Ep 20 How to be a Better Talk Show Host

What's the best way to build competence and skill if you want to be a new talk show host?

Speaking the show about effective speaking in public to the media, at work and in Life. Speaking with T.J. walker.

This question comes from Kelly, one of our online students from the Udemy platform. She says, TJ I am pursuing this course to be a talk show host broadcaster in the esport community. Now, confession, I'm not sure I even know what the esport community is. I'm assuming that's electronic sports, meaning video games, that sort of thing. And folks, I'm from the Galaga Pac man era. Okay, my alias. We'll talk about that later. I'm expecting from this course to gain the confidence and a broader knowledge of what a host is, what they do, how to interact, how to prepare, and how to get your audience to come back. Well, there's a lot there. I'm going to try to unpack all of this complex question to give you some guidance now as far as what a host is, a host is simply someone who you want to spend some time with to learn from them or experience from them or learn from their guest or to get some enjoyment or entertainment out of that's all a host is. There's a million different types of hosts in the world. Jimmy Fallon is different from Stephen Colbert, but they're both sort of in the late night talk show host vein. There is a political talk show host like a Rush Limbaugh, an American politics scene. There is David Frost was a host for many, many, many years on the BBC, Al Jazeera, other places, so many different types of host. At some point it comes down to they either interview other people and put a spotlight on the guest or they pontificate themselves. Sometimes there's a hybrid between the two. Bill O'Reilly, the number one rated cable news talk host in the United States, does a combination of both. He gives his own views, his own viewpoint section, the top of the show and throughout. But he also interviews guests. Some shows you don't even know the host views on anything. Other shows it's all about the host. There's no one right or wrong way. Now. Most shows have guests or have news footage. Some shows it's totally a host. Rush Limbaugh, a number of political commentators, talk radio host. It's just the host pontificating. I'm the host of this show speaking with TJ Walker and I don't have guests for a number of reasons. Part of it is just the administrative task of organizing and scheduling guests and rescheduling and all that. And part of it is I've been doing this for 32 years and I wanted to have a very clean, simple, clear focus of people send me questions and I answer them based on my more than 30 years of experience of speaking and coaching and training people to speak and hosting shows and giving speeches. So that's the format. Now I want to address very, very specifically your question about how to actually get prepared for hosting. Because that is something where there's a lot of good advice out there. And also. Well, I'll just go ahead and say it.

Bad advice.

