Free Communication Skills Masterclass

So how can you become a better communicator right away? Here's a quick sheet. That's right. If you're nervous about going into a presentation, a talk, a breathing, a speech, you're not quite sure what you're going to say. Do what I do. I have a cheat sheet. Everything I'm going to say for the next hour is all right here. Now, the beauty of this is it's a single sheet of paper. If I'm speaking on camera, I can just put it in front of of my laptop, in front of my computer. No one sees it. If I'm speaking to a larger audience and perhaps walking around, or even if I'm in a, a big room, in front of a large audience, I can have that one sheet of paper on a table. I can have it on top of a laptop, I can have it scattered out, several copies around the room. No one will see me picture picking it up. The beauty of it is it's only on one sheet of paper. So that's a quick one you can do right away. That will make you so much less nervous because you're not going to have to remember what to say. Chances are your memory isn't any better than mine and mine's no good. That's why I use a very, very simple cheat sheet. Now let's go right into a second quick win. The number one way to be confident when you're starting any presentation is to do what I just did. Start with a quick win. Give something of value to your audience, something where they can say, hmm, that was useful. That was interesting. I didn't know that I can use that. Maybe I should listen to this person a little more. That's so much better than the traditional way of starting a speech where someone kind of walks out, you know, Good morning. I'm happy to be here today. Let me tell you about how important I am. Let me tell you about all the wonderful things I can tell you about what I've accomplished. Boring. Rule number one, when it comes to communication, nobody really cares about you. People care about themselves. So the faster you can hop right in to telling people something interesting for them, the better. Hi, I'm TJ Walker, and what we're going to do in the next hour or so is go through an actual training to make you a better communicator. We'll work on communication skills together so that you can be better one on one, speaking to small groups, business groups, business meetings, sitting down on a conference table, but also standing, giving a briefing, a speech, and A talk. And we'll even talk about how you can speak more effectively to the media or in front of a camera. These are skills you're going to learn. I'm TJ Walker. I've been training people just like you all over the globe for about 30 years. I've trained presidents of countries, prime ministers, Nobel Peace Prize winners, professional athletes, and a lot of folks just like you. So here's what we're going to do today, and it's a little bit different now. This is a training seminar. It's a live training seminar for me when I'm doing it. But I'm not going to lie to you. One of my concerns in the whole marketing world is there's so much nonsense these days about, come to my free training webinar, come to my free live training session, and it's just marketing spin. I'm going to be honest with you. My marketing team's not that happy with me. They said, tj, if you're going to generate leads and get more people into your sales funnel, you can't actually teach them anything. You have to whet their appetite. You have to sort of poke their pain. You have to do this value stacking where you say, and you get $10 billion worth of stuff today if you act right now, the next five minutes for 9.95. Frankly, it's a lot of cheesy stuff I'm not that comfortable with. So I'm going to make a deal with you. I'm going to be transparent on what I'm doing here, and I hope that we really have a fair exchange of value. I'm going to actually give you the same training that I give to paying clients. Really walk you through step by step. Not just tease you, tantalize you, throw a shroud over things, and then at the last minute say, oh, but what you really need is behind this curtain, and you can't get it unless you spend $10,000 with me. I'm not going to do that. I'm going to earnestly give you what I feel is great information to help you become a better communicator. And then every 10, 15 minutes or so, I'm going to give you some options for finding out more if you want to go to the advanced level. But my goal here is that you actually improve. You go from wherever you are, several steps up in terms of your skill as a communicator. And then if you want to get to an advanced level or if you want to advance even faster, then you can check out opportunities to work with me and my team. So what are we really going to focus on today? I'm going to help you with the things that you've already told me. You're concerned about your body language when you're speaking. That's why you can see me from here up. And it's not just the tight little shot. I want to actually show you the things that you can do to look more comfortable and confident and the things that you shouldn't do so that you don't look nervous and uncomfortable. I'm going to give you tips on how to use your voice in a more powerful way. So many students I work with and clients around the world are insecure and feel like your voice is no good and it's hurting. We'll focus on that. I'm going to really go through the most common mistakes most people make as speakers, and together we'll come up with specific tips, tricks, and tactics so that you can avoid those mistakes. That's really the goal now. The ultimate goal is to help you become a better communicator. What is communication? It's when you have an idea in your head. It comes out of you in some way so that another person or group of people can hear you, understand you, find it interesting and relevant to them and remember your message so that they can take an action. Whether it is buy a product from you, sign a contract, hire you. If you're on a job interview you, endorse you, vote for you. Anytime we speak, it's typically because we want people to take a specific action. So that is the underlying assumption of everything we're doing here today, is to really help you accomplish something before you worry about the perfect message and the perfect outline and these brilliant ideas. For a lot of folks, it's, oh, my gosh, what do I do when I have to stand up in front of people or even sit in a room with my boss and five other people? What do I do with my hands? How do I keep from looking stupid? What if I rock awkwardly or fidget? All of these are completely legitimate concerns because ultimately we want to communicate a message. But it's never about style versus substance. You always have to have both. I can have the best message in the world, the best tips in the world on public speaking, speech writing, communication. But if I stand here like this for the next hour giving you fantastic ideas, brilliant ideas, wonderful tactics, the only thing you're going to take away is, boy, oh boy. TJ sure seems nervous and like he has to go to the bathroom. Why? Because you associate with someone rocking back and forth with nervous. You associate someone looking down nervous and someone holding their hands down here as either nervous or uncomfortable or having to go to the bathroom. So that is the message I would be sending. It's not that your visual message is always more important than what you're saying, it's that you need both. Think of it this way. If you had to hire someone to be your assistant and they had the best resume in the world, but they send you a cover letter filled with typos, spelling errors, mistakes, smudged paper, you probably wouldn't hire them, right? On the other hand, if someone had a beautiful cover letter, beautiful punctuation, beautiful spelling, but you looked at their resume, they never worked a day in their life and there's nothing on their resume that suggests they have the skills you need, the qualifications, and absolutely zero computer skills. You're not going to hire them just because the letter looks pretty, right? So it's always a fake debate between the style of how you move, your body language versus the substance of what you say. If you're going to communicate, you have to have both. In sing now you've heard people say, well, just act natural. Act natural. Here's why that's horrible advice. When you are speaking, giving a presentation, whether it's a job interview, whether it's a talk to 10 clients, maybe it's a thousand people in your industry, maybe it's just two people, your