7 Reasons To Start LIVE Streaming Today!

Hi and welcome. I'm TJ Walker and today I want to share with you seven reasons for why you should do more live streaming. Here. Facebook, Live, YouTube, Twitter, almost every major social media platform is encouraging and enabling these to go live to speak to people directly on video. So I want to share with you. Plus I've got a fun bonus. So there's actually eight reasons as to why you should be in fact doing more live streaming and if you've never done it, why you should do it in the first place. First, little tip I do want to share with you, and this is courtesy of Sean Cannell and his his great YouTube channel, Think Media. So when you're doing live, you can share your video with others and you can ask your colleagues to share as well. Anyone watching can share your video on their own site. So I'll take just a moment and ask you to just click the share button so maybe your friends, others, colleagues can see this video as well. So reason number one, why you should consider doing live media as opposed to producing a video and posting it is, is it's much, much easier to engage with people. There's just something about live. If people can see you, you can see them. And I see some of you are streaming on now, we can talk to each other. I can ask questions of you, you can ask questions of me. So it makes it much less of just a canned formula, something packaged, something corporate, and more of an actual conversation. So that is tip number one. It simply can be more interactive. The second big reason as to why you should in fact be doing more live streaming is that you can form a more emotional connection with your customers, clients, prospects, people in your community. There's just something more emotional about talking to someone, seeing their face, hearing their voice, hearing them respond to you. So if you're looking to build a stronger connection with people and a deeper connection, going live can do that. So that's the second big reason. And by the way, you don't have to use a teleprompter. You don't have to memorize things. Simple thing I do is just use a simple one sheet of notes, nothing wrong. Don't think you'll mind with just occasionally glancing down. The third big reason why you should consider doing live streaming is that you can get a larger audience. Facebook, YouTube, all the social media platforms actively encourage people. They actually, they encourage the consumption of live video. So when you do a live video, it's more likely to pop up in front of your followers, your friends, your fans, your colleagues, your clients. So they're more likely to see your content as opposed to just preparing the typical video, editing it and posting it. By the way, if you have any questions today, comments, disagreements, feel free to post it right here. There we go again. That's part of the real value, the engagement. I may say something that's totally off. I may misstate something. You could correct me in real life. That would be great. By the way, if you are watching this live, and I realize I didn't give most of you much notice, if you are watching it live, go ahead and say hello. Type it to the chat box, the comment box, and say hello. And also let me know if you have any particular questions about live streaming. I'd be more than happy to answer them if I know them. But keep in mind, that's the third big reason is you can simply reach more people because you can reach them when you're doing it live. The video can live on as a recorded video that people can access on any platform. So you are more likely to get a larger audience when you do a live stream. Now, the fourth reason why I think you should do live streaming, this is very special to me, is no editing. If you're doing it live, nobody expects you to edit and have all sorts of fancy graphics and dissolves and special effects. You can just talk to people. The expectations are, in a sense, lower when it is live. Now, people want something interesting. You can't just get on and jibber jabber about nothing. But if you're giving people something interesting, useful or entertaining, and I try to be useful, interesting, not necessarily entertaining, people will like your video. They will watch it, they will engage with you, and they will give you feedback. So that's the fourth big reason is you're not going to have to spend time editing. I know that. Frankly, I don't. I shouldn't admit this to you. I don't even know how to edit. I do hire other people to do that for me when I occasionally need editing. But if you don't like to edit and you don't want to do that, doing live streaming solves that problem. The other big problem I find, especially with big corporations, is you start a video project and one person wants to look at it, have some thoughts. Lawyers want to look at it, others want to look at it. Graphic arts. And you start this editing process eight months later, everyone forgot what the topic was about and the video never sees the light of day. You don't have those bureaucratic problems when you're doing live streaming. So that's another reason I love it. It's, it's quicker and faster because there is no editing. Now, the fifth big reason I really like live streaming is there's so much less competition. Chances are your competitors are not live streaming. And here's the real reason. Most people are afraid to. Most people are scared. Most people, oh, what if I make a mistake? Well, I've made mistakes already today. Guess what? Chances are you didn't notice or you didn't care or you'll forget it instantly. It's