Ep 51 Don't Let One Tweet Destroy Your Career Feb 20 16

Are your tweets coming back to haunt you?

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

Saul, one of our regular viewers and listeners, writes in tj, what did you think of the recent tweet from Marc Andreessen? He tweeted, anti colonialism has been economically catastrophic for the Indian people for decades. Why stop now? This was now. Mark Andreessen, for those of you who don't know him, is a very, very famous venture capitalist. He was one of the creators of Mosaic Netscape, one of the, really the founders of the Internet. Fabulously wealthy, successful, savvy, and his fingers are on every kind of major significant Internet company in the world. So considered a savvy guy, successful guy. This created a huge firestorm. People interpreted this as him endorsing colonialism and essentially spitting on developing nations and India and places all over the world. Here's the thing that is confusing about Twitter. If most people tweet something inflammatory, derogatory, insensitive, no one notices. Because if you have 12 followers and not a single one of them read it, it didn't really happen. Now, I only have a couple thousand Twitter followers, and if I tweeted something, if I tweeted this same thing, frankly, I don't think anyone would particularly pay attention or notice. But here's where it's dangerous and different for famous people. You know, a lot of things are different when you're famous. You know, you get to cut in front of line, you get better restaurant reservation, all sorts of things are different. Sometimes it's better, sometimes it's worse. Now, the better part is if you're famous and you have hundreds of thousands or millions of Twitter followers, anything you say that's putting a spotlight on something you care about gets amplified, gets attention. The downside is if you make some offhand comment or you think you're being cute or you don't really think out something how it could be misinterpreted. It can spread like crazy, and next thing you know, people are slamming you, attacking you, vilifying you, calling for death threats, calling your office, faxing you. For those of you who still have faxes can really cause a huge problem. It's no different than going on live national TV and prime time and saying the exact same things if it's wildly negative or inflammatory. Now, Marc Andreessen took the post town. He since apologized numerous times in a lot of different ways. People are still attacking him. Now, before we take up a collection plate for poor Mr. Marc Andreessen, let's not forget, he's really rich, he's successful, he has his own company. He's going to be just fine. This is going to be a major irritant, but I predict at some point we'll be be forgotten and he's going to be a lot more careful when it comes to his tweets. The real lesson here for the rest of us, though, is we do need to give thought to what we tweet, because it might be that you're not famous now, it might not be that you are a huge Silicon Valley billionaire and people are already scrutinizing you. But. But what about the future? These tweets live on. Even if you delete them, other people could capture them. So you might be obscure and have one follower on your Twitter following. Now, if you forget to delete and you have wild, crazy, inflammatory things on there five years ago and now you're running for public office, people are going to go back and scrutinize it. Looking at it through the lens of how can we make this person look stupid, sexist, racist, foolish, intolerant, pro colonial. There's all sorts of things people can look at through a negative lens to paint you in a very harsh way that isn't going to help your career. So am I telling you to never tweet? No. Am I telling you to be politically correct, whatever that means to you? No. I am telling you really give some thought to it. And if you want to be controversial, if you want to be inflammatory, if you want to attack, make sure you're willing to get the counter attack. And the counter attack could be someone just saying, I don't agree, and that's it. But it could be thousands and hundreds of thousands of people writing and tweeting you and vilifying you and mocking you, criticizing you, calling your phone, trying to hack into your website. There's so many things people can do if they all of a sudden don't like you and they think you've said something boorish. So keep that in mind. And remember, you're creating an electronic paper trail for you. That's why so many people are talking about, you know, college kids with all their pictures drunk and half naked, and Facebook can come back to haunt them. Well, employers do check that out. One area in particular, it's not the case with Marc Andreessen here that gets people in trouble, is certain aspects of humor. Humor is often attacking somebody, but if it is someone who used to be considered acceptable to attack and now they're not. You can look boorish and awful and insensitive. This is something that happened to the John replacement Stewart on the Daily Show. People went back through his tweets, found things they didn't like. He had to spend some of his time defending his tweets. Trevor Noah now he's kept his job and is seemingly doing a fine job. But why give yourself the extra irritation? If you want to be funny, fine, be funny. But ask yourself if you're going to attack, is it worth the blowback? How many people won't understand? How many people are just going to get confused? And is it truly worth the headache? I still tweet. And I still tweet every day. But you've got to ask yourself those questions.

Do you have a speaking related question for number one USA Today best selling author TJ Walker? For more than 30 years, Walker has been a public speaking coach and media trainer to presidents of Countries, Prime Ministers, CEOs, Nobel Peace Prize winners, professional athletes and Ms. Universes. Send your questions to infoediatrainingworldwide.com or on Twitter J. Walker.