boss and your boss's boss. If you're a little bit uncomfortable, you're going to in all likelihood act natural. The natural thing to do is to act scared. When we're scared, we as human beings stiffen up, we stop moving because we're biologically programmed to want to avoid being seen. Because hundreds of thousands of years ago, if you're out in the savannah and lions and saber toothed tigers could see you, you're at greater risk. So the logical thing to do is kind of freeze. No one will see you. But if you're doing that in a presentation, a speech, it's going to make you look nervous, it's going to make you look scared. It is not going to help you. So that's why the advice of just act naturally doesn't really help. What you need to do is act the way you do when you're in another environment, when you're comfortable, confident and relaxed. What I have found in working with 10,000 plus people face to face around the world in 45 countries, and in working with 2 million online students from virtually every country Is that everyone, everywhere, when they're comfortable, they move, their body moves a little, their hands move, their face move, their eyebrows move. So what you really want when it comes to your body language is movement. Now, the way to figure this out is to practice with your cell phone. And what I would highly recommend, you'll hear me say this a lot, is if you want to be a better speaker, communicator, presenter, you need to practice what, what you want to say just on your cell phone, record it on video and look at it. Chances are the first few times you do that, you're going to think, wow, that person looks a little scared, little stiff. Now, one area where people get themselves into trouble is they see themselves move a little or they see their hands move and they think, oh my gosh, that looks horrible. I shouldn't move my hands. That's just distracting. So what a lot of people then do to correct it in their mind is they do this, or they grab a lectern or they hold a pencil. Makes it worse. So be very careful when you are looking at yourself on video, when you're practicing and rehearsing, that you don't over correct and make things worse. You actually want your hands to move. That's what will make you come across more comfortable. Now let's talk about voice. There's something that very strange that goes on with most people everywhere in the world. When they hear their own voice coming back to them through the speaker, they instantly think, oh, wow, that's awful. That sounds horrible. That doesn't sound like me. I wouldn't want to listen to me, wow, my voice is uniquely awful. Now I know that I need to really change my voice completely or never ever speak. That's not the lesson you should take away. Here's what's really going on. We all hear our own voice distorted through the bones in our skull all day long. So when we hear our voice through a speaker coming back to us, it's much less distorted. So it sounds weird to us. It's not our self image of our own voice. And because of that, it's disorienting, it feels weird. Chances are your voice is perfectly fine. Maybe it's not good enough for Hollywood movie producers to pay you a million dollars to make a voiceover ad for their movie. Okay, mine's not that good either, but it's extremely rare. In fact, I've never even had a client with this one problem where someone's voice is so awful, so bad, so distracting, it actually impaired their ability to communicate. People were Running out of the room to avoid them. That just doesn't happen. So chances are your voice is not so beautiful and memorable and resonant that people pay you millions of dollars. But it's not going to drive people away. That's okay. You've got a voice that it's perfectly fine for what you need to do. Here's the number one thing that will help you get comfortable with your voice. It is back to what I mentioned earlier. It is practicing on video, hearing yourself. The more you get used to hearing your voice, the better off it will sound to you. The more comfortable you'll be with your own voice. Now let's talk about common mistakes people make. The number one mistake people make with their voice is they speak too softly, they get a little nervous. And when they speak too softly, it brings the volume down. It flattens them out, it makes them sound monotone, and it makes you sound scared. Nobody wants to buy from someone who's scared. Nobody wants to hire someone who's scared. Nobody wants to vote for someone scared. So that's the problem with reducing your volume. Now, it's natural. Again, people say, just act natural. That's not good advice most of the time. It's not that I want you to be fake and phony, but the natural thing to do when you're out of your comfort zone is to tighten your body, tighten your vocal cords, and your volume goes down. Huge problem. It's harder for people to hear. Flattens you out, makes you seem uncomfortable, nervous, and less communication takes place. And the wrong communication takes place. So the number one thing you can do with your voice is to not yell and scream. But you do want more energy than normal, a little more volume than normal. Think of it this way. If you're at a crowded, popular restaurant, you're at a big table, say, with 10 or 12 family members and friends. You maybe have an aunt, an uncle on the other side of the table whose hearing isn't quite as good as it once was. And you want to say something, you're just a little more animated. You have a little more energy in your voice, a little more arranged. You're not acting, but the volume is a little more, the range is a little more. There's a little more expression on your face, your body, your hands are moving a little more. This is what you want to bring out the best in your voice. So what have we accomplished so far? I hope I've given you a sense that I am operating here in good faith. I've tried to give you some Good quick tips on how to start right away by doing things like using a simple outline on a sheet of paper. We've gone over tips of how to improve your voice, how to improve body language. And what I'm not going to do is just tweak you and try to make you feel bad and insecure. I'm not going to do all these typical gimmicks in marketing where, wow, imagine how much money you've lost. Millions of dollars because you're not in my $10,000 public speaking program. I'm not going to do that. I'm going to continue just trying to help you, give you positive tips on how you can be a better communicator with the and being transparent with the hope that some of you could be 3% say, okay, this guy really giving me some value. So now I want to hire him to go to the advanced level or I got value from him. I'm going to bring him to my company and train all of our top executives or I want him to come to our organization, give a keynote speech. So let me just take a minute here very briefly and go through the different ways people like you use someone like me. We also have monthly media training workshops for people who really want to advance their skills speaking to the media, whether they are creating their own own online shows or being interviewed by the BBC, Al Jazeera and cnn. These are intensive in person workshops. We also have virtual day long public speaking and media training workshops. So for people who do not want to travel or fly, this can be done virtually. We also have a monthly master communicator workshop. It's a two day workshop. That's where you come for the public speaking training on one day and and the media training on a second day. It's back to back days. It's very intensive and you really leave with a masterclass set of communication skills. Another option we have for people is in depth live webinars, typically once a month. These are in depth for a particular subject, whether it is speaking up in the workplace, whether it is how to be a podcast guest. It's going to be a very intensive small group live webinar where you get personalized instruction and feedback from an instructor. So these are monthly live webinars, typically about two hours long. Much less expensive than the in person trainings, the live trainings or the private trainings. We also have private media trainings. Either I come to you or someone on my team comes to you. We work with you either one on one or small group sessions recording you Role playing, simulated media interviews, playing it back again and again and again until you get to the point where I'm not your media role model. You become your own role