Mastering Communication: TJ Walker's Live Speech Rehearsal & Tips

Hi and welcome. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks for joining me today. This is a live rehearsal of a speech. Now, for years, like most presentation coaches, I always tell people, you got to rehearse your speeches, you got to rehearse your speeches. And frankly, almost nobody ever does. And part of it, I think, is this lack of know. How do you actually rehearse a speech? It feels awkward, it feels silly. So rather than give you more advice and browbeat you into rehearsing, I figure, why don't I just demonstrate what I'm going to do? So I have a speech later today. It's an online speech. I'll be talking to hundreds of lawyers all over the world with a major legal services firm. And I've got a speech. Now, it is a topic I've talked about a lot, but it's a little bit different. There's some nuances and. And I'm going to rehearse right now and sort of walk you through the process of how I actually prepare a speech. There are different ways of preparing for speeches. There's more than one way. This is just one way. But I hope it motivates you to spend at least some time thinking about how are you going to prepare and rehearse your own speeches. So let's really start at the very beginning. They organizers told me they wanted me to talk about how to communicate in the workplace more effectively. One on one and small groups. So that's what they want me to talk about. So how did I actually start preparing this speech? I did not try to think on my feet and wing it. That's not a good idea. And I actually didn't do it right in front of you, although I suppose I could have. What I did was I sat in my chair, leaned back, my table was down, I got a pad and pen, and I just started brainstorming. That's how I like to start a speech. I don't want to craft the perfect opening. I don't want to craft any great sound bites. I just want to really think about what are the main ideas. Now, sometimes I may come up with 15, 20, 30. I want to narrow it down to just five ideas. And you'll find out more about that in a moment. And then I want to just sort of look at them. Ugly text. I mean, I can barely read it. So if you can't read it, you're not alone. And those of you joining me, thanks so much for joining me. I'm just walking you through my process of how to rehearse a speech. And then I'm going to actually rehearse a speech that I have to give in front of paying clients later today. So you'll kind of see warts and all this process. So my first step was just brainstorming with handwriting. And Farouk says hello and you're doing a great job. Farouk, thanks so much for joining me. And I apologize. I won't be taking questions now because I'm in a limited time frame as I've got to go right into a, a digital pitch meeting with a prospect in about 40 minutes. But I will be coming back live today a little bit after 12 noon eastern time. So in about a little less than an hour and a half, I will be coming back live today and taking your questions. And you can always post questions on the community tab on the YouTube channel. And I see you're on Facebook. You can post them on Facebook as well. But I sometimes miss it there. If you post it in the YouTube community channel on our tab on my channel, I'll definitely see that and respond to it. So again, the first step is I just brainstormed here. Then I thought about it, collected it in my mind, then I went to my computer and actually typed it up. I typed up just five key points, actually numbered it, and then a couple of words below it. Very careful not to use full paragraphs, very careful not to have, you know, run on sentences that go here. Then what I did is I bolded it, enlarged the font and I made sure everything fit on one page. So this is the actual outline. I can now I just did this and I suppose I could have shown that to you as well, but I spent maybe 10 minutes coming up with this outline. Now the importance of having a one page outline is I don't have to pick it up, fumble around. You know, if it falls down on the ground, I don't say, oh my gosh, everything is out of order. You've seen people do in movies, maybe you've seen that in real life. So I have it on a single sheet. Now my speech later today is done virtually. So even though I am going to walk around the room a little bit like this to demonstrate certain practices. It's not like I'm in a giant theater or a huge convention hall where I could be walking 30, 40ft around. So there's not going to be tremendous movement. So today I'll have one single sheet of paper for an outline. The outline is not Roman numeral 1, a little A and all that. It's just 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, big bold letters, underline. And then I do have a couple of little pieces underneath it to remind me of examples and of stories I want to tell. By the way, if you're getting any value out of this, I do appreciate you hitting the like button, hitting the subscribe button, hitting the share button, signing up for notifications. It helps us stay in touch, helps the channel grow and remember I am here for I can't do it right now, but I will be coming back with you live later answering any question you have about communication skills. So what I'm going to do now is sort of just do an actual rehearsal. So I'm not going to talk about my speech anymore. I'm going to give my speech and I'm going to use you as my focus group. I'm going to ask you at the end, not whether you like it or not, that frankly doesn't