The Ultimate Guide to Enhancing Your Communication Skills

So how can you become a better communicator right away? Here's a quick win cheat. That's right. If you're nervous about going into a presentation, a talk, a breathing, a speech, you're not quite sure what you're going to say. Do what I do. I have a cheat sheet. Everything I'm going to say for the next hour is all right here. Now, the beauty of this is it's a single sheet of paper. If I'm speaking on camera, I can just put it in front of of my laptop, in front of my computer. No one sees it. If I'm speaking to a larger audience and perhaps walking around, or even if I'm in a, a big room, in front of a large audience, I can have that one sheet of paper on a table. I can have it on top of a laptop, I can have it scattered out, several copies around the room. No one will see me picture picking it up. The beauty of it is it's only on one sheet of paper. So that's a quick one you can do right away. That will make you so much less nervous because you're not going to have to remember what to say. Chances are your memory isn't any better than mine and mine's no good. That's why I use a very, very simple cheat sheet. Now let's go right into a second quick win. The number one way to be confident when you're starting any presentation is to do what I just did. Start with a quick win. Give something of value to your audience, something where they can say, hmm, that was useful. That was interesting. I didn't know that I can use that. Maybe I should listen to this person a little more. That's so much better than the traditional way of starting a speech where someone kind of walks out, you know, Good morning. I'm happy to be here today. Let me tell you about how important I am. Let me tell you about all the wonderful things I can tell you about what I've accomplished. Boring. Rule number one when it comes to communication, nobody really cares about you. People care about themselves. So the faster you can hop right in to telling people something interesting for them, the better. Hi, I'm TJ Walker, and what we're going to do in the next hour or so is go through an actual training to make you a better communicator. We'll work on communication skills together so that you can be better one on one, speaking to small groups, business groups, business meetings, sitting down on a conference table, but also standing, giving a briefing, a speech And a talk, and we'll even talk about how you can speak more effectively to the media or in front of a camera. These are skills you're going to learn. I'm TJ Walker. I've been training people just like you all over the globe for about 30 years. I've trained presidents of countries, prime ministers, Nobel Peace Prize winners, professional athletes, and a lot of folks just like you. So here's what we're going to do today, and it's a little bit different now. This is a training seminar. It's a live training seminar for me when I'm doing it. But I'm not going to lie to you. One of my concerns in the whole marketing world is there's so much nonsense these days about, come to my free training webinar, come to my free live training session. And it's just marketing spin. Now, I'm going to be honest with you. My marketing team's not that happy with me. They said, tj, if you're going to generate leads and get more people into your sales funnel, you can't actually teach them anything. You have to whet their appetite. You have to sort of poke their pain. You have to do this value stacking where you say, and you get $10 billion worth of stuff today. If you act right now, the next five minutes for 995. Frankly, it's a lot of cheesy stuff I'm not that comfortable with. So I'm going to make a deal with you. I'm going to be transparent on what I'm doing here, and I hope that we really have a fair exchange of value. I'm going to actually give you the same training that I give to paying clients. Really walk you through step by step. Not just tease you, tantalize you, throw a shroud over things, and then at the last minute say, oh, but what you really need is behind this curtain, and you can't get it unless you spend $10,000 with me. I'm not going to do that. I'm going to earnestly give you what I feel is great information to help you become a better communicator. And then every 10, 15 minutes or so, I'm going to give you some options for finding out more if you want to go to the advanced level. But my goal here is that you actually improve. You go from wherever you are, several steps up in terms of your skill as a communicator. And then if you want to get to an advanced level or if you want to advance even faster, then you can check out opportunities to work with me and my team. So what are we really going to focus on today? I'm going to help you with the things that you've already told me. You're concerned about your body language when you're speaking. That's why you can see me from here up. And it's not just the tight little shot. I want to actually show you the things that you can do to look more comfortable and confident and the things that you shouldn't do so that you don't look nervous and uncomfortable. I'm going to give you tips on how to use your voice in a more powerful way. So many students I work with and clients around the world are insecure and feel like their voice is no good and it's hurting. We'll focus on that. I'm going to really go through the most common mistakes most people make as speakers, and together we'll come up with specific tips, tricks, and tactics so that you can avoid those mistakes. That's really the goal now. The ultimate