Tips for Landing Your Dream Job Swiftly

How can you really stand out in your next job interview? Don't just come having read your own resume or a press release on a website. Really do research Google everything said about that company and come prepared to talk about what you like about their new developments and how you want to be a part of it that will make you stand out. Hi, I'm TJ Walker and we are live. This is the TJ Walker Success Channel. Hello to our friends on TikTok, YouTube, Facebook and all the other social media platforms. This is the platform, this is the show for you where we talk about communication skills, how to build your communication skills, how to improve communication, and how to build your confidence in your communication skills. I'll be taking your questions and your comments. A quick note to my colleague Ben. We're getting like an error message about our Facebook feedback. Do you see what's going on there? Because it says we're not. We're not able to push into our Udemy student Facebook page. So it looks like it's. It appears to have fallen off. If we can try to add that, that would be great. Hello to all of our friends on TikTok. Apologies, I can't have you join me live on screen on TikTok. But if you come on over to our YouTube channel, you can click the link my colleague Ben will post. It's posting right now. How to join us on streamyard. And then you don't have to just listen to me. This can be a true conversation, a dialogue. And Joyce says, I thought for a split second that's Jerry Seinfeld. Well, that's a comparison I like. Jerry Seinfeld has a lot more hair than I do. You made my day. I do appreciate that. That's. And he's only a few years older than I am. Jerry's in his 60s. Quite often the number one comparison I get on TikTok is that I look like Joe Biden, somebody who has even less hair than I do and who is 82 years old, 20 years older than I am. So you made my day. I very much appreciate that. Joey, thanks so much for joining us. Irfund is joining us. Jimmy has joined us as well. If you have any questions about communication skills, then please post it right here. I would love to answer your questions. We could have a conversation. We could bring in feedback from others as well. We're live today on TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, X and Twitch and a handful of others. So we're trying to make this show as accessible to you as anywhere you are on the Internet and social media. And the reason I'm doing that is it's, I think, demonstrating a good communications practice, which is if you're going to be a communicator, focus on what's easy for your audience, not necessarily what's easy for you. What's easy for me is to stay home in bed, have an old T shirt on and click, go live on Facebook or YouTube or just one. That's easy for me, but it's not as easy for you. And it's certainly not easy for you to take me seriously if I'm in bed in a T shirt. Taylor says, nice suit. Well, thanks so much again, that's sort of demonstrating my. My principle here, which is if you are a communicator and we're all communicators at some level, if you're going on a job interview, you're trying to communicate why that company should hire you. I'm wearing a suit not because where I am in South Florida, where it's hot and muggy and the saying goes, it's August 11th months of the year. I'm not wearing this suit because it's the most comfortable thing, although it's fairly comfortable. I'm doing it because my research into my audience shows they just take me more seriously. Given the fact that I have a track record of being a corporate communications trainer. I'm not a young guy trying to look hip and cool. So that is why I'm actually wearing a suit, to seem more credible to you and to not cause confusion. Because if I'm just seen wearing a tank top and a bathing suit and you're tuning in, you may be wonder wondering, well, is this guy giving tips on how to make margaritas? Well, no, that's not my area of expertise. Although I've done that. That's not the purpose of this show. So that is why we're here. John says, that's me without a T shirt. I don't know if that's your profile. We can't quite see that, but thanks so much. Sushi says, is communication skills influenced by environment, a hermit in a room and no social life the solution? Absolutely. I mean, if you never, ever, ever swim and you're 40 years old and you try to swim, probably not going to be good the first time you do it. You're probably going to feel very strange and alien. But just walking up to your knees in the pool, if you're in the water every single day, even if you've never had formal swimming lessons, you're probably Going to be able to do some swimming. It is the same thing as communicating. So the more you communicate, the better you get. Now here's the big challenge. So many people feel that, well, I'm not an extrovert, I'm an introvert. I like staying home and reading. Okay, fine. But I'm willing to bet at some point, once a week, maybe a couple times a week, you do like to get together with people who have common interest. Maybe it's the chess club, maybe it's a book reading club. And you do actually like to talk to people about your intellectual pursuits. If you've had one good conversation with one person at any point in your life, you already have all the skills you need to be a great communicator. That's the part people lose. They tell themselves, well, I'm not an extrovert. I'm not some big back slapping, glad handing guy who loves the limelight as an egomaniac. So of course I can't be good as a communicator. Wrong. It's just not true. Steve