The Best Techniques for Condensing Slide Content for a Presentation

How do you keep from overwhelming? Hi, folks, we're here live on TJ Walker. Thanks so much for joining. We're going to hop right in and do a long form video. My colleague Ben is with us. But Ben, I need you to hit mute because I'm hearing typing as I start. Okay? Oh, yeah. So you've done it. Great. All right, we're going to hop right in, creating long form content for communication skills for my various social media channels. Thanks so much for joining me. I will be taking your questions today. Please post your questions in the comments section. Thanks a lot. We're going to get the timing right on this. How do you keep from overwhelming your audience with too much information by putting in too many slides and other visual distractions when giving a presentation? Well, it's really very simple. It's all about the planning process. If your planning process is, is, let me gather more facts, let me gather more information. Let me put more and more bullet points on slides and add more slides and add, add, add, add, add. And then think about what to take out. You've already lost the game. You'll never win this battle. You're going to overwhelm your audience. And it's not that they're going to be thinking, oh, gosh, there's so much great information here. Let me suck it all up. No, they're going to think, this is just a chaotic mess. Let me ignore the speaker and check my cell phone because my friends and colleagues are sending me one message at a time in a text message or an email. So let's start off at the very beginning. The beginning of a presentation is not. Well. Here are 29 different slides I used last month or my colleague used last week. Let me save time by recycling them and going through them quickly. It cannot be. Here's the big marketing document our marketing team spent $200,000 researching. So I have to put all these message points into every presentation. That is not a prescription for success. When it comes to presenting, you've got to start off at the very fundamentals, and that is asking yourself, what is it I want my audience to do after hearing me present? Do I want them to buy from me? Do I want them to approve a budget? If it's a job interview, do I want them to hire me? Do I want them to vote for me? Do I want them to support my tax increase or my tax cut? What is it you want them to do? Now you got a brainstorm on every possible message point that you think is going to motivate your audience. To do what you want them to do. Brainstorm could be 5, 10, 15, 20, 50. Now, all these old slides you have may come in handy, but here's the most important part. Next, put them in priority. Get rid of anything that isn't in the top five. You gotta throw away your babies. As great editors talk about their writing, this is crucial. You now have to apply the very same thing to every slide you have. So ask yourself, when you're showing a slide, what's the worst thing that could happen? If I didn't show this to the audience, would anything really bad happen? If the answer is no, don't show it. Ask yourself, is this a nice to know or is this a have to know? You've got to be greedy and selfish when it comes to ideas you're putting in front of your audience. Because you have to realize it's hard to get audiences to remember ideas from any speaker, even if you're the best speaker in the world. So you don't want to reduce your chances of getting your most important ideas remembered by throwing up lots of clutter. So you've got to apply stringent rules and standards for every single slide. It's not. Well, the team already spent a bunch of time on it, and the graphic looks nice and it's the same color scheme and the punctuation is nice, and it's been approved by investor relations. That cannot be the standard of what you use to submit. And put a slide in front of your audience. That's a horrible standard. Ask yourself, does this slide absolutely 100% make an idea more understandable and more memorable than you simply saying it out loud? If you cannot say yes to both questions, take that slide, tear it up, throw it in the garbage can, or better yet, hit delete. Or you can email it to people if they want more information or give it as a handout. But whatever you do, I'm begging you, do not project it on a screen while you're talking to people. It is doing no good. So when it comes to slides, handouts, visuals, anything, you need to apply a strict scrutiny to it. You need to hold it to high standard. Now, here's the ultimate standard. If you absolutely have positively want to make sure your slides are helping your audience and therefore helping you, you need to apply this standard. This is a very advanced standard. Very few people do it. It works 100% of the time. If you're giving a PowerPoint slide show, if you're giving a prepared presentation to 30 executives on on Thursday, whether they're clients, prospects Potential investors. And you want to know if a slide is working or not? Test it. That's right. You can actually test slides to see if they work. Now, how do you do that? Do you ask people, one at a time, you like this slide? Completely worthless? They'll probably say, oh, yeah, it looks nice, It's a nice logo, Color scheme looks nice. Complete waste of time. What you need to do is find two or three people who are similar to your audience that you're going to be speaking to on Thursday. Get them together on Tuesday lunchtime or during the workday after hours, and don't tell them what you're doing. Don't say, I'm trying to figure out if these slides are great or not. That's going to skew the results. Instead, simply give your presentation when you're done with the present and you've shown them the slides along the way, just as you would in real life. For Thursday, when you are done with your presentation, ask your audience. Ask your focus group. Even if it's one person, tell me every single slide you remember, what was on it and what was the message behind it that you took away? Now, this is going to be eye opening for you because what you're going to find is most people are going to say, you know, I don't know. I'm sort of getting the sense that you know what you're talking about and you're smart and you're working hard. That means you didn't communicate much. Every single slide where someone in your test group says, oh, I remember this particular slide, and they're describing it to you and they're getting the description accurate, and they can tell you what the message was and it's what the message you intended. You now have 100% empirical evidence that that slide works great, congratulations. Keep the slide. Use it in real life on Thursday knowing that it's effective, it's been tested, there's proof it works. Now, here's the problem. Chances are the vast majority of your slides are not going to pass that test. And now you've got a choice. You could say, well, I'm going to ignore the evidence and just throw my garbage out to the audience, knowing it doesn't work. But hey, I'm taking the time to create these slides, so what the heck? That's in fact what most people do. That's not what any good speaker does, and it's the worst nightmare of any great communicator. So use this evidence. If you have a slide that people don't remember and they don't get the idea behind it, throw it away. Here's a little time saver for you. Any text you have, there's a bullet point with text. In my professional experience, having tested audiences all over the globe for decades, in every culture, in different languages, nobody ever remembers a slide with a bullet point in text. Well, why is that? Because text, words are made up of letters. Letters are abstractions, part of higher level thinking with human language. Well, guess what? You already have a way of communicating language. It's by speaking. So you putting text up on a slide doesn't really add anything if it's just words can come out of your mouth. The beauty of a slide is to put a visual in front of people that people can see. So that will eliminate all your bad slides if you follow that rule. Now, the other thing to keep in mind is do not not ask your audience to multitask. Your audience can do one thing at a time. We human beings love to think we can multitask. I like to think I can multitask. I'm trying to look at my screen here and my mixer here and see how many people are live and all these other things. But all I can really do is think about this topic and talk to you at one moment and do that well. So if you're putting up a slide, people to look at, Close your mouth. Stop. Look at it. Let them look at it. Now, here's the part that's going to blow your mind away. You may have never seen it before, but when you are speaking, take the slide down. That's right, take the slide down. Show nothing. What I do is I build a blank screen in between every PowerPoint slide. It's just a black screen. So when I advance one, it's black. It appears as though the projector is projecting nothing. Or if it's a television screen, it appears as though the TV's been turned off. Guess what happens to the audience? They have no choice but to look at me at that particular moment so they don't have to make a decision. Do I look at the screen? Do I look at what the speaker's saying? Do I look at hand notes? There's none of this multitasking choice. I'm asking my audience to do one thing at a time. If there's a screen, look at it. I'm not going to talk to you while it's up there. If I'm talking, nothing else interesting, you're going to look at me and listen to me. Now, if you want to use handouts, that's Fine, I use handouts, but do it in a very specific way. Typically, if I finished an entire section on a particular topic, let's say I've just finished a summary of top 10 tips on how to deliver an effective PowerPoint presentation, I would stop, give a handout that lists the top 10 tips, and I would actually stop, not say anything, wait for people to look at it, read it, wait for heads to come back up and look at me, and then I would proceed or I would give the handout at the end of the presentation. You want to be keenly aware of the attention of your audience. You want to be jealous of your audience's attention. You do not want your audience focused on their cell phone unless you specifically ask them to tweet some brilliant comment you think you just made. Even then, I'd be very careful. You think they're tweeting you and they're checking sports scores and weather for tomorrow's ball game. So be conscious of your audience's attention. Anything can distract them. Too many slides can easily distract people. But you can have five slides. If all five are boring slides with no visuals and too much complexity and a lot of words, those slides are going to detract them. If you say stuff that's boring, that is going to distract your audience because they're going to fall asleep, zone out, start talking to people or their cell phone. So these are tips you need to follow if you really want to connect with your audience, communicate with your audience and not allow your visuals, your slides to detract from you or your message. Okay, that is finishing our first long form segment of the day. I want to say special. Hello. I'm going to hit stop on the, on the record of the, of the 4K version. So hello to everyone. Let me switch. Make sure I'm seeing my comments. We've got. Jag is joining us, says good evening. Jag, good to hear from you. You mentioned. Whoops, I'm. I'm appearing to be out of focus, so let me switch camera angles. So, Jag, let us know where you are today. Are you. If you're saying good evening, I'm guessing somewhere in Asia. We're glad that you're here. So thanks so much for joining us. And Jake, also let us know what your biggest communications challenge is right now. What are you working on? Are you in? And I apologize, I'm getting distracted because I'm seeing myself. I'm seeing myself blurry. So we're in a relatively new studio here. We've worked out, I think Most of the kinks, but there's still some kinks here. And for some reason, when I am on camera three, this is camera one. What I just showed you was camera two. For some reason, when I'm in the close up in front of my computer on camera three, it's sometimes blurring. I don't quite know why. Let's try again. Head on over with me. Okay. It's supposed to do continual auto focus. It's supposed to latch on a face. And my colleague Ben is with us in the green room. Our producer, Ben. Is it looking a little blurry to you? Can you tell? It is. So I don't know if I've accidentally hit a setting. I'm not sure quite what's going on there. Regardless, I just did the first long form video. I'm going to do a short form video which means less than 60 seconds, which we have to do from camera angle to anyway. So let me go ahead and do that. And we are relatively open today. We're taking your questions. We don't have guest plan today, so I'll be taking your question. Anything related to communication skills, public speaking, presentation skills, speaking one on one, talking to employees, customers, clients, colleagues, family members. That's what we talk about here. This is a community where we all try to help each other become better communicators and therefore reach more success in life. Okay, so I'm going to do this same topic on slides. Do it in a short form basis. So how do you keep from overwhelming your audience with too much information from slides and visuals? The key is this one idea per slide and no more than five big ideas in your whole presentation. That way you don't use your slides as a dumping ground for more and more text. It should not be the poor man's, the poor woman's teleprompter. Okay, so that's a short form version. That's a short form version of that same topic. Obviously you can't go into every single nuance if you're trying to go from 10 minutes worth of content to 30 seconds. So we're still trying to figure out what's going on with my focus here. I don't mean my mental focus, I mean the actual focus of the camera. And Ben, are you still seeing a little bit of a blur? If you can. Let me. Ben is in the green room. Okay. So perhaps you can reach out to Muhammad and see if our other technical producer who's helped build this studio, see if you can get a hold of him and see if we can Find out any clue what's going on there. Again, I want to thank those of you joining us live today. Appreciate you stopping by. Later on in the program, we're going to be doing a continued series on how to make influencer videos. Amazon influencer videos, we'll be doing that. And I'll also be taking your questions live. If you would like to join us live. Happy to do so. We've posted the link, the streamyard link right here. And if you want to come on, you can join me live on screen and we can have a conversation, a dialogue, you can give a practice presentation and we can talk from there. So feel free to join us. Special hello to our friends on Facebook, on LinkedIn, Twitch X and Instagram. We're not live on TikTok today. We're still trying to figure out all the details on that. We've had a lot of great live sessions with Twitter all last week and hoping to. Hoping to get back on that right away. Let me try again and see if we can get anything else going on with the visual clarity for camera three, which is what I'm on right now here in our studio. Okay, so we're going to go to the next topic for short form. And this I think you can see. I'm not looking at you right now. Now I'm looking at you. We do this angle a little different to kind of simulate what a speaker is doing when they're up on stage at a conference speaking. So I'm going to do. I'm going to make a note. These are questions generated by Chat GPT calling information from all across the Internet. So I've done a short form and a long form on that one. Okay, here's the next question created by ChatGPT. How can I avoid the temptation to apologize excessively or dwell on mistakes during my presentation? Which is a perfect example. One of these tiny little niche questions I love because they don't come up that often, but they are important. You're making a presentation, you make a mistake and the human reaction is to, I'm sorry. Oh, that was awful. I'm so bad. I apologize. Don't do it. When you apologize, especially excessively apologize in a presentation. That's the most emotional moment of most presentations. It's also the most memorable. It's not the message you want to convey if you make a mistake. Just keep going. Most people will never notice. Okay, so that is the short form that was probably about 30 seconds long. My editing team will turn that into slightly fancier with music and edits and text and B roll that can be distributed out across social media. Now I'm going to do one that is a longer form that I hope can also be edited. We're still testing our camera three and