Master Your Presentation Skills: Exclusive Insights from TJ Walker

Welcome to the TJ Walker Success Podcast. In this episode, you'll hear an exclusive excerpt from the complete presentation skills masterclass for every occasion. This course, fully created and delivered by the real TJ Walker, is your ultimate guide to mastering the art of presenting with confidence and impact. If you want to access the full course and take your presentation skills to the next level, click the link on your screen or check the description below. Now, let's dive in.

Are you enjoying this soothing background music? Do you like the fancy graphics here? How about the special effects on the side? That's right, you're not getting any of that right here because here's the reality. For most presentations in your life, you're not going to be able to use so special effects, animation, music, all. You're going to be able to use your own voice, your own body. That's what this course is going to help you with. To give effective presentations in every aspect of life. Sure, we'll cover PowerPoint when you do use graphics and images, but we'll cover every other aspect of giving presentations in your life. You need strong presentation skills to get jobs. Keep jobs, get new clients, keep clients to speak to investors, vendors, employees, family members, friends. Life is a series of presentations and this course is going to give you the presentation skills to get results to actually influence people when you speak to them. That's the bottom line. Now, I have worked with more than 10,000 executives, politicians, students, civic leaders all over the globe for more than 30 years. Everyone's different, but everyone wants the same four skills. The first is knowing how to look comfortable, confident, relaxed anytime you speak to people, whether you're sitting down for a one on one presentation or standing up speaking to 10,000 people. The next skill is knowing how to speak so that people really understand you. The third skill is speaking so that your audience remembers your message. That's the hard part, getting people to remember anything we say. It's not the ums and the uhs and the hand gestures that get us in trouble. It's being so darn boring and unmemorable that's the problem for so many of us. This all leads us to the fourth skill. Influencing the audience. That's the ultimate goal. I want to teach you everything I've learned in working with so many people all over the world. I've also studied the greats. In this course, I'm going to teach you the secrets used by Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Margaret Thatcher, Nelson Mandela. We really go in depth and look at how great leaders have used strong presentation skills to advance their causes from every field. Politics, business, sports, you name it. It's going to be a great course and it's going to be in depth. Let's start off with some quick wins. If you have to stand up and give a presentation to a group of people, the first thing you can do is nothing. Just take two seconds, smile, look at people, and you'll stand out as much more confident and comfortable than most speakers who just race into it. It also gives you a couple of seconds to reflect. Calm yourself down. Tip two, don't worry about memorizing, stressing, trying to read bullet points on a PowerPoint. Instead, do what I do. Cheat. Use a cheat sheet. The key is one sheet of paper, really large font. This way you can just put it down, never have to touch it. No one sees you turning pages. You'll look supremely confident and authoritative. The third really big tip, don't ever give any presentation until you've practiced on video. These days, just use your own cell phone. So don't practice in a mirror. Waste of time. Practice recording yourself on video. Look at it. Keep doing it till you love what you see. Lots more to come. Stay tuned. What's the next presentation you have to give? Where are you most focused on improving your presentation skills? What opportunity is facing you? Is it a job interview? If so, go to the section of the course on preparing for job interviews. Is it fear of public speaking? I've got a section on on that. Go right there. Is it speaking to a large group or giving PowerPoint? I have a section on each one of those. So rather than going through this course in a linear fashion, why don't you hop right into the thing that is of the greatest interest to you? Focus on your needs. That's going to be best for you. Okay? Did you see what I did right there? I started this whole presentation by focusing on on you. I'm asking you to go to the area that's of greatest interest to you. That's what I want you to do in your presentation as well. Now, I can't see you and I know from research you could be in any one of 192 countries. And there are tens of thousands of you in my courses. I can't address you individually until you write to me, but what I can do is try to give you guidance right here in this course. And I want you to make this course as useful to you as possible. I also want you, when you're giving a presentation to an individual, a colleague, a friend, a family member, an investor, to make sure. Your presentation is as tailored to their interest as possible as well. So do what I'm doing here. Don't force people to go through your structure. I've got a structure in this course. I want you to ignore it. I want you to focus right away on what is of the greatest concern to you. So take a moment, look through the course, see if there's anything that really addresses your immediate need. And if you do want just a general grounding on every aspect of presentation skills, then keep going right in the same path you're on. Life is a series of presentations. We're all human beings. We all want things. We all have to give presentations at varying degrees, different levels of difficulty, different levels of stakes involved throughout our whole lives. Part of what you've got to do if you're going to be really good at building your presentation skills is looking at the opportunity and figuring out