Engage Authentically: Enhance Communication Skills

Are you an authentic speaker? An authentic communicator? We live in a time where there's so much phony, so much artificial intelligence, you don't know what's real and what isn't real. And people are saying over and over again what they really want is somebody authentic. But what does that really mean? I can tell you here in the United States, one person, Hussein, is really authentic by tens of millions of people, paints his face orange every day, dyes his hair orange, and to tens of millions of other people is the most inauthentic clown in the entire world. So what does this really mean? There are a lot of different types of authenticity. Marc Maron, the well known podcaster, comes across as authentic to many because he really reveals things like depression and worst moments in his life and relationship breakups. Joe Rogan, the wildly successful podcaster, is seen as authentic because he's not afraid to make fun of himself. And he talks about hair transplants and the scars in the back of his head and doing all sorts of things to try to make himself look better. He talks about things that most people would be too embarrassed to talk about that makes him come across as authentic. What does it really mean to you? Let me know in the comments below. I would love to know what authentic means to you and who you think is the most authentic communicator you know. But more important, I want you to think about what do you need to do to come across as more authentic to people you speak with, Whether it is friends, family, three colleagues at the office, to people in your industry, speaking to prospects, clients, speaking on national tv, speaking on your own social media channels. What do you need to do to be authentic and to be seen as authentic because it means so many different things to people. I do think you can put things in a couple of different camps. One is simply revealing weaknesses in yourself, talking about your vulnerability that's going to make you seem authentic to a lot of people. That is certainly one way of coming across authentic. Another way, and I would call it a darker side, is not being able. Note to editor Scratch that out. Another way of coming across authentic is this is a darker side of things. It's revealing things you hate, hatreds, biases, things that many people in society would say, that's wrong, you shouldn't say that, and you're still willing to say it. And the people who have the same biases as you, the same frustrations, the same objects of dislike or even hatred, if they are in alignment with you, they very well may feel that you are Authentic because you're willing to say things they think but are afraid to say out loud. So that's also a type of authenticity. You've got to judge for yourself. If you do come across as authentic, there is a reward for you. People you speak with, people you talk to are going to feel a closer connection to you. They're going to listen to you more, they are going to feel like you understand them more and they are going to want to support you. But keep in mind, there's many, many ways of all. Note to editor scratch that. But. But keep in mind there are many, many ways of coming across as authentic these days. One thing I've seen a lot of top communicators do, it's not really my style, but they use the F word, they use other profanity and they feel like, well, now I come across as hip. One extraordinarily well known and respected motivational speaker had a documentary a few years ago come out and it seemed like every other word was the F word. Now, I'm not offended by that. We're all adults here. At least I am. I hope you are. If you're watching this, to me it seems a little gimmicky, it seems contrived. It seems like you're trying too hard. If every other word has to be the F word of look how hip I am and look how cool I am and what a bad boy I am and yet other people like it, here's my recommendation to you. Figure out how you want to come across in a way that's authentic to you. Because very few of us are really great actors and ability to. Note to editor scratch that. Very few of us are such great, wonderful actors that we can put on a fake Persona all the time for days, weeks, months, years. It's going to be a lot easier for you if you come across in a way that feels authentic to you. So that's really the biggest recommendation I have for you, is figure out a way that's authentic to you and that allows you to reveal some weaknesses, flaws, your inner life with the people you're communicating with. And in the long run, that's going to make you feel better and it's going to make you more successful. Hello and welcome. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks for joining and apologies, TikTok friends. I had not changed the camera angle before we started that, so hello to my TikTok friends. We're still trying to figure out how to get you into our main feed. We are live. My colleague Ben has posted. If you Want to join us live and see all the camera angles and be able to talk to us? Come on over to my YouTube channel. So we've got a lot of fun in store today. We have a lot of people lined up and we have folks on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitch, Twitter. And I'm not seeing Instagram today. I don't know what happened to our, our Instagram feed, but we'll see if we can get that back in. I'm taking your questions today. Oh, I gotta hit stop on my master record of the 4K. So what I just did at the beginning there was sort of the rough draft of a video that will be edited, refined, chop, sliced, diced and put into a YouTube and other social media platform. Edited, long form, video on demand. And we'll come up with some title, presumably about authenticity that is designed to attract people. And there'll be B roll and graphics, a little music put in. My mistakes will be taken out. What you just saw there I think is a good example, frankly of how rough drafts work when you're making video, especially if it's an unscripted one, but scripted as well. People make mistakes most of the time. When you see a video on YouTube or TikTok or any social media platform, it could been the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 10th take someone did. You're not seeing the mess ups, you're not seeing the mistakes. Consequently, it sometimes creates the impression to people, oh, I could never do that. All these people are so articulate in social media and I would be stammering around, well, I've done thousands and thousands and thousands of videos, not to mention hundreds and hundreds of hours in hundreds of online courses. And as you saw earlier, if you joined us, I can still make a stumble. I still make mistakes. The one we had today, this morning I had more than usual. I think I had three separate sort of do overs. But you know what? It's going to take the editor about 5 seconds to edit that part out, put it together, put an image over where I'm making the stumble and where they're editing that out and it will seem seamless, it will seem like it was done in one take. So that's what we're all about. I see our good friend Janice and a great presentation skills, communications expert in her own right has stopped by and she says, just wanted to drop in to pick up some tips. Don't fear making mistakes. Keep practicing. Practicing and edit. Thank you, tj. Well, Janice, thank you so much for your helpful tidbits and I know you're busy and running an active practice. But if you want to come on and give our folks an update on what you're doing or for that matter, promote any book or new online course or anything else you're doing, a program you're doing, we're always happy to share the spotlight right here at the TJ Walker Success Channel if you're joining us for the first time, especially my friends on TikTok. This is the T.J. walker Success Channel. We're all about helping you become more successful in life by improving your communication skills and building your confidence in your communication skills. It really takes those two together, I find, to help people reach their ultimate success. So that's why we're here. Typically here at 9am to noon, Monday through Friday, relatively open format, although we are going to start having more and more guests and in depth interviews. But we always have time for your questions. If you post a question here, I will do my best to answer it thoroughly, giving you some guidance, tips, tricks, practical tools of how you can communicate, how you can communicate more effectively. So that's what we're all about and it's great to see. Already we have more than 100 folks have stopped by just to say hello. Right on Tick Tock. And again, if you're on Tick Tock, if you want to join me live on screen, I can't do it on the Tick Tock app today, but if you want to come over to our YouTube channel, then you can come on live. But special hello to Aaron. I see Jack has joined. Dee Dee Farzad, GW has joined us. Kevin Bushby I think we've seen before. Craig Michael Walker, no relation that I'm aware of. But always nice to have another Walker joining us. Tim has joined us. The T&TJ stands for Tim Timothy. So nice to have another Tim Lynn has joined us. Mike, Sam, Walter and so many folks. If you do post a question on TikTok, I might see it, but there's a much, much better chance of me seeing it. If you do come on over to our YouTube channel and it's the same channel name, TJ Walker Success and then I will definitely 100% see your comment or your question and be able to answer it in detail. Amin writes. Any tips on how to say no when communicating at work? No, I'm being a bit glib. Yes, I will give some tips on that in just a moment. Ahmed also says any books that have truly influenced your communication style? Well, Ahmed, yes. I mean I've tried to read almost every book written about Communication that is published by a major publisher and a lot of self published ones. For me, especially early in my career when I was writing a blog post, this is before we even called it a blog post, a newsletter every single day on some aspect of communication. I really decided I've got to read every book out there and so many of them say the same thing. But what I did find is there's always one nugget in any one book that is going to be useful. So for example, there was a book I believe written by Lillian Wilder Probably 35, maybe 40 years ago where she talked about the tip of typing up the word and putting a red marker around it and then putting that on her clients watches. And after a week people would stop saying I took that and ran with it and actually designed stickers for my clients where we put the sticker on their watch and these days on their cell phone on their computer screen. And I've had countless people around the globe say wow TJ you really solved my problem of saying ums and us. And it wasn't my idea, I just took an adaptation of it. I put my own spin on it by turning it into a sticker and it has helped people. But that's something I got from, from that book. Now without sounding self serving, you can see it's in a fuzzy background because of our filter. But this is my book. What I tried to do is take the very best information I learned from every single book and distill it into this book. T.J. walker's secret to Foolproof Presentations. So that distills it. I'll give some thought. We are doing an Amazon Live segment the end of today and pretty much the end of all of our segments lately where I go through books that have been influential to me. Many of them are in the personal development realm, but some are in the communications realm too. So please take a look at that. Ahmed said. Very interesting filler word awareness tactic. Thanks for the tip. Well, it's not just that it makes you aware of it, it makes you aware of it when you aren't speaking. The problem I have with something Toastmasters used to do, I don't know if they still do it, but they would have someone at the back of the room dinging a bell every time you say while you're giving a presentation, which I think is a horrible, horrible idea because it makes you so jittery and so focused on not doing something, you're not actually focusing on delivering interesting information. So to me it's about trying to reprogram your brain in off times when you're not speaking because everyone you either look at your watch. If you still wear a watch, you look at your cell phone hundreds of times a day. So if you have that little visual reminder of you, don't say our. It makes it a thousand times easier to reprogram your brain to not say or. And you can do it for other filler words too. Ahmed says. Awesome, thanks. We'll check that out. So very glad you could stop by, Ahmed and Janice. And at this point, our couple of hundred friends have stopped by on TikTok today. So thanks so much again. If you want to talk to me live on camera, ask a question, share an insight of your own, disagree with me, you can do it. But you're going to need to come over to our YouTube channel. That way I can bring you in through the Streamyard application. We can share the screen, we can see you and hear you. So more than happy to be inviting because sometimes we do these simulcast and on my phone it flashes up. Someone from TikTok wants to join us and I found logistically it's just too hard to do that while I'm simulcasting on all these other platforms. So that's why we're not quite letting you on live. It's not because I don't want to hear your opinions. Okay, so what I'm going to do today? Well, first of order of business, I always take questions first from anyone who comes on screen and talks. That's the first priority. The second priority is people who type in a question for any of our live show, which is. Oh, exactly what Amit did. It just occurred to me, I did not really answer his first question. So let me, let me do this first and answer your question in a short form and a long form on the issue of how to say no, I'm going to go to camera two and if you're on TikTok, you're not going to see that because you're only seeing me through my cell phone camera. Apologies. If you do want to see the full studio and what I'm doing as we create productions, come on over to the YouTube channel, which is TJ Walker Success on YouTube. Okay, so let's deal with this. How to say no when coming when communicating at. What's the best way to say no when you have to communicate at work? Sometimes it's simple and direct. No. But make sure you don't come across as angry or you're. Time out. We're going to do that one over boy making More mistakes than usual today. But that's okay. It's all edited out. What's the best way to say no when you're communicating with someone at work? Sometimes it's as simple as saying no, but making sure your facial expressions, your tone do not imply that's a stupid question or how dare you do it in a neutral way. And it will be more accepted. Okay, that's what I would consider sort of the short form version of how to answer that. Now I'm going to try to do a long form version and I will adjust the camera angle so our friends at TikTok are not just looking at an empty set. But now my tripod is not wanting to cooperate. So let me see if I can get that there. Okay, so we're going to do this from camera one about how do you communicate no in the workplace? So I'm going to hit record.

I'm.

