Speak, Connect, Inspire: Mastering Storytelling - Sohaara

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We are happy to be with you today. This is our first edition of a series of webinars and events that we're going to hold with a lot of experts around the world. We are very lucky and fortunate to have our first guest speaker as T.J. walker, one of the world's experts in communication. As you know, Suhara is very big on communication and we will start with a hot topic, storytelling. Tj, welcome.

Good to be with you and good to be a part of your learning community here. Thanks so much for having me today.

Thank you. Tj, I have been actually, I want to say the story, how I got to find you. I was searching the top experts in communication, soft skills and storytelling because it's big in my mind for the community that we are serving around the world because I know a lot of great thinkers, but they miss that skill of communication and storytelling. So I feel that they're not fulfilling their potential fully at global stage just because of that missing ingredient. And I have always thought about it and they say this loop should be closed some somewhere. And then I put that question to a lot of engines, AI agents and Google, of course, of course. And then I got your name everywhere, one of the few names, so you need to know that also. That's how I got. And then, then I started to read about you and following your work and then I got convinced and I contacted you.

Well, that's, that's, that's a good learning moment right there. When you tell a story about your audience, they're going to pay attention and like you and they're going to remember it. So thank you for doing that. But it's a good lesson. Anytime you're giving a sales pitch, a presentation, if you can make your story about your audience, they'll really sit up and pay attention. But please continue.

Yes. So, so I contacted you and then the story continued and became better. Then right away, like the same day you answered me and you repl on LinkedIn like you're very responsive and I was impressed with that. And then I felt like, oh, like TJ is really answering his messages everywhere. And he's like, you were like, okay, tell me. I. You searched me quickly and then you searched Suhara and you said, I liked your mission. So let's talk. I'm interested. And then I told you about our mission in the beginning, about women, you know, inclusion in the economic force. And we are all about upskilling. Given opportunities for income, for skills, for fulfillment and dignity. That's all we do. But we do it in different shapes and different means and now different audiences as well. So I started that.

Speaking of. Sorry, speaking of different audiences, we are simulcasting today across all of your social media platforms as well as mine. So people who are in sort of my community who haven't heard of you, your website, your organization, can you tell a little more about who you are and what you're about?

Yes. Thank you, Gigi. See, that's my missing points in storytelling. I forget to say who I am. My name is Khadija Karteet. I am Moroccan American. I live in Boston. I'm the founder of Suhara. Suhara's name in the beginning was Fusion. And we were created for a purpose, which is how to include more people in the economic fabric by upskilling them, tooling them, and connecting them to the right opportunities. We started with women in the beginning two years ago, and now we are for everybody. And we think that we are solving the problem of work and especially with AI Right now, we're thinking about it in different angles. And you are one of the major people helping us about this because soft skills is a big thing now. Coming back with AI and Gen AI.

Great. Well, thanks for sharing.

So, tj, today it's about storytelling. I prepared a few questions for you, and let's see how we're gonna do it. I know you are. You know, I will start with telling my audience who you are and not. Not the details of it. I'm gonna let you say the details, but I know that, that you have coached a lot of presidents, a lot of CEOs, a lot of celebrities and world world leaders throughout your journey. You have been anchoring many TV channels and you were in Guinness actually for the. The biggest count of invitations in one day that I learned through researching. So. But please tell us more about what you have done throughout your career.

Well, I'm really like most people who are watching this, thinking, I'm not a good speaker. I didn't think I was a good speaker. I wasn't a natural born speaker. I was the shyest kid in class. When I was in junior high school and middle school and elementary school, I was the shy kid. Now, I wasn't born with any innate skill. I was the kid where a teacher came up to me one day in fifth grade, said, what's wrong with you? Why are you such a snob? You never say hello to me or anyone. I'm like, I'm not a snob. I'm just nervous and scared. So I was the scared kid. And my life changed when I was about to graduate from elementary school. My teacher came to me and said, you know, Tim, that's what the T stands for is Tim. Hey, I got good news and bad news. The good news is you're getting A's in your classes, but handwriting, you're getting a C. Your handwriting isn't good, but I have a deal for you. She was in charge of the elementary school graduation for Bruns Avenue, where I went to school in Charlotte, North Carolina. She said, I gotta find some kid to give a welcoming speech to parents, teachers and students. If you give that speech, I'll change your grade from a C to an A in handwriting. And I didn't know anything about speaking, but I thought, hey, I like A's. How hard could it be? So I agreed to do it. I stood up nervously, held my text speech. Good afternoon, parents, teachers and students. Welcome to our graduate. It wasn't the greatest speech in the world, but I got through it. Little applause afterwards, I got an A in the class. And I learned right then at an early age, at age 12, if you just stand up and speak, good things happen to you. And I've been speaking ever since, and good things have happened to me and my career ever since.

That's amazing. And that's amazing of the teacher to ask you that. So we need more people encouraging other people to take initiative, especially in speaking and showcasing what they know, what they think, right?