model. It's very intensive but it's the best, best way to learn very quickly. Okay, so again, let me be transparent with you. I just took a minute or so of your time to talk about different ways people interact with me when they either want to learn a lot faster than just self learning or they want to get to an advanced level much faster. But I want to stress you don't have to do any of those things. You can simply continue with me right now, today and I'm going to walk you through the very same things I do go through when I'm in a live training with someone. And you can practice these on your own, you can improve. I don't want to scare you and say wow, if you don't call me right now, your career is going to be destroyed. You'll never get an advantage. I'm not going to do that. Even though that's what all the marketing gurus tell me I need to be doing to agitate you to pull out your credit card. Why am I doing this? I really believe more in the long term. I'd rather build a long term relationship with you. I hope that you're getting value out of this and that you can be a part of what I do right here on the TJ Walker Success Channel on virtually any major social media platform. Because here's what happens. I found over time that if you give value long enough, whether it's six months, two years, sometimes 10 years, people then come back to me. Maybe they start watching something I talk about when they're in college, but then they hire me to train them when they are a CEO ten years later, maybe someone's in middle management, they get some tips that help them through a tough job interview. Today, five years later, they hire me to be the keynote speaker at their trade association. So I try to do this in a way that's win, win for everyone. But I'm more interested in the long term, creating long term relationships, long term value. So that's why I'm not going to tell you you have to act now and this offer is going to end if you don't buy in the next 20, 20 minutes and you're not going to get all these bonuses. There's all these gimmicks people do and hey, I've tried them too. I just don't feel good about it. And to me it Just doesn't feel authentic. There's a lot of talk these days about being a good communicator, being successful. You need to be authentic. Well, I want to be authentic. I don't want to trick you, manipulate you, create false scarcity with all the gimmicks most people do in training videos and webinar and funnel videos. Instead, I simply want to give you value, help you, teach you things that are going to benefit your career. And then at some point you want more, you'll know where to find me. So what are the most common mistakes people make when they're trying to present? It's not saying. It's not having hands float around awkwardly, it's not even looking down or rocking and having bad body language. The number one mistake most people make is they just convey way too many data points. They go on and on and on. They don't use enough judgment. This is why I want you to, first of all, ask yourself, what do you really want people to do? Narrow it down to one task. Hire you, vote for you, invest money in you, approve a budget, really have that clarity. Can't just be, well, I want people to have an overview on everything I do. Nobody needs to know everything you do. If they did, they would have your job. Your job as a communicator is to think about, here's everything I know about what I do, here's this other person or this group of people, and here's a tiny subset of what I do that they really need to know. That requires discernment, that requires judgment. And so much of what makes most people bad speakers, boring speakers, average speakers, is they don't use judgment. They simply throw everything out there. So you should brainstorm on every possible message you could say to an audience. 5, 10, 15, 102,000 message points if you want to. Now, you need to apply scrutiny. Now you need to put your messages in priority and eliminate anything that isn't in the top five. That's right. You should have no more than five messages for any speech, presentation, talk, briefing you're doing, unless you're a college professor and everyone is writing down everything you say for an exam. But in the business world, the adult world, the civic world, the professional world, people are not writing down everything you say. That's why it's essential for you to figure out what's most important, narrow it down to just a handful of ideas. Now, why do I say this? It's because for decades I've traveled the globe whether I'm speaking to one person in Serbia or whether I'm speaking to 500 people at a major conference in Los Angeles. I always ask the same question. Think of the best speaker you've seen in the last year in your field, in your career, in your profession. Now tell me every message you remember from that speaker. The best speaker. What can you think of? We'll go around the room sometimes. And so often the response is, I don't know, TJ Everyone in our industry is boring. I don't remember anything they say, okay, sometimes people say, oh, yeah, I remember this one speaker. And they. And they'll give me one idea. Now, sometimes people say, oh, I remember this guy's really funny. And he walked around. No, no, that's not what I want. I don't care about their humor or their movement. I want to know what I ideas did you actually remember? So sometimes it's one, occasionally two. Sometimes someone will remember three ideas every three months. And I often ask this question several times a week. Once every three months, someone will remember four ideas from the best speaker they've ever seen, maybe in their life. And then once every six months, someone will say, oh, yeah, I remember this speaker. And they'll list five ideas. And it was often the best speaker they've ever seen in their life. In all the years I've asked that question, nobody has ever come up with more than five ideas they remember from their best speaker. I want you to think about that right now. Really think about the best speaker you've seen in your own. I don't mean a professional comedian or professional politician, but someone in your field, in your industry, where you heard them once and you remember it. Not your CEO or colleague who speaks to you every day. And over time, you remember a bunch. But I mean, from one presentation, pretty hard even come up with more than two or three, isn't it? Well, ask yourself this. Do you really think that the average person you speak to is so much smarter than you are? Do you really think they have a memory so much better than yours? No, they don't. So don't try to force them to do something that you're not good at, because you probably don't remember more than a handful. So that is one of the most important things you can ever do to be a better speaker. It really is a situation where less is more. Focus on just a handful of points or fewer, and you will instantly be a better communicator. It takes off all the pressure because you're not all of a sudden trying to remember all this stuff and rat a tat Tat and speak quickly and oh, my gosh, there's another bullet point and another slide I got to go through. You're no longer playing that game. You're playing a different game of making your ideas really come alive to your audience. Okay, so you've figured out what you want to accomplish in this speech, what you want the audience to do. You brainstorm on ideas. Now you've narrowed it down to the top three, five. What do you do? Put it on a three by five card and throw it at them and walk away? Well, no, that's not going to do anything now. You've got to breathe life into these messages. The number one way to do it is by illustrating every key point with a story. You can give examples, you can give case studies. If you're going to use PowerPoint, you can have images. But the number one way to really make any point come alive is to tell a story that involves a real person, a real problem, a real place, a conflict, real dialogue. What was said and how it was resolved, that's the number one way to get people to remember. I wish we could just take the facts, put it on a stick, go and put it in people's heads, and they've got all the data and we can go home. I wish we could do that. That's not how people actually absorb information. One of the advantages of stories is they can help you in times when you're nervous, because if you speak long enough, you're going to occasionally have something that takes you out of your comfort zone. I remember the most