Ep 31 What is the Worst Time Slot for a Speaker?

What's the best time of the day to give a speech or presentation?

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

Of course I don't want to speak at 8:30am Everyone will be hungover and too tired. That's the worst time to. After lunch. No, I don't want to speak after lunch. Everyone will be tired and dragging and wanting a nap. Speak after dinner. No, People will be drunk and ready to party. I don't want to speak. Then speak after. Smithers at 3 in the afternoon. He's the best speaker at the convention. I'll look horrible. I don't want to speak that. All right, folks. People spend a lot. I hear things like that all the time in my line of work. In my professional opinion, people spend way too much time. They waste way too much time trying to figure out the strategy of what's a good time to do it? What's a good time to avoid speaking? Who do I follow? What's in between? Here's the thing, folks. Most speeches any time of the day are really boring and unmemorable. If you can actually be good. If you can actually speak to people with some passion, deliver some interesting ideas in a memorable way, it doesn't matter. The speaking order. Way too many political candidates are the worst about this, of figuring, oh, I want to be able to speak first or I have to speak the last. I have to get the final word in. None of that really matters if your opponent chews you up and spits you out, or if you say something stupid, or if you're like Rick Perry and you go oops. Nobody remembers where in that infamous Debate before the 2012 campaign what order Rick Perry spoke in. They remember that he said oops and forgot what he was going to say and paused awkwardly for what seemed like 10 minutes. That's the only thing that matters, by the way. Welcome to this special weekend edition of the program. As you know, most podcasts are once a week. A few are daily, Monday through Friday. This podcast is every day because if you're willing to learn more about public speaking and speaking to the media, I'm here for you. Some of you just have a routine. You go for a walk in the morning. You want to have something to listen to. I want to be here for you. But we do try to make the weekend editions a little shorter and truncated so you can get along with your weekend activities. Here's my general thesis. Focus all of your energies when you're speaking on actually Speaking in a way that's interesting, that's memorable, that's engaging. That way, if there's 14 speakers in a day, whether you're first, middle, last after a big heavy lunch or the end of the day when people are antsy to get out, it's not going to matter. They're still going to remember you the most. They're still going to take away your idea. They're still going to tell other people when they get back home, back to their own city, or back to their office about what you said. Because you're interesting. It's, it's kind of like spending all your time as a race car driver trying to figure out the, the best tires, which tire is going to give you that extra eighth of a mile an hour edge. But you don't have an engine in the car. It doesn't really matter how good your tires are if you're a race car driver, if there is in fact no engine in the car. If you are a speaker and you are trying to figure out, oh, I don't want to speak at the 8:00 clock slot, the 9:30 slots, much better. You really are like someone obsessing over tires with no engineering. Make sure you have a great speech. Make sure it's delivered in an interesting way. This time you're spending negotiating with the organizer or the meeting planner, that's probably time you're much better off using. Practicing your speech on video, looking at it, and figuring out what works and doesn't work. I realize people don't like to hear that. They like to do the gamesmanship and the brinksmanship and the strategy of, oh, I want to be the fourth person or I don't want to follow this person. Here's the thing about following great speakers. To you, it's following that great speaker. But to everyone else, it's still a clean slate. If they are in the room listening to you, they're really not comparing you to the previous speaker. They're just trying to make a judgment. Is what TJ is saying interesting or useful to me? Or is what TJ is saying boring and uninteresting? Therefore, I can open my phone, check my email, text my friends, and go about my business. That's the only thing going on with most audiences. So if you have a chance to speak after Anthony Robbins or Bill Clinton or Rush Limbaugh, anyone you really admire as a great Colin Powell, a great, fantastic public speaker, take it. Don't waste time complaining about, well, I hate to be the guy who follows this speaker. Just Say something interesting. In my experience, audiences are so happy when a speaker can say something interesting, come across in an interesting, memorable, engaging way that they'll reward you. And I'm dating myself here a little bit. But think back in those of you who were around in the 90s. I mean, if you really loved watching Friends, and that's your favorite show, and Seinfeld appeared right after that, and you loved Seinfeld, you never said to yourself, well, Seinfeld wasn't very good this week because it followed Friends, and Friends was really fun. That's just not how people think. So part of being a great speaker is getting rid of the mindset of me, me, me, the little public speaker, and focusing on the mindset of the audience. The audience is here in the present. Now, if the last speaker was so great and everyone ran out of the room to get his or her autograph, and no one is literally left in the room, okay, I understand that's a problem. But that's not a problem of the speaker. That's a problem that no one's in the room. And something tells me at your average company retreat or organizational retreat, whoever the best speaker is in your organization probably doesn't have groupies running out of the room begging for autographs when he or she's done. They may have people who want to chat with them or ask a few questions or think that it was a good presentation, but you'll probably have most of your people there, and that's good. Don't compare yourself to the previous speaker. Don't knock yourself down. Don't say, well, gosh, there's no way you could like me because I'm just not very good compared to this great speaker you just saw that everybody loves, and you don't love me. I've seen speakers do that. You've seen speakers do that, and it just comes across as sort of needy, pathetic, and whiny. I would not do that in any particular. In any scenario. Please, please don't do that.