matter. I want to know what do you actually remember? So get ready if you can stay with me for a few minutes. The whole presentation is going to be an hour long. I'm hoping I don't talk for more than about half an hour because I want to give ample time for question and answer and to really engage with the audience. So let me go ahead and this is how I think I'm going to start the speech. I'm going to share with you the secrets of how to really communicate effectively in one on one meetings, small groups, groups in the workplace so that you really feel connected with people and they feel connected with you. Timeout. What's wrong here? I'm not looking at you. Why would you want to pay attention to someone if they're not giving you any attention? So the first thing you got to think about when you're meeting one on one with someone or a small group in the workplace is realize they're human beings. We human beings are programmed to be reciprocal if someone is ignoring us. And let's face it, in a lot of meetings these days are online. If someone is looking down here or worst scenario of all, they're talking to you like this and there's a part of you thinking, well what is TJ doing? Is he really checking sports scores now? Is he playing solitaire? Is he multitasking? Is he playing online poker? What in the world is he actually doing? Well, I wasn't doing anything like that. But you don't know. So it's human nature to often assume the worst. The other thing about human nature is we like to reciprocate. So if you see me ignoring you, are you Seeing me talking and I'm looking at notes or I'm looking at my phone, you're going to do exactly the same thing. You're going to go, if he can look at his phone, I can too. And next thing you know, you're trying to multitask. Well, it's one thing we know about human beings is that we're all awful, multiple multitaskers. We think we're great. All the research says we're horrible. If you doubt me, look at the highways in almost any country in the world. As soon as cell phone adoption became widespread, deaths skyrocketed because people are trying to do this and do that, and it doesn't work well. It also doesn't work well in your meetings. So the first thing you've got to do before you even think about your message, before you even think about your bullet points or slides, if it's that sort of a meeting, is can you connect with people as a human being? The easiest way to lose connection is to do this eye contact part was wrong. Khan, now you've intrigued me. Okay. Oh, that's what you're saying about the very beginning. Yes. I was looking like that. Yeah. You want to be looking at people when you're talking. I don't mean staring at them like this the whole time, but for the most part, you want to look at people. Most of the time when you are in a meeting, speaking with them one on one or a group, you want to do it for a couple of reasons. You want to see, are they paying attention? Because if two of the four people are on their cell phone and you're not their boss, and they're not your boss, and it can be a delicate situation. Sometimes you can't just say, hey, dummy, you're being rude. Put your phone away. But you can stop. And sometimes people will get the hint and they'll look up at you if they realize you're kind of waiting for them. If they're not giving you eye contact, you can then draw them out, ask them a specific question. So rather than just going right in and diving in with what you want to say in the meeting, you can maybe start off by saying, hey, James, tell us about the latest update of what's going on with your client. Bring them back in. Because I do think if you're a communicator, and we're all communicators, at some level, you need to be jealous of the attention of the people you're talking to, whether it's one on one or a small group you want people, people's attention because if they're not giving you their attention, you're not communicating anything. You're just background noise. You're like the news on at 6am in the morning when you're getting dressed and taking a shower. It's background noise. None of us really wants to be background noise. Unconventional advice says, haha, a staring contest is not recommended. No, I'm not suggesting a staring contest, but I do want you to look at, at human beings and not having staring contest with your computer screen or your notes or your PowerPoint or. I've even seen some people do this recently where they're thinking and their eyes are closed the whole time and it's just a bit disorienting. The other reason you want to really look at people is you want to see do they look confused? If someone is looking at me and I'm speaking in a meeting, one on one or a small group, they seem a little confused. That's a signal to me. It's a nonverbal signal I'm doing something wrong. So I'm not going to say, hey, are you getting this? That makes it sound like I think they're done. But it's a signal to me that maybe I should go back and give another example, give another case study. I might even say, I don't think I'm quite explaining this well and I'll try another way. So that's something you can only do if you're actually looking at your audience or that one person you're talking to. Very key to look at signals. Are they squirming? Are you making them uncomfortable? Do they look confused? Are they doing this and clearly getting it. All of those are important signals to you. Do they look like they have a question? If so, I beg you for one on one meetings, small group meetings, let