I know I touched my camera slightly earlier today in the setup, but I don't think I adjust any settings and we're still a little bit fuzzy, which kind of defeats the whole purpose of investing in a new studio with state of the art cameras and 4K capabilities. So we'll continue working on that and trying to improve that. But meanwhile I'm going to switch to camera one. We're going to do a long form video on that same topic. So I'm going to hit record, want to make sure I'm framed properly. I'm going to take, try to take the papers out of the screen so they're not as dominant. And I want to time this because my goal is to make these about eight minutes long or longer and that way they qualify as sort of the most user friendly, algorithm friendly type of video for platforms like YouTube. But the most important thing is give great value. It's, it's better to do a 62 second video that's fantastic that people love than an eight minute video that's just so. So. Okay, going to hit my timer. You're giving a presentation, everything's going really well, but then you make a mistake. Hey, you're human and you want to be transparent, you want to be likable, you want to be real, relatable. So what do you do? I'm sorry. Oh, I made a blunder. You make a joke out of it. Here's the problem. If you apologize, especially if you apologize excessively during a presentation, it can overwhelm the substance of your message. Because when you apologize quite often, that's when ahahaha. The emotion is coming across your face. It can become the most emotional moment of an entire presentation. And the problem with that, it's not that emotions are bad. The problem is emotions are memorable. So if the most memorable moment of your entire presentation is you apologizing for something, then that's what people will remember. Not the actual content, not why they should invest in you, not why they should support your organization with all the budget funding you're requesting for next year, they're remembering that emotion of the mistake. I'll never forget one time I was conducting presentation skills training right outside of Washington D.C. with a lot of engineers from a major technical company, technical organization, and one of them was giving a presentation. Everything was going well. Nice PowerPoint slides going right along smoothly. But their projector stalled. Their laptop wasn't working. They hit next. Nothing happened. Hit next again. Nothing happened. Finally, the person got so exasperated, they went. They slammed the top of the laptop down, shutting off the PowerPoint project. Everybody laughed and they continued to go on and give their presentation. And it went well. So what's wrong with that? The problem is, the only thing anyone ever remembered from that presentation was that Apple action of slamming the laptop down, that frustration, saying, I'm sorry, this isn't working, and then going on. So we live in the real world. Mistakes happen. Blunders happen. Nobody's perfect. I'm not perfect. Nobody's expecting you to be perfect. It is human nature to make a mistake, say, oops, my bad, I'm sorry. Am I asking you to be arrogant and cocky and act like I'm perfect all the time? How dare anyone suggest I'm less than perfect? No, that's not what I'm suggesting. What I am suggesting is that for the vast, vast majority of mistakes you make in a presentation, don't apologize. If you need to make a correction, just say the actual number is 2 million, not 2 billion, and keep going. Don't say, oh my God, I said billion. That's crazy. That's so stupid. Why did I say that? I meant to say 2 million. No, just say the number is 2 million and keep going. Give yourself a brief little correction, trying not to act like you're flustered, embarrassed, and overly emotional about it. If all you do is forget a word for a second, don't say, oh, I'm sorry, senior moment. Just stop, pause, give yourself a second. Wait for the word to come to you. Keep going. No one is going to remember that it took you a second to remember that word. If you repeat yourself, start a sentence, but don't complete it and go back to the beginning of the sentence and start again. Don't apologize. People do that all day long, every day, in conversation. Even extremely intelligent, articulate people do that. No one's going to notice. No one's going to care. You want to act at all times when you're presenting. Comfortable, confident, relaxed, conversational. Not that you think you're infallible, not that you think you're perfect. But you're there. You're sharing ideas. You're sharing information. You're excited about it. You're passionate about it. If you stumble over a word or you get the wrong word there occasionally, don't worry about it. Do not apologize. Now, if something dramatic happens, a Piece of the ceiling falls down. When you're giving a presentation, it's your office and someone almost gets injured, of course you can comment on that. You can say, I apologize for the ceiling falling down on you. We're almost done. Everything appears to be safe. Do you want to try sitting over here? Or you may have to evacuate and give your presentation in the parking lot, but that's rare. It's extraordinarily unlikely that that's the sort of thing that happens to you. Typically in a presentation, the more common thing is you get a word wrong, a fact wrong. It takes you a second to remember because you're a little bit nervous and you waste time apologizing. Ultimately, your audience doesn't care if you're perfect. They don't want you to waste their time. They don't want to have to extend sympathy for you for making mistakes. They just want some idea that's interesting and useful and memorable. If you can do that for your audience, they will love you and no apologies will be necessary. Okay, so that was not eight minutes, but I still think that that was a lot of good content. So I think we can use that. And so that will be edited down by my team into a long form video. Video. So my colleague Ben, one of our producer, is with me in our green room. We're trying to solve a technical problem in that. Now that I'm on camera three, I'm blurry. Ben, do you have any other theories as to what has happened? Have we been able to get a hold of Muhammad or anyone else? Yeah, we. I got to Muhammad. It'll be able to fix it during a call. Okay, so we're going to work on that now. I don't want to seem like I am violating what I just talked about in this last video. So what we're doing here is a live show, and it's more than a show. I typically come to you Monday through Friday, 9am to noon Eastern time, where I sort of bring you into my workshop. I take you literally, figuratively, behind the curtains in my studio. And I show you what I'm doing as a communications trainer and as a communications expert who creates content. I've created, I guess, more than 3,000 videos just on this YouTube channel and thousands of videos from my online courses that are not on YouTube. So I created a lot of video. And what I'm doing here is it's a live show for you. It is for you. I answer your questions, I talk directly to you, but I also show you behind the scenes of me Making short form content, long form content for social media channels. And I show you sometimes making webinars that I'm doing, online courses, updates to courses. I show you all of this. So there are going to be times when I'm making mistake. I realize it. I'm announcing it to my editors so that we don't accidentally put the wrong thing in. I would not do this if this were a speech just for you or a training or a live webinar just for 300 people for a 60 minute webinar on Zoom. I would keep on going and do my very best. But I'm sort of taking you behind the scenes so you can see what goes on and realize I'm not perfect. Nobody's perfect. You've got to work on these things and tweak these things to make them better and better. So if you have any questions, comments, reactions to anything I'm doing or saying today, please post them in the comments section. If you're watching this on demand, later you can leave comments right on the video on YouTube and all the other social media platforms. So meanwhile, we're going to proceed to the next topic. Trying to do as many short form and long form videos today as possible. Quick program note. Tomorrow I have to head to New York to do to conduct some corporate media training and I know that I won't be coming to you live for at least a couple of days. I'm hoping by the end of the week. By Thursday, Friday we'll be back live, but I may be on location, not in the usual set, but broadcasting from a tiny little webcam on my laptop. So the production might not be as good, but we will be able to answer questions, be a part of the community, critique each other and have some fun too. So a lot of fun stuff going on this week. Let's go to the next topic. Okay, so that one, I'm needing to make a note that I did both the short form and the long form for that as well. Okay, next question. Again, this comes courtesy of Chat GPT. How can I demonstrate appreciation for the other person's input perspectives when talking to them at a meeting? Okay, let's do a short. I don't know if I have quite enough for the traditional YouTube long form of eight minutes, but I've got more than 60 seconds I can say on that. So let's start off with a short. We're going to switch to camera two and I'm going to move my bottle. I try to create a little variety. Sometimes this angle going here, sometimes the other, If you're conducting a meeting and a colleague is saying something, how do you show appreciation for that person's thoughts, their perspective? Well, one, actually look at them. Don't be staring at your phone and not look at them, number one. Number two, restate what they said. Make sure you really got it. If you take the time to summarize their point, they'll know that you listened. Beyond that, ask them, did I get it right? If you do that, they will feel listened to, they will feel respected. Okay, so that's the short form version of that one. Now I'm going to attempt to do a longer one. I don't think we'll go quite eight minutes, but we'll see. Camera one, I'm hitting record for the 4K version for my editing team to have more to play with. And try to remove the notes so that they don't distract as much. I'm going to take them out of the camera range. So you're in a meeting, a colleague is talking, they're putting forth their ideas. How do you really let that person know that you are listening to them, that you are respecting them? Well, for starters, you need to look right at them and not do what so many people are doing in meetings these days, which is uh huh, uh huh. And trying to multitask, looking at email, text, other information. So look at them. Not if you think you're getting the point. That's step two. Step three, try to summarize their point. I don't mean word for word like you were a stenographer, but in your own words, summarize what they said. That's step three. Step four. Then ask them, am I understanding it right? Did I get it right? So it's not just that you are listening, it's not just that you understood, it's that they now clearly see you're trying to make sure you are understanding them because you're asking them. Then if they say yes, that's exactly my point. Now we know there is a connection. Now the person knows you're not only trying to understand them, you're not only trying to respect them, you have understood them. Actual communication takes place. This is what's going to make you a more effective leader. This is what's going to make you effective at running meetings, whether you're a facilitator, a CEO or anyone else. Because all human beings want to be heard. They want to be respected. They want the status. Knowing my ideas are important and one of the reasons many corporations lose top talent. It's not necessarily because of pay, it's not necessarily because of the perks or the free sandwiches or the beer at lunchtime. No, it's because people feel like they are not listened to. They feel like their ideas don't matter. They feel like they are not a force in the organization. And sometimes it is simply a matter of listening to people in a deeper way, a more meaningful way. Now you need to act upon their ideas as well. It's not enough to simply listen, but the first step is making sure people truly understand that you're listening to them, you're getting their ideas, you are focused on them. We live in an attention economy. And something that is prized almost more than money these days is attention from other human beings. And if your colleagues feel like you're not giving them attention, they're going to feel slighted, they're going to feel ignored, they are going to feel undervalued. So that's why you've got to do everything you can to give attention anytime someone's speaking to you. Okay, so I know that that was not in fact eight minutes long, but they're not all going to be eight minutes or longer. So. So I do the best I can. My main goal, what I ask myself when I'm creating a video is not that I do 722 seconds or something like that. My main goal is have I delivered real value to someone who wants to be a better communicator, so if they listen to me, they would understand what I said and get one main idea of how to improve something they do so that they become more successful. And then I let the chips fall where they may in terms of time. But everybody has something to improve. And one of my own improvement goals is trying to get better at doing long form video content for platforms like YouTube, which typically value videos and retention of long, longer than eight minutes. But I can't get it right every single time. So that's my own immediate goal for improving as a communicator. What are your goals? I'd love to hear from you. Let me know what you're trying to do to become a better communicator. Right now, something else I'm trying to do is avoid distractions. And I'm actually distracted now because I see my face is looking a little fuzzy on this camera three that we're using and my production team we're talking about. And when I'm getting this close now it seems like it's clearer, but this is a little closer than I like to be. Ben is, is Everything clear now, the way I am. Yeah. Okay. I'm typically back here and it once again has gotten a little bit fuzzy, which makes me think somehow I've taken the auto focus off. I don't know why, but I guess for today I'll have to stand right about here. Okay, we are taking your questions, any questions you have about communication skills, public speaking, giving presentations, talking one on one, doing live YouTube shows like this, doing webinars, talking to people on Zoom, being interviewed by the media, going on cnn, all of those things we talk about right here. These are things I give people guidance on and train people on all over the world and have so for decades. Hi, I'm TJ Walker. This is the TJ Walker Success Show. We're all about helping you become more successful in life by improving your communication skills and improving your confidence in your communication skills. And let me step back a minute and define why those two things are different. Sometimes when I do a training with someone, their actual skills go way up, but their perception of their skills stays the same or even goes down. And that's not a success because the next time they give a presentation, if they think they're still doing poorly, they'll bring themselves back down. Other times, people might think they're great at presenting, be totally confident, but not actually be very good. So it's, it's entirely possible to see people out there thinking, I'm nailing this. This is great. I'm just fantastic. And everyone else finds them boring, tedious, not interesting at all. They're not actually competent. So your perception of how you speak might be much higher than your actual competence level. What I seek, what I try to do to help people, whether I'm working one on one, doing small group workshop seminars, or helping millions of people across the globe through social media trainings like this, is to get both the competence and the confidence on the same level. And at a high level, that's really what we're all about. Because ultimately that's what will make you more successful. Okay, we're going to take a quick commercial break in just a moment. I'm going to run for you some ads that I've been doing for the Amazon Influencer program. It's not that these are the slickest ads in the world, but they are a starting point into the influencer world. They do make money. Disclosure, they don't make a lot of money. Full disclosure or fuller disclosure. I'm showing these to you. I hope to motivate you to get into the game. We live in a world now where if you have an opinion on a product, if you like a product and you already tell other friends or colleagues about