Ep 122 Public Speaking How to Be Concise May 1, 2016

How can you be more concise as a public speaker?

Speaking the show about effective speaking in public to the media, at work and in life. Speaking with TJ Walker.

This is a question I get probably once a week. I got it just yesterday with a client. Tj, how do I be more concise when I speak? How can I make my statements crisp, concise, brief? Some of you aren't going to like my answer, but here it is. My answer is, why do you want to be concise? I answer the question with a question. I do not believe your goal as a speaker, as a presenter, as someone being interviewed in the media for that matter, is to be concise. Your goal is to communicate your ideas, period, paragraph, end of story. The goal is communication. The goal is not to be concise. Of course, you don't want to ramble on and on and on for hours and hours. In my experience, that is a fairly rare problem. I have clients come to me all the time, say, dj, teach me to be concise. We do sample interviews and they give seven second answers. Yeah, they were concise. They also didn't communicate anything and didn't hit any key messages. People stand up and give their speech and they sit down after four minutes. Yeah, they were concise. Remember anything they said. Let's step back a minute and look at some of the top communicators in the world today. Now, we're not talking politics. Some of you might not like his politics, but John Oliver, the comedian and talk show host on HBO, does a monologue that's often in excess of 20 minutes. He's just talking to the camera about one topic. It's often an incredibly dry topic, not in the news. Something about prison reform, obscure laws. And he talks about it for 20 minutes. And you know what? People listen to every word. Why? Because he's interesting, ladies and gentlemen. The whole key to length should be how long can you talk in an interesting way? If you're interesting, two days is just the right length. If you're boring, 20 seconds is too long. That really is the fundamental metric. I'll give you more in a moment.

Speaking is brought to you by Media Training Worldwide. For all of your media training and public speaking training needs, go to mediatrainingworldwide.com.

Someone else who's not particularly brief or concise. Gary Vaynerchuk, the well known social media guru, purveyor of the TV wine library in years past and now head of his own gigantic social media agency. He's a guy who does a. It's not every day but it's often a daily video and audio podcast. Sometimes it's 11 minutes, sometimes it's 25 minutes. He speaks as long as he wants, where he has something interesting to say and his YouTube channel. The views for his show are astronomical. And his own research shows that people actually watch very deep into the show. His show is often longer than mine. People watch more of his show longer in his show than mine. So me being more concise in relative terms than Gary Vaynerchant doesn't help me. So focus first and foremost on what are the ideas you have, whether you're giving a speech or a media interview. Then figure out how to make those ideas come alive and spend as much time as you need to, or that you can. Now, if you are asked by your boss to give a very brief presentation at an annual board of directors meeting and it's very structured and everything is timed out and you've got all sorts of busy people who have to run to their jets in an hour, well, sure, you've got to be a little more precise with your time, but if it's your own meeting, your own event, and your primary goal is to communicate, don't focus on being concise, focus on actually communicating your message. You'll be much better off. Look at someone like Anthony Robbins again, some of you may dislike him or think he's cheesy. I've been to his events before, I'm not a follower of all of his tactics. But I do think he is good speaker, even though some of his style is not my cup of tea. All the high fiving and hey yeahs and stuff. But there is absolutely no doubt that to the people who go to an Anthony Robbins rally, they love his public speaking. In fact, they love it so much they'll listen to him from 10 in the morning till midnight for not one, not two, but four, three days. Is Tony Robbins successful because he's concise? No, of course not. He is successful because he's good at communicating ideas in a way that is compelling and memorable and where he motivates people to take action. That is why he is compelling. So let's step back for a minute. Why do people think it's a good idea to be concise? Well, if it's because you have been rambling and you're boring and you're doing what a lot of people do, which they get up and sort of read a speech, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Lots of data points, lots of data points. Look at my slide back here. Lots of data points. If you're going on and on and on and droning on and doing a data dump and you're awful and boring. Well, sure, if your only choice in the world is being really long winded and boring versus short winded and boring, boring for an hour versus boring for five minutes. Well, sure, it's much better to be boring for just five minutes. But that's kind of like saying, you know, what would you rather I do, T.J. hold a lit cigarette to your arm for five minutes or hold a lit cigarette to your arm for two seconds? Well, sure, I would take the two seconds of the lit cigarette to my arm if those are my only choices. But I sure wouldn't pick either of those choices. If I had any control over the issue, I would say keep the lit cigarettes away from my flesh and any other flesh. And that is exactly what your perspective should be when it comes to your speeches, your presentations, your talks with the media. Now, let's go really deeper with media interviews. People are cautious in media interviews because they think, wow, if I say one wrong thing, I could get a quote off, be misquoted, ruin my career. And some of you have heard me talk about before. I lost my own job once, 25 years ago because of a quote, and I said it, and I'll revisit that again in the future at some point. So it certainly realistic and rational to be nervous when speaking to the media. Therefore, people assume, well, the less I speak, the less vulnerable I am. It's not quite like that. You're much safer talking to a reporter for two hours. If you actually stick to your messages and you have great planned sound bites on message than you are talking to a reporter for 60 seconds. But you haven't given thought to it and you haven't planned your messages and you haven't planned your sound bites. If you're simply reactive in an interview and you're repeating negatives and you're repeating assumptions and you're repeating the words of the reporter, you set yourself up for all sorts of bad quotes, defensive quotes, negative quotes. If you've actually given some thought to what you want to say, packaged your messages, packaged sound bites for your messages, and practiced your interview with someone asking you questions, or you even asking yourself questions just talking to your cell phone and listening to it, well, then you're not in danger by going beyond 7 seconds or 10 seconds in an answer. You can talk for a minute in every answer, maybe longer in an answer, and have absolutely zero risk because you've planned, you've focused, you have an agenda with interesting ideas. So I beg you, I implore you, do not worship at the false God of being concise, being brief, of being short. I never heard thousands of people standing up giving a standing ovation to someone at a major convention or conference. And when you ask them why they like that speaker, they say, well, because he was so concise. Wow, she was so short. That's never going to be a reason why people love you. It's not going to be why people talk about you. Now, if you're given an hour and you can do everything you need to do in 50 minutes, great. But if there isn't a strict time limit, then talk as long as you want. I was going to talk on the show today for 10 minutes, but it's now 10 minutes and 22 seconds. I don't care if you found this interesting, you're still here. If you got everything you needed to after seven minutes, you bailed out then. Thanks so much for joining me. I'm TJ Walker. May all of your presentations in life be not concise but successful. See you next time.

Speaking with TJ Walker is the number one rated daily streaming TV and radio show devoted to all aspects of speaking and communication. If you received value from this show, then please subscribe to it@mediatrainingworldwide.com Please review the show, leave comments and share it with your friends and colleagues. Today.