uncomfortable presentation I ever had. It was more than 30 years ago. I was on a talk show in South Florida. It was a talk radio show, and I never forget. I walked into the studio and the seat is really low. I'm sitting down this little chair like a little boy. The host is looking over me sort of in a very imposing way. He asked me a question. I start to answer and he interrupts me. He says, TJ I have more respect for a Klansman than I do for you. We were talking about politics, and I set him off somehow. And I said, yeah, but. But now, Mr. Kane, what I really think. Before I could say anything else, the host reaches under the table, pulls out a gun and points it at me. Now it's talk radio in South Florida. Palm trees are around, no one can see me. He says, now do you see my point, Mr. Walker? And all of a sudden, you know what came out of my mouth? Absolutely nothing. I froze. I sort of panicked. Nothing good came out of My mouth. But eventually I stammered something. The interview sort of continued. I got out of there. Now, did I let that one awful interview, and it was an awful interview. Did I let that scare me away from ever going on TV shows, radio shows again? No. In fact, I went back to that radio station two weeks later and guest hosted for another host. Now, I still stayed away from the host who interviewed me. I still think he's crazy. But I didn't let it slow me down because I have a passion for speaking, communicating, helping other people do it. And just because it's one bad interview, no one remembers, no one else really cares. Okay, so what did I really do there? I told a story. I just had one idea I wanted to convey. I wanted you to know that, okay, your trainer, your instructor isn't perfect. He's not great all the time. This is a learned skill, and that I have a passion for communicating. I don't let one bad thing try to dissuade me from ever doing it. It's really just one idea to give you a little better sense of who I am. I told a story. This story had a character. Me. It had another character, the talk show host. It had a problem. There was a gun in my face. It had emotion. I was fearful and scared. It had a setting. It was a talk radio host, Florida palm trees. It had a resolution. I didn't get shot, and I actually went back. So I. Is it a great story? Is it going to win a Pulitzer Prize? No, but it's a true story. And it works because I've told that story to people the first day of a training, and sometimes I bump into them five, ten years later. They say, hey, tj had any guns pulled on you lately? It works because it remembers. And they remember the point that I wasn't someone just born, naturally glib and articulate all the time, but that I can work through it and not let one bad presentation scare me off. So it works at that level, I would recommend that you give a lot of thought to any message you want to convey. It doesn't have to be as dramatic as someone pulling a gun on you, but you do need to make it interesting. Now, you may say, well, tj, I just give weekly reports on total sales for our 282 donut shops around the country. There's nothing that dramatic. Okay, but here's the thing. Not all data are equal. Some data points are more important than others. So if all of a sudden there's a huge spike in a couple of stores because it's A new product, tell people about the product. Tell people about the reaction of some of the customers. Make it come alive. Where people get confused on stories is they think they have to be a generic motivational speaker and start talking about, there was the starfish, and I looked down and there were only two steps instead of four. They think they're going to have to give some cheesy generic motivational story. Now all you have to do is recount a real conversation about a real problem with a colleague, a customer, a prospect, a fellow student, where you were and how it was resolved, and make sure it's something that would be interesting and relevant to the audience. If you do that, you'll be in great shape. Here's the thing. You can say, well, T.J. i'm not a natural born storyteller. Wrong. All human beings tell stories all the time. If it's Monday morning and you go into work or you go to class and someone says, how was your weekend? You don't say, well, at 6:01 I woke up Saturday morning. At 6:02, I got coffee. At 6:03, I went to the bathroom. It's no. And yet that's how so many people get speeches and boring PowerPoint presentations. Is this linear way of fact after fact, if someone said, how's your weekend? You're likely to talk about the most interesting thing, good or bad, that happened. Oh, my God. I was going to Miami and I thought I could get there in an hour and i95 shut down. It was an absolute parking lot. We just sat there in the car and didn't move for 20 minutes. It was excruciating. And my family's yelling at me and I'm yelling at them. What did I just do there? I told a story. Is it an interesting story? No, but it had the story elements. It might be perfectly appropriate if I just bumped into a friend Monday morning at Starbucks because I told a story involved characters, place setting, problem, emotion, resolution. That's all a story is. So you already tell stories. You've got to figure out when you're communicating the right story that is relevant to your audience. But if you say, well, T.J. i can't think of any story at all about this message, then you got to ask yourself, is this really an important message? Do you really have to spend time with this audience talking about this message? If you've never talked to anyone in real life about it, if it's never come up anywhere, if there's never been a problem related to this, is it truly a message that is so important that you need to take people's time. Typically, the answer is no. Remember, you're being judged not by how many facts come out of your mouth, but by how many facts go in people's brains and are remembered. If people don't remember what you're saying, you haven't accomplished anything. I could speak to you right now in Swahili, but if you don't understand Swahili, I don't get any credit for speaking Swahili because I haven't helped you in any way whatsoever. If you are just giving people fact after fact after fact, and you're doing it in a way where they can't remember it, you might as well be speaking a foreign language to them. Nothing good is actually happening. Okay, let's talk about PowerPoint. Now, I love PowerPoint. PowerPoint is great. Some of my best friends are PowerPoint. But let's be real. The problem with 99% of PowerPoints is they're so boring, they put people to sleep. It's not the fault of the PowerPoint, it's how we use it. There's a lot of boring television these days. You can go to channel 133 on cable and all it does is list the school lunches from last week. That's boring. But if you love watching World cup soccer and you can't be at the soccer game, watching World cup soccer on your television is great tv. So the problem is not the medium. Television isn't boring or interesting. It's what you put on TV. PowerPoint is not boring or interesting. It's what you put on PowerPoint. The number one problem most people have is with their PowerPoint is they're just putting bullet points in text. They're using it as the poor man's, the poor person's teleprompter. Well, I've got an amazing high tech invention that is a much better way for you to store data so you remember what to say. You won't have to use the PowerPoint slide projecting it in front of everyone to remind you of what to say. I've got an invention. It's very sophisticated, it's very expensive. So get your credit card out and your checkbook out. Here's the invention that keeps me from never, ever, ever forgetting what to say when I'm giving a presentation. It's called a $0.01 sheet of paper. Everything I'm saying to you during our session here, it's because I've got a little reminder right here. It's a single sheet of paper and it costs you nothing. Or you probably already have a sheet of paper around the house. So you don't have to spend money on me or anyone else. Use a sheet of paper. The beauty of paper is nobody has to see it because this is one sheet of paper. Other than to make my point, I normally would never pick it up. You would be under the illusion that I'm just speaking to you for an hour because you're not going to see me touch the paper. So if you're going to use PowerPoint, use it the way that Steve Jobs did. For example, they call theirs Keynote at Apple, but it's the same thing. Computer driven slides