Ep 63 How to Make a Toast March 3 16

What's the best way to make a toast?

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

Life Special moments, birthdays, anniversaries, major religious events, New Year's Eve. Those are times when people gather together, have food, drink, cheer, and inevitably someone will offer a toast. Many people want to make toast, but just aren't quite sure how to do it. This is a question I get frequently. One came in about this on YouTube just the other day. I want to address it. Spend a little time here in the program today. It sounds like a simple thing, and yet many people never make a toast. I want to give you a few basics to make it simple. First of all, just focus on the positive and say what you want to say. Don't worry about necessarily being witty. The first thing to do raise your glass. Look at the person you're toasting or the people if it's a group, and just say something pleasant and upbeat. It's not a full speech. It is a speech because you're talking in front of more than one person quite often. But it's not a speech in the sense that you need a beginning, a middle and end, and PowerPoint slides and five points. It's not that kind of a speech, and yet it is something that makes people nervous. What I would focus on what I do in my own life is I focus on one nice thing you can say about the event. The time, what's happening, the people. You raise your glass, you say something pleasant, and it can be as simple as to all my friends and family, it's been a great year and here's to a fantastic new year. Raise your glass to everyone. Clink it if it's nearby. You don't want to have to get up and run 10ft away. The person at the end of the table and everyone has a drink. Now I'll get into some of the arcane rules. I think you can actually ignore a lot of these. One rule is if someone is toasting you, you raise your glass. You let your glass touch. You don't want to be breaking glass, but you don't drink. You're not supposed to drink to yourself. I think you can ignore that. Unless you're at some state dinner and there are reporters around who are going to talk about protocol violations. I think you can ignore that. Another rule, according to traditionalists, you don't ever want to toast with what I have here. And for those of you listening on the podcast, I'm simply holding up a glass of water. You are not supposed to really toast with water. The problem I have with that rule is now I have a three year old daughter and we like to toast. I'm not going to give my daughter a shot of whiskey or bourbon or wine. So she likes to participate. So I ignore that rule. Plus you may be with people who, as happened to me the other day, someone at the table was pregnant, normally drinks wine. She's not drinking it now. Do we want to exclude her? So that's one of the traditional rules, is you don't toast with water. I think you can ignore that rule. Other rule, in general, you're better. And you see this violation all the time in movies, TV shows, by people trying to be classy. You see this on the TV show Scandal, which is a show I like. But when you see someone with their hands and their fingers touching the full goblet, all the glass, and it's a wine glass, that is a huge no, no, because your body is 98.6, you're warming the wine up. And white wine should be roughly the 55 to 62 degree range. Red wine, people think, oh, red wine is supposed to be warm, room temperature. Well, no, red wine is supposed to be the temperature of the room in France in the winter, like 64 degrees. So if you're warming it up with your hands, you're making the wine taste bad. Also, just for anyone who knows about wine, it makes you look very unclassy and unsophisticated. So the thing to do with wine glass, a champagne glass is you hold the glass by the stem. It also makes it a lot easier when you are toasting and touching your glass. Again, it's not a loud clink. You shouldn't be breaking glass. There shouldn't be shards of glass anywhere after you're toasting and should just be a little touch when you're holding it by the stem. You. It makes it a lot easier to do that. So it's one of the ways of enjoying a meal more. I think in special occasions, when you're with people you appreciate and you want to acknowledge them, it's a way to do it. Too many people feel like, well, it has to be a witty, dirty limerick or it has to be really funny. If you're naturally funny, fine, do that. But if you're not, don't sit in silence, don't sit in the shadows, speak out. Because here's the thing, it is a type of. I know I sound contradictory, I'm saying it's not a speech, but it is if you're nervous about public speaking, then it is a speech and you're likely to avoid it. You're likely to avoid all speeches. So that's why I'm a big fan of people toasting because it's essentially practice. It's kind of a gateway drug into larger and I mean that in a positive way to larger speeches and presentations. Too many people, most of you, not the case. But too many people in the world just tell themselves I'm not a speaker, I'm not a presenter, I'm not a public speaker. And you keep telling yourself that, yeah, it's true. It becomes self fulfilling prophecy. I'm a big fan not of being obnoxious and trying to dominate every conversation, but looking for every opportunity you can to polish your craft of speaking and presenting. Getting a little more comfortable with it, getting a little better with it. Toasting is one more opportunity because maybe you toast just one or two people in your family tonight at your dinner table makes it that much easier to do a toast the office in front of 10 people tomorrow, two months later. If you're at an industry conference and you're the person in charge of introducing someone and it's a dinner for 50 people and you want to give another acknowledgement to someone, you're going to be that much more comfortable raising your glass and toasting that person in that situation. But don't feel like you have to give numerous, numerous toasts. Typically one is all you need.