Jobs by most accounts was an introverted person. He wasn't somebody going around slapping everyone's back, telling jokes at the party. Yet he was a great communicator because he focused on his creations and he really explained to people why it would benefit their life, transform their life, bring magic to their life. Which benefited him as well, benefited his shareholders, benefited the public. You can do exactly the same thing. Want to say hello to all of our friends joining us live on Facebook, YouTube, all the other platforms. If you're watching this on demand, thank you. Post comments. And I do typically respond to every single comment, question and thought posted. So even if you're not watching this live, please feel free to participate, give feedback, talk about what you like, what you don't like, and what questions you want me to address in future live shows. So we had so many people joining us from so many platforms today. I want to just quickly, I've got to look at my cell phone for our TikTok audience because we don't have that integrated yet into already hundreds of people who've stopped by on, on TikTok. It is really a fascinating community there. I'm not going to weigh into the American political debates of whether TikTok should be banned in the U.S. i'll leave that to others. All I will say is it is exciting to get in front of so many new people and to be able to have more conversations. So I hope that dealt, I mean, let me think a little more about your question and see if I can do more justice to it because there's a lot to unpack there. Kurt says I am an expert. Well, Kurt, great. Share us. Share with us what your expertise is. And I don't know if you were sharing with that or you were talking about why I'm wearing a suit because I am trying to position myself to look like an expert as well as ideally talk like an expert. So the question again is, are your communication skills shaped by your environment? Let me try to do a short form video on that as well as long form video. Those of you joining us for the first time, this is my workshop. I take you behind the scenes, take you sort of behind the curtains and TikTok friends. There's a curtain here. You're off. You're not seeing the full camera angle. And if you want to see the full studio here and see what I'm really talking about and participate, come on over to the YouTube channel. Just go to YouTube, type in TJ Walker. Success, you'll see my channel. And if that's too long to remember, just type in TJ Walker. It's typically the first or the second channel that pops up on YouTube. There you can see the full studio, the three camera shoots and all of that. So what I want to do now is do essentially a rough draft of a video that will be a short form, meaning less than 60 seconds for TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, other places. I also do long form videos, really meaning anything longer than 60 seconds, although I try to hit around eight minutes. So that's what we do right here is you ask questions, I come up with questions. Together we try to improve our communication skills. This is not a Mr. Beast show. There's not action packed editing, graphics, mood music every two seconds. I'm bringing you into my workspace. This is my workshop, my studio, where I make content that's dispersed around the world on social media and online platforms. Online learning platforms. Just a little about me for those of you who don't know me. I have more than 2 million online students who take my courses on communication skills and personal development skills. And combined I have about 3 million either students or followers or subscribers across all social media and all learning online learning platforms. There's more than a hundred of them. If you combine them all, Ben, we're still getting a focus problem. This has happened a bunch again. As I mentioned to you, we're showing warts and all here. We're taking you behind the scenes. This is live and we work out all our problems together. You see my workflow. So one of the problems we have had lately is I'm now on camera two. This is what I do to simulate being on a stage. Our TikTok friends, apologies, you can't see that. One of the problems we've had lately is my camera three, which is what I'm on now, and I'm in front of my computer and can see your comments, is the auto focus is getting messed up. I think it's because of the hand gestures, but I don't want to stop moving my hand gestures because then you look stiff and nervous. And I'm not modeling best practices because I do believe that confident, authoritative speakers move their hands when they speak. So I don't want to freeze my hands and artificially keep them constrained down here. But I also don't want to go out of focus. So, Ben, if you could talk to Muhammad about this, one of our other technical colleagues, and see if there's something else we should be doing. Maybe we should in fact take it off autofocus and just have it on a set focus for me, being roughly two and a half feet away from the camera. So we'll have to look into that again. Hello to so many friends who've joined us on TikTok. I just want to. And Ben, I think you've done it. I'm talking to my colleague, Ben, if you could let people know. I know we can't do the URL, but let people know how they can join us if they're on TikTok, if they want to come on screen, just type in a message to our TikTok account so people can come into the Streamyard application and join us live if they have a question or comment. Okay, let me try to do a short form on this very topic of does your environment change your communication