Ep 72 Does Online Public Speaking Training Work The DrNickMorgan.com Episode March 12

Is online presentation training effective.

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

Hello and welcome. All of the questions today are presented by my colleague and friendly competitor, Dr. Nick Morgan. He's put forth a question. This is, this is sort of a, I hate to use the word synergy, but it's one of these synergistic things where I'm using content for my show, he's taking content for his blog, and ideally we both gain ideas. I do want to stress to you there are a lot of charlatans out there who call themselves presentation coaches, media training experts. Dr. Nick Morgan is not one of them. He is one of the few I admire and respect. I read his blog. It's@PublicWords.com I follow him on Twitter. NickMorgan is his Twitter handle. You can also go to his website, Dr.nickmorgan.com by the way, he's got some great upcoming public workshops in the presentation training arena in the Boston area coming up. So check out his website. So here are the questions that he has presented to me today. TJ One of the hottest trends right now in the presentation training world is online training. Why do you think that's the case? Well, it's about time, I guess is all I can say. I started my first online presentation training course in the late 1990s. It was a fabulous failure, an unmitigated failure. I lost time and money. It was simply too early. And round about 2005, 2006, I said, okay, there's more broadband connections. Online training seems to be getting a little more attention. I invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in programmers from India and various places, built an interactive online presentation training course and built some great courses. People who looked at it, reviewed it, thought it was great, and I sold maybe three copies. Huge failure. And I frankly tried to forget about online training until a couple of years ago. A few colleagues of mine said, hey TJ, you got to get onto this place called Udemy, Udemy.com because they are doing a great job of marketing online training. And those of you, in full disclosure, my courses are on Udemy. I also have my courses on my own website, which is where I prefer people go to get my courses@mediatrainingworldwide.com but the timing was right. Simply more and more people have access to broadband connections. More people are used to the idea of learning online. More and more colleges are purely online, and more and more traditional colleges are offering courses in an online environment. More and more people are connected to the Internet through their cell phones with high speed connections and wi fi. And more and more people want to learn. In our current economy, if you're not learning new skills, it's just too easy to be fired, become obsolete and never get another job. So all these factors have come together to make online training very popular. And as a part of that, presentation training gets caught up in the mix. And that's in a good way. If you're already learning so many other skills important to your career and presentation training courses are now available, why not take that? So I think a part of it is just taking a long, long time. And occasionally I'll have friends or colleagues or even family members or competitors say, wow, tj, that's great. The last year your online courses have taken off. That must be like an overnight success. Well, more like 20 years and having lost a whole lot of time and money, although thankfully it is profitable now. And I'm on about 30 different online platforms and in a good month I will sell. I have sold more than a thousand different courses, so it is finally gaining acceptance. Now, Dr. Nick's next question is a much tougher question. Is online training effective? What has been your experience with it? Well, here I have a conflict of interest and I'm going to be totally upfront with you and I'm going to be above board, tell you exactly what I think, even though it's not what. I'd like to tell you more on that in a moment after this brief word about some free online training.

For a free, no obligation online public speaking or media training course, go to mediatrainingworldwide.com and start learning today.