it and recommend it, we now live in a world where you can become an influencer like Martha Stewart or, or anyone like Jack lalanne from back in the day or anyone else famous that you know of without being famous. That is the interesting thing because certainly I am not famous walking down the street type famous. And yet I can be an influencer. You, you can as well. So that's why I'm going to show you some of these ads. I hope you get some inspiration from them and think, well, you know, that's not that good. If TJ can do it, I can do it too. That's really what I'm hoping you take away from this. So we'll be back live in just a couple of minutes. Hydropeak thermos seems like a part of the family. I use it every day. I carry it with me to to the pickleball court every day. I live in south 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 reliable lighting. That's why I keep these around the house, next to my bed, next to the couch, so I can read there. If you're looking for something that's flexible and affordable and reliable, this reading lamp fits the bill. I don't do a lot of stapling these days, but every so often I do need to staple this Stanley. It works perfectly every single time and it has for years. If your office, your home office, your regular office needs a stapler. Stanley knows how to get the job done. Like anyone else. I like a bargain and go for other brands from time to time that I've never heard of. But when it comes to batteries, things I need to really work where I need the power, I like to stick with something reliable. Duracell is a brand I trust. We buy packets of batteries in bulk so we always have the power we need. This sunset lamp is very versatile. Comes with a great handy remote. I can easily turn it from blue to red to green to white. It's useful for your home, for your office. I use it for My TV set to give a little more depth. You're gonna like this. This if you want, simple way of creating a little extra light in any room. This glide gear teleprompter is fantastic. I mount it on my tripod. The camera goes in the back. I then pull this out and I put my ipod, iPad there. All of my text, my script is on there. I can use software to manage that. And now I can be in front of this, whether it's 3ft, 8ft away, looking directly into the lens of the camera, following a script. No more of this stuff where I'm looking at cue cards over here, up there, I'm looking right at the camera. So it makes things really look and feel professional. Hi, I'm TJ with the TJ Walker Success Channel. I create videos for a living, media training, online courses. And there are times when I've got to get it word for word, just right, whether it's at my own products or services. That's why I have to use a teleprompter. This one has never failed me. I like the Kirkland water filter cartridges because I drink water all day long and I don't like chlorine. Okay, we are back live. Thanks so much. We do periodically, every so often, run these ads. It's not that I am paying all the bills from these ads. These are Amazon Influencer ads that are created primarily with the idea that they are going to be on the product page on Amazon for the various products you saw. And so if you're not familiar with the Amazon Influencer program, the way it works is if someone watches your video on the Amazon pay, they've already come to Amazon to buy. Typically, if they're on the product page, they watch your video and then buy. Amazon deduces that somehow your video was helpful in closing a sale. And so they make you an affiliate for that one and they give you a tiny Amazon commission. So it is how I like to think of it as regular people, average people, non Kardashians, can get into the influencer game. Because I've had so many people throughout the years asking me, tj, I want to speak more. I want to make more money. I don't want to spend all my time sending out demo reels to speaker bureaus and hearing nothing. This is kind of a modern way of getting into the game. It's not get rich quick, I can tell you that. But if you start doing it a while and, and you are creating a lot of videos and you're experimenting, I'm pretty Sure, you'll get to the point where I am and I'm certainly not making some huge fortune, but I do sign on every morning to Amazon and I do say, see that in the last 24 hours I made some money every single day. Now, is that. Am I guaranteeing that you're going to make money? No, all. Am I telling you that I'm making millions of dollars or even thousands of dollars a day? No. All I can tell you is it's getting views every day, clicks every day, and some of that results in money every day. If you are already recommending products to people and those products are friends, family, colleagues and, and those products are for sale on Amazon, this is a relatively easy way to monetize some expertise you have. Because if you have enough expertise to speak on camera in a way where you're articulate, people understand you, you already have the skills you need. And ideally, if you're watching this channel, you do have the skills and the confidence to speak on camera. That's what we're all about. Okay, let's shift gears or really get back to the main task we're working on right here, which is I'm taking you behind the scenes and showing you how I make content for my communication skills channel. I'm making short form content and long form content. So the next topic is how can I adjust my posture to appear attentive and engaged without seeming overly rigid? This is a problem. It's not the most common question I get. That's okay. We're trying to go deep here and answer every possible question anyone could have about communication skills. It's one of the luxuries of coming to you live three hours a day. We don't have it's not Mr. Beast where he's doing typically, you know, 1, 2, 18 minute videos a month. So every second has to be so action packed and have people on the edge of their seat with more and more millions, hundreds of millions wanting more watching it. That's one type of content creation. That's not what we're about here. What I'm trying to be here is really the world's greatest library source, reference source of information, tips, tricks, tools to help you become a better communicator. No matter how narrow or niche or esoteric the question or issue is as it relates to communication. Okay, so I'm going to do a, I'm going to do a short form on that. I use these terms, this lingo, short form meaning less than 60 second video so that it can go on YouTube, TikTok other social media and then a longer form one where I really just talk as long as I want, preferably at least eight minutes long. So I'm going to go to camera two, hit record. Again. The question is how can I adjust my posture to appear attentive without seeming overly rigid? So how do you adjust your posture when speaking so you don't appear overly rigid? For starters, don't do what I'm doing right now. So called perfect posture with your head flat, trying to reach the ceiling isn't the way to go. You want to move. Typically that means moving into people. That means bending down. But you can see it doesn't look like good posture. It looks almost like I'm hunched for part of the time. That's okay. Now you don't want to stand all round shoulder all the time. The key is movement and occasionally leaning in to your audience. That way you won't look rigid or stiff. Okay, so I'm fairly happy with that one. I do think that that covered the biggest points. By the way, if you're seeing anything on these rough draft videos I'm doing that are confusing, let me know. Maybe I'll just redo it. Maybe you'll make me realize, oh, you know, that was really weak. Let's, let's redo that. I'm perfectly fine with that. If you see something you really like, let me know that too because that might send a signal to me, hey, let's get this one out faster. Or let's, let's promote this one even more if it seems like it's really resonating with people. So I would love to get feedback from you on anything you're seeing here. Okay, now what I want to do is a longer form video on that very topic. We're going to check that in just a moment. I've got to make sure I'm reading all of your comments coming in. And I do appreciate sometimes people send me private chats. If you're a part of Streamyard, you can do that if you're joining us on Instagram, X Twitch, YouTube, LinkedIn or a couple of my Facebook channels and you want to come on live, all you have to do is go to Streamyard. We posted the link in the comment section and if you don't see it there, you can go to my YouTube channel to the Community tab where each day we post the live stream URL so you can connect and join me right on camera. Okay, so now we're going to do the long form version of that. I'm Going to switch to camera one, which I typically do. And that allows me to move around a little more and demonstrate. So what do you do when you're giving a presentation and you don't want your posture to come across as too rigid or too stiff? Well, for starters, don't do this. Don't stand up with so called perfect posture. If you stand up with shoulders back, head high, yeah, that might impress your mother. But if you're speaking that way, your audience will perceive you as rigid, stiff, uncomfortable, nervous. That is not a good look at all. When you're speaking, you want to move. You will not seem rigid or stiff if you're moving. Now, I don't mean you have to run around the room and flail around and get down on knees and be overly theatrical. No, but you do need to move if you're standing. Even if you're standing behind a lectern, you still have a range of movement. You have a half a step in any direction. If you're on a stage or in a classroom setting where there's more space, you can in fact move around in a purposeful way. And that way you won't seem stiff and rigid. One of the things that makes people look stiff, rigid is they grab the lectern. They think, oh, I don't know what to do with my hands. I don't want to have people see me shake my hands and seem nervous. I know I'll trick them, I'll fool them. They won't see my hands shake. I'll grab the lectern. And we've all seen people holding lectern so tightly that you're imagining when they walk off, they pick the lectern up and it goes with them because they can't un pry their fingers. You don't remember what they say. You just remember that they look scared and stiff and nervous and uncomfortable. That's not the look for you when you are speaking. You want people to feel comfortable with you. You want them to feel that you're comfortable talking to them. You want people to feel like this is a conversation. The person speaking to me has interesting ideas, useful ideas, memorable ideas. And they're just having a conversation with me, sharing it. That's how you want to come across. And therefore, you don't want to look overly formal. People confuse themselves. They say, well, I'm giving a formal presentation today, so let me stand firmly. No, there's no such thing as a formal presentation. There's no such thing as an informal presentation. There's no such thing as a PowerPoint presentation. There's only two types of presentations in the world. You know what they are. It's either interesting or boring. That's from the standpoint, the perspective of the audience. That's what every audience member is thinking. Every time you speak, no one's saying, well, I sure am glad TJ is giving a formal presentation today. No, they're saying, wow, TJ's boring me today. This is no good. Or they're saying, hey, TJ is giving me interesting insights I can use to help me. It's one of those two things. That's what you want. When it comes to your posture, what's going to work best is variety. And it can be subtle. It can be as subtle as this. Did you see what I just did? I leaned forward about 3 inches. But it makes a difference whether someone is in the audience, online or in person. You want to lean into people. Occasionally. You want to feel like you're connecting with them, because that's what people do. In real life, if you're with three friends and you're at a sports bar and your team just scored, you don't typically say, did you see that last score? Did you see that last goal? That's not what you do. You say, hey, did you see that goal? You're leaning in to dramatize certain important moments, important ideas. Or you might say, can you believe that call? That was a crazy call from the ref. You're leaning in. Your hands are moving. Let's talk about hands. One of the biggest myths out there is that if you want to be a professional speaker, if you want to come across as professional, serious, you shouldn't move your hands, because, my goodness, moving your hands will be distracting. Wrong, wrong, wrong. One of the worst things you can ever do if you want to come across as professional, as interesting, as engaged, and as confident and authoritative is to not move your hands. Your hands are like this. Even if you are moving, you're going to look like a toy soldier or robot. You need your hands to move so you don't have to be flailing around, but you want your hands moving. If your hands are by your side or in your pockets or holding the table or holding the lectern, it's going to have a negative impact on your posture. It's going to make you look stiff and rigid and therefore not comfortable and not authoritative. So you want to consciously move your hands. I don't mean in the sense of, I'm now bringing my left hand up 8 inches. I'm now pointing with my right hand 45 degrees out. You don't want to be thinking about it like this. You're not the marionette trying to pull your hands certain ways. You simply want natural movement. Because all human beings, when they're communicating and they're passionate about a subject, which ideally you are, anytime you're speaking, your hands will move. You might not realize it, you're not aware of it, you're not thinking. I'm now bringing my left hand up to make a point. No, but your hands move. When your hands move, typically your body moves, typically, your face moves, your head moves. All of those things create subtle variation, subtle variety that affects your posture. And that is what makes you look interesting and relaxed and calm. Now, what's going to help your posture a great deal is rehearsing your presentation on video. I know, I know. I say that a lot. You're like, yeah, T.J. one day I'll do that, but not today, because I don't want to hear my voice and I don't want to look at myself. Here's the problem. If you don't practice your presentation on video and you just give it in front of your audience, the words might be fine. But if you're kind of standing like this and looking at your PowerPoint slides or looking at your script like this, no one's going to remember anything you said. They're going to remember that you look like someone who was about to be taken in front of a firing squad or you look like a hostage. So this is, in fact why posture is so important. There's a well known study that came out in the 1960s that people often misinterpret where they think that 93% of all communication is your body language and your voice, and only 7% are words. Now, that's not right. It only applies to communicating emotion. But you can have great ideas, lot of interesting facts, good slides. But if you come out and start your presentation, I'm very happy to be here today. Thank you so much for having me here. And you look like this. In fact, at that moment, your body language is going to completely overwhelm your words. You can say you're happy to be here, but if your posture is so stiff and rigid that you look like you're bracing for a beating, that's what people will remember. In that case, the body language will overload. In that case, your body language will actually overwhelm your message and people will only take away the fact that you seem really uncomfortable. So that's why it's critically important that Your posture, accent and affirm what your message is. You want to come across as relaxed, comfortable and confident. And that means, and that means your posture is, yes, high confident. But there's variety, there's movement. You're leaning into people and you're connecting and you're not perfectly straight up. Okay, I don't think that I quite hit the, I don't think I quite hit the, the seven minute mark there but, or the eight minute mark, but I think I covered a lot more in depth than material than simply what I did in the short form, the 32nd one. So I'm going to check that one off. What I'm trying to do today, frankly is sort of get ahead of the game and produce more short form and long form content. Because typically on all of my social media channels, we post not one, but two short form videos every day, one long form video every day, and that's seven days a week. And we use this long form show, this three