A question for you.

Here's my question to you. Do you really think it matters the order in which you speak during a conference day, a meeting? Do you think it matters, and do you honestly feel that it has affected the audience's reaction to you if you spoke at a time that, for example, people thought was undesirable? I would like to hear from you. So please send me your response to that question on Twitter jwalker. You can also post on Facebook, our page there, YouTube, wherever you see this or hear this, I would like to know Your answer to that question do you think it's affected your reception from the audience based on where you've spoken? And do you actively try to avoid certain times or select certain times when you are giving a presentation?

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But folks, I won't kid you, some situations are more challenging. Now this doesn't fit the typical corporate speaking situation, but if you are a comedian and it's the late show on Saturday night, it does affect your presentation, your comedy routine. Because 10 o' clock at a comedy club on a Saturday night is often filled with drunk college kids. So if you are a true aficionado of comedy, that's often the worst time to go because the comedians feel like they have to do sort of the cheapest tritest sex and body part jokes and the most profanity at the expense of sophisticated humor or intelligent humor. So the timing can affect certain things. More than 20 years ago, I was a host of a late night talk radio show on W. At the time, the call letters were wsbh, a tiny, tiny AM talk radio station in the southern tip of Miami Beach, South beach. And this was 1992 and I was hosting a show from midnight to 4am talk show, no guest because it's pretty hard to get guest at 4am on Saturday morning. Now this station was so, by the way, this was Larry King's first radio station down in Miami. But this station signal was so weak that if you drove more than a half a mile away, the reception got sketchy. Now, beyond the fact that it had such a small reach, this was 1992. So the whole south beach craze was really, really building, building momentum. Nightlife everywhere, people partying everywhere, late night parties, raves, discos everywhere. Believe me, the last thing anyone wanted to do down there at that point was listened to AM political talk radio. And it was a political talk show. So that was a challenging speaking environment because nobody was listening. I would beg and beg and beg for calls, often couldn't get any. One night I was going on and on and on, hitting every topic in the news, asking for questions, begging. Finally, at 3:30am, I see the phone line light up. I'm so relieved, I'm so happy. And I say to the producer in the other room and the call screener, Bill will take the call on line one. And I look through the glass divider and there, sound asleep, is Bill snoozing through the call. He only called the whole night. And we lost it because the only person listening to me was sound asleep. So, folks, I won't kid you, there are some times that are more challenging than others. But the key is you've just got to go with it and you have to learn. Now, as bad as that was, and believe me, I wasn't making. I don't think I was making any money. If I did, I'm sure it wasn't more than about $2 an hour. And I was missing on all the fun nightlife at the time. But I still enjoyed doing it and I still learned from it because there is an extraordinarily valuable skill you can learn from speaking almost uninterrupted for four hours. Now, there were a few commercials, but we had no calls and we had no guests. And I was doing this Saturday and I believe Sunday nights, midnight to 4am So I had to learn how to talk. Some of you have asked me, well, TJ, how can you do seven shows a week for up to 20 minutes each and you're not reading a teleprompter, you're not writing out the whole script. How could you possibly do that? And my response is, it's the easiest thing in the world after having done a four hour daily talk radio show with no guest and very few listeners. So that's my other big challenge for you, is if you're given a slot that's less than desirable, make the most of it. Learn from it. Build your craft, get better at whatever it is you do, because you never know when the skill you learn there might be incredibly useful in the future. 25 years ago, I had no idea there would be this thing called itunes, or for that matter, YouTube. If I had, I would probably be a lot richer today. But the point is, I learned from the skill that I was using in building at the time. I didn't go on the talk radio show and whine and complain. I can't believe I have this horrible time slot I wish I could be on in drive time. No, I just made the best of it. And that's really all you can do. Because in most situations in life, you're speaking at a convention, a conference, your board meeting. You don't really have control over where you speak and when you speak. What you do have control over, though, is how you speak and what you say. And that is the ultimate advice. I have to focus on what you can control. You can't control the audience. Most of the time. You don't control when you speak. So focus on the thing you actually control saying something interesting in a compelling manner. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks for joining me. As always, may all of your presentations in life be a huge success.

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