Yeah. And these days, there's opportunities every single day. You can't graduate from school every day. It's not like when I was young, growing up, you had to beg, knock on doors, begging, the Rotary Club let you give a speech. Nowadays, every single person watching this, everyone of any age at least if you're over 18, you've got an opportunity to speak every day right here on social media. We're on LinkedIn today, we're on Instagram, we're on YouTube. Speak. That's the number one way of getting better and improving and honing your storytelling abilities is just to speak, ideally on a daily basis. Now, you don't have to be. You don't have to go hog wild like I do. I do an hour and 15 minutes every day, seven days a week, and I post a dozen videos a day. You don't have to do that, but certainly once a week. Could you talk for three minutes, tell people one story about something you've done to improve your life or someone else's life? Do that, do that regularly. You will be confident, you'll be more comfortable and you can actually Become a master storyteller that way.

Okay, so, tj, I want to tell you, some, like the regulars like me, I am good at talking to people one to one. But when I go on camera, even though I watch myself and it's okay, I don't feel like I'm so upbeat to go to camera the next time. It's always like a dreadful moment a little bit before and then I say, okay, and I go, you know, and it's not too bad. But there are some people that are more introvert than me and less trained and more rusty and also hesitant. I want to ask you, also, there is another factor which is abundance. A lot of people are talking on online right now, and not all of them are effective. Some people are really. I. Some of the people I target are the good ones that are quiet. So those, they feel like they're so good at what they do and they're gonna not serve themselves if they go on camera and mess it up. So they prefer to stay in the, you know, not on the front line and keep writing or doing their work. So for those I want to talk with you today about greatness. I want to ask you, since you have coached so many great, what, like, what separates a great, great storyteller from an average one?

Part of it is just more experimentation, trying more. I don't think anyone's a natural born speaker any more than anyone is a natural born writer. No one at age 6 says, oh, I'm not going to go to school and learn how to write letters and learn about periods and paragraphs. I'm just going to write a great novel. No one does that at age 6. People who become great writers were taught every day systematically, here's how you write a capital letter. Here's how you use a period. Here's how you use a semicolon. It's a learned skill. Speaking is a learned skill as well. It just so happens to be. It's not a skill taught in most academic environments or schools, but it is one you can learn, and you can learn it by doing. You just said something I hear from clients around the world on almost a daily basis, which is, hey, I'm good talking one on one, but put me in front of a camera, in front of a large audience, and I'm no good. I hear that that's a very, very common problem, and it's really just a matter about getting comfortable with it. If you've ever had one interesting conversation with one friend in your entire life, you already have all the skills you need. To be a great storyteller in front of 5,000 people or in front of a video camera talking to people. If you want to see an example of a horrible, horrible public speaker, look at Mr. Beast when he was starting out on YouTube. His videos are still there. If you want to look at an example of a great communicator and a great storyteller, look at Mr. Beast and his videos he's doing now. Now, we don't all have to be in the entertainment business, but he shows, if you just do it regularly and put in the time of video after video or speech after speech, you get better, you build confidence, you build presence, your voice comes back. The number one problem most people have who are really good talking one on one to one friend is something changes in the environment. They're now no longer looking at a person, they're looking at a camera. So it feels alien, it feels strange. It takes them out of their comfort zone. So we tense up, we freeze, we look our, our face is less expensive. Our voice becomes flat and monotone. Maybe our eyes shift because we're trying to look at our notes. We stop doing all the things we do when we're in a normal conversation with a friend or a colleague. Now, typically when I start a group presentation training, I'll go around the room and I'll say, tell me, you know, where are you comfortable speaking where you're not comfortable? And invariably Jane will say, well, TJ, I'm comfortable speaking to small groups of three people, but if I'm speaking to 10 or more and I have to stand up, I'm uncomfortable. And Sanjay will say the same thing, but for him it's, maybe I'm only comfortable one on one, but not when I'm in front of five people. For other people, it's 50. I was working with a client once in a very large democracy in the other part of the world, and we'll call him James. Said, james, were you comfortable speaking or were you not comfortable? He said, TJ, I'm very comfortable speaking to small crowds, but I get nervous in front of large crowds. I said, james, that's completely normal. Tell me more. He said, TJ, yes, I'm very comfortable talking to 5,000 people at a time, but I get very uncomfortable when I'm speaking to 100,000 people at a time. Now, I happen to be a member of parliament and from a very famous family in a large democracy. I said, well, that's not what I hear every day. But the principle is the same. You're comfortable because you're used to speaking to 5,000 people. You're not comfortable speaking to 10 to 100,000. So what happens is we change ourselves. We all become little scared bunny rabbits. You're walking by in the street and there's a bunny rabbit, it freezes, thinking, oh, if this human doesn't see me, they won't shoot me and kill me and eat me. So they freeze. As humans, we do the same thing. So if you're speaking outside of your comfort zone, several things typically happen. Your hands stop moving, there's this perception that your hands are going to go crazy. No, that's not what happens to people. The problem is they freeze their hands, their face freezes, Their voice stays consistent and monotone and flat and boring. And they look and sound scared. So what you have to do is practice enough. Not so you act, but so you stop acting. People come to me all the time, whether it's a president of a country or a billionaire fund manager or a United nations official. They think I'm going to teach them how to act in front of the crowd or how to act on, on stage. The reality is I do the opposite. I teach people to stop acting. The problem most people have when they get in front of a camera or they get in front of people on a stage is they start acting scared. And when that happens, they completely change everything about how they normally speak. And they become frozen, stiff, monotone. And it takes them, it makes them feel uncomfortable themselves, but it makes them look comfortable to everyone else. And you want to do basically whatever you do when you're talking to your best friend over your favorite beverage in a nice restaurant. Now, maybe the subject matter is different, maybe you clean up your language a little. But the essence of good communication is the same. You are communicating in an engaged, comfortable, confident way. And you're illustrating your key points with stories. If you bump into a friend Monday morning at the office and they say, how was your weekend? You don't say, well, at 6:01 I woke up Saturday morning. At 6:02 I got out of bed. At 6:03, I went to the kitchen. At 6:04 I turned the coffee machine on. You don't do that. You say, oh my God, I had the best weekend ever. Oh, I had a horrible weekend. I got run into and I hit and run. You go right to a story. All human beings do that. And yet when we get up to give a so called formal presentation, we do the, you know, 6:01, I got up out of bed. 6:02, I turned the coffee machine on we do these boring data dumps and unfortunately that's not how human beings process or remember information. They remember it through the power of story.

