TJ Walker argues that the idea of a "natural born" public speaker is a myth and that effective speaking is a learned skill. He supports this with analogies to surgeons, athletes, and comedians, personal anecdotes (e.g., learning pickleball), and a practical call to practice, get feedback, and overcome excuses.
Chapters
You're either a natural born communicator or you're not. You've either got it or you're not. You're either born with a silver tongue or you should just stay quiet. You should stay in the background. You should stay hidden. You've heard that before, right? Well, guess what? It is complete, utter nonsense. It's bs. Nobody's a natural born speaker. It is a learned skill. Now, we're all natural born communicators in the sense that pretty much every baby can cry. Baby is hungry, it can cry. If it needs a diaper change, it can cry. So you actually are a natural born communicator, whether you realize it or not. But that's different from can you get in front of 10 colleagues, 20 students, 50 people, a thousand people in your industry, and be interesting and compelling and confident? You may be thinking, tj, that's not me. I'm not a natural born communicator. Well, time out. Think about any important skill you do that people value. If you're an engineer and you design great bridges, were you a natural born engineer or did you have to go to school every day for four years to learn that? If you want to be more successful, then improve your communication skills. The best way to do that, smash the subscribe button right now. You may be a brilliant surgeon, but do you think anyone should have or could have paid you a lot of money to perform open heart surgery when you were 10 because you were just a natural born surgeon? No. You became a great surgeon because you went to medical school, you went to residency, you practiced on dead bodies on cadavers. For a while, you watched other great surgeons, you had mentors, you learned how to be a great surgeon. Think of the greatest athlete you admire. Whether it's tennis or gymnastics, Every one of them had coaching and practice for not days, not weeks, not months, not years, but decades. That's how they became great. Now, it's true, if you want to become a National Basketball association star, it does help to be 6, 10, 7ft tall. That is a natural born true trait. That helps. Okay, but speaking, guess what? Nobody cares how tall you are. I've never yet seen any speaker out on stage and audience members stand up and say, hey, before you give the next part of your speech, let's see how many pounds you can lift to make sure you're strong enough. No, nobody cares about that. When you are up on stage and people are watching you, you can be 4ft tall. People will think of you as 6, 7, 8, 10ft tall. Because they're looking up at you. If you're speaking in front of a camera, no one can tell because everyone's looking either a phone or a screen, or at most this big. You can look like you're big enough to fill up the screen and that's all that matters. What I love about speaking is it's something that requires zero genetic rare traits. There are plenty of sports where it just really helps to have a genetically rare trait. Michael Phelps is helped by the fact that he's a long torso, relatively short legs, and insanely flexible, large flipper like feet. You don't have to have any of that to be a great speaker. The number one thing you need to be a great speaker is the willingness to, to give bad speeches and to learn from those speeches, to get feedback, to build comfort, to practice. It's kind of the same way someone becomes a great comedian. You ask most great comedians, what does it take? Are you just naturally born funny? And one of the things they'll tell you is you have to have the stomach to get in front of audiences every night for two years and be awful and get almost no laughs. That's how you become a great stand up comedian. You have to fail, you have to speak and fail. And over time you get better and better and better. And that is why so many great, charismatic, so called natural born speakers seem to be good. They simply failed more than you have. They were willing to take the risk, they were willing to learn. So stop giving yourself an excuse. I understand if you're uncomfortable speaking. Chances are none of your teachers ever taught you how to speak. Chances are you've never been trained and had someone put a video camera on you and tell you what works and what doesn't work and how to get better. So it's completely understandable that you don't think of yourself as a really good speaker. But the answer is not to say, well, you got to be natural born. The answer is to learn, to practice, to, to get experience. A couple of years ago, I'd never played pickleball before. I didn't just tell myself, well, I can't play pickleball. I'm not a natural born pickleball player. Well, no, I took some lessons and then I started playing and within a relatively short period of time, out playing, playing every day, guess what? I was still awful. I wasn't great right away, it was a slow process, but gradually I got more and more comfortable with it. I learned the difference between a tennis swing and a pickleball swing. There are different nuances there. And I got to the point where I win a lot. I'm not ready to go pro, believe me. But I'm at the point where I feel like I'm a pretty good pickleball player and I enjoy it. And when I play with similar people, I win half the time, sometimes more. And that is my goal for pickleball. What is your goal for speaking? You might not want to be the next Anthony Robbins out giving motivational speeches in front of 20,000 adoring fans. You don't have to do that, but you might want to be someone who can pitch 10 investors on your startup and walk away with a million dollar check to create business that has a huge impact on the world. You might be someone who's a mid level manager now in a corporation and you want to become the CFO or the CEO one day. And you've got to get comfortable speaking routinely to 10, 20 investors, 1020 vendors, 100 employees. You've got to get confident at that. You might be a pretty good lawyer who graduated from a top law school, but if you want to be a star in the courtroom, you have to learn how to speak in front of the jury. You can do it if you decide, hey, this is a skill. It's like any other skill I can learn by doing. I can make incremental progress. I'm not going to tell myself this is something you're either born with or you're not, because that is a complete myth designed to keep you down. You can be up here if you want to, but the first step is realizing there's no such thing as a natural born speaker.