not the mistakes that harm people in the long run. I believe the biggest problem most people have is doing nothing. Nobody hearing your message, nobody experiencing your message. That's far and away the biggest problem most people have. So keep that in mind. So many of you, I know you like to be competitive. You like to compete with all the other people in your industry, maybe people within your organization. This is a great way of competing because most people are afraid to do live streaming. Oh, what if I make a mistake? What if I say, nobody really cares if you say once in a while, it's far better to just get out there and say something interesting. So that's one of the big reasons I like. That's reason number five. Reason number six, when you do any kind of live streaming and you do it regularly, it just gets easier so much faster. So you're getting better and better and better. Meanwhile, your competitors are sitting back thinking, oh gosh, I should do that, but I'm afraid to. I'm not going to do it. I'm not good enough. So that's one of the real values of doing live streaming on a regular basis is your skill level quickly ramps up, your confidence level quickly goes up. And I see a few more have joined us today. If you have any questions about live streaming and the reasons why you should do it, I'm happy to try to answer them for you. And again, trying to demonstrate the benefit I mentioned in number one, the very first benefit of live streaming is you get to be more interactive with customers, clients, your students. You know, many of you are my online public speaking students and personal development students. I want to thank you for joining today. That's what's so great about it, is you can answer questions in real time. Now, the seventh reason some of you may look at as you don't buy it yet. It's just more fun to do live streaming than it is to talk alone in a little dark room where all you're doing is talking to a piece of machinery when you know that real people and I see Some of you right now are giving me the thumbs up and are saying, hello, it's simply more fun to talk to human beings than it is to talk to a piece of machinery. So that's the seventh reason, I think, why it's important and frankly, a very good idea to do live streaming video on a regular basis. And thanks for the viewer there who just gave another thumbs up. So now I do have a bonus lesson for you, a bonus reason. The bonus to doing live streaming is it's great public speaking practice. Those of you who know me know I'm constantly saying the most important skill in the world is public speaking. It's the single most consistent thing present with wildly successful people. They have become great communicators at some level. Well, when you're doing live streaming, it's a type of public speaking. So if you're insecure, if you're nervous, if you're uncomfortable, you can work through all that. You can do more speaking in front of people in one week without leaving home than some people who aspire to be professional speakers do in a whole different year. So many people waste so much time knocking on doors, calling up speaker bureaus, oh, please hire me, please hire me. I want to be a speaker. And they're not actually speaking. By doing live streaming, it's forcing you. It's giving you the discipline to formulate your thoughts, speak, and you're not giving yourself the luxury of doing everything. Seven takes. This is all live. I'm not doing multiple takes here. I'm not editing myself. I'm just having a conversation with you. So that is what I think is the eighth reason, the sort of, the bonus reason as to why you should do live streaming on a regular basis. So I'm TJ Walker. Thanks for joining me. I'm gonna do some extra content here in a minute. So if you are a regular student of mine in any of my personal development courses on any online platforms or public speaking, I urge you to stay on for just a moment. But first, I want to give you a chance. If you do have any specific questions to ask me. Now, I might not know the answers if it's a technical question. I'm not the greatest technologist. But the biggest problem for most people is not what light to use, what camera to use, any of that. The biggest, biggest challenge is just emotionally, how can I put myself out there? How can I put my face forward without being scared or intimidated? I was sitting around having dinner in Manhattan just last night with some friends. One of them is a former very successful talk show host and he mentioned he was basically afraid to do Facebook Live. He only wanted to do audio because he didn't want anyone to see that he was unshaven. And I'm like, you've got so many great ideas, just put it out there. Nobody really cares if you have a beard, especially these days. Let's go to the question Mohamed writes in hi, what do you think of live streaming for business news? I mean sharing important news and a bit of personal analysis of one of those important news items. Mohammed. That's something I did for many, many years. You can definitely get lot of audience that way if it's breaking news. It depends on your niche. Now if you're in a very specific tight niche, let's say concrete, most people in the world don't care about news related to concrete. But if you have specific insights, information, breaking news about commodity prices, for sand prices, for example, and you can reach people sooner, then that gives them another reason to trust you, to want to do business with you, to perhaps bookmark your page, to think of you as a trusted resource. So