People say to me just like a second, I read your newsletters every day because there's some think funds usually like a piece or two is fun to, for me to look at. And it's short. One of them is the Louver story that happened this week. And you said these, you know, when these events happen, these assets become more valuable, not because the asset itself is valuable because of the story. And you mentioned Mona Lisa. So that was like, it's like I learned something reading that about how value goes up thanks to stories.

Yes, and you're referring to the case of the Louvre museum in Paris where there was a theft recently. Millions of dollars were jewel of jewels. And my point was that, that our appreciation and understanding of art is quite often filtered through the story around it. The Mona Lisa was considered certainly a good work of art. It was known among serious art people. But the rest of the world had never heard of the Mona Lisa until hundreds of years after the death of Da Vinci. They only heard about it because it was stolen from the Louvre and it wasn't recovered for about a year. And all the publicity, all the attention made it the most famous painting in the world. And that's. That story is what influences that intrigue of wow, it was stolen. Where was it? Who got it? How did they get it back? That's what brings us in. I'm not saying it's a bad piece of artwork, but it was not the most famous piece of artwork in the world. The story behind it made it captivating. And the people who are most successful in life are not necessarily the people who work the longest hours who got the highest gpa. It's quite often people who have good skills and a work ethic, but they're able to package that with their storytelling ability. And it doesn't have to be what you think of as the silver tongued orator. Elon Musk is kind of awkward on stage, yet by many metrics he's the best storyteller in the world right now. Because the story he tells about the future of Tesla gets investors so excited they give him such a higher valuation than virtually any other company in the world because they are buying into his story about the future of electric vehicles and robots and everything else he does. So that's why it's a crucial skill. I don't even like to call storytelling and public speaking a soft skill that makes it seem like it's a warm, cuddly little puppy or something. That's a hobby. I think of it as a hard skill. It is a hard, measurable skill, just as measurable as any aspect of accounting or physics or mathematics. You can measure it because if you give a presentation and when you're done, you go around and ask people, what do you remember? If they don't remember anything, you get a zero, you get an F minus. You can quantify it. If you give a presentation and you focus on a handful of ideas and when you're done, you go around the room and ask people, what do you remember? And they throw back the five ideas that you wanted to put a spotlight on. Well, now you succeeded. You are successful. That's five for five, 100%. That's an A. So part of what I do in my practice, in my online courses on places like Udemy and my own website and my in person workshops around the world is I try to get people to have a very quantifiable attitude when it comes to their stories, their speeches, their presentations. Because so many people who consider themselves hardworking and analytical, they want to bill 2000 hours this year if they're a lawyer. They want to quantify how much the company spends on electricity or toilet paper in a month. They stand up to give a presentation and all of a sudden their attitude is, well, as long as I get through it and don't make a fool out of myself, I'm happy. Well, why such a low standard? That's like telling your investment counselor, as long as you don't lose half my money this year, I'll be happy with you. I don't think anyone has ever said your goal when you're giving a presentation should be to communicate the messages that are important to you, that are going to motivate your audience to take some action that will benefit them and you. So you've got to hold yourself to highly specific goals when you're in a presentation, hold yourself accountable.

Yeah, tj, you say the lot. But I want to like, like a learner. I want to pinpoint some and dissect some of what you say as very mastered thing that is gelling in your brain into pieces to our audience. Like, I'm listening to you. So. And you mentioned Elon Musk with his storytelling. I agree fully that Musk is not the best communicator, but still his message goes through so well and it's in short bits. Like he's even like twitch. It could be a word or it could be A sentence and that becomes a meme or, you know, like people will mention it repeated. So the goal is fulfilled fully. So that makes me think about. Storytelling is not just a tool. It's wrapping. It wraps an idea inside it. So you have to have a strong content and then have that confidence and that mission in your head that allows you to tell. The brain tells the tongue, say it in that way. But when it comes out, the, the listener knows it's real. And that's what he does. He doesn't make it beautiful. He doesn't. He just looks for that exact term he wants to use for that situation and he does it, he says it. So that's for Elon Musk. You can, you can comment on my comment after. There is another thing because I know my audience needs some specific things. So for, for like these professionals, you know, they're not Elon Musk, but they're strong professionals or entrepreneurs who want to convince investors there is some mental exercise to be done before coming to speak so that you don't have to worry about the eyes looking at you and worry only about the message you're about to convey. A lot of people ask me, like, how come you go to the room and you don't? Because I'm more about what I want to say than who's listening. Because it doesn't matter. It could be the President's there, it could be anybody. What I care about is what I'm saying because I love it, I believe in it. And that's what makes my message goes. And I'm not like, good as, as you, but I want these messages to go to our audience because it's about how you feel about it, how you think about it more than who is the recipient of it. And I think Musk does that. So yeah, we can like, could you organize these ideas for our audience to.