projected during a presentation put an image up. When he wanted to convey what he was creating for an iPhone, he said, well, you know what this is? And he had a cell phone. He says, you know what? This was an ipod. What are we doing here today? And he merged the two images together for the iPhone. That's many, many, many years ago. But I can still remember it. Chances are you can too. And yet a PowerPoint presentation I might have seen yesterday or that you might have seen this morning is instantly forgotten because words are abstractions. The human memory can understand abstractions. It doesn't remember abstractions. What humans remember are really two things. Images and stories. That's why I just spent a lot of time telling you, Please tell stories for all your main points. And if you're going to use PowerPoint, one image per slide. And I don't mean an image of a triangle with three words on it, that's cheating. It's still word based. Now, if you want to convey a lot of words to people, you want to give people words, by all means give them words, but email it to people, give them a handout, give them a URL to go to, but do not stand up in front of people and just read a whole bunch of words. I like words. I've written books. In fact, I've written half a dozen books. But I'm not going to get up here today and just start reading chapter after chapter, sentence after chapter for a book. It's a good book to read, but that's not the way you actually convey information to people when you are speaking to them. We also have live in person presentation skills workshop. Either I come to you or someone from my team comes to you. We work very intently one on one or in a small group setting. You get on camera not one or two or three times, but typically 10 or 15 times in a day. The ultimate goal is for you to get to the point where I'm not your role model. No one else is your role model but you. You're looking at a video of yourself speaking, saying, wow, I wish I could be that good all the time. I would be a superstar in my industry. That is the result of the in person private trainings. Again, these are one on one trainings. These can be small group trainings. Everything I'm talking about is listed in detail on the page that you're watching this on right now or in the description of this video that you're watching right now. So you can click to find more information there. Okay, now I'm going to talk about the single most important thing you can do to become a great communicator. It's easy. It costs nothing. But emotionally, it's the hardest thing to do. And I am sympathetic to that. This is frankly why a lot of people and a subset of people watching today, maybe even you, call me up or come to one of my workshops or hire me for private training or engage with me in a specific way because you don't want to do this on your own. I'm talking about rehearsal. The single easiest way to go from an average communicator or below average communicator is, is to rehearse your presentation and just use a cell phone or a webcam. You want to record your presentation, look at it. Oh, T.J. i don't want to do that. I don't like my face. I don't like my voice. I get it. No one else cares. No one cares that you don't like your voice or some aspect of your body. They just don't. Because if you're speaking, they have to watch you. They have to listen to you. They just want some idea that's interesting and useful to them. Imagine if you're my high school English teacher and you assign me an essay and I just say, well, I'm not going to write it out. I don't want. I'm going to dictate it and I'll just email you the audio file. Well, T.J. why are you going to do that? It's a written essay. I want you to write it, edit it, make sure the punctuation, grammar is great. Oh, but I don't like to look at my own writing. It makes me uncomfortable. So I'm just going to dictate it and send it to you. If you're my teacher, you'd probably say, I don't care what you want. You've got to write something and you've got to polish it up to make it look good. Otherwise you get an F. I hope that's what you'd say. Well, that's essentially what's going on with so many of us with our presentations. We may spent hours and hours and hours, sometimes weeks, sometimes months, thinking of ideas, writing a speech, writing PowerPoint, rewriting PowerPoint, editing the PowerPoint, but we never actually rehearse. So the first time we ever give it is in front of the live audience. And it's also the last time, which means our first draft is our rough draft and it's our final draft. So there's no way of improving it. If you really want to go from average, below average to great, do this one thing. I promise you it will make you a dramatically better speaker. Here's the reaction most people get when they watch a video of their speech. I see it every month, every week, sometimes every day to week. People turn to me after watching their own presentations. Oh, God, that was awful. That was really boring. I wouldn't want to watch that. What do you think, T.J. and then I have to say to them, well, look, you seem like a pretty smart person. If you think it was really boring, guess what? It was. So will your audience think that. So the answer is not to never look at your rehearsal. The answer is to redo the speech until you find it interesting. That is the solution. Not just saying, well, this is the speech we've worked on and it's been signed off and it's been approved and everyone's approved it, so it's too late to change. You can't have that attitude. Your audience doesn't care. You are not ever ready to give a speech until you have rehearsed on video and to the point where you like it and say, that's exactly how I want to come across. That's the best I can do. I think that's gonna work on my audience. There's nothing I'm saying to you today that I haven't said before on video and watched it, I assure you. Doesn't mean you're gonna love every second I say. But it does give me the confidence in knowing this is what I want to say. This is how I want to say it. I remember once, about 20 years ago, I was working in a small Eastern European country for the very first time. I was working with a prime minister, and his staff said, tj, whatever you do, don't change the speech. We've worked on it for months. We were in a former dictator's palace. This was A democratically elected prime minister. But I'm in this palace. We're surrounded by armed guards with machine guns. It's me, the prime minister, a couple of his staff members, and he says, tj, do you mind if I practice my speech in my native Slovenian? I said, sure. He stood up, read his speech. I video recorded it. We watched it. He was reading the whole time with his head down. We watched it. He turned to me and said, well, tj, what did you think? And I felt a little awkward. It was my first time in this part of the world. Cold War hadn't been over that long. It's just me and this guy and a whole bunch of guys with machine guns. So I felt like saying, it was awful. It was really boring. But I was a little nervous. Finally I said, you know what? He's paid me a bunch of money to be here. I'll give him an honest assessment. I said, Mr. Prime Minister, with all due respect, I don't know what you said, but I thought it was really boring. His eyes got big, sort of glowered at me. He looked at his guys with machine guns. He looked back at the TV set and said, you're right, it is really boring. I wouldn't want to watch me. So with that, he took the speech. We ripped it up, threw it in the trash can, and started over. But this time, we did it the easy way. I said, okay, let's step back. You're giving this presentation to your cabinet. It's an important speech. What do you really want to convey here? What do you want them to do? We wrote that down in a sentence. I said, okay, now let's brainstorm on ideas. But then we got to narrow it down to just five ideas. We did that, and it only took about 10 minutes. And then I said, okay, now I want you to give me a story or an example or both. For each one of these five message points, he came up with that wrote a couple of words underneath. Each message point had a single sheet of paper just handwritten on a simple notepad. He said, can I do another practice? I said, okay. He stood up. I turned my camera on. This time, since it was only a single sheet of paper. He was looking up. He was looking at me. He was looking at other people in the audience. He was looking at guards. His space came alive. His energy came alive. His