that can be a great way. Part of what I'm trying to do these days. I formerly did everything news based, doing political commentary and news commentary. Now everything I do is more of what you would call evergreen quality because I'm not doing things that are based on something in the news. This will be information that will be useful six months from now, year from now, I believe now, ten years from now. Maybe this is irrelevant, but it is not something that's instantly gone. But I do like this, Muhammad, for the idea of giving value to your community, your tribe, your customers, clients, prospects. Because some people might not like to read a trade publication or a website or a blog that you do, but they do in fact like watching video. That's again, I guess I'll give this as a ninth bonus as to why you should do live streaming video. It's the simple fact that more and more people prefer watching video as opposed to reading. Now I'm a little bit of an odd duck there. I'm someone who makes thousands and thousands of videos, sometimes more than a thousand videos in a year. And yet I prefer to read. I try to read a full book every single day. I read lots of newspapers online. I don't actually watch a lot of video, but that's me. But that is another advantage to you, Muhammad, in that if you do live streaming, you may capture video. A whole lot of people who are interested in news that relates to your industry and also simply don't like to read much. So, Mohammad, if you don't mind sharing, what industry are you in and what type of news would you want to share with your audience? If you care to share, I'm happy to share that with our audience with the live stream and I'll give you a moment to type that in. By the way, I see some of you are just joining us. All of this will be available on demand here on Facebook, and if you're watching this on YouTube, you're watching the later on demand video version of this. But we are here live today, which gives me an opportunity to interact directly with you. Now let me tell you the real reason I'm here today and why I invited some of you is I wanted to get feedback from you. I am thinking about doing a daily live stream right here on my Facebook page and it would be simulcast on LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, and about two dozen other social media platforms. The focus of the live show would be personal development issues, how to improve yourself at every level. Now, I would be helping people with my mainstay, my biggest area of personal development expertise is specifically communication, how to speak more effectively, how to communicate more effectively, how to use your communication skills to advance your life towards more success and fulfillment. So I would have some tips on that every day. It would also be an opportunity to speak directly with you, answer your questions on a daily basis. Whether you're a student of mine, on my own platform, on other platforms, it would be a way for you to have that sort of instant contact with questions. So I'd like to know, does anyone think that's a good idea or do you think that's too much? T.J. once a month, once a quarter would be enough. The reason I like daily is when you look at the people who seem to have the biggest impact on the culture, on people's thinking, on political life. Even though I'm not political in this, it's the people who have daily shows, whether it was Oprah back in the day, whether it was Rush Limbaugh today. And again, I'm not trying to do anything political like Rush. It is the daily interaction. That's where you can connect with people, help them the most, and really go deeper in a lot of issues. So many of you may know me primarily from my public speaking media training courses, but in the last year I've developed about a dozen personal development courses. Everything from how to increase mindfulness, how to have more focus in your life, how to build habits, how to be more successful, and other aspects of personal development. So That's a part of what I will be exploring in this show. This should be launching in the next couple of months or so. I'll keep you updated, but I would love to have your feedback on a Is this something you would want to watch? I'm not asking for a daily commitment, but I want to know is this something you would want to watch? Watch every once a week, twice a month? How often do you think a daily livestream here on Facebook or any other platform of your choice would be useful to you? How often would it be interesting to you and do you think there would be value in it? So that's the first big question I have for you. The second question I have is what would you like me to cover? I certainly know that one of the things I'll cover every day will be at least one in depth aspect of how to communicate more effectively. Part of what I will cover is your questions, responding to specific questions, concerns, thoughts you have. Another part that I'm thinking of doing is just having segment on great personal development books and reading. I now read a book every single day, seven days a week on some aspect of personal development. Now they're not always thick books, sometimes they're Kindle shorts, but I'm probably going to review a section or at least one of those books every day to see if people are interested in that. I also do daily meditation. Now I'm a little hesitant to mention this because it can seem a little too to some people and it's something that you could easily mock someone if you just went to a video and you saw someone with their eyes closed doing