Here's the bad advice. And that is just do your show. It's going to be awful. You'll have a good laugh, but just do the show. Get it out there. It is true that many people procrastinate for so long, they never get around to doing any show. Wasted opportunity. But the other side of the equation is just to do a show, no matter how bad it is, no matter how rough, unpolished, uncomfortable, put it out there, figuring, well, I'll get better as I go. What you're really doing to the audience is saying, hey, I don't really respect your time or care about you. I'm using you as my practice dummies. Your audience might not appreciate that most people don't like having their time wasted or having you subject their bad stuff to them. If someone is applying for a job to work with you and they send you a letter that is filled with typos and you say, hey, this is filled with typos, you're not going to be very impressive. They say, oh yeah, I know it's filled with typos. Circle the errors and give it back to me and I'll improve it for my next cover letter to my next job prospect. You probably wouldn't appreciate that. That's not my job. Why are you wasting my time? So please keep that in mind in that don't practice on your audience. People form opinions of you and it's very hard to shake it once there is a negative opinion. And yeah, maybe you'll get better and better and new people will love you. But why lose all your initial audience in the political world? Look at someone like Rick Perry, the former governor of Texas. When he ran in the 2012 presidential campaign, he had that one bad oops moment in a debate. He was never able to change public perception of his communication skills. Now I understand he wasn't being the host of a show, he was a candidate. It's a little bit different, but the Principle is the same. If you have the option of putting out your worst for someone or not, don't do it because Rick Perry actually went on to give a lot of good speeches. And I'm not a Rick Perry fan or supporter, folks. He went on to give a lot of, I thought, great speeches, excellent media interviews. No one ever remembered that. No one talked about it. He ran for president again in 2015 for the 2016 campaign, had to drop out. The only thing anyone remembered was that one awful moment. So that's my fear and concern for you. If you decide you're just going to wing it, start hosting your own shows. No matter how hard horrible they are, just keep on going. I don't mean to suggest you have to be perfect. If you roll back the tape or the audio in the last 20 seconds on this very program, you'll hear a stumble from me. It's not that you have to be perfect. It's not that you can never have an or, an or an error. But you do need to sound conversational and you need to sound comfortable and relaxed. And when you are a host, you need to be likable at some level. Most hosts do come across as likable. Now, there are varying degrees of that. John McLaughlin, the American political talk show host, he has the McLaughlin Group he's been around for more than 30 years, is not what most people would consider a warm, fuzzy, likable character. But there's something about him almost of a cartoonish quality that people do find endearing, even though he doesn't seem like the sort of person who would be your best friend to confide to about personal problems. There's a lot of different styles of host out there. In my experience, the people who come across the best don't create some new fake Persona. They're just being themselves and they're showing the passion they have for their subject matter. Now, if you want to be a host broadcaster in the esport community, I'm assuming you're already a huge, huge fan of esports again, whatever that is. I'm assuming you already know a lot. I'm assuming that you care, that you know who the personalities are, that you know, what you think makes someone a great athlete in this community or, and I don't even know if you call them athletes, a great participant or expert in this community. This is stuff that you can't just train someone on to be a good host. You got to really love the game. That's why some of the best talk show host and host for sporting shows are not necessarily the best athletes, but. But they have a passion for the game. They watch all the games, they study the games. They know the history of the athletes. They know the statistics of the athletes. They know how many runs a particular baseball star had in a particular season in 1949. They have a passion for this. That's what makes them a good host. So part of your homework is, I would do, if I were you, a dozen practice shows. And if you're going to interview someone, find someone in the esport community you're already friendly with and ask them to do a show. Tell them, hey, I'll interview you on the real show, but I need to do some demos, some practice pilots to get better at this. And if your show is an interview show, then interview them, put a spotlight and then really watch the show. Listen to it. Figure out exactly what you like about yourself and what you don't like about yourself. Listen to everything you say to make sure it makes sense and you're not all of a sudden speaking too quickly because you're nervous, or so softly because you're meek and scared of the guest. The next thing I want you to do is to watch this. Unless it's a purely audio program, I'm going to assume for the moment you're doing a video based show. So I'm going to ask you to do something that first blush sounds odd, but I'm going to ask you to turn the volume off of your computer or your TV and then to just watch yourself hosting the show.

Body language.

So why would I ask you to watch yourself with the volume off? It's because I do want you to study your body language. Great hosts move in a way that conveys confidence, authority and comfort. They don't look scared, nervous, uncomfortable. Now, there are exceptions. There are plenty of hosts out there who, those of you on the podcast can't see me, but I'm playing with a pen now. Sean Hannity on the Fox News Channel, Bill O'Reilly of the Fox News Channel often have a pen in their hand. In general, I don't recommend that. But you know what? Those guys make tens and tens of millions of dollars a year talking and they have a pen in their hand. So it obviously isn't a huge career detriment. But beyond that, both of them move in a way that suggests they're completely comfortable, confident. They are as relaxed as if they were in their own living rooms at home with family and friends. So I do want you to watch your program, your pilot practice sessions, and make sure you really like how you're coming across and that you're coming across relaxed, comfortable, confident and engaging. Now, I'm glad you're already in the online course. I do have some other programs for people that are going to help them, so I just want to give you an option for figuring out how to do that right now.