volume came alive. We recorded it. We watched it. As soon as he was done, he jumped up. He gave me a big hug. DJ you made me a great speaker. I said, well, no, it wasn't me. That's how you actually speak. You're naturally good. What happens is when you try to do this artificial data dump and read, it makes anyone into an awful speaker. So I beg you, I plead with you, don't try to read a speech. It's so much harder to do. And it actually takes more time to practice and rehearse than working from a simple outline. By the way, did you see what I just did there? I made a point by telling a story. The story had a character, me. Had another character. The prime minister. Has setting, Castle palace, Eastern Europe. Had a problem. Boring. Speaker reading. Had a little conflict again. This time machine guns. Still, they'll always involve guns. Had a resolution, had basically a happy ending. Had a lesson for it. So storytelling is not something you do once in a speech. Storytelling is not something you do just because you want to be a motivational speaker. It's really a part of the grammar of good communication. You want to communicate something. You can state the message in a straightforward way and then illustrate it with examples. And stories. And stories are examples. They're simply the most compelling, interesting, memorable type of example. That's what's key. Mo's with us live and says tj, how long should be the storytelling part within a speech? Well, no, it depends on the context. If you're giving a ten minute speech, maybe you give a couple two minute stories. If you're an hour long keynote speaker, then maybe you have several. One for every major message point, you might have five stories that each are six or seven minutes long. It just depends. The key with a story is when someone's listening to it, they've got to understand it, they've got to see the relevance to it and they've got to understand the point to them. Here's something you'll never hear. You'll never be at a conference or a big seminar and have people leaving saying, I hated the way that last speaker gave us so many interesting, relevant stories that have an impact on my career or life. You'll never hear that. What you do hear is, my gosh, that speaker was so incredibly boring. I wish they had just emailed us the document and we could have stayed home. Or they'll say, wow, I'm glad that speaker was so boring and allowed me to really catch up on email and send off some important messages. So that's the problem. Is it possible to go too long with a story? It's possible, but typically that means you're giving details that are interesting or relevant to the audience. Is it possible a Story could alienate part of your audience. It's certainly possible, but typically that means you didn't really think about what's the message. First, we don't want to tell stories to be storytellers. We want to tell stories because it's the single most effective, efficient way of making an idea come alive in the mind and memory of an audience member and getting them to retain it. That's why it's important. And Mo, thanks for asking the question. What did I just do there? I'm giving a presentation. This is a seminar, a webinar. And Mo interrupted my speech with a question. Well, guess what? This isn't my speech. This isn't my webinar. This isn't my presentation. It's yours. It's Mo. So I do actually recommend when you're giving a presentation, whether it's a one on one conversation or a job interview. Obvious there, but really, anytime you're speaking to 10, 20, 30 people, someone has a question, let them ask it right away. It might take you in a slightly different direction from where you were from your outline. That's okay because now you know if you're answering that question, you're 100% interesting and relevant to that person. And what they're asking may be more top of mind of what other people are thinking than what you had planned. It also, frankly, makes it more interesting. It makes it interactive, it makes it more of a dialogue, a conversation, rather than just a monologue. So if you have an opportunity to speak, don't be one of these people who says, well, let's hold all questions till the end. It sounds pompous. It sounds like you're, you know, head of state or something. And I really don't like people who say, well, write all your questions down. Most people don't want to write a question down, just let it come up naturally. There. Of course, there are exceptions where if you have an exact specific 10 minute time limit, or if you're giving a keynote speech and you have just a half an hour in front of 3,000 people and someone starts asking a question and you have to repeat the whole question, okay, you can't necessarily do that two minutes into your presentation. But most of the time for most people, if you're talking to 20 people or fewer, it's pretty easy to look that someone has their hand up or just blurts out a question. My advice, answer it right away. Key things to know about rehearsing. Yes, you need to do it on video. Your cell phone is fine, A webcam is fine. Can you do it with a mirror? No. A horrible idea to practice in front of a mirror. Because if you're practicing your speech in front of a mirror, there's a part of you that's going to be saying, is there a dent in my nose? Am I losing more hair? It's just human nature, and you can't do two things at once. We all like to think we're great multitaskers. We're not. You can give your speech or you can analyze your speech. You cannot do both at the same time. If you're looking in a mirror, the second you made a mistake or did something, well, it's gone. If you record yourself on video now, you no longer have to think about giving the speech. You can simply watch your presentation and really analyze what's working. What's not working, that part where that part went well and how can I do more of it? Or, wow, my voice really faded there and I sound scared. Let me not do that now. You've heard people give tips before on, oh, you should practice your speech on video. Here's the thing. Just hearing that advice doesn't help. And in fact, if you do it the wrong way can make you worse. If you practice your speech once and then you watch it and stop every two seconds, critiquing a hundred things you don't like, you can spend three hours critiquing it at the end. Intellectually, you'll feel like you've learned a lot. Emotionally, you'll feel like, oh, my God, I'm a horrible speaker. I should never speak. That is not the way you want to rehearse. My recommendation is you record it, you watch it, and you try to focus the first time on what you like. Try to do more of it. Don't obsess over the occasional or. Or, well, I scratched my face and I wish I hadn't. Don't obsess over that. Instead, you want to look at it as a process, an editing, refining process. So look at it once, figure out what you like, do it again, try to do more of what you like. Second time, figure out what you like, do more of it. Now focus on one thing you don't like. Try to correct it. Focus on things you can correct. If I'm watching a video of this and I feel like my voice is too low, I. I can boost the volume. If I look at a video of this and I think, wow, my hair doesn't look as good as it did 30 years ago, there's nothing I can do about that. And nobody else cares about my hair, so I should not waste time thinking about irrelevant stuff. You want to focus on things you can actually control. Now here is the magic moment when it comes to rehearsing on video. You want to look at it, figure out what you like, do more of that, less of what you don't like. Do it again. Keep doing it again and again until you get to the point where you like the video, where you think, wow, this person's pretty interesting. I would listen to this person if it weren't me. That's a magical moment because when you get to the point when you like your own speech, it becomes virtually impossible to be nervous. If you know in advance, you're going to be interesting, you're going to look comfortable, you're going to look confident. It's really hard to be nervous if you're going out with your best friends on a Saturday night to your favorite restaurant or favorite pub to watch your favorite game, and you're going to be talking to your friends all night. It's really hard to be nervous about talking to your friends, right? You might be nervous about the outcome of the big game, but talking to your friends is easy and it's fun because you don't have to worry at all about whether you're going