hour show each day. Do do several things. Kill two birds with one stone. One is to be a community for you and where you can ask questions. You have access to me live anytime you want. And I typically drop what I'm doing if you do have questions and, and I'm responsive to you. But the other thing is this is my laboratory. This is my workshop. Rather than just as you just saw in a moment ago. I made a mistake twice. In that last one, I didn't stop, apologize. I simply stopped, paused, rewound to the beginning of the sentence and did it again. Knowing that my editing team can put a video image, a B roll, and edit it together to make it appear as though I seamlessly spoke the whole thing in one take. With most People's videos on YouTube, you never see the mistakes. You don't see the behind the scenes, you don't see the actual shooting of it. And I'm not criticizing other people. It doesn't make sense for Mr. Beast to show you every second of footage that's shot for one of his 18 minute videos because it's thousands of videos and, or thousands of hours of video. Then you had to watch it all. You'd be bored out of your mind. In all likelihood. What I'm about is trying to empower people to communicate more effectively. And so I'm trying to show you how it is. I think showing you the mistakes actually, I hope will motivate you to do it too. Because you could say to yourself, well, TJ can make mistakes like this and he's supposed to be the Big professional, but I can do it too. And what I'm hoping to show you is that when you make a mistake, to stop, pause for a second, makes it easier for editing and then just hop right back in. It really is that simple. Okay, so I'm going to make notes that I did, in fact, a short form and a long form for that one. Okay, next question. So typically I'm either just reading these questions live from you, or I looked at it once briefly before and I've not scripted these things out, I haven't outlined it or bullet pointed. I'm scripting this in my head now. You may say, well, I can't do that. That sounds really hard. It's very easy if you do enough videos because what makes it hard for people is thinking, oh, a camera's on me, lights are on me. I can't think. I'm feeling nervous. That's how I felt for many years. But if you do it long enough, you feel as relaxed doing this as, I mean, I feel frankly more relaxed creating in front of a camera than I do if it's perfectly quiet. I'm sitting in my chair, my feet propped up and I've got my keyboard on my lap. Now, I do also write that way, but I actually find it easier thinking, writing in my brain, scripting here than the other way. Now, there's different ways of doing it. There are some wildly successful YouTubers who, who write out everything, rewrite it, script it, do 10 scripts, eliminate nine, do one, rewrite it again, edit a thousand times, and they have a billion views. So there's no way, one way of doing it. I'm simply showing you the way I do it. Okay, if you're watching today and you don't have a question, I'm happy you're here. Please just post a comment letting us know where you're from. JAG showed up earlier. Ben is joining us from Africa today. I believe we have a few folks joining us from Asia. So if you're with us, just post a note, let us know where you are. Always nice to learn a little bit more about the community. I'm going to go on to the next question. When is it appropriate to smile during an interaction and how to do so naturally. So this is a fascinating question. Is this something I read about from time to time? I don't typically have people ask me questions on this, and that's why I'm fascinated by chat, GPT and artificial intelligence. Casting a wide net across all discussion groups across the Internet to find what people are Actually thinking about and talking about. So I'm going to do a short form. By the way, we're still trying to figure out a technical problem. You may have noticed I'm closer than I normally am to this camera. Part of my head is shut off, is cut off. I'm typically back here. And what we've had happen today, for some reason is my auto focus on camera three. This is what we refer to as camera three isn't working quite right, and we don't know why. So if I'm like this, I've been a little bit blurry today. If I'm closer than normal, then it's not blurry, but it's a little too tight. You see part of my head chopped off, and it's. It's a little too close because now you see kind of every little wrinkle shine. I do have makeup on, but I don't have enough makeup to cover the five o' clock shadow. You see some of the darker circles under the line, the eyes. So it's not really the optimum distance away from the camera for this level of makeup. So just. I try to share little things like that with you to let you realize nobody has all this figured out. With any video production, there's a certain element of surprise, uncontrollable things. There's always things you do depending on budgets and what you do. I'm doing a relatively simple production here. I do have a team of people who help me, but I'm the only one in this South Florida studio today. So I AM hitting camera 3, camera 2, camera 1. Running the mixer. I'm hitting record when we're doing the. The higher definition 4k things. So there's a number of multitasking things going on here. So let's go to the next question regarding smile. So I'm going to start off with a short form on smile. What's the best way of smiling at someone in an interaction? Well, it's not like this. I'm only smiling with my mouth, not my eyes. It looks fake. It doesn't. It doesn't come across as sincere. When you smile, you want to smile with your whole face and your eyes. And you know what? You might get wrinkles here. It might not be as flattering, but that's how people know you're really happy to see them. Okay, so that's the short version with tips on how to smile. Sounds ridiculous because. And I'm sure I can get a comment from someone saying, well, thanks for teaching me how to smile. I couldn't have figured that out. And yet it really is something I find people are curious about. When they're nervous, they're thinking, oh, gosh, how do I smile? So I'm going to try to do a longer form one on that right now. Not quite sure I'll hit the, the eight minute mark, which is my goal. But I'm gonna try without doing padding. That seems like I'm trying. Okay, so we're gonna go to camera one. The human smile. There's nothing more powerful. Human beings love it when you smile at them. We like it when smiles come our way. But if it's something like this, I'm only smiling with my teeth, without my eyes, that doesn't work. People can detect that. It seems bony, it seems contrived. That's why so many holiday pictures with the family don't really look that great because people are like, hurry up, take the picture. They're only smiling with their mouth and their teeth. Real smiles, genuine smiles, come from your entire face and you don't have to worry about what you look like. Right now I know I'm getting wrinkles. My eyes are looking smaller and beadier. But if people see me smile that way, they know I'm actually happy to see them or about something they said. When is it appropriate to smile in a meeting, a talk, a speech or a presentation? Well, it needs to be in reaction to something. If you just come out and you're smiling the whole time, it can look like it's plastered on your face. It can come across as inauthentic. You don't want that. The most effective smile is when you're looking at someone and then they either say something or there's some recognition, or you say something and then slowly the smile comes out and it takes over your whole face. That's what comes across to people as sincere, as meaningful. It needs to be something that changes and evolves. There has to be variety. It has to be in response to something. If everything makes you smile, then really nothing's making you happy. Nothing is getting a positive feedback from you because it's not really feedback. If it's just a smile plastered on your face, that's not really giving anyone meaningful feedback because it's too consistent. Now, that's better than always frowning. We've seen frowny faces, but at some level, a constant smile isn't that much different than a constant frown in that it's so consistent, it's not giving other people meaningful feedback on how you feel. So my advice, when you're speaking to people one on one. Small meetings, larger meetings, presenting to larger audiences. You want a full range of expression on your face. It's perfectly okay to be blank from time to time. It's okay to be surprised from time to time, to be skeptical. And yes, it's perfectly fine to show a smile. People who are the best communicators use the full range of their face. Now, most people I encounter, if you talk to them in a comfortable setting, one on one over their favorite beverage at dinner in a sports bar, most people actually are wildly expressive with their face. They naturally have a full face range of emotion. Unless there's some physiological problem with the muscles or nerve endings in their face, most people are naturally good at this. The problem is when people are uncomfortable, when they're nervous, whether it's from a job interview, the tensions associated with that, a speech in front of important clients or prospects, a presentation to the board of directors. When we're nervous, what happens is our face freezes and we become blank. And if we try to correct it and we're still nervous, that's when we get into the I'm happy to be here today. And it looks phony and contrived. So what you really want in order for your face to come across its best, including smiles, is you want to be comfortable and relaxed, or at least appear to be comfortable and relaxed. The way to do that is by rehearsing. Pull out your cell phone, pull out your webcam, rehearse your presentation, rehearse your talk. Even if it's just a one on one meeting and it's not a set speech you're giving, you can still talk about things you want to talk about in that meeting and just get used to seeing your face being expressive. Now, I do want to caution you, a lot of times when people watch a video of themselves, they think, wow, my face looks crazy. Or my eyes got big and I look like a crazy fool. I'm glad I watched. Now I know I need to take it down a notch. No, you don't. What you think of as your face being crazy, everyone else is most likely going to think you just look interested, you look engaged, you look conversational. The worst thing of all is really a blank look on your face, a frozen look, because that's the most common thing for scared people to do. The next worst thing is the smile where it's just the teeth showing because you're not fooling anyone. You want to smile with, with your whole face and you want to use your face in all of Its forms of expression anytime you speak to people. Okay, so that was the longer form version of that particular question. So I'm going to just check that off. We'll go back to camera three again. I've got this issue where I have to stand really close on camera three today for some kind of odd reason, the auto focus is not working. We'll try again. Yeah, we're still not focusing correctly. My producer Ben is with us behind the scenes. And Ben, if we have any update on that, we'll help to fix that up next time we come to you live this week. Quick program note. Tomorrow I'll be traveling to New York, I believe, unless something changes at the last minute to conduct some presentation skills training workshops. So it may be, in fact Thursday before I'm live again, hope to fix this problem. Okay, going to the next question. What subtle cues can I use to demonstrate interest and attentiveness without invading personal space? Okay, so so many issues when it comes to public speaking are really the same now as when Dale Carnegie wrote a book about it 100 years ago. The personal space one is a little different for a lot of reasons that are probably obvious to you. So let me try to do a short form version of that. And quick program note, I will be doing demonstrations later today in the show, as I typically do, where I'm actually making Amazon influencer videos. So again, the question here is what subtle cues can I use to demonstrate interest and attentiveness without invading personal space? Okay, go to camera two. We'll try a different angle. So what subtle cues can you use to demonstrate you're interested in listening to someone, you're giving them your full attention, but you don't want to violate any personal space because these days, even a pat on the back can be misconstrued. Well, the main thing is this. Listen. Look at them. Don't be staring at your cell phone. Lean in a little without getting too close. Not all of those things send a signal. I care about what you're saying. Okay, so that's the short form version. You're seeing me hit buttons over here on the mixer. I am recording just these production elements in a much higher format quality, 4K. Everything else is being recorded in high definition, which does not take as much space on servers and storage. But when we're editing it, it's not as good of a raw material to make things out of. So that's. That's what I'm in fact doing. Okay, I'm going to try to do a long form version of that right now. By the way, if you're just joining us, thanks so much for joining. I'm T.J. walker. This is the T.J. walker Success Channel. And this channel is all about helping you become a more effective communicator and a more confident communicator. So if you have any questions about how to communicate more effectively, whether it's one on one, small group, large group, employees, colleagues, friends, family, feel free to ask your question. I'll do my best to give you an answer based on my experience of having trained tens of thousands of people around the globe in person, but also having trained more than 2 million online students from pretty much every country in the world other than North Korea. I don't think the North Korean political regime likes me for some reason. But it's not personal. They keep most Westerners out. Okay, so let me hop into this one. As a long form, I'm going to make a note so I don't repeat myself. A lot of the time the questions I answer right here are because you come right on and ask them or you type them in the comments section or you email them to me in advance or you post them on my community tab or on Facebook. But I also answer questions courtesy of of Artificial Intelligence and chatgpt. Okay, so I've done the short form version of that. I'm now going to do a long form version of demonstrating interest and attend this without invading personal space. I'm going to hit record. I'm going to go to camera one. So how do you demonstrate your attentiveness to someone that you're really giving them your attention when speaking, but without violating their personal space? Because, hey, cultures change. There was a time when going up and giving everyone a hug was acceptable. Patting people on the back, touching them on the knee was quite common. That doesn't necessarily work anymore. And I'm not advocating you do that. You got to use your judgment. As far as what might be invading personal space, in some cultures it could be 12 inches. In other cultures it could be 36 inches. As far as how close you get to someone's face, every culture is a little bit different. But I do want to give you some tools that will work most of the time for most people. One of them is simply give people eye contact. If you want someone to feel like you're paying close attention, look at them. And that means don't be looking at your cell phone. Even better, don't have your cell phone on a table in front of you. Don't have it in your hand. Have it hidden. Have it so that it's not visible. I don't know about you, but I get annoyed sometimes. I get together with friends, we're having a conversation, a restaurant or someplace out where there's a meal, and they're staring at their phone. They're multitasking. It's annoying, it's disrespectful. So if you want someone to feel like you're giving them attention, respecting them, and you don't want to do anything that seems like it's violating their physical space, you don't want to be patting them on the back or touching them on the elbow. That's okay. Look at them. Also nod when they say something. You understand. Smile occasionally. Give feedback. Don't just blankly look at them. Give feedback. If you're not sure about something, look like you're quizzical. People need to know that. Ask a question. If you're not sure what they're talking about, ask a question to make sure you actually understand what they're saying. This will make people feel respected and they will not feel violated. Now, again, one size does not fit all in every culture in the world, because there are some cultures