One of the things Musk does, and you're right, he's not a conventional smooth talking guy, but he's always talking about something interesting. Electric vehicles interest people going to Mars. Interesting. Talking about interesting things. One of the problems so many people have in the business world in their own careers is they're not interesting. And they, they are handcuffing themselves because they tell themselves, I have to go through all the data. I have no choice. I have to go through this big bullet point, this big, this PDF, this PowerPoint deck. And I love to tell stories, TJ, but there's no time because they had to go through all the data. And that is the biggest thing that Stops most people from being a good communicator. Here's the first thing I do every time I work with a group of executives in a presentation training day. I'll go around the room. You know, bill, tell me the best speaker you've seen in your life in your industry. Now tell me every message point you remember. He'll say, oh, tj, everyone's boring in my industry. I don't remember anything. Sally, tell me about you. She'll remember, too. Sanjay, tell me about you. He'll remember three. I go around the room, and typically it's one or two messages out of an entire speech that people remember listening to someone in their industry. Every so often, it's four messages every six months, somebody will remember five ideas. Best speaker they've ever seen. Here's my real point here. Here's my real point. I always ask people, do you think everyone in your audience has a better memory than you do? No. We've just shown none of you can remember more than five ideas from a speech. So your first lesson in our day of training, never give a speech where you're trying to communicate more than five ideas. That's a huge breakthrough for people because if you go into a speech thinking, I've got all these data points, you basically destroyed your ability to communicate. And you've crowded out any time for actual interesting stories. Sorry, go ahead.

Yeah. Yes. Thank you, gj. So I want to ask you two things. Why do industries still stick with the pitch deck or the deck? Why that quantity over quality? I just want to have your feedback on that. Another thing is that I see storytelling evolving before it was formal, like a president. Shows like that, you know, status, there is formality. You can see it even in other cultures. Right now, they still maintain that formality in communication. But the US Is moving away from formal to authentic or spontaneous. So touch on that as well, because I am watching other countries going in that direction also, and their learning. So we want to share thoughts about the direction of communication.

Sure. So I'm going to say something a bit controversial. I'm going to claim that no one listening to this, watching this, no members of your community, none of your students will ever in their entire life give a formal presentation or a technical presentation or a PowerPoint presentation or a financial presentation. How can I say that? Because I'm a firm believer there are only two types of presentations in the entire world. It's either interesting or boring. From the audience's perspective, there's only two types of presentations. It's either, oh, this is interesting. Let me sit up and pay attention or wow, this TJ guy's boring. Let me sit back and check my email and notifications and text. That's the only thing going on in the audience's mind. So as a speaker, you have to have that mindset and you need to respect your audience. It's not that you got to be funny or entertain or do a little dance, but you really need to focus what you're saying in a way that you're delivering value to the audience and being interesting to them. I've never once heard people leave a conference saying, I hated the way that last speaker gave us so many interesting, relevant stories that had an impact on me and my industry. I've never heard anyone say that. And yet I have routinely heard people say, wow, that last speaker was so boring, they were dry as dirt. They should have just emailed it in and we should have gone to the golf, you know, the golf course instead this morning that I hear all the time. So to me it's not a matter of formal, informal, it's about are you going to be interesting and useful. Now when you say people tell informal stories, if you look at some of the most famous comedians, you know, Robin Williams, in the past when they were on the Tonight show, it seemed like they were giving just the most spontaneous answers to a question. Telling a story that just occurred to them. No, they rehearsed it 100 times quite often. So you can say something in a conversational way, not necessarily memorizing it, but saying it in a conversational way even though you said it a bunch of times. All of us do that. If someone asks you, where are you from? Or how did you end up with your major in college or where did you meet your spouse? All of us have a story for that. It's not that we've memorized it, but we're saying it more or less the same way and bringing in the same elements because we know it might interest people. If we met a spouse and interesting way or we picked a college major that's out of the ordinary, there's a story behind of it. All humans are storytellers. The only difference is most people are good one on one about non business things, but when they're in a business situation, they get a little nervous and they say, oh, I'm not a storyteller. Let me, let me play it safe and stick to the facts and read my, my script or read my PowerPoint slides. You asked why do people use PowerPoint slides? It's because it's easy and lazy for the speaker. Hey, I don't have to practice. I don't have to remember anything. I don't have to rehearse. I don't even have to get familiar. I can just stand up and read. So that's why it's used. The only problem is this. There's very few guarantees I'll give your audience today, but here's one I will give you or your money back. Your audience doesn't care what's easy for you. If you are the speaker, the presenter, the trainer, nobody cares what's easy for you. They only care about themselves. And I don't mean that in some cynical way. That's just. That's human nature. People are looking and listening to you, thinking, how can I value? How can I get value from this? How can I learn from this? So good speakers realize that. So nothing you do should be done to make it easy for you. It should be good for your audience. Like right now, it'd be much easier for me to look at you. I can look like this right now at my screen. The problem is if I do our whole webinar like this, it's going to make people wonder, was TJ checking out Facebook now? Is he doing email? Because it doesn't look like I'm engaged with you. I'm actually looking at you right now, but it looks like I'm staring off the floor or my cell phone or something. Now I'm actually ignoring you and I'm staring at my video camera through a glass of a teleprompter. I'm not using the teleprompter now, but that's what I see. It's not easy for me, but I'm doing it to make the audience feel more comfortable.

