TJ Walker explains why most presentations fail: too much data, not enough focus. Cut to a few essential ideas, prepare specific stories for your audience, and decide what action you want them to take before you start.
If you want to be more successful, then improve your communication skills. The best way to do that, smash the subscribe button right now. Okay, You've got an opportunity to give a speech or presentation, but your first reaction is, oh, this is going to be so tiring. This is so tedious. I really wish I didn't have to do it. Time out. If your first reaction to having to give a speech or a presentation or a talk to colleagues, clients, customers is, this is going to be a lot of work for you, you're doing it all wrong. If this is some big laborious process like building a warehouse, and you see yourself with a wheelbarrow going out and gathering all these facts and all these PowerPoint slides and all these data points, if it's depressing you because it seems like so much work, so tiring, so tedious, guess who else is going to think it's tedious? That's right, your audience. Because they don't want to be overwhelmed with facts and data and numbers and more and more charts that they can't process. The number one flaw most business people, most professionals make when they're speaking, it's not hand motions, doing weird things. It's not us and ums. It's certainly not just fidgeting. The number one problem is they're making this a tiring, tedious affair of dumping way too much data. Now, the solution is very easy. Don't go into a presentation thinking, oh, this is going to be one big, long slog. I'm not looking forward to this, but I've got to do it because my boss or someone asked me to give this official formal presentation. Stop. There is no such thing as a formal presentation. Remember, there's only two types of presentations in the world. It's either interesting or boring. It's either memorable and interesting or boring and instantly forgotten. So your challenge is to figure out very quickly, before you start, before you open your mouth, before you write the first note, before you create the first slide, is how can you make this interesting? How can you figure out what you want them to do? And then how can you figure out what ideas are going to be interesting to them to make them want to do the thing that you're suggesting? Thanks so much for joining me. I'm tj. This is the TJ Walker Success Channel. On this channel, I try to help you become more successful in life by communicating with with greater skill and confidence. If you see anything you like here, get any value, please. Like this video right now. So where do you really go with this how do you change your basic standard operating procedure? Because in so many organizations, there's just a set expectation. Okay, you've been assigned this presentation. It's the end of third quarter, and you're supposed to give a summary of everything that happened in third quarter. And everyone is used to you following a format of you've got all these 20 slides and you plug in numbers. This way you don't have to do it that way. Remember, with every presentation you ever give, there's a chance you meet expectations. There's a chance you fail to meet expectations and everyone's disappointed. But there's also a chance that you exceed expectations. There's also a chance you not only exceed expectations, but you're really interesting and memorable, and you increase the odds that some of the people in the audience do what you want. That is what you should be aiming for. Every single time you have an opportunity to stand up and speak or sit down at a conference table and speak or. Or sit in front of a camera and talk to people through zoom or some other social media platform or meeting platform, you want to excel and exceed expectations. And it's really not that hard. If you are in the preparation of giving a presentation and you're finding that this is tedious, this is hard work, you're kind of bored. Guess what? Everyone in your audience is going to feel that doubly. So you got to be a better editor. So much of being a great communicator, nothing to do with the quality of your voice or your hand gestures or any of that, it's simply being a better editor and figuring out that's not essential, that's not essential. That's not essential. Good writers call it killing your babies. Good speakers know that you have to edit out most of the ideas you could talk about. Remember, if your audience needed to know everything you know, they would already have your job. Your job when you're speaking is not to tell people every single fact you know, because that's tiring to you and everyone else. Your job is to figure out of everything you do now what's most essential for your audience to know, to understand and to act upon. Completely different from you telling them everything you need to know. So you've got to use judgment. And no, I don't mean thinking on your feet, I mean thinking on your seat. Before you ever stand up to talk to people and before you ever turn that zoom camera on to meet with colleagues around the world, use your judgment when there's no pressure, when no one's looking at you. And to really try to narrow your presentation down to a handful of ideas and then use your time, your creativity, coming up with specific, relevant examples to them to make the points come alive. Think of specific, relevant stories that are relevant to your audience. Not generic feel good stories about your weekend or a starfish or something like that, but stories involving real conversations with real customers, clients, prospects about real problems, where you were, how they were resolved, and how you felt. That's what resonates with audiences everywhere around the world. That's the difference between this whole thing being sort of a tiring long slog for you and your audience versus being something fun. If you know right now you're going to give a presentation and they're going to find it useful and interesting and helpful and come up to you and talk to you specifically about the ideas you put out there that they found useful to them, guess what? It's going to be fun for you. This is not going to be tiring at all. What do you think? I'd really like to hear from you on this. I've got my theories. Everybody has a theory. If you agree, let me know exactly why. Don't just say nice video. If you disagree, I want to know exactly why you disagree. So post your comments here. We can have a discussion. I can make more videos as well to answer your questions, but let's make this a community. That's how we all learn more. I learn so much from you, from your specific questions and where you tell me I've lost you. Geez, that doesn't make any sense. That's how I get better. And that's how you can get better too. So please get in the habit of asking people specific questions and for specific feedback. Whether you're speaking live, whether you're speaking online like this, and then really listen. It's going to make it more enjoyable for your audience and for you as well. If you got any value out of this, you're really going to want to watch this next video.
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