meditation. But one of the things I'm thinking about, if nothing else, is just having a one minute segment of deep breathing relaxation, closing your eyes and trying to completely clear your head of all thoughts. It may only be for one minute. I may decide a segment like that is too cheesy too I don't really know. So I'm interested in any other ideas you have on what you would like to see in a daily live streaming show on personal development. Now I follow a tremendous number of other personal development experts, their blogs, their YouTube channels, their podcast. So part of what I would be covering on this show is kind of a summary of the best of what's going on there. New books on personal development, blog post steering, essentially being a curator so you have a better sense of what is out there. So that's, that's a part of what I'm looking at in doing this live daily stream because so many people, whether it's Anthony Robbins. Brendon Burchard, they love those people and I think they have a lot of good ideas, but they don't necessarily know how they can access them on a daily basis and they might miss some new post. So I would be doing a little bit of a summary of what's going on there. I would also look at some items in the news. I don't mean political commentary, but for example, in the news right now there is a big controversy over some statements Bill Maher made about how he thinks we should bring back public shaming for obese people. He says shaming worked to stop people from drunk driving, from smoking and wearing seat belts. And he points out that terrorists killed 50 people in America last month, but obesity killed 40,000 people. Now there are other people, like the talk show host James Gordon of CBS who said, Bill Maher, you've gone too far. You're being mean. Shame doesn't help anyone. This is counterproductive. These are issues that I think are profoundly important to anyone who cares about personal development. Now, I'm not a nutritionist, I'm not a personal trainer, but I am struck by just the absolute explosion, the epidemic of obesity not here, just in the United States, but around the world. And according to the World Health Organization, a couple of million people a year die prematurely because of obesity. So it is, depending on how you define things, kind of a number one killer or at least a contributor to deaths. I don't think bullying is the answer, but I'm not quite sure. The idea of just saying all body sizes are of equal value and beauty and no one should ever reflect on how to improve their health as it relates to how much food they eat. These are tough, tough issues. Things that do fascinate me, and I know some of you too. Sher Khaled writes in it's this lovely home, by the way. Thank you, Sharon. I am today just in my great room. So and my 6 year old daughter should be walking in here in just a moment. You may have a chance to meet her. But that's the other thing. You don't have to do this with live streaming, but you can do it anywhere. I'm typically in my TV studio, which is in the first floor of my home, but it's just a dark square room. It's not that it's a 9 foot by 6 foot room. It's really an old closet. I thought why not make things a little more interesting and invite you into my living room, my great room. So one of the things I may be doing in this live daily stream is just doing it from different parts of my home just for variety. It's nice to have a little variety and I can point it in different directions and well you'll you'll see that later if you're interested. But Sherer, thanks so much for writing and Sherer or Muhammad, do either of you have any questions, let me know. I am here for you. Mani San writes in, says hi mate, twice a week will be helpful and so you think maybe tuning in for twice a week would work for you? Well, that's great. Thank you for sharing that and I will definitely alert you to when we'll start these Moni do you have any particular topics you would like to see covered in this vein of more broadly speaking, personal development and certainly communication is a part of that. Let me know what topics you are interested in. Part of what I think I'm going to do is also just share with you my own journey in personal development. Ideally, we're all growing by the way, you're seeing some shifts in the colors. It's it's the time of day. It's 3:38 Eastern Time here in New York. I'm in Long island. So this window behind me is getting having sun come in. Sun and then the clouds come in. So that's why you're seeing the differences, which I don't really mind that I'm trying to make things a little more interesting. In a typical broadcast studio, you wouldn't see that they would try to control that. Something I should have mentioned another benefit to why you should do live streaming is when you look at traditional media, the shows that have the biggest audiences are for the most part all live. NFL football, NBA basketball, college sports, they are live. That's what attracts the largest audiences in their traditional world of broadcast TV and cable as well. People just like live stuff. The immediacy, the sense that I'm getting something now that no one else is getting ahead of me. Yet another reason to do live. Many writes anything under the sun except for Brexit. Yes, I will stay away from the political topic of Brexit. And I understand that everybody who lives in Great Britain is just absolutely up to here with Brexit talk and you don't want to hear about it anymore. I of course have my opinions on Brexit. I will keep those to myself. So we will stay away