So you're, you're looking at the camera now, not to my face. Is that what you're doing?

I want you to feel like I'm looking at you.

Yes. Yes. How about now? Do I look at you more better when I do like this?

I can't tell because I'm looking at my camera. Now I'm going to look at you. Go ahead.

Because, yeah, I can. Yeah, I can see you when I talk.

I'm going to go ahead and make you full screen. Go ahead and tell me what you're doing. Where are you looking now?

Now I'm looking at the camera. Do I look like I'm looking at you?

Yes. I feel like you're looking at me and listening to me and respecting me. Now look at the screen.

Okay. I'm looking at myself now in the screen right now.

Yeah. So now you look sort of distant off, unfocused and not as comfortable. So it's a minor little thing. Is it the end of the world if you are not looking at the camera? No, but what I try to do in my training is to give everyone every little extra added plus to help them come across their best. Because part of what makes us nervous when we get up to speak is the fear of, oh, I may look nervous, I may look stupid. That in turn sets off this negative flywheel where we actually make ourselves more nervous. If you get up to speak in front of people in a live audience, or you're speaking to them on camera and you already know exactly how you're coming across, and you're convinced you're coming across the best you can, it actually becomes impossible to get nervous. The nervousness comes from that fear of the unknown. And that really leads me to my number one principle of storytelling, which is practice on video until you see what you like. I'll never forget my first time. It was 20 years ago. I was over in Eastern Europe, working in a small country. It only recently left the Soviet Union. I was working with the Prime Minister and his staff said, hey, whatever you do, don't change his speech. We've been working on it for months. We are in a private oral dictator's palace. He wasn't a dictator, he was the prime Minister, but it was from the old days. It was a palace, remote part of the country. Were surrounded by his bodyguards with machine guns. And the prime minister says, dj, do you mind if I practice my speech in my native language and we'll go from there? I said, sure, no problem. He stands up, head down. He's reading his speech in his language, boring, flat, monotone, no I expression. We record it, we watch it together. He turns to me and says, well, tj, what did you think? And I thought, wow, this guy was incredibly boring and awful. But do I really want to say that? I mean, here, surrounded by guys with machine guns, I don't know where the US Embassy is. I don't know if he's going to take criticism kindly. But I finally said to myself, you know, he's paying me a bunch of money for honest feedback. I'll tell him I said, well, Mr. Prime Minister, I have no idea what you said, but with all due respect, you bored the heck out of me. He looked at me, he looked at the guys with guns. He looked back at the screen and he said, you're Right. It is insanely boring. I wouldn't want to watch that. With that, he took his speech, he tore it up and we threw it on the ground. He said, okay, let's start over now, Mr. Prime Minister, what do you want to do? Let's get a fresh notepad. Let's just brainstorm on every idea you really have to have this audience knowing to do what you want them to do. We came up with about 10 ideas. I said, guess what? Way too many. Put them in priority. He put them in priority. And I just scratched off the bottom five. We're going to focus on these five now. Tell me a story for each one of these points involving a real conversation with a real person about a real problem, where you were, how you felt, how it was resolved. So we took literally 10 minutes just jotting a few notes on a single sheet of paper. He said, okay, let me give it a try. Turn the camera on again. He stood up. Now he wasn't tempted to have his head down reading because it wasn't word for word, it was just a simple outline. He gave the speech. Now the eye contact was good. Now he was gesturing. Now his face was animated. Now he was telling stories about how he'd actually helped people and constituents. We recorded it, watched it. Soon as it was done, he jumped up. He gave me a big hug, said, dj, you're a genius. I love this. I said, well, I'm not the genius. This was in you the whole time. All you have to do is do it like that. So it's not a function of. It's not as simple as being natural. The natural thing to do is read a speech. If speechwriters write a speech for you. But the natural, but the effective thing to do is to be how you are when you're communicating one on one, telling stories. So he went on to deliver the speech that well, and it was well received. So it all comes back to that principle. You got to watch yourself on video to know. You cannot judge a presentation based on the slide deck. You can have the world's greatest looking slide deck and every single person in the audience can have their head on the floor fast asleep. You didn't communicate anything. So you've got to really see what it looks like. When I was starting out in this business 40 years ago, it was expensive hiring a local TV reporter with a big 60 pound camera. And nowadays we're all surrounded by video cameras. It cost nothing. So that's my number one message to people, is if you want to be completely confident, if you Want to eliminate nerves. Whether it's a job interview, whether it is a presentation, a briefing, a keynote speech, regardless of what it is, the number one way to build confidence and eliminate nerves is to simply practice on video until you like what you see. Well, dj, how many times is that? As many times as it takes. It might be once, it might be 10 times, it might be a hundred times. Do it until you like what you see. Because everyone watching this and all of your students has a tremendous wealth of experience watching speakers that are awful. We all know what bores us. We all know what we don't like. So if you look at a video of yourself speaking and you think, wow, that's dull as dishwater, I wouldn't want to watch that. You're right. You know, people come to me saying, you know, tj, teach me to be more confident. More confident. They're expecting me to say, meditate or take a beta blocker or drink green tea, and I like green tea. Or they expect me to say, imagine your audience in their underwear. Well, that's a horrible advice. Depending on your audience is either too disgusting or too exciting. That's bad advice. The number one way to get over nervousness is to see how you're coming across and be convinced you're interesting. And to say to yourself, when you're watching a video of your own presentation, wow, if that weren't me, I would watch that. That's pretty interesting. That is what solves the problem. Not imagining a standing ovation.