where if someone of one gender looks at somebody of another gender in the eye, it can be seen as rude. So I'm not telling you that every single principle here works every single time. You've got to know that. But if you are in a culture where that not is. If you are in a culture where that is not frowned upon, then use it. Look someone in the eye. Because so many people these days feel like no one's listening to them. Maybe their spouse, their kids at home. Ignore them. Laugh at them. Here they are in a business setting, they're trying to talk about the stuff they work on all day long. And if you also are not listening to them, not even looking at them, they're going to feel disrespected. So you want to look at people. You want to give them the sense that you care about what they're saying. Part of it. Lean forward. You don't have to touch them. Again, there are workplace issues that are very different these days from even five years ago, 10 years ago. You don't have to physically touch anyone to let them know, hey, I appreciate what you're saying. I'm connecting with you. I might not physically be connecting, but intellectually I'm connecting with you by leaning forward, looking at you, nodding, maybe getting a little closer, but not too close. Again, don't want you to violate people's space but when you're connecting with them and people feel like you're connecting and trying to understand them, they will feel respected, they will like you more, and they're more likely to listen to you as well. Okay, so that was the long form version of that issue. I don't think we hit eight minutes. That's okay. That's a slightly tougher issue, that one. What I didn't like about my own answer there is I felt like I was a little bit defensive and it's the nature of that topic because I don't want to give people one piece of advice saying, hey, you know, touch people on the elbow, tap them on the shoulder, give them a hug. Advice that, frankly, was pretty common advice as recently as 10 or 15 years ago. These days can get people into trouble. And I'm not about getting people into trouble when it comes to communication. I'm about helping communication, fostering greater communication. That's what we're about here on this channel. Okay, let's go to the next topic. Again, I'm getting these courtesy of ChatGPT. Artificial Intelligence. Next question. How can I avoid using negative language or framing that may undermine my message or alienate the audience? Okay, this is really a very, very important issue in our modern culture. Not just the political world, but all the business world and civic life. I, I do want to go into this in a little more detail. We're going to do that one right after this commercial break. I'm going to take a brief break and if you have any questions you would like me to address in a video format, then please let me know. All you have to do is post it in the comment section and we'll be back in just a couple of minutes. Enjoy some more of these video ads. Not because I expect you to go out and buy all the products, but because I want you to be motivated to make your own ads, your own influencer ads, whether it's for Amazon or any other store or brand, so that you can gain value from your own expertise, your ability to speak and reach more people, maybe make a little money. Brain Taste in my water. Hi, I'm TJ with the TJ Walker Success Channel. I talk for a living. I make videos all day long on YouTube, make online courses and do speeches and workshops. 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I am T.J. walker. This is the T.J. walker Success Channel. This is the place where you can come more than any place else in the world, to my knowledge. We're live. You can ask questions about anything that relates to communication skills and be a part of a community. I'm happy to give you my advice based on having trained thousands of people, in some cases thousands of people just like you and tens of thousands of people face to face around the globe for many decades. And having trained and coached 2 million online students on communication skills, we're going to hop right into the next question. This one courtesy of ChatGPT. I'll make sure my tie is not loosening too much. Okay, this one is a question that relates to negativity. How do I avoid using negative language or framing that may undermine my message or. Or alienate the audience? Okay, so let's hop right into that. Go to camera two. I'm hitting record. You don't have to be Susie Sunshine all the time where everything is great. But when you stand up to speak or sit down to speak, remember the most powerful, most memorable thing out of your mouth is something negative. So if you attack someone and say 10 good things about yourself. Chances are the only thing anyone remembers is that attack. So choose wisely. Okay, so that is the short form. That's a tough issue. There's a lot of different nuances there. And, you know, we could spend five hours talking about that as it relates to negativity and politics and why. On the one hand, it's corrosive. On the other hand, it's highly effective for politicians who play on resentments and anger the right way. So I'm going to stay away for the most part from the political context of that. I'm making a note that I did the short form one and now I'm going to do the long form on that topic. Okay, so I hit record. I'm going to go to camera one. And I'm going to try to get an accurate timing of this. So what do you do if you're giving a presentation, a talk, a breathing, a speech, and you do have to talk about negative things, problems. That's real life. You can't be Susie Sunshine every second of the day. But you have to be extraordinarily careful because there's always a danger that your negative message completely overwhelms every positive thing out of your mouth. There's something about human beings, the way we are programmed to place greater importance on the negative, the risk. Prehistoric times, if someone said to you, oh, it's going to be safe walking through the jungle or the savannas for this many miles. They didn't use miles back then, but there's a tiger that could jump out and eat you at an hour. Mark, you're not going to remember the safe stuff. You're going to remember, oh, in an hour I'm going to be at a part of the jungle or the savannah where a tiger or lion can jump out and eat me. And it's important because knowing that remembering that will save your life. So there's something about human beings where we are biolog. There's something about human beings from a biological standpoint, an evolutionary standpoint, where we are hardwired to remember and fixate on negativity because that relates to risk. So what does this mean from a practical level? If you're in a job interview and someone says to you, so why are you leaving your job? What did you not like about your last job or your last boss? You may think you're being completely candid and forthcoming and positive by talking about nine things you really liked in your job and then sort of casually mentioning, But I hated the fact that my Boss was always late and disorganized, and it made it impossible to get things done on time. It may seem like a little aside, but the problem with that message is it's profoundly negative. It's therefore memorable. The person interviewing you may think, well, TJ's trashing his last boss to the world. That way, if I hire him, he's going to trash me to other people in the future. I might be better off eliminating risk by not hiring tj. When that person gets together with other colleagues about who should we hire for this position, and they've all interviewed half a dozen people, it may be the only thing remembered about my interview performance is that I said negative things about my previous boss. Am I asking you to lie and say positive things about everybody all the time? No, I'm not. What I'm urging you to do is to be highly selective because the human brain remembers negative information. If you're talking to the media, for example, and you go on and on and on about every great thing your company is doing and everything you've done for the last two years, but then you say something like, well, sure, when the pandemic hit, we of course were scared out of our mind and afraid that we would be out of business. That's the quote that's going to get in the story. Because it's negative, it's attacking, it's emotion, it's action oriented. There's all the things attractive to journalists to make an interesting story. It's not because journalists want to make you look bad, even though you might think they do. They want an interesting story that people will talk about and remember, and people remember the negative. So in many cases, if you want to be a successful communicator, you're going to have to really make priorities and ask yourself, if I can only get this audience to remember one or two things, what will it be? And if it's not that you're trying to solve a particular problem, this bridge fell down. We got to make sure it doesn't happen again. That may be a legitimate message. This airplane has doors fall off. We got to solve that problem. Okay, if you're solving a really big problem, you do have to talk about it, but you've got to be highly selective. And then you've got to spend your time building a positive case for the messages you want people to understand, to motivate them to do what you want them to do. Really decide in advance if you're going to use any negative message. Do people already know this? If a bridge already fell down, people know about it. In most cases, if an airplane went down because the window fell off, people know about that. So they're not going to associate you, you with being gratuitously negative or nasty. And this gives you the opportunity to talk about your solutions, what you want to do, how you want to solve the problem. And that is the safer ground. When you are speaking. The answer quite often is you can't go into every little nuance in every presentation. You have to make sure judgments. So if it's a new audience, it's an audience that doesn't know everything about what you do, they don't know everything about you. Be selective with your negativity. Focus primarily on positive messages because that will help you succeed. Okay, so that was a longer form video for that particular question. I don't feel like I loved that answer and I would love your opinion. If you're watching this on demand later, let me know how you feel about that because it's never too late for me to say to my editors, you know, let's just scratch that one. In fact, a case could be made. I would be a lot better. Certainly as we, as we do these live shows more and more and build more of an audience, we should actually have a vote from people. Once we get much larger audiences, people can vote. Thumbs up, thumbs down. Was there enough there to even turn this into a long form video? Or should we say typically, ah, TJ rough draft. Don't use it. One of the things that makes Mr. B successful is he's not afraid. Even after he's invested hundreds of thousands of dollars coin according to him, there have been cases when he has produced videos and they've been working on it for a year. They produced the whole thing, it's finished. They've spent maybe seven figures. He still might not greenlight it for distribution. He may say it's just not up to standards and we're not going to release it. So there is a school of thought to being very, very restrictive and holding high standards to what you do. I of course like to think I have high standards. But I also am trying to do something a little different here. I'm trying to provide the world's largest resource library answering questions about every single aspect of communication skills. So there are going to be times when someone asks of extraordinarily niche question and I've got an eight minute answer to it and I know it's not going to be of interest to most people in the world. I know in advance it's not going to get millions of views. I'm still going to do it because if I can help one person, maybe I can help a few dozen people a month, and over time, it will have helped people in a meaningful way. So that's kind of my attitude on how selective to be. But I'm open to the idea that, you know, maybe occasionally I should say, no, that one doesn't pass the test. We're not going to distribute it widely. Okay, I'm going to go with you and just share with you my thought process. So I have printed out a whole lot of questions posed by ChatGPT about communication skills. Some of them I like and think, oh, I can really help people and give them some insights that perhaps they haven't heard, some insights that are more actionable to help them become better communicate. Other times, I think, you know, I don't really have that much to add on that maybe I'll pass on. Occasionally I may say I'm not exactly sure what the best advice is, in which case there's not much for me to add. So let's continue going through this. What should I do to prevent the use of vague or ambiguous language that may confuse or mislead the audience? You know, I have some thoughts on that. I'm not sure they've crystallized to the point where I can speak with great clarity and therefore I would be guilty of delivering an ambiguous speech about how to avoid ambiguous speech, which, in addition to being ironic, would not be very helpful to people. Okay. How do I avoid the tendency to rush through certain sections of my presentation and the desire to be brief and succinct? Okay, that is something I. I do feel like I can add to and help people with. So let's do a short form on that. How do I avoid the tendency to rush through sections of my presentation trying to be brief and succinct? We'll go to camera two. Okay, I'm just looking at this camera angle. I don't know if I burned myself at the pool or just. It was just a weird shadow. But that's one of the things that, that people don't like about looking at themselves on video is, oh, gosh, what's this new spot? What did I do here? I'm getting worse looking. You just got to get over it. Okay, you know what? I'm going to try to drink a little tea. I placed my cup a little further away than I want to and had been drinking from it. Okay, so we're going to hop right into this one. On again, the Topic is as posed by chat GPT. How do I avoid the tendency to rush through certain sections of my presentation for the sake of being brief and concise? How do you avoid the temptation of rushing through certain parts of your presentation? Because you want to be brief, you want to be concise. Well, the key is planning in advance. You might go faster, but your audience doesn't necessarily remember faster. That's not how it works. You want a natural ebb and flow in your speech. If it's rushed, it means you didn't plan. It means you didn't rehearse. You need to rehearse in advance to make sure you never have to rush in the real presentation. Okay, so that's the short form version. Now we're going to go to camera one. I'm going to do a longer form on that. We'll try to time it. How do you avoid the temptation of rushing through certain parts of your presentation because you want to be seen as succinct and brief. Meanwhile, you're no longer as clear to people. Well, keep in mind your speech should change in speed and tempo. There should be a variety. It shouldn't be. I'm now speaking to you in a professional tone throughout. That's very consistent. No, you don't want consistency. But when you do occasionally rush, it needs to be to make a point because you're really excited about something, not because, okay, this is a whole bunch of boring facts. I got to get through this quickly before we get to more good stuff, which I know you've seen people do. Do not rush through stuff. Anytime you're rushing to get through a presentation, what you're really doing is sending a message to people. Hey, everybody, you're not very important to me. The collective. If there's 60 of you, the collective 60 hours of your time wasn't worth me spending a few minutes in advance rehearsing to make sure I got my timing right. Now, how do you feel about me? Well, I just told all of you, I don't respect you. I don't respect your time. Most people reciprocate if they're saying, he doesn't respect me, I don't respect him. They're not going to listen to you. They're going to tune you out. They're going to form a negative perception of you. So anytime you're speaking a little faster than normal, it needs to be on purpose. There needs to be a real reason. And the reason cannot be, oh, I gotta hurry up, because I didn't plan this. I didn't Plan my timing right. And this stuff is boring stuff. So let me go through it. If it's boring, don't talk about it. If it's not as important as other stuff, leave it out of your presentation, email it to people, give it as a handout. Don't