So Dr. Nick's question. Is online training effective? And I want to differentiate between online training and online presentation training. Online media training, which is my specialty in general, online training can be highly effective for some students who are motivated. Unfortunately, so many free courses are out there. People sign up on a whim, cost nothing to sign in. It also costs nothing to drop out. If you go to a private university and you plop down $32,000 for a semester for tuition that may or may not even include some room or board, if you drop out, you've just lost $32,000. You've lost something's on your record that can scar you for life, scar your career chances for life. Your parents probably hate you if they're paying for some of this. So there's tremendous incentives to stay in court, go to class, do the reading in a traditional university situation, not because the education is necessarily better, but because you paid so much, you've lost so much if you drop out. So the strength and the weakness of online training is quite often it costs nothing or very little. So if you drop out, it costs nothing or very little. So the retention rates are awful. But if you're really motivated and you're learning a pure academic subject that involves a body of knowledge, then you can learn a tremendous amount in online training. Now, let's talk about specific to presentation skills. Here's the big problem. Yes, of course you can learn presentation skills in an online environment, but that's different from do people learn on online training? Do most people learn in online training? And sadly, as much as it pains me to say this, the answer is no. Here's why. When it comes to learning presentation skills, I believe the only way to learn is by speaking out loud, capturing yourself on video, watching it, playing it back, critiquing yourself, being critiqued, doing it again and again and again until you love what you see. And unfortunately, in an online environment, there's no one there to crack the whip and to stand over you. And to make sure that happens, if someone hires me or Dr. Nick Morgan to do a day of training, we're coming with our video cameras. At that point, they have no choice. Unless they fake illness, which has happened before, but that's extremely rare, they're going to be videotaped, they're going to improve, they're going to get better, they're going to have real mastery by the end of the day. The problem with online training is it's too easy to sort of sit back, click, watch a video, click, take a little exam, click, read a couple paragraphs, click, and think that you're doing something, think that you're learning something and not actually do the work. Now, in all of my online training courses@mediatrainingworldwide.com and places like Udemy and Skillshare and others, I state right there in the lesson, here's your I'll do a video or two, and I'll say, now here's the exercise. You need to come up with a speech, a presentation, an outline, say it out loud, record it, and upload it here into the course. And I'll critique it and others critique it. I don't even charge you extra for that. Guess how many of my students do that. Would you care to take a wild guess as to how many students will actually take me up on that? It is far less than 1%. More than 99% of people do not record themselves and upload it for A teacher, in this case me, to critique. Well, if you aren't willing to do that, you aren't learning and it is a complete waste of time and money. I'm sorry to say that now, at some point in an academic arena, if people are smart, and I do have courses in some public schools too, but I'm not the teacher for it, I can't enforce it. But if people really want to learn, and in a high school or college or grade school environment, what they have to do is require people to put videos up and they have to have someone look at it and not even let you go to the next lesson until you have uploaded a video and critiqued yourself. At that point, online training is going to be extremely effective. Highly, highly effective. But as long as the current situation, and I'm sad to say my courses are like this on all the platforms, there's simply no mechanism preventing someone from going to the next video and passively watching as opposed to doing what really matters. And that is speaking out loud, practicing on video, watching yourself. So if you want to learn online, do it with the idea you're going to record yourself. If you're not even going to record yourself, frankly, it's a waste of time. Next question from Dr. Nick Morgan. Do you have an online training product? Yes, I do. And since you did ask me, I'll be a little self serving here. I have, I believe, the largest library in the world of online presentation training courses created by any one instructor. I have more than a hundred courses and they are very, very specific and niched. So I have a public speaking course just for people who fear public speaking. I have a public speaking course just for people who want more tips on how to speak to larger audiences. I have a public speaking course for engineers. So it's very, very niche. If you want to look at the full curriculum, just go to mediatrainingworldwide.com and click on the online learning. You'll see a list of more than 100 courses. I have a public speaking course just for kids, another one just for college students, for example. Yeah, there is a lot of similarity to all of them, but I find everyone likes something addressed to their particular concerns. And that's why I have, for example, a crisis communications course for oil and gas executives. The examples are specific to their industry. The substance isn't that different from my general crisis communications course, but all the examples are different and that's why it's more relevant to them. So please check that out. Also go to drnickmorgan.com to check out all of his online training tools as well, because I know he has some as well. Question four from Dr. Nick. What