Ep 79 What Do You Say If You Don't Know the Answer to The Question Media Training Public Speaking Training March 19 16

Is your doctor afraid of public speaking?

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

So a new study came out the other day and folks, it's almost comical what kind of studies you can get funded. To me this seems silly, but I do want to share it with you because I think there's some lessons here. This comes from the Journal of Graduate Medical Education. It was published February 1, 2016. It's an article by Vikram Tejwani Daka and Carlos Isada. It's entitled Public Speaking Anxiety in Graduate Medical Education. A Matter of Interpersonal and Communication Skills. Now, they did a survey. Between November 2012 and December 2013, 18 of 107 medical residents they surveyed, basically 17% had symptoms of anxiety when speaking in front of others. That's 17% now. Interesting. That's a bit lower than the 21.2% for US adults who reported anxiety. This according to the National Comorbidity Survey replication. Folks, to me this is just patently silly because asking someone who has never been trained to speak to speaks, then wondering if they're nervous is kind of like saying to these doctors their first day of medical school, okay, you're not a doctor yet, it's your first day of medical school. Would you please perform this operation and tell us if you're feeling nervous or not. Well, I guarantee you in that situation, 100% of medical students their first day of school would be profoundly nervous. If asked to perform an operation with no training, their response I think would be, what do you mean perform an operation? I haven't been trained yet. This is my first day of school. Well, that's pretty similar to how I feel about public speaking. If no one's trained you, if you haven't had any coaching, if you had any instruction, why shouldn't you be nervous? Now you can make the claim, well, T.J. you're inflating your own self importance, saying that just getting up and talking to a few people is the same thing as brain surgery. I understand one is in some ways many, many ways more complex than the other. But if you are nervous, if you are uncomfortable, it can be incredibly difficult to give a good presentation. If you're doing things the wrong way, if you have never been trained, or if you have accidentally learned the wrong principles of public speaking. And that's what happens to so many people. They read something somewhere, oh, you're not supposed to move your hands. Or their role model is a professor who stands up and lectures and writes on the Blackboard. Those are simply not things that will serve you well when you're getting up to give a presentation or a speech. So to me, a research subject like this is useless. If you want to improve the comfort level and decrease anxiety of doctors or MBA students or executives or anyone else, the answer is simple. Don't waste money on more studies. Actually train people. Give them. You don't have to hire me, although that's not necessarily a bad idea. But give your doctors some training. And I certainly, if there is a medical school in the world that does this, great. I've never heard of it, but certainly if not a whole semester course, some kind of week long supplemental course to doctors would be appropriate, teaching them how to talk to patients, how to talk to families of patients, how to deliver bad news, how to speak and lecture to prospective patients about various specialties of medicine. Because all doctors have to talk all the time, unless they are 100% in research. And even then they have to talk with their research assistants. They have to present their research at conferences. So I'm very hard pressed to think of a single example of a doctor who doesn't have to speak or present. And they might not be speaking to large medical conferences of a thousand people, but they do have to speak. And that's why I think as a part of any medical education, you're spending four whole years in medical education. Somewhere in there there needs to be a week long intensive communication training for physicians. I mean they're already spending for the most part the average physician. They're spending 25 years in school by the time you add up, grade school, high school, college, medical school, residencies, and there's so much education and yet some of them want to be the next Dr. Oz. Why not teach them? Not necessarily the negative stereotype of Dr. Oz hyping phony weight loss products, but I mean the good Dr. Oz who gives good medical information, they want to be a part of public health campaigns and yet no training. That's why I think doctors should get this training on how to communicate more effectively. So enough of the studies about people fearing public speaking, having anxiety about public speaking. Why don't we actually spend money training people how to speak?

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 JWalker.