spend people's valuable time talking about it quickly. Because when your audience gets a sense that you're just going through the motions, they're going to go through the motions of pretending to listen to you, but really they're daydreaming about the rest of their day. They're thinking about, what am I going to do this weekend? And if they're not in the front row or they're watching you online, they're not even looking at you, they're looking at their cell phone. Other things that are more interesting, interesting to them. All of a sudden, instead of hearing your words, they're hearing like a cartoon character. And that is no good for anyone. Look, I understand the drive, the goal to be brief because we've all sat through meetings and presenters where they went on and on and on. It was really long and really boring. So, yeah, if it's a choice between being long and boring and being brief and boring, yeah, it's better to be brief and boring. But that's not the real choice. You always have a choice to be interesting, to make your ideas come alive for your audience, to be interesting for them, useful to them, memorable for them. If you do that, no one will care how long you are most of the time. People would much prefer someone be incredibly interesting and memorable and talk for 15 minutes than someone who is succinct, quick, but rushing and boring and talks for three minutes. So do not worship at the altar of being succinct and brief. You should instead be worshiping at the altar of how can I be interesting? How can I be useful? How can I be memorable to my audience? If you do that, time will typically take care of itself and you won't have to rush. But far and away, the most important factor in this is if you want to speak in the right speed and change your speed, you need to rehearse. Now you understand you can't rehearse and spend three hours preparing for a daily five minute staff meeting. I understand that, I'm not asking you to do that. But some presentations are more important than others and you know which ones they are. Whether you're pitching investors, whether you're pitching a board of directors for a whole new direction of the company, whether you're pitching yourself for a new job. Some presentations are more important than others. If you are defending your division's expenditures for the last year and you're trying to get your budget approved for everything you want to do next year, that's an important presentation. And that's where you got to make a choice of I'm not going to tell them every single thing I did line by line over the last year. I've got to focus on what's most important. Because if you try to tell people everything, that's when you find yourself rushing and talking faster. And I got to go this Apologies. I'm going to run out of time. I don't have much time and you're wasting time. Speaking of time, don't ever talk about time when you're giving a presentation. Don't ever say, I realize I don't have a lot of time. I realize my time is about up. I was just told I didn't have as much time. I was just told I have five minutes less than I thought. Don't waste time talking about time when you're giving a presentation with people. Instead, simply use the time for maximum benefit for your audience. Yes, you got to think about the time. It may be annoying to you if you were told you have 20 minutes to speak in the last second. The organizer says, hey, we're running short. You wrap it up in 10 minutes. I understand that's annoying to you. Guess what? Nobody else cares. Don't waste time talking about your concerns. Poor little me. I was told I had this amount of time. Now I have less. Instead, use every second for maximum positive impact for your audience. Everything out of your mouth needs to be geared towards helping your audience understand something new and useful and interesting to them and and to remember something new, interesting, useful to them. And you need to do it with the right varying speeds, never rushed because of time. Okay, so that one was not really the time I wanted. That was about six minutes, a little over six minutes long. But I think I said everything I wanted to say about it, so I'm not going to worry about it. Those of you just joining me, I talked about this earlier and I've talked about it in the past. Everyone's trying to improve or should try to improve in some aspects of communicating. I'm trying to increase my ability to communicate in longer formats. Traditionally, I've been most comfortable delivering how to videos about communication skills in the 1, 2, 3 minute range. So in certainly the last six months I do it a lot of energy into the short form content things less than 60 seconds. What I have found works best for me in terms of reaching wider audiences around the world and reaching at least hundreds of thousands of people each month across social media platforms is when I focus on one idea and that's 12 to 19 seconds long. That is what has resonated the most with audiences around the world. I'm also trying to get better at communicating to YouTube audiences that like longer formats. And YouTube likes the algorithm where it's eight minutes or longer, the algorithm likes that and keeps people on longer. But you'd be far better off having a great three minute video that everyone watches all three minutes and shares than just having an eight minute video to fill time in. The last three minutes are boring and no one finishes it. So there are trade offs there. Ideally you and I can get to the point where we can really speak at any length and be interesting, useful and memorable and for that matter, modern day sh shareable regardless of length. So that's really what we're working on here and what I'm trying to do. So taking your questions today, if you're joining us live, happy you're with us. And if you do, if you are here, please give a thumbs up. I do appreciate I see a number of thumbs up so far. Please leave a comment, even if it's just to say what country you're in and where you are today. And please sign up for notifications, subscribe to the channel and share it with other friends, colleagues, people you work with, anyone you think could benefit and help their own career be more successful by becoming a better communicator. Okay, so we're going to go to the next question and again these questions are courtesy of chat GPT. We're about to head into hour three. Three and in the last part of our three, I will be making Amazon influencer videos. You saw me play some of those earlier. Those were edited together by my team. A little music and stuff, but obviously not very fancy. You're going to see me make actual videos here without any editing. Soup to nuts. From concepting, scripting in my head, shooting the video to uploading it, labeling it and putting it into the Amazon store. So that's coming up later on in this hour three that we're in right now. Okay, looking at other questions, how can I avoid the use of excessive or unnecessary transitions or animations in my slide? Okay, This is something I like half of that question. So I'm going to, I'm going to talk about, I'm going to try to address this and I'm going to Try to not be too negative. But I do have some very negative feelings about animation in slides. Okay, all right, so we're going to do a short form on that. We're going to go to camera two, try to eliminate certain visual distractions. You know what, let's change it up. I'm going to do Our camera three. Isn't working. We'll keep it this camera too. So how can you avoid. Let's see, hit record. So how can you avoid unnecessary animations that can distract in your presentation? Well, here's the thing about animations. For the most part, just don't use them. Unless you are giving a presentation on your career at Pixar or Disney. Chances are animation isn't really what you're about. So you're just using a bunch of things to look slick and dazzle people. Now focus on your ideas. Use one image at a time. Use a picture at a time, but leave the animations for the movie makers. Okay, so I'm going to hit stop on that record. I do feel relatively strong about that because I've seen a lot of people. Well, I'll tell you why in a moment. Let me just do the long form one. I'm going to switch to camera one. Hit record. And I think my mat has slid back. So I've got a bend down. I stand on these mats to put less pressure on my feet and to be more comfortable. And I also have it now adjust the height well so I want to have my head almost touching. Okay, let me hit stop and start again. That. Okay. How do you avoid the problem of excessive animation cluttering up your presentation and perhaps distracting your audience? Well, the first thing you've got to do is ask yourself, why am I I using this animation in my PowerPoint presentation for this audience? Now you may have a good answer. If you're a full time animator for Walt Disney Corporation or Pixar, showing animation may be 100% relevant to you. But if that's not your job, quite often the answer is, well, I'm using animation because I can, because the technology awareness allows me and because I can sit here and fiddle with cool buttons and use that as an excuse not to actually rehearse my presentation. If that's the answer for you, then don't use animation. For most people in business situations delivering a presentation, you need to avoid the animation because it's so distracting and it frankly takes a lot of time. Once you start, you tweak it, you change the color. Maybe you want to add music before you're done. You've spent hours on it. These are hours you could have spent actually rehearsing your presentation. You don't want to do that. Note to editor, Stop right now. Okay, I've had some alarm going off. I just wanted to make sure my watch didn't think I'd fallen down. Note to editor. We'll continue right from here. So you don't want to do that. You want people to focus on your ideas. And if you're not a professional animator, then slick animation isn't what you're about. Here's the problem for most of us. Maybe you've learned some new editing tool. Maybe you're good at animation. Maybe you're to the point point where you get a lot of likes on your Facebook or your tick tock animation. But when your business audiences watching you give a presentation and there's a projection screen and they're looking at animation subconsciously, they're comparing you to Hollywood and Marvel movies and all of these fancy productions where millions and millions of dollars were spent. You're not going to beat that. You're not going to win that competition. I don't want to compare my presentation to Hollywood's finest. Instead, I want people comparing me to the really boring speaker who spoke before me and after me. Because if they're judging me on how well I'm speaking, that's a battle I can win. I'm not competing against all the special effects and technology of multimillion dollar studios in Hollywood. So forget the animation. Instead, the most effective way to use PowerPoint is one idea per slide, one image per slide. Typically, a simple photo is going to make your point come alive. The other problem with using animation is sometimes it is good, but it's too good. I'll never remember once about. Note to editor, cut out the last sentence. I'll never forget the time about 15 years ago, I was conducting a presentation skills training in St. Croix in the United States Virgin Islands. And I was with a whole bunch of engineers at a refinery. And one of the engineers was giving a presentation on new developments in what his division was doing. And he was using PowerPoint. And in one of the PowerPoint slides he had a fly buzzing across. This was an animation he created and it buzzed across the screen. And after the presentation everyone was like, wow, that was so cool. That was great. How did you do that? This was before animation was done as easily slides. And everyone was impressed. Everyone thought it was great. Everyone thought it was cool. Everyone thought he gave a great presentation. Sounds good. What's wrong with that, because I asked people, what did you really think? Everyone was positive. But then I asked a second question. The second question was, can anyone tell me what the point of that slide was? What was the message behind that slide? Nobody could answer that question. Then I asked people, can anyone tell me anything? He said in that presentation? Nobody can answer that question. All they remembered was the slick special effect. And that's why I say, unless you're in the business of creating animation special effects, you're far better off not using them in your presence. Presentation far and away the most important reason I don't want you to use animation. Note to editor, scratch the last sentence. Far and away the most important reason I don't want you to use animation is simply a function of time. There's a finite amount of time for anyone to prepare for a presentation. And in my experience, people are using the fact that, oh, I'm doing animation to give them an excuse not to actually rehearse. Well, I would love to rehearse my presentation, but by the time we got all the slides ready in the animation, there was no time because we finished five minutes before the presentation was to be delivered. No, you're not fooling anyone. There is always, always time to rehearse a presentation if you decide it's important. In the same way, there's always time to proof a press release. If your company's about to go public or some disaster has happened, you don't just dictate it once and say, well, I don't care if there's no. You don't just dictate it. Note to editor, scratch the sentence. You don't just dictate a press release once and say there's no time to edit it. To make sure there aren't misspellings or typos or grammar mistakes. You're going to take the time to edit the press release before sending it out to the whole world. If you want to give a great presentation, it's not enough to review the text of your speech. You need to say it out loud and see how it comes across. That's the only meaningful way to. To edit a presentation. You have to say it out loud and you have to watch it. And in my experience, once someone starts building animation, it crowds out the time to rehearse, and it crowds out the time to rehearse on video, which means it crowds out the time to do a second rehearsal. It crowds out the time to refine the speech. It crowds out the time. Time to get comfortable with your material, to eliminate things that don't make sense to work on your body language, your voice and everything else. So that's the real danger of animation. Is it the end of the world if you want to put in a nice interesting animation and you also have done everything else I asked as far as rehearsing on video, no, it's not the end of the world. But first things first, make sure you have an interesting presentation, interesting memorable ideas, stories. Make sure you rehearse. If you do all of that, then if you want to add an animation, be my guest. Okay, so that was the long form version, as you can see, and my timer stopped there. I'm not quite sure what happened, so I don't really know how long that one was. Now, as you can see, I messed up a few times there. Most of the time, I would say 95% of the time, whether it's a short form or long form, I do it in one take. I try to do everything in one take. But sometimes I'll say, in that case, I said, I'll never remember. I meant to say, I'll never forget. It would have made no sense and it wouldn't have made any sense to spend a lot of time editing that. So I simply stopped, said note to editor, scratch that last sentence. Kind of went backwards to the previous sentence, started over. So that really shouldn't take more than a few seconds for my editor to chop out the one bad sentence, move up the part where I started again and did it well. And then to cover up that jump, they'll put an image, a B roll, probably not an animation considering what I said. But that's how it's done to make it look smooth where you don't see all the rough stuff. Now what I'm trying to do that's a little different here is to show you the rough stuff right here in our live time together. Now, I see we've had a number of people join us just in the last few minutes. We're deep into hour three of our daily three hour session here. I'm TJ Walker, this is the TJ Walker Success Channel. And this is where we talk about all things related to personal spoken communication. So we don't talk about writing techniques, we talk about how to speak to people, whether it's one on one, small group, large group, speeches, presentations, talks, being interviewed by the media. That is our focus. How to communicate more effectively when speaking to people of any size, audience from one to a million or more. If you're talking to the media and I can tell you I mean, I have some clients I