Revitalize Your Speech: TJ Walker Success Live Workshop

What do you do if you practice your speech and you find it's just too boring, you should probably just tear it up and then start from scratch. Ask yourself, if I could sit down face to face with one person in the audience and they can ask me five questions, what would it be? That's the outline for your speech. Hi, I'm TJ Walker. Thanks for joining me today. It is Monday. We are live right here with your questions on the T.J. walker Success Channel. This is the one place on the Internet where you can ask any question that relates to communication skills, public speaking, presentation skills, small talk, one on one communication, talking in a job interview, talking to the news media, making your own social media videos, anything that relates to speaking, we are here for you. Our whole purpose is to make you more successful in your personal life and your professional life, to build your communication skills and to build your confidence in your communication skills. So I see people are joining us already. Thanks so much for stopping by. We've got a full 3 hours today live to take your questions. You can communicate in several ways. You can post your comments right there on YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Twitch and the other platforms we're on. Even better, you can click the link that I've just posted into Streamyard. You'll then be entered right into our green room and with one push of a button, you can be sharing the screen with me right here. So happy to take your questions, your comments, your thoughts, your critiques. We can debate some of these issues. A lot of things to do with public speaking I think are not really debatable in the sense that if you're so soft spoken, nobody can hear you, you need to boost volume. But plenty of other things are open to debate. I do advocate people walk around the stage to come across more commanding and with more authority. But I was watching the comedian Jimmy Carr last night on a British comedian. I think he's British, not Australian, but British sounding comedian, very poised, very polished, insanely funny. But he stands on a giant screen, a giant stage and never moves. And you know what? He's still wildly successful and funny. So there are exceptions to every single rule. GR Vibe says, hey, I'm new, appreciate your work as well. I have some questions. Well, you are in the right place because I'm here for your questions. It's open Monday. I've got a lot of topics I want to cover, but I would be very happy to hear you go to the front of the line. So you can either type your questions in right here, GR or you can push a button and join me on screen. It's entirely up to to you, so I'll give you just a moment to do that. Otherwise I'm going to do a long form version of the topic that I just discussed of what do you do if your speech is really boring and you're not quite sure how to proceed? Because I want to give some very specific tips on that. So for those of you GR you're new here, others new, this is kind of a show within a show and sometimes a show within a show within a show. I'm here answering your questions. We're live for you, typically about 15 hours a week, which I believe is more access than anyone else gives you for live interactive feedback from a public speaking communication skills coach. But I also show you, I take you behind the scenes, behind the curtains to see how an actual content creator creates content makes video. So I make my videos that go on my site right here and you see the rough drafts and everything. GR says I suck at communicating to people also stutter, sometimes stammer. But I would love to be more articulate. How can I do this? So GR most people in my experience feel like they stammer and stutter occasionally. Everyone stammers, repeats a word from time to time. Now, I can't judge how bad a problem it is for you if you don't come on and talk to me. And that's okay if you don't want to. You might be in a noisy place or on a bus today, that's perfectly fine. But sometimes the problem isn't as bad as we think. I would also note, and forgive me, I'm going to give a reference that is controversial in some countries because of, because of certain racism and colonialistic tendencies by this guy and the country he was in at the time. Winston Churchill. I understand. Especially a lot of our friends in Southeast Asia are not big fans of Winston Churchill. But as a speaker, he was considered to be a great speaker. He also stuttered and stammered, but he had such force, such authority, such power, it didn't matter. He was still able to come across in a very authoritative way. Now, my main bit of advice for you is speak more. You don't have to come on with me today, although I'd love you to. But the main thing is look for opportunities to speak every day. And that used to be tough. You'd have to knock on doors and ask to speak to the Chamber of Commerce and the Kiwanis Club. And maybe after six months someone would let you. These days, just turn on your Cell phone, hit record, post a video of yourself speaking in social media and start getting some feedback, even if it's one person on LinkedIn. That is a type of public speaking. Because if you post something on LinkedIn or Twitter, YouTube, any place like that, it's a type of public speaking because the public can access these social media websites. So that's why I recommend try it and you'll get better and better and better. Nobody was a great runner in one day. Nobody was a great swimmer in one day. Nobody was a great writer in one day. You get better. You weed out the flaws through repetition, practice, feedback. So it's really not much different when it comes to speaking and communicating. So gr, if you want more feedback or if you felt like that wasn't helpful, let me know. Feel free to post more questions. Also, feel free to just join me in the green room and I can bring you right here on stage and you can share your concerns with others too. Okay. Right now I want to do a long form video. Excuse me. I'm used to drinking out of a plastic bottle and I just spilled water on myself. So that wasn't very professional. Ok, when I say a long form video, what I mean is a edited, produced social media video that is more than one minute. Now, what I try to do for YouTube and other platforms is around eight minutes. I don't always hit that mark, but that is something I aspire to because it tends to give people more value. The YouTube algorithm likes it. They get to sell more ads. Everybody wins. Gia writes. Gotta thank you so much. Currently in a noisy place. Definitely will join when I get the chance. Well, thanks for joining us in a noisy place. Sometimes people watch in coffee shops, buses, trains. That's great. And I understand. I don't like to talk online if I'm in a place where a lot of people can hear me and it's disruptive to them. So understand completely, but please join us when you can, because then I can diagnose your problem little more. I have found quite often that people who stammer and stutter a lot aren't aware of it. And the people who think they stutter and stammer a lot maybe repeat themselves once in eight minutes and no one else noticed. So there's often a huge disconnect. Alfred writes in Good afternoon from Alfred, you're gonna kill me because you specifically taught me how to pronounce the name of your country. And lo and behold, I have in fact forgotten. So, Alfred, it's so good to see you and hear from you, if you have any questions or you want to join us live on screen. More than happy to have you. So as you're gathering your questions together and Ben, I know you've got a lot to. Ben, I'm going to hit record again. Ben is my producer who's with us in the behind the scenes in the green room. Ben, I know you've got a lot to do if you need to sign off. Understood. And I'm assuming, yeah, I've got the correct microphone on, so we're all set there. I'm going to switch to camera one and we're going to do a long form on. What do you do if your speech is really boring? Okay, angle my mic a little closer to me. By the way, trying out a new look today. I've been doing the pocket square because to me, that's like one of the few areas where a man is allowed a little flash, a fashion flourish. But I just found I spent too much time fluffing with it and playing with it. That's distracting to you and to me. So am I really losing anything by not having a pocket square? I don't think so. So I'm going to go without it for a week and see. See how it goes. Okay, we're going to start right now with a long form video. And it's going to sound weird because I'm going to pause, start, finish, pause. Well, I'm doing that to make it easier for my editor to use it. Okay. All right. So note to editor. Now I'm about to start. Okay, so what do you do if you've written a speech, rewritten it, practiced it, rehearsed it, you've even watched it and you look at it and your reaction is, oh, my God, it's a boring data dump. I beg you, I plead with you, don't tell yourself. Well, it's too late to change anything. I'm handcuffed because the slides have been approved and we've worked on it. The train has left the station. No, it's never too late to change your presentation. If it's going to be an improvement for the benefit of your audience. Everything you do when you speak has to be looked at through the lens of. Is this helping my audience understand the messages that are important to me? If you can't say yes to that, then stop. Stop what you're doing. Do not continue. You don't keep digging a ditch. If you're in the wrong place and it's getting you nowhere, that is foolish. Well, unfortunately, that's what Too many people do with their speech. So, first of all, I'm happy that you planned your speech, that you prepared, that you even rehearsed. But if you listen to it or watched it on video and you realize, wow, it's kind of boring, it's a little bit dense, too much stuff here, kind of a data dump, then you're smart for realizing there's a problem. But then it does raise the question, what do you do about it? Now, the suggestion I'm going to give you, you're not going to like, but it's going to help you and more important, your audience immensely. I want you to take the speech you prepared, tear it up, throw it in the garbage can, or hit the delete. Let's just get a clean slate. Here's what I want you to think of. If you're preparing this speech and you're talking to 40 clients or 40 prospects on Thursday, just sit down a minute and think. If I could sit down with one of these clients or prospects, no speech at all, and just said to them, hey, today I want to talk to you about. And you throw out the topic. What questions do you have? What are the five questions that this one person would ask you? Try to figure that out. Write it down on a piece of paper, type it up on a screen. Really figure out from their perspective on the topic you want to talk about the subject you're really trying to convey. What questions would this they have? Write those down. Now I want you to practice your speech again. This time, let's forget the slides for now. Let's just look at that single sheet of paper with five questions. Start off your presentation and let people know what you're going to talk about. Glance down at the first question and just say you may be thinking and then ask that question. Now answer the question as if you were sitting down, one on one with a cup of coffee in your hand, talking to that person. Be conversational. Be interesting. Be expressive. Give examples. Give case studies. Do all the things you do when you're having an interesting conversation with a client or a colleague or a prospect. I know you have them with so many of my clients. They're really great. One on one, they stand up and now all of a sudden they're frozen and boring and stiff and doing data dumps. It doesn't have to be that way. If you prepare your presentation the right way. Again, the easiest, fastest fix is throw away the presentation, come up with those five questions, and then just ask yourself the questions in the presentation, whether it's 5:10, 20, 30 minutes, even an hour. This is a structure that works because it mimics natural conversational flow. We've all had interesting meetings with people over lunch, over dinner, over coffee. We lost track of time. Could have been 40 minutes, could have been an hour, could have been two hours. And we had fun. We learned something. It wasn't just because there was good wine or a good meal. It was interesting conversation. Now, I understand a pitch presentation, a speech, a formal talk in front of 40 people or 400 people isn't exactly the same thing as a one on one conversation. But you can mimic the most interesting elements of an interesting conversation when preparing your presentation. Now, at some level, it seems scary to do this. Well, what do you mean? Of course I have to go through all these slides and I have to go through all the data and I have to look at bullet points, right? Well, no, you don't have to do that. Your job, first and foremost when you're presenting is to make an idea from your head understandable to someone in your audience, interesting to someone in your audience, and memorable to someone in your audience so that they can take an action based on your idea, whether it's buy from you, hire you, vote for you, whatever it is you're trying to do. So please keep that in mind. Now, if you've got a bunch of slides or you feel like you have to use, okay. But the slides shouldn't be the starting point. The starting point should be your ideas, the outline, which now consists of these five most common questions your client, customer or prospect would ask you if they could just sit down and talk to you over coffee. In the process of answering one of these questions, you may have a particular visual that comes to mind. Then by all means, create a slide and show it at that point. But what's driving your presentation should be the questions your customers have, your clients, your prospects. Not a slide with a nice logo and a nice complicated graph of all the questions. Quarterly data that's come in for the last 10 years. Your ideas, questions, your messages, the conversation you have, the examples, the stories. That's what will breathe light into your presentation. Do that before it's too late. If you practice, you rehearsed, and you realize yourself this speech is boring, it's not too late. Change it. Okay, so I'm going to hit stop on that. So what did I do there? I tried to create content for a long form video that will be played on YouTube and other social media. I forgot to time myself, so I don't know how long that was. I don't think I quite hit the eight minute mark. But that's okay, you don't have to. That's simply one, one goal. But it's far better to be interesting and deliver value and do it in 4 minutes and 27 seconds than it is to just fill, fill up time or space and hit the 8 minute mark. We've had more comments coming in. VL says, did you intentionally choose the downward pointing camera? I have a different angle set up for shorts, so be. Here's why I do that. So the camera is lower than my face. The camera is about. I guess that's a little under four feet. We have the curtain behind me. The reason we're doing this is when we look at all the data of thousands of videos of mine on YouTube, far and away the ones that consistently got the most traction were videos where I appeared to be. Well, actually not just appeared, was on stage speaking to an audience. I'm up on a stage, elevated, there's curtains behind me and I'm not looking at the camera. And it creates this simulated effect of me giving a speech. So this is why I have this angle. Does it make sense for you to have that? Probably not. This is. It makes sense for most people. No. It's unique to my situation in that I give advice to people about speaking and public speaking and it could be one on one communication or speaking in a job interview. But for most people, the scariest type of speaking is in front of a larger audience up on a stage. So that's why we have simulated the stage. Because I'm not really on a stage. I'm in a studio, in an office, all alone here in Palm Beach County, Florida. But we're simulating this. But that is the reason, because it just seems closest to what people associate with a scary situation for speaking and where an expert would be talking about that sort of thing. But here I am, I'm same place, it's just a different camera angle and this one at my eye level. But appreciate you asking me. TR says, what way do you make money from speaking? Wow. I'm almost tempted to ask in what ways do you, do you not make money from speaking? Or how does anyone even make money without speaking? I mean, obviously you can do it if you're. If you're in the back of a kitchen and you wash dishes all day long, you might not have to talk to people. If you're a cook, you might not have to talk to many people. But if you want to be a cook who is a world famous Chef who makes millions and millions. Well then actually you're spending most of your time not cooking anymore, but talking on television for your own TV shows and cooking shows and promoting your own products and cookbooks. So there are so many ways, I mean, we could easily speak every second of our live 15 hours this week just on ways of making money from speaking. But let me try to give a little clarity to that. First of all, anytime you're in a job interview, you're speaking because your resume will get you into the job interview, but it might have gotten 10 other people in in there. So how well you speak gets you the job quite often. So the difference between having a job and not having a job is all the money you make that year. So that's one way you make money from speaking. There is the simplest way that people think of as you're the professional speaker, someone hires you at a conference, they give you a check for 10 or 20 or 30 or $50,000 for the one hour keynote. So obviously that is one type of way of getting paid to speak and making money from speaking. But that's probably less than 0.001% of the ways people make money speaking. If you are running your own company, doesn't matter if it's a small freelance business, a mid sized consulting firm, you're probably spending all of your time speaking to prospects all day long to get new clients, or you're talking to clients to make them happy so they continue paying checks. If you're a trainer, if you're an online coach, if you're a creator of online courses, as I am, and a lot of people who watch this channel are, you are making money speaking. I happen to have a couple of hundred online courses for where I'm speaking in front of a video and people pay me money for that. Now I had to promote it and I had to answer questions and there's email involved and marketing. But at its core, it does involve me speaking and recording it as opposed to writing a book. Because as much as I think I have the world's greatest courses on all these aspects of communication skills and personal development, if I simply turned them all into books and promoted them massively, a data would make even 5% of the income I've made from online courses. Because people pay more to see a speaker than to read text. GR says, I have a hidden camera I can clip on my body. How can I use it for YouTube and speaking to people maybe? Well, a hidden camera is a little bit of a trickier issue because if you're recording people and they don't know it, then you've got all sorts of ethical issues, legal issues involved. Now in the United States, I'm having a focus problem, not mentally, but my camera. Excuse me one second. I'm going to turn off. I don't know what it is I'm doing, but there's something happening with the autofocus on my camera three and it's causing us. Now we've lost camera three. So let me go back. We're going to try to straighten this out. There we go. Many years ago in the 1960s, there was a famous show in the United States called Candid Camera where they did, in fact, video record people secretly and they would play tricks on them and sort of make them look foolish and silly, and then they would air it on a national TV show. Now, they didn't do it until they got the consent of the people who were recorded. So if you are going to record anyone, I'd make sure it's in a public place and I would get consent. And if someone doesn't want their image used, I would not use it. Now, you could record yourself talking to people and darken out their faces. I mean, there have been plenty of comedians, stand up comedy folks who will interview people saying all sorts of stupid things. Things. And then the comedian is saying funny things and doing jokes and asides, and they use that and they just, they digitize the person's face so as to not destroy confidentiality or to. To give someone unwanted publicity. That's something you could do. Tell me why you want to do that. First of all, gr. What is it you do? What do you aspire to do? And what would you like to communicate to the world if you could be all of a sudden a great communicator. No stuttering, stammering, any problem like that. If you could just communicate with the world, what is it you'd like to communicate? Let's figure out that first before we get in the nitty gritty of it. Should it be a hidden camera or a camera this level or this level? Let's really figure out what sort of messages you want to communicate, who do you want to communicate with, and what your ultimate goals are? That would be helpful. Okay, so let me, let me take a stab at your question of how do you make money from speaking? So I'm going to do a long form on that. How do you make money as a speaker? That's a common question. The most obvious answer is, you're so good. A meeting planner says, hey, Come to our convention, get up on stage next to Anthony Robbins, and here's a check for 10 or 20 or 50 or 100 or $200,000. Yeah, that's one way of being a so called professional speaker. Nothing wrong with that. But 99.999% of people who make money speaking don't choose that route. You can ask yourself, if you want to make money in virtually any profession, how could you possibly do it without speaking? All of us have to speak on a regular basis to clients, prospects, colleagues, bosses, board members. I can't guarantee you riches just by being a better speaker, but you are going to really harm your long term ability to, to make money and to make the most money possible if you don't learn how to be a great communicator. Are there jobs where you don't have to really speak much to people? Sure. You can be in the back of the kitchen washing dishes. And if you don't like to talk, that's okay. You wash the dishes, you'll be happy. You could be in the back of the kitchen cooking. If you get the nacho orders done, and I've done that before, you can make a living, or at least a minimum wage living. But let's look at that cook for one second. That cook really wants to make a lot of money. They've got to talk about the food they create, they got to talk about their recipes, they got to show people how to make it. Yeah, they've got to have to get on the food channel or create their own YouTube channel or social media channel telling people how to create delicious treats. The most successful chefs in the world actually spend more time talking than they do shopping. They are talking about their passion for food, how they make it. Now, you might not want to be Gordon Ramsay. You can use a different style, but if you want to make the most money possible as a chef, then you do need to be able to speak. Whether you have your own shows on cable tv, broadcast tv, social media, doing interviews, promoting your latest book. That's how you make money. Now you might say, well, tj, I don't want to be a famous chef. I just want to speak more and make more money. Why should I even bother learning to speak if I don't know a real revenue model? Okay, think of it this way. How did you get your last job? You had to speak in a job interview. Your resume was helpful. It got you into the job interview. But the resume doesn't get you a job, typically because 10 other people had a resume that met the minimum standards, they were all interview. If you were selected, it's because of how you spoke. Now, if you didn't get that job, or if you just had a job interview and you weren't selected, it's perhaps time to try to improve your, your communication skills, which is a type of speaking. You could be a small business person, a consultant, an author, an expert, have your own engineering firm and you're looking for clients. Well, how do you get clients? Yeah, you need a website and email and all that. But at some point, people don't write you the big checks unless they speak to you. You have to talk to them in person or through zoom or in some way so they really get a sense of who you are and what you're about. They need that interaction. That is speaking. That is how most people make their money. Speaking. What do CEOs of publicly traded companies do all day long? They're not doing the accounting. They have a CFO for them. They're not writing the marketing copy. Most of the time they have a chief marketing officer. What do CEOs of major corporations do? They speak all day long. They speak to their employees, they speak to stakeholders, they speak to investors, they speak to really big clients, they speak to the news media, they speak to regulators. They are full time communicators. Now they're typically not charging $10,000 for a speech. When they have to travel across the country or across the world to speak at an industry conference, they are not being paid by the conference organizer, they're being paid by their company. When they own the company or a significant part of the company, they're building value to the company. So the highest paid speakers in the world are not the so called