is the best way to learn to become a better speaker? And folks who are regular listeners to this podcast and regular viewers know I've said this till I'm blue in the face. The best way. Practice on video, watch it, figure out what you like, what you don't like, do it again, do more of what you like, do less of what you don't like. Keep doing that until you love what you see. That is far and away the best way to become a better speaker and also to speak as often as you can to many, as many different audiences as possible. Final question from Dr. Nick. Tell us about TJ. How did you become a speaking coach? Well, the interesting thing about speaking coaches, you look at the background, a lot of them, and you think, how in the world did they end up there? There are some famous, prominent speaking coaches who had horrible stuttering problems as a child, overcame all sorts of adversity. And I don't have anything that dramatic. I was a quiet child. I was certainly not talkative at all. Very, very quiet. One day I was sitting in class in sixth grade and my teacher came up to me and said, tj, I got a deal for you. She was in charge of putting on the elementary school graduation ceremony. She needed a student to give a little basic speech, an introduction, welcoming speech to parents, teachers, students. She said, tj, I'll make a deal with you. If you give this welcome speech, I'll change your grade on handwriting from a C, an average grade, to an A. All you have to do is the speech. Now, I didn't really like the idea of speaking, but I thought, well, I'd like an A. Why not? How bad could it be? So I gave the speech. It wasn't anything particularly good or memorable, but I got the A for the class. And I learned at a very early age, if you're just willing to stand up and speak, people give you things, good things happen to you. And only a few months later, I was in junior high school. We didn't call it middle school back then. It was junior high school. It was a 50s day, and I won a Fonzie look alike contest. And I had a lot more hair back then. It was a lot darker and I had it slicked back like a 50s character. The reward was that I got to do the junior high school newscast on closed circuit tv. So I became the news anchor for the day. And this was sort of my first brush with the News media, being on camera. This would have been 1975. Wow, I'm starting to sound old. That was 41 years ago. So that was my first brush with the media. And then a few months later, I ran for the student council, student government, and then the next year became the student body president and was constantly speaking in front of 1200 students and at student government conventions and things like that. So at some level, everything I've done since then has involved speaking media politics. Now, I don't work that much with politicians today. It's probably less than 1% of my client base. But everything at some level does deal with speaking, presenting, communication, speaking to the media, and media skills. Now, in college, I was a philosophy major, but I also was someone who did commentary for the student TV station, radio station and newspaper. I always had a strong interest in all media, not just being a print journalist, for example, and became an intern with a congressional candidate my senior year and became. That's where I did my first media training, basically was an unpaid intern, found someone with a camera and practiced with a candidate before his TV debates speeches. And that was sort of my beginnings as a media trainer. And that was way back in 1984. Ever since, everything I've done has either been as a political campaign aide, a government communications aide, or as a private consultant or as a talk show host. I mean, one of the reasons I'm doing this and one of the reasons that able to do so much media training is I've hosted thousands of hours of talk radio shows. I've been on about seven different networks. I'm ashamed to say all of them were unmitigated failures. I've been on about seven networks. I think they've all gone out of business at this point. So if you've got a radio network, you probably don't want to hire me as a host unless you're planning on going bankrupt. And I've hosted my own syndicated TV show and to be brutally honest, have not been successful as a political pundit, which was my original goal and aim. So I had to do a tweak and say, okay, I like media skills, I like speaking skills. No one really wants to hear my political ideas. How can I tweak this? Still use my skills, use what I like to do or what I'm good at, make a living at it. So while I started doing training on the side as sort of a freelancer 30 years ago or so, I didn't really start this as a serious, serious business until around 2000, 2001. So it's been 15 years. Once I focused on it 100%, that's what allowed me to start writing every day and that's what generated books. And then that's where courses came from and that's where more websites came from. So now I've got a lot of books, a lot of videos, used to do DVDs and CDs and now 100 online courses. And that's what's given me sort of a footprint around the world. So about 10 years ago, I opened up to partnerships. So I have a partner in India, I've had them in Korea, Portugal, the Middle East. So I do get to spend a lot of time training people all over the world, traveling around the world, which is frankly a lot of fun and interesting and just makes you a better communicator when you're exposed to more and more styles of how people communicate around the world. So that's how I got into this business. Nick, thanks again for your questions. Thanks for being a part of this. And again folks, if you haven't been to his site, I'd urge you go to drnickmorgan.com, go to his blog@publicwords.com you may also want to check out his Forbes column. A lot of good content there as well. I'm TJ Walker. As always, may all of your presentations in life be a huge success.

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