train who routinely speak to 100,000 people at a time. Large, large political rallies and some of the larger democracies in the world. A lot of you talk to one person at a time and you're trying to prepare and get more comfortable to speak in your next job interview. Everyone's issues are important here. Everyone's issues are completely legitimate. So that's why I'm here. And Hugo stopped by and says happy Easter to all. So, Hugo, happy Easter to you. We had some fun Easter egg hunts in my household. I have an 11 year old who doesn't necessarily believe in the Easter bunny, but does believe in chocolate and she does believe in free candy being found easily around the house. So that's part of what we did. And a fun, relaxing weekend with friends and family here in South Florida where I am. Hugo. Hope you had a nice time. Hugo, if you have any questions, I'm devoting today to really creating as many short form and long form videos that can be used for social media later edited down. I am going through a lot of questions posed by ChatGPT pulled from the Internet from people just like you who've written comments and talked about these issues. But I'm always happy to take real questions from real people as well. In a few minutes, we're going to shift gears and I'm going to make Amazon influencer videos and try to demystify that process. Because I know so many of you have told me over the years, tj, I'd like to make money speaking. I like to speak. I don't really know where to start. I can't get conventions and major trade associations to return my call and hire me. I can't get major brands to sponsor me because I'm not Kim Kardashian. What do I do? Well, these days there is kind of an in between way where a lot of these gatekeepers can be eliminated or avoided. And the one thing I'm doing now is the Amazon Influencer program where I make videos reviewing products that have personally used, personally bought in most cases. And then when people watch the videos on Amazon and then purchase, I make a small affiliate commission. So I'm not hired by Amazon. I don't have an official contractual spokesperson relationship with particular products yet. But that is one reason why people do these influencer programs is it often opens the door to building direct relationships with major brands. So. And that's one of the reasons full transparency, why I'm doing it. Okay, let's answer a few more questions here before we have to shift gears into making the Amazon influencer videos. Okay, I've got certain things in categories of body language. What types of open ended questions can I ask to encourage, encourage the other person to share more? A great question for workplace communication. I'm going to let that one marinate a little. I'm going to underline that I'm sharing a lot of these questions with you. First time I've seen them. So I didn't write these questions, fully script out answers and then deliver the final product to you. What I'm doing here is actually doing the nitty gritty work and I'm showing you, I'm showing you the thought process of what I go through, how I think about these issues, how I grapple with these issues, how I sometimes pick one over the other. Attempting to be helpful to you with social media, short form video, long form video, online courses that I create. Many of you may know me from my online courses. I'm on about a hundred platforms, Udemy being the most notable, but also skillshare, Coursera, Thinkific and platforms like that. Okay, so here's some voice questions. How can I adjust my tone of voice to create a positive and inviting atmosphere? Okay, so that is one that is a very real issue for a lot of people. So I'm going to do a short form on that. We'll go to camera two. I'm going to hit record. How can you change your voice tone to be more inviting, to be friendlier to people when you're speaking? Well, the key is don't be nervous when you speak. When you're nervous, that's when your voice sort of gets frozen and scared and stiff sounding. Okay, tj, but how do you not be nervous? I'm going to be nervous when I speak. The key is rehearsing. If you rehearse on video a whole bunch of times, the natural, warm, friendly tones of your voice will come out because you want your voice to have highs, lows, fast slows. That only happens when you're completely comfortable or when you've rehearsed. Okay, so that one is slightly. There's good stuff there. I'm trying to think how I can do that better, better when I am in fact doing it as a long form. Now again I'm, I'm being transparent with you. I'm showing you the things that other creators don't show anyone. They only want you to see the, the perfect final element. I'm showing you how these things are made. Now I am in South Florida. It's not A hot day. It's 77 degrees, but. And I have the air conditioning on 73. But I'm noticing that I'm feeling sweaty and I'm getting shiny. I don't want to appear shiny on my social media videos that are being produced and edited and pushed and promoted. So I'm going to take a moment, I'm going to try to just wipe one layer of makeup all off and, and wipe the, the slightest little bit of perspiration off. And you can see there is color on there. But it doesn't, it doesn't look like I'm, it's not like it was tan. I'm not trying to give myself a tan with makeup. All I'm trying to do is to eliminate shine and to have sort of a even appearance that doesn't distract. So now what I'm going to do is reapply a little powder because I do want to keep the shine off. Now, I don't wear a lot of makeup, but everybody on TV wears makeup and a huge percentage of people who are successful on social media wear makeup. So there shouldn't be any stigma. And I'm not telling you you have to. I'm just trying to look a little more professional. So I'm just taking a little mosaic powder and I'm lightly putting the mosaic powder up to the hairline and beyond. I don't want there to be some big contrast. I'm not spraying hair on my scalp. I'm not trying to fool you into think I have a beautiful head of hair. Again, all I'm trying to do is create sort of a neater, smooth, dry look. I don't want to look like I'm sweating on camera because people associate that with being nervous and being uncomfortable. And I'm not nervous or uncomfortable. But I also don't want you to think I'm nervous or uncomfortable. So let's talk about this for the long form video. Then we got to switch gears to the Amazon influencer videos. How can I adjust my tone of voice to create a positive and inviting atmosphere? Okay, so we're going to do that. We're going to switch to camera one. I'm going to hit record. So how can you use the tones of your voice to create a positive and, and warm atmosphere with your audience? Well, there's no easy way of doing this. I wish I could say do that and your voice will be warm and friendly all the time. It's not that simple. You got to step back a minute and ask yourself what's messing up your vocal tone to begin with. Typically, it's because you're nervous. And when you're nervous, your voice can kind of sound like this because you're thinking about, what am I going to say? Fine, seconds from now, and I don't want to mess up anything, Or I'm reading a PowerPoint bullet point, and that sounds awful. The voice is too consistent. It's flat. It's a type of monotone. But I'm willing to bet when you're with your best friends and you're talking about some sporting event where you were all there together or you're actually watching a sporting event together, your voice is fine. It's because your voice is occasionally going louder, sometimes softer. Sometimes you're yelling, sometimes you're whispering. There's a full range of your voice. And that's why if you're with your friends, you might be together eight hours talking, and nobody's bored. You're having the time of your life. Maybe you're taking a road trip and you're just bsing about everything you did in high school. It's interesting. It's not interesting because you used a professional tone of voice. And do you remember in 10th grade in chemistry class where Mr. Baldwin asked us to dissect the. No, that's not how you're talking. You're talking with constant changes of voice. You're not consciously thinking, let me use the full range of my voice notes. Editor, please edit out my coughing here. Okay? When your voice is really working well and you're warm and inviting and you're with your friends and you feel friendly and they feel like you're friendly, you're not trying to do anything special with your voice. It's coming out naturally. But what good is that if you have to give a note to Editor, cut that out. So what good is that, though, if you have to give a formal presentation to your boss or the board of directors, to a group of investors, because by definition, you're going to be a little uncomfortable. It's a formal setting. They're high stakes. Well, the biggest thing you can do is to rehearse on video. What most people do is they think, wow, this is a really important speech. I better get it just right. So they rewrite the speech and rewrite the speech and rewrite the speech and send it to people to get edit suggestions. And they change this comma and change this paragraph break. And if they're using PowerPoint, they change the logo and the slide and the color scheme and the size font and the Type of font. All of these things are just an excuse to keep you from having to do the one thing you should do but you don't want to do, and that is to rehearse. Because the thing about text on a piece of paper or a PowerPoint screen is you can't tell the vocal intonations. You can't tell if someone sounds friendly, confident, warm or mean, scared or nervous by looking at text. You only can gather that information by listening to someone. You cannot listen to how you sound in your speech unless you practice it in advance. I know you don't want to do it. None of my clients want to do it. The only problem is it's the only thing that really works. It's the only thing that will give you feedback on how you sound. Whether your voice is warm, friendly, whether you sound like someone other people would want to have a meal with or to avoid. You need to rehearse. Just use your cell phone, capture the audio, capture the video, and watch it. Here are the things to watch for. If your voice is too consistent and you sound like you're going from point A to point B to point C, that's not warm and inviting. I take it back. It is inviting. You're inviting people to take a nap because it's so boring. You're putting people to sleep. What you want in your voice is ups and downs. Faster and slower, louder and softer, occasionally pausing. You want variety in your voice. That's what's going to make you warm. That's gonna. That's what's gonna make you easy to listen to. That is what's going to make you sound friendly. Okay, so that one was not quite long enough, I think, for the traditional long form. I've been a little bit short today. That's okay. I still think there's good information there that's helpful to people. We're going to switch gears now and I'm going to make some Amazon influencer videos. So I've got to get my cell phone ready. I typically, I don't use the expensive three camera shot studio. I am here in the studio, but I do these right here on my phone because it's the easiest, simplest way of shooting it and putting it right into Amazon without any editing, process, uploading, downloading, other than right to Amazon. So I'm doing it as a speed issue. It's not to say it's the best way. There are plenty of influencers who spend two full days making an ad for a particular product, an affiliate ad, and I may do that. At some point. But I'm still in an initial experience, exploratory phase with my own influencer career. We're coming right up at about the. Well, I think we've just passed the three month mark. So I now have over 500 influencer ads, if you want to call it that, product reviews. And I'm looking for signals from the marketplace to see what resonates the most, what works. So what I'm going to do right now is I go to my phone, I'm going to hit the camera, I'm going to hit video, I'm going to reverse it so that I can see it's on me. I use a simple tripod here, which those of you who are regulars have seen this. I'm going to twist it, tighten it so that it doesn't roll around. I'm going to be doing mostly vertical videos today. I'm going to put in a receiver, a little receiver so that I have better audio quality. And I'm going to use this microphone. I turn on the microphone so that I see this green light. The green light is on. Oh, let's see. I think I held it too long there. Turning the green light on now you can see a little green light on. So I'm going to turn the. The light is on and I'm now gonna put it just a few inches away from my mouth. Putting it on my tie. You know what, we're gonna switch to camera one today because again, the. Something's wrong with our auto focus. So I do apologize for that. So this is facing my curtain. I may have a little variety today and not, you know, it seems a little bit crooked. I, I don't really want any other products showing because that can sometimes make Amazon a little nervous. They can in fact reject your ad if they see other products in it, especially if they see a license plate, something that would appear to be giving away someone's identity. And I wanted to show this to you, but I'm having a little bit of difficulty with the framing. Okay, now you can kind of see me. So you'll see that I'm gonna go ahead and unplug my one neon light because I do realize that is a little distracting. So I'm gonna unplug that one right there and to be a little less distracting for you. So let's go into my grab bag. I pick products from home that I actually like and I actually use. So this is a pair of Levi Strauss jeans. And I may even do a couple of on this because they do have A special place in my heart. I'm going to use a remote control because I do not want to have to see myself touching it, going stop and having to edit that out. So, Okay, I'm not going to take the time to model these and you're seeing me cut off. And I'm framing this with my phone in a way where the product is dominant. Levi Strauss jeans have a special plated. So the one thing I would recommend with these, the same simplest form of editing is just hit delete. I stumbled over a word, which everyone does occasionally. I don't beat myself up. I just hit delete and I start again. When I hear the word jeans, I think of one thing. Levi Strauss. I've worn not this pair, but I've worn Levi Strauss jeans since the 1970s. They were great then, they're great now. Okay, now I do wear other jeans. I don't want to kid you, but I, I do like Levi's. The they didn't have this style. These are the kind that, that stretch. When I was a kid, it was the, I guess the classic 501 jeans. These are 514, but they have stretchy material and other things like that that sometimes people like. Okay, these are my. These are tennis shorts, pickleball shorts that I wear. I play pickleball every day and I love my Nike pickleball tennis shorts. They're light, they are easy to put on, and they work well every time. If you want something simple for pickleball or tennis, give these a try. Now. I felt like I was running out of time. I'm trying to do those in 15 seconds because the metrics show almost all of my views come from videos 15 seconds or shorter. Many, many people, some far more successful than I am, are very successful with longer form video. You can do an hour long video, Amazon influencer, and it can still work. Okay, here are old Navy shorts, which I do like. They, they're simple and light. Typically I wear these to the office because I'm not coming to the office wearing a suit. Here in Florida, I'll button these to make them look a little more put together for the ad. But I do like these pants. I did get them on Amazon and I do wear them regularly. I live in Florida where the saying goes, it's August 11 times a year. I got that wrong. It's 11 months a year. So I'm going to just again, not beat myself up. Hit delete. Because the way I said it made absolutely no sense. Okay. I live in Florida where the saying goes, it's August, 11 months of the year here. It's hot. That's why I wear shorts virtually every day. I love my old Navy shorts, cotton, comfortable and simple to wear. Like even that one, I mean that's not the best ad copy. Simple to wear. What does that even mean? But I don't necessarily want to take the time to redo that. My good friend John Steen has stopped by says is there an an affiliate for Sonny Blocks gold coins as formally advertised on your nationally syndicated radio show in the 1990s. So John, so good to hear from you. John is, is one of these guys where to me this is a perfect example of, of why you don't say no to media outlets and media interviews. Way