them talk right away. Because the one thing we know, if someone is asking you a question at that particular moment, everything they're hearing is interesting to them because they're hearing their own question. We also know that the next thing out of Your mouth is 100% interesting and relevant to them because it's in response to them. And that's where you need to be careful to give yourself enough time because you're really hold all questions to the end. At your staff meeting, they're going to forget about it, they're not going to do it. They're going to be confused about this thing over here while you're going off five different points and you have lost them. Next thing you Know they're daydreaming. Khan says. I meant the previous part. You asked what was wrong. Absolutely right, Khan. I am interested. We'll probably hold it till the end. Any feedback you have for me on. I'm most interested in what do you remember, But I'm also interested in any advice you have on how you think I can be better at this, how I can do even better at this. And it did just occur to me I didn't even turn my accent lights on. I'm going to go ahead and do that. Gives the background a slightly more professional look. I wouldn't want to do this for the paying client for a keynote, but I do want to sort of walk you behind the scenes of different things I'm trying to do to get ready for the speech. So it's crucial that you have good eye contact. I'll never forget the first time I worked with a prime minister in Eastern Europe. It was just after the year 2000 hit, and this country had not been a part of the democratic world for very long. I'm working with the prime minister and I'm in a palace surrounded by his prison guards or regular guards with machine guns. And he says, tj, do you mind I practice my speech in my own native language? Sure. His staff said, hey, tj, whatever you do, don't change any word of the speech. We've worked on it for months. Okay. So he stood up, read his speech. His head was down the whole time. He had a lot more hair than I do. But he read the speech the whole time. I recorded on video. We finished, watched it, he turned to me and said, tj, what did you think? And I was a little uncomfortable. It's my first time in that part of the world. Cold War had not been over that long. And truth was, I thought he was incredibly boring because he read. No eye contact, put me to sleep. Monotonous. And I wasn't sure what to say, all these machine guns around. But I finally thought, you know, he's paying me a bunch of money to tell him what to say. So I was honest. I said, Mr. Prime Minister, I don't know what you said, but with all due respect, you bored the heck out of me. His eyes got big. He looked at me. He looked at the machine guns. He looked at the TV screen again. He said, you're right, it is incredibly boring. I wouldn't watch that. I wouldn't listen to that person in my own cabinet meeting. Why should I expect anyone else to? So he took his speech, tore it up, threw it in the ground, and we started over. What do we do? We just got a notepad. We brainstormed on ideas for about 10 minutes, narrowed it down to five ideas, brainstormed on stories for each one, came up with one for each point, made a simple outline stood up. This time he was able to look at me and the handful of people in the room. Good eye contact. His voice came back, his energy came back. He was having fun again in this meeting. We recorded it, he watched it, and when it was done, he jumped up, hugged me, and said, I'm a fantastic speaker now. Thank you, and you saved me. But I didn't do anything to you. All I did was to take the shackles off. When you try to read a speech, you basically destroy your ability to communicate with people. As humans, you destroy your eye contact. Especially small meeting with 10 or 12 cabinet members. They're going to be off daydreaming about their own meetings, coming up, their own issues, and it's going to destroy your ability to communicate. So you've got to figure out how to talk to people by looking at them. You got to see, are they paying attention. That is what is going to make you much more effective. Small groups, one on one, and even large groups. So I'm sort of stepping out of the moment now for the practice and sort of telling you what I'm doing. So that's kind of my first big point of what I'm talking about. And now we'll take just a second. I'll perhaps walk back or I'll switch camera angles, and that will allow me to look at my second message point, which I just did. But please notice I didn't say, ah, where was I? Let me forget. I forgot. I'm not doing that. It's just a quick glance down. And because the font is large, it's easy to jump out at when you are having a small group meeting. Part of the problem is people don't know, like, why are we even here? Are we just wasting time? I could be getting other stuff done. This is going to make me miss the time to pick up my kid Little League practice. It's very important that you give people a strong sense of what the objective is of this meeting. You need to have an objective. You need to let other people know, too. And then you've got to figure out what are at most the five ideas that you want to convey. If you're trying to convey something. Sometimes a meeting is just about a brainstorming session and you have no agenda. But other times, you are trying to make something happen. You're trying to talk to people about a new compensation plan or maybe a new restructuring plan. And you do have to get certain ideas