Going to remove some of these papers. The white is a little distracting in the corner. Again, this is for stuff we're doing that will be used later to make long form edited videos for social media. And I want to time this because I'm trying to make these about eight minutes long. It's better for various algorithms on social media platforms. What's the best way to say no when you have to communicate with people in an office environment? First of all, it's okay to simply look at someone and say no, but you got to be very careful how you do it. Your facial expressions, your tone of voice should not convey that's a stupid question. Ridiculous for you to ask that. Are you a moron? That is the problem a lot of people have with saying no. It's not the rejection part, it's making the person feel like an idiot. If you're working with someone, doesn't matter if they're your boss, you're their boss, or it's a colleague. You need to maintain cordial relationships. You need to maintain respect. And so often people fear that if I say no to this person, they're going to be like, I don't respect them. This is especially common if your boss is asking you to do something. Work late, and you already have plans with your family, you really, really want to say no, but you're afraid to. So the best approach sometimes is to look at someone, listen to them, don't cut them off. They may be asking you something, you think you know what it is, but really it's a small subset of that. It might actually be something that you can do. So be careful not to Prejudge, Be careful not to interrupt, say, no, I can't do that. That's ridiculous. I've had plans this weekend forever. And how dare you ask me that? Maybe all they needed you to do was to hit go live for a video, which you could do from your cell phone at your kid's soccer game. So listen carefully. First, without trying to spin answers in your own head about how can I say no quickly and easily, really listen. Then what I'd recommend you do is restate to the person asking you the question to make sure you truly understand what the request is. Now, don't say it word for word the way they did. Don't say it in a condescending way. Don't say, well, let me get this straight. I worked hard all week. You now want me to give up my entire weekend that I've already planned with my family to go to the beach, to come in to the office and do the work you should have done this week? Is that really what you. That's not what I'm asking you to do. I need you, in a neutral way, to summarize what you think they are asking for and then state it. And then ask them, am I understanding correctly? What you may find is that simply restating it makes it a simpler task. And you can in fact say yes, or you can say yes to a part of it. That's a great way of saying no without the word no coming out of your mouth. And I don't want you to be afraid of saying no. But sometimes you can give somebody a yes to 10% of what they're asking for. It's easy for you, and it starts off the conversation in a positive way. Well, Jim, what I can do is. And then maybe there's some part of that. Maybe they've asked you to plan the entire holiday party in a week for 100 people, and you know you don't have time for it. But you can, with one call, get a great venue because of a personal relationship. And it would take you 30 seconds, maybe start with that. Jim, what I can do is get a great venue for the party next week, and it's the sessions. And then tell them about it. And ideally, the person says yes. That's great. I can't help with all the other details because of the commitments I have is a more graceful way than just saying no. I can't do it. I'm so busy. It's a busy time of year. How dare you ask me. Don't be afraid to say no, but don't be afraid to give a partial yes to some part of what they're asking for, as long as you're not misleading them. You don't want to be one of these people who just says yes to anything anyone ever asks for, but then you don't deliver. Short term it minimizes pain, but long term it will destroy your relationships at work. You will become that person seen as untrustworthy, unreliable, someone who does not get the job done. That doesn't really help you. So at some point you have to realize the person asking you for something could be disappointed, could be a little disappointed, could be a lot disappointed. That's okay. Now you've always got to make judgment calls. If you really believe that your boss is going to fire you unless you say yes to something and you really need that job and you have no savings, that changes the equation. You're going to have to factor that in. Ideally, that's not your situation in your work world. And you have a good enough relationship with colleagues, whether they're your boss, whether they work for you, whether it's a co worker where you can be asked an honest question. Someone can ask you to do something, you can ask them to do something and either party can say yes or no. You want to get to the point where you can look someone in the eye, say, I understand, this is what you'd like, this is what you need. I can't do it, so no. Can I help you find someone else who can? That's quite often the best possible way to say no in the workplace. Okay, so that one was not exactly the length I wanted. That was six minutes long. What I aspire to do, what I try to do with these long form social media videos is to go about eight minutes long because that's what tends to do the best on YouTube. It allows them to share it with more people, put more ads in. YouTube does well. You get more audience and it helps you too. So that's. But, but I feel like I had good insights there and I feel like that was it. I didn't want to put padding in. I want to give you just the best information you need. I try to do these things in a short form and a long form because a lot of people love watching TikTok shorts and YouTube shorts are not ever going to watch an 8, 10 minute video. But some people want more depth and want more substance. So that's why I do long versions as well. Hello to all of our friends on TikTok today. Now I see we have 1.3 thousand hearts since we started this just 27 minutes ago. I would love it if someone could tell me what that means. Is there one person who's doing 1,399 and there's only two people doing? Because I see a lot of hearts coming by. Leonard, appears like you've liked a few. Thank you so much. For those of you joining us on TikTok, if you have any questions related to communication skills, I'm happy to answer you and to try to help any way I can, but I'm going to need you to come over to our YouTube channel. That's where we are connected with Streamyard. I can see your questions, your comments on a big screen. Leonard says sometimes it's best not to beat around the bush. Absolutely, Leonard, you're 100% correct. So if someone thinks has a logical reason to think you can do something and you say something like, well, maybe and you really wanted to say no, you are better off letting them know now that you can't do it rather than leading them along making them assume you're going to be able to do the task. And then when you finally do say no or they figure it out, it's too late and there's egg on their face. So Leonard, you're absolutely right. You are better off not beating around the bush getting to it. And it does look like Leonard has done a whole bunch of like. So, Leonard, I do appreciate that a lot and I would guess or hope that that does help send a message to TikTok. Hey, let's share this with more people. Which may be why we have hundreds of people who've stopped by at least for a little while on TikTok already today. And I'm just quickly scrolling to see if I missed any other questions or comments that are worthy or not worthy that merit a response. Typically for some reason with my friends on TikTok, someone will write in that, hey, it's Joe Biden. Well, no, I'm not Joe Biden, although I am a man who's not young, who does not have a lot of hair and has gray hair, who's not particularly gigantic in any one direction as far as being over overweight or 7ft tall or 5ft tall. So to that extent, if I remind someone of Joe Biden, I understand and I'm not offended at all. So we got a lot of fun planned for today. I am going to be answering your questions. I'm also going to be answering questions posed by chat GPT artificial intelligence. I'm also going to be going live on Amazon and showing some books that I really like that I think are helpful to me. Books that I bought with my own money, that I've read, underlined, shared with others, oftentimes they are giving me concepts that I incorporate into my online courses and online videos. And now, thanks to the Amazon Influencer program, there's a way for me to share that with people right on Amazon and people like it. They can one click, they can buy the book right there. So it's kind of an interesting program for people who want to speak more, want to make some money and don't necessarily want to be on a plane, flying across the country or other continents, or sitting in a lot of meetings striking brand deals with major corporations. It's a simplified process. It's not a way to get rich quick, but it is a simplified process that allows you to create content that can get in front of people and can make you money. So we'll be talking more about that in hour three today. So yes, you will see me drinking water here, drinking tea. This is a rough show. I'll be very candid with you. This is me bringing you into my workshop. I take you kind of behind the scenes, we pull back the curtains here and I show you exactly what I do as a content creator, as someone who makes videos for YouTube, who makes online courses. I have about 200 plus plus courses on the Udemy platform, Coursera, Skillshare, all sorts of platforms across the globe. If you are interested in any courses, you can always click the About Me section whether you're on TikTok or YouTube and it'll take you to links to my website, Media Training Worldwide. We're about to unveil my revamped tjwalker.com website on Monday. So I'm going to probably show that to you here first, get your feedback and see what suggestions you have for me. Okay, so I'm going to go now to some. Actually, we've got a question that was emailed in. I'm going to go to that first. I was giving you the priority list. The priority list is anyone who comes on, shows their face and lets their voice be heard would give you priority. And you can do that just by clicking the Streamyard link, which is in the comment section on every platform right now other than TikTok, because they don't let us do it. But if you want to come on screen and you're on TikTok, TikTok, come on over to YouTube. The second priority is someone who, when we're live, types in A question, and I try to answer those right away in real time, as I just did for Ahmed. So you don't have to write in and wait weeks or months or pay anything. You can just type in your question. The third priority is somebody who emails me questions, which I have one here I'm going to answer right now. And then the fourth priority is we pull sentiment from all over the globe, what people are actually thinking about talking about searching online, and we use ChatGPT and artificial intelligence to do that. I may have missed one. Remco presenter gives a thumbs up. So thanks, Remco. Appreciate that. I'm curious, what part did you like? What are you giving a thumbs up on? If you don't mind clarifying, that would be great. Ahmed also says, I appreciate your perspective. You are a gifted communicator. Well, thank you, Ahmed. I do appreciate that. But I do want to stress, anything I'm doing, I believe is something any human can do. If you have basic neurological control over your face, your mouth, a functioning brain with an average IQ or better, anyone can communicate just as well as I do. It's just a matter of practice and learning and going through steps and doing things like rehearsal. It's easy for me only because I've been giving thousands of speeches and presentations and talks to live audiences. To live audiences, virtual like this and just in front of a camera, making online courses. That's the only reason. It's no genetic gift. But I very much appreciate your positive sentiment. Ahmed says, I mentor clinical students at the university level. Any insights on how to structure and provide constructive feedback? Okay, so, Amit, this is something that near and dear to my heart because humans are funny. I find around the globe people will say, you know, give me feedback. Rip me apart, rip me apart. Give me constructive feedback. And they're expecting it. In my case, as a presentations coach, they expect me to tell them 93 things they did wrong in their last speech. And I could do that. I don't find that actually helps anyone because intellectually they think, wow, this instructor knows a lot. This trainer knows a lot. Wow, I learned a whole lot. Boy, oh boy, I'm so awful. The lesson I learned is I should never speak again. That's the problem with what constitutes constructive feedback in a lot of fields. Not just in my industry, but in any industry. We all have egos. Every human being has an ego. Tell me someone who says, oh, I have no ego. Just give it to me straight. That person probably has an ego twice as big as you or me. Okay? So every Human being has an ego. Everyone at some point, even though they know it's good for them, feels uncomfortable getting criticized. It's just human nature. I'm not saying that to suggest that you never say anything negative or you just butter people up or tell people what they want to hear. No. I do think that in many fields, especially mine, of communication skills training, the most effective way to do it is you first of all give constructive feedback on everything they're doing well. Build up strengths, get them to see their strengths before you even talk about the negative. Then what I do in a training is I focus on one positive element or one negative element of time and instantly couple it with something they can do to fix it so I don't overwhelm them. If you just tell somebody, here's 27 things you do wrong, where do I start? Now, I don't know what aspect of clinical training you do with students. Every industry and every field, every subject matter could be a little different. But I do believe that for most human beings in most endeavors, building the strengths, letting them know what they're doing well, as a starting point is great. The next thing is focus on one thing at a time to improve. Think about how you learn math. Typically, if you're kindergarten or first grade, you learn just how to do simple addition numbers 1 through 10. You don't just start off with the first day. Here's addition, subtraction, division, multiplication, and give someone a say, oh, gosh, you did all these three things wrong. That would be overwhelming. You focus, step at a time. Okay, I want to. I think now that you've brought that up, and I think I am going to make sort of a long, short form and a long form on that issue. But let me catch up with other comments here. Remco says the part about teaching to get rid of the ums. I asked the kids I work with to film themselves and to count by making marks. So thanks for sharing, Remco. Here's my. Here's my dilemma there. If you are working with people to improve their communication skills and you're spending time watching the film and counting the ums and uhs, my concern is that's what people fixate on. And it's not a problem that's fixed in an hour or even a day. Over a week, it is fixed. So when I'm spending a day training someone, typically I'll only mention the umps part once I give them the sticker and say, we're not going to talk about it the rest of the day because I want them to focus on other skills that can be built and changed right then and there. The UN requires a little bit of reprocessing the brain. Now quite often, even though we don't talk about it, the problem disappears in an hour or two because now they're more comfortable. The ums and us come up when you're uncomfortable. So it's a little bit of a nuanced distinction there, Remco, but I don't recommend if you have limited time with someone, having someone count the ums at us. The other thing I found is someone can give a 10 minute speech. They said two or three times. They're sitting there counting it, they're thinking, oh my God, I'm an idiot, I look like a fool, I sound like a fool. No one else in the room even noticed it. Everyone else thought the presentation was great. The person counting the US has now convinced themselves that they're awful. So we've destroyed their confidence. So the next speech they give, they're kind of so focused on not accidentally stepping on an or having an ah come out, they brought every other aspect of their speech down. Yeah, they didn't say ah, but now they're a boring speaker. So it can be very counterproductive. So I would caution you about that. The biggest tool, the biggest way of using the tool of video recording is not spotting the mistakes. I know that's contrarian. And people are like, what is TJ talking about? The number one way of using the tool of video to help someone become a presenter is to get them to do it again and again and again quickly in the same block of time. If it's a half day, a full day, to get them to the point where they can look at the video and say, wow, to quote Larry David, pretty, pretty good. You want them to actually like what they see. There may still be flaws, that's okay. But you want them to get to the point where they say, well, I would watch that person give a presentation. That's the magic of video. Because if all you're doing is fixating on, oh, you said I'm there. Oh, you look down at your paper once. Oh, you. It's a never ending stream of negativity and I do not recommend that. But I very much appreciate your comments, Remco, and I do hope you got some value of what I said. Sharon says, I'm a little bit late. So what does it mean to be authentic when you speak? Does it mean to express what you feel moment by moment? Not necessarily moment by moment, although I do think speakers who come across as authenticity certainly are not reading a speech like this or staring at PowerPoints. The problem with that is not authenticity. The problem is it's boring to people. So if you want to come across as authentic, you need to sound like you're being conversational. Now, you could be sharing a story that you've told a hundred times to other audiences about a flaw, a big problem, crisis in your life, and how you handled it. So it's not that you're thinking of it a fresh idea for the first time in the moment, but you do need to come across in a way where you seem like you're having a conversation with people and you're using a conversational tone of voice. And that's what is virtually impossible to do unless you have a master's degree in fine arts from the Yale School of Drama. If you're trying to follow a script. So you are going to come across more authentic if you are not following a script or reading a script or memorizing a script. And Sharon, what you can do. This whole video today will be available on demand as soon as we finish. So you'll be able to see the first eight minutes where I do talk at length about authenticity, but just briefly. It's typically, I put it in two categories. It's you sharing things about yourself, your own problems, your own flaws, your own mistakes, which most people are afraid to do. That's the positive side of authenticity. I do think there's another side of authenticity that doesn't get talked about as much, and that is certain people who talk about who. Who they hate, what they're angry about, their resentments. If you're talking about things that you're angry about and you want to attack people and get people angry and other people share the same angers and frustrations and enemies as you do, you may be seen as very authentic. Even if you paint your face bizarre colors, put bizarre wigs on and clown wigs on, you'll be seen as authentic by some. That's not my favorite type of authenticity, but I do see people like that described routinely by their fans as authentic. So thanks so much for that and, and don't worry about being late. I very much appreciate you here at all. And again, everything we're doing will be available on replay as soon as we finish. So that will be just a little bit after noon today. Remco says. Haha, yes, that's what I meant. Every day counting a note in their phone. Lost in translation. Okay, Remka, it sounds like we're on the same page. But I do want to stress there's more than one way to help people. I have one way that I do. You may have better ways. I mean, the reason I think I am good as a communications coach and as a public speaking trainer, media trainer, is I'm constantly scouring the world for good ideas that anyone else is putting out there. Then thinking about how can I adapt it, adopt it for my own clients and my own students. So we're all trying to learn from each other. We're all borrowing and mixing and matching. That is the creative process. I try to be creative in what I'm doing. And Remco, I know you are as well, so thanks so much. We can all learn. I'm sure you have some techniques that I haven't tried and haven't thought of. Okay. There was a question here that came up. I started talking about it and is often the case the more I gave what I thought was kind of a simple, straightforward 30 second answer, the more I realized, wow, there's a real nugget here that I'd like to share with people in a more structured on demand video later. So let me go back and look at that question because I wanted to go into a little more detail. Okay. The feedback. Let's talk specifically about that. Okay, so I'm going to do a short form for starters. And it's a different