professional speakers making 10, 20, 50, even $200,000 a speech. It's founders, it's entrepreneurs, it's CEOs who are evangelists for their company or their brand. And they're building in massive customers, clients and shareholder value. So those are some of the ways you actually make money. By speaking. If you're a human being, I don't care who you are, we, what stature you are in your career, your income, you got to speak. If you're a billionaire, you got to speak to all your servants telling them how you want your house and your, your yacht and your, all your arrangements, your gardens tended. If you're homeless, you have to speak to people on the street asking for money. All of us as human beings have to speak. And it does have a direct impact, impact on our pocketbook. So please spend your Time, your energy, your efforts, learning how to be a great communicator. It will pay off. Okay, so that is a rough draft of a long form video I did in response to your question, gr I hope it was helpful. Let's see, some comments came in. I want to be able to articulate my thoughts and have people understand them. Okay, so why, why do you want to have a hidden camera? I guess is my question. I'm not understanding the connection. And again, for those of you joining us, GR is in a noisy place and didn't want to come on camera. And that's quite all right. But if you do want to come on later this week or even later today to talk about it, happy to talk about it in more detail. If you're just joining us. Hi, I'm T.J. walker. This is the T.J. walker Success Channel. This is the place where we try to help you become more successful in life by boosting and building your communication skills and by building your confidence in your communication skills. I've been training people one on one. Small groups, large groups, all over the world, in 45 nations for now. Hold on, I'm not making this up for 40 years. I did my first training as an intern in a congressional campaign in 1984. So yes, we're in our 40th year of doing this. So it's a community. If you want to be a part of it, hop right in. We're all trying to improve ourselves, become more successful. We might occasionally reference a politician, but we're not here debating politics and what politicians we love or hate. We might occasionally reference leaders of particular religions and people who are anti religion for that matter. But we're not talking about religion. We're talking about how certain people communicate effectively and lessons we can learn from that. So very happy you could join us today. I'm going to be taking your questions directly as I have from GR and several others today. If you want to come on live, you're more than welcome to do it. We've posted the link to Streamyard. With one click, you can be joining me. I'm also going to be answering questions that people have emailed to me or that have come up in recent trainings of mine, as I just did. In fact, I need to. Excuse me, I need to make a note of the one I just did so that I don't repeat it. Okay. All right. I've got another topic I want to do, and it relates to something a little bit counterintuitive that I often tell people, which is that Good speakers are lazy, bad speakers are often hard working. That's opposite of what we think. Okay, so I'm going to do a short form on that. Again. Those are videos I'm trying to do really in less than about 25 seconds. And then a long form. I aim for about eight minutes, but you know, sometimes it might be five minutes. That's. It's a different sort of art form on social media. There are some people where they've got short form videos and they have millions and millions of views and they don't even do long form videos. Or they do and not many people view it. The opposite is true. Some people are great at long form and they're short form videos that they either don't do it or they do it and have very few views. I'm trying to be flexible and meet people where they are. I'm trying to meet my audience where they are. If you like to watch short form videos, I make those. Now this is not a short form video because I'm talking to you for three, three hours live today. So I try to cover all the bases, edit videos down to short form, 25 seconds or less. In my case, long form typically 7, 8, 9, 10 minutes, and the live videos which go on for a lengthy time to give people greater chance to ask questions and get direct feedback. Okay, so we're going to hop right in to this topic of Good speakers are lazy, bad speakers are hard working. And I'll explain it in just a minute. Here's the shocking thing. So many great speakers are actually lazy. That's right, you heard me. Lazy. And so many bad speakers are hard working. What do I mean by that? The bad speakers write, write, rewrite, have all these elaborate PowerPoints, slide after slide after slide. The good speaker simply borrows interesting conversations they've had with one person at a time and retells those stories. Okay, so that's the short form for that one. That's. I don't know if I really conveyed that thought. If you, if you can give me feedback. Gr. If you're with us, let me know. Did I, did that even make sense? Sometimes I have a topic and I know I want to do a long form video and a short form video. Certain topics do better for short form. Certain topics are better for long form and certain topics they're good both ways. You just have to adapt. It's. It's not that one is better than other. It's kind of like the old debate between a movie in a book. A book might be better than A movie. But a movie might be better than a book that was based on. It's just. It's a different art form and I'm trying to get better at every one of these art forms because they're all a little bit different. GR rights. Maybe I could talk to random people and see how I do. Well, yes, the more you talk to people, the better you are. Because ultimately, speaking, public, speaking, presenting is just talking. Now it's talking in a little bit of a different way. It's quite often talking with an agenda. You want to sell an idea, a product, a service, you want a budget approved, you want someone to hire you. Whereas you could just be talking at a bus stop and you see someone's wearing a sports jersey and it's a team you like and hey, great game last night, huh? There's no real agenda there. You're just sharing a little bit of humanity and you are trying to relate to that person as a human being. Forgive me, I think it's something about when I waved my hands, I lost the auto focus. We're having a little bit of a focus, not mental focus, but focus with the camera today for some reason on camera three because we have the setting, the autofocus setting for a face, but sometimes when I wave my hands, it is messing up the auto focus. So we just want to get that straight. Okay, I think we're back in focus. So GR says, maybe I could talk to random people and see how I do. I like the topics, so I'm not sure what you mean by I like the topics. Certainly you. I'm going to. I don't know why it's a Monday morning. I don't know why we're having these technical problems. I'm going to. What I'm doing is I am turning my camera three off and I'm turning it back on. Typically that solves the problem. And we seem to be back in focus. GR says, oh, I like the topics that you speak about. Well, thanks, I appreciate it. But I am here to be helpful to you and try to respond to you. So any topics you want, please let me know. Okay? All right. So I'm going to do a long form version of the topic I just discussed. Let me hit record. So I'm going to try to do this. I'm going to time it this time. I'm going to try to go about eight minutes long. Then we are going to. You know what, let's just take a quick commercial break right now and then we're going to come back and I will do a long form on this topic. I'm going to show you commercials and it's really a part of the show. These are ads I made for the Amazon Influencer program and they're very simple ads. I did them all basically one take, typically no editing other than I think my staff edited on a simple URL for someone to see it. And I'm showing this for you to give you a better sense of really how simple it can be to it relates to your questions. You're making money speaking. I don't make a ton of money making Influencer ads for other products, but I make some money. Peak Thermos seems like a part and let me just make sure I have all my audio settings on the right way so I'm doing my sound and I've got it on that speaker and yes so it should be so I'm going to play this for a few minutes, then we'll be back live. These are recorded. These are I would say pre recorded, but everything recorded means it happened in the past. So a little pet peeve of mine, I don't like when people say something is pre recorded. It's simply recorded. I'm going to play these ads for a couple of minutes and they'll be back later live with you. If you have any questions, comments, thoughts, post them in the comments section of the family. I use it every day. I carry it with me to the pickleball court every day. I live in South Florida where it is hot, cluttering up the house in the office. That's why I love these bookends. They don't call attention to themselves. They do one thing. They keep my books nice, neat, together, together and not falling down. I use them on my shelves. They work well at home and the office. If you want to have a neater book collection, you can't go wrong with these bookends. I love seltzer water and sparkling water, but I hate having to go to the store to get it. I don't like more and more bottles for landfill. That's why I love my soda stream. I can take regular water and I can make it sparkling. It tastes great. I love it because it fills me up during the day. I'm less likely to snack, but it just tastes good. It's more interesting than plain tap water and you can make it anytime you want. I get bored drinking plain water, tap water. I love sparkling water. And yet I don't like having to drive to the store, constantly stock up on all those bottles and then having empties around, around the house. That's why I love using this soda sense CO2 cylinder. It works perfectly with my machine that creates tap water and turns it into sparkling water. If you like sparkling water. This CO2 cylinder has done a great job for me. The Stanley stapler is powerful. I mean, don't point it at anyone when you use this. Whatever your stapling is going to staple stick, just make sure you don't get it to stick to the table by accident. It's a powerful, powerful stapler. My family, we use it around our home. I use it in my office. It is effective. This Canon camcorder is still useful. I love being able to use this in a training. I can flip the viewfinder around. I love being able to attach it so easily. Light battery it really is a very flexible camera that still has a lot of utility in the modern world. This Amazonbasics tripod is a very effective little tool. Now it comes up to about this high when it's fully extended. But it's light, it's simple, it's flexible. What I like about it is when it's fully compressed, it fits right into my computer bag so I don't have to have some big equipment, fancy equipment bag taking it. I put my video cameras and this. Hey, we're back live. I'm TJ Walker. This is the TJ Walker Success show and it is Monday, April 22nd, 2024. We are taking your questions about communication skills, whether it's public speaking, small talk, one on one communication, job interview skills, how to speak to the media, how to give presentations, PowerPoint, all of it is fair game. Your questions, your comments, your thoughts and your participation. With one click you can come right in and join me on screen. Jules writes in Since I wrote to you, I don't edit it anymore. I do one take or one retake. Thank you very much. I'm saving a lot of time in my life. Well, Jules, that is music to my ears. One of the things one of my biggest frustrations for so many clients is people understand when it comes to writing. You could write a novel and rewrite it and work on it for seven years and polish it and go through 29 drafts. You can also just quickly do a tweet or do a text message to someone and just do it live in a sentence or two. There's a whole spectrum of how much time, effort, energy you want to put into preparing, editing, refining, text, continuum. Unfortunately, so many people have this idea that when it comes to video, there's only one way of doing it. You've got to be like 60 Minutes TV show or a movie where all has to be scripted and you have to edit and think of the, you know, do we do this camera angle? Do we do this camera angle? And there's all this fancy. Do we have this graphic? Do we use this B roll? You could do that, but you don't have to. There's nothing wrong if you have a good, clear message of just turning on the camera, speaking to the camera and hitting stop. That's right. It really can be that simple. So, Jules, it sounds like that's what you're doing. If you are an online course instructor or let me back up, let us know how you use videos. And for that matter, can you share one with us? Unless it's confidential. If you have a YouTube channel or a social media channel or a course, post the link to your whatever video it is, I'd love to look at it and I would love to use you as a poster child for doing quick, simple, easy, talking head videos. So look, I'm the first person to say there's more than one way of doing things and my way is not the only way, and my way is not necessarily the best way, but it's one way and it's the fastest, most efficient way. So everything I'm doing right here today with you live is done in one take. Essentially, because it's live, we do take. We pull out some of the elements of this and then edit it to short form and long form video. So I'm not opposed to editing. But I can tell you, if I had waited to learn to edit or had to spend the money to edit my first 50 courses, I probably wouldn't have gotten past three courses. And I have, for those of you don't know me, I have more than 200 online courses on about 100 different platforms. My first 150 courses, I didn't have any editing in them for like the first 10 years. And they did really well. They became best sellers and it was just me talking. I think occasionally I had someone edit the promo video or the sales video, but I had 30 hour courses of just me talking. And you may think, well, that's crazy. Who could possibly do that? You have to edit, you have to have B roll, you have to have music, you have to have graphics. You could. There are plenty of successful people who do all that power to them. But here's my concern for everyone who does that. There are probably a thousand people have great ideas, great expertise who are really good Talking to people one on one. And if they just hit record and talk, they would have great content. And they hold themselves back because they think, I don't know how to edit, or I've got to learn how to edit, or I've shot the video, I haven't edited it yet, or I've got to hire an editor. I need to go raise money from investors to pay for all of these things. Sometimes you're better off just hitting the publish button. So, Jules, I'm glad. I'm very glad to hear that. I've saved you a lot of time. That. That warms my heart. But I would love to hear what kind of videos you do. Is it for marketing your own products within a financial services company? Is it because you're an artist and you like to introduce people to your art? How. How are you using video? Are you an online course instructor? I'd love to know. Westside writes in how do you handle conflict? People falsely accusing you for something you didn't do? I guess it depends. If it's something online and someone says, you know, tj, aren't you responsible for assassinating John F. Kennedy? I would just sort of laugh and smirk at that. I think I was about 11 months old when JFK was assassinated, so I'm pretty sure I'm not implicated in that. Sometimes the best response is to simply ignore it. I would need to know more of the context. Now, if you work in a small company and it's someone you work with right next to you and they're trying to get you fired, and they're constantly accusing you of embezzlement, that's something you cannot ignore. So feel free to give me a little more context. West side. I would love to know about that. While you're thinking about that, Jules, I want you giving me a great, it's your idea. I want to respond to it and give you a little more detail in a short form and a long form content video about this whole concept of editing. So I'm gonna hit record. I'm gonna do a short form. Here's a shocker for you. You don't have to edit your video. You could, but sometimes just hit record, talk, say something interesting to people, hit stop and post it. Okay, that was a short form video. I mean, I want to do a long form on that very same topic. And I'm going to try to do a timer here on this one. You don't have to edit your video. I know that sounds like heresy. That's crazy talk, right? Video needs to Be edited. It needs to be polished. You need to have music, graphics, B roll, different angles, different shots, lots of creativity. Well, you could, but think of it this way. Every medium has a continuum. You could write a great novel, spend seven years on it, write it, rewrite it, throw away certain chapters, start over again, hire copy editors, format it, and when it comes out in a book seven years later, it's really, really something polished. It's something that's going to be good for decades. You know that with writing. But you also know that you could just send a tweet in two seconds. You could dictate one sentence in a text to someone, and that's text communication. There's a whole range, a whole continuum of how much processing you do when it comes to communicating by text. We all know that. We realize we make judgments according to how important it is, how big the audience is, and what we're trying to do. Well, for some reason, when it comes to video, a lot of people think one size fits all. They have kind of the novel as their reference point. They think, well, I can't make a video for YouTube unless I have it all scripted out. And music selection and different camera angles, fancy graph. Well, you could do it that way, but you don't have to. One of the tragedies of my career is I meet so many people who are genuine experts. They have a passion for their subject matter. They help people. And one on one or talking to three or four people, their passion comes alive. They give people so many fascinating insights that help them personally, professionally. They've got these great insights and they think, wow, I want to do this on video. But their model is it's got to be like a movie or a 60 Minutes production with lots of camera angles and editing and video production and CGI and all these things, and it's overwhelming. And the bottom line is they never do it. Maybe they shoot the footage, but they tell themselves, well, wait till I learn how to edit or I got to go raise a bunch of money to hire editors again. You could, but you don't have to edit if you have a great message that's interesting to someone, that's useful to someone, and they could benefit. Today, my advice hit publish today. Now, I've done thousands and thousands of videos on social media, online learning platforms. My most successful video of all time is me speaking on camera. Not a single edit. No music, no B roll, no graphics, just me giving information for an hour. And. And it's my most successful video of all time. If I had never hit Publish on that. I would have lost out on scores of prospects and clients who've come to me over the years. So that's my challenge to you. What are you losing out right now by not posting a simple talking head video of you talking about how you help people? Yes, you can always get fancier. You can always hire editors. You can do storyboards. You can get three camera shoot. You can do all of that in due course. But something beats nothing. So I'm urging you, don't spend another day thinking, oh, once I learn how to edit or once I get the special effects program, then I'll start publishing video. No, publish a video today. Take out your cell phone, pull up your webcam, hit record, talk whatever it is that you say to people, clients, customers, colleagues, day to day, over the phone or zoom or in person that they find useful and helpful. Talk right to the camera, record it, hit publish today. All right, so that was. That was only four and a half minutes long. That's okay. That's really all I had to say on that topic. But I do think it's an important topic, and it is a frustration with mine that so many people. Here's the odd thing. I know professional public speaking trainers and media trainers who don't put video out because, well, you know, someone, I might not be perfect. And I don't want people judging me because I'm the one who's supposed to be perfect. Everyone has all these excuses, but ultimately they're just excuses. Jules says, posted. That's the first video I made for my younger son, telling him to post, post, post. Okay, and did you. Did you post it somewhere? Because I'm not seeing it here and you might not want to share it, but I don't. Unless I missed. I don't think that I missed a comment. Jules, if you want to share with us either the video from you or your son, let me know because I'm not quite figuring out what you're talking about. Westside says, I would love to stay on the live, but I have to head out. I love what you're doing. I just have one more question. How do you improve your speaking vocabulary and sound more articulate? And Jules, you said it's up there. I'm. I'm scanning through. If you don't mind reposting, Jules, because. Oh, here's what's happened. Jules, if you post a link in the streamyard comments, it doesn't allow you to do a link. I would need you to send it. Post it in the private chat. If you're in Stream Yard you should see an option for private chat. I can see it and then I can pull it up and share it. So apologies for me not explaining that the technical side of of this, but there's something with the Streamyard software and I believe with YouTube and some of the other platforms is they don't want people filling it up with spam. Yours is not spam, but they, they only give the power to show a URL to the administrator, which I am. So if you posted something it didn't post it in the comments for me to see it. So sorry about that. Yeah, if you can give that a try. And Timmy says good morning. Believe it or not Timmy, I was called Timmy probably my first six years of life. And to these days my, my sisters still call me Timmy The T&TJ stands for Timothy Timmy of course being a nickname for that, a shortened version. So Westside wants to know how do you improve your speaking vocabulary and sound more articulate? Your vocabulary will grow if you read more in the particular language where you want to build your vocabulary and you read serious work. You're not just reading the sports page and the entertainment podcast, pop culture, celebrity news. That's how you build a vocabulary. And if you spend your time and look, we all watch movies. I watched a sitcom. I watched the new Frasier sitcom last night. We all need some entertainment. Problem for most people these days though is you can fill every second of your day. You can spend 10 hours a day watching nothing but trivial entertainment that will never build a single vocabulary word. So try to have a mix. Listen to intelligent podcasts, watch real documentaries produced by serious people about important topics that will build your vocabulary and that's going to help. The best way to become more articulate is to speak more. What's the best way to become a world class runner? Well, you got to run every day. What's the best way to become a world class tennis player? You got to play tennis every day. Now, simply playing tennis every day isn't going to get you to the championship of Wimbledon, but it will make you a lot better than the average player down at your club or your neighborhood park. Most likely because you're playing every day. And that's the key to becoming more articulate. Jules says, oh, I'm on YouTube. Let me see if I can just click. And again, Jules, if you could just post in private chat because I don't know how to get to your YouTube channel from this application of Streamyard. So sorry about that. If anyone else can help her because I'm happy to. To give a little more spotlight and attention. We're having a problem with our auto focus. Sorry about that. Let me switch over to camera one. So, Jules, I'm happy to give a spotlight to your video for. For you, your son, anyone else, but I can't access it from here. So apologies for that. If you can put it in the private chat and forgive me, I don't really know how to tell someone how to find the private chat. If you're on YouTube right now, which depends on appears you are. But the right at the beginning of the comments, you'll see stream yard. I believe if you click that, it will then give you the option once you have entered streamyard. So if you don't mind, take a look at that and we can. We can do it. Jules says I'm on it. Great. Okay, while we're doing. While we're looking for Jules video, I want to answer west side's question of how to become more articulate. This is a question that comes up a lot. Let me try to do a new short form and long form on that topic. People say, tj, how do I become more articulate? And I ask, well, how do you become better at swimming? You swim every day. How do you become better at playing tennis? You play tennis every day. If you want to become more articulate, speak more every single day online, in person, to one person and to many. Okay, so that's the short form version of that. Ah, Jules is with us. Fantastic. Let's go right to Jules. How are you today? Am I on? Yes.