goal is to help you become a better communicator. What is communication? It's when you have an idea in your head. It comes out of you in some way so that another person or group of people can hear you, understand you, find it interesting and relevant to them and remember your message so that they can take an action. Whether it is buy a product from you, sign a contract, hire you. If you're on a job interview, you know, endorse you, vote for you. Anytime we speak, it's typically because we want people to take a specific action. So that is the underlying assumption of everything we're doing here today, is to really help you accomplish something before you worry about the perfect message and the perfect outline and these brilliant ideas. For a lot of folks, it's, oh, my gosh, what do I do when I have to stand up in front of people or even sit in a room with my boss and five other people? What do I do with my hands? How do I keep from looking stupid? What if I rock awkwardly or fidget? All of these are completely legitimate concerns because ultimately we want to communicate a message. But it's never about style versus substance. You always have to have both. I can have the best message in the world, the best tips in the world on public speaking, speech writing, communication. But if I stand here like this for the next hour giving you fantastic ideas, brilliant ideas, wonderful tactics, the only thing you're going to take away is, boy, oh boy. TJ sure seems nervous and like he has to go to the Bathroom. Why? Because you associate someone rocking back and forth with nervous. You associate someone looking down nervous and someone holding their hands down here as either nervous or uncomfortable or having to go to the bathroom. So that is the message I would be sending. It's not that your visual message is always more important than what you're saying, it's that you need both. Think of it this way. If you had to hire someone to be your assistant and they had the best resume in the world, but they send you a cover letter filled with typos, spelling errors, mistakes, smudged paper, you probably wouldn't hire them, right? On the other hand, if someone had a beautiful cover letter, beautiful punctuation, beautiful spelling, but you looked at their resume, they never worked a day in their life and there's nothing on their resume that suggests they have the skills you need, the qualifications, and absolutely zero computer skills. You're not going to hire them just because the letter looks pretty, right? So it's always a fake debate between the style of how you move, your body language versus the substance of what you say. If you're going to communicate, you have to have both in sink. Now, you've heard people say, well, just act natural. Act natural. Here's why that's horrible advice. When you are speaking, giving a presentation, whether it's a job interview, whether it's a talk to 10 clients, maybe it's a thousand people in your industry, maybe it's just two people, your boss and your boss's boss. If you're a little bit uncomfortable, you're going to in all likelihood act natural. The natural thing to do is to act scared. When we're scared, we as human beings stiffen up, we stop moving because we're biologically programmed to want to avoid being seen. Because hundreds of thousands of years ago, if you're out in the savannah and lions and saber toothed tigers could see you, you're at greater risk. So the logical thing to do is kind of freeze, no one will see you. But if you're doing that in a presentation, a speech, it's gonna make you look nervous, it's gonna make you look scared. It is not going to help you. So that's why the advice of just act naturally doesn't really help. What you need to do is act the way you do when you're in another environment, when you're comfortable, confident and relaxed. What I have found in working with 10,000 plus people face to face around the world in 45 countries, and in working with 2 million online students from virtually every country Is that everyone, everywhere, when they're comfortable, they move, their body moves a little, their hands move, their face move, their eyebrows move. So what you really want when it comes to your body language is movement. Now, the way to figure this out is to practice with your cell phone. And what I would highly recommend, you'll hear me say this a lot, is if you want to be a better speaker, communicator, presenter, you need to practice what you want to say just on your cell phone. Record it on video and look at. Chances are the first few times you do that, you're going to think, wow, that person looks a little scared, a little stiff. Now, one area where people get themselves into trouble is they see themselves move a little or they see their hands move and they think, oh my gosh, that looks horrible. I shouldn't move my hands. That's distracting. So what a lot of people then do to correct it in their mind is they do this or they grab a lectern or they hold a pencil. Makes it worse. So be very careful when you are looking at yourself on video, when you're practicing and rehearsing, that you don't over correct and make things worse. You actually want your hands to move. That's what will make you come across more comfortable. Now let's talk about voice. There's something that very strange that goes on with most people everywhere in the world. When they hear their own voice coming back to them through the speaker, they instantly think, oh, wow, that's awful. That sounds horrible. That doesn't sound like me. I wouldn't want to listen to me, wow, my voice