to be interesting or coming across natural, relaxed because you already know how you're going to come across. It's exactly the same for any speech, presentation, boardroom briefing, or even media interview. You'll know you're confident because you'll have seen the results in advance because you practice on video. Now, I wish I could tell you, well, if it's a 10 minute speech, you've got to practice three times of two minutes and that's it. It's not a precise mathematical formula. What is precise is that if you just keep doing it till you like it, you're going to be so much better when you're giving the presentation. Now, for some people it's two practices. For some it's 20. Not that long ago, I worked with a very, very busy CEO. His staff said, you know, he's not going to have much time to prepare. Billionaire employees, vendors all over the world. He came in for the day of training with me and said, TJ, I practiced my video 132 times, but I've already learned so much. It took him 132 times until he got to the point where he felt he was coming across his best. Now, full disclosure, this is frankly why a lot of people hire me for a day. Hire Team members of mine to either come do private workshops, one on one workshops, full day workshops, is because most people simply are not going to record themselves and look at themselves objectively again and again and again. You could do it. But that is why people hire me. That is why people come to our paid live webinars and our paid online training zoom sessions and are paid in person session. So if you're interested in that or you feel like you are not certain you can really do this rehearsal on your own, I am here for you. So you can take a look at the links in the description of this page, you can take a look at the links on the page where you're watching this video and you'll see a lot of options on how to specifically work with me or a member of my team for this hand holding part. And do keep in mind this is where most people are outside of their comfort zone. And that's why it's nice to have someone essentially holding your hand through this process. Because here's what I found. Most people when watching video themselves misdiagnose in three areas. Number one, when their hands are moving naturally, they think, oh my God, I look like an idiot, I better stop moving my hands. They overcorrect and make things worse. The next thing where people just universally misjudge is they see their head moving as it should and they think, oh my gosh, I look like a bobblehead. I look crazy, I better stop that. And they freeze their head to try to look professional. And now they look scared stiff and nervous. The third thing where people misdiagnose is their voice. They are convinced their voice is no good and then they'll try to artificially do things like talk lower to sound more authoritative. And that just makes you sound phony, uncomfortable. Typically it will make you monotone. If you're trying to talk down here makes you monotone and boring plus artificial. So that is one of the reasons why people frankly work with a professional public speaking coach, communications coach, whether it's me or someone else, is guiding them through that. Because it's very easy to misdiagnose yourself when it comes to watching yourself on video. Additionally, we have a Master Communicator on Demand course. This course has all of my best hits. All of the top courses you see anywhere online, this brings them together. You get the Master Communicator Kit plus more than 150 courses of mine that are highly specialized in every aspect of communication and personal development. Okay, so you have practiced on video, you're happy with how you're coming across. You think, wow, I look good. I sound good. That's my message. My stories are great. I'm in great shape. What more could I possibly do? I'm ready to go. Well, timeout. There is one more thing you could do, and that is to test. Now, I'm not saying you want to test every presentation you ever do. If you're talking to one colleague at lunch today about a project you're working on, I'm not suggesting you rehearse till three in the morning and then test out sample videos. But for certain presentations that are more important than others, I do recommend you actually test. If it's a really important job interview, if you're giving a presentation to a board of directors where you're trying to get significant budget approval for a new project, if you are speaking to a room full of venture capitalists because you're asking them to give you $3 billion for your artificial intelligence startup, those are high stakes presentations. So I would recommend you don't simply rehearse, but you test. What do I mean by testing? People say, well, tj, public speaking is a soft skill. It's not something you can test like chemistry and physics and mathematics. Well, wrong. You can test your presentation and your presentation skills. Let's say you are giving a speech to a room full of venture capitalists on Thursday. You've prepared your presentation, you've rehearsed it, you've looked at a video. You like it. There's another step. You can go find one friend who's also a venture capitalist. Maybe someone who's already invested with you, but ideally someone who has the same knowledge of your business as the venture capitalist you're going to be speaking to on Thursday. Now that you practiced and refined your speech a whole lot, send them that video on Tuesday and say, please tell me, what do you remember from this speech? What do you take away? Don't say, how'd I do? They're going to say, oh, you did great. You're wonderful, you're fine. That's not valuable feedback. What you want to do is ask someone who heard you once to tell you what messages they remember. What stories do they remember? That's what's valuable. And if they just say, well, everything you did was great and it was fine and well done, you're really professional. That means you flunked. You didn't actually communicate the messages you cared about the most. So you've got to go back to the drawing board. You've got to come up with new material New examples, stronger examples, stronger stories, clear messaging. Until one or more people you test it with front of can throw back in your face the messages you really care about. Because what you really want to give you confidence going into any major presentation is knowing not only do you like it, not only do you think it's great, because sometimes we're too close to the whole thing. You want to know that someone else who has the same mindset, the same or similar knowledge base to the people you'll be speaking to in real life could hear you once and get it. Of course you want them to have a strong impression of you and think you're confident and professional and all that. But what you really want is for them to have a clear sense of the ideas you're bringing, the value you're bringing, and what you want them to do. Because I'm telling you, if you practice and you test your material and you have someone who maybe you know as a straight shooter and they're not afraid to criticize you if they are telling you the messages you really wanted to convey, you know it worked. People can lie and say, oh, you were great if they actually think you were weak and nervous and uncomfortable. To build you up, maybe. But they can't lie and tell you your messages if they really didn't get it. So that's the ultimate in meaningful feedback. And that is how you test for big, important, high stakes presentations. One thing I hear from people all the time is tj. I'm really comfortable speaking to small groups, speaking one on one, speaking in the boardroom. But wow, I got to do a TV interview later today and I'm a nervous wreck. It seems strange, it seems alien. Well, it is different speaking to the news media where there's a journalist, a talk show host, a reporter, putting a mic in front of your face, putting a light in front of your face, having a camera that's not yours, it feels scarier. And again, the number one problem people have is they tense up, they stiffen up. The other problem is when you're speaking to the media, it's not that they're all out to get you, but not only can what you say be taken out of context, by definition, if they're quoting you for a newspaper or online story, if they're pulling a sound bite for a radio or a podcast interview or a TV or video based program, by definition, they have to quote you out of context, out of the context of the entire interview, of the entire conversation. That