angle. I'm on a camera to angle for my friends on TikTok. So I'm going to hit record. What's the best way to give constructive feedback to a colleague? Giving a speech saying, hey, give me feedback. Well, it's not to say here are 27 things you did wrong. That's what they think they need. No, instead, catalog everything they're doing well so they do more of it. Then pick just one thing they need to improve. So that's the short form version of the constructive feedback. Obviously a lot gets lost truncating it down to just 20 seconds or so. And that's life. Would I love everyone in the world and a billion people to come right here for our live three hour session every day and then I'd never have to make any short form. Yeah, that would be great, I guess, but not going to happen. I have more people watch one short form video in a month than all the people who join us for the live. So you've got to pick your battles. You've got to figure out where can you use your talents, your time, your skills, your resources to reach the most people at least that's the thought process I go through here. So I try to create content in ways that can be accessed not the way I want, but the way you want, the way other people want want. So I have a couple of short form videos every day. Some are as short as 9 seconds long to give one tip, typically about 20 seconds long. And then I have a long form video. It could be five to ten minutes long. So those are three videos right there. We have a live show here most days Monday through Friday, although not next week. The first two or three days I'll be training on assignment and going to Washington D.C. and then finally I have 30 hour courses on communication skills and personal development skills that are available on my website and other platforms like Udemy, Skillshare, Coursera, places like that. So from nine seconds to 30 hours, I want to be as accessible to you and help you in the ways you want based on, in part, the time frame you want to invest. Everybody has a certain amount of time, from zero seconds to all day long on what they want to invest in improving themselves. I'm trying to be flexible to help people that way. Okay, let me go in a little more detail on this issue of really the best way to give feedback. And I'm going to go to camera one. I'll shift back for our tick tock friends. You got a colleague about to give a good timeout. Note to editor. Scratch that. I'm going to get my time, I'm going to set my time. You've got a colleague about to give an important presentation. They want to practice in front of you and they say, hey, can you give me some constructive feedback? Well, what do you do? You want to be helpful, you don't want to be negative, but you don't want to just tell them they're great because that's not really going to help them. What is the best way to give constructive feedback to someone on their communication skills, or for that matter, any of their skills? Well, here's what happens when I do it. Someone speaks, we record the whole thing. We both watch it together. Before I say anything. Then we finish watching, they turn to me. T.J. what'd you think? Go ahead, rip me apart. I can take it. I want to get great. Just have at it. Let me have it. They're expecting me to listen 93 things they did wrong. And truth be told, I couldn't tell them 93 things I think they did that were less than great. But that's not how I start. The starting point is I asked them what did you like about it? What are you talking about? I didn't like anything. Let's look again. Everybody does something well in the sense that they didn't make certain mistakes that other people make. Chances are your colleague had a good speaking speed, or maybe their volume was good, or maybe they moved their hands well, maybe their voice was nice and conversational. There's always something people do well. It's important for them to recognize that. Then I'll go through and tell them every single thing they did well. Everything I liked about their voice, their message, their stories, their example, their gestures, their movement, their eye contact, listing every single thing. Now, I'm not doing this to butter them up, and I'm not going to lie. I'm not going to say, oh, your volume was great, if they were talking like this and I could hardly hear them. No, I'm not going to lie to them. I'm giving them sincere praise in the form of feedback because I believe it is legitimate. So that's we do the second pass going through this speech. So now they're feeling a lot more relaxed. They're like, I thought I was so awful. I had no idea I was doing this many things. Well, something else happens. I have pointed out things they're doing well with their voice, their hands, their eyebrow going up to look expressive, whatever it is. And I'm giving them some praise that they've never heard anyone say. So what's happening now is they're thinking, this TJ guy, he must be pretty sharp. He's giving me specific, positive feedback. No one else has said, my family never said that. My boss never said that. So my credibility is gone. Again, none of this is lies. None of this is bs. It's all sincere, specific praise. And sometimes the praise is simply, you didn't say and. And, er, and have a lot of verbal tics, the way so many of my clients do. That can relax someone. Now, it may be that their speech is still incredibly boring and awful. It may be that they spoke so quickly I couldn't understand them, but at least they did certain things well. Perhaps it was no ums and uhs. Perhaps they had good hand movement or good eye contact. So we're stressing those positives and the person is feeling a lot more relaxed. They now feel like this is possible. I'm not as bad as I thought I was. And what's happening is they're thinking, well, this guy TJ seems pretty shrewd. He's giving me all this feedback, things I'm doing well, that no one else has said before and seems legitimate. He's not saying anything that sounds to me like he's just spinning me or buttering me up or trying to flatter me. It all seems legitimate. So then what I do is I ask the person to give another presentation, we record it, and I say, look, we got all day long to talk about the negatives, and of course you have some things that need to be improved. I'm not going to kid you. You're not perfect. Nobody's perfect. But what I want to do now is do another version of your presentation, and I'm going to record it. And the only task is for you to simply do more of the things you like. The things that I noted, the things that you noted. Do more of that. We've got all day long to talk about the things you don't like, believe me. And I have them give the whole presentation again. I record it, we watch it together. I don't say anything yet. And I just ask them, did you do more of the stuff that you said you liked? And typically, it's always yes. And I also asked, did you do anything a little bit better this time? Were you able to add on some of the good stuff to make the whole thing seem a little better? And typically the response is yes. So they're already feeling good. They're already feeling like they've made progress because of criticism. But it's criticism in the positive sense, not the negatives. Now is when we're ready to go to the flaws, the blunders, the distractions, the mistakes, the things that really bring people down. But we've started at a high level. The person emotionally is up here. They're feeling good about their baseline. They're feeling good about progress they've made already. So now what we do is we go through. And I'm going to ask them to say, what is the one thing you don't like that you think is changeable? And here's where I point out myself and I say, look, everyone can look at video of themselves and not like something. I can look at a video of myself and say, wow, I wish I had the hair I did when I was 18 years old. Wow, I wish I had the waistline of when I was 18 years old. But we can't change that today. Instead, we're going to focus on how we move, how we look, how we sound, our message, our story. Let's focus on things we can actually change. I want to know what you want to change, and then I will focus on Just one thing. And it could be a matter of looking at people more and not staring at a script. Say, why don't we do the whole thing again? But this time let's use a simple outline where there's just a few bullet points so there's nothing to stare down at and look at for three minutes at a time. You can glance down and look at people. I get them to do just one thing. I point out one flaw. But it's a flaw where there is a highly specific action that can be taken by the person to fix it. It's not general and abstract, like, well, it was really boring. I wouldn't want to listen to that. I feel sorry for your audience. Well, that's criticism, but it's not constructive in the sense that it's so general, it's so vague, it's so fuzzy. What do you do with that? Now quite often people are too boring and it's because the speaker is delivering 89 message points and it's rattata. It's just a conveyor belt of data and it's boring. So what I may do in that case is say, hey, let's try just one thing different this time. Let's put the slides away for a minute and I want you to talk this time and just cover one idea. And let's tell an example or a story to make that come alive based on an actual conversation you had with a client, a customer, a colleague, and we'll record that. And typically when the student is watching it, the client's watching it, their eyes get wide, they're like, wow, that's so much better. That's so much more interesting. I'd much rather watch this person speak. Okay, so now we have a template. So you had a 20 minute speech before with 189 bullet points that you found boring. Now you just saw a two minute speech where you focused on one idea. What if we just decided to focus on five ideas for this speech and you did essentially the same thing, you introduced the idea and you told a little story or example about it before going to the next one. And we only have five, we're in good shape and they may try that. So that is what I find is the most effective way to give constructive feedback. Catalog strengths, then focus on one flaw, one thing that can be improved at a time. Give a highly specific thing that's actionable to do. Record again and just try to do that one thing. When I ask people, focus on improving one thing for this next presentation, even if I don't Give feedback. They'll typically do it. If they try to improve three or four or five things, they will fail miserably. Human beings, myself included, are horrible at multitasking. So if you tell someone, look, you got to move your hands, not do this. You have to use a fuller range of your voice and not speak in a monotone. You have to walk around a little and not rock back and forth. And you've got to give a story for each one. 1. If you tell someone to do all those things in the next presentation, they're going to be worse than before, not better. So it's critically important to get them to focus on making just one improvement at a time. When they can see they've made specific improvement, then you really give feedback and say, look at this. It's great. You're focused on making one change and you did it, and that's great. So we have all these strengths. Yes, we still have flaws, we still have problems, but we now have a system. You cataloged your strengths. You focused on one flaw and a solution. You fixed that. Let's go to the next one. And sometimes someone might have 27 flaws. Okay, 27 takes later, we've gotten rid of them. Quite often it's really more like two or three or four problems. We fix those problems, and we are in great shape. So it could take four different practices on video to get them to that point. The magic moment for constructive feedback when it comes to communication skills is getting someone to the point where they've worked through every flaw, worked on some improvement, and can now watch a video of themselves and say, wow, if I can be half as good as that person is, I'm going to be the best person at this company presentation or this conference. And they're pointing to a video of themselves. Now they have real confidence because of the constructive criticism you gave them. Okay, so that was. That was almost 12 minutes. But that was really important stuff, I got to tell you, and certainly a lot of other communications consultants know that and advocate that. But I do find it still kind of blows people's minds when I do it in real life, because so many people, when they're dealing with family and friends, they are used to just someone saying, we got to stand up straight. Stop saying, don't fiddle with your hands in your pockets. People think they're being helpful just by telling negative things. And I just don't have any evidence to show that that really creates change behavior, whether it's communication skills or pretty much any other skill. More comments have come in barb our fantastic community manager is with us. More views with short form videos, but is the return on investment there? So Barb brings up a great point which is there are a lot of people who do really well in short form video, but you don't get much ad revenue from it. And also it's just more easy to forget. So what sort of a long form meaningful connection are you building with a community if all you do is short form? So it is kind of the low hanging fruit and people liken it to a sugar high. And there are people who just do short form videos and have millions of views a month and might end up making $89 a month and it's not enough to pay for anything and it doesn't build to long term clients or consulting or other gigs either. So for a lot of people, just chasing views from short term might not get much return on investment. Whether you're defining return in terms of money, ad revenue, partnerships, community building, there's a lot of different things you could value. And certainly there are people who only focus on the short form videos because it's, quote, easier to get views and it doesn't add up too much. For me, it's all about how can you reach people where they want to be and how can you be flexible if you are somebody who has some expertise and you want to share your expertise with the world. There are a lot of ways of doing it. I mean I do it in the form of 200 plus, some of them 30 hour long courses. I do it in the form of books because some people like to read. I've done it in the past with podcasts. I'm about to start podcasting and a lot of our stuff will be audio on the audio only formats. Some of it is in a long form like this where I'm here with you for three hours a day and answering questions in detail. And some of it is in more edited, structured 8 minute, 5 minute, 10 minute videos. And yes, some of it is in short form, 9 to 20, 25 second video. So for me it's a small piece. It's one of many, many pieces of how I try to communicate to help people. And from Barb's question, what's the return on investment? I invest very, very, very little time creating short films form video because I typically not always, as you've seen today, I typically do it in one take. I'm not writing the script, I'm not doing numerous takes and I personally am not doing any of the editing. Now we have different editors and we try to treat everyone fairly, but the overall amount of money I spend editing and producing short form videos a month is very small. It's a very small amount of money. So I'm able to reach hundreds of thousands of people if you combine all the audiences on different social media who see my short form video. So I chalk it up as a great return on the investment because it can sometimes lead to people who become aware of me, who never heard of me before, who are then willing to perhaps dabble with a long form video. Maybe some of them come into our live right now. So it's a, it's a part of overall awareness building. Brand building is how some people rationalize it. So I don't think it's the only thing. Although there are some people who are, are true masters at the art form, I do not consider myself a master of the art form form of short form video. But there's a young woman, I believe she's about 19 years old, not far away from me in Miami, Jenny Hoyos, where every short form video she does has millions and millions of views. And she's wildly entertaining and fun and funny. She's kind of like a Mr. Beast just for short form. So she certainly seems like she's able to build an entire career out of short form. Here's the other thing, Barb, that I like about short form is that so many people, business people, other experts, authors, tell themselves, I'm gonna start a YouTube channel, I'm gonna start a social media channel and make video. And they've been telling themselves that for years. And it just seems like too high a bar to produce the typical eight minute video and the scripting. And then they got to think about the teleprompter and maybe they'd shoot one. And then they're editing it for three months and then they finally post one. It doesn't get much. What I like for a lot of people with the short form video is it's just a lower barrier to entry. It could be you just talking to a camera without any editing. I mean, I certainly did that for years. And it's a way of getting people started. It's a way of getting people comfortable talking on camera. And then maybe you go to longer form videos, maybe you do live stuff, maybe you make online courses. So I really like short form for a lot of people as just the easiest gateway into creating content in a video format. But I certainly agree, I think, with your sentiment, which is you shouldn't just be creating short form because all you care about is likes and views. That is not really that meaningful a metric. So I think you and I have talked about that before, and I think we're in pretty much strong agreement there. Mark has just stopped by, says, I'm driving, but I pulled over to type this question. I know you speak a lot about crisis communications. What do you have about writing crisis communications plans? Okay, well, Mark, thanks so much. And if you're back on the road again, I understand. So there is a whole industry on crisis communications where consultants are hired and they write these big, long, gigantic manuals specific to a company, and they charge 40, 50, $100,000 for it. And the company quite often pays them, says, thanks a lot, they put it on the shelf. They check a box for their insurance company that, hey, we've done the crisis communications plan. We're in good shape. And they never look at it again. And then a crisis happens, and the CEO wants to tell. Wants to be forthcoming. You know, people are injured or something, wants to express some sympathy. And the communication, the head of communications will say, here's really what we need to do. Here's what we need to say. We need to get out front on this. The CEO needs to hold a press conference or go live on streamyard or somehow be accessible, take questions. And then there's a chief legal counsel in so many companies. And the chief legal counsel is maybe making 10 times as much money as the head of communication. The head of communications may make 100,000 that the Chief Legal officer is making a million dollars a year. So the chief legal officer is going to the same country club as the CEO and their friends, their buddies, they may play golf together. And so the chief legal officer has more play, has more influence on the CEO. And what happens time and time again is the legal officer gives good legal advice, which is don't say anything because you might create more legal jeopardy. And the CEO doesn't. They put out some bland statement a day or two later, and it makes the problem worse. Now, maybe they don't get legal liability in more trouble, but they've so destroyed their public reputation that they're out of business. Great, you didn't get a lawsuit bankrupting you. That's the good news. The bad news is you're bankrupt because you have no more customers, because you destroyed goodwill, because you did not talk to people in a time of crisis when they really wanted to hear from you. So, Mark, as you may detect, I'm perhaps a little jaded on crisis communications plans because to me, the plan is very simple. Something Bad happens. You as an organization have to publicly communicate to the world what you know, what you're going to do to make things better. If something bad has happened and it's your fault, you need to express sympathy for anyone who's been harmed. It's not the same thing as admitting legal liability, but sympathy, acknowledging the facts, letting the bad news come from you rather than you hiding behind curtains and closed doors and locked fences, because that always makes you look the worst and it makes people think you're guilty. And I see it every day when corporations actually have crises is they refuse to talk, to report, oh, it's negative. We don't want to be attached to this story. Well, if it's a true crisis, by definition it affects your long term and short term reputation. So you have no alternative because if you don't respond, they're still going to do the story. And if you don't speak on camera publicly now, you've given the reporters, especially the TV reporters, the option of saying, and we reached out to the CEO of the Acme Communications company and he refused to comment because obviously he's so guilty and ashamed of the horrible things they've done is the subtext. So that's my frustration with communications plans, Mark, is they're all completely worthless for the most part, if you don't have one thing in play, and that is the willingness of the head of your organization, whether it's a CEO or a managing director or chairperson of a nonprofit, to talk about what has happened. And these