what's the best tactic for this particular situation. What tools do I want to use for this particular situation? If you are giving a presentation where you're proposing marriage to someone, PowerPoint slides are probably not appropriate. In fact, it might backfire. You see that working in movies occasionally, but in real life that would seem strange. On the other hand, if you are giving a presentation to angel investors or to venture capitalist getting down on one knee, begging or giving a proposal, that's not going to come across very well either. You've got to look at every single presentation through the lens of what else is around me. What are people expecting here? What does this audience want? Whether it's an audience of one or an audience of 5,000. So be aware of this. I can't give you tips and tricks that work 100% of the time in every single situation. You've got to look at it through the lens of this audience, this goal. What are they expecting? How can I exceed their expectations? Not just meet expectations or fail to meet expectations. Let's hop right in now and talk about our goals. What are our goals for our presentations and what are we really trying to build when it comes to our specific presentation skills? In this course and in general, I'm working under the assumption that when you present to people, it's because you want to influence them. If you are giving a presentation to one person you're proposing to, you want them to say yes to marrying you. If you are giving a proposal to a convention of angel investors, you want a specific action. You want investors to come up to you afterwards, after your presentation and give you checks. There is a specific outcome. Most of the time when we give presentations. Now, sometimes it can just be a general, vague, fuzzy notion that you're competent. Keep doing. If you're giving a presentation on everything your department has done in the last quarter, sometimes it's just because you don't want to be fired or see your budget cancel. But many times when you present, it's because you want something specific. You want a specific budget item approved, you want someone to specifically sign a new contract hiring you. You want an investment, you want a vote if you're presenting to a league of voters and you're running for office. So everything we do in this presentation skills class is designed to help you do that one thing, influence the audience to do something you want. Even a comedian has a goal. A comedian, when presenting to you, has the goal of making you laugh. So everyone has an agenda. Doesn't make it bad or nefarious or a problem. But we do need to realize we are not just standing up to hear our own voice. We're doing it to influence people. Now how are we going to do that? I break presentation skills down to four very specific areas. The first is knowing how to really look comfortable, confident, relaxed. Anytime you are presenting to someone, it could be sitting down, one on one, could be standing up, speaking to five people, 500 or 5,000. It could be in so called formal situations where you're in a boardroom, you're using PowerPoint presentations, handouts, a lot of different situations, but you still want to know how to look comfortable, confident, relaxed for any situation. Problem a lot of us have is we're really comfortable sitting down, talking to one or two people. We stand up and now we're talking to 20 or 30. We're out of our comfort zone. What do we do? We freeze up or we start to read or we grab a lectern. That's not what we're after. I want you to look your best, not your style, but my style, anytime you have to present. The second goal is knowing how to shape messages that are understandable to your audience. If you're speaking too quickly, they're not going to understand you. If you're using too many complex phrases, phrases, words, jargon, they're not going to understand you. So that's the second skill we really have to learn when it comes to presentation skills, making sure our audience understands us. The third presentation skill we're going to work on is making sure our message is memorable. This is where it gets tough. I want you to think of the last 5, 10, 20 presentations you've seen in Your office, your work, your school, your place of business or employment. Think of these presentations now. Think of how many messages you remember from the best presenter. Can you name 30 messages? 20, 10, even 5? Now this is a question I ask audiences I work with all over the world. When I'm conducting work, one on one training workshops and small group workshops on presentation skills. I say think of the best speaker you've ever seen. Tell me how many messages you remember. Typically people say everyone's boring in our company. I don't remember anything. Or they remember one idea, occasionally two, sometimes three, every once in a while, four. And every six months, some of them will remember five ideas. I've never had anyone remember more than five ideas from the best speaker they've seen in their career. So that is the third presentation skill we're going to work on is really making sure your ideas are more memorable. Then and only then can we work on the final skill which is influencing the audience to do what we want. So that's the whole point of this course, helping you with that one bottom line and helping you build those four skills. This is embarrassing, but I have to be honest with you. When corporations hire me to conduct presentation skills courses, we have an initial conference call with all the trainees a couple weeks in advance before the in person training. And after that day, incredibly unpopular. In fact, I've been told I'm the least popular trainer companies have ever hired. People hate me. They do not like me. Do you want to know why? It's because I require anyone I train to practice a presentation on video just using a cell phone and to email it to me in advance. People hate doing that and I don't blame them. It can be scary the first time. But here's the thing. After the training, after they've done all that