Mastering Communication: Learning from Great Speakers

Should you spend time watching great speakers, TED Talks, watching interviews of famous leaders when they are being grilled by journalists? Absolutely. You should do that to become great at anything. You can't just do it in a vacuum. It's a context. All great novelists read a lot of other great novelists. All great musicians listen to a lot of great music. If you want to become a great communicator, a master communicator, you need to watch the greats, and they're everywhere. Online. You can look at TED talks, you can just Google certain topics. You can go to other forums, ideas, conferences in person, but also on video. The magic of living in these modern times is everything is at your fingertips. You can get thousands and thousands of the best speakers in the world, all coming to your living room, all coming to your den, wherever your computer is, wherever your cell phone is. Now, it's not that you're going to watch one Anthony Robbins speech and say, well, that's how it is. So now every time I give a speech, I'm going to say and say hi to get the audience to interact with me. I don't want you mimicking other speakers. I do want you learning, borrowing, adding bits and pieces. There's an old expression that thieves steal from one person. Great artists steal from a dozen people. When you're borrowing elements and combining them in a new way, that's not stealing, that's creativity. That's blending, that's synthesizing in a new way. So that's why it's essential for you to learn. And sometimes you'll see something and you might want to experiment. I'll never forget once I was at a huge public speaking success motivation conference and I saw the late Zig Ziglar, and he has a moment where he says, and I got down on one knee and I proposed to that little redhead. And I thought, well, that was interesting. There's a lot of variation there, a lot of variety. He's really a great showman. Now, do I routinely get down on one knee during a presentation? No, I didn't want to directly copy that, but I liked his masterful use of the stage, the way he moved around. I do in fact, try to move when I speak. Now, if I'm on camera and it's a tight shot, I don't want to go out of the camera range. That can be a little weird and distracting. But if I'm in front of a live audience and I am on stage or I have a lot of space in front of a room, I don't want to just stand in one spot stiff and nothing moving but my mouth, or nothing moving except from the waist up. I actually do want to use the room. So a part of that came from me watching Zig Ziglar and other great speakers. Now, I might not like all of his message. I might not like any of his message, but if I can learn even one thing from a great speaker and incorporate a part of that, it's worthwhile. Now, you can learn from people you don't like. You can learn from people you don't respect. You can learn from horrible dictators. Not that you're endorsing dictatorship or oppression or tyranny, but communication skills are different. There's one leader. I'm not going to mention his name because I don't want to be controversial and make it sound like I'm praising someone who was an evil dictator. But there was someone, a world leader, who did horrible things. But he came to power because of his ability to speak. It wasn't because of his height, his looks, his wealth, his charm, his family pedigree. He came to power exclusively because of his ability to speak. One of his techniques was as soon as he was introduced, standing in front of a large crowd, he did nothing. He said nothing. He aroused curiosity. Now, he would sometimes do this for as long as a couple of minutes, and it would start to merely make people wonder what's going on. It aroused tremendous curiosity. And then he started off very, very quietly. People had strained. He would build and build his volume and his power. It worked for what he wanted to do. And he brought audiences into a frenzy and had tremendous power. Again, I'm not asking you to use your communication skills to oppress people or tyranny. What I'm asking you to do is be aware of speaking skills everywhere and figure out how you can incorporate different elements to make it work for you. Now, with the speaker I just mentioned, he had that technique where he would just say nothing for as much as two minutes. Do I do that if I'm introduced to speak somewhere? Do I stand up and say nothing for two minutes? No, I don't. I wouldn't feel comfortable with that. And I think too many people might consider that weird. But here's what I do. Here's where I did learn from that. If I am introduced and I stand up and I'm about to speak, I pause for two seconds. Why is that important? Because most people are afraid to do it. They're introduced. And next up, ladies and gentlemen, we have T.J. walker. Thank you very much. I'm so happy to be here today. There's zero gap between the time they're introduced or the time they stand up till they start talking. By saying nothing for just two seconds, looking at people, little smile on your face, you can project a total calm and a confidence that stands out. It's just enough to make people think, hey, what's going on here? That's why I like it. I've never had anyone come up to me afterwards and say, you know, that was really weird the way you didn't say anything for two seconds. Two seconds is such a short amount of time. Nobody remembers it. So it's hitting people more emotionally and in the gut than intellectually that they remember. But it just sends a signal, wow, this speaker is confident, this speaker is relaxed. That is the message I want to send to people. So that's just an example. If you routinely look at great speakers, some of it rubs off on you. As long as you speak too. Now, if you just watch great speakers and you never speak, you're not going to get any better. I can watch stand up comedians all day long every day for years. If I never do stand up comedy and I never practice jokes, I'm not going to get any funnier. Same thing with speaking. But if you watch the grades and then you experiment, you try it on your own, some of it will work, some of it may feel a little phony, contrived, you don't do it. But the stuff that works, you do more of it. That's how you get good at anything. So yes, I absolutely think if you're serious about being a great communicator, you need to spend some time on a regular basis. I'm not suggesting three hours a day of watching TEDx talks from 9pm to midnight every night, but you need to spend some time on a regular basis looking at great communicators speak, analyzing it and asking yourself, what do I like here? Is there 1% of what they're doing that I can do over here when I'm speaking? What are they doing that I don't like? So I make sure I don't do that in my next presentation. Do that consistently and you will get better and better and better as a communicator.