days, when video cameras are everywhere and everyone has a cell phone, I think it's frankly insane to just put out a written statement, because a written statement says, I'm a coward, I'm ashamed, I don't want to face questioning and I don't want anyone to see me. So I think in the modern world, a crisis happens that within an hour you need to have some statement saying, here are the facts as we know them, here's everything we are doing to try to solve this problem, or if it's a fire and explosion, to try to reduce its impact, whether it's evacuating people, here's everything we're doing and here's what we plan on doing to make things right. And you can do it with one push of a button to go live on a company Facebook page if you want to, or use a platform like streamyard, call and email every single reporter and say, hey, I'm going to be live and two minutes on streamyard or Zoom, and you can ask me any questions But I am going to start off with a statement. And during a crisis, quite often the only answer is I don't know if something has just happened. If there's an explosion at a factory that you're in charge of and they ask you how did it start? How many people were harmed? You don't know, don't be afraid to say, I don't know. What I can tell you is we contacted local, state and federal authorities to help us with this. We've contacted all the relevant regulatory agencies. Our focus right now is doing everything we can to safely help people. And I'll be back here in an hour to give you an update. If you do that, there's going to be a lot of sympathy for, for you, with the public, with key stakeholders. If you just say, let me hide, let me stay in the conference room where I talk to my legal counsel and head of investor relations and the lobbyist and we just keep putting people off and say no comment, no comment, then you're going to destroy your reputation. And that's the real problem of most media crises. It's not necessarily the legal challenges, although there can be legal challenges. There's no doubt. It's. If you destroy your reputation in the modern world, you destroy brands, you destroy, you vaporize billions of dollars. You. It's a little bit of a dated example now, but the, the BP Horizon incident, which is now about 15 years or maybe longer when that happened, their CEO did such a horrible job communicating even though he was a good communicator, that BP lost billions of dollars of market cap because of how their reputation was hawked. And if you have an interest in that, I do have, I think it's like an hour long analysis of crisis communications and how that was handled in the bp and that's in my online course on crisis communication skills. You may want to check that out. It's on my website@mediatrainingworldwide.com and it's also on the Udemy platform and somewhere I believe it's actually on YouTube as well. So you may want to check that out. But Mark, I don't know if I really did you justice for that, but to me communications plans for the most part are worthless. Is it helpful to have some plan? If you are a school and you need a system of a phone tree to call every parent to let them know the school's in lockdown? Okay, you need to have some of that. But the, in general, the, in the crisis communication industry that sells executives on. We're going to give you this big plan that's, you know, 322 pages that no one ever looks at, especially in a crisis. I don't put a lot of stock in that. Okay. All right. We are going to take a short break here. It's after 10. I'm going to show you some ads I made for the Amazon Influencer program. I'm showing these in part not to sell you a whole bunch of stuff, although it wouldn't bother me if you did, but to show you an example of how simple and easy it is to make ads in the modern world in a way where you can get in front of people and you can make some money some of the time. So I'll be back live in just a few minutes taking more of your questions here. And sometimes make 100 in a day. And it can look like I'm anywhere. Now, what I like about this green screen is it's got stability to it. There's never any wrinkles. It's huge. It goes down easily. It goes back up. And if you're using a different set, you push it all the way down and you can just put it in a corner so it really is flexible. It looks great, and it will help make your next production really look first class. I like books, but I don't like them falling down and cluttering up the house and the office. That's why I love these bookends. They don't call attention to themselves. They do one thing. They keep my books nice, neat together and not falling down. I use them on my shelves. They work well at home and the office. If you want to have a neater book collection, you can't go wrong with these bookends. I love seltzer water and sparkling water, but I hate having to go to the store to get it. I don't like more and more bottles for landfill. That's why I love my Soda Stream. I can take regular water and I can make it sparkling. It tastes great. I love it because it fills me up during the day. I'm less likely to snack, but it just tastes good. It's more interesting than plain tap water, and you can make it anytime you want. I get bored drinking plain water, tap water. I love sparkling water, and yet I don't like having to drive to the store, constantly stock up on all those bottles, and then having empties around the house. That's why I love using this soda sense CO2 cylinder. It works perfectly with my machine that creates tap water and turns it into sparkling water. If you like sparkling water. This CO2 cylinder has done a great job for me. The Stanley stapler is powerful. I mean, don't point it at anyone. When you use this, whatever you're stapling is going to stick. Just make sure you don't get it to stick to the table by accident. It's a powerful, powerful stapler. My family, we use it around our home. I use it in my office. It is effective. This Canon camcorder is still useful. I love being able to use this in a training. I can flip the viewfinder around. I love being able to attach it so easily. Light battery. It really is a very flexible camera that still has a lot of utility in the modern world. This Amazon Basics tripod is a very effective little tool. Now it comes up to about this high when it's fully extended. But it's light, it's simple, it's flexible. What I like about it is when it's fully compressed, it fits right into my computer bag so I don't have to have some big equipment, fancy equipment bag taking it. I put my video cameras and this and my laptop in one bag. I put it over my shoulder on the plane and it allows me to go anywhere in the world with tripod ready. This Sony condenser microphone is the one I've used for years and years for all of my YouTube videos. It gives clear, powerful audio. It is professional in every sense. Sony, of course, well known, well deserved reputation for electronic excellence. If you're looking to up your game, try the Sony Condenser Microsoft microphone today. Of course you want to look your best. I want to look my best. But you want to sound your best too. That's why I always put in a microphone into my iPhone 15. This microphone works perfectly. It boosts my sound. I don't have to get right next to my cell phone. I can be further away and the audio still sounds great. You're going to want to use this microphone phone if you want to create professional looking and sounding videos. We're back live. Hi, I'm T.J. walker. This is the T.J. walker Success Channel. This is the one place, to my knowledge, in the entire world where you can come every single day, Monday through Friday and ask questions. Any questions that relate to communication skills. Whether it's talking one on one to small groups, large groups, personal communication with friends, family, professional communication with colleagues, clients, clients, prospects, how to speak in a job interview, how to speak to a boardroom, how to pitch investors, how to speak to the news media. If all of a sudden you get a call from the BBC, cnn, or some other major news network. That's what we're here to do. I'm TJ Walker, and I've been training corporate executives, political leaders, civic leaders around the globe for decades. I have more than 2 million online students from every country in the world except for North Korea. Still working on that one. And I personally trained in 45 different nations. Presidents of countries, prime ministers, Nobel peace prize winners, senators, members of parliament, you name it. Everyone's different and yet everyone's the same. All human beings have to communicate, and all human beings at some time are worried about, am I really coming across the best I can? So that's what we try to do, is help. Right here. You can always speak to me right here on camera. We can share the screen and do this together. You can ask questions, you can give a sample pitch and get feedback from me and other members of the community. You can debate me, you can disagree on some of my points. That's perfectly fine. There's more than one way to help people become more effective at speaking. Special hello to all of our good friends on Tick Tock. I see Dan Cagle has joined us again. Danny, Michael, so many great folks who've joined us. I apologize if I missed your questions on TikTok because I can't see them as easily because they're coming in on a cell phone. But if you want to guarantee that I see your questions, just hop on over to our YouTube channel and not only can you post the questions and I'm guaranteed to see them, but you can also come online if you want. And we are live here. We don't have a huge staff. Which makes me realize during that commercial break, it's not like I had some production assistant run over and say, tj, your pocket square has gotten crooked. So I'm going to correct that myself right now. Addis Abba says hello on TikTok. Thanks so much for jumping in and saying hello again. If I did miss any of your questions or comments on TikTok, please just come on over and join us on the YouTube platform. Although we are broadcasting live on pretty much every social media platform today. And I can see, I can see the questions coming in because they're all filtered through the program of. Of Streamyard. Now, King writes, you taking like the radio. I'm assuming you mean you're talking like the radio, my friend. You are really boring. Well, King, I respect the fact that to you, I am boring. And which case you got not a million, but tens of millions, maybe a billion options on just TikTok alone, YouTube, other places. So I do want to be very candid with you. This is not the channel for everyone. If you want Mr. Beast style, anticipation every second. What's next? What's next? What's next? Watch Mr. Beast. He's very good at what he does and gets hundreds of millions of views for his videos. I'm not trying to be Mr. Beast. I'm not as funny, I'm not as entertaining. What I am good at is helping people become better communicators. You don't have to have my style because, King, you might feel like you never want to have my style. That's okay. I don't want you to adopt my style. I want you to have your style and for you to come across exactly the way you want. But I will give you, and I mean this in a friendly, sincere way, King, I'll give you an opportunity to share your criticism directly. All you have to do is hop on over to our YouTube channel, click the button for Streamyard, and you'll be right here on screen and everyone can see you. Because there's more than one style, more than one way of being a good communicator. And I can tell you, no matter who you are, you can be the greatest speaker in the world. Somebody's not going to like you. Somebody's not going to like your style. I could point to any wildly famous successful motivational speaker, political leader in the world and find instances of that person where there's an audience and somebody fell asleep, somebody else thinks they're a horrible speaker. So you can't please everyone and you can't let yourself get bothered when you do get criticism. That's one of the things that holds so many people back from speaking out on video. Whether it's live video like this, whether it's making a TikTok video, whether it is making a long form 10 minute video on YouTube. Is this fear of criticism? What if nobody likes me? Well, you haven't really accomplished much until you've gotten criticism. Because anyone who's successful, anyone who's wildly successful is going to have a lot of people who've written negative things about them. That's just a fact of life. If you doubt me, go to Amazon. Look at the best book you've ever read in your life. It might have 100,000 reviews, it might have 4.5 average, but there's going to be hundreds of people who gave it a one star review and said, this is the most overrated book ever. And it's the book you think is beyond criticism because it's so good. Now, I'm not suggesting I'm beyond criticism, but I can tell you, I might not have Mr. Beast level success, but for me and my aspirations and my lifestyle, I consider myself very successful. And I enjoy what I do. And this is what I do. And I go into it knowing not everyone's going to love it. And that's okay. So I do want to thank you for stopping by. And again, I am sincere. You can disagree with me and you can even share the stage with me, King, and we can have an honest discussion. So thanks so much for stopping by. Another question has come in from our YouTube community and it's how is AI helping you with your presentations? Okay, I want to do a short form and a long form on that. So I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to start with a short form. How can you use artificial intelligence to improve your presentations? I don't recommend that you say, hey Chet, give me a speech written word for word that I can just read. It's not going to sound like you, but what you can do is ask for suggestions on topics that would be of interest to your audience. So I'm not in love with that short form answer, but it is a question that comes up that I do grapple with. I'm going to see if I can do a better job in this long form one and see if I can be more helpful. Some, some questions lend themselves more to a short form answer. It's. It's typically easier to do a long form because then you don't have to make as many choices and put things in priority. You can just share all of your insights. So I'm going to take a stab at that for the long form and I'm switching to camera one now and let me make it a little easier for our TikTok friends to see. So how can you use artificial intelligence to improve your presentations? Well, there's the easy way or what seems like an easy way. You can go to chat GPT or some other AI program and say, I got to give a speech on this. Please give me a 10 minute speech. And it will spit out this script that seems perfect and you can try to memorize it, you can read it, you can convert it into bullet points or a PowerPoint, you can put it into a teleprompter and maybe it will seem professional, but chances are it's not going to seem like you. Now, does this mean you should never use artificial intelligence? No, that's not what I'm saying, but I think you need to be very strategic in how you use AI to become a better presenter. So I'll tell you what I do. I make videos on a daily basis right here, short form and long form. And most of the time, the issues, the questions come from me really working with clients in the real world face to face, or they come from you writing in a question or joining me in a live show asking a question. But sometimes I need more questions, I need more topics. So this is a great place to use artificial intelligence. I'll give a detailed prompt and write in something like give me 20 topics that relate to communication skills that would be interesting for short form video or long form video and social media and that are not just the obvious issues like how do I stop saying and. Or how can I keep from being nervous when I present? And it will spit out 20 topics. And I'll say, how about 20 more? It'll spit out 20 more and I'll say, how about 20 MORE? It'll give me 20 more. So I'll typically get about 60 topics, headlines, topics for subjects that relate to what I do in communication skills. And then I will scan these and typically out of 60, I'll find half a dozen, maybe 10, where I think, ah, that's really spurring me onto something that's really motivating me. This is hitting something that I've sensed with clients and students for a long time, but no one's ever asked it quite that way. So it's going to allow me to talk on that subject in a way that's a little bit different. But I'm not going to let the AI write it. I'm going to let it suggest the topic. I'm now going to use my expertise, my insights, my experiences, my stories to flesh it out. So whether I'm doing a short form video for 30 seconds or doing a longer video for 8, 10, 12 minutes, that's going to come from me, not the AI. That's how I happen to use artificial intelligence to help me with presentations. Now, there are other ways of doing it. You could have a traditional PowerPoint presentation with lots and lots of bullet points and you look at it and you think, oh my God, this is incredibly boring. You could use an artificial intelligence program and give it the command of, hey, give me a new PowerPoint presentation and have only one idea per slide and come up with AI artwork, a visual, an image that will dramatize that idea. And now you may have something really powerful. Now you can show slides where it's one idea at a time. You've got an image to make your idea more memorable. Now, that's not how most people are using AI, but it is an example of how it could dramatically improve your communication. The other area where I personally like to use AI is for titles. Now I use a program called Vidiq and it has an AI function where I describe my video or I have a working title and it then rewrites the title using artificial intelligence to make it more user friendly, to make it more search engine friendly, to optimize it. I don't pride myself in being the world's greatest titler of videos. So it's not something where I have tremendous pride of authorship. So I'm happy to sort of outsource that. What I care about is my presentation. But so much of the power of my presentation is how many people see it. So I can use artificial intelligence to rewrite the title to attract more people, to invite more people in. Instead of 100 people seeing it, 10,000 people seeing it. That's a really powerful, positive way of using artificial intelligence. The other thing you can do that I do quite often is I will download the transcript of my entire presentation, whether it is a speech, whether it's an online video, and then I will take that entire transcript, maybe it's 10,000 words, and I will ask the AI to give me a great professional summary of that. This can now go in to the description of my social media video. This can now be used in a newsletter where I try to help people who just want to read and don't want to watch the video. Or I may use it as a way of getting people to want to watch the video. So this isn't me outsourcing the hard work in my brain to a computer. It's taking my ideas, the 30 minutes or the 10 minutes of my presentation and all those words, and it's simplifying it, it's condensing it. Now I could do that. Anyone who creates an original speech or presentation can always figure out a way of narrowing it down and eliminating 80%. But that's really time consuming. It's not a lot of fun and it's not that creative. Not suggesting editing skills aren't important, but that is an area where I feel very comfortable using artificial intelligence, where it saves me massive amounts of time. And what it comes up with, it's still my ideas, it's distilling my ideas. Yes, you've got to prove it and check it occasionally. You can Botch something or distort it. But for the most part, you know, there's the phrase garbage in, garbage out. Well, if it's my ideas, I don't think that's garbage. It's good stuff in, good stuff out. It's just a shortened truncated version. So now you've got the description. You can also use it if you want to add transcripts. It can give you correct pronunciation, notes editor, scratch that out. You can also use it for creating transcripts. It can clean up your raw transcript and put in proper grammar and spelling and all of the things that will make it easy to read. So that's another tool. So yes, if you are a communicator and if you are a speaker and you speak to live audiences and you speak in social media and you make videos, AI is not going to replace you yet. But it can be a great tool to make you even more effective and to reach more people. Okay, so that was kind of a long version answering that question, question. So I hope you found that helpful. So by the way, we're going to finish out the week. Not yet. We still have an hour and 20 minutes. So we got plenty of time left today for your questions and your thoughts. But I do want to give you a heads up. I will be going live on Amazon and showing you how to do Amazon live. It's, it's kind of similar to a home shopping network where I will be talking about products I like and recommend with the hopes of motivating you to become an influencer yourself if you want to. If you're looking to speak more, get more practice, get more practice on camera, Promote businesses and products you like, maybe make a little money. It's a pretty easy thing to do. And I'll be showing you step by step how I do that. I see Adam has joined us in just a moment. I'll be coming to you. Oh, and I see he's posted a few. Come, let me just bring you on rather than read your comments. And Adam, if you want to turn your microphone on, we'd be more than happy to hear you.