Oh, sorry for that because I'm walking with my dog right now, My three dogs. And I just sent you the link to thank you very much to be on. But I wasn't looking for that because I don't. I didn't know what I was doing right now. I'm French, as you can see. I don't speak that. Hey, you speak French as I can hear, but I don't. Do you see me?

Because I do see you.

Oh, I got you. See, I'm walking. Here are the dive.

Oh, look at that. Great. Where are you in France today? Or where are you today?

I'm in the Quebec, sir.

Quebec. French. French speaking. Quebec. Great.

From Montreal. But I don't want to take too much of your time because I want to listen to you and learn a lot.

Stay. Stay with me. I'm gonna share. I'm gonna pull up your video and I really appreciate you.

It's still in French and I'm talking about Steven Spielberg, because it's video for my little son. I want him to go on YouTube. And I tell him, I'm telling him, post, post, do something and post. Do something and post. These are. That's what I do. But I would like to do it also. But, you know, you're telling everybody to do that.

Great. Well, I'm glad it, I'm glad it helped you get something out. Let. Let me go ahead and share this a minute. Stay with us. I don't. And I'm going to share your video, if you don't mind. I, I won't necessarily understand all of it. I, I did have the good fortune of spending all of last June in Paris, so I, I did brush up on a little of my French. But we'll. We'll see. We're gonna take a look at it right now.

It's about, you don't need to be Steven Spielberg to post. You know, just do something. And you will become one day or close to him.

But you don't. You don't need to.

To be as. I don't see that video.

Do you see it? It's. I am playing it now for everyone else.

Oh, there you go.

Yeah. And I'm going to go ahead and enlarge it full screen. Hey. Okay. I, I just, again, I didn't understand all of the words. My French is not that good. But what came through to me was you seem very positive and upbeat. Great passion is coming through. I love that you were just. I'm going to mute your mic a minute because I think again, but I am gonna, I am gonna unmute you in a minute because I do want to hear from you. So I love the passion coming through. And you told us a little background, but it sounds like you're trying to be very uplifting and motivational for your son, talking to him about an icon like Steven Spielberg. And what I liked is obviously there was no hesitancy. There wasn't this second guessing we weren't rolling your eyes up. Oh, I messed up. You're just having a conversation with your son and you're recording it. And it came through with great feeling, with great positive energy, with emotion. Clear. The volume was good, the speed was good. Your. Your face was moving. And to me, that's an excellent way of making a short, simple talking head video. You could have written it, rewritten it, used chat GPT, gone to a studio. I don't think it would have helped it for what you were trying to do there. Only tiny technical tip, I would give you Is your head was way down here and there was all this space above your head. I do recommend, even when you're walking, try to frame it with your camera so that the top of your head is touching almost the top of the screen. The other thing, and this is a small thing, but it's for like 20 bucks you can. If you know in advance you're going to make a video, it will sound much better if you use a little microphone. I mean this is like a 20 buck microphone microphone I use when I'm making simple Talking head Amazon Influencer videos. And you just plug the receiver into your. Okay, so you do have it. Maybe it was the wind. So now I'm going to unmute you and let you respond. Thank you.

