TJ Walker argues that the single most important skill for better public speaking is empathy: speakers should view every sentence from the audience's perspective and retain only what is useful or memorable to them. He warns against self-focused, data-dense presentations and prescribes narrowing messages (1–3 key ideas), using concrete examples and stories, and designing slides for one idea/image each to make content memorable and actionable.
Chapters
If you want to be a better speaker, focus on building one specific skill first. And it's not about using the right hand gestures or having a richer voice or getting the PowerPoint slide just right. What I want you to do is to work on your empathy. That's right. I want you to feel how your audience is feeling. I want you to think about their feelings. Because the big problem so many speakers have is, is they get up and it's, this is me. This is my time. This is my present. Hold all questions till the end of my presentation. Let me tell you about my company and where we were founded, my background and my credentials. Boring. All I've done there and what so many speakers do is talk about me, me, me, me, me. And then they start the meat of the presentation. What do they do? They're walking someone through every single fact, every single data point. If it's a slideshow, it's lots of complicated graphs, lots of bullet points, and the audience is sitting there thinking, huh, I'm not quite getting this. This is complicated. This is so much stuff. You know what? I'm going to plan B, which is check my email and check my phone and text from friends, because this guy's boring. Why? Why did that speaker bore you? They were showing no empathy for you. They weren't dealing with your concerns, your feelings, your problems. Great speakers. Think about. What is it that I'm trying to convey? What ideas do I have? What insights do I have? What services do I provide? If I'm selling a service, what products do I have that actually solve a customer's problem? What services do I have that actually address a real need for a service that my clients, my prospects have? So everything out of your mouth when you speak. If you want to be more successful, then improve your communication skills. The best way to do that, smash the subscribe button right now, needs to be done through the perspective of this person who's sitting there listening to you, watching you. And if you really want to empathize with your audience, you've got to apply a strict rule. With everything out of your mouth, ask yourselves, if this audience member heard me say this last sentence, would their reaction be, oh, that's interesting, that's useful. If so, keep that. Keep it in your presentation and deliver it. But if you think the person's perspective might be so get rid of it. Chances are your audience doesn't really care how many cities or countries your organization is in. Chances are your audience doesn't really care about where you went to college or what your degree was in or your last three jobs. Leave it out. Chances are your audience doesn't need to know about all of your company's progress every single week for the last three quarters, or leave it out. Or summarize it in a way that's meaningful. Put yourself in the shoes of the audience. That's what I mean by empathy. I want you to ask yourself, think of the best speaker you've seen in your profession, your industry. Not a stand up comedian or professional politician, but someone in your industry. Think of the best speaker you've seen in the last year, maybe five years, maybe ever. Now get a piece of paper out and write down every single message you remember from that speech. Every idea, every number. Go ahead, I'll wait for you. Take as long as you want. But when you're done, look at how long that list is. Chances are it's not very long. I've been asking that question people just like you around the globe for decades. And what I have found is pretty much most people don't remember much of anything from the best speaker they've seen in their industry. Sometimes it's one idea, two ideas, three. Every once in a while it's a handful of ideas, literally five, never more than five. And that's from the best speaker they've seen in the last five years, 10 years, or their whole life. Do you really think your memory is better? Look at that sheet of paper right now. It's pretty empty, isn't it? So realize your audience doesn't have a better memory than you do. So why in the world are you giving them number after number after number on a slide show? Some empathy for your audience, for your prospects, for your customers. It's far better off to make one number really come alive that's truly meaningful and insightful to your audience. Create a story that's actually real and tell that story to your audience about the significance of that number. If you want to go to a second number, okay. But you've really got to make it memorable. Which means you've got to give examples. You've got to case studies. You've got to put interesting case studies, interesting examples, and most of all, you need compelling stories to make those numbers come alive. Empathetic speakers can all be different. Different industries. You see them in every industry, but they have one thing in common. They do not overwhelm their audience and bombard them with fact after fact after fact after fact. Empathetic speakers are the same everywhere in that they use judgment. They ask themselves, does my audience truly have to not Only understand this point, but remember it. And that eliminates most of your messages. Then what they do is they think, how can I really help out this audience member? Because this audience member has other things going through their head. They've got friends and family and colleagues sending them texts. Maybe they're hungry. They got a lot of other stuff going on. So how can I make this idea that's important to me more memorable to this audience member? They do it by telling a story that's about a real problem with a real conversation in a real place, about a real person, a real conversation with a client, colleague, vendor, individual, and how the problem was resolved and how you felt about. That's all a story is. They're doing that for you. It's not for the speaker. If you're a speaker, the easiest thing to do is to just brainstorm every fact number, message point, data point, accomplishment, stand up and read it all. That's easy for me, but it's a complete waste of time for the audience. So you've got to have empathy for what's going through the mind of your audience. What are they thinking about? And realize, this person listening to me now, but you right now, you're not being tested on anything I'm saying. Therefore, you're not sitting there writing down everything TJ says when you're giving a presentation. In the business world, or in the civic world or even the academic world, if you're not the teacher, nobody's writing down everything you say and going home and studying it. They may be listening and listening respectfully, but it doesn't mean they're memorizing what you're saying. So you've got to narrow it down and you've got to really think about how are you presenting this idea to someone. So that's not only understandable, but it's memorable. Empathetic speakers do not stand up and show slides with bullet points and text. Why is that? Because they know you in the audience don't like reading while someone's talking to you. And there's absolutely nothing about text up on a screen while someone's talking that increases the odds of you remembering it and acting upon it. Selfish speakers say, I don't really care about this audience. To heck with that. It's easy for me to just type a bunch of words, add a couple of bullet points, and read it. And I will use this PowerPoint as the poor man's, the poor woman's teleprompter. Easy for me. To heck with all of you. That's the selfish standpoint. The empathetic speaker looks at everything through the lens of what is helping the audience. That's why if they use slides, it's going to have images, one idea image per slide. If they're going to talk, it's about one idea at a time. Examples and stories to flesh out each point. And that is how anyone, including you, can be a great empathetic speaker and communicator.