How you doing, dj?

Fantastic. How are you today?

I'm doing great.

Yes, you had some thoughts on the artificial intelligence and appreciate you stopping by and saying hello as well. Share with us your thoughts.

So I joined a little bit late, but what I got from your, your speech, I think it was for a long form video. I agree that you can use, you can use AI and everything and most definitely speaking or doing a presentation and AI will be more of your ally than your enemies. It will not replace you, but it can help you. You, whether you're a content creator, whether you're a speaker or a communicator, AI will not replace you in any way now. Not at least in, in two decades maybe, but more it will help you. It will be your ally. And most definitely you can use AI. There are things that AI can replace. Editing maybe, but in, in speaking you most definitely cannot replace AI. At least not now.

Well, I, I mostly agree with you. I do think there are some jobs, there are some corporate copywriting jobs, advertising marketing jobs where AI is allowing companies to say, you know, why are we paying this marketing firm $10,000 a month? I can do this very quickly with one assistant and have the AI create this text marketing tools and do it for 1500 dollars a month. So I, I won't say that nobody's losing their jobs. Especially you know, there are a lot of companies that have tons and tons of similar products. Whether it's fashion or let's say a diamond company that has 10,000 different style rings and they want to rewrite the copy for different websites at ebay, keep it fresh all the time. That used to really take a lot of man hours, people hours doing that. And that really can be done with AI and some corporate communications people can lose jobs. So I won't say that no one can lose their job. I do think if you are an expert, an author, a consultant, and you have true unique expertise as I like to think I do, and you're already helping people around the world. We are in a time now where AI could be your best friend. And I think you and I are kind of sharing the same sentiments there where it can be a great enhancement. But I don't know, I mean no one really knows the future. Things change so dramatically and the rate of change gets faster and faster with the power of AI and the Internet and, and databasing growth processing skills. So no one really knows how quickly things will change. I mean my understanding is right now I could feed into AI every one of my 200 plus courses and my books, feed it all in, in a database and then say to the AI now produce three new videos a day that are all a little bit different, that all pull upon sentiments people are talking about online today that pull from the news and create the script, use my voice. Because AI already does a great job with voice, uses my image. So AI could in theory create daily videos for me and I could put myself out of business. Now I haven't done that Yet, But I've seen enough demonstrations. I mean, conceptually, all of those pieces are there. So what we don't really know is at what point does the AI get so much better creating music, creating movies than what people do? I mean, I don't think we're that far away. Where from Hollywood producers say, I'm tired of dealing with these prima donna actors who want all these perks and $20 million and directors and all that. I'm just going to give some prompts to an AI and say, create a romantic comedy and have it borrow from and just name the top five grossing romantic comedies of all time. Just say, pull from these. Have a really beautiful sexy male and female in it. Have sort of a typical drama of they meet, they didn't like each other at first, then they were forced together again, and then they fell in love and then they're happily lab. But then there was still a problem, but then they got back together in the end. I mean, most romantic comedies are basically that. I don't think we're that far away from an AI be able to do the whole thing. And a producer can do that. Cut out all the directors, the lighting people, the gappers, the actors, the editors, and it be under control. So whether that happens in six months or 12 years, I do think that's happening.

Well, I agree on the. Well, I agree on everything. Really? Yes, AI is moving really fast. We went from like transportation with horses to cars, I think, in a very long time. But from, I don't know, inventing cars to like the, like, how do I say it? Yes, everything is moving really fast from the things, the milestones in technology, the things that used to take 10 years to do, now take two to three years. So yes, we are moving fast. But I do think that if you are an expert in what you're doing, like for example, a unique editor, someone who has a unique style and a normal editor, a normal editor will be replaced by. But a unique editor will not be as easy to replace as a normal editor. So if you're an expert in your field, regardless, editing, communication, regardless, if you're an expert and you have a unique editor value to give other than the normal or the average speaker, you will definitely be harder to replace. So it's something to motivate people in their fields to not just be normal, but to be an expert or to give you unique value.

And I think that's a trend we've seen with the Internet in general, where it's easier and easier for anyone in the world to Find the biggest expert. So simply being okay or pretty good, a lot of those people are getting squeezed out of the economy. And this isn't necessarily always a good thing. It's more of a winner take all economy. It creates more inequality, but it is a fact of life. And that happened before AI because now anyone can go on and say, well, who's the best heart surgeon in the world? And do you know who's the best, who's the single best divorce attorney in my state? They can find that easily. People didn't have access to that information before. And people who are simply average or mediocre can find the demand for their services plummeting. Susan just writes in and says, my husband's company just replaced 10% with artificial intelligence. So there are people who are going to lose their jobs. There's absolutely no doubt about it. It is happening. I think now what we are seeing here in the United States anyway is unemployment is lower than it's been in 60 years. So for right now, all these productivity gains have not resulted in net losses of job. Any one person could get fired. But our economy's been stronger than, than ever before. Not a lot of people like to admit that for political reasons, but our economy has never been stronger. Is it perfect? Is there some inflation? Sure. But AI has not created net losses of employment in the United States or certainly any country that I've seen. Doesn't mean it couldn't though. It doesn't mean we don't get to the point where it's so good. I mean, we already seen with robotics putting some sort of low level workers out of a job. I mean, that's happened for decades now. But now we're at the point where technology AI is putting educated workers. That's happening to lawyers, it's happening to radiologists. Because there are certain things that are simply done better with more computer processing power. Adam, now correct me if I'm wrong. You're an editor, correct?

Yes.

How would you program an AI to do what you do and to do it ideally as good or better than you. So you could in theory have a thousand clients at once, and they're getting great results because of how you're directing the AI to do what you want?

Well, I would like to think of myself as someone who cannot be 100% replaced by AI. It is impossible, I've made sure of that. But I can say that it can save my time in many ways. For example, in a video, you cut the pauses, the parts where you say, or there's like just A pause maybe. And by the way, this, like, this exists now. This, this is available now where you can cut the pauses, maybe add automatic subtitles, and then, yeah, I think it can, like, do the basic editing, which is subtitles removing pauses, maybe adding color correction. And AI already exists in video editing, but in very, like, small parts where it's not noticeable, but now it is. And for, let's say how to get a thousand clients, like, how it can help me to get a thousand clients, I could say automate, like emails, maybe DMS called outreach. Help me with that. And just. I don't know how to describe it. Do you know Jarvis from Iron Man? Are you familiar with the movie?

You know, I'm not a big Iron man fan. I think I've seen parts of it. I. Tony Stark is the lead character. Robert Downey Jr. But I'm not a fan.

Well, it's no need to be.

It's.

It's simply Iron man had an AI called Jarvis. Jarvis used to call people for him, like, have an automative, like, voice call people for him. And so we can. As an editor, I would use that. I would program an AI to contact the clients, do the meetings for me, make everything on schedule, and I just do the editing, which requires creativity. The part where I need to be creative, that's my job. And anything else leave to AI. So, yeah, I can, can definitely save a lot of time, but I would like to think happily that it cannot replace me 100%.

You know, it just occurred to me, I completely forgot of another application of AI, which I did a couple of years ago. I had a couple of artificial intelligence language translators come to me, say, tj, we want to take your courses in English. Sadly, I only speak English and dub them using the power of artificial intelligence, where it's your voice, but you will be seen speaking in Mandarin and Korean and all these languages. And while I'm on a lot of platforms, the one that generates the most number of students and revenue for me is Udemy. So I wrote to Udemy and said, hey, I've been approached by some language translation companies. I want to make sure it's okay with you. Can we do these courses using artificial intelligence that pulls from my voice and has the same content to make it accessible to people? I want to make sure I'm not violating any rules. They said, absolutely, no problem. You can do it. So we did about two dozen courses in half a dozen languages. Spanish, Italian, I think Mandarin. The courses were launched and they had some good reviews. They weren't Wildly profitable yet. But after about four months, Udemy says, hey, you're breaking our policies. You're not allowed to use artificial intelligence for voice. I'm like, wait a minute, I have an email right here saying, I can do this. I was concerned about this. I've now invested a lot of time and the AI partners invest a lot of time and money. But Udemy has its own. It's their platform. They can do what they want. They can decide tomorrow that you're not allowed to be on our platform unless you have blonde hair. It's their platform. And so there was nothing I could do. Every course had to be taken down. But that was a couple of years ago and it sounded to my ear great. I mean, again, I'm not fluent in the languages it was doing it in. But for someone trying to make their content available to all languages and they're doing it from their own platform, that's another great way of using a power of AI to reach more people with your presentations. Because being able to present to someone in their own native language is obviously more powerful than just seeing a subtitle below. And it was sophisticated enough that they were able to sort of, I guess, move my lips to make it sort of track. So it, it didn't look really weird and disjointed with this, the audio, not tracking with the mouth movement. So that's yet another application. Right. Adam, good to hear from you. Hope your studies are going well and looking forward to working with you and partnering as your schedule opens up. I want to say hello to Susan joining us today. Susan, thanks so much. Susan says I'm exploring the Amazon Live side of affiliate marketing. Thanks for that. And Susan, I will be talking about Amazon Influencer lately or later today. And once you become an Amazon Influencer, you've got really two main options. You can create a video, edit it, refine it, however you want to do it, or in my case, I just shoot it once and upload it. That video typically, not always, but typically goes on the product page. But it could go on Amazon Inspire their version of a TikTok. It could go plenty of other places. It could go on other product pages where someone can watch it. If they watch it, then buy the product, you get an affiliate commission. They also have Amazon Live, which is live, just as you would expect from that name. And then from the Amazon Live, it becomes an on demand video. So if someone comes to your storefront, they can look at all of your Amazon Live. So I've now done, I believe, six of these if you're at all interested, you can go to my storefront on Amazon and I've linked to it in the description of my page on YouTube. You'll see it. It's. It's a fairly long URL. It's just Amazon.com shop tjwalkersuccess. If you're like me, that's too much to remember. But that's pretty much everyone's address on Amazon is they have shop and then the person's channel name. So that's how it is if you want to check that out.

