This is a short YouTube talk by TJ Walker offering practical strategies to overcome self-doubt during presentations, talks, briefings, or job interviews. Walker emphasizes shifting focus away from the speaker’s internal judgments and toward helping the audience—using examples, stories, and responsiveness to audience feedback—and ends with a subscription call-to-action.
What do you do if you're in the middle of a presentation, a talk, even a job interview and all of a sudden you're kind of overwhelmed with self doubt. You're thinking, how am I doing? This isn't really going that well. Self doubt is creeping into you while you're actually giving the presentation. Well, if that's ever happened to you, you're not alone. It's happened to everyone at some point. It's happened to me. Here's what I need you to really focus on. Focus on the person or the people you're speaking to and just tell yourself, what ideas do I have that they are going to value the most? The second you are doubting yourself, what you're really doing is saying to the audience, hey, you're not really important. This is about me, me, me, me, me. You're being selfish now. Everyone's selfish. I'm selfish. But I need you to focus in the moment just on helping the person in front of you. Whether it's 1 person, 10 people or 10,000. Focus all of your energies on giving more examples, more insights, telling more stories that are going to help that person. Believe me, there's plenty of time after the fact for you to pick apart your presentation, to second guess yourself, to doubt yourself. There's time for that. There's a lot of time for that. The only time we don't want to do it is right now when you're in the middle of the presentation. Because if you're trying to talk to someone, but meanwhile there's a thought bubble of oh, they don't think this is really going very well. It's going to mess up the stuff here that you're actually talking about. It's going to mess up the tone of your voice, it's going to mess up the expressions on your face, it's going to tighten up your body language. It's going to get uncomfortable really quickly. That doesn't help you. Now look, I'm selfish. We're all selfish at some point. I want you to be selfish at that moment and realize nothing good can happen to me if I'm doubting myself in this talk, this briefing, this presentation, this job interview, I'm just going to give it my best, going to really look at that person or the audience, do everything I can to try to help them. Now if it's a job interview, I'm going to help them by giving them reasons why I'd be great for the job, by telling them stories about my successes that would be relevant to helping their Organization, do better. That's helping them. If I am giving a briefing to people in my industry about some new technology my company's involved with, I need to focus on the fact that this technology is going to help them be more productive. It's going to help them make more money. It's going to help them have better quarterly earnings. It's going to help them give salaries and raises to their employees. When you focus on the benefit to other people, you're not going to have time to think about poor little me. It's about focus. Now, I understand it can happen. But think about times when you know someone is so focused on doing something, you don't think about anything else. Imagine your child is about to walk in front of a speeding bus or truck and you're 10ft behind and they're three feet away from stepping off the curb. Here it comes. At that moment, you're not thinking about, how am I doing? How's my voice? Am I yelling too loud? No, you're just screaming, hey, Rossa, get out of the road. You're gonna get killed. You're screaming. You're so passionate about helping that one person at that moment, in this case, your own child, saving a life. You're not thinking about, how am I looking? Or am I running? Am I sweating? Is my voice cracking? No, you're 100% obsessed over helping that person through your speaking. In this case, yelling and screaming, saying, don't step in front of the truck. Don't miss a beat on your journey to success. Tap the bell to receive notifications so you get constant updates for your own journey. Now, I realize if you're giving a quarterly report on paper sales in your company because you work for Dunder Mifflin, the stakes are not quite as high. But still, the basic principle is the same. If you're focused 100% on one person or several people or individuals throughout your audience of how you can truly help them. It's just not going to occur to you to have a pity party, to be doubting yourself and guessing and wondering, how am I doing? How am I doing? Now, I do want you to be responsive. If you see a number of people are looking at you and they're looking confused, that's helpful advice. It's not that you're doing anything poorly, but something isn't clear. Give yourself praise for actually noticing and paying attention. Because so many people are oblivious. They're reading a script, they're turning their back to the audience and looking at PowerPoint, they wouldn't even notice if half their audience members fell over dead. So if you're getting indications from the audience that they are confused or concerned, stop and say, I feel like I'm not really doing a great job communicating this. Let me give you an even better example. Give another example to flesh out the point you just made. Don't make it sound like you think they're dumb for not getting it. Put the blame on yourself mildly. So let me try to do something that I think might help, and I might be better at explaining it this way. Give another example, another case story. You do want to be receptive to your audience, but you don't want to make that put you in a bad mood. You simply want to use it as accurate feedback to help you calibrate what you're saying in case you need to explain things in more detail. Now, you may occasionally have someone where they're looking at their watch constantly and they're looking at the clock. And maybe you thought you had an hour for the job interview, but it started at 11:40, it's now 11:55, and you can hear the person's stomach rumbling and they're looking at their watch. Well, they want to go to lunch, probably. So don't count on it being an hour. Then you have to calibrate. You have to think, out of all the things I was planning on saying in this hour, let me focus on one or two ideas that are most important, one or two examples that will make this point come through and try to finish up in the next five minutes. So you do want to be aware of feedback you're getting from your audience, but you do not want to use that to make you feel bad. You want to use it to make your presentation even more effective, more useful, and more helpful to the audience. Focus on them while you're presenting. You can focus on yourself later. Can I ask you a personal favor? I'm trying to help more people just like you all around the globe improve their personal communication skills and to be more successful. And if you hit the subscribe button, not only will I be able to help you, but that'll send a message to others around the world that this is a place for them. So please, as a small favor, hit subscribe.
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