Great. Thank you, tj. So I took from you his inner really selling your. Your communication to yourself. You have to like what you're doing so that you're comfortable giving it to others. Another thing is you said, watch yourself. Would you, like, record videos and give it to some other people you trust so that they can look at it and tell you their feedback?

Yes, but not the first step. The very first step should. Should be you watch it and figure out what you don't like. Because again, everyone has experience seeing videos and seeing speakers they think are awful and boring. So if you are practicing a business presentation, you have to give next Thursday. Ideally, you start it a week in advance. So if it's. If it's. If today is Thursday, I can practice it, record it. If I'm watching it and I'm thinking, okay, here I am. My name is TJ Walker at Media Training Worldwide. I coach people how to look. If I'm watching that, I don't need feedback from anyone else. At that point, I can tell, wow, I look awful. My eyes are darting back and forth, my voice was monotone, my head was down. I don't need to even waste anyone else's time getting feedback. Use your own judgment. For starters, I When you get it to the point where you think, hey, I've tried everything, I think this is the best I can do. Then test it in front of an audience. But here's the number one thing you want to ask them. Whether you're practicing in front of colleagues, you know, five people at lunchtime, or you're sending them a video, the number one thing you want to ask them is tell me what do you remember from this presentation? Because if you have colleagues, friends, family, others, they're going to want to be supported, they're going to want to be encouraging. So if you just say, hey, here's my speech, what do you think they're likely to say? Oh, Gail, good job, good job. That's not helpful. Oh, you'll do fine. You seem great. What you want to do is ask them, tell me every message you remember. If you are using a PowerPoint slide, ask them every slide you remember or that they remember. If you've given a typical PowerPoint slide and they don't, and they say, oh, the whole presentation looked great, it was really professional, and you say, okay, tell me every slide you remember and they don't remember anything, you should now take those slides, tear them up, throw them in the garbage can. You now have empirical evidence it didn't work. The whole purpose of a slide is to help your audience remember your key messages. It's not to be the poor man's, the poor woman's teleprompter. And unfortunately, that is how people use their PowerPoint slide. Not effective at all.

TJ, I would like to ask you a nuance for if you see a difference in effectiveness or tools or techniques of storytelling between founders of startups or entrepreneurs in general and people who are employed and professionals, given the context of the mission. So do you think these, this category needs something different than the other category or for you, it's the same formula?

Well, one differentiation at some level, if you are a startup founder, and let's keep in mind there's, there's millions of companies that are started and are founded every year around the world. There are only a few hundred who get venture capital. And what we think of is, you know, the Facebooks, the Googles. Of those, there are only a handful that really survive and go public or acquired in a really big way. So the people who do that generally are good storytellers even if they might seem sweaty and nervous, because Mark Zuckerberg when he was 20 years old, wasn't anybody's idea of a silver tongued orator. Bill Gates, even in the middle age, seemed very nervous. Many people remember him when he was speaking in a deposition in front of the United States government for antitrust. And he was like this, hunched over, rocking. And that was the only thing they remember from his presentation was how awkward and nervous he seemed. But at some level, both those men had great stories to tell. You know, Mark Zuckerberg is, you know, we want to connect you to the whole world. And Bill Gates, the story was, you know, we want to have the stuff that runs your, I'm not using his word, the stuff that runs every computer in the world. So they had a story about how they had revolutionary product that was going to be useful to the entire world. And that's a part of why they gain such credibility that they could raise a lot of investment capital and get a lot of customers quickly. At some level, storytelling is like any other communication. Now, not everyone can write a Pulitzer Prize winning novel, but everyone can learn how to write an effective cover letter. Resume, a paragraph, a report. If you follow certain procedures, start a sentence with a capital letter and with a period. So in all communication, there's always an aspect of style and substance. If you need, if you're in desperate need for a new trainer on accounting skills for your, for your organization, you need them full time. I could send you, I could have the best resume in the world, all the credentials you need. If I send you a cover letter where I don't use any capital letters and I don't use any spaces between the words and I don't use any punctuation, what's going to happen to my application, to your company? You're probably going to look at that cover letter and just throw my resume in the garbage. Because my style of how I wrote that letter overwhelms the substance of my resume. On the other hand, imagine I've written the most beautiful letter ever. Paper's nice, the punctuation is great, the style is great. Spelling, everything's perfect. And then you look at my resume and I've never had any experience other than flipping hamburgers for two weeks at McDonald's. You're not going to hire me either because I didn't have the substance. So when all communication, it's never about style versus substance, you always have to have both. We know that when sending a cover letter and a resume, but a lot of Times people trick themselves, they fool themselves, they delude themselves into thinking, well, I'm not a public speaker, so I'm just going to get up and go through the facts and let the chips fall where they may. Horrible attitude. It's a different skill set, not harder. It doesn't take a high IQ to be a great speaker. It just takes learning a process, learning a new skill set that I happen to believe anyone can learn.