Thank you for having me, tj.

Thanks so much.

Thank you.

Have a good day. Great. Have a good weekend. Thanks for stopping by. Okay. I'm going to be answering more questions, creating more short form and long form video. By the way, Mark, I realize that you are driving, but I do want to. If you take another break or you're pulling over to get some gas or anything like that, feel free to join us. You can either type in another question or you can even join us right on screen. I'm happy to talk to you because I kind of feel like you asked a perfectly valid question and I kind of went off on a diatribe. I was sincere in everything I said and I'm sure there is some value with crisis communications counselors doing plans, but you kind of set me off on an area there and I hope some of it was helpful. But I'm more than happy to have a discussion with you. I don't want to seem like I'm not willing to discuss the validity of crisis communications plans. Great. All right, let's let me practice what I was just talking about. So I mentioned to you that I do in fact use artificial intelligence to give me ideas. I don't let artificial intelligence write the script for a whole course. I don't let artificial intelligence write a whole book. Although, interestingly enough, this is a topic that I think about like late at night, believe it or not, before I'm about to sleep, which is how can I use artificial intelligence to help more people who like reading books? Because I have a number of 30 hour courses. I mean, I have a course on storytelling, for example, that is about 30 hours long. And presumably it would not be difficult using artificial intelligence to turn every video into text, a text, text, transcript. And, you know, 30 hours is going to be, you know, probably a couple hundred thousand words, more than enough for the length of a book. I would love to figure out a way of downloading the video into a transcript, taking all of those transcripts Putting it into an AI and asking the AI now rewrite all of this to make it a good book on storytelling. So one of those things in my wish list, along with 189 other business ideas, is to find some partner who will do this. So if any of you are watching and this interests you, let me know. I would love to do some kind of 5050 joint venture where my online courses through the power of AI are massaged, edited, refined and improved and turned into books. And then we can publish them right on Amazon. So what's happened now is I put my hands a little too close to the camera and it messed up the autofocus. I'm going to switch. And there I went to different camera angles again. My friends on TikTok, if you want to know what I'm talking about, come over to YouTube and you'll see what I'm talking about because we have a number of different camera angles. But I do appreciate everyone on TikTok who has stopped by today. I do appreciate that. So if any of you have an interest in doing a publishing joint venture, that is one of those things on my to do list. But there's so many other interesting, exciting options. I haven't gotten to that yet. Shira says. So what happened finally with your videos on Korean, Mandarin and other languages? Are you still broadcasting to those other language markets? Sharon Basically nothing's happening. It, it, it's kind of dead. So I own when I created these courses in other languages through a partnership with artificial intelligence companies, it was really just for the UDEMY platform because that's, that was the main area where I was really getting traffic and marketing exposure and selling a lot. And UDEMY forced me to not delete them, but to make them private, meaning no one can ever see it again. If someone's already in there, they can see it, but it's not something anyone can find. Therefore it makes no money. They're essentially dead. And I don't really know what to do about it because I have no way of knowing how to market a course, public speaking course in Korean and native with me using the Korean language. And it's too small a market for me to allocate time thinking and going and finding partners in Korea. But if you know of anyone, let me know. I can certainly give you or anyone who writes to me and ask access to activities. I'm not violating any rule of any platform if I give a private pass to someone to take one of those courses. So if you're at all interested or if you have ideas on how to help more people with it, then by all means, let me know. You do give me an idea. Maybe I should just post those on a YouTube channel and if nothing else, build brand awareness and maybe do it as a, you know, promotion for the AI company as well. And I ended up working with two or three of them and I, I felt bad with how it worked out because we did this as a joint venture where I provided all the intellectual property. They, but they put a lot of time and energy and effort into all the translation and stuff, even using the AI. And so they made no money, they had some losses. I didn't make anything either, but I didn't really have to spend much time or any capital on it. So that's one of the, that's one of the downsides of AI is you know, you're going to try different things and experiment. If you wait until everything is so clear cut, where you can't lose, then it's often too late. The people who do the best in any new technology got in earlier, they got in early and placed small bets and they waited to see what worked and then they doubled down on it. That's essentially what I've tried to do with artificial intelligence, is make a whole bunch of small bets, experiment, don't stop everything you're doing that's profitable and work 14 hours a day on it. Unless you really have a great, great idea for a high tech startup and maybe you're getting venture capital and that sorts of thing. That's not the route I wanted to go on because I certainly don't consider myself a high level technologist or an AI technologist or expert. But I am someone who wants to use the tools of my time that I think is essential for not just a speaker or communicator, but for everybody. Anyone who wants to be relevant is you have to use the tools of your time. If you cooked people food for a living 100 years ago or 120 years ago, you didn't have to use a toaster because toasters weren't really used, no one had it. But if you want to run a restaurant in the modern world and someone asks for toast, it's pretty helpful to have a toaster. And I see this time and time again with so many professionals where they get to a certain level of their career and they have a certain level of success and they say, hey, what's working for me here is working. I don't need to expand. I mean, this happened to Kodak. They essentially invented digital Photography. They said, what do I want to do that for? That could ruin our sales of film. And then, then they went bankrupt. And what was it, Hewlett Packard that could have had Bill Gates software for or for programming computers or the operating system? Like, well, what do we need that for? And they didn't. Keep learning new stuff and staying on the cutting edge. And after a while someone else eats your lunch. I've seen this myself in the world of communication skills training. There are a lot of trainers I know, public speaking experts, some of them arguably a lot better at storytelling than I am in certain aspects of speaking. But they got so stuck in just giving the keynote speech or just doing the in person training, they didn't learn the technology of video and online video. J. Huff, I see you liked my video. Thank you so much, J. Huff, Appreciate that. They didn't take the time to learn the new technology and now most of them are retired or bankrupt or unemployed or all three because they didn't stay on the cutting edge of the pandemic hit and they were blindsided. Their expenses were still high and their income went to zero. And believe me, I am, as Barb can tell you and others, I'm not the most tech savvy person in the world and I'm not someone who spends 18 hours a day watching video of the latest technology. But in 1998 I did decide I want to get in the online training world. Turns out way too soon. Lost a lot of money. 1998, I lost money. 1999, lost money, 2000 lost money in online training. Kept on losing money, kept on experimenting, experimenting, kept on trying and 15 years later I was an overnight success. Now my online video courses are very popular and very profitable and have been at a really successful rate. Only for about six years, seven, I guess, arguably seven years. But that was with 15 years of failure. But if I hadn't been willing to learn and take that risk and lose money, I wouldn't have any of the tremendous upside I've had that it's now generated 2 million students around the world. Now, whether I can replicate that with AI, there's no evidence yet to suggest I figured that all out. But I do try to spend some time every day learning a little bit about new technology, how to use technology, how to try something a little different. And we've been doing that just in the last week because trying to use the technology of the Amazon platform, specifically Amazon Live, I've heard about it, I've heard about it for months, never really tried it. And then Just hopped in and tried it last week for the first time. And now we're today, I believe will be our seventh sort of Amazon Live. And Susan, I hope it maybe motivates you or shows you some of the ways of doing it or shows you a way of not doing it for that matter. But I try to keep experimenting and there's failures along the way. I've made now almost 600 videos and images for the Amazon Influencer program and I have plenty of them that were rejected. I have plenty of videos that have been accepted and have zero views. I have plenty of videos that have been accepted, have been put on product pages, have views, zero sales. So it's not that I only made $100 or $50 or 10 cents. I made literally zero cents from that investment of my time for the video. Now I will say I've tried to lessen, reduce my risk by only spending 15 seconds on these, a lot of these videos and then another 15 seconds uploading it. So I've tried to reduce the risk and share and spread out the risk by trying a lot of different things. So that's really the only path I've ever figured out to succeed. Now, there are some people who make online courses. Every course is wildly successful. They have 18 courses, they're all fantastic bestsellers and they do really well. I wish I could have done that. That was not my path to success. My path was, yes, I've made a couple dozen international best selling courses that have helped a lot of people and made me a very nice collection of fees in the process. But I've also made 200 courses that have essentially been less than stellar sellers, that have not been best sellers or 150of them have performed relatively poorly. Or maybe they were best sellers for a brief time and then didn't really do well in the long run. But I'm successful in part because of just more at bats, trying more. And to me that's what's exciting about the modern world of social media. Online courses, publishing books is you just, you get more at bats. When I was growing up, back in my day, I realize I sound like an old man when I talk like that, but. But for most of my adult life, anything to do with creating something, whether it's in video, audio, text, book, you had to go through so many gatekeepers and you had to spend all of your time knocking on doors and facing rejection before you could have a single word seen by anyone else doesn't exist anymore. That just doesn't happen. You can communicate, you can Create, Share your creations with the world. Now, unlike any other time in the history of humanity, is it easy to get rich? Is everyone going to get rich quick? No, that's not what I'm saying. But I do think that if you work hard and you focus on some niche and you genuinely try to build expertise in a subject matter and it's a subject matter that other people value, it can't just be, I know every intricate aspect of the lint in my belly button. No one else cares about that. It has to be something people care about. If you spend a lot of time going really deep into a subject matter and then you spend time thinking about it, coming up with your own innovations, your own twists, your own ways of either making that stuff, that content more interesting to people, more entertaining to people, easier to learn, and then you package your expertise with video, with audio, with text, in books, in online courses, in social media videos, and you keep trying. You can make money. I'm not guaranteeing you'll get $100 million from Amazon the way Mr. Beast did the other day, but you can make money if you follow that process. It's not get rich quick, it's get rich slowly. And for many people, it's not about getting rich. It's about getting an income that sustains my lifestyle, my demands, while letting me do what I like. There's so much focus on, oh, these YouTubers all make $150 million a second that it really blinds people to the far bigger opportunity, which is, you know, in the past you could say, oh, look at Picasso, he's getting rich. But every other artist is starving, so don't even try to become an artist. And that was the world. Whether it was in the recording industry, the acting industry, you had some people at the top who'd gotten through, gatekeepers really making a lot of money. And everyone else had to be the starving artists making nothing. We don't live in that world anymore. The attention all goes to the people, the Mr. Beast, who are making so much money. But in industry after industry after industry and niche after niche after niche, there are opportunities for people to make YouTube channels, TikTok channels, Udemy courses where they spend eight hours a day, let's say seven hours a day, Monday through Friday, they consistently create content, they consistently create value. They sell their services in different ways. Content, advertising, consulting fees, speaking fees, books. And they put together a nice middle class income for themselves. Different in every country, let's say in the United States, let's say it's $70,000 a year. You're not going to get rich on that, you're not going to buy mansions with that. But if you had a choice, if you went back in time and asked a lot of people 30, 40, 50 years ago, hey, you can have your really, really boring job working as an administrative assistant at an insurance company where you're doing boring stuff, making $70,000 a year or the equivalent for that time period. Or you could live today, have no boss, create content, work with clients, work with customers, have varying revenue streams and make $70,000 a year doing what you love, whether it's art, whether it's painting, whether it's teaching people how to play the piano, which is better. I guarantee you everybody from 30, 40, 50 years ago would say, wow, I'd much rather be alive today if I could make a middle class income doing what I love. Now, Gary Vaynerchuk talks about this a lot and I think he's absolutely on target, which is, don't say to yourself, unless I'm Kim Kardashian becoming a Kylie Jenner making a billion dollars a year, no use trying now. You don't have to have that. Why not start off just trying to figure out how can I make a sustainable income to pay my bills, live the basic lifestyle I want and do what I like to do all day long and create. I do think that the vast, vast majority of people in the world, world, if given a choice, would rather spend their days creating stuff and getting positive feedback from people about their creations than doing boring work as a mid level office worker. I do think that is true in pretty much any culture in the world and that is now available. I understand if you have a family and you're supporting three kids and maybe a spouse and you have a boring job that's paying the equivalent of $70,000 a year in your country, you can't just quit right now to all of a sudden become a YouTuber focused on how to play the tuba better. You can't just quit. You could start working on it part time, evenings and weekends, which is what Gary Vaynerchuk recommends. He always said, don't quit your job. Do something that you love so much, you don't mind spending every waking moment of your free time when you're not at your paying job doing it. Don't quit your job till you're making a lot more money from your side gig. I think that is a model that's very powerful for so many people across the globe today. And if you're stuck in a boring job and your way of dealing with that is coming home and just turning on TV or turning on entertainment streaming media, whether it's social media or Netflix. If your solution is just spend every moment kind of numbing yourself, watching other people's creative content, well, then you're stuck. You're not ever going to get to a better place. But there is a better place available if you start trying. But I have to stress, I don't. I can't just say to you, oh, buy my $2,000 course, and you're going to be making $100,000 a month from your own online course in two months. Now, there are people selling that. There are people selling the hype. They're selling the dream. I like to think I'm selling reality. But we do have a new reality in the modern world, and it is a reality where creators are rewarded. Now, does Mark Zuckerberg take too much of a percentage of that creation? If you're creating on Facebook, yeah, you can make that case. Do the owners of TikTok to the owners of Twitter take excessive amounts of the profit involved from. You can make that case, too. But I'm here to tell you, if you want to create and you're willing to spread some of your risks, you can use other social media platforms. I do. But you can also have your own website. I mean, there are people making absolute fortunes these days just by typing newsletters. But they're typing newsletters that give insights and information to people where people think, I can't get this anyplace else. It's interesting, useful, helpful. I'm going to subscribe to this newsletter. The beauty of newsletters is no one own, that's an open platform. Nobody owns all email. So if you build a relationship with actual subscribers, paying subscribers, that's something you can control. You can't simply be deleted, as I have been on YouTube. You can't simply have a course taken down on Udemy, as has happened to me. You are in control. So I've not excelled. I certainly haven't been wildly successful charging for emails. But I do know that there are a lot of creators who do that because you may think, well, tj, I'm not some big egomaniac like you talking in front of a camera all day long. Okay, fine. Don't make any video. There are people making good living just by doing specialized newsletters. They bring their passion, they bring their expertise, and they create original, great content in a time where there's never been more content, never been more information in the world for free than right now. And yet these people make a living from it because they are adding value. They're bringing their creativity, their insights, their analysis to various trends, various industries, and other people are willing to pay for it. And is it easy? No. Do more than a few percentage of people really make more than a few thousand dollars? No. In fact, I've seen, as I'm sure you have too, studies of creators in the world and something like 97% make less than $50,000 a year. So this isn't get rich quick, but to me that's never the right question. The question is how many people who have spent five years spending, say 20 hours a week creating content and they've done it on more than one platform and they've experimented with different formats and they've honed their craft and they've experimented with different revenue models, whether it's a paid newsletter or giving paid speeches or doing training or consulting. How many people like that who spent five years at IT are not making at least a middle class income? I think that number is pretty small because most people give up. And hey, I've given up on. I've started a podcast seven years ago, did it daily for a year and said, you know what, not much is happening here. I've had talk radio shows that didn't really go anywhere and gave up on those. So there's nothing wrong with starting something and stopping something as long as you take that knowledge and try to apply it to your next venture. So you're trying something a little different that's smarter and at least has the potential of succeeding because it's different than your last failure. The problem so many people have is they do three podcasts and it's not an instant success and they didn't instantly get inundated with great sponsorship deals and 50 million downloads. And they say, well, this podcasting thing, it's a bunch of hype. It doesn't work and they give up. Well, if you quit after three episodes, it pretty much doesn't work for anyone. Same with YouTube. TikTok people get all excited. They see a friend doing it, they see someone in their industry, like, I know more than this person. If they're doing this and they have 50 million views, I can do it too. And they do three, it falls flat and they just quit. You can't quit too early on this. Now you also don't want to do exactly the same thing for 10 years and not make progress. That doesn't work either. Mike, Kyle, and thanks so much. We're getting a whole bunch of hearts. We've had 1.5 thousand hearts on TikTok today. So I do want to thank all of our friends on TikTok for joining us. We're gonna have to sign off in a minute because we're switching over to our Amazon Live. My colleague Ben is with us. We're continuing our ongoing experiment with being an influencer. I'm sharing with you in real time my journey there as an Amazon influencer. Not only making videos on demand, but also going on Amazon Live. So we're going to be doing that right now. So I want to say goodbye to Robin, Cece, Alex, so many Brett, Tyler, Maxwell, Benny, Olive, so many friends have joined us on TikTok. If you want to continue with us, I need you to come on over to my YouTube channel. Just go to YouTube, type in TJ Walker Success and you will see the channel. If that's too much to remember, just type in TJ Walker. It'll be one of the top two channels you see pop up right there. So thanks so much, have a great weekend and quick program note to everyone. I'll be on location in the field conducting presentation training and media training next Monday and Tuesday in Washington D.C. so it's highly unlikely I'll be able to see you live the first part of next week. I'll either be back Wednesday or by Thursday. So I won't say see you in all likelihood until then live. But I am with you every single day, not once, not twice, but three times. Two short form videos on TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, everywhere and one long form video. So please continue to watch the videos like give comments, let me know where you disagree. I would love to know where I'm not connecting, where you don't see the live, where you think it's even bad advice, you can share it with me. So thanks so much or get a sign off on TikTok. Now to get ready for our Amazon Live, let me bring up my colleague Ben who helps me with every aspect of TJ Walker Success Channel as well as media training. Ben, we're going to try this with Amazon and you and I should really do more deconstruction of these at the end of each one. Is there anything that you and I have forgotten to talk about in our off camera meetings that you need to share with me that I need to do differently for our Amazon Live, which we're about to do? Ben, your microphone is off.