from the political news right now. Mohammad just writes right now. I'm learning a lot from you doing this. I guess I'm assuming you're saying Just from this, part of what I'm trying to convey is don't over complicate this. The big problem so many people have with any video production they do, whether it's an edited video for Facebook or YouTube or anything, is they want to think about it and turn it into a big movie and spend two years on it. Well, you could do that or you could just talk to people. Now, I just got back from an overnight in Manhattan and some meetings there and I realized, wow, I had not sent out my newsletter this week. And then on the train back home, I thought, why don't I do a newsletter on reasons to do live streaming? And then I said, well, why don't I actually do a live stream on that? So as soon as I came in, I just plugged my laptop, put it on a stack of books, turned the light on, and I did spend about three minutes writing up a script. And you can see at the last minute, I remember this bonus tip, which is that, hey, it's good to do public speaking. It's a good way of learning public speaking by doing live streaming. By the way, here's a quick production tip for you. Do you see how when I held up the white piece of paper, it totally messed up the lighting on my face? This is why I think in general you don't want to wear white clothing as it will darken your face. It can make you look worse. And that's why typically I probably shouldn't even have a white chair in the backdrop because that can mess up the lighting. Sometimes as well, we're a little more informal. The standards are a little different when it comes to live streaming. So I didn't spend a lot of time rearranging that. If I start doing this on a daily basis, then I'll give a little more thought to it. But for the most part, if you can give people one good idea, one good insight in a live stream and make them feel like they're getting something of value, they'll like it and they'll come back. Now, another tip, when you're doing live streaming, a good thing is to shut down all notifications on your computer, shut down everything else on your computer so you don't get distractions. I just. I told you I was going to make a mistake in this live stream. I just made one because I didn't have all of my pages down. So I'm now getting a notification saying that Gary Vaynerchuk is now live. Well, he is a page perfect case study on the power of live. He does Live videos constantly on every single social platform. And he has a huge, massive audience. He has millions and millions of fans all over the world. I'm one of them. I think I've bought every one of his books. And if you had to really look at one guy who's the poster child of understanding social media video, social media video, I would recommend Gary Vaynerchuk. The second person I would recommend, and I mentioned him at the beginning of this whole livestream, was Sean Cannell. And you can find him at Think Media on YouTube. Tremendous site that gives you all the insights on what cameras to use that my wife and I just bought a. I believe It's a Sony A640 for other videos we do based on Sean Canal's recommendation. I have a ring light that I'm using on the other side of my laptop and camera that is lighting me right now based on recommendations from Think Media. So that's a great site that I would recommend as well. So I wanted to share with you a couple of other ideas that I had for my show that I'm experimenting with and sort of noodling around, trying to figure out what do I want to really do as a regular format. So I'll probably have one or two segments each day. If I end up doing it daily, it may be twice a week where I spent about seven, eight minutes essentially doing a monologue, but just going really deep on some fundamental question of personal development, whether it's habit building, whether it is how to communicate more effectively if you're introducing yourself in a social situation, whatever the issue is, I'll do one or two of those each segment, go in depth and try to give you some real and actionable advice so you feel some benefit, so you get something out of it. Now, I have done live ones from time to time, but I haven't done it that much lately. So I just made one little mistake that I wasn't sliding down my cursor, seeing some of the other comments that came in. So Tamara just writes in, when live streaming, how do you keep the stream of your talk going without stopping or having long pauses? Any tips on that? Well, you can do what I just did right there. Take a sip of water. So, Tamara, this is one reason why people are afraid and uncomfortable with live streaming. It's like, what if I forget what to say? Let me ask you this. Have you ever gone to dinner with a good friend and had a nice meal, maybe had a glass of wine? If you enjoy that sort of thing as I do, you talked for Four hours. No one was worried about pauses. You just had a natural conversation, a flow. And it is easy when you do it and you're comfortable. So we're having a conversation now. You wrote, I'm not hearing you right now, but I read your question. I responded, I'm trying to make it conversational. This would never happen if I had to sit there and type out a whole script. This is not the network news from 1982 where every word is written, rewritten, edited, put on a teleprompter, slice, dice, timed. That's not what makes a good webcast. What makes a good webcast is the interactivity. I hope, Tamara, that you got some value from me addressing you directly, mentioning you by name, answering