across. It's critically important that you figure out in advance what are your top ideas. The number one problem most speakers have, most business people have in small group meetings, one on one, or for that matter, large group meetings, is they get greedy. They want to cover every single thing they've covered in the last month in their job and that's too much stuff. So they think, well, I got to give this presentation to my five board members I report to on Monday at 10am so let me start preparing. They get a wheelbarrow and they start piling up. More facts, more data, more details, more bullet points. If it's a slide, they're piling it all up. They're wheeling that bill, that, that wheelbarrow into the boardroom. Now is their time to speak. And they're thinking, what do I leave out? What do I leave in you know what, let me cover my you know what and just dump everything. So they start talking faster and faster. And here's another data point, another data point and another data point. It's overwhelming to the people you're speaking to, whether it's a large group, whether it's four colleagues, whether it's one person, your boss, the person you report to, it's too much data. Gotta remember every communication form has certain strengths and certain weaknesses. A novel old fashioned paper book has certain strengths. If you have a novel that you've absolutely loved spending 12 hours reading, sometimes it's disappointing to see the movie because so much of it's condensed. But movies aren't worse than novels, they're just different. Every medium has strengths and weaknesses. Spoken communication has the strength of. It's a great way to get people to pay attention to something. It's a great way to show people what you care about, how to put a spotlight on something. It's not particularly a great way of conveying lots and lots of data. So please keep that in mind when you're talking one on one with a colleague. When you're talking with small groups in the workplace, if you have a lot of data, send them an email with full paragraphs. Send them a PDF that's got full paragraphs and lots of text and lots of information. If you want, you could do it. Steve. Excuse me, not Steve Jobs. Jeff Bezos does in meetings where at Amazon, if you want to have a meeting, you got to prepare a one to five page memo. That really gives all the background, what's to be covered, what the points are, the purpose of the meeting. And it can't be bullet point. It's not a PowerPoint slide with bullet point and random things in images. It's full sentences, full paragraphs. And the meeting starts by this being put in front of everyone. And there's total silence. People have a chance to read and then you go right into discussion. That's one way of doing it. And it might not work in your culture with your clients, but it's something to think about. There are different ways of making communication work in small group meetings, but there's one way where it doesn't work. The way it doesn't work is to bombard people with lots of data, lots of facts, lots of images, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. And the worst case scenario of all, the typical PowerPoint. So now I'm not anti PowerPoint, I'm anti the way most people use PowerPoint. Most people use PowerPoint as the poor man's, the poor woman's teleprompter that they get. Wow. Now I don't have to prepare, remember anything, or rehearse. I'll just read bullet points. And the first thing that happens to most people is they fall asleep or they check email, or they play on their phone, or they text their friends about the game from last night. So not saying you can't use PowerPoint, but if you use it with a bunch of bullet points and text, I would submit to you, you don't have any proof or evidence that it works. Now, as attorneys, you believe in evidence. You don't just float novel theories without citing anything, without citing any evidence and say, and this is why my client is innocent, and this is why my corporation shouldn't have to pay any fines. No, you'd be left out of the courtroom. Your clients wouldn't appreciate it. You would lose. Well, I would submit to you that the traditional PowerPoint that you may use in a small or mid sized business meeting with lots of text doesn't actually work. But you know what? You don't have to accept my theory. You can test it the next time you're giving a traditional PowerPoint slide presentation. When you're done, ask people how many messages they remember and when you're done, see what comes back to you. I'm willing to bet they remember virtually nothing. Now, I mentioned you should narrow things down to five message points. Why do I say five? It's because I test people all over the world for decades and I say that think of the best speech you've seen in the last year in your field, in your industry. Think of the best speech in the last five years, maybe 10 years. Now, don't tell me that you remember the person's style or their humor. They moved around a lot. I want to know just what messages do you remember? What stories and messages do you remember? And quite often people say, well, tj, everybody in my industry is boring. Everybody in my company's boring. Okay? Sometimes they remember nothing. Occasionally one message, sometimes two messages, occasionally three messages. Every three or four months, someone will remember four messages, and once every six months someone will say, oh, teacher, I remember the best speaker I've ever seen in my life. And I. I remember. And they go through five