practice and we've spent a full day together, at the end of the day, I'm all of a sudden the most popular trainer they've ever had. Now I haven't changed. The only thing that's changed is people now become aware of the value of recording themselves on video. So this is the number one tip from this whole course. It's not a popular tip at this stage. At this stage you're thinking, wow, where's that money back refund button again? Don't go there yet. But the biggest secret that great presenters have, world famous speakers, business people, political leaders have is they practice on video and they have someone on their staff often practice with them on video. But you don't need a staff. You can just Pull out your cell phone and practice. But here's the thing about practicing on video. If you record yourself on video once and stop, waste of time. Didn't help at all. If you record yourself on video and actually look at it, figure out what you like, don't like, and stop, well, then that's worse than a waste of time. That's going to make you worse than before because all you're going to do is fixate on what you didn't like. Oh, gosh, my hair's falling out. I don't like my V. I'm getting fat. So practicing on video and looking at yourself doesn't help. Some of you think, where's he going with this? Here's the magic, here's the secret. Here's what's not said in the public speaking books and most of the other courses on this. You have to focus one at a time on things you didn't like. Record it again. Look at it. See if he made any improvement. Record it again. The real magic is when you keep doing it on video until you like how you come across. Might take you four or five takes. Might take you 30 takes. The average client of mine, who's already a successful executive, who's already probably given thousands of presentations in his or her career, practices 30 times on video before sending me one. You can bypass all those headaches by just doing it right now. You can jumpstart a career as a great speaker, a great presenter by doing it now. So I realize it's not what people want to hear. They want to hear some quick gimmick of stand with your hands on your hips like Wonder Woman, and you'll be a great speaker. Or take a pill, take a beta blocker, you'll be a great speaker. Or visualize your audience in their underwear, and you'll be a great speaker. I'm here to tell you all those things are a waste of time. You want the number one trick, how to be a great speaker? Just practice on video until you like your own speech. Because you have an entire lifetime of hearing bad speeches, bad presentations. You already know what doesn't work, because you've had to be subjected to that. You also know what works, so use your own experience. I'm going to be asking you to practice throughout this course on video, so get ready. I'm not asking you to yet, but I will be asking you to. The number one reason most presentations fail. The number one reason most people have deficient presentation skills, it's because of insecurity. We think, oh, gosh, I'm not very good at this. He's going to make fun of me, she's going to laugh at me. They're going to think I'm not smart enough, I'm not hard working enough. I'll show them. I'll overwhelm them with fact after fact, data point after data point. I'll give them so much information, no one can complain I left anything out. Boom, boom, boom, boom. The wheelbarrows come in. And how does that make you feel when someone does that? I can tell you. I test audiences all over the world and nobody remembers anything that the data dumpers put out there. So so much of being good at presentation skills has nothing to do with your hand gestures or your eye contact or your voice or your body movement. We'll get to all those things. But a far bigger factor is just making a fundamental decision. You're not going to act like some insecure ninny who is so scared of somebody saying you left something out that you feel this need to dump everything you know. Remember, the people you're speaking to, anyone you're presenting to doesn't have to know everything you know. If they did, they'd have your job. I don't like to teach by the negative and avoid the negative because that tends to just stress the negative. I like to stress the positive. But I do want to get this one thing out there. Just we got to get over this idea that we have to give people the data. Remember, it's not communication if it comes out of your mouth or if it's shown on a slide. It's communication if your audience understands it and remembers it so they can act upon it. Can you do me one favor? And don't worry, I'm not going to ask you to record a video of yourself speaking yet and posting it. But if you could just write a couple of sentences about who you are in the Q and A section, the course. That's what I'll call the discussion section for this course. Just a couple of sentences about who you are, where you live, what you do. If you feel like it. You don't have to. But I find the students who get the most out of this course participate. They ask questions, they ask questions of me, they make comments. Also, you can grade other people's presentations. They can grade you. I'll be grading and critiquing everyone's presentations, but it's not just me. A lot of times it's other students giving feedback, pointing out things that you do well you weren't even aware of it. So if you really want to get the most out of this course, I would recommend don't just sort of sit back and watch videos passively listening. I need you to get engaged. I'm going to ask you a little further on about engaging even further by recording yourself speaking. But for right now, just type a couple sentences about who you are, what you're up to, what you want to get out of this course right here. Thanks. There's a whole section in this course on body language, but I do want to focus on the number one presentation skill when it comes to body language. Your eyes. You ever see somebody ask you for something or act like they're trying to be really serious and convince you?

But.

