Back in February, I asked you to tell me about your favourite TED talks. I had been invited to give a TEDx talk about my year of reading the world at an event organised by Procter & Gamble and I was keen to pick up some tips. It was very useful to hear about the speakers you found particularly inspiring.

In March, I flew out to Geneva to give my talk and had a wonderful time, appearing alongside such inspiring people as former Olympian Derek Redmond, sculptor Alex Chinneck and Luvuyo Mandela, Nelson Mandela’s great-grandson.

Although our talks from that day were filmed, they weren’t posted online. However, a few weeks after the event, I got an email from the organisers with some exciting news: the European director of TED, Bruno Giussani, had asked to see the footage of my talk. Not long after that, I spoke to Bruno on the phone and he invited me to speak at TEDGlobal>London this September.

That was when the hard work really began. Because of the precise timings of TED events, I had to get a draft of my talk to him in a matter of weeks – and find a way to cut the presentation I was used to giving (which can sometimes last as long as an hour) down to just eight minutes.

This was a new experience for me as I never normally write out what I’m going to say, preferring to talk without notes from a range of visual prompts. Still, I stuck to the brief and a few drafts flew back and forth between Bruno and me as we worked on tightening and focusing the presentation.

In the end, eight minutes proved a little too restrictive, so we settled on 12 minutes. We also agreed that I would do without my usual visual-prompt slides and hold up some of the books from the quest at relevant points instead. This meant that I would have to do what I had never done before and memorise my presentation pretty much word for word, finding a way to deliver it that hopefully wouldn’t make me sound like a robot.

Practice was the only way. And so from mid-August onwards, I went over my talk almost every day. I repeated it in the shower and in front of the mirror. I set a timer on my computer and rehearsed delivering it within the time limit over and over, until I stopped feeling stressed by the numbers counting down. I muttered it to myself as I walked down the street (I got some funny looks).

In early September, I had a rehearsal over Skype with Bruno and his colleague, Katerina. They stared out of the computer screen at me as I delivered my talk. It was quite a challenge to keep smiling and enthusiastic in the face of such intense scrutiny, but they seemed pleased. Barring a few last-minute tweaks to the opening, they thought it was ready to go.

The day before the event, I attended a rehearsal at the venue, the Royal Institution of Great Britain in London’s Green Park. I stood in a room facing around ten members of the TED team, including two performance coaches, and gave my talk. The team was generous and warm, applauding enthusiastically when I had finished. The coaches shared some advice on eye contact and movement on stage, as well as flagging up a few phrases that I could emphasise more carefully.

That evening I went with the other speakers, among them social progress expert Michael Green and Norwegian journalist Anders Fjellberg, to a dinner at the house of Bond producer and photography collector Michael Wilson. It was a great chance to unwind, mingle and reassure each other about how our talks would go – like me, many of them had found the experience of letting go of their normal speaking props a challenge.

The day of the event was a blur of make-up, microphones and meeting people. Backstage, most of us sat without saying very much, going over our talks in our heads and nibbling nervously on the snacks the team brought to the green room.

My presentation was in the second half, so I sat in the audience for the first session, willing on the people I’d chatted to the day before.

Then the interval passed and the speaker two slots before me was onstage. Then it was the speaker before me. Then me.

I heard Bruno announce my name, took a deep breath and walked forward into the red circle. The timer began the countdown and, well, you can see below how it went from there…

Photo: Courtesy of TED