Great. Yeah. Thank you, gj. It's a big takeaway. It's substance plus style. Yeah. And I heard it over and over throughout the discussion. And the points that you. You brought, which is Elon Musk, Bill Gates, also. I agree, the communication is. I mean, it's not his 40, but there is a message behind that communication, so you can't ignore that. Also, Mark Zuckerberg, I watched some of his old videos. It's not. I mean, it's not. His communication is not what brought him here. And we can.

But he's getting. In his defense. And I'm not a Mark Zuckerberg fan. It's gotten much, much better. He looks so much more confidently.

After all the issues that Meta had with the public, he hired experts to rebrand him as the person. Actually, that's what I heard. I didn't follow that very closely.

I mean, he's learned to speak Chinese. If he can learn to speak Chinese, he can learn to speak English in a way that's engaging because for many people, they still have memories of him being interviewed early in his career by the tech journalist Kara Swisher. And he was so nervous, he completely swept through his entire jacket and shirt. And she had to, like, say, you know, you got to take your jacket off. You look like you're going to die in front of us. So he's had, you know, he's paid his dues, and now he speaks so often. It's. It's very hard to be nervous about something that you do frequently. And the thing about CEOs and founders is they spend successful ones. They spend most of their time communicating. You have to, whether you're running a big company or a small one, you have to spend your time speaking to clients, speaking to customers, speaking to investors, speaking to the media, speaking to your own vendors, speaking to your own employees. So leaders, whether they are a CEO or a founder or in the political world, spend most of their time speaking. They're not actually spending most of their time typing away somewhere or doing research. That's why it's such a critical skill.

Exactly. Tj, thank you. So much for saying that. Because communication really is what matters at the end. Like we. We learn math and physics and science and business. But really what we do every day that wraps that thing, that delivers that thing every day is communication. But the world does not highlight the importance of that skill that much. Some people got it, but not everybody got it. So there is a need for democratization of the awareness of the. The necessity of communication. Actually this why I chose to this topic storytelling as first because I thought it's the biggest skill that we can teach our audience as foundational. And you say something is like founders, they have to do it every day. So if they don't like it, I really don't want to live their life because it's really dreadful life. Every day you wake up I think you don't like to do and you do not good at. So it better to start with that, you know, at least embrace it and have your own think about it so that you can do it naturally. Then you can go to your, you know, research, technology, whatever you do as core.

Yeah.

So yeah it's.