skills? Does the environment you're in shape your communication skills? Well, of course, if everyone in your family yelled and screamed all the time, that's going to affect you. If you're a hermit and you stay inside your own little room all the time, that can affect you too. But you can control your environment, at least as an adult. Get out there, talk to people. The more you talk, the better communicator you become. Okay, so that's one I have to say, tell you, I like that. I think it was good information. I was able to say it succinctly. So this is one that my team will take that, edit it, maybe tighten it a little, although it was pretty brief, put some B roll, put a little music Put a graphic, maybe a little sound effect and that will be dispersed across eight or more social media platforms. Typically that's what gets the most views out of all my content. More so than the long form live shows like this, more so than the edited 8, 10, 15 minute videos. So I say that not because short is always better, because sometimes people only watch for two seconds. But I do want you to know how I think about communication, which is not one size fits all. It's not. This is what I do. And the only way I do it, I try to look at communication from the standpoint of, well, what are my messages that are going to help people. But now how can I reach as many people as possible in different ways that work for them, not for me. And for some people, they don't want to watch TJ for three hours or for 20 minutes, or for eight minutes, or even for one minute, but 25 seconds of TJ for one tip. Okay, I'll do that. I know that's how some people think because I see the data, I, I see the views on YouTube, Facebook and TikTok. So I do know that a lot of people like to consume information in quick little bits. That's a reality. So why am I saying that? I want you to think about that too. Some of you I know are good public speakers and you like speaking, you like perhaps lecturing in the academic world, you like having an hour, Great. Not suggesting don't do that, but my point is why limit yourself to that? Maybe take your hour speech, chop it up, turn it into 30 or more short form videos, disperse it on social media and maybe you'll have a lot more people want to hear your speeches, hire you for a speech, hire you as a guest lecturer, come to your next speech. So I want you to think about that, okay? Since one of our viewers and our community members put this topic out, I want to do a longer form video on this topic of environment because again, some people are not going to watch a short video but will watch a longer, more in depth video. So that's what I'm doing. A quick hello to Curtis, to Ben, Ray to Cap, to health company, to seven Anthony and Time Machine, plus Steve Atkins all joining us on TikTok today. Thanks so much for joining us. Apologies you're not getting the full sort of studio experience because I'm doing this through my cell phone. If you want to see what everyone else on all the other social media platforms are seeing, come on over to my YouTube channel, it's TJ Walker. Success on YouTube a little bit about today's agenda. Today is sort of a freeform day. I'll be taking your questions. If you want to appear on camera with me, you can. If you want to type in questions as some have already done, you can do that. Some of you have emailed me questions in the last week. I'll be addressing those. Some of the questions I deal with have come to me because of recent in person trainings. And some questions come courtesy of artificial intelligence chat GPT. I'll be sharing those with you as well. Okay, so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to go to camera one and I'm going to do a longer form video on this topic. I'll try to change the angle so our friends on TikTok can see as well. So the reason I start and stop here is I'm making it easy for, for our editors to know where to start this and where to stop. Does your environment influence your ultimate communication style? Of course it does. Your environment can influence everything about your life. So if you grew up in a family where everyone yelled and screamed at each other and interrupted each other all the time and that was considered negative, normal and no one was offended by that, of course that is going to influence your communication style. Doesn't mean you can't change it or improve it or refine it or just alter it. What else does this mean? I know some of you are thinking, well, I'm kind of a hermit. I like to stay home. My idea of fun is reading a book alone, no one around. I'm not some big social butterfly. I, I can't possibly be a good communicator, can I? Well, not so fast. You can control how you come across at any point in your life. You can always get better. But of course your environment does have an impact. If I never ever swim, and I'm 40 years old and I've never been willing to stick my toe into the pool and now I want to learn how to swim, I could do it, but I'm going to be pretty uncomfortable, pretty anxious the first time I go in. And when I get to my knees, I might be thinking, oh, how does this really work? What's going to happen here? But I could eventually learn how to be a good swimmer. On the other hand, if you get in a pool every day or get in the ocean, you splash around, you're totally comfortable with it, even if you've never had formal swimming lessons. If you're just in water every day, chances are you'll be A decent swimmer, you could certainly swim across the pool or get yourself out if you fall off a boat because of your environment. So what does this mean if you