How to Fool a NY Times Columnist Into Thinking You are Smart

Speaking with TJ Walker, dissecting the communication skills and practices of world class leaders.

Wow. Some things never cease to amaze me. This is from a column from the New York Times, no less the well known columnist, their op ed columnist, Frank Bruni. He's talking about Donald Trump. Now, he's not a big fan of Donald Trump, as you could imagine, but he starts dissecting some of Mr. Trump's supporters, specifically Chris Christie. Now the whole point of this column is that he's utterly shocked about how bad Chris Christie looks. Chris Christie's approval ratings in New Jersey are well into the low 20s. He couldn't get elected a re elected dog catcher right now, he was obviously not selected as Donald Trump's running mate. And Chris Christie has for all intents and purposes become a big punching bag. Just a joke around the country, but especially here in the Northeast. But here's the part that really caught my eye and it's specific to what I do and what a lot of you think about and why you're listening to this program. I hope I'm going to quote from the Frank Bruni column. He's talking about all the politicians and politics he's covered over the decades. Here's what he says. Over decades of writing about politics, I've crossed paths with many candidates and office holders who impressed me, but few who blew me away. Chris Christie blew me away. This was three and a half years ago, well before all the trouble. The New Jersey governor was addressing a group of education reformers and he did what looks easy until you try it yourself. Talking without notes, slogans, stammers or any other clumsiness for close to half an hour. It was too specific a speech to be one that he pulled from memory. He was thinking on his feet in shapely paragraphs. He irradiated conviction. He oozed authority. What in God's name happened to him? There's a part of me that just. Again, I just can't tell you how shocked I am to see a supposedly intelligent person like Frank Rooney, the New York Times columnist, say this. Here's the thing, Frank. I could teach a circus animal to do that. And it's not specific to me. Any good presentation coach can teach someone to stand up and speak for half an hour. Now if he were speaking for 24 hours, I might be impressed, but half an hour? I know a lot of speakers, myself included. I mean, that's just warming up. Speaking for 30 minutes without notes or without what appears to be notes. Now here's the thing, Frank. If I Came to you and I gave you a couple of paragraphs and a cover letter to work for you. And the paragraphs were nicely written without spelling errors or extra commas, and they were wholly written paragraphs. I seriously doubt you'd be impressed. Why is that? Well, it's because almost everybody can do that. Certainly if they're applying to work at the New York Times, they can, because people have been trained to write, they've gotten formal critiques, they have a lot of practice writing, first grade, second grade through 12th grade, through college for some people, graduate school. Not so when it comes to public speaking. But Chris Christie, three and a half years ago, had already had a lot of experience as a public speaker. He had been an office holder, he'd been a U.S. attorney, he'd run for office many times, he'd already been governor. So guess what? He'd given thousands of speeches. It's not that hard, Frank. Sure, there are a lot of governors, senators, politicians of all stripes who are bad public speakers. But you know what? There are a lot of people who are bad writers, too. But just because someone can string a sentence or two together and not have spelling errors doesn't make them some sort of genius. It's the same thing when it comes to public speaking, which, by the way, folks, this is a perfect example. Sorry to sound self serving today, but this is a perfect example. Why? If you're looking to enter a field of politics or frankly, any other career, business, civic life, it pays to learn how to be a great speaker. Because people think you're a genius just for speaking in whole sentences and whole paragraphs. It's not that hard if you practice on video, if you get feedback, if you've actually thought about it. Now, I wasn't at this event where Chris Christie spoke in front of Frank Bruni three and a half years ago, but I can tell you it's pretty easy to fool audiences into thinking you're not using notes and still use notes. If you use notes in a particular way, and that is have them on a single sheet of paper, large, bold font, do what I do. And I have three identical copies of my notes throughout the room. I never stand behind a lectern and nobody ever has any clue I'm using notes. And Chris Christie might have needed that, he might not. But I seriously doubt that anything came up in front of that group of education reformers that Christy hadn't thought about before and talked about before. And if you're thinking about a subject and talking about a subject regularly, guess what? It's really easy to stand up in front of people. Now, Frank, you may be a nervous public speaker. You may be a great public speaker for all I know. Don't mean to besmirch you, but this idea that someone is intelligent because they can speak coherently in front of a group of people for a half an hour is an absurdity. Granted, it's an absurdity that I benefit from because people often think I'm intelligent because I can stand up and speak for 30 minutes, 60 minutes, 90 minutes without UHS and UMS, seemingly in wholly constructed paragraphs. But it's a really simple skill that anybody, and I mean anybody, can learn. Now, I say that if you can't ever speak intelligently to one person, well, you're not going to be able to do it to many if you don't have basic mental faculties. And I'm not talking about 190 IQ, but I'm saying if you genuinely have mental impediments or speech impediments, well, sure, it's going to be hard, but your average person who's had one good conversation with one friend that's lasted for half an hour, guess what? Already has all the necessary skills to be great speaker. Now, in the next paragraph of this Frank Bruni column, he says, what in God's name happened to him? Talking about Chris Christie to his potential. Yes, yes, I know. The George Washington Bridge happened. Well, guess what, Frank? Being a great speaker has nothing to do with judgment. Some of the world's worst dictators of the 20, and