is uniquely awful. Now I know that I need to really change my voice completely or never ever speak. That's not the lesson you should take away. Here's what's really going on. We all hear our own voice distorted through the bones in our skull all day long. So when we hear our voice through a speaker coming back to us, it's much less distorted. So it sounds weird to us. It's not our self image of our own voice. And because of that, it's disorienting, it feels weird. Chances are your voice is perfectly fine. Maybe it's not good enough for Hollywood movie producers to pay you a million dollars to make a voiceover ad for their movie. Okay, mine's not that good either, but it's extremely rare. In fact, I've never even had a client with this problem where someone's voice is so awful, so bad, so distracting, it actually impaired their ability to communicate. People were running out of the room to avoid them. That just doesn't happen. So chances are your voice is not so beautiful and memorable and resonant that people pay you millions of dollars. But it's not going to drive people away. That's okay. You've got a voice that is perfectly fine for what you need to do. Here's the number one thing that will help you get comfortable with your voice. It is back to what I mentioned earlier. It is practicing on video, hearing yourself. The more you get used to hearing your voice, the better off it will sound to you. The more comfortable you'll be with your own voice. Now let's talk about common mistakes people make. The number one mistake people make with their voice is they speak too softly, they get a little nervous. And when they speak too softly, it brings the volume down. It flattens them out. It makes them sound monotone, and it makes you sound scared. Nobody wants to buy from someone who's scared. Nobody wants to hire someone who's scared. Nobody wants to vote for someone who's scared. So that's the problem with reducing your volume. Now it's natural. Again, people say, just act natural. That's not good advice most of the time. It's not that I want you to be fake and phony, but the natural thing to do when you're out of your comfort zone is to tighten your body, tighten your vocal cords, and your volume goes down. Huge problem. It's harder for people to hear. Flattens you out, makes you seem uncomfortable, nervous, and less communication takes place. And the wrong communication takes place. So the number one thing you can do with your voice is to not yell and scream. But you do want more energy than normal, a little more volume than normal. Think of it this way. If you're at a crowded, popular restaurant, you're at a big table, so say, with 10 or 12 family members and friends. You maybe have an aunt, an uncle on the other side of the table whose hearing isn't quite as good as it once was. And you want to say something, you're just a little more animated. You have a little more energy in your voice, a little more range. You're not acting, but the volume is a little more. The range is a little more. There's a little more expression on your face, your body, your hands are moving a little more. This is what you want to bring out the best in your voice. So what have we accomplished so far? I hope I've given you a sense that I am operating here in good faith. I've tried to give you some good Quick tips on how to start right away by doing things like using a simple outline on a sheet of paper. We've gone over tips of how to improve your voice, how to improve body language. And what I'm not going to do is just tweak you and try to make you feel bad and insecure. I'm not going to do all these typical gimmicks in marketing where, wow, imagine how much money you've lost. Millions of dollars because you're not in my $10,000 public speaker speaking program. I'm not going to do that. I'm going to continue just trying to help you, give you positive tips on how you can be a better communicator with the and being transparent with the hope that some of you could be 3% say, okay, this guy really giving me some value. So now I want to hire him to go to the advanced level or I got value from. I'm going to bring him to my company and train all of our top executives or I want him to come to our organization, give a keynote speech. So let me just take a minute here very briefly and go through the different ways people like you use someone like me. We also have monthly media training workshops for people who really want to advance their skills speaking to the media, whether they are creating their own online shows or being interviewed by the BBC, Al Jazeera and cnn. These are intensive in person workshop. We also have virtual day long public speaking and media training workshops. So for people who do not want to travel or fly, this can be done virtually. We also have a monthly master communicator workshop. It's a two day workshop. That's where you come for the public speaking training on one day and the media training on a second day. It's back to back days. It's very intensive and you really leave with a masterclass set of communication skills. Another option we have for people is in depth live webinars, typically once a month. These are in depth for a particular subject, whether it is speaking up in the workplace, whether it is how to be a podcast guest. It's going to be a very intensive small group live webinar where you get personalized instruction and feedback from an instructor. So these are monthly live webinars, typically about two hours long, much less expensive than the in person trainings, the live trainings or the private trainings.