your question. I hope that's a lot more important than the fact that I may have made a mistake or I should have perhaps not had a white chair in the screen, or the fact that because the clouds are coming in and out, it is messing up my lighting a little. I hope the fact that I answered your question directly made it more valuable and made it so that those other problems didn't really matter to you. So hope that's helpful. If you have any other questions about live streaming, let me know. If you have any other thoughts on specifically what you think would be interesting to you, helpful to you, insightful to you in your own personal development journey that you'd like me to cover on a regular basis, then please let me know. By the way, I should point out, if you ever do a live stream and you think it was just awful, you think, wow, that was horrible. That was a rough draft. I hope nobody saw it. You could just delete it now. I don't recommend doing that. I'm not going to delete this. I'm going to post it. Doesn't matter if it gets a lot of criticism. I'm going to post this because I want to reach more people with my message. But if you're unsure of your ability, Tamara, to have that stream of consciousness going and the stream of the talk go, then you can always just start. Don't really promote it in advance. And then if you think it's awful, you just don't post the final version of it and you haven't really lost anything. The other thing I should point out is I'm going a little bit long. I've been with you for more than a half an hour today. You could decide to do a live stream for three minutes. It doesn't have to be a half an hour, an hour, five hours. You know, you have these kids today. I sound like an old man. These kids today you have these kids and they're mostly kids who do the live streams on Twitch where they are playing video games and some of them make $20 million a year. They are live for four, five hours now. They're playing games and stuff and you see the animation on the screen a good chunk of the time. But they're doing this for four or five, six, some of them ten hours a day. I'm not suggesting you need to go that long. You could decide you want to do one 10 minute live session a month as just sort of live office hours for your clients and customers all over the world. And if nobody asks a question, you may stop after five minutes. You might ask people to email you questions in advance that any of you seeing this on demand, you're not with me live today. If you have questions that you want me to answer in the next live stream, feel free to post them right here on Facebook or YouTube or any other social media platform where you're watching this. So, Tamara, that's one thing to think about is if you run out of things to say or you feel like you don't have anything more to say, just say thanks, see you next time. And you can sign off now. I kind of like to talk confession. I used to be a full time talk show host and did four hours of talk a day. I did three hour and four hour shows Monday through Friday. So to me talking for half an hour, hour, that's, that's barely warming up now. Doesn't mean I'm going to be doing four hour shows here every day. I may decide that the best length of time, the time that really works for most of you is that if I limit it to 12 minutes, I don't know yet. That's one of the beauties of live streaming is you can experiment in a way that you couldn't do 10, 20, 30 years ago. You had to buy a 30 minute infomercial block of time. That was how Anthony Robbins got so famous is he was one of the first to use infomercials in the late 1980s when those became legal in the United States. But that's a very precise 29 minutes and 30 seconds long. It has to be. The beauty of webcasting is you don't have to, to be that precise. You can experiment. You can also one week do 10 minutes, another week do two hours. Try different things. Muhammad writes in how should we start our first ever live stream? How to introduce ourselves, how to get into the real content that we actually want to share, I would suggest that you just do it and tell people something interesting for them. I started off by saying I'm going to tell you seven reasons why you should be live streaming today. I got right to the knee. I didn't sit there and say, well, My name is TJ Walker and for 30 years I've been doing personal development training and media training and public speaking training and I've worked in 35. I didn't want to give people a boring bio. I wanted to give them value first. If I give people enough value, go Google me, check out my LinkedIn page, they'll go to my blog, they'll watch other videos on YouTube. Make people want to know more about you. I would say Mohammad, I would certainly recommend that if you're doing this to promote your business, then talk about something that is of interest to your audience and you can promote it to them. And it may be that LinkedIn is the better place for you. If you're only going to do on one platform, then you may want to do it on LinkedIn to reach to them so that people seeing you talk about these issues aren't confused. Because you can confuse people sometimes. A couple of years ago I did an online course on wine tasting and it just confused people. People don't associate me with that. And it frankly did not get very good reviews, it did not sell very well and I no longer keep it up. It was an experiment. But I have 137 other courses on online platforms and most of them, not most of them, but a lot of them do very well. So I don't mind experimenting and