are a hermit, if you are someone who thinks of yourself as introverted, remember, there's probably some times when you do like to talk to people. Maybe your ideal weekend is just sitting at home alone, reading a good book. But maybe once a week, maybe once a month, you love getting together with that book club and talking about your ideas with fellow book lovers and fellow lovers of that author. You like the exchange of intellectual ideas. Whereas you might not want to go to a big, loud, noisy keg party where everyone is really loud and chugging beer. That might not be your thing. That's okay. My point is, there are certain circumstances, certain environments where you are comfortable speaking and you do like speaking. Here is the real test. If you've ever had one conversation with one person in your entire life where you felt good about it and you could tell they were interested in what you said, listening to you, and. And there was an exchange of ideas. If you've ever done that one time, I've got good news for you. You actually have all the skills you need to be a great communicator. You can in fact do well in a job interview, a new business pitch, speaking up at meetings, asking investors for money, talking to your board of directors about what, why you need approval for a new project. You have all those skills. May not seem like it, but ultimately communication, spoken communication is about you speaking to one or more human beings. Speaking in a way where they can focus on your message without worrying about, you know, does TJ seem too scared or nervous or uncomfortable? Where you're more or less coming across okay and not overtly nervous. Speaking in a way people understand what you're saying and can remember your idea so they can act upon it. That's ultimately what communication is. And I'm willing to bet you do this all the time. Just going to a restaurant and ordering a meal is a type of communication. And if you get what you ordered, at least some of the time, it means you are able to communicate. Here's my suggestion. If you do think of yourself as an introvert or a hermit or a homebody, do not try to magically change your personality and tell yourself, I'm now an extrovert. It's going to come across phony, contrived, not natural. And you're not going to want to do it. So don't worry about changing your personality. Instead, what I do want you to do is look for opportunities, perhaps more opportunities than you do now in a typical week where you can speak to people about things you enjoy, that you're passionate about. Perhaps it's chess, perhaps it's 18th century Russian literature. Find other people who have similar interests and actively seek out places, time, space to talk to them. Could be online, could be face to face, could be a small group, could be one person at a coffee shop. But look for ways of speaking to people. The more you speak, the better you get at communication. Okay, note to editor. I think that one works. Okay, so now I'm going to switch Back to camera three. So if you're just joining me on TikTok and you're saying, what is this guy doing? This is our workshop. Here I am sharing with you how I actually create content that relates to communication skills. My name is. Excuse me a minute. I think I got too much powder makeup on my face again, and I'm getting an irritation in my nose. So I apologize for seeming to touch my nose too often. This is a workshop. So this is not a finished produced show like on CNN or some major news network where everything is highly constructed and vetted and planned and prepared. I'm bringing you into my actual workshop so you can see how one content creator makes content. I'm not suggesting it's the only way, not even suggesting it's the best way, but it is the way that I create content. Now, note to Ben. I just hit stop on our master record to be stopping. Ah, I know what's happened. I think my disk is full. Okay. All right, so here's what we've got to do. And a quick note. We are recording everything on high definition technology as you're seeing it now. But we also record things on 4K, which is the highest quality of recording video these days, which you would see a movie, major movie, on Netflix. And I just realized now I may have completely filled up my disk. So we're going to take a short commercial break and then I'm going to come back and. And I'm going to delete this during the break and then I'll come back and we'll be able to hop in again. So let me share with you some commercials that are also kind of learning moments too. These are commercials I've done as an Amazon influencer. I'm showing them to you not because I expect you to buy every product that I'm talking about or endorsing, but I want you to to kind of envision yourself there's a product you like A product you've told friends and family about. You could do a video just sharing how you feel about it, what you like about it, and that way you could make money, help other people. So it's something to think about. So I'm going to play this. Seems like a part of the family. I use it every day. I carry it with me to the pickleball court every day. I live in South Florida where it is hot and muggy and it's important to me to be properly hydrated. I don't want to rely on a vending machine that's pedaling other stuff. I want to take my own filtered water. That's why I use this hydropeak. It does a fantastic job. It's durable when it's fully compressed. It fits right into my computer bag so I don't have to have some big equipment, fancy equipment bag taking it. I put my video cameras and this and my laptop in one bag. I put it over