And realizing I don't, I mean I don't really like to drive, but I drive every day because it's important to get. It's easier than walking sometimes. Especially if you're going 10 miles, so 6. I believe successful ambitious people and certainly your students are realize whether I love it or not, I gotta be good at it. You might not like writing a memo, but at some point we all have to write a memo at some point. So learn to master the craft and learn what's different and unique about it. Because here's what messes people up a lot. They think of speaking. They think of their college professor. Well, if you're my college professor, you can stand up and do a boring data dump. You can stand up and speak and never give stories. Just write stuff down, lecture and be really boring. And it will work. Because you have a power relationship over me. You can say, TJ I'm giving you a test next week and I'm going to write down everything you say, study it, read it, memorize it, do extra readings. Because if I flunk your test, I flunked the course. If I flunk the course, I lose my scholarship, I get kicked out of school. My parents are disappointed me. I have to go live down by the river in a shack and work at McDonald's and eat cheese. So you have tremendous power over me. If you are a teacher, a professor, a high school, a college, a graduate school teacher, I'm A big believer that in the business world, the civic world, the political world, every other world, it's not like a university or a high school teacher teaching, because the power relationship is different. If you're hearing a politician speak or even your own boss speak, it's unlikely they're going to come to you and say, here's a test. And if you don't answer all the questions right on what I said, I'm flunking you or I'm firing you. We don't have that pressure. So it's much harder to get audiences and the adult world, especially the business world, to remember our ideas. And this is a key, key concept that messes up a lot of people because they're still thinking, well, I want to be like the, the math professor who just listed, you know, 89 theorems on the blackboard quickly and dazzled us with how bright he was. That doesn't work in business communication. You have to narrow the focus down. The second you tell yourself, well, I'm giving a technical presentation, therefore I have the right to dump data and I don't have time for stories. You've already failed. You've, you've basically begged people, hey, everyone, pick up your phone and check your email and text and completely ignore everything I'm about to say. Why would you do that? Yeah, let me shift gears if I could shift gears, because this is a really important point, similar to what you brought up earlier. People often ask me, what's the best eye contact to have? If you are giving a presentation and there are people in the room, and it's not just a camera, it really comes down to three types of eye contact. There's the people who are so awful and nervous they're reading off the script. You could stand on the front row and light your hair on fire, they'd never notice. That's the bottom 1%. Then you got about a 98.9% of people who are doing some version of the windshield wiper. Maybe it's fast, maybe it's slow, but if you're in the audience, you never really feel like they're looking right at you because they're scanning the whole room at the same time. Better than just reading the paper. A paper or a PowerPoint, but you don't really form a connection. That's not what the best speakers in the world do. One of my trainers used to work with former US President Bill Clinton just as a low level campaign aide. And they were out campaigning for a day. It was reelection time 30 years ago, end of A long day. They were sitting around a table, their shirts were rolled up, having a beer, playing some cards. And my guy Andy turned to him, said, Mr. President, you nailed this speech today. You had 10,000 people in the palm of your hand. How did you do it? And President Clinton turned to Andy and said, very simple, Andy. I didn't talk to 10,000 people today. I picked one person in the audience and I had a private one on one conversation with that person for a full thought. Now, it's only a couple of sentences. It's only about four seconds. And then I went to another person in the audience, and I had a private one on one conversation with that person for a full thought, four or five seconds. And then I did it again. Here's the thing, Andy. When people see me, look at them, it really forms a connection, number one. Number two, everyone else who sees me, they don't see my head going around there. So I look steady and confident. It also makes me more relaxed because I'm only focusing on one person. And here's the thing, Andy. This works even when there are bright lights in my face and I can't see see anyone. If I just focus on one spot for a couple of sentences, 30 people in that area 100ft out will all feel like, wow, he spoke right to me. And this is how you really have the best eye contact if you want to be in the top 1%. Okay, so what did I just do there? I gave a purely technical presentation just now. I could have put up a PowerPoint slide. So three types of eye contact, you know, bottom 1%, reading middle 98.9%. Windshield wiper, top point, 1%. Hold eye contact for two sentences, five seconds. I could have put it all up in a data format. No one would have remembered it. Instead, I packaged it with a story. The story happens to be true. And in this case, it was a third party story. I wasn't even there. But it allows people to visualize it because there's a setting, former president, an aide, a table, cards, beer, an audience of 10,000. There was a problem. How do you connect with 10,000 people? There was the emotion. It's a little story. It only took a minute and a half to say, but people remember it. Sometimes years and years later, they come up to me and they still remember it. So that's really the biggest key, is you got to narrow your messages down to a handful. Now you have time to illustrate each key message with a story that makes it understandable and, more important, memorable to your audience, because that's how you create change.

Thanks, gj. I learned this one from you today. To talk to many people and to like focus on a group or one for one full thought. So I learned that from you today. Thank you. I also learned something. There is something about like effectiveness in storytelling. It's not just the lovability of it, is the memorability of it. So I heard that from you over and over today. It's not like I liked it. You were good. It's like what did you retain from what you liked?

That's really what it's about. What do people remember? Because I ask audiences, people I train a major corporations, institutions around the world. I always said, again, tell me the best speakers you see. What do you remember? People only remember two things. They remember the passion someone has or if they're funny and they remember the stories. The stories stick, the facts fall away. They don't remember the facts. It's different if it's a college classroom, but in the business world, if you're speaking, they remember the stories and that is why it's effective. So I want to leave your audience with the strongest recommendation to think of the stories in your own life. It's not about staying up till 2am writing and rewriting and being creative. The best speakers in the world often have the least amount of creativity. They're simply retelling actual experiences they had helping customers, clients, prospects, what the problem was, where were they, how did they resolve? How did they feel about it and how was it resolved to benefit people. And simply retelling those anecdotes can often be the most effective communication and sales tool ever. Good luck.

Thank you. Thank you. Gj. We'll meet you another time for another topic. Thank you.

Great. Before we go, for people listening, especially my audience, not familiar with you as much, give it, give the website and the other types of courses you have. You do include access to my communication skills courses. But the the website again is suhara.com.

And it's spelled S O H A A R A dot com and they can find it also on mobile as an app. And we do more than upskilling. Upskilling. We do English for work because we started from growth markets and most are non. The English is number two or three. We do soft skills and we are starting financial literacy and digital literacy because we're going after foundational skills like we just said in this discussion. So a lot of people overlook those. So we want to take care of them. We do also tooling. So a lot of tools like investor list like templates, like conferences. We do connecting. So we connect them to experts like you or like other experts. And we connect them to investors, customers, co founders and employees, employers. So it's about the matrix for work and success.

Great. Well, thank you so much and thanks for including me as a part of your community. Looking forward to seeing you again next month.

Thank you. Take care.