So now we go to your questions. This one comes in from Jeff, one of my online training students from the Udemy platform. Great platform. So CJ Regarding how to give an extemporaneous speech, Toastmasters does a table topic exercise where the speaker must give a one to two minute speech on a topic that is given to him or her right before the speech. There are 30 seconds available for thinking and mentally preparing before speaking. This is definitely a great skill to have, but how can one prepare for a speech without knowing what they will be speaking about? And believe me, the topics are all over the place. Well, there's a couple of solutions here. One is easy and one is hard. The easy one is the real trick to this is not all of a sudden having a great pre written speech for every topic in the world. That's impossible. The real trick is getting to the point where you are standing up in front of people and it seems like a speech and you're just as comfortable as when you're sitting down talking to a friend. If you're having coffee or a beer with a friend and your friend asks you an opinion on a ball game last night, whether you saw it or not, you'll say something. You're going to be completely relaxed. You'll be able to talk about it. In fact, you probably had wide ranging conversations with a friend for hours. Sometimes you could be on a road trip somewhere and talk for eight hours. I know I have. Everyone has. They Ask you a question. You might talk for five minutes, you might talk for 10 seconds, but you're able to talk because you're relaxed enough to think and talk at the same time. Now the challenge for you at Toastmasters and other venues is you're thinking, uh oh, everybody's looking at me. What do I say? I gotta say something. I gotta say this is nervous. You tense yourself up. You're so keenly aware of being in the spotlight and you're so keenly aware of people looking at you, it freezes up your brain. So part of the solution is to simply do it more often. The more you do anything, the less new it seems, the less uncomfortable it seems, the easier it gets, the harder it is to be nervous about something. So I want to encourage you to go to Toastmasters. It's a great organization. I'm often asked to speak at Toastmasters around the world. So for those of you who don't know what Toastmasters is, it's a non profit organization where people can get together and practice their public speaking skills. Typically once a week, could be twice a month, once a month. But you can go in a non threatening, low pressure atmosphere. Practice speaking sometimes prepared speeches, sometimes, as Jeff has just mentioned, the table topic. So the way to short circuit your learning process and make it go even faster is to practice at home. Have a spouse, family member, a friend, simply toss out random questions to your topics to you and hold up a cell phone and capture you speaking. And you might not be great the first one, two, three times, but the more you do it, the easier you'll be able to just listen to the topic and be able to say something about it. Intelligently summarize what you know, if you have an opinion, even great. If you're angered or annoyed or excited about something, bringing that passion in is great too. Now this is an incredibly useful skill to have in the real world because if you're at a board of directors meeting and your CEO calls upon you, you want to be able to talk just as if you were having a one on one conversation with someone who works for you, presumably a less stressful situation. So it's not just gimmick silly game to play at Toastmasters. It is a skill that's very helpful in real life. So that's one thing you need to be up on, is just practice. Have a friend, family member, just practice and you record yourself on video. Now you can even do this on your own. You could stand up, have your cell phone ready to capture the video, your webcam, then Just open up a newspaper, click whatever story it lands on, force yourself to talk about that, and see how you do. It might not be perfect, it might not be great, but if you look comfortable, if you look confident, if you can state something intelligently, you'll certainly do better than most at the Tabletop Topics discussion portion of your Toastmasters meeting. Now for the advanced tip. This is a little harder to do, but if you really want to be able to be conversant on a wide range of topics, you have to have wide eclectic reading habits. There's simply no other way around it. Unfortunately, too many people have narrowed their focus. Just like Sports. They'll read 100 sports articles a day and they have no idea if the Middle east blew up yesterday. If all they care about is technology and they have no idea what movies played in the last year because they haven't been to a movie in 10 years, they're going to sound pretty ignorant if someone asks them about the latest movies. So my advice to you is really look at what you're reading every day. Whether you go to websites, if it's just your Facebook feed and your friends send a lot of cat videos and Kim Kardashian updates. The problem is you're not going to have much interesting to say when people ask you about topics outside of those. So that's the biggest solution is to have wide ranging reading habits. Books. Not just Internet web stories, but read books. And I read electronic books. It doesn't have to be paper format and try to read at least all the front page news stories from some major outlet you respect. I do respect the New York Times and I read that you might choose the Washington, you might want the London Times, but look for some news source you trust because you could waste all day long looking at Internet news and never get anything done. You can't look at everything. Find a reputable source and then get a range of international, national, business, economic news, social, political news, cultural news so that you can be frankly an interesting person. You don't have to be up on everything, but you need at least enough to have a conversation, whether it's a formalized table topics discussion at a Toastmasters or just a conversation with friends and family over dinner. Hope that helps. Jeff, thanks for your questions. At any point you have questions, please send them here. I'm always happy to answer your questions. That's what this whole show is about seven days a week. We answer your questions. I say we, I answer your questions. I don't want to make it sound like I have this big giant research team and production crew. This is just me folks. I'm here sharing with you my opinions that are based on real world practice and expertise. Having trained tens of thousands of people from six continents for the last 32 years on how to give speeches and speak to the media. That's all this show is. So I'd like to hear from you your questions on any aspect of public speaking or speaking to the media. Please send them to me. Tjediatrainingworldwide.com is my direct email. You can send it to me there. As always, may all of your presentations in life be a huge success.

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