my shoulder on the plane and it allows me to go anywhere in the world with tripod. Ready. This Sony condenser microphone is the one I've used for years and years for all of my YouTube videos. It gives clear, powerful audio. It is professional in every sense. Sony, of course, well known, well deserved reputation for electronic excellence. If you're looking to up your game, try the Sony condenser microphone today. Of course you want to look your best. I want to look my best. But you want to sound your best too. That's why I always put in a microphone into my iPhone 15. This microphone works perfectly. It boosts my sound. I don't have to get right next to my cell phone. I can be further away and the audio still sounds great. You're going to want to use this microphone if you want to create professional looking and sounding videos. Have you ever looked inside your computer? Chances are it is filled with dust. Dirt. How do you get it clean? I use the compucleaner too. This is a very, very powerful, powerful airflow. It gets rid of the dust, it gets rid of the dirt. It does not damage your computer. So if you want to really give your computer a nice spring cleaning, this is the tool for you. It's highly effective. I've had mine for years. It continues to do a great job. This Logitech wireless mouse is extraordinarily reliable and durable. I've had it for about 10 years. It still works well. I've even broken the back off. No fault of the mouse. That's just me being clumsy and it still works Great. In this high tech world we live in, why would anyone want an old notepad? Because there's something about actually taking a pen or a pencil, writing it down on paper. It makes it more meaningful, more memorable. I love these notepads. They're simple, easy to carry and they require no batteries. The SanDisk 2 terabyte hard drive is flexible. It's very light, as you can see, and it's okay. We're back live. Hello, back again with my TikTok friends, YouTube and everyone else. So let's make that a learning moment. Because part of why most people who are smart, intelligent, educated, thought leaders, you could be a consultant, an author, an expert, a trainer. One of the big reasons people don't make video is they think I'm not a techie. It's so hard. There's so many million technological things to learn. It's overwhelming. Well, I'm here to tell you it can be overwhelming. It is substantially more difficult than just typing messages. I'm not going to kid you about that. Now you want to take it up an order of magnitude of greater difficulty going from recorded video to live video, which is what we're doing right now. Anytime you make live video, there's so many other complications that can come in. So let's just make that a learning moment. I record everything I do on the Streamyard app, as I mentioned, that records it in, fork in, excuse me, high definition. I then have a mixer here that takes a feed from all three cameras and forgive me TikTok, you can't see that for certain elements. When I know I'm making a short form video and a long form video, I record it in 4K, which is a much higher quality than high definition. I noticed earlier when I hit the button to stop recording, it didn't stop. That happened yesterday and I didn't know what was happening today. It happened again. I couldn't stop it. Which meant it happened at the end of the day, yesterday's show. It happened today, just a few moments ago with you. And that told me, okay, we're early in the show. If I can't hit stop, it means I can't hit record again, which means I can't make anything available today available to you later in social media in long form or short form edited formats. So that's when I started thinking and trying to deduce what's happening. And then I realized, ah, I had not deleted the folders from my hard drive recently. And let me just show it to you. I'm going to pull it out of my mixer. So this is a SanDisk 2 terabyte drive. So it's small, but it's 2 terabytes, which I'm again, I'm not a techie, but it seems like it's, that's pretty big. But if I do enough shows for a couple of weeks, it fills this up. So I'm now putting this back into my mixer. So when you see me occasionally going like that, I'm hitting record for certain elements of this show so that we have the highest quality video available. So that's what I'm doing. We are open to your questions today. If you want to join me live on screen, you can do so. Today is really a day about you. We don't have scheduled guests, but I can tell you we got a lot of great guests coming up in the next few weeks. I'm getting very excited as our show continues to evolve. We're going to try to have a major significant guest on communication skills pretty much every day, not for the whole three hours, but for one of those hours and bring in different voices, learn from different experts. Our show yesterday was fantastic. If you didn't see it, I'd urge you to check it out because we had Don Kubian on, who is a renowned expert in Canada on the art of selling live. And I tell you, she, she could have the proverbial could sell snow to Eskimos. She was so good at selling it humbled me and made me feel like, wow, I'm awful compared to her. And I'm a professional communicator. So you may want to check out hour two of yesterday's live show to learn more about the art of how you sell a product, a service when you're talking to people in a live streaming video TV environment. It was a fascinating show. So let's say hello to. Let's see. Steve has joined us on TikTok Health Camp has joined us. Ray, Ben Curtis Sushi says identify change and self image. If you could