back in 1992, I had just moved to South Florida for the first time and started broadcasting political commentaries on a teeny tiny show. A teeny tiny radio station. I believe it's a thousand watt station. I forgot the call letters and somehow I met John who I think was pretty much my only listener for the entire of the entire station. And we became fast friends and socialized a great deal and have stayed in touch ever since. So John, good to see you. He's making reference to a guy named Sonny Block who I later was on a network. I had a show that was owned by Sonny Block who was arrested or indicted, fled the country for securities fraud. He was selling gold coins and I was not implicated. I was not selling any of his gold coins and he was selling radio stations as unregistered securities. So John is nice enough to remember that. But again to me the main point is don't say no to media interviews because you meet interesting people that sometimes can turn into lifelong friendships. So John, so good to see you today. And yeah, I think Sonny Block I think was he, he self deported to Dominican Republic I believe and did not make it out of there alive. To my. Well maybe he went to Rikers Island. I forgot that. I do think it was a sad demise in that situation. But John, good to see you. We're going to continue with our Amazon affiliate ad today. Now here's a product I can really get excited about. It's a plastic bag but I'll tell you why I'm going to make sure I'm referencing the brand. Yeah, these are the greatest things ever. You'll find out right now. I absolutely love these compression travel bags. I'm a big believer. Never ever check a bag when you're traveling. If my family and I go away even for a month, we put everything in These compression bags squeeze out all the air and it all fits. Okay. That one was 16 seconds. I'm going to have to redo that, but I'm just going to go ahead and delete that. I wasn't that happy with it, but these things, I'm, I'm not kidding you. You know, some products I'm more excited about than others. This is genuinely a product I'm very excited about because it, it makes the travel so much easier. I love these compression travel bags. I'm a big believer. No, never, ever check a bag. I can put so many clothes into these bags, roll them up, squeeze out the air, and everything goes into my carry on. That summed it up quite nicely. Don't take it from me. You take it to any serious travel, they will tell you the worst thing you could ever do is check a bag. And I, I do believe that we can get. People get into debates. TJ how could I do that? I wouldn't have all the clothes I want. Nobody cares what you wear unless you're going to Paris fashion shows and you're in the show. It's so much easier to not have to have to check a bag, wait for it to get there. It's lost in transit, didn't make an exchange. Someone stole stuff. All these things have happened to me. When you carry the bag on, you don't have to worry about any of that. Okay, now I'm going to switch gears and do a product review for a book. I don't think I've done this yet, but the book is so good I don't mind doing a second ad. And by the way, I've been pleasantly surprised with books are now really selling for me in the Amazon Influencer program. Now, you don't make a lot of money, but I think of, you know, James Clear's Atomic Habits. I think I've sold maybe 50 of those books from my ad and I don't even see my ad on the main product page. So I don't even know where they're showing it. When you make a video for at the Amazon Influencer program, there are a lot of different places they can put it. They can put it in their own ads. They can put it in their TikTok like in Amazon Inspire feed. There's a lot of different places they can put it. So what I'm doing now is I'm going to my Amazon Kindle and I want to find this book that I would like to review. So I find the Kindle and I am, oh, there it Is Charles Duhig, how to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection. I can't even remember if I did this last week. I might have. But again, there's no limit to how many ads you can do for any product on Amazon. And I am genuinely so excited about this book. I certainly hope to have Charles Duhig on as a guest on this show once we start ramping up and doing more podcast interviews with people who are true communication experts. So I'm happy to give him another plug. Charles dewig's Super Communicators. It's a fantastic book. I don't care how much. Excuse me, that one clearly isn't going to work. We're going to delete that. Let me just take a little bit of water. In a moment, I'll be uploading all these. And I'll be showing you exactly how I do it to demystify the process. Some of it's a little tedious, but it's not that hard. And I want you to see, rather than someone just talk abstractly about being an influencer, how it's done. Soup to nuts. Okay, I've got to bring my camera back. Charles dewig, Super Communicators. It is an absolutely fantastic book that will take you to new levels when it comes to your own communications skills. He's a masterful journalist and a master communicator. Okay, so we've now done five different Amazon influencer videos. I try to do a minimum of five ads every Monday through Friday when I'm in the studio and, and sometimes when I'm traveling, do as I did last week. I. I did not five a day, but I did a number of. Or, excuse me, the week before when I was on vacation in Colorado, I still did Amazon influencer ads talking about ski wear and things like that I was using. So I put that back into my protective case, but I didn't want to show the protective case because it's a little distracting. Now what I didn't do, I sometimes do, but sometimes forget. I didn't test the first one to see if the audio was working properly. We did have a situation last week where one day I shot a whole bunch of ads and the audio wasn't working and I had to redo it, turning the microphone off to save the battery. And now I'm going to just do a quick test. I'm going to hit one, hit audio on Charles doing super. Okay, so I heard it. I can tell the audio quality. Is this as good as it's going to get Using this Relatively inexpensive microphone. So now what I do is I go to Safari, which is the web browser on my cell phone. I go to the URL, I type in am, am, A and I scroll down to I until. Well, now I don't see my own page. I've got to type in a few more letters. Oh, I misspelled it. I did A, A, N, A. So I'm going to type in AMA for Amazon. And I still don't see my product page, which is unusual, but let's just go. Emma. A M, A Z, O, N, C O M Slash Shop. Now it should pop up. Now TJ Walker's Amazon page shops up. I hit create content. I hit post video. I got a photo library. And now I hit the most recent video. And now, now I do see that the last video I did Friday was Charles Doig's. And you know what? It's okay. It's okay to have more than one video. But I see it now right here and that's all right. So I had done it. Is processing the video. Once it's done processing it, it will upload it. John puts buy this book now before. John. John. We do assiduously avoid politics on this channel, but I do appreciate you remembering different versions of different books that we've dealt with over the years. But thank you so much for remembering and stopping by. Much appreciated. Okay, so I've uploaded the video. I'm now going to. I'm now going to tag it. I'm going to your orders. I'm going to hit the dictation because I can dictate faster than I can type Super Communicators by Charles. It's. I don't know why it said it wasn't there. I'm going to added again. I'm gonna hit browse history. Super Communicators by Charles. Now it came up. I didn't try to say out loud his last name because it's not a name that that most dictation services are going to be familiar with. So I didn't want to confuse it. So I tagged it. I hit done. Now I title it. Become the best communicator you can possibly be. Exclamation point. I titled it before I hit done. I. I looked at the title. It added a comma, which I did not want. I deleted that. Then I hit save. So that one's done. Now I go to the next product. I hit posts, go to photo library and John Steen. By the way, you should be doing Amazon influencer videos. It's a Pretty easy program to get into. All you need is a thousand followers on TikTok or some so YouTube, Facebook, they let you in and then you can just say good things about products you already use already like and you already tell friends and family about and you can make a little money. Okay, these compression bags, that's the next one. And if you do travel and you're going away for more than a weekend or you're even thinking about checking a bag, I urge you, use a compression bag. Now, I don't know if one brand is that much better than the other, but as a whole niche, I'm a huge, huge fan of compression bags. Okay, I'm going to type in high bag. Yeah, high bags. Compression bags for travel get 52,000 reviews, four and a half star rating. I'm not the only one. Now, I don't mind reviewing something that, that has fewer than a thousand reviews and I don't mind something that has less than a four and a half star rating. But when I see something has tens of thousand reviews and a 4 and a half star rating, that does tell me that it really does a great job of making the marketplace happy. You'd be. Can't use a contraction. Never check your bags again, exclamation point. Never lose a bag again, exclamation point. That I think does sum up the appeal of this absolutely fantastic product. I hit submit. I gotta create content. We go to the next one. I hit post photo library. The next product, the Old Navy shorts. Now, this may be a little bit trickier because Old Navy has lots and lots of men's cotton shorts. Let me see if there are any other identifiers on this, but these are short. If you can tell, these are not new. I've had these for at least three years. Maybe they're five years old. Old Navy Ultimate Slim built in flex. I don't know if that's the brand name beyond Old Navy or not, but let me just type that in. Old Navy Ultimate Slim men's shorts that didn't. Men's shorts, Ultimate Slim. Let me see if that narrows it down. So they're gonna be. I typically don't spend a lot of time trying to match the exact color. These are this. The basic, basic element is the same. It's the basic fit. I think I found it here. I'm adding product. I'm hitting done. Comfortable and stylish shorts you can wear for years. Years. I think that sums it up. Again, am I expecting to sell millions of dollars of shorts like this? No, it's a process. What I'm trying to do is hone my ability to be a spokesperson. And again, I'm not an official spokesperson for Amazon or Old Navy. But it's a starting point, it's an entry point. I already am a spokesperson for my own books and online courses and workshops and seminars and keynotes. But this helps take things to a new level, ultimately, I believe setting the framework for major brand deals, sponsorships and advertising. Post video. Choose file. Whoops. I don't want to choose file. I want to go to the photo library. And now the jeans. The Levi Strauss jeans. Now, when I was a kid, now I really sound like an old time. When I went back in my day, There was only one pair of jeans. You had Levi's 501 jeans. They were very hard and stiff. They were blue. You would wash them a hundred times and beat them on rocks to make them look like this. This is how this looks when they're bought. So the gene world is obviously very different and has evolved, has tremendous competition since the early 1970s when I started wearing jeans. So let me see if I can be specific enough. Levi Strauss men's genes. 51 4. 514 men's jeans. Okay. And I do see them. And, well, 87,000 or no, excuse me, 17,000 reviews. Four and a half stars. Again, you might not like Levi's jeans. You may think, well, do I really need to listen to TJ wearing jeans? What I'm trying to do is a process where I basically go through everything I own, eliminate things I don't like and wouldn't recommend to someone, and then just say a couple of words about it for an Amazon ad. And if you, if nothing else, it helps reduce my own cost because I'm getting a certain percentage back. Levi Strauss jeans were great 50 years ago, and they're great today. Exclamation point. And today, exclamation point. So that one, when I first did it, a contraction came in. Amazon does not let you use contractions in the titles. Plus, it was too long, so I had to go back again. There's a lot of different ways of doing it. I tend to dictate because I can dictate with a lot fewer mistakes than typing and a much faster dictating. And I frankly can't stand typing on a cell phone. So that's why I'm doing that. So that concludes our Amazon influencer portion of this show. Quick program note. Unless things change, I will not be with you live tomorrow. I'll be headed to the airport, headed to New York City to conduct some presentation skills trainings. Although changes with clients can happen quickly. I may be back here live with you too. So most likely off for Wow, I just accidentally hit my mouse and I completely lost our whole screen. There we are. I see that I did not hang up on you and did not conclude the the stream prematurely. We are coming to the end of I just did it again. So sorry about that. We are coming to the end of our three hour show today. Typically we go from 9am to noon Eastern time. Right here we're on the TJ Walker Success Channel on YouTube, on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitch X often we're on Twitter. We were not on Twitter today. Let's a little bit trickier dealing with their technical specifications but hope to be back on Twitter soon as well. I want to thank you for joining me today. We've had a number of great folks stopping by, John Jaga Podora with us and a lot of other friends from different platforms and even want to say hello to our friends on Twitch who stopped by. I not been wildly active on Twitch but I try to take the attitude of not be all things to all people. But if there are people in the world who want to learn how to be a better communicator, I want to make it as easy as possible for them to connect with me and to be a part of this community. So that's why I take the philosophical view. It's better to just be on every single platform that will take take us so we simulcast this show every day on 7, 8 platforms to try to help as many people as possible. Are we absolutely killing it on twitch and having 10 million views a day? No, that's okay. I'm here in this for the long haul. I've been doing communication skills training since 1984 so not doing a big 40 year celebration, but that was the first time I did some level of communications training, working just as a volunteer, just as an unpaid intern for a congressional campaign where I grew up in Charlotte, North Carolina. Brought in the video camera with a TV crew and we practiced political debates, video recording it, trying to figure out what works, what doesn't work. Unfortunately that candidate lost by about 90 votes. Very heartbreaking. Extraordinarily close campaign, but learned a lot. It was really my first media training and presentation skills training. So I love this. I love talking about communication, I love communicating. I'm still learning. If I'm a step or two ahead of you in some areas, I'm happy to share that expertise. You may be a step or two ahead of some people and their own progression learning communication skills. If so, I urge you to stop by, share your expertise. You can always come right on camera. Typically, each day we post a link to the Streamyard Connection in the Community tab of the TJ Walker Success channel on YouTube, so we don't try to keep it all exclusive and hidden. If you want to be a part of the show, you can share the screen with me, talk with me, ask questions, debate me, disagree with me. If you look at some of the chats on the YouTube channel, one of you got very upset with me because of my advice that you should not hold a pen when giving a speech. And reasonable people can differ on that. I I do not recommend holding a pen when you're giving a speech because I want your hands free so you can gesture freely. It's one of these 1% tips. There's some people who've been wildly successful, especially TV commentators who do hold a pen. All things being equal, I would love for your hands to be free so you could gesture freely. So that's just an example of the sort of debate we can have right here on this channel. T.J. i'm T.J. walker. Thanks so much for joining me. I'll see you later on today and every day because we post three new videos every day on this channel. So please check those out, watch them, share them, leave comments, and I will be back to you live sometime this week, most likely no later than Thursday. Thanks.