failing. If you are going to try live streaming, realize there are going to be some failures. But it's such a low cost. If you buy a 30 second ad for a TV commercial during the World cup soccer or for the NFL super bowl and you make a horrible commercial, you could lose three, four million dollars down the drain. If you do a live webcast and nobody shows up, you might still get a lot of people watching you in the on demand section. So what did you lose? Not much. You still learned how to speak more effectively. You learned how to deal with your nerves of oh gosh, I'm on camera. And you learn something by doing it. So that's why I'd recommend don't try to figure out the perfect opening and the perfect this or that. Just start. By the way, I do see a very weird reflection on the window behind me. So I'm going to Do a slight adjustment to see if I can cover that up again. I wouldn't normally do this in a regular production or a produced one, but things are a little bit looser when it comes to doing live tv. Now you can see I have a large TV screen behind me. I would probably put pictures or images of that if I'm doing this on a regular basis. So you could certainly think about what you want to have in your backdrop. But Muhammad, the most important thing is I would say just start give people a sentence or two about who you are and what you do. And I tell people I am a personal development expert. I help people become more successful as communicators, speakers, presenters and every other aspect of life. I just try to keep it short and simple and then let people learn based on the value I'm giving them. That's really where people are going to benefit the most and have a sense you don't want to confuse people and get thought to. I mean the reason I'm wearing this, for example, I used to always wear a suit and tie because I wanted to be professional and clients I had busy executives are always wearing suit and ties, or certainly many of them did for many years. I do this now because I do think that perhaps the number one issue facing the world today, or certainly the wealthier parts of the world is this obesity epidemic. And I've spent a lot of time and energy and effort getting myself in shape and losing 35, almost 40 pounds in recent years and getting to the point where I feel like I'm at my ideal weight. So I'm trying to walk the talk and show people I'm not just going to give you advice on how to have goals for your health. I can demonstrate them. When you're wearing a suit and tie, you can mask all sorts of flaws, levels of obese and confession. I at one point was 217 pounds. I was about that close from being technically obese. But I decided to practice what I preached others about how to communicate effectively but instead communicating with myself to influence myself to follow good healthy goals for each eating and exercise. And that's why I'm now at what I consider to be my ideal weight. So I've given thought to why. Why am I wearing just a simple pullover shirt and not a suit and tie? It's to sort of show that I'm not hiding anything. You can hide a great deal when you're wearing a suit and tie but Mohammad, thanks so much for your question. Oh, how do you your second part of Your question how to get into the real content that we actually want to share? I'd recommend you do it as quickly as possible. Which is why I gave instant tips within the first 30 seconds of this video today on how you can benefit from doing live streaming and why you should be doing live streaming. And then I'm telling you this biographical stuff of, you know, I lost weight or I was heavy, that's 45 minutes in. So if you're not really, really committed, you don't have to hear any of that. So that's what I would suggest is use your judgment. What I can tell you from a lot of my successes with my online video based courses is you have to say something interesting to grab people's attention. Not in the first five minutes or the first minute or the first 30 seconds, but really the first 10 seconds. So when I'm doing an online course, the first thing out of my mouth is typically, here's a quick win. If you want to get better at this. Boom. Go right into a tip. So people feel like, okay, I'm glad I watched this. I've gotten something out of this already. Let me listen to a little more. So getting quick benefit from hello. And since not many of you are watching and it's 45 minutes in Rossa, come on over. Let me just introduce you. This is Rasa. This is my daughter. She is a public speaking expert in her own right. She's the co instructor in our course Public speaking for Kids and she also has a new series out, Healthy Cooking for Kids. That was a fun show we recorded recently, wasn't it? Yeah. And that's going to be coming available on her own YouTube channel. So thanks so much. I'll talk to you soon. Okay. And she is a little bit shy, but you know what, she loves doing videos and she loves speaking. So I'm not sitting there coercing her, but I am telling her that if you want to do it, you know mommy and daddy will help you. I do get the question from time to time, what's the best way of helping kids become a better speaker? I'll tell you what I do with Rossa. We started this in preschool when she had to start doing show and tell. What I recommend for any kid is you just practice with them with your cell phone, record them speaking, then watch it together. But here's the tricky part. Here's what you're gonna have a hard time doing. Only praise your kid on what they are doing. Well, don't say well, stand up straight. And you said don't criticize. You