specific message points. In all the years I've asked that question, I've never had anyone remember more than five message points. So that's why I'm urging you. When you are going into a meeting, let's say it's five or ten colleagues that you work with regularly and you've got half an hour hour slotted, don't fall into the temptation of just going through every single fact and bullet point and every number. Focus on at most a handful of message points because it's only what they remember that they can act upon. So please don't be greedy. Now you can say, well, tj, my audience is different. Maybe test them. I'm willing to bet that if you try to convey the typical 20, 30, 40, 50 messages, bullet points, numbers on a slide, even if you're articulate, even if you have great eye contact, your audience is instantly going to forget. Therefore, no real communication took place. So narrow the messages down. If you've got a lot of data, email it in advance. Some will read, most won't. If it's really important, try the Amazon method of give them the memo before the media starts and literally give people time to have their heads down reading before the meeting starts. Then you can dive in to what is really important. Get rid of the slides that don't work. Now, if you want to talk about PowerPoint, I can come back and talk to you about that some other time. The most important thing to remember about PowerPoint is one idea per slide. Images, not text. I realize that sounds crazy. That's not the way we do it here. That's not the way it's done in our corporate culture. I don't care about your culture or your industry. Frankly, I care about what works in the mind of your audience, your customers, your clients, your colleagues. And I can Tell you, the human brain is wired to remember images. It's not wired to remember text that goes across quickly when someone else is reading it. That's simply the way it works. A Taliban says, hey, buddy, I enjoy your teachings. It's helped me a lot. Well, thanks so much. I'm going to ask you in a minute. What specific teachings do you even remember? Because I want to practice what I preach and we're going to get to this whole concept of testing soon. Okay. By the way, I'm going to feel perfectly relaxed and comfortable drinking water during my professional paid keynote speech I'm giving later today. In the same way that professional comedians can be on a stage in front of 10,000 people and drink water. There's nothing wrong with that. It's not like I'm a Broadway actor and it's in the middle of Macbeth and it's a soliloquy and I'm all of a sudden. That would mess up the flow. But we're not professional actors here. We're human beings simply trying to communicate with other human beings. Okay, now I'm going to say something that all of you have heard about. And by my estimate, fewer than 90 or fewer than 1% of people actually do it. That is rehearse. Now, I'm not suggesting you rehearse every one on one conversation you have front of the water cooler with one person. But if it's an important presentation, if it's a high stakes presentation, if it's a job interview, either you're being interviewed or you're conducting the interview. Why not rehearse? Certainly, if it's something that's going to have a huge impact on people's lives. Say, unfortunately, you have to lay off three colleagues. You could in fact rehearse what you want to say because sometimes you can think of something in your brain, it sounds perfectly fine. You can say it sounds fine to you, but if you then watch on video what you say, you'll be like, oh, my God, I sound like a heartless cruelty monster. If you do it in rehearsal, it's not too late to tweak it, to change it, to refine it, to make it better. But the reality is, most people's rehearsal is the actual talk, the actual presentation, the briefing they give. So the final draft is the first draft. There's no possible way of refining it. And again, I'm not suggesting every single small talk interaction bumping into the hall with someone that you need to rehearse that and stay up till 3am every morning. No. But Some group meetings are more important than others. Some staff meetings are more important than others. You can in fact rehearse. Steve Jobs was not known as some big extrovert, back slapping guy. Life of the party, he was introverted, but, but he knew that when he had to give presentations to the world, unveiling a new product, it was important. And he rehearsed. He showed that it was important by spending typically a week of rehearsing his presentations. I'm not suggesting you lose a week of billable hours to rehearse every Tuesday morning staff meeting. But there's something really important and you need to make sure it really gets through. Then rehearsal, it doesn't take that much time. Now, when I started off in this industry many decades ago, video recording rehearsal was difficult. We'd have to hire a local TV reporter to get a 60 pound camera and come lugging it in and spending hours setting things up. It was difficult. These days no one has that excuse. You just pull up your cell phone, you talk to it, or you put it down, you lean it up against a computer or a bookshelf and you say what you want to say. And maybe you rehearse just the first minute because you want to make sure the tone comes across the way you want. You want to make sure the words make sense, you want to make sure that you don't seem nervous. And by practicing on video, you dramatically increase the odds that you do a great job in real life. The