Well, there you go. I just spoke like you said. Open the, the cellular, speak what you have to say. And I posted after, after the day. I posted a couple of them and I just made small, small light color adjustment. And I didn't know if, I don't remember if I had the, the microphone, the cavalier microphone, but that's what, that's what I did. I had fun. I had a lot of fun. That was really cool. And I stopped because my son didn't enjoyed the, the, the walking of the, of the, the, the, the. The speaking and the, the making of the video and the editing. But one day he's 14, so one day he's gonna get to it probably. But I tried and I'm gonna go by myself and show him that it's fun. That's what I, I want to do.

You know, you just hit us. I gotta make a note because you just gave me a great idea. Most of my great ideas come from my students and my, you know, part of this community had fun. It's so important when you're speaking to be a great speaker, to have fun when you're speaking. And that's what came through with you. Now you said it didn't work. Tell me again what your goal was. Your goal was to motivate him to make movies or what was your goal?

I want him to be able to express himself. To be not a consumer, but a producer, you know?

Yes.

Not only consuming, but being on the way to produce stuff that people is going to come consume. I want him to enjoy the he likes so much thing, talk about anything and people will listen to you if they have to. And try, try, try, try and post, post, post. But I wanted to express himself, to be more outside of himself. That's, that's what I wanted to, to do fantastic.

Jules, you are. You, you and I are singing from the same hymnal because that's the message I, I preach to my daughter every day. She's 11 and like any 11 year old she wants to watch movies and YouTube and tick tock. Now we don't. We're actually unusual in our community. She's probably the only kid in her grade who doesn't have a cell phone or an iPad and we're going to try to keep it that way a long time. But yes, she does watch movies with us and entertainment. What I stress to her is exactly what you said is it's okay to be a consumer, but you need to spend at least half your time being a creator. The problem most people have is it's 100% consumption. You're passive receiving receiver. And I think the future is going to be divided between consumers and creators. Now all creators have to consume some.

There you go. Produce in the morning, consume in the evening, you know.

Yes.

So that's a good way to, to make your life work.

Absolutely.

But they have to, to learn that they consume a little bit at night, but they don't produce that much. But it's gonna come, it's gonna come.

And Jules, let me ask you, you have a 14 year old, do you, does he have his own cell phone or iPad or access to.

On weekends for the, the, the, the, the. An iPhone. That's it. And the computer for the school. And I've got a 22 years old girl, 20 years old boy and they, they all got the cellular but they are only consuming the, the stuff on the Internet. So that's, that's something.

Don't enjoy that much.

But they will. If they see me, they're gonna, they're gonna mirror me, you know, like I try to mirror you. That's only the, that, that's the way we learn. By mirroring people.

Yes, it's, it's an old saying, but true. But you know, your, your kids follow, pay a lot more attention to what you do than what you say. There you go. And it does provide a role model. I mean I, I play tennis and racquetball sports and these days pickleball. Where did I develop an interest in that? Well, my dad played tennis every day. So it's not that he said son, you must exercise every day through sport. It wasn't the lecture, it was seeing him take care of himself physically and enjoy it. And obviously some of that rubbed off. So sounds like you're a great role model. Jules. Are you able to use Business or video for anything business or professionally. Right now.

My retreat at that time, I used massage, text a lot and vocal massage, but not video. I would like to, you know, because it's a good way to communicate with people. It's a good way to communicate, but right now I've got a lot of time. As you see, I'm walking my dog this morning, thinking and trying to. To find some. Some way to. To go on YouTube or somewhere. Just like.

Right. Well, Jules, we really appreciate you stopping by and I'm gonna. I'm gonna make a video too. Just talking about two of those concepts you brought up. One, just having fun. And two, having this separation, this divide in your life of consuming and creating versus just consuming. I do think those are very important concepts. Well, thanks so much. Enjoy the rest of your walk. I don't want to. I don't want to take away all your. Your pleasant, quiet. Take care.

I'm listening to you. Take care.