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Kathy, my other advice for you is who do you admire? Who do you respect as current hosts? Broadcasters in the esport community? I don't want you to mimic them, I don't want you to copy them. But the greatest writers of all time all do a heck of a lot of writing. I've never met a brilliant novelist or a fantastic writer who says, I don't want to pollute my head with outside sources. So I never, ever, ever read any other novelist. No, that's not how great writers work. Great writers generally do a tremendous amount of reading. They're not copying Hemingway necessarily, they're not copying Tolstoy. But these are influences in the same way, I think great hosts are aware of all the other genres. They're aware of the other hosts. They have a strong set of opinions of what they like and don't like about other hosts and the things that they like about other hosts. They may do a little bit of that. Again, you don't want to seem like you're just blatantly ripping off someone else's style. You don't want to seem like a caricature of another host. For many years in the United States, after the rise of Rush Limbaugh, a conservative political talk radio host there in the he started in 88 nationally. Coincidentally, I started a political talk show in 89 on one of his original stations. He was a little more successful than I was. Let's leave it at that. But by the early 90s, when he became really successful and was making millions and millions, you saw hundreds and hundreds of people flock to the airways trying to sound exactly like Rush Limbaugh. And with very few exceptions, they didn't get anywhere because they were seen as derivative. So come up with your own style. Again, I don't know anything about you or the esport community. I can see from your name and from your picture you are a woman. And if you are, let's just say hypothetically, because I'm not familiar with your community, that there are very few women host. Use that to your advantage. Differences are great. Some of the best hosts in the world somehow stand out as different. Don't try to sound like every other guy if most of the hosts in your genre are guys a part of what you are going to learn. Even though this sounds a little bit contradictory, on the one hand, I'm saying practice a whole bunch. Do 10 or so pilots, watch it before you even do your first one that you put online or on the air, wherever your final destination is. But on the other hand, I want you to do as many shows as possible and continue to listen and watch the shows constantly figuring out what you like and what you don't like and then seek out every single opportunity. Being a great host quite often comes down to the more you do it, the better you get. So if you're starting off with a weekly show and you can somehow do it twice a week, do that. If you're asked to substitute on other people's shows, substitute host. If you have a chance to go daily instead of weekly, by all means do that. Because I got to tell you, if you're doing a daily show, it's really, really hard to be nervous or uncomfortable or seem stiff or rigid after a few months. There are exceptions. I have seen people who were good guests, but just never really were good hosts, even after months. But by and large, if it's a daily show and you're hosting it every single day, you will get more comfortable, you will get more confident, and you get to the point where you can truly be in the moment. This is the hard part for hosting a show, because initially when you're hosting, let's say you're interviewing someone you're thinking about, oh, I hope I don't screw up. What's the next set of questions? Am I looking the right way? What do I say if he says this? You're not in the moment. And because of that, you can sort of sound distant and you don't look as present and your guest might actually say something really interesting and you miss it because you're thinking about all these other things and you're not asking as intelligent and as insightful a follow up question because you weren't clearly, clearly listening. The more you do it, the more you get comfortable with this, the more you can block out all those other things. You're not thinking about the next question, you're not thinking about where to look or your makeup or any of that. You're just listening to the guest. That way, when they say something that's confusing or interesting or intriguing or contradictory, boom. You can hop right on it, dig deeper and find out something truly interesting that your audience would want to ask that person if they could have a one on one conversation. If you are having a guest focused show and you're interviewing guests, that's where you really add the most value. If you can ask the questions that the guest would ask if they could actually be there talking one on one, you do that and you will be in great shape. Kelly, thanks so much for sharing your question. Please feel free to post videos of some of your practices right on the online platform where you're learning. You can also post them on our Facebook page and post links to it on YouTube wherever you are watching or listening to this program. By the way, folks, any questions you have, please send them to me. You can post them on any format where you're watching or listening to this podcast or this video TV show. Any question about public speaking? Speaking to the Media Crisis Communications? Hosting PowerPoint? I'll answer the questions to the best of my ability. Thanks so much. I'm TJ Walker. As always, may your speaking opportunities in life be a huge success.

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Today.

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