Patricia Medici: The coolest animal you know nothing about...and how we can save it

Opening image from Ted Talk, Patricia Medici's Tapir

       
 Patricia Medici gave a Ted Talk in August 2015 entitled "The coolest animal you know nothing about...and how we can save it." Patricia is a well known Brazilian conservationist whose lifelong goal has been to save the endangered species of tapirs in South America. She gave her Talk at the 2015 Ted Fellows conference, which means that the audience that Medici was presenting to was a group of diversely educated individuals who had applied and paid to attend the conference and were therefore interested in what she had to say. This interest would have been unavoidable regardless, as the topic which Medici was discussing was, in fact, very interesting. And the interesting subject matter combined with the well crafted presentation made for an easy viewing.
        Medici began her speech with an overview of the personal work she had done for tapirs in South America and she showed several images of her posing with tapirs she had worked with.

Image which accompanied Medici's beginning annecdote

 By beginning with a short anecdote, Medici captured the audiences attention and made the remaining 10 minutes of her presentation much more enticing. Her vocal delivery was paced very evenly, and in spite of her Brazilian accent, she would enunciate every word she spoke to communicate it as clearly as possible. She did say "um" a few times, and there were moments where it seemed as though she had forgotten what she was about to say, but aside from those few short moments, her vocal delivery was fantastic. In addition to this, her body language followed very closely with Carmine Gallo's suggestions for effective communication. She did not stand rigid, but instead used motions with her hands near her midsection with suggested relaxation and receptiveness to the audience.
         Because Medici was discussing her own work with the tapirs, much of the evidence that she provided during her Talk was evidence she herself had gathered. She discussed first how they had gathered the information necessary to understand more about the elusive species of endangered mammals, next why they are endangered and why is it is important that they be saved from extinction, followed by what she and her fellow conservationists have been doing to save them, and finally what we can be doing to continue to save them. Though she packed a lot of her research and evidence into a short amount of time, she told very personal stories and used vast amounts of visual aids which made the information easy to follow. In addition to making the presentation easier to follow, the visual aids also created a powerful affect among the audience because of the emotions which they invoked.

For example, Medici displayed images such as the one shown below and followed it with saying: "how could you not want to save them? They're the cutest mammals on earth." This was obviously meant to create a very emotional reaction among audience members, which, at least for me, it did.

The only thing which I would suggest to Patricia Medici is to practice the fluency of her speech to eliminate the small pauses and "um"s which sometimes filled her silences. Aside from that, she was well spoken and the Ted Talk was both educational and interesting.