Thanks. And stop. Back again soon. Take care. So this is why I love doing this. You can't get this just by doing email. I can't do this just by typing a blog post and waiting for someone to respond. It's the interaction of ideas, the exchange that is so helpful. I'm hoping Jules got some benefit out of it. He did say that he did, but I got benefit because it's. Sometimes I hear concepts I've just never heard before and it allows me to come up with some new insights that I think would help people. People communicate more effectively. Sometimes it's a. It's an idea that I know is important, but I just haven't talked about it in six months or 18 months. And I think it's worth talking about. So the first one he discussed right there was fun. Let's talk about that in a short perspective. Short form. You want to be a great communicator, a great speaker, if you not just about rolling up your sleeves and working harder and practicing more and the grueling effort. It's about having fun. Great communicators communicate with every pore of their body. They're having fun when they speak. Okay, now we're going to do a long form on that. And I want to time this. I would like to hit about eight minutes. I don't know if I'll have eight minutes, but. So I'm not going to pad. But I'm going to try to not rush and to go into more details and know and more nuance on this. So if you have any comments, go ahead and post Them, but I won't be checking. I'm going to check one last time here and then. And west side, I see your comment. I will come to it. Well, let me be respectful of west side. So I'm going to hit stop for a minute. And west side says, what are some of the best ways to make money that doesn't require a lot of school education? So it's probably the easiest way to make money that doesn't require lots of formal education is to be able to speak in a way where you can persuade someone to buy from you. I mean, being a salesperson at some level, you could argue all of us are salesmen, salespeople, saleswomen. Everybody's selling something. You're, you're running for office, you're selling your vision of a better society. If you've written a novel, you're selling your book. If you're in a job interview, you're selling your services to work for this company full time. So we're all selling something. So I don't mean that in some negative, cynical way, but the best way to make money is to find a product or a service you really believe in and you think is great, where you can passionately talk to people about why that product or service would be good for them. And in most organizations, not all, most organizations, they don't care about your educational requirement, credentials, as long as you can sell that product or service. Now, there are certain industries like Wall street, heavily regulated financial services, where many of the top salespeople start to have MBAs and Series Sevens and Series 63 licenses. But for most industries, if you can sell, you can make a lot of money. Am I promising you get rich quick? No. Am I telling you come sell my books full time and you'll become a millionaire in a week? No. You got to figure out what you believe in, what you like, build relationships with companies, products and services. And that's typically, I won't say easy, but it's easier than going to the top medical school in your country and becoming the top surgeon and becoming rich that way. That's a very, very, very difficult thing to do. And Westside says, great answer. Thanks. Well, thanks a lot. Let me think more about that. But first let me try to answer this question about how to have fun when you speak. And I'm going to do a long form version of that one on camera one. And I want to time this because I would like to hit around eight minutes. So you want to be a great speaker. You may be thinking I should work harder and harder and harder. Roll up my sleeves. Spend more time writing and rewriting. Well, some of that might help. But there's an extra secret ingredient you need. And here it is. Fun. You need to have fun when you speak, when you present, when you talk to people. All great presenters exude the sense that they're having fun right now, talking to people. This isn't some drudgery. This isn't some big chore. Well, I gotta go through all these PowerPoints. This is boring for me. It's going to be boring for you. No great communicators. They might not be jokey, they might not be a comedian, but when you see them speak, they're exuding the sense that there's no place else they'd rather be than right here in front of you talking about this subject. It doesn't matter if it's a new widget they're selling. It doesn't matter if they are a physics professor and they're talking to you about physics. It could be an accountant who's excited about the fact that they're saving you money. You can figure out something to be excited about in any topic you present on, and you can figure out a way of making it fun. I don't mean a ha, ha, ha, fun or silly or trivial, but just the sense that you're excited about talking about this subject. You can do this. Now. What robs so many presentations of their fun is the preparation. It's preparing the wrong way. It's thinking. A presentation is about getting a giant wheelbarrow and filling it up with as many facts and bullet points and numbers and slides, cramming it all up, coming into the room, and then quickly dumping the entire wheelbarrow full of data and facts and numbers in front of people. That's boring. That's tedious. That's literally the opposite of fun. It's hard work. So you gotta ask yourself, when you're preparing your speech, when you're practicing it, and I do hope you're practicing your presentation on video. Does this seem like work? Does this seem tedious? Does this seem like drudgery? Well, if so, you have a problem. Because if it seems like tough work for you, it's also tough for someone else, your audience. You need to make this whole experience fun. Now, you may be dealing with very serious topics, complicated issues, major policy issues of substance. Doesn't mean you can't have fun with it. I don't mean being silly or trivial, but show people why you're excited about this idea and you can have fun primarily by giving interesting examples and telling stories. Tell stories about problems you solved, problems you encountered, problems where you made mistakes before and now you learned how to overcome it. You should have a smile come across your face occasionally when you speak again, not a big phony plastic smile on your face the whole time, but something occasionally that sends out a little signal that, hey, we're in this together. I'm having fun. You're gonna have fun together. As we go through this experience for the next five or 10 or 15 or 20 minutes in this presentation, we're all going to learn something and have fun too. So, yeah, being a great speaker can involve some hard work, but part of the work is figuring out how to make your presentation fun. Okay, so that was only a little under four minutes, so I'm not going to worry that I didn't hit the eight minute mark. It's something to aspire to. It makes the videos a little bit more marketable on YouTube and other platforms, but I'm far more interested in making it interesting and sharing what I think is the best tips set of tips and insights. Okay, now the comment that Jules brought up I do want to address as well. Being a content consumer versus a content creator. Let me do a short form for this. The single biggest question you or any child of yours will ever answer is this. In the modern world, are you a consumer or are you a creator? If you want to be successful in the modern world, you cannot just consume content all day long. You've got to be a creator as well. Okay, so how do I feel about that? I don't. I can't say that. I love that. Now, sometimes I'll do a video, a short form video, I think, wow, that hit such an important insight. It's so important. I haven't heard other people say it. It really delivered a new insight. I think I got to it quickly, concisely, brilliantly. We put it out and it gets two views. Other times I'll do one. And I think I'm not sure if I really conveyed what I wanted to do because I was keeping it so short. And it gets thousands and thousands of views. So I've been in this long enough to realize I can't always trust my gut. And anyone who's really good at making social media and I don't put myself in this top echelon will tell you you're often surprised and what your gut tells you from one person isn't good enough. You have to look at data and you have to test a lot of things. And I might not be great at every aspect of social media video, but one thing I am good at is testing a lot of different formats, throwing different things out there to see what does work. So I'm going to do a short form version. Oh, it says I'm still, oh, I am sharing, but I'm not sharing the wrong thing. I'm going to do a long form version of the. That topic I just did about being a content creator versus a consumer. I'm going to go to camera one and you've heard me mention, for those of you new, you've heard me mention, I'm hitting record. Everything we're doing here is recorded soon as we're finished. This is available on YouTube and several other platforms and this is in 1080p high definition. I'm also recording certain snippets in 4K version which is a higher quality than high definition. Don't ask me to explain all these things. I don't really know anything beyond that. But I just know that the absolute highest quality that's easily available to consumers now is the 4K. So we record just certain elements of that from all three of my camera angles and it creates gigantic mountains of data. So I'm selected rather than recording the entire show. Otherwise I'd never be able to upload it and download it. So we do sections of that. So I have a mixer in front of me. This allows me to go to camera one, camera two, camera three, and to record. So giving you a little behind the scenes shot of what we're doing here. Jewel says, I love your idea of doing a short form to get into it and then a long form because you've got the confidence from the short form. Great idea. So, Jules, I, I mix it up sometimes, sometimes I will do the short one first and that's kind of my rough draft for the long one trying to figure out what's important. Sometimes it's actually easier for me to do the long form, talk it all out. It lets the ideas kind of bounce around in my head and then I have enough time to reflect on it, to think. Okay, I just tossed out 10 ideas. In retrospect, here's the one that's most important. Now let me do the short form on that. So I mix it up. I'm, I'm undecided if one way is better than the other or if I should just mix it up on a case by case basis. But I urge you, give it a try if you're experimenting with different formats, because I will say this about short form. Whether you are on TikTok, Facebook, YouTube at this moment in 2024, it is much easier to get a lot more people to view something on a short form video. Doesn't mean you should only do short form and ignore long form. You can build a much deeper relationship with people in a long form video. You can go deeper in a subject matter. But that's why I try to do both. I'm trying to do I post two short form videos a day, one long form a day, seven days a week and then most Mondays through Friday. We are live nine to noon right here. So I'm trying to create a variety of experiences for people who want to learn more about how to be a better communicator. One of the things we'll be talking about later this week where I've been doing a lot of research also all weekend, is how to use the power of artificial intelligence video cloning to be even more useful to people on social media apps, online courses. Because we are at the point now where it's kind of like Black Mirror, the science fiction show, an episode that aired 10 years ago where you can pull all the different feeds, YouTube, blogs, books, feed it into something, feed someone's image and then have them give answers, talk to people, even take meetings. And it looks like the real person, but it's the artificial intelligence avatar. We did talk about that last week with Deepak Chopra using a product from Delphi. Brendan Bouchard, well known motivational speaker and personal development expert, is now heavily touting and is an investor in Delphi, which is a product I've been very impressed with and was was testing at 5am today to see if that's how I want to get into the whole artificial intelligence video avatar solution. So that's something we're going to be talking about a lot in the coming weeks. Okay, so I want to now do a long form video on this topic of being a consumer versus a creator. Okay. And excuse me, I think that I got a little bit of my power. So for those of you new to this, we don't have a whole giant makeup team here. This is a simple production. I do put a mosaic powder on to minimize shine and I'm not particularly shiny now, but I think I actually got some a little down here and it's causing me to have a slight irritation. So I've been scratching my nose. I don't really like scratching my nose in front of people, especially on camera, but there's an itch. So forgive me for that. You Know what? Let me just go off camera for one second. There we go. Sorry about that. And I'm going to try to reapply a little powder so as not to shine. Why do I do that? I'm trying to give and demonstrate and help model how to speak in a confident, relaxed, comfortable way. So I don't want to be sweaty and shiny looking. Trying to talk about, here's how you appear to be confident. If I look like I'm scared and nervous and sweating, so that's why I'm doing that. And again, everyone has a certain level of vanity. I'm no different. What the makeup does is it doesn't suddenly make me look like a matinee idol or a Hollywood superstar. It just evens things out, minimizes imperfections that most people do have in their skin and minimizes distractions. That's all it does. It's not trying to give me a better tan or anything else. Okay, we're going to hop into this long form one. I'm going to time myself. I'm not going to give myself the pressure of I've got to do it for eight minutes, but I do. I would prefer that this be a longer one. And I've hit record on the master. What's the single most important question you have to ask yourself right now, today that relates to your future success? Believe it or not, it's not, should I go to this graduate school? Should I be an engineer or a doctor or a lawyer, get my MBA at Stanford? Those are not the questions that will determine whether you're going to be a success or not. It really comes down to this. Are you going to be primarily a consumer in life, or are you going to be a creator? We live in a world now where anyone with a cell phone can get the most amazing creations right in front of them. You can consume fantastic movies, sitcoms, entertainment, TikTok videos. There's fantastic content out there. You can just consume all day long. But what does that do? It might educate you. It might rot your brain. It might be just spinning your brains up into mush. But one thing it's not doing is really helping you because you're not helping anyone else. Now everyone has to consume content, content from time to time. Paul McCartney and the other members of the Beatles had to listen to a lot of music before they created music. He still listens to a lot of music. Great novelists read a lot of great novels, but they also carve out time every day to create. Great novelists typically say, okay, I don't wait for inspiration to hit me. I show up at my desk each day and I eliminate distractions and I start typing at 9am or 8am Whatever it is that works for them. They block out set amounts of time to create. Now we live in a time where all of us have magical creation tools at our fingertips. Every cell phone is as powerful as as a million dollar TV studio movie production house from 30 years ago. We all have these tools and yet most of us ignore it. We just say now, maybe tomorrow, maybe another time, maybe when I take a course on editing, maybe when I take a course on script writing, then I'll creep. But for now, look at this silly cat video. Or here's another course I'm going to watch on this topic. Basket weaving or conflict negotiation maybe good courses. But if you just consume, consume, consume, it just makes you a consumer. That means money's going out of your pocket. In most cases, investment is going out of your pocket and the biggest thing you have to invest is not your money. Although you may have plenty of money you're frittering away, it's your time. When you spend so much time watching this entertainment, watching this sitcom, watching this YouTuber who's funny, you're not developing your own creations. We are increasingly moving towards a world where it's winner take all. The haves, the have nots are being separated more and more. There's plenty government policy could do to change that that's beyond the purview of this channel. I am concerned with equipping you with the tools to get ahead to be successful. And the number one thing you can do to position yourself for success in the modern world is to change your frame of mind and tell yourself you're not just a consumer, you're a consumer and a creator. And in fact, you're a creator first. You are a creator who does consume some of the time for research, for motivation, to get new ideas, for occasional relaxation. But you block out the core time of your day, whether it's the first thing in the morning for you, whether it's late at night, if you're a late night person. But we all have times when we're at our absolute peak productivity. Don't fritter it away by every two minutes. Looking at the latest Facebook video, the latest little chuckle on TikTok, the latest preview of a movie from your favorite starlet stand Focus. Large blocks of time, two, three, ideally four hours a day where you are just creating now. I don't care what it is you create or what format you might Be a sculptor in its clay. It might be chipping away at marble. It might be a giant canvas. It could be typing away at your business plan. It could be typing poetry on your laptop. And of course, it could be speaking in front of a video. Making your online course, course making your entertainment video, making your new song come to life with the singing from your voice. Am I guaranteeing you'll get rich quick? No, but it gets you in the game and it puts you on a very clear divide that our society is facing. Consumers, creators. The more you get to the side of being a creator, the more position positioned you are for ultimate success. Okay, so I did not hit my. I must not have hit my timer the right way because that said 19 minutes. I know I did not speak for 19 minutes there, so I think I somehow messed up there and did not get that the right way. So apologies for that. Hi and welcome. I'm TJ Walker. This is the TJ Walker Success Channel. This is the place where you can come to ask any questions you want on public speaking, communication skills, small talk negotiations, how to speak at a job interview, how to give a PowerPoint presentation, how to host a podcast, how to deliver a speech in front of 5,000 people. If you have a question that relates to communication skills, this is the place for you. I'm TJ Walker. I've been coaching people like you, as well as presidents of countries, prime ministers, Nobel Peace Prize winners, Ms. Universes, and a lot of business people all over the world for 40 years. I have more than 2 million online students and I've worked with tens of thousands face to face in 45 nations. So that's what we're all about. If you have a question, post it in the comments section. If you want to join me live, feel free to do so. I've posted the link on streamyard and all you have to do is push the button, turn your camera and mic on, and you can share the screen. You can, you can ask questions. You can get a critique of your latest video speech, whatever you're doing on video where you're speaking. You can even debate me. You may have heard me say something. You think that's terrible advice, tj, you shouldn't say that. You're wrong. People disagree from time to time. We're happy to have a friendly, open debate right here on any aspect that relates to communication. Now, coming up a little bit later, we're going to be continuing our series on how to be an influencer. Because several of you, even today Westside, has mentioned how can you make money? Speaking one way is to be an influencer. So Westside, if you're still with us or you're watching this on replay, this will be especially relevant to you. It's now I won't say easy, but it's never been easier to be an influencer because for so long you had to be really, really famous and truly excellent at something like a Tiger woods the golfer or Martha Stewart who was so famous from, from her original book. These days you don't have to be famous and well known to hundreds of millions of people around the globe. There are avenues of being an influencer. TikTok has them, YouTube has them, Target has them, Walmart has them and Amazon has them. I have as a, this sounds self serving for me to say as a service for you, but one of the reasons I'm an Amazon influencer is I wanted to sort of share my journey with you because I know so many of you have asked me, tj, I want to speak more and I like more. More money. How do you do it? Well, being an influencer is one way. So several months ago I started down this journey of being an Amazon influencer. So later today we'll be going live on Amazon. I'll be demonstrating this and showing you exactly what I do. You'll be seeing me promoting some books that I happen to like, some products I like and then I'll be showing you step by step how I post these videos on Amazon and the process where someone watches it, buys the product, I get a tiny commission and really how you can do it as well. So that will be coming up and the next in the next hour. So you're not going to want to miss that. We're going to take a brief commercial break, coincidentally showing you these Amazon videos I've done right here. So. And Westside says, hey, my phone's in my pocket while I'm at work. Still listening. Well great, glad you're with us, Westside. And I do think you're going to find interesting what we're doing with the Amazon influencer. And Westside, do you mind me asking where, where do you live? Because the Amazon Influencer program is not available in most of the world. It's available in the United States, South Africa, I think the United Kingdom, but it's not available in most places. But my understanding is it's being tested now by Amazon. It will be rolled out around the rest of the world too. So I'm hoping you find that useful. We're going to take a quick commercial break and, oh, you're in Canada. So I do believe that it is available to people in Canada. So you may want to pay particular attention to that. We're going to take a break. I'll be right back. Thanks. And my laptop in one bag. I put it over my shoulder on the plane and it allows me to go anywhere in the world with tripod ready. This Sony condenser microphone is the one I've used for years and years for all of my YouTube videos. It gives clear, powerful audio. It is professional in every sense. Sony, of course, well known, well deserved reputation for electronic excellence. If you're looking to up your game, try the Sony condenser microphone today. Of course you want to look your best. I want to look my best. But you want to sound your best too. That's why I always put in a microphone into my iPhone 15. This microphone works perfectly. It boosts my sound. I don't have to get right next to my cell phone. I can be further away and the audio still sounds great. You're going to want to use this microphone if you want to create professional looking and sounding videos. Have you ever looked inside your computer? Chances are it is filled with dust. Dirt. How do you get it clean? I use the compucleaner too. This is a very, very powerful, powerful airflow. It gets rid of the dust, it gets rid of the dirt. It does not damage your computer. So if you want to really give your computer a nice spring cleaning, this is the tool for you. It's highly effective. I've had mine for years. It continues to do a great job. This Logitech wireless mouse is extraordinarily reliable and durable. I've had it for about 10 years. It still works well. I've even broken the back off. No fault of the mouse, that's just me being clumsy. And it still works great. In this high tech world we live in, why would anyone want an old fashioned notepad? Because there's something about actually taking a pen or a pencil, writing it down on paper. It makes it more meaningful, more memorable. I love these notepads. They're simple, easy to carry and they require no batteries. The SanDisk 2 terabyte hard drive is flexible. It's very light, as you can see, and it stores a mountain of information. These straps are why I can play pickleball in the hot Florida sun and not worry about my glasses falling off. Hi, I'm TJ with the TJ Walker Success Channel and I love exercise and I love being active, but it's tough if you Wear glasses and you're in the hot Florida sun. That's why I always use these straps, because they just fits right on each side of your glass. It slips on. Then I can tighten this so that it's right up against the back of my head. So if I'm shaking things, I'm on the pickleball court. I'm running around. My glasses are not bouncing around. I don't have to worry about them falling off because this has happened to me before. I've been playing pickleball. Ball comes at me, I jerk out of the way. My glasses have fallen down and been badly scratched. I don't have to worry about that anymore. I don't have to worry about running and almost diving and the glass is just flying off. With these straps, I feel secure that my glasses are right, right where I want them to be. And I can focus on what I'm really after, which is the exercise, the sport, and having a good time. This 3M transport cape really does the job. I can put it on my skin, even sensitive areas around here, and it stays stuck as long as I want it. But I can peel it off. It doesn't tear my skin the way other medical tapes have done in the past. So it's just the right amount of stickiness. I use it every single day, regardless of how often you need to use medical tape. This is a very high quality product. This Talani Kids backpack is versatile. It works well taking any book you need to school. What do you like about this book bag? There's a lot of different, like, pockets it. So I could place a lot of my folders and pencils in here and there's a lot of, like, there's a lot of space in here. Okay. So I appreciate. Jules just wrote, wow, great ads. I appreciate that. But Jules, I want to stress those are just me talking. It's one take most of the time. Every once in a while, I'll screw up a word, but there's no copywriting. I didn't hire an ad agency. And the last ad you just saw there with my daughter, we forgot to plug in a microphone. The audio quality really wasn't very good either. But that one ad has been seen, I think several thousand times now. Some ads like nobody sees or five, but every once in a while, something will take off. So that particular ad got a lot of play. Play. I won't say how many book bags have been sold, but more than zero. We'll put it that way. So again, I want to stress being an Amazon influencer is not some get rich quick program. I do hear of some people breaking five figures a month. I think that's highly aberrational. I can tell you I don't think I'm violating any of Amazon rules. I'm not getting anywhere no near that amount. But people can make money being in the Amazon Influencer program doing simple ads. Now some people do storyboard it editing music, B roll. The videos you just saw me were one take, typically zero editing other than after, after I posted it on Amazon without any editing. My team would take it, add a little music and a URL for us to play here on this show. But you don't even hear that music on Amazon where it actually gets most of its views. So I appreciate your comment. Jules also says, wow, being a seller without taking your car to go and sell the product and not repeating yourself all the time. Yeah, so that is funny. I mean what has been interesting