have to resist that temptation. Instead, simply praise Build their confidence. Over time, the strengths will push out the weaknesses. And you do that every week for a whole year of kindergarten or preschool or first grade. I guarantee you your kid is going to be probably the best speaker in that class, will have confidence and will just have a sense of speaking is something I can do. I'm good at it. I don't ever have to hide from it. Just never going to be a source of anxiety if you practice that way with your kit. Now here's the surprising thing many people seem shocked by. This is pretty much the exact strategy I use when I'm working with a CEO or a successful author or a high level political official. I reinforce the strength. Now, at some point I do point out their weaknesses, but the first two or three times I get someone on video, I do in fact just strengthen their things. They're doing well. I underline what they're doing well so they do more of it. I have found that's really the way people improve any skill in life is reinforce the positive. Everyone comes to me and says, tj, rip me apart. Tell me what I did wrong, what did I. What do I need to improve on? They think that's the way they improve. In my experience, that's really not the way to improve speaking skills. It's far better to focus on the strengths. We do have some time. I appreciate many of you just joining me. So if you have any questions on the main topic of the day and in the headline reasons why you should livestream, and you weren't able to see the first part, I'm happy to answer your questions. So if you'd like to go to the chat box and post your questions, I am happy to stay here and talk to you for a little while longer. If you have comments on anything else, please let me know. And also if you have suggestions on topics you would like to see me cover on a regular basis for a daily live streaming personal development show, then please do. In fact let me know. So I want to give you share with you just a couple of other things I'm thinking of. One of the courses I've done recently is on habits, specifically daily habits. So I'm thinking of just having a segment each day where I talk about just one habit and how to build that habit and how I'm doing it in my own life. So for example, everyone always talks about how you should drink more water. Drink more. You've heard that. You've probably heard the thing about you should drink eight glasses of water per day. There's no actual evidence that 8 is a magic number, but certainly most people in the medical community would say you're far better off drinking water for the sheer fact that if you're drinking water, you're not drinking Cokes and Pepsis and so soft drinks and sugary beverages and things with lots of garbage in it. One of my goals six months ago was to just very precisely start off every day with a large glass of water before I had coffee, breakfast, anything else. So many health experts say it's a good thing. And I'm someone who does traditionally drink water, but I might not have any water till 10 in the morning unless I think about it. So what I did is I created a selfie speak audio where I just talk to my own phone, record it. TJ you are going to drink a large glass of water every day, first thing. So I tell myself that once in an audio. But I listen to that audio every day along with a bunch of other goals. And then I just. Middle of the day, I pull out my cell phone, I go to my personal development notes just on my phone, and I have a little checklist. Did I drink a full glass of water this morning? And I just put the date and a Y for yes. It may sound simple, it may sound cheesy, trite, but it turns a wish, an aspiration, a hope into a habit. I've had a large glass of water every single day for the last six months and that's less room for coffee with sugar. And I've gotten rid of the sugar. It fills me up. So I'm not eating as large a bowl of oatmeal or whatever else I have for breakfast. So I see benefit. You may have no desire to increase it, but I do think as human beings, we are looking for ways to, to improve ourselves, to have a happier life, to have a healthier life. And you can go back to Aristotle, Socrates, you name it. So many great philosophers over the years have said your life, your success in life is so often based on just daily habits. What's a mundane habit on a daily basis has a profound impact on your life in the long term. So that's why we'll be spending some time dealing with habits, habit acquisition. Let's see if we have any other comments here. Mohammad writes in. Kindly give us a brief review of any new book that you read. The frequency of such livestream reviews is up to you, but I'd appreciate such reviews. So, Mohammed, I have a confession to make. I'm a little embarrassed, but this happens to an awful lot of people, especially people who like to consider themselves well educated and well read. I had gotten into a bad habit of just not reading many books. I read so many news sites, go to so many news sites. So one of the habits that I have made a specific focus on the last six months is to severely limit the number of minutes I spend consuming Internet news, even from good sources like the New York Times. And then I've shifted that reading time to reading books. So I do have a goal of reading one new book every single day. Completing a book. Now I'm not doing speed reading. I'm a fairly quick reader. But it's not about speed reading. It's just about different reading. Because we all read all day long. We read text, we read social media chats.