changes everything. So when I train people on how to speak to the media. I really have to coach them how to think. Not in terms of how does this answer sound to someone who heard the whole conversation and the whole answer, but you really have to build a mindset where every sentence out of your mouth, you're holding up to the light thinking, how would someone interpret this? If nothing before the sentence is seen and nothing after the sentence is seen, every sentence out of your mouth has to look good standing on its own. So that's what makes dealing with the media so much more difficult. Most quotes come from a handful of speech patterns. They either have analogies in them, bold action words, cliches, humor attacks. Where so many people, whether it's CEOs, business leaders, or politicians, get into trouble is they accidentally use emotion and attacks on something that wasn't really their main point. So if you're interviewing me and I'm telling you all these things about how great business has been the last three years, all the wonderful things that go on, and you throw a question, say, well, did you feel a little nervous right when the pandemic hit and regular trainings went down? If I said something like, well, of course I lost sleep at night worrying about how my business tanked for a few months, but. And then I go on to talk positively for the next hour, guess what the only quote in the story might be? Of course I lost sleep at night. Absolute lost sleep at night. Is action oriented. It's a cliche. It's emotion about how my business tanked. It's an attack. I attacked my own business. It's emotional, it's action oriented. So in that one and a half sentences, I used about eight sound bite elements, all of them negative towards me and my business. So if I get quoted with a profile on my business using that quote, was I misquoted? Well, no, I actually said it. You have footage of it. Was I quoted out of context? Well, yes, I was quoted out of context, but every quote is out of context. You can't complain about being quoted out of context. You can complain. Nobody cares. So if I don't want that to be a quote in the story, the solution is control my own mouth. So when I teach people and my colleagues conduct media training, we really teach people how to control the one thing they can control. Not the interview, not the reporter, not the setting, but our own mouths. It's our own mouths that get us into trouble. The other thing that's a little different about media training is you have to look at a camera quite often, or if there's a journalist interviewing you, you need to ignore the camera and look at the journalist. It's a little bit different than if you're just in front of your own webcam. But that's an example of things you need to learn if you want to be good at the media. And again, today, the easiest thing is to practice on video. If you want to become a YouTube star or have a video podcast, just practice. Record it on video, upload it, look at it, get feedback from others. Okay, I told you this was going to be different from the typical webinar that's really just trying to scare you and then shake you till your credit card comes out and gets your money. And I do mean that. I want to genuinely help you with the idea, full transparency. That whether it's one out of a hundred who watch this or one out of a thousand, some of you are going to want to go to a higher level and expert level. Hire me or my team for a day of training or for a keynote or for a zoom training session. So that is in fact why I am doing that. But I want to give you even more. I've talked about testing. I've asked you to record yourself practicing on video until you like it. We've talked about taking it to the next level, sending it to a colleague, someone similar to the audience you're speaking to, to get feedback from them on what messages they remember. But I'll even go further. If you post a link to your video in the comments section of this video, I'll watch it and I'll critique it and I won't charge you anything. In full disclosure, people pay from 10, $20,000 a day for my time for personalized training. But I'm going to give this to you to give you a little taste of how this works. Also, I want to nudge you a little to get you to the point where you're not afraid to show yourself to the world. Because for most people, it's scary. It's much easier to sort of sit back, watch old TJ here, go to an online course, read another book on speaking, and never actually speak and put your speaking out to the world. So I want to nudge a few of you along. I have to confess, even in my own students who pay for my courses, the online on demand courses, only about 1% of students actually record themselves on video and submit it for me to look at. Everyone else stays in the shadows, which unfortunately is not the best place to learn. So I'm going to toss that out to you. There's no charge you're not obligated. You're not going to get a credit card receipt saying you've got to pay. All you have to do is record yourself speaking, upload it to YouTube or Google Drive or Dropbox, anywhere. If you post a link and I can see it, I will watch it and give you detailed feedback. Additionally, I am available as a keynote speaker. Many organizations around the world are really trying to build in their employees, their colleagues, their community a sense of importance in communication. Communication regularly in person to colleagues, employees, prospects, vendors, and the larger community that cares about their industry. So they'll bring me in to give a keynote speech on that. If you're interested in more information on that, then please click the link below either on this page or in the description. I want to thank you for spending time with me today. I hope you have a much better sense of how to be a strong, confident communicator. I want you going into any meeting, any presentation, any job interview, any pitch for new venture capital with the confidence that you're going to come across your best. It doesn't mean you're going to get what you want every time. Nobody does. It doesn't mean you'll get every job offer or every investor will throw money at you. But I want you to get to the point where you feel confident that you're coming across your best. If you had a colleague say, I need a one page memo sent to this client a week from today on a subject you've been working on, that wouldn't really make you nervous or uncomfortable. You might not want to do it, but you would do it. You would write a draft, you might get feedback from other colleagues, you would run it through spell check, you would edit it, you'd maybe have one other colleague look at it before you hit send. By the time you hit send, you're not thinking, oh gosh, I wonder if it's spelled correctly. I wonder if they can understand it. I wonder if that makes sense. No, you have an editing process, a step by step process to help you communicate effectively when you're sending text. I hope what we've done today is I've given you a better sense of a step by step process of how you can edit yourself, refine yourself, improve yourself, and come across your very best every single time you're speaking to someone, whether it's one person, five people, 500, 5,000, or the whole world through the media. So I want to thank you for your time. Hope you got a lot out of it. If I can help you reach out to me again, I've tried to do this very differently in most sales, funnel videos, training sessions, webinars. This is the part where I say, wow, you've got 24 hours to buy this thing and, and if you don't act now, you've ruined your career and you're missing out on a million dollars worth of products that today are only $99 because you got all these extra bonus, bonus, bonus, bonus, bonus. That's what normally happens here. And I just have to be honest with you. I've shared this with you earlier. To me it feels a little cheesy and to me it doesn't feel authentic. It is a better way of making short term cash. I'm in this for the long term. I've been training people professionally how to be better communicators since the mid-1980s and I'm hoping to be around another 40 years or at least another 30 years. So I'm trying to lay groundwork for the long term, long term relationships. So perhaps you get value today and you don't need services from someone like me for five or 10 or 15 years. That's okay. I hope to be here for you. I'm TJ Walker and I'm wishing you complete confidence and success in all your communication. Thanks.