to me is sometimes I'll look at a product and I like the product but I would never in a million years think well someone's going to have to listen to me before buying that product. And I'm wrong. And turns out it sells a lot. One of them is a particular sunscreen that I use that I put on underneath my eyes because I do have some dark circles under my eyes and it lighten, it has, it's a very strong zinc based sunscreen. Most zinc based sunscreens, you've seen the lifeguards where their nose is 100% white. Well this is not white. It comes in almost any color. My daughter once got one pink. I'm using the one that's more or less flesh colored or at least my flesh color. And that one is just sold tons based on a ad that I did for it. So I don't, I don't recommend Amazon Influencer as a like a strong buy. Like if you don't get into this now, you're going to miss out on a fortune. I don't think it's some get rich quick. I do think it is a possible get wealthy slowly long term because of doors it can open and bridges it can build for you with brands. Getting you into the whole game of thinking like a spokesperson, building your sales skills, building your presentation skills, giving you an excuse to hit record. I think for all those reasons it's a good thing and I will be doing more of these videos. I'll actually be making them right here in front of you in our 11 o' clock hour. It's 10:51 here in the east coast of the United States right now. I'm coming to you live from Florida in the West Palm beach area. I happen to live in Delray Beach, Florida. By the way, if you are ever in Delray beach, you can see right on my profile, you come here, I'll buy you a cup of coffee. Just let me know you're coming. You can reach out to me on LinkedIn and let me know if you're coming. I'm always happy to connect with friends, members of our community, and we can share and collaborate what's going on in each other's businesses and lives. So thanks so much for, for giving that some thought and consideration. We are having another problem with the auto focus on our camera today. So excuse me. I think I just got a little too close to the camera. I'm turning it off for a second. We go to camera two for a second. Typically when I go back, it solves the problem, so I'm going to try not to get as close. I think what's happened is I've gotten within, say, 20 inches of the camera. I'm about, I'm guessing 24, 26 inches away from the camera right now. For some reason. If I'm getting closer to it, it's messing it up. The auto focus, it is on a continuous autofocus. And this is a Sony A7C. I will be. You know, it's interesting and a little bit odd. Of all the things I've done for the Amazon Influencer program, I haven't done what most people would consider the most obvious things to do for a YouTuber, which is about the equipment. Because people do often ask me, what camera do you use, what lens do you use, what tripods? And that's some of the most expensive equipment in my studio, as you can imagine. And a part of it is I've wanted to learn more about them, so what I could say about them and talk intelligently. Part of it is it's harder for me to show it to you unless I don't use the camera that day. So there's a little bit of a technical issue for. For that. We're going to switch gears now and I'm going to go to more questions that sometimes people email, sometimes people come right on screen, as Jules did earlier today. Sometimes people post them. If you post your questions in our live chat today, you do get priority. Well, the ultimate priority goes to anyone willing to go on screen. But I also have questions that come up during live trainings, because I do. I do conduct live trainings. And workshops around the country and around the world was just in Washington D.C. last week conducting a training and several topics sort of popped into my head during that training and I've addressed some of those today. And here's the next one that came to me. What's the biggest mistake most companies make when it comes to videos about their products? And it's they, they make it like a 30 second video with just a bunch of images. It's be so much better to have people talk about it. I'm constantly amazed at, I'm interested in the product, I want to learn what does it do, how does it actually work. And I know that the company has plenty of people who talk to salespeople, who talk to customers, explain it in detail. And the only thing on their website is a video that just has images and music. And I have no idea what it's actually doing. And I see that as a huge mistake. Amazon to its credit is trying to solve that problem by letting influencers like me and possibly you create videos that explain it. So let me try to do a short form and a long form on this because this is a, this is a pet peeve of mine and I think it's a huge wasted opportunity for so many businesses. So we're going to get a camera to record. What's the biggest mistake most businesses make when they show video of their product? They just have images and a little pretty music. No one actually explains what it is. You don't have to make a slick image commercial. Talk to us, tell us what your product does. Okay. And that was the short form. Now let me try to do a long form version. We'll get a camera one for that. And I don't think I'll hit eight minutes on this. I've got some strong feelings but I don't think it's enough for eight minutes. But we'll try to go a little bit longer. What's the number one problem most. I'm going to start, I'm going to start that over. Also I don't want my tie appearing to be that much too short. So we're going to start that over. What's the number one mistake most businesses make when they decide to use a video to showcase their product? It's that they think they have to be some sort of fancy perfume ad that's just images and music. Now it's not going to be a 30 second AD that's going to win Addie Awards or Clio Awards. If you're going to make a video about your Product, explain it, have an actual human being showing it, talking about it constantly. I'm mystified. I'm interested in a product, trying to figure out if it's right for me, how it works. I click the video on it and it's just. It's pretty music and it's dissolves and it's pictures. I have no idea what the product does or how it works. This is a huge, huge, wasted opportunity. Any company that has a product that's being sold and marketed around the world probably has someone inside the company who's already used to talking about it to sales reps, to customers, to other people in the industry. You have people inside who know how to talk about your product. Let them talk on camera for a video so people can see. If you want to do the fancy pretty image ads, do that. But you need to have a video that really explains. Explains the product, shows someone using it, explains the benefits, talks about how it actually works. It's a huge, wasted opportunity if you don't have that. That's one video you need. Now, the second most important video you really need if you want to keep a good relationship with your customer, is you need to have someone showing how to assemble it, if any assembly is required. I'm constantly mystified by major companies selling their products on every online platform in the world. You get it, you're all excited. It looks like it's great. And there's some teeny tiny manual in fine print that is so overwhelmingly complicated and you can't really see which part is which, which one goes where. If they just had a video of someone in their factory or their plant in their office putting it together the first time and saying, hey, this is the thing we call part B. But you can tell because it's about a foot and a half long. If someone actually held it up and showed us step by step how to put the thing together, how to use it for the first time, it would dramatically reduce returns, it would dramatically reduce negative reviews. And yet so many companies don't do that. Well, we're not a video production. Well, you're not professional writers too, but you have text explaining the name of your product and what it does. This idea that you had to be a professional video producer is nonsense. You can hit a button that says record and talk. You can give value to your customers, to your prospects about your product or your service. Don't waste the opportunity and don't try to win some advertising award that is going to show up on 60 Minutes or the super bowl. Or the World Cup. Focus on actually giving helpful information to your prospects and customers. We will appreciate it. Okay, so that was just a little under four minutes, and I think that that's about all I need to say on that topic. Again, you've heard me mention this before, but the the YouTube algorithm does like long form videos that are more like eight minutes longer. They can put in more ads, show it to more people. They do value watch time. But I can tell you the most successful in terms of sheer numbers of views each month. The most successful online video creator in the communication space often has videos that are 65 seconds long, 90 seconds long. They're too long to be short form. They're too short to be really the ideal thing that YouTube likes. And he's amazingly successful, much more successful than the Dale Carnegie people, the Toastmasters people, and a lot of other competitors of mine. So I do want you to, you know, perhaps aim for certain metrics when you're creating, but don't feel so locked in. The most important thing is create something that you think is really going to help one particular person. Maybe it'll help others create something that you personally find useful or that you found useful when you learned that insight and now you're sharing it with others. That I think is what's most important for creating content on a regular basis. Now, disclosure, Most of the advice I give is not geared towards people trying to be entertainers. If you want to be the next Mr. Beast, well, you should be watching Mr. Beast and other channels devoted to the entertainment space. My expertise is primarily about people in the how to space, knowledge space, education space, trying to teach people specific skills that help some aspect of business or some aspect of life that are not primarily about entertainment. Hey, I tried to have fun and we spoke earlier today about how to be a great speaker. You need to have fun, but it's not fun in the sense of ha ha, this is entertainment. If you're watching me right now for entertainment, you've probably made a big mistake. But I do appreciate you stopping by. Let's go to the next question. By the way, if you have questions, you can post them right here in our Streamyard chat which connects all of the videos, all the comments from people watching on Facebook, on LinkedIn, on YouTube, on Twitch, on Twitter, X, on Instagram. And soon we will be on on Amazon Live. And for some reason we're not on my Udemy student page today. I'm not quite sure what has happened there, so we'll have to take a look at that. Apologies to any of my students who normally would watch on that page. So every now and then there is some kind of a slight glitch. Okay. So we're going through and checking off questions that have answered. I tr. You know, a lot of these issues do recur from time to time and everybody, every subject matter expert does repeat themselves. I try not to repeat myself too much. But then again there's certain concepts that if you follow them help you so much it's ridiculous not to really stress them. And there's certain problems that people repeat again and again. Again that. So I have to repeat certain themes from time to time. Okay, what I'm looking at other topics that I've written in and here's one that I did want to talk about. I was going to create this video while on the pickleball. I've gone out of focus again. We are having a few technical issues. Sorry about that. I'm going to have to. Again, I want to share with you what I'm doing. So this is a relatively simple lean production. Now I've built a studio here with some consultants. We have a three camera shot. And this is not a million dollar studio, it's not a hundred thousand dollar studio, but it's a significant five figure investment for this. But it's just me. So I've got a mixer board right here, you can see a little bit of it. And what I'm doing right now is I am turning camera three off. We have three cameras here. I'm turning it off and then I'm turning it back on. And traditionally that has solved the auto focus program where we went out of focus a moment ago and has happened several times today. So apologies for that. So one of the topics I have that I wanted to address for a short form and a long form video that I think is important is for people to realize everyone is a bad communicator someplace. Everyone's I think, good in certain situations, bad in certain situations. There are a lot of people who are really good one on one small groups. The United States President Lyndon Johnson, who was president in the 1960s, was known as just being incredibly powerful and commanding and authoritative. One on one or small groups. He would twist people's arm, literally. He could command a Senate church chamber with when he's just a handful of colleagues extraordinarily powerful, which led him from a 28 year old Congressman to becoming the Senate majority leader and then on the vice presidential ticket with John F. Kennedy and then became president himself and elected as president too. But by all Accounts a horrible public speaker, not commanding at all. Awkward, stilted, wooden, uncharismatic, and yet known for being really compelling behind the scenes off camera. So why is that? It's because it's a different format and people can be good at one and not the other. What I try to do is give you the tools so you can come across the best you can be in every format. But I do want to stress everybody's awful somewhere. And I wanted to share with you I'm awful communicator on the pickleball court. I get frustrated, I'm yelling, I'm screaming, I'm saying inappropriate things from time to time if you've ever seen me on the pickleball court. So it's something I need to work on to improve. And I want you to reflect as well on not just where you are bad as a communicator, but where are you good so you can do more of what's good in situations where you're bad. I'd like to be more thoughtful, have a more pleasant tone of voice on the pickleball court, the way I try to be with you right here. But I also want you to realize that no one is just a perfect communicator in every single, single arena. Someone you think of as the most commanding, confident, charismatic speaker in the world might be pulled up at a conference on a stage the last night and it's open mic night and they're told, hey, you got to do five minutes of standup comedy now. And that person might just start sweating and being awful. Because that would be me. I'm not a good stand up comedian. That is one aspect of the whole communications world, speaking world I've never mastered and I've taken stand up comedy classes before. It was not a pretty result. It certainly was not a funny result, put it to you that way. So I want you to reflect on this and realize everyone has some area of communication where they're probably not that proud. Some they're not that great. And that's okay. All of us are better at certain areas than others. For most people I work with, they're really good. If they're talking to one person or two or three, it's a comfortable situation, comfortable surrounding, and they're talking about something they care about, they're passionate about. So if you're talking to your two best friends about a sporting event where all of you were passionately rooting for one team, it's probably pretty easy to be a passionate speaker and you can say, well, tj, big Deal. No one gets paid to do that. Well, here's why it is a big deal. If you can speak passionately about your favorite soccer or football team and articulately without stammering and stumbling and without your energy being too low or too fast, guess what? You can do it on any topic in front of any size audience. You really can't. You already have the skill set. Some things are not transferable. But speaking, most of speaking is transferable. Now, I could speak to you fluently. Now, that's not necessarily transferable to the stand up comedy stage because it's much more intricate to be able to speak in such a way that every five seconds there's a surprise that generates a laugh in people. That is a highly, highly specialized art form. But simply talking in a way where you're passionate, interesting, understandable, engaging, memorable, that's something. If you do it in one place, you can do it in another. So if you're doing it over a lunchtime or a meal time with friends and family, you can in fact do it in front of a boardroom. You can in fact do it on Shark Tank if you had to. Speaking of which, I've seen recently, there's a version, there's like an inexpensive knockoff of Shark Tank, and I believe it's on one of the Amazon fast channels. And they have people in the elevator come up giving a pitch to a panel. And if the panel likes them, they say, okay, you can get off the elevator and come talk to us. And forgive me, I forgot the name of the show, but some of the pitches were just awful. And the reason for that is it's memorized. Now, you understand the, the contestants on the show, the entrepreneurs trying to get funding, are probably coached by producers who say, look, this is tv. We got to get this just right. And they're actually timed. It's kind of a clever idea where they're on the elevator. They have to make the pitch to the camera between the time it goes from ground floor up to whatever floor it's on. And I believe they have 60 seconds. So it is trying to, trying to structure it around an elevator pitch, literally in an elevator to get someone's attention. And so they, when you only have 60 seconds, it does put more pressure on you to get the timing just right, obviously, because if you're only halfway through and time is out, that's not good. But when you try to memorize word for word, what happens is that where you're looking up and you're off tracks, I'm going to Do a short form video on this very subject right now and try to give people tips on how, how do you speak in a short period of time where you know, you get it just right and you don't memorize. That I think is very, a very helpful tip. And very soon we're going to be going to our Amazon Live segment. We'll be, we'll be segueing over and continuing on all these channels, but also available on Amazon live on the TJ Walker Success Shop on Amazon. And if you, if you're interested in seeing what that page looks like, you can go to my YouTube page, go to the about section and I do have a link at the bottom of that. It's also available if you just go to Amazon.com shop tjwalkersuccess, you will find my Amazon store right there. Okay, so let me go ahead and I'm going to try to do a short form on this topic of how do you really speak without sounding memorized when you've got a limited 60 second elevator pitch time slot? I think that's the way to think of it. Going to hit my recording on button on the mixer. What do you do if you have to give an elevator spitch and you have it. I just stumbled on a word. Let's cut and do that over. What do you do if you have to give an elevator speech? I wanted to say pitch. I did the same mistake. I'm switching words. I don't typically do that, but hey, it only takes two seconds to just start over. What do you do if you have to give an elevator pitch and you've got exactly 60 seconds or less? You want to get everything just right, but don't try to memorize it. What happens if you try to memorize it? You forget something, your eyes go up, the whole thing comes to a screeching halt. Instead, just focus on the concepts and be conversational and get it out in less than 60. Okay, so that is the 62nd version. So again, I show you warts and all, how we make content here. I try, I would say 90% some days, a good day, 95% and sometimes 100%. But overall, in a typical month, I'm guessing that about 95% of the time, whether I'm making a short form video, a long form video for social media, or an advertisement for Amazon, that I get it in one take 95% of the time. Sometimes people say, wow, T.J. you're so articulate. That's amazing. I could never do that wrong. You could do it if you do it as often as I do, it's simply a function of doing it frequently because you get the first take right. On basically all of your conversations with friends and family, you don't say, stop, let me go out of the kitchen and come in again and say, good morning. No, you get it right the first time. So part of what makes it easier is I'm not following a set script. There's a role for scripting with some social media videos and some ads, obviously, but you don't have to. And for certain areas of content, and I would argue public speaking, communication skills is one of them, you're far better off doing, not scripting everything. You're better off focused on a few ideas, making them come alive and speaking about them in a conversational way. So that's what I want to do. Now, on that same topic of what do you do if you have a set time period and it's short? So I'm going to switch to camera one and then fairly shortly we're going to be going to Amazon Live and doing that segment hitting record. By the way, this is a particular style suit where it doesn't have a belt. It's not supposed to have a belt, but it also means you've got to have it fit perfectly. So that's why. Hence a little adjustment here and there. Note to editor, don't use that. So what do you do if you have to give an elevator pitch? 60 seconds or less, that's all you got. Maybe it's for a television show, maybe because you're literally on an elevator and you can see the person you're pitching is kind of looking at their watch and there's not a lot of time. You don't have a lot of time, so you can't just sort of meander around and have a full conversation. Maybe it's Monday, folks, and I just had sort of my fourth mistake in the last two videos. I'm going to scratch that, start over. Since we're early in, sometimes when I make a mistake, I will just stop, pause for a second, give the editor a time, and then go back to the previous sentence. But that was so early. I'm just going to start from the beginning. So note to editor, don't use any of that now. We'll start from here. So what do you do if you have to give an elevator pitch and you've got exactly 60 seconds or less? There's some TV shows now that let entrepreneurs pitch on an elevator in 60 seconds? You may be on an actual elevator and you see someone that you wanted to pitch and you can tell they're looking at their watch. If you don't get them before their leave, you are out of luck. So what do you do? You can't treat it as a normal conversation that could have a give and take and a flow for 10 or 15 minutes. You have to be concise. But I caution you, don't make this mistake. That mistake is memorizing. You may think, hey, I want to be really hardworking. I want to be great. I want to be good at this. Let me stay up late at night memorizing, saying it over and over again. Don't do it. Chances are you're not a professional actor. And what happens when you have that additional stress? Okay, this is the real thing. It's not practice anymore. There's a video camera or here's Mr. Big Shot right in front of me. That adrenaline rush makes your memory shut down. You're a ability to have recall doesn't as work as well. So what happens is you may start off buying the first 10, 15, 20 seconds. Then your eyes are going to roll up and you're going to hit a blank. And you're going to feel pressure. You're going to feel like, oh, I'm messing up here. And that's going to come across in your face, it's going to come across in your voice, and that is going to send a message to the person or the people you're pitching that you're nervous and uncomfortable. Because in fact, you are nervous and uncomfortable. So how do you get around that? You do want to plan, you do want to prepare, you do want to practice, and you do want to rehearse on video. The key is don't try to say it word for word the same way. Have a simple outline, maybe just two or three bullet points. Then talk. Talk it out. Say it in a conversational way and focus on the conversation. Know the points you want to hit, but do not, I repeat, do not try to memorize it word by word. Because two problems can happen. One, you forget, one word is off. And now the whole thing has gone off the tracks and you're left there with a blank. And that's the worst possible situation. But there's another problem. And that problem is you get every single word just right. And you are so proud of yourself that you went through the checklist. But you sound robotic. You don't sound like a real person. You sound like someone who memorized. Because acting is difficult. When you see someone in a movie, when you see someone on a West End stage stage, or a Broadway stage or a Bollywood stage acting, and they're really making you believe in that character. It's because they're great actors. They've been trained for years. They've rehearsed with great directors. Chances are you're not a trained actor. Chances are you don't have a director working with you for months in rehearsal to pitch your company in an elevator pitch pitch. So don't try to do it. Instead, be conversational. Have fun with it. Focus on just a couple of ideas that you think will make someone want to hear more from you. Remember, the goal of an elevator pitch is not to sell a product. No one gets off an elevator saying, wow, I just made $50 million from this investor. Here's the check. That's not how elevator elevator pitches work. The whole goal of an elevator pitch is to arouse curiosity, to arouse interest in someone, to want to hear more. It's about getting them excited to hear more. So you only need one or two interesting ideas to put in front of them to make them think, ah, that's interesting. Let's take a meeting. Okay, so that is the long form version of that one. And it didn't set my time just quite right, but I think it hit the most important points. We're going to get ready now here and prepare for our Amazon live. We'll be with you in just a couple of minutes. I'm going to switch over to our ads and then we'll get ready. Come back to that. So don't go anywhere. There's lots more fun to come. Whoops, that's the wrong page. So there you have it. Kids like it and their parents like it properly hydrated. I don't want to rely on a vending machine that's pedaling other stuff. I want to take my own filtered water. That's why I use this hydropeak. It does a fantastic job. It's. It's durable. I've dropped it many times, have a dent or two in it, it still works perfectly. If you're looking for a thermos that is durable, sturdy, doesn't leak, I don't think you can go wrong with a hydro pack. Are you looking for something light and easy to take around to bring your music to your next party? And you're joining me on the live show now, this speaker does the trick. I've had this for several years, have used it countless times with friends, family members, gatherings we've had, and it turns any normal gathering into more of a party. It sounds great without me having to lug around big speakers or find outlets. It holds its charge, it lasts for hours. It sounds great. It syncs up easily and quickly to my cell phone. I'm not the greatest tech wizard, but it's, it's easy, easy to use. If you want a nice sounding speaker for your events, home office, out at the beach, this speaker will do the job. Reading is important to me. That's why I love this reading lamp. It's very flexible. You can adjust up, down, you can adjust how bright or dim it is. Hi, I'm TJ with the TJ Walker Success Channel and so much of my success I give to reading. Reading a lot. I like to read at least an hour every night. So it's important for me to have. And my colleague Ben is with me. Ben helps with all matters of the show, technical and otherwise. Then we're going to go on and we're going to do Amazon Live today. Quick question. What has happened to our second Facebook page? We were talking earlier before the show and we realized it wasn't there. What's happened to our second Facebook page feed today? Do you know?