Yeah, no, I don't think we have anything left.

I think the only thing is just for you to be able to, to.

Download it maybe on your own phone or your laptop.

I have it on my phone and I don't. I was too lazy the last few days because I was just going right to my storefront, which I will need once we're in the processing. But there's, there's really no reason why I'm not on Amazon where the. I'm on the Amazon Live app because I have the app. So let me just pull it right up on myself because that I can share with people because that's not a violet. That's not showing them the internal private page. So I'm going to type in Amazon Live. For some reason that's taking me to a website. There it is. Amazon Live creator. I see the app. Oh, it's downloading it. So I don't know why it was not already downloaded because I know I had it at one point. So there we are. All right, so now I see it. You know, one thing that occurs to me is all the best practices are that we really need to come up with thumbnails for these. So, Ben, if you could work on that. Our thumbnails? Yeah. Because I'm just seeing gray. That's not kind of marketing 101. You couldn't get much worse than that. Although that maybe is the only thing that I'm seeing. I don't know. So, yeah, I have not really explored the Amazon. Amazon is almost a bizarrely wildly complex business. They, they have their fingers in so many pies. I'll leave it to others to talk about the antitrust issues involved there. But from an individual entrepreneur standpoint, it's almost overwhelming. There's so many ways you could make money with Amazon. And I'm not talking about being a driver. Nothing against people who want to be drivers, but just whether you're making Amazon merch, you have your own brand, their Amazon Inspire app, their Amazon connections. I mean, I could easily hire a staff of 15 people and work myself 20 hours a day just trying to mine all the little pieces of gold you could in theory get from Amazon. And I, I, I spend a little time, I would say, but I'm certainly not spending a lot of time. Time. All right, so I have gone to the Amazon Live app and what I'm guessing, well, you're gonna, you're gonna turn this on from here. You're gonna be in control of it. But I am assuming I will, then I don't know if I'll need to refresh, but I will be able to see what you're seeing. When you're doing it because you're doing it from a desktop version, is that correct? No, I'm doing it from the mobile phone. Okay, so we're both on the mo. For those of you just joining us, hi, I'm TJ Walker and I'm a communications expert. What we're doing right now is sharing our journey as an Amazon influencer. Because it's a particular type of communication where you speak on video and you make videos on demand promoting products. Or you can go live right on Amazon's webpage, Amazon.com and you can go live promoting your products just like you're on the Home Shopping Network or qvc. So we do that typically at the end of each day. Now we. This is just our seventh time doing it. I'm going to get my products ready. I have another bunch of books. We've been doing a lot of books lately, and I just had to bend down and get the books. Will be doing this live, and then I'll be doing a second part of this where I am actually showing you how I make the videos for the video I demand. Now, before I do that, I want to get my microphone ready. So I've got the microphone. Oh, and my receiver that goes into my cell phone is being charged, so I had to walk away from camera one minute. And then you can entertain people for a moment while I do that. I now have. Okay, I now have the receiver, which will go into my phone. So even though we're on the. The app for going live, I'm getting ready for when I do the recording version. So I'm going to go ahead and turn my microphone on. And it's a little. A little prickly. Sometimes the microphone. I know this is charged because it. I specifically charged it all night. So now I have the green light, and the green light is staying on. So I know that will work. I want to be very careful not to accidentally turn off the mic as I have done before. Okay, so we've got that ready. Now. Ben will go live. I'm assuming I'll see it on my app, but I don't know. I may actually have to sign out and sign back in again. We'll find out again. We're experimenting here in live time. Could we have worked it all out in advance and just shown you the finished, final product? Yes, but then you wouldn't see how it actually works. I actually think it's helpful to you to see the mistakes I make, the thought process, the iterations of all these different aspects of content creation. And this is yet another one creating a particular type of presentation, a type of sales pitch, the live sales pitch for products. All right, Ben, let's hop right in. Let me get a little bit of water before we start, and you'll give me a countdown. I'll go ahead and take you off screen, and then you'll actually. It helps me if you could actually count it down rather than just pointing to me. And that. That makes it a little bit easier for me. Okay? Okay. All right, so again, we're still going to be live with all of you, whether you're watching on YouTube or LinkedIn, but we're also going to be live on Amazon. And. And if you're on the Amazon app, then there will be a carousel where people can see the product, and with one click, they buy it. Now, I just accidentally clicked away from the Amazon app, so let me pull up the Amazon. Okay, we're back. All right, Ben, go ahead. Okay. Three, two, one. Hi, and welcome. I'm TJ Walker, and this is the TJ Walker Success Channel right here on Amazon Live. I've got some great products to share with you today. These are all books that I personally read, paid for with my own money. No one paid me to promote any of these. And I read the books. I've massively marked on them and underlined insights that are useful to me. You can see the pages are turned down, and these are books I like to share with friends, colleagues, others to make them more successful. And now I want to share them with you. With every book I show here, all you have to do is look in the carousel below and you can, in fact, purchase the book right away. So let's hop right in. The first book I want to share with you is Habits of a Happy Brain. This is a book by Loretta Bruning. I have to confess, I had not heard of her before, but this. This book really stands out to me. I mean, I think she is just a truly profound, profound thinker in the field of psychology. Habits and happiness. I realize it's hard to see, but I judge a book by how many times did I turn down a page? Because when I see an insight, I turn the page down and then I underline things. This book has tons and tons of underlying things, and I just found it instrumental in my own personal development of creating overall theories of how to build habits. And ultimately, what do we want habits for? We want habits not just to be healthy, but to create overall happiness in our life. And I think she did that. So this is not a New York Times bestseller book. She is not a household name. You don't see her on national TV every day. But she may even be retired higher today. But if you're all interested in habit formation, personal development, this is a book I highly, highly recommend. Loretta and I believe her last name is pronounced Bruning. But you can see the book down below in the carousel and you can go ahead and get it. So please check that out. Okay. The next book is the how of Happiness. As a personal development coach and trainer, I'm always looking for new ideas, even if it's one little twist, nuance of how someone can acquire a habit more effectively, how they can use a habit to become happier. And there were a lot of nuggets here. Again, I see tons and tons of nuggets here that I've underlined. I've turned down the pages. Now, these are books only for me. These are not library books or I wouldn't be turning down the pages and marking them. But for me, I find it very, very happy or very helpful to jog my own memory where I turn down pages underline, because quite often I'll come back and actually make short form videos where I sometimes give credit, I sometimes have changed it enough where I don't feel like I'm appropriating the author's unique. Certainly I'm not using that word for word the same way. But here's just an example of something I wrote down. If we observe genuinely happy people, we shall find that they do not just sit around being contented. They make things happen. They pursue new understandings, seek new achievements and control their thoughts and feelings. You could say, well, TJ already knew that. That's not that pretty profound. But I challenge you. Really. We see in so many movies and pop culture kind of this idea, well, here's this happy person. Look at them being happy. That's not how happy people are happy. They're always doing things. I can think of a friend of mine right now who is in his eighth decade and yet he's constantly traveling, he's constantly creating new things, he's constantly investing, investing in new businesses. He's constantly building new businesses. He's about to get married and he's active in sports. Sometimes not once a day, but three times a day. He may play pickleball and tennis. So to me he perfectly embodies this. And this is an example of how I think this book, the how of Happiness, is really helpful. And forgive me, I just don't know how to pronounce the author's last last name. It's Sonia Lubomirsky, I believe. But apologies to Sonia if I have in fact, butchered your name. But the book is available right now, as is everything I talk about here on Amazon. You could click the carousel below to purchase the book or just to read more about it and see if it's a good fit for you. Okay, this next book is one that if you read any personal development book in the last 50 years, you're going to see other personal development experts quoting him. Viktor Frankl. He has perhaps the most amazing backstory of anyone who's written about any aspect of personal development in the last 70 years. He was a Nazi concentration camp victim. Everyone in his family is what Everyone was killed, slaughtered in the Holocaust. He noticed so many other people around him who lost the will to die and just perished. And he was able to survive. And his book, Man's Search for Meaning, has been a best seller for decade after decade after decade because there's certain truths that really resonate here. His big theory is what distinguishes human beings isn't just looking for food or for shelter or for money, is we need meaning. And we are unique among all animals in the ability to assign meaning to life. And we cannot always control our circumstances, but we can control the meaning we give to circumstances. We can control how we react to circumstances. In that sense, in my mind, he's very much sort of an updated version of ancient Stoic philosophy, but adapted to the 20th century and in a way that's highly relevant to the 21st century. It doesn't take a long time to read. It's a fairly slim volume, by the way. He went on to massive success as an author, as a psychological psychiatrist, and as a thought leader for the rest of his life. And remarried, went on to have a long, healthy, successful life. Truly inspirational character. Man's Search for Meaning. Again, it's quoted. And basically it's almost a requirement if you write a personal development book. You cite him, quote him. Why not check the original source source? Then you'll have a deeper understanding. So check it out. The book is available in the carousel below. It is, to my knowledge, never gone out of print, some 70 years later, and I think is a book that we're going to be seeing for for decades, if not centuries to come. So check that out. Okay, this next book, Eat the Frog. This is in reference to a quote, or eat that frog. A reference to a quote from Mark Twain, who gave people the advice, if you want to get something difficult done, do it first thing. In the morning. Think of it as if the first thing in the morning you had to eat a frog. Everything else in the day would be pretty easy to do after that. Tackle the most difficult challenge you have at the beginning of the day. This is written by Brian Tracy, who is one of the founding fathers, or I guess you'd call him a godfather, the personal development movement. He is someone that almost anyone who's followed personal development has either read one of his books, he's a wildly prolific author, or they've heard one of his audio tapes. He got in really early in the whole personal development audio cassette world and still has new content coming out on his YouTube channel. Newsletters. I get his newsletters. He's over 80 years old these days, but still very vital and active. Fascinating backstory. I mean he was someone who drop out from high school, I believe, sort of bounced around kind of an itinerant bum for many years, but straightened himself out, fell into sort of a sales position, got into personal development and really just created himself. He's kind of the, the paradigm of the self made man who did not come from privilege, didn't have fancy academic degrees or any academic degrees, became self learned, really mastered the art of self development and then became a prolific content creator. Audio video books and he's got I think at this point 50 books. This is one of his more popular ones. International bestseller. This one says more than 1.6 million copies sold. And I bought this more than several years ago, so it's a widely successful. What he does so well is he's able to distill a lot of common sense plus the best of the rest of the personal development world. But to distill it using the simplest. I didn't say oversimplify, but he's able to simplify things in a way that make them instantly understandable. You can instantly grasp it, you can instantly make it action oriented. He is really, really good at simplifying things to make them actionable for everyone. You don't have to be an Ivy League PhD to understand him. But if you are AN Ivy League Ph.D. you're still going to learn certain things from Brian Tracy. He has a common man touch where he's never talking down to you but giving you practical information. This book is chalk full of that practical information. So Eat that Frog by Brian Tracy. If you are interested in improving yourself. You've heard of Brian Tracy before. I'm pretty sure. If you haven't read other books of his, this would be a good one to start with. Okay. And the Next book we have is called million dooll habits. 