elaborate on that, there's certainly some things I could, I could talk about, but if you want to elaborate more on that. And Dunn has joined us. Thanks so much. Butter has joined us. I could certainly talk some about self image as it relates to being a communicator. And let me see if I can go ahead and test and see if I've got the disk settings correctly. So I'm going to hit record. So now I'm not getting, wow, I'm not getting a record button at all. It may be that I somehow mess things up when I pulled it out while doing a live show. So I have not done that before. So it may be that that somehow messed up the feed. Ah, no, it does work. Okay. I think I just had not plugged it in properly. So let me talk specifically about this whole concept of your self image. And you're mentioning identity again. So I'm going to, I'm going to do a short form on this. But I do want to hear from you if I answered your question in a way that makes sense or was it all helpful? So I'm going to push. I'm going to go to camera angle 2, which you can't see, but if you want to see, come on over to the YouTube channel. Just go to YouTube TJ Walker success or my colleague Ben has posted right here in the Tick Tock stream the description of how to get to our. Our live stream as well, which. And we use the service stream yard. Okay, let me hit stop a minute and then I'm going to hit start again. Are you using an outdated self image of your. So part of what we do here is I, when I make mistakes, I just stop and we redo it. And I just realized I was about to use something, say something that made no sense. So let me do that over. Start over. Do you have an outdated self image as a communicator? So many people say dj I'm not a good speaker, I'm not a good communicator. Stop with the negativity. If you've ever had one good conversation, have you ever convinced your parent to give you one thing? You have good communication skills. So top notes editor. Delete that last word. So stop telling yourself I'm a bad communicator. You were a really bad walker. At one point in life you couldn't walk. Now you can walk. You can become a good communicator. Okay, so. So that's a perfect example of I get a concept from you, a question. I think about it, I try to be as helpful as possible. That was a short form video and I made a mistake. Hey, nobody's perfect all the time. I don't take the time to write scripts, rewrite scripts, polish them, put them in a teleprompter. I find it's better for me and for you to just speak, which is how most spoken communication actually works. But occasionally, as you just saw, I made a mistake. I want you to see that because I want you to think, well, if TJ can make mistakes and he does this for a living, I can go ahead and record videos too. And if I make a mistake I can just redo it. I'm hoping that is the lesson that you take. And Sushi's been nice enough to try to give me some prompting and I do appreciate that. And Angelica says, is it wrong to want to run and hide when people talk to me? Sushi says, like broken homes and negative families. Okay, so let's, there's a couple of deep things going on there. Let's. Let me try to address your concern. Sushi and a long form content where I'm not as rushed. Don't feel the need like I've got to say everything I need to say in 30 seconds. So I'm going to switch to camera one. I'm going to move my cell phone so you can see more of what I'm doing and I apologize, you are going to see my, my shotgun microphone there. I can't easily change that part of the studio. And I'm going to try to get this at eight minutes long. So I'm going to go ahead and look at my own stopwatch function set that. Not the end of the world if I can't do eight minutes. But that's what I'm trying for because it's most useful for various social media platforms. Are you using an outdated self image of a communicator? So many people tell me, T.J. i'm just not a good communicator. I'm not naturally good, I'm not a good speaker. Well, time out. You weren't a good walker when you were six months old. You hadn't learned to walk yet. Nobody is a natural born walker, nobody's a natural born speaker. But at some point you learn to walk and you learn to run. In all likelihood, you might not be an Olympic caliber sprinter or marathoner, but you can move, you can walk and maybe you can run on the pickleball court as I do or some other sport. You don't think of yourself as well. I'm just not somebody who can walk or run. You learned how to do it. It's exactly the same way when it comes to speaking, communicating. Whether it's one on one communication, whether it's talking up in a meeting, whether it's giving a presentation to three colleagues or to a board of directors of 20 people or maybe even on stage talking to 500 or a thousand, or maybe like this in front of a camera, talking to theoretically the whole world. You can overcome your initial identity of a speaker. I can tell you personally I thought of myself my first 11 years of life as someone shy, introverted. I was the last person to raise my hand in class. I was the worst person to have to sell magazine subscriptions for my school or bird houses to raise money for my boy Scouts. I was horrible at it. My self image was, hey, I'm sort of shy. I don't really like standing up and talking in front of people. But guess what? I changed my identity. I developed new interest and it kind of forced me to speak out more. I developed an interest in politics, in that case, student politics. When I was 12 years old and I decided I wanted to run for homeroom representative, the student government in my junior high school. This