Yes. I just noticed that on Streamyard the group is no longer available. Yes, but actually we can still connect to group using the rtmp. So that's what I later did.

I do remember our colleague Barb talking about there was going to be some change and I couldn't remember if it was. I think it's a change from the. From the Facebook side, not Streamyard. Am I understanding it correctly?

Yes, I think. I'm not sure where it came from, but I just noticed the group is no longer available, so I had to use RTMP to connect to group and tell.

I mean, I know conceptually, but I don't know a way to describe it intelligently to our viewers. What is rtmp? Because anyone who's interested in doing live casting and streaming on platforms, especially more than one, it's a term that comes up a lot. What is it? It's real time something protocol. What is it?

Yes, it's real time messaging protocol.

And so how would one add. So Facebook, it used to be, is one click with the Streamyard we use. So what will we have to do starting ideally tomorrow to go live on Facebook? Yeah, Group.

So using this protocol, messaging, you need to have a link. There will be a server link that you need to connect and then there'll be a streaming key. There'll be a pass key for you to be able to connect to your Streaming software.

But is that something that Facebook has to give us? Do we have to go somewhere? How do we figure out how to do this? And by we, I mean you, because I'm not technically savvy enough to figure this out. How do we. How do we figure this out and solve it for tomorrow?

So we need to go to. I think we need to go to Facebook each time we are trying to create a live session to get the RTMP server and the stream key.

Do you want to do a quick test now and to see if we can add it, even if it's just for the last few minutes?

You said.

Do you want to try and see if you can do it right now?

Yes, I've connected it already. We are live on screw, actually.

Oh, well, I'm only seeing. When I look at the top, I only see one Facebook. So are we. Are we connected to our Facebook group? So what about the Facebook TJ Walker, you know my name label with you.

I label with Udemy Facebook group. You.

Okay, I'm seeing the TJ Walker success page, so I am not seeing the. Unless it has a different icon. Let me say.

Yes, it has a different.

Has a different icon there. I see it's turned it into a U. It's pulled the udemy. Now it says Udemy Facebook group. So does that mean we were on it live all day?

Yes, we're being hung.

Okay, so apologies, my blunder. So a good learning moment for all of us. When you're. When you're doing anything with video, it's automatically 100 times more complicated than just text, which is one reason why many people get scared away from doing video. If you're doing something live, it's now sometimes 100 times more complicated than a recorded video because there's so many different bells and whistles and things floating in and out. Ways of making mistakes. And most people feel too embarrassed or ashamed to make a mistake in front of people live. And because right now we're. We have a number of people watching this across platforms, and this is going to be stored for video on demand on a lot of platforms. And I. I'm a human being, and I don't like to look like a fool, and I have as much vanity as anyone else. But what I do have going for me is I don't mind making mistakes speaking in front of people if I think it can help them. So that's part of. Part of why I'm doing this. That's part of the premise behind this TJ Walker success channel, especially our Live show every day is you're going to see how a content creator creates content, shares content, distributes content, makes a mistake, goes through trial and error. You've already seen me make many mistakes today when it came to making some of the short form and long form videos. And that's okay. It's a process. I may make more mistakes in front of people today than you will, but. And by you, I don't mean you, Ben, but I also am able to reach thousands of people today. If you look at the four main videos I put out on a dozen platforms or so, it's collectively it will reach many thousands of people. So for me it's a trade off and it's therefore worth it. And that's what we're trying to do here. Now, do I actively want to make mistakes? No, we're trying to get better every day. We're trying to learn. So now, now I know Ben, since Ben sets up our technology for our live stream every day, so I'm going to assume. So you know how to set up for the Facebook group now. So yes. Okay. And I'm just counting. So we are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and we're about to stream on the eighth platform on Amazon Live. So let's just get ready to go ahead and do that. And for those of you new with us, I am an Amazon influencer, which they let almost anyone do if you have a thousand or so followers on a major social media platform. And what it means is I can talk about a product that I like that's available for sale on Amazon. I make a little video, talk about it. If someone watches the video and then buys the product, I'm seen as the affiliate and I get a small commission. So it's really pretty simple. What's interesting about it is that Amazon puts your video on the product page so I don't have to go email and spam and torture some community. I have to buy the product products to look at it and hope that a tiny 0.2% will buy. Amazon takes my video and not always, but most of the time puts it on the product page. So Amazon is delivering traffic to my video. It's not just any traffic, it's people who specifically are looking to buy who either have their credit card in their pocket or their credit cards already in Amazon. So if they like it, they just buy it. Which some people get in trouble with that. I know that personally in my household, it's a pretty rare week. I would say we're four out of seven Days we don't make a purchase on Amazon. It has become that reliable. Some of I haven't done product reviews on it yet because I haven't bought it. But this is now my fourth summer in Florida, where it is very hot and humid. Typically, I try to travel the whole summer. And this summer I thought, let me try something different. Let me try to embrace where I am. If Elon Musk or someone said, tj, we selected you to go to Mars and it's not going to cost you anything, and it's going to be the experience of a lifetime. But, you know, it's really hot. I would get some kind of suit so I could be comfortable on Mars. In Florida, for hundreds of years, no one wanted to be here because it was too hot. Then they developed air conditioning, so now people can live here. But it occurred to me I'm not using logic. If I'm hot outside, I need to essentially air condition myself. So I bought three products over the weekend, which I hope to get in the next couple of days. One of them is a fan, a refrigerator fan that goes around your neck. It may look really stupid. I don't know, it might not work, but I'm hoping it cools me down. The other is a vest where you take things like ice cubes. You keep it in your freezer and you put it in your vest and it keeps you chilled. The third thing, and Ben, you may laugh at this, it's like a baseball hat that has a big hole in the top. You fill the hat with ice and then you tighten it. But now you've got ice on your head. So I'm hoping that with the three of those things, I can be cool this summer and, you know, go for walks on the beach, play pickleball when I'm not with you, not let the heat bother me. So that's a long digression to Amazon is an important part of my life because I can't just go to a grocery store or a shopping mall and find any of those products. They're highly specialized. Okay, let's hop right in. Let me get my products ready. So we're going to do two things today. Well, we're gonna do three things. We're doing the show right now where I take questions from you and I'll continue to take them as we are on Amazon Live. We're streaming currently on seven different platforms. We're about to go to the eighth, Amazon Live. So I'll then be talking about these products live, where people can buy it live. They'll see it. And the products will be visible in a cat carousel. Oh, Ben. And the final product I do need you to show is the book from last week with Don Gabor. And I didn't. Okay, so there's, so there's that. That's the second thing we're doing is that Amazon Live. And then the third part is I'm going to make short form videos just using my phone. And I forgot to go ahead and put in my microphone. Let me go ahead and do that now and do a quick test. And these will be the short form on demand videos for Amazon, not the Amazon Live part. But I will be doing it while we're live. So we get a little bit meta here. I don't mean the Facebook meta. I just mean in terms of a thing about. A thing about a thing. Huh? Now that's very unusual. That microphone I took. You know what I did, Ben, is I took my microphone home this weekend because I thought, you know, my daughter's promise to do Amazon influencer videos for all these new products she got for her room makeover. So I took my microphone and receiver home. I didn't leave it charged up. And now. Ah, there we go. Now this is blinking. I don't know if this means it's low on battery or not. That's typically not a good sign. Okay, these, now I've done ads for these. This one's now pure green, but they are a little bit finicky. I want to turn this one off now because I don't want it possibly pulling from the wrong microphone. Okay, so I see a green light. I think we're in good shape. I'm going to go ahead and attach my microphone. I'm putting the camera in my tripod, which is right next to. To my regular camera, and I'm going to go ahead and turn the camera mode on. Reverse it. I've got to get the angle up just a little. And my accent lighting is time dab. So I'm going to turn my accent lighting back on, But I think this. I'm going to turn my lower light off because I'm trying to get the angles so they look good. Not just for the YouTube folks, but when I end up making the videos for the Amazon influencer. The lights are a little bit distracting on at this angle. And Jules says, wow, being a seller without taking your cart. Oh, that one we already read. He also says, I really love when you explain all the workflow you do for making your video. So, Joel, you summed it up nicely. I Think I am trying to essentially show the workflow because when you only see finished videos from people on YouTube or TikTok and other places, it looks intimidating because everyone's seamless and perfect and no flubs. And you don't know. Do they do that in two minutes? Do they spend three months on it? By showing you the workflow, I'm hoping to motivate more of you to make your own content. Speaking out on video. Okay, so Ben, let's go ahead and hop right in with our Amazon Live.

Okay.