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.

Folks, when I look at the and I encourage everyone to do this, you're trying to do something well, look at what your competitor's doing. I do spend time looking at other podcasts that are about speaking mention speaking in their name, show up. If you do search in Apple in the podcast section for speaking public speaking. And what I find is a very high percentage of the shows are geared towards people who aspire to be professional speakers. Now there's nothing wrong with that. That of course is not the focus of our show. We do have some regular listeners and viewers who are professional speakers and aspire to be professional speakers and I do have those people in my client mix of people I train. But this show is really for people who simply want to communicate more effectively, whether they are a CEO, a founder of a company, a politician, a mid level executive, a senior official at a UN agency. It's for people in all walks of life who want to be more successful at communicating their mission. And they could be running a small nonprofit in their neighborhood. They could be running a bank with 100,000 employees. It's about communicating effectively. But I do get questions from time to time from people who aspire to be professional speakers. In fact, I'm not pitching it here today, but I do have an online course on how to be a professional speaker. I do see seemingly more and more content podcast videos geared towards helping people learn special tricks, way to short circuit the system to become a professional speaker faster. And I have weighed in on this before and will continue to do so. But I wanted to take a few minutes today, just put a spotlight on what I think is the number one thing aspiring speakers should really focus on. The number one thing you should focus on if you want to be a professional speaker and get paid to speak, is to actually focus on something completely different. What you need to focus on is accomplishing something in your life that other people admire and respect. So it's an indirect path, but when I look at the most successful speakers, professional speakers in the world, it's never people who woke up at age 21 said I want to be a professional speaker. That's just not where they come from. It typically comes in an accidental way because they focused on being really successful in something else. One speaker, those of you who are regular listeners and viewers of this show you've heard me talk about is Gary Vaynerchuk TV wine library fame. He's written numerous best selling books, he has a huge new media agency and is a new media guru and understand and he's an investor, wildly successful guy and has been involved in a gazillion high tech startups and gets massive fees to give speeches all over the world at tech and other industry conferences. Did he set out to be a public speaker or a professional speaker? No, he set out to sell a whole lot of wine and that led him to learning about the Internet and getting better and better at it and doing a TV wine library show. And he focused on doing that and helping as many people as possible and getting millions and millions of viewers and followers and it all sprung from that. So people were fascinated by here's a guy who was running a family little two million dollar wine shop, liquor shop and he grew it to 60 million and he did it by using YouTube and Internet and social media and Twitter. So he actually accomplished something that people heard about, respected, thought was incredibly interesting, and thought, there's a lot of things he did that I'd like to do, folks. That is the number one template for being a professional speaker. You look at other people on the circuit. Richard Branson is in demand. Well, did Richard Branson say, I want to be a professional speaker? No. He became a billionaire by starting a record company, and then he has a gazillion other companies. He became wildly successful doing interesting creative things in business and becoming a billionaire. And then, and only then, did people really want to hear him speak. And he gets paid a lot of money to give speeches, too. Bill Clinton, again, I'm not being political here, folks. I could use the example of Ronald Reagan, only he's no longer with us. But Bill Clinton makes a lot more money speaking than anyone who is a certified speaking professional and a top leader of the National Speakers Association. And, hey, I'm not knocking the organization. I used to be president of its New York chapter. But Bill Clinton makes a lot more money as a professional speaker, even though he doesn't charge for nine out of 10 speeches. But he makes the money because he never intended to be a professional speaker. He focused on on becoming president, helping people through public policy. And then even though some of you don't like him, a lot of other people did. That's what drove all of the demand for his speaking engagements and speaking fees. Same with Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan didn't set out to be a professional speaker, but after his presidency, he made a lot of money, Japan and elsewhere as a speaker. So it's not a partisan thing. So that's my biggest advice to people who aspire to be a speaker. And that is, why would someone want to listen to you? What have you genuinely accomplished that makes other people think, wow, that's impressive. Sure would like to learn what that person knows that I don't know. That's the best way to be speaker. So if all you do is have the same old motivational message of, you know, I was down and out and I worked hard and now I'm successful and you can, too. There's just not a lot of demand for that anymore. There was a time when you could make a speaking career out of that. Those days are long gone. You need to actually accomplish something so that if someone hears you're speaking and they say, so what? You've got a good answer. What have you done that other people haven't done but would want to do. That's the question you need to answer before you spend any more time trying to figure out how to be a professional speaker. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks for joining me today. As always, may all of your presentations in life be a huge success.

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.