key to rehearsal though, isn't just going through the motions or reading it out loud on a script. The key is you've got to say it out loud as if you were talking to that audience. The audience might be one person, it might be five colleagues, it might be four colleagues in the room, and seven are connecting from seven different cities on zoom. But I want you to practice visualizing that audience and just focus on speaking. Record it. Don't try to analyze it while you're doing. Record it and then watch it. But here's the key. Don't just pick it apart and say, well, that was wrong. That was wrong. I said what? Oh my gosh, I'm horrible and I need to lose weight and I'm getting old and grand. No, that not only doesn't help you become more effective as a communicator, that actually can destroy your confidence. So what you need to do is watch it and focus on what do you like, what do you want to do more of? Then try to think of what's just one thing I could do a little bit Better. And then if you have time for rehearsal, do one more rehearsal. Again, I'm not suggesting you do this. If you have three meetings a day and you stay up till midnight rehearsing three hours a night every night. But some meetings are more important than others. Some are more critical for you to really communicate effectively. And the rehearsal will dramatically help. It will help a lot. I want you to really think about how you can prepare and get into this flow so that you go into every presentation, whether it's with one person, maybe you're going to your boss asking for a raise. That's a type of presentation. It's a type of presentation that makes most people nervous. Maybe you're going to a client and you're having to tell them, hey, we've had to up our billable hour rate and you know, it might not make everyone comfortable. Rehearse it now. The final step, and my fifth point to you is don't take my word for this. I might be full of nonsense. You don't really know me. I want you to question me, I want you to doubt me. But I also want you to doubt the way you've done things in the past. You may be wildly successful, you wouldn't be where you are without having some measure of success. But it's not necessarily because you've communicated at your absolute best every time. It may be because most people are in fact lousy communicators and the standard is very low. So why not try to be your absolute best? So the difference between average and you is even a greater difference. That's what you should be shooting for. Now. The key to really testing your presentation is not just you looking at is getting feedback from others. So if you are in fact having a company wide meeting, or let's say everyone in your London office you're meeting with on Thursday and it's a major restructuring or something's really important that you've got to convey. And there's going to be 30 people there. Pull one or two of them aside. Tuesday at lunch, give them your presentation. When you're done, don't say, how'd I do? They're going to say you're great and wonderful. People like to be positive and upbeat. Instead, ask them what do they remember? This is go. Someone can tell you you were great even if they think you're awful because they don't want to offend you. But someone cannot lie and tell you what your messages were if they don't actually remember them. It's impossible. So this is what you're really after. What did they take away? What did they remember about your presentation? That is what's meaningful. Because if I finish a presentation and people come up to me and say, oh, dj, great job. Great presentation today. If I just say, great, thanks a lot, really appreciate it, wasted opportunity. Instead, I'm going to say, hey, thanks a lot. Tell me, what do you remember about it? What stands out? How? How would you summarize anything I said to a colleague who couldn't be here today? At that point, if they say, well, tj, you were just so professional and charismatic and articulate, you are really a true pro. Great watching you. That's what they say. Then I know my speech was a complete, utter failure. If all they can do is talk about my style, that means I didn't really communicate any ideas that were useful to them. I failed. I don't want you to fail. And if you systematically test your presentations, the important ones, before your colleagues, before a board meeting, before a staff meeting, you can in fact know what works and what doesn't work. Because if you had a specific message you wanted to convey or a specific PowerPoint slide and your audience actually remembers it, even if it's one person, that is extraordinarily valuable data. And now you know it works if they don't remember it, it's time to tweak the presentation. Go back. Maybe you need to narrow the messages. Maybe you need to come up with more examples. So that is what is most essential for you to become not just a good communicator, one on one and with small groups, but consistently a great communicator so that every time you speak, you're not convinced everyone's going to do what you want, but you are going to be convinced they understand. You get your messages, remember your messages, and there's at least a chance they will take the actions you want. Okay, so that's the finish of my. Forgive me for doing this. Hey, Jess, I'm just finishing a rehearsal. I will clock in in about 60 seconds. Okay. All right, thank you for joining me today. I will be coming back live in about an hour and a half, so if you have questions, please join me then. Thanks so much.