27 powerful habits to wire your mind for success, become truly happy and achieve financial freedom by Stella Moreira I believe is how we pronounce her name. So so many books deal with habits of exercise, sleep and that's incredibly important. Those things do relate to your finances. Well, this one is a little more specialized in how to have daily habits that affect your bottom line and affect your net worth. And it goes far beyond just don't buy Starbucks, make your coffee at home. Lots and lots of practical tips, mindset ideas you'll get from this book that will help you and also brings in philosophy from other world class leaders. So check out this book, Million Dollar Habits. It's available below in the carousel. So I hope you find that useful. Okay, so that's all the new products I want to talk about. We're going to keep that available in the carousel and if you're on the app or you're on my store, you can see it typically in the replay of this along the right of it. So I hope you find those useful. What I'm going to do now is just a little bit of a summary for folks and it's also to make these recommendations available to people on the actual page of Amazon where these books are for sale. So what I just did with the Amazon Live and again thank you so much to everyone joining us today on Amazon Live. Whether you're watching us live or or whether you're watching this on demand, we want it later on demand. We want to thank you for spending time with us. What I'm going to do right now is actually do a short version of these ads, these promotions. I'm going to make little videos where I actually talk about these products again. But I'm going to be recording it with the idea that some people want to watch this before making a purchase and they will be able to do that by going to the product page and seeing it. So I'm just adjusting my cell phone because I do make these Amazon influencer videos using my cell phone rather than our usual studio setup. I am going to adjust one light because it looks a little too dominant on my cell phone camera versus the regular studio you're seeing right now. So if you're just joining me and interested in books, I hope you find this is a good refresher. Some of you may be thinking, you know, I like this whole idea of Amazon Live. Maybe I could do an Amazon Live and talk about products I like. Maybe you can. So I'm hoping That you get a little motivation from this and learn from me. It's not that I do everything perfectly. I'm not the number one salesperson on Amazon, that's for sure. But I do make sales every day and I do like to think that I help people. I'm going to bring my chair over here so that I can put the books without dropping them on the floor. So I'm taking my remote control and I try to do all the ads, the recorded ads, the same way I did the Amazon Live, which is just talking to you in a conversational way. This isn't a script. The publishers didn't send me talking points and say, follow this ad script. It's just me sharing why I like a particular book or why I like a particular product if it's not a book. So we're going to hop right in and do these right now. Habits of a Happy Brain. Habits of a Happy Brain. This author is unique among psychologists and personal development experts. Her insights into the human brain and how we form lasting habits will help you have a better life. Okay, so what I'm trying to do is get these ads done in 15 seconds. That was right at 15 seconds. Now I'm going to do something which I should always do and that is test to see if the microphone worked because we. Pull this out because we have had a few problems with our microphone lately and I don't really know why, so. And sure enough, we had a problem there. So I'm gonna redo that one. Apologies to our friends on Amazon Live, but it's just yet another opportunity to hear about the book and for you to decide if you want to buy it again. They are all available on the carousel book below. So rather than do more troubleshooting, what I am going to do is just use the built in microphone on my iPhone, which is pretty good. You don't have to have a built in microphone, but something is happening to this one. It is flashing and I just not quite sure why, but I don't want to spend more of your time. Well, I do have an identical mic here, but that one is also flashing. So we may have a microphone that just is not accepting the charge anymore. So I'm going to take the receiver out and I'm just going to do it again. And if you have any questions, by the way, if you're watching on Amazon Live, you can in fact type in questions in the chat function. My colleague Ben is monitoring those. He'll let me know. And if you're watching elsewhere, you can also Type in questions on the platform you're on. So I got to record this again. This time I know the audio will capture because I don't have a plug in microphone. Habits of a Happy Brain. This author is a psychologist who goes so much deeper and beyond what you typically hear in personal development books. She'll really give you insights into your own brain to change your habits for the better. Okay, now I can't imagine that I didn't record that audio, but I will just. And sure enough, it is recorded so we can continue. Okay, we're going to go to the next book, The how of Happiness. You may think you're either born happy or you're not. No. There is a way to become happy. This author gives you lots of specific practical tips to build happiness in your life. Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. This is perhaps the most quoted book of all time. In other people's personal development books. Why not learn from the source directly? It's crucial, crucial information. Now this one is such a big deal. I'm going to do another one. And sometimes when you're doing an old book from publishers long time ago, I've found it doesn't necessarily get on the product page. But I really feel strongly about this book and that it is important for people to read. So I would check that out. Oh, so I'm getting some. Apparently I missed some of the comments. So Rem started following on Amazon. Thank you. Dr. Sunny says I can hear you fine. Well great, Dr. Sunny, thank you. And Rem says awesome to see you show us this. Do it yourself. Yes, that is what Amazon Live is about, is you as a creator get to do it yourself. I wasn't flown to Seattle and brought in with a big limousine to big studios with a giant production facility. Now this is do it Yourself and you'll see everyone from Martha Stewart to Paris Hilton doing this to perhaps your next door neighbor, your neighbor down the street. It is a more democratized way of people being able to sell and be a part of the whole e commerce world. And hats off to Amazon for making that available. Dr. Sunny says, I love Eat the Frog. Never heard of Habits of a Happy Brain. Sounds interesting. It is an interesting book. The author is, and I'm not saying anything disparaging, a little quirky and different from a lot of personal development people and I think much less self promotional. You don't see her on the talk show lecture circuit, but I found her, her insights useful, different, unique and memorable. So Rem I think you'll enjoy or Dr. Sunny. I'm hoping you'll enjoy that. Rem says, how many cameras do you use for this live? Well, I'm. Well, I have one on my cell phone that I'm using right now to create it. But as far as what you see, I am using this is my camera three. This is my camera two where I sort of do things like I'm speaking, but I'm really just here in a studio by myself. And then I also have camera one, which for certain products when I'm doing stuff for Amazon Live, I could do it for a bigger item. I could show it right here. But it's easier to do things from the camera three because I'm right in front of my desk and my computer. Plus I can read comments that come in. But we do have a full range studio there. Maybe not as quite as fancy as Home Shopping Network, but it's more than just someone hunched over, a little webcam and a small little room in a basement. So that's part of how we try to differentiate ourselves. Okay, so let me hop right in because we don't have a lot of time left and we're at the end of the week. Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. This book is truly an inspiration to to millions around the globe. He got through the Holocaust and went on to live a thriving life. And this one, I think I want to do a longer format as well. This is perhaps the most widely quoted book of all time in other people's personal development books. Viktor Frankl. Why not learn from the source? Viktor Frankl is a true source of inspiration. His life was almost destroyed in a concentration camp during the Holocaust. His wife, his family, everyone he knew was killed and he took from that a sense of purpose in life, of how you can control not what other people do, but you can control how you react to what other people do to you. That one insight helped him and so many other people around the globe with his writings, his teachings. He went on to live a long, healthy life, remarry, have purpose in his life, and be a respected doctor and educator around the globe. If you want to get a sense of how does someone with a stoic philosophy update that into the modern era, then I highly recommend this book. Man's Soul Search for Meaning. Now that was a longer one and I do find that most of my views are from shorter videos, but it was an important book and I wanted to bring that up. Brian Tracy is one of the true superstars of the personal development movement. He's wildly prolific Author, expert on audio tapes. Eat that frog. It's one of his best books. Check it out. Today. You need good habits. For more than eating and sleeping and exercise, you need good financial habits. Million Dollar Habits will help set you down the path of financial prosperity. Check it out. Okay, so now we have ads for those five products. In a moment, we have to say goodbye to our friends on Amazon. We really appreciate spending so much time with you this week. It's great to be a part of the Amazon community. Although let me state be very clear, I'm not a paid employee of Amazon. I don't have an official partnership in the legal sense with Amazon, but I am a part of their Amazon affiliate program as an Amazon influencer. It's something that if you're at all interested in possibly figuring out what to do, starting your own career as an influencer, I think it's an easiest way to get in and get going if you don't have some pre existing huge old audience. So you may want to check that out and just Google how to be an Amazon influencer and it'll take you to pages that spell out all the details. So thanks so much to our friends on Amazon. We're going to sign off right now. Everyone else stay where you are. Okay, Ben, I am now getting a message saying edit live stream. Do I want to save changes? Because I didn't get that the last couple of days, I'm assuming. Can you verify that we're off of. I'll bring Ben back on here. Can you just verify that we're off Amazon but that I didn't end the stream for everything else? Yes, we are off Amazon. It just gave me a page, flashed up and asked me if I wanted to save other changes on all the other platforms. Okay, so we're okay. Thanks, Ben. And we're coming up to the end of our time this week. It's been a great week. We spent about 15 hours live with you this week. Almost done. A lot of fun. What I am going to do? Well, it's. We only have a few seconds left and you have seen me do this before. But what I do is I go to Amazon my own product page or my own on my own personal page. I'll do it with one. So you can see I hit the button that says create content, I hit post, I go to photo library and then I just, I'm tapping the last video I made. I hit done. That video is now being processed by Amazon and their servers. It's now being uploaded into Amazon and in a moment. It's going to give me the option of tagging it with one or more products. In theory, I should be tagging it, I guess, to the audio and the Kindle and all that. I typically just link it to 1. I'm going to hit browse history. I'm going to dictate million dollar habits. I see the book, I tag it, I hit done. Build a wealth mentality habit now, exclamation point. I dictated, I checked to make sure there's no spelling errors or extra commas, and I hit submit and that's done. So that's what I'll be doing today to the other four books as well. It's nothing that difficult, but it's all these little steps. And I'm hoping that you look at this, say, well, what TJ's doing isn't that sophisticated. It's not that complicated. He's not doing anything that great. If he can do it, I can do well, guess what? If that's your conclusion, you are correct. You could do this. Amazon does have one barrier to entry. They like to see that. From what I'm told, you have about 1,000 followers on either Facebook, TikTok or YouTube. But beyond that, at least as of a few months ago, they were kind of letting anyone in. So it's not like you have to have Kim Kardashian following in social media to get in this program. So I would recommend whether you choose Amazon or some other program, why not seek out other opportunities to practice your speaking, where you get in front of people and you're giving them some value and some value can come to you. That's all being an influencer is. You don't have to promote anything you don't like or you don't believe in or you don't feel as ethical. That's part of what I enjoy about it so much, is I only have to talk about stuff I like and you can, too. You know what else I like? Spending time with you right here. Thanks so much. It's been a great week. Hope you have a fantastic weekend. Again, quick program note. I'll be out in the field working with executives, training the first part of next week, so we won't have as many live sessions, but I will be coming to you every day. We barely made it yesterday. We had a slight glitch and we didn't get out our third video till about two minutes till midnight, but we still got it out. I tried try to be consistent and practice what I preach about consistency. So every day we put out two short form videos, One long form video. Please watch the videos. Most important, leave a comment. Even if it's something you disagree with, leave a comment. Like the video, Share the video, sign up for notifications and tell other people about the channel too. Thanks so much. Wishing you great luck in all your communications in life.