I'm not going to mention the names because then that gets controversial, or people would say, I'm comparing Chris Christie to some awful dictator of the 20th century. But some of the worst dictators of the 20th century were fantastic speakers. The two do not go together. You can have the worst political judgment ever. You can have the worst economic judgment, moral judgment, and be a fantastic speaker. I wish I had some magical way of making anyone who's a great speaker also great at political judgment and economic soundness and moral judgment. But it's completely unrelated. It's the same with writing. You can be a good writer and be a horrible person. In fact, some of the best writers in the world would tell you that they would be the worst possible president of the United States or governor or senator. It's a different skill set. So, yes, of course you have to look at what politicians say, but you have to also judge them on what they're actually doing. What are they accomplishing if someone runs on the platform of I'M going to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse and get rid of government waste and make government smaller and leaner. And then they end up destroying the credit rating of a state. Well, that tells you all you need to know about their political judgment. So you have to always take into account someone's words with their actions and with their results. Now, of course, it's trickier if they've never served in public office and they are a new face. You have to judge them by other standards. So, for example, let's just say hypothetically, I'm running for president based on my business experience and I say to you, I'm the world's greatest businessman. Judge me on that. Well, then I think you'd want to go back and look at my business record. So if it turned out I was bankrupt all the time, never paid my own employees, and got a lot of subsidies from government agencies, didn't pay my taxes, well, I think that might be a basis for forming judgments about me, not based on how well I speak. I think that all candidates running for office, regardless of your ideology, your party, should learn how to be competent public speakers. And it's, it's frankly an embarrassment that so many people put their names forward as candidates and never learn the basic skill of public speaking. But this does show you explicitly how you can in fact be rewarded as a candidate and as an office holder by people who are supposed to be savvy. When you are a columnist for the New York Times, it doesn't make you a genius, but presumably you didn't just fall off a turnip truck. You're not some rube out from the countryside who sort of wandered into New York City and you're looking up at the skyscrapers with your mouth wide open. You're supposed to have some level of sophistication, and yet we see it. I see it all the time. Politicians who speak well are deemed to be smarter, more forceful, more dynamic, more intelligent even. It just ain't so, Folks, thanks for listening. I want to share with you one other thing. One of the worst things that's ever happened. Well, that's a slight exaggeration. One of the worst technical things that ever happened to me and one of the most embarrassing things professionally that's happened to me in a long time happened today. I was doing an interview with a well known financial expert and I thought everything was going well. And it turned out only my side of the recording was captured. So I wasted an hour of this gentleman's time. I'm humiliated. I'm flabbergasted I still don't know how I'm going to make it up to him. Going to apologize profusely. I can tell you that it does show. As much as I like to tell other people, practice, do your due diligence. Check all your technology, your microphones. And I did it today as well. Sometimes things still don't work out. You have to have a plan B. And that is where I messed up. If you listen to all the experts on podcasting, they tell you do not rely just on Skype and on call recording systems for Skype. Have your own digital recorder. I bought a digital recorder for this very reason, but I hadn't yet learned how to do it. So shame on me. I didn't have redundancy, I didn't have plan B, a fail safe plan. And now I wasted a lot of my time, a lot of someone else's time and I'm embarrassed about it. I hope to get that plan, that problem solved quickly. That's my homework tonight. I've got to learn how to use this recording system, digital recording system, so that something like that never happens again. So whatever you do, try to have a plan B. Some of you heard me talk about the plans. I had to give a PowerPoint speech recently in Las Vegas and the PowerPoint projector wouldn't work even after three hours of working with hotel technical staff. But I had a plan B. I gave the presentation without using PowerPoint slides and I think it still went great. And there have been times when I'm doing a media training or public speaking training and my camera breaks. Guess what? I have a plan B. I always bring a second digital video camera and I'm not just talking about my cell phone, I'm talking about a whole additional camcorder. Now the reason I do that is 16 years ago I had a camera break and I didn't have a second camera already and it was an embarrassing, embarrassing moment for my training career. So folks, try to always have a plan B. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks for joining me. A quick note. I am going to be speaking in Geneva later next month, mid month I'll be speaking in training in Budapest. So if you're in those areas, drop me a line. I would love to meet up with you for coffee or find out more about what you're doing in your area. Some of my events are private, some are public. I do try to share with you from time to time. Just getting back off the road from a couple of weeks in Brussels and in Las Vegas will be in the New York area for most of the next month, other than the occasional day trip, but looking forward to meeting as many of you as possible wherever you are in the world. So please drop me a note, let me know where you are and if you're going to be in those areas at that time, you can send it to me tjediatrainingworldwide.com or send me a note on Twitter jwalker or on Facebook LinkedIn wherever you're experiencing this podcast. Thanks. See you tomorrow.

Thanks for listening to Speaking with TJ Walker, where the communication skills and practices of world class leaders are dissected.