But they're looking over here at the floor, they're looking away, their eyes are darting. Your eyes are your most powerful body language tool. When you are giving a presentation, you need to be looking at people. Now most of us know that. So if we're speaking one on one or to two people, we look at them most of the time. Now you don't want to stare someone and make them feel like you're giving them the dead eye. You, but you do want to be looking at people most of the time. Fine to look down occasionally. Little bit different when you're presenting to a larger audience. In that case, you want to make sure you really do lock eyes for a few seconds, a couple of sentences and then go to the next person. More tips, advanced tips on eye contact during presentations later on in the course as well. But for right now, I just want you to focus on really looking at people. Human beings are funny. We are very tit for tat. Sometimes somebody is mean to us, will be mean back. Somebody's rude to us, will be rude back. Not saying that's good or you should be that way, but in my experience that is how people are. So if you're giving a presentation and you're ignoring your audience, your audience is going to respond in kind of by ignoring you because they've got something a lot more interesting. If you don't find them interesting, they're going to find something interesting on their cell phone, they're going to check email, texts, what's going on on Facebook, WhatsApp. There's a lot of opportunities out there. That's why it's so critical that when you're giving a presentation and it's not incredibly comfortable one on one talking to one friend or one colleague, you're going to be tempted to stare at notes. You're going to Be tempted to look at a screen and read bullet points. If you're really nervous, you might be tempted to stare straight ahead or stare at the floor. That one thing is likely to destroy any possibility you have of actually communicating your ideas. It's going to give people an extremely negative sense of your presentation skills. On the other hand, you can be relatively stiff. Maybe your voice isn't that engaging. But if you're looking right at people, most of the time, they'll feel like you cared about them, that you spoke directly to them, that you were trying to have a conversation with them. So while we're in this beginning of the course, I do want you to focus on things that are really going to have a big impact. Even if you can't do all 10,000 tips in this course, if you really focus on having great eye contact every time you give a presentation, it's going to help you a lot. Now, I do realize we have students in this course from 192 countries. There are some cultural differences. In some places, an audience showing respect to you might actually close their eyes and you think they're sleeping. I understand that all I can do is give you basic principles that I do find work most of the time in most places, and I have worked with people from six continents. I do have students from 192 countries, and I've trained personally in 30 different countries around the world. But you're still going to have to filter it through the reality of your own environment. If I say something that's against what works in your culture, you're going to have to focus on what works in your culture and ignore my advice from time to time. But remember, unless there's really strong reason not to, you need to be looking at your audience. Whether it's one person, ten, one hundred, or a thousand. You're polishing your presentation skills. You're going to give a presentation. Why? What is it you want your audience to do? Well, I have to tell them everything we've done the last. No, no. Too many people make the mistake of never really asking themselves before they start the whole process of creating presentations. Perhaps slide decks, perhaps notes, writing out, typing out speeches. They never really ask themselves, what is it I want my audience to do? So right now, I want you to think of some presentation you have to give, whether it's in the work world, school, business, public life, civic life. Think of a particular presentation. And I want you to write down in one sentence, what is it you want your audience to do? I want you to put that in the Q and A section. Think about that, because we'll be building out this presentation that you get to pick. But the starting point is right here. The starting point is what is it you want your audience to do? Do you want them to vote for you for president, invest in your company, approve a budget, go out on and this is not a class on dating, but you could give a presentation on why someone should go out on a date with you. That's a type of presentation. I want you to be as highly specific as possible. Everything we do is going to be focused on this end goal. We're going to back up from this goal and try to get to it. That is the way effective presenters work. They focus on the goal. So before we do anything else, I need you to go to the Q and A section and write down, type up for everyone to see the topic you're working on that you'll be presenting on. But then what is the goal? What is the one thing you want your audience to do after hearing you present to them? We're almost ready to start giving a presentation. But how do you start a presentation? This always feels awkward for so many people. My clients ask me, tj, what's the best way to start a presentation? Should it be with a joke or a story? Don't put pressure on yourself to be extra funny. If you're not a stand up comedian, you don't have to be overly dramatic. All you really have to do is one thing a little different from most speakers. Most speakers start off with good morning, my name is this. My title is this. Today I'm going to talk about X, Y and Z and blah blah, blah, blah, blah. And everyone is saying, this person hasn't really started yet. Let me check my email. Oh, there's a Groupon. That's what you don't want to do. All you really have to do is say something interesting to your audience. Everyone's expecting you to talk about yourself at that point. Nobody cares about you. Just say something interesting and useful to your audience. You go back to the very first lecture in this course and you'll notice right out of the gate, what did I do? I gave you three quick wins, three quick tips on how you can be better with your presentation skills. Because I wanted to hook you. I wanted to show you you're going to get value right away. You're not going to have to go through all the weeds and wait and dig and dig and dig before I give you value. I wanted to give you value right out of the gate. I didn't start off by well, let me tell you about my illustrious 30 year career as a presentation coach and my number one USA Today best selling book Secret to Foolproof Presentations and the Presidents and Prime Ministers and Nobel Peace Prize winners. I didn't start with any of that because frankly, I didn't think you cared at that point. Why should you? You're here to build your presentation skills. So that's why I started off talking about three quick tips on how to improve your presentation skills. The Now, I didn't get a chance to meet all of you individually, but I know by the basis of you having signed up paid for this course on presentation skills, you're interested in presentation skills, you're going to have to make some assumptions about your audience. For me, it was pretty easy assumption for your audience. Many times you can make a similar assumption about what is going to be most interesting to them and just start with it. A story can be a great way of doing it. A question stating something that might get their attention doesn't have to be needlessly provocative. Basically anything other than Good morning, I'm happy to be here, blah blah blah, me, me, me, me, me. Talk about the audience. When you start, do that and they'll pay attention to your next point and your next point and the next point.