how you do on stage, you're always going to be able to do better, always. You're always going to be able to improve. You have to take a snapshot of where you're at and put the work in and do the best you can do at that moment in time. And that comes through putting in hours.
Kassi Kincaid (23:19):
Absolutely. What would be advice that you have given so much advice already, but one or two nuggets that our listeners just have to take away today for people aspiring to do at TED Talk?
Greg Smith (23:36):
Again, what problem are you solving? How do you relate to what you're saying? What happened your life that makes you even care? What scars do you have on your body that you want to share with people so they don't get the same scars? That's important. If you can't relate at a struggling level. Look, human beings, and this is from Lieutenant Colonel Scott Mann, a retired Green Beret, and he puts it this way, human beings are a mess. M-E-S-S-S, we are meaning seeking creatures, meaning seeking. In other words, if we don't see meaning in something, we're not going to waste our time, especially in today's world where in one day you get more information than a person in 1952 got an entire lifetime. I mean, college students right now, they got so much coming at 'em. You've got to remind them, you've got to send 'em reminders.
(24:33):
As a professor, I can't expect them to remember everything I say. If it's important, I better write it down and send it to them and then remind them about it. It's easier for one person to remind 40 people than for 40 individuals to remember everything you said. So meaning seeking, we have to have meaning. Emotional. We are emotional creatures. All decisions are made emotionally. We do not make logical decisions. And if anybody says that's not true, I always do my homework. I always do my research. I never buy anything unless I've done the research. Yes, and you're confident in your research. That is an emotion, ladies and gentlemen. Emotions are everything. If your amygdala is not in your body, you won't be able to make a decision. You won't be able to make it be in a relationship. It's not a good life. So we're emotional.
(25:17):
We're social creatures. We need each other. We know that we don't have fangs, we don't have body armor, we don't have incredible strength. We need each other. And by human beings socially connecting, we rule the planet. We know that innately. We know that in our DNA level. So we are social creatures. People want to connect. We are storytellers. In other words, everything we do, everything is a story. Every word in your vocabulary has a story behind it. Every decision you make, you run a story in your mind of what's going to happen if I do this or that we make, that's how we relate to each other. That's how we communicate with ourselves. Your brain lights up in eight different areas when you tell a story. So you have to understand how a story's laid out and that we're story animals. And the last one is, we're struggled. Everybody struggles. We think nobody's got it worse than we do. Oh yeah, they do. And it's all relative to, I mean, you can see somebody, I mean the last 18 months I had COVID, my father passed away, got cancer where they removed part of my stomach and most of my esophagus, I got a divorce and I moved. And that's all in the last 18 months. Now, some people would go like, whoa. And so maybe I'm still reeling from it. I don't know, but I'm doing great. I'm doing fine. Everything's fine. I feel good.
(26:49):
I can't say, but some people break a nail and they're having a worse experience than I just had. So it's relative. But everybody's struggling somehow everybody, there's a great one if you want to watch it, it's Chick-fil-A's training film that they show all their, it's on YouTube. Just say Chick-fil-A. Everybody has a story and watch that. And there's no words. They just show a brief, a less than a sentence of what this person's going through. And you connect with this person, you don't even know them. And you're like, because running in our mind the story, right, of the struggle they're going through, you connect with people through your struggles, not through your successes. So when you understand those five things, meaning, seeking, emotional, social, storytelling, struggling creatures, when you get that, you have a psychological edge in this world that other people don't have. So I would say that's important to really digest that and understand it.
Kassi Kincaid (27:48):
Wow, that is so profound, Greg. And honestly, it enlightens me even more to why you're so passionate about doing TED and to sharing all those ideas and for really helping the world. And that's the impact of TEDx. And one of the things I too thought was really interesting about TEDx Youngstown is how many speakers that you have relative to some of the other Teds out there as well. Some of the other TEDs that I've seen is maybe six to eight speakers on the lower end. So is there a reason that you pick more, you just love more ideas?
Greg Smith (28:25):
Really. You always overbook because there's always things happen. One time we had a speaker where their house flooded, they just couldn't do it. Another one where they had just this last one, we had a really major speaker. I don't want to say who that person was, but big dog speaker was supposed to come and they had an illness in the family where they had to be there and they had to drop out. And that happens. It's just part of the process. If you always overbook and sometimes not as many dropout as you think will dropout, so you have a little bit more than you should, but I would say 25% overbook your speakers. If you want to do just a morning thing, keep between eight and 10 speakers. If you want to go in the afternoon, go 12 to 15, and if you want a whole day event, go 15 to 20. It just gets very arduous. Lunch is hard. However, a lot of the bigger ones do that. I think next year we're going to probably dial it down a little bit just to feel out the area and make sure we get really good dedicated speakers and really curate hard and get a reputation here and then grow it.
Kassi Kincaid (29:37):
Very cool. Well, Greg, this has been such an amazing with you today. Thank you so much for your time and for really enlightening us on the behind the scenes, TEDx being a license holder. That is just so cool. Thank you for your time today.
Greg Smith (29:54):
I appreciate it. Thank you. Really appreciate it.
Kassi Kincaid (29:56):
Thank you so much listeners, for being here today for this episode on The Edge of Creativity podcast. Be sure to follow so you don't miss any of our upcoming conversations. We'll see you next time.