And I'm gonna, I guess, take you off. You will give me a countdown as you typically do. Whoops. Something. I've got the. The. The tri. Don't start yet. My tripod creeped, crept into the. In front of the camera. There we go. Now we're now. Oh, you know, the other thing I didn't do is test my remote control because I don't want to be seen touching the camera to start touching it off. And this is what I had a problem with Friday. And then as soon as the show was over, I tested it and everything was fine. Great. So we are in good shape today. I just did a test.

Can you check your audio too?

The audio? The Amazon.

Yes, the mic you want to use to record.

Oh, this. Well, you're right. I should do that. Okay. So. Because sometimes I've done all this and then we look at it and there was no audio. All right, so let's do a test, testing the audio. Want to make sure the audio is working for the Amazon influencer videos. Amazon. Okay, we're. I initially thought, oh, it's not working. But I had the volume all the way down. So all, all these little things can really confuse people. And it is a little bit harder doing it when you're in front of a lot of. When you're in front of people trying to do a show within a show too. But it gets easier as you do. Okay, let's hop right in.

Okay. Three, two, one.

Welcome to Amazon Live. I'm T.J. walker. This is the T.J. walker Success Channel right here on Amazon. I'm so happy to be with you and share with you products I actually like, use, have spent my own money buying and recommend to friends clients around the globe. The first one is the book the Age of Addiction. How Bad Habits Become Big Business by David Courtright. So this book, I think does a fantastic job of just looking at all the different ways businesses use humans fallibility, our desire to have more, whether it's more food, more sugar, more salt, More fat, more entertainment in the form of another quick video. It's an important topic. It is getting more play in modern culture. But books like this really don't get as much attention as they should. The book is available. You can look at it right now. You can order it today, this second, it's in the carousel. If you're watching this on Amazon Live Again, the age of, of addiction. A lot of times, especially people of a certain age, they, oh, addiction. That's, you know, people who are heroin addicts have no self control. They're in the gutter drinking booze all day. Well, those are certain types of addiction. But in this modern world, where obesity is now the norm in many cultures and in many communities around the globe, where sitting and looking at your phone 18 hours a day is the norm in a lot of places, addiction is something that is hitting pretty much every family, every community. There are high costs. So I urge you to take a look at this book to get a better understanding of all the ways corporations try to addict. And it's not that every corporation is evil. Some social media companies do certain things that aren't necessarily designed to help. But hey, I'm on social media. We all want people's attention. The question is, how do you as an individual take control over your own life? I think that book helps give more tools to people for doing that. The next book, Hangry A Startup Journey by Mike Evans. He's the founder of grubhub. Now you may use grubhub, you may like it, you may not like it. A number of people in restaurants have some mixed feelings about it. But if you are at all interested in how startups work, the ups and downs of all the different ways of things going on in a startup, I think you'll enjoy this book. Now, I've done startups before, many startups, none that went to the point of going public or having a billion dollar acquisition. But I could relate to so much of what Mike talks about in this book. The book is available for sale right now on Amazon. You can see it in the carousel below if you're at all interested. But so many insights here. You may have absolutely no interest in grubhub or having a startup that involves delivery. But if you're interested in business and entrepreneurialism, I think you'll get a lot out of this book. So you may want to check it out. And one of our friends on LinkedIn says really enjoying your presentation. Well, thanks so much. If you click the button to join us on streamyard and Sign in, we can see who you are. It's always nice to connect a name and possibly a face if your icon is there with comments. But you don't have to very much appreciate our LinkedIn friends stopping by and saying hello. Also, let me know what you're actually enjoying from the presentation. What are you getting out of it? That would be very helpful to know. Okay, this next book, there is some controversy. I'm not going to sugarcoat it. It's called Breathe by author James Nestor. Its subtitle is the New Science of a Lost Art. I can tell you I personally found the book influential. I'm using a number of the techniques advocated. I won't go into it because I do not want to be seen as giving medical advice or healthcare advice on this forum. I'm not a medical doctor, so you should not be taking any medical or healthcare advice from me. But if you're at all interested in breathing, how it relates to sleep, lack of sleep, I would recommend this book. Now, I do want you to read the reviews, all of the reviews, and to get a sense of the range, the spectrum, the feedback, critiques, criticisms. There are some legitimate criticisms, but overall I found it a very useful, helpful book. Breathe, by James Nestor. It is available for sale right now in the Carousel. So take a look at it and with one click you can buy it. Because hey, we're on Amazon. That's the beauty of it. The next book, the Science of Happiness. How our brains make us happy and what we can do to get happier. Now, who doesn't want to be happier? Jules writes. I read Breathe. What an extraordinary book. Okay, well Jules, thanks for sharing that. If you want to share anything you liked about the book, be happy to share that with our community here on Amazon. Live Now. The Science of Happiness by Stefan Klein. I am Someone it says it's an international number one international bestseller. I am a big student of personal development. Happiness is the ultimate goal or certainly one of the major goals of people in the personal development movement. And this book gave perspectives you don't find in just the typical motivational speaker or even psychologist approach to books on happiness. So my rule of thumb is if I can get even one good idea from a book on happiness and it makes me happier in some way or helps me help other people get happier. It was certainly well worth it and I have many, many pages turned down here and underline. That's for me the mark of a good book. That's how I know it was a worthwhile book. As many pages turned down and Underlined. So you may want to check out the Science of Happiness if you are interested in more happiness and you are a student of personal development. So check out this book and then the last book. I did mention this last week in our last live session but then my camera, our microphone broke. I wasn't able to do our, our normal creation of short form videos for this book. This is by Don Gabor, the noted expert on person on not just personal development but on small talk. He's, he's one of the most renowned experts in the world how to start a conversation and make friends. I have the paper version. I can't find it on my, on my wall over here on my shelves. But it's a great book. I bought it with my own money. I've read it, I've recommended it to other people. And here is the digital version here. How to Start a conversation and make friends. So these are the five books I did want to recommend to you today. I'm also, in case you missed any of this or you're just joining us on Amazon Live, I'm going to be doing sort of a recap and doing a brief recap of each product, making an extra video of it and that will be made available for the Amazon Influencer program. Typically those videos are going to go right on to the product page. So it's a little bit different space from where we are on the Amazon Live page. Jill says master Breathing, Master speaking. So yes, some people when they speak get nervous and they start breathing in a shallower way and that affects their airflow, their, their power, their voice, their authority and they start rushing. So. So you're referencing the book Breathe, which I just held up. So that's what Jules got out of that book. We have a comment from our LinkedIn user says enjoying you sharing the mechanics of producing a video. I didn't see it all but I will be checking back. I have to jump for a client call. Have a great day. Well, you are exactly the sort of person we are hoping stops by just for a few minutes here and there. Everything we're doing is available on demand. This soon as we're done with this video it'll be available on demand on LinkedIn where you are. It's also available on YouTube. And then since you are in meetings and in business and busy, we do have short form videos and long form videos on LinkedIn as well. Ben, I know our short form videos get posted on LinkedIn. I believe all of our long form videos do as long as they're not over 10 minutes. Is that still the rule on LinkedIn now? Ben says yes. So every platform can write the rules the way they want to and they change from time to time. I try to stay up on it, but sometimes things slip. Westside says, what do you think about the book called the Power of Discipline? That may, forgive me, that may have been a book that I've reviewed recently. I, I do know that I have read extensively numerous books that deal with the subject matter of willpower and discipline and motivation. But I don't always instantly connect the title with the book, even if it's a book I like and recommend it. So apologies if you want to come on and show the book or reference it, that's fine. I do short plug here have a course on how to have self discipline. So if you're interested in that you can go to my website Media Train. Oh I'm on Amazon Live still. Sorry, not supposed to promote anything else. Sorry about that. So we're just out west side. I'll talk to you about that in a moment when we conclude with our Amazon Live. So what I want to do now is quickly do short form videos for our friends on Amazon. It'll be a quick recap. I just have to grab the book. Some of them fell off the table here a moment. So I'm going to be making videos that will then be posted directly on the Amazon Influencer page and or my store and then they, they're, they would be consistent to go on to the actual product page and then west side will come back to you. And Ben, if I don't have my Amazon page open now if we do have any comments from our friends just on Amazon, you of course let me know or put it right in the comments section that we can see. Okay so I'm going to get my cell phone ready. I typically make my Amazon influencer on demand videos on my cell phone. It just makes it easier for up for quick creation and uploading it right into the system. So I'm going to move the camera up and this will be a quick refresher. For those of you nice enough to join us on Amazon Live today you can you will be able to see these videos later. The Amazon lives go into an on demand section. You can see pre previous Amazon lives on my Amazon page and you'll also be able to see any videos I'm making now too. So let's just go through the videos for today. And I've got to switch to Video. Hangry A Startup Journey if you're at all interested in the world of entrepreneurialism. Even if you don't care about food apps, this book by Mike Evans tells you all the ins and outs of the journey. Check it out. Okay, so what I'm trying to do there is just something short, 15 seconds. Make it easy and accessible for people. Give them one good reason to check out a particular product. Breathe by James Nestor. If you're at all interested in how you breathe, how that affects sleep, every other aspect of your life, check this book out. There are a lot of surprises here. So again, I want to be very careful and respectful of the conditions Amazon puts out to its influencers. I do not want to be seen as giving any overt medical or health advice. So the review is a little bit, I guess you would call, generic. We live in the age of addiction. This book spells it out all the different ways businesses addict us, whether it's with sugar, with fat, with sweet salt, or entertainment. Check it out. And finally or not finally, the second to last, the Science of Happiness. The Science of Happiness by Stefan Klein. If you're interested in actually figuring out from a scientific standpoint how to be happier, what makes people how happier, how you can control your own environment to increase happiness, check it out. Okay, and now the last one is for this book that I'm. I'm enthusiastic about all the books I recommend. Otherwise I wouldn't recommend them because there's. I don't know what percent. I would say probably only 20% of books that I buy with my own money and read would I consider recommending. So I really want to give you the stuff that I care about a great deal, but some I care about even more than others. So this one, how to Start a Conversation and Make Friends is one of those. How to start a. And I typically don't make that many mistakes for these, but I just made one and it's always easy to just start over. So, to my friends on Amazon Live. Sorry you had to see that. But hey, we're here. We're live. We're. We're having a conversation that's a part of life. Okay, so let me switch back. How to Start a Conversation and Make Friends how to Start a Conversation and Make Friends by Don Gabor. This book. I need a glass of water. Excuse me, folks. That's. That's a part of live tv. It's part of live streaming. It's just a reality. You. You can choke up from time to time. And other. I'm feeling fine, don't worry about me, but. Just need a slight Sip of water there. Thanks so much for indulging me. Let's try again. How to Start a Conversation and Make Friends by Don Gabor. Don is the number one expert on small talk. You may think it's unimportant, it's actually hugely important to your happiness. So I'm going to do several on this one because you can do as many videos as you want in this particular program and I'm trying to give, not say the same thing, but try to be helpful to prospective customer book customers to give them more information. Have you ever felt awkward in a social gathering? Not quite. Quite sure. How to start a conversation? This book, how to Start a Car. Wow. So I don't know if it's because of the end of the day because it's, it's not the end of the day for our folks with Amazon Live, but this is sort of the end of a three hour stream. And you know what? Now, now I just deleted the first one as well. So we have to start over. Apologies to our friends on Amazon, but I want to really be helpful to potential customers of the book on Amazon. So we're going to start this again. How to Start a Conversation and Make Friends by Don Gabor. Don is an internationally renowned expert on small talk. You may think it's not important, it's actually the most important thing for your happiness and success. Okay, one version. Have you ever been to a networking event or party and all of a sudden you weren't quite sure who to talk to? How to Start a conversation. You're going to get a lot out of this book. How to Start a Conversation and Make Friends by Don Gabor. So I did two 15 second ones. I'm going to do a whole horizontal one now because some people like to watch videos in a horizontal manner and it just sort of leaves us, makes us accessible to people in a different way. So I've just switched my camera angle and forgive me, Amazon Live, folks, I'm making another video for Amazon as we speak on my cell phone in a different format. How to Start a Conversation and Make Friends by Don Gabor. This book is a classic. It's been updated. I've read the paper version, the digital version, I've recommended it to others because small talk, it seems inconsequential, but it's actually profound. Profoundly important. It affects relationships, friendships, business relationships. Your entire career could come down to how well you engage in small talk. So don't worry about being perfect. I just made a mistake right there. That's okay. The key is Keep going, have fun, focus on other people, learn to really listen. And it's a skill anyone can learn. So give this book a shot. Okay, So I tried to incorporate the fact that I made a mistake right into the video. So we'll see. Does it work? Does it not work? We'll see. Let's do one more. How to Start a Conversation and make Friends by Don Gabor. Small talk is one of these things that's not really taught in schools, elementary schools, high schools, even colleges and graduate schools. Yet it's critical, critically important to your long term success in the social arena, but also the business world. So many of the most important relationships start by just a casual conversation. You bump into someone at the coffee shop, you're at a networking event, you're at a conference and there's a free moment. Why not use that time to start a talk, a simple conversation? If you're not sure how to do it, check out the book. Don Gabor is the expert. Okay. All right, so that concludes our Amazon Live. I want to thank all of our friends on Amazon. It's always good to be a part of you and to be a part of, frankly, the most successful online commerce business in the history of the world. It's interesting to be a part of it. And thanks so much. Try to come here live every single day. See you tomorrow. Okay, so for the rest of you, we're all still here, so thanks so much. And what I typically do is I show you step by step how I post those videos right into Amazon. It's not that complicated, but there's just a whole number of steps. But we are out of time today. We've been going live for more than three hours and there are, at some point, there are limits. There need to be some limits, some constraints. So I want to thank all of you for joining me today. Appreciate your time and I'm hoping all of your communications lead you to more personal success and professional success. I'll see you live here tomorrow. But please, please subscribe. Make sure you're getting the videos that are going to come out later today and tomorrow morning and watch them, leave comments, share them like them, sign up for notifications and spread the word. Thanks. See you later.