A question that's often posed to me. TJ, what do you do if you're asked a question and you don't know the answer to it? Personally, I love it when someone asks me a question I don't know the answer to. First of all, it's more interesting to me to think about it. Second of all, I will gain credibility with my audience quite often by admitting I'm not omniscient, by admitting I need time to think about it. It's extraordinarily rare that an audience will perceive you negatively if you actually admit you don't know something and you need time to reflect, think about it, do more research. Now this presupposes it's not a question that any fair minded person would assume you should automatically know. If somebody says to me, T.J. what's your middle name? Or how long have you been training? And I'm like, well, you know, I'd really have to think about that. Well, I'll just look like an idiot. So I'm not talking about easy, easy questions. But if it's something that has not come up before or you genuinely don't know the answer, the key is be honest, be authentic with people, let them know I do not know, but don't just stop there and don't say it in an embarrassed way. Quite often what gets people into trouble with the questions that they don't know the answer to is their emotional reaction where they act, maybe annoyed that the person asked them the question that will get you into trouble. Or like they're mortified or humiliated, they feel like a fool. Might be an understandable reaction, but unfortunately that's going to be the most memorable moment of your entire presentation. You don't want people fixating on the fact of oh my gosh, did you see how embarrassed TJ looked when they asked him who his favorite speaker was? And he couldn't say, you don't want that to be the most emotional moment of your presentation because that will take attention away from the ideas you care about. So my general rule of thumb is you want to get as many questions as possible unless you're severely restricted on time because that shows people are interested in what you're saying. It shows they're thinking about what you're saying, they're trying to process what you're saying, they're trying to understand what you're saying, and they're trying to go deep, deeper in the subject matter that you're focusing on. So I love questions certainly most of the time, if they're asking a question where you are positioned as the expert or the authority or the go to person, you do want to have an answer. But every so often someone asks you a question you just don't know, don't be afraid to say, I don't know. And believe me, if any of you send me questions that I don't know the answer to, I'm not going to hit delete on the question. I'm not going to write back and just say, well, you know, don't bother me with this. This is outside my purview. Unless you're really asking me about, you know, what's the best way to win a motorcycle race. I'm not going to ask a question, answer a question that's completely out of my genre. But sometimes people say, well, tj, what is the best way to embed an animation within a PowerPoint slide where there's already a video? And my answer would be, I don't know. Because I Personally don't create PowerPoint slides. I use PowerPoint, but I don't create the slides. I'm happy to direct you to a number of people who do, but then I'll try to go in and give some value with my expertise. So in that particular case, I would say, if you're going to use animation, here's someone who can help you do it. But first and foremost, I would ask you to give serious thought to the question, why are you doing this animation? How does this genuinely help your audience understand your idea and remember your idea? Because I well remember a training I did maybe 10 years ago in St. Croix. An engineer gave a PowerPoint presentation, had a special effect. It may have been 12 years ago, so there weren't people using him as many special effects. He had a little bird or butterfly floating across his page in a particular slide in his presentation. When he was done, everyone was like, wow, Jim, that was great. That was fantastic. How did you make that happen? That special effect is really cool. So I asked people, what do we think of that? Everyone liked the special effect. But then I asked another question. I said, well, what was the point of that slide? Nobody had any idea. What else do you remember of substance, of messages of Jim's presentations? Nobody had any idea. They just remembered that it was an interesting kind of little special effect. So what did I do there? I admitted freely that I didn't know the answer to the person's question of how do you embed a special effect in a PowerPoint presentation where you already have video? I was straightforward. I admitted I didn't know. I would refer them to someone who does. But then I tried to look at the question through a broader lens within the context of what I thought the person was really trying to accomplish. And then I did bring in my expertise and I illustrated it with an example and a story so that I could still add value and still have my expertise come through. So that's what I would recommend. What you don't want to do is guess. Now, it's not true that everyone can spot liars, but for most of us who are not regular habitual liars in the workplace, if we are guessing and we're saying something's true and we're really uncertain about it, there is a good chance that either the tone of our voice or something we're doing with our face or body language will send mixed messages and people will think D.J. is just guessing. Here he's talking out of you know what? You don't want that questions are easy. You either know the answer or you don't. If you don't know the answer, be very straightforward and say that you don't know. Just don't act embarrassed about it. You see this quite often with business executives, sometimes politicians, when they're talking to reporters, they're asked a question. They want to seem smart, they want to seem knowledgeable, especially first time political candidates. And they guess and they often guess wrong and then they're exposed as liars and fools. Famously this has happened on several occasions where reporters will call up members of Congress or political candidates and say, need a quick quote from you. What should we do about the the hostile situation going on in Fredonia? Well, Fredonia, mythical country from a Marx Brothers movie. And every time that happens, I don't know if it happens quite as much in the age of Google, but for many years pre Google times, politicians would fall for the bait and give some comment like we're monitoring the situation closely and we hope for a safe outcome. Things that might make sense for a lot of different real political conflicts, but instead just made them look like fools and idiots too afraid to know they'd never heard of that country and were faking insights that they clearly don't have. So please remember it's okay to get questions where you don't know the answer to be straightforward, be honest, don't be embarrassed, and do the best you can. I'm T.J. walker. As always, may all of your presentations in life be a huge success.

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