was so long ago. We didn't have middle school, it was junior high school. And that forced me out of my show. And I had to stand up and talk to 20 other students in my homeroom about why I wanted to represent them. And I won. I got a little bit of positive feedback, nice taste of this. And that developed more interest. And then a couple years later, I ran for student body president of my junior high school. That allowed me opportunities to speak at student assemblies in front of 1200 people and in front of the closed circuit TV newscast. So my self identity grew. Now you may be thinking, well, I wouldn't want to do that at 30, much less 12. You don't have to be me. You don't have to want to be a politician, which is what I did want to do way back when. But figure out something that interests you. You may think of yourself as an introvert. You may think of yourself as someone. Well, I grew up in a quiet family. We all just ate dinner silently. Okay, there's nothing wrong with that. But you can become whatever you want. I don't mean you can become a professional basketball player if you're four feet tall. But when it comes to speaking and communicating by speaking, you can in fact improve. You can in fact refine yourself. You can in fact develop a new self identity as a strong communicator. If nothing else, you may want to create a community forum or YouTube challenge or a YouTube channel where you talk to people about why it's okay to be an introvert, why the world needs to stop telling all introverts that they need to become extroverts. You could become a spokesperson for introverts if you wanted to. That's just a hypothetical. The point is, find something you like to talk about. Whether it's chess, whether it's basketball, whether it is medieval literature, whatever it is, find something you like to Talk about where you want to share with other people. It could be work related. If you do a job and you've been there two weeks, chances are someone else may come in today. You are now two weeks ahead of them. You can show them the ropes. You can tell them if nothing else, where the restroom is, what the policy is in the kitchen, how to use the coffee machine. That's communication. You can in fact do it. But it's going to help if you get away from this negative self identity of I'm not a communicator. If you're a human being, you are a communicator. You are someone who breathes, you're a breather, you're someone who eats, you are an eater. Doesn't make you a foodie, but you do like to eat food and you are a communicator. It is hardwired into being a human being. So forget about your upbringing or build upon the successes and focus right now on what is going to help you live the life you want, have the most happiness, have the most success on your terms. And that is likely to involve you communicating, you speaking with people every single day. Okay, that, that concludes. So that was about a little less than six minutes. That was a. That was what I would do for a long form video. My editing team will take that and my tripod is slipping here for our TikTok community. I just have to tighten, tighten the screw in the back. So that's an example of kind of what we try to do here is we're a live show for you. Your questions come first, but it's also the workspace. I'm rolling up my sleeves metaphorically and showing you how I create what I do. I'm not an artist in the sense of a Picasso or a great sculptor, Rodin, but I do create. And I'm showing you this creation process in part because I want you to unleash your own creativity. Rage King 3 says, do you write books? Yes, I do. And this is not a plan. Are you an author? Well, yes. You can go to Amazon and type in my name and you'll see TJ Walker's secret to Foolproof presentations. You'll see media training A to Z. You'll see half a dozen books I have written and I and some of the books are best sellers. But I haven't written many books in the last decade or so. And I'll tell you why. Because I primarily teach people how to communicate through speaking, through spoken communication. And I have found that the medium of a book is Simply not the best way to do that. So I have devoted most of my creative energies to creating either online video based courses on communication or creating videos like this. Because if you're talking about how to communicate effectively and you're talking about things like your voice needs to vary, your hands need to move, your head needs to move, that doesn't really come across well in text. It just doesn't. The medium of video is profoundly superior. If you want to teach people communication skills, if you want to teach someone music, if all you do is ever read books and you can't hear the music, I think it's going to be hard to learn music. So Rach, by all means. You know, I'm proud of my autofocus has gone out. I'm proud of my books. I think they're great. I think they have great insights. I would recommend if you want to become a better communicator, don't start with a book. Start with some class that encourages you to speak, record yourself and watch yourself. Doesn't have to be my class. I do have a couple hundred courses on the Udemy platform. If you go to to tjwalker.com you will see links to my courses as well. On my own platform there are live workshops I do. People hire me for in person trainings. This depends on whether your budget is $5 or $10,000. There's a lot of different ways of accessing me or someone like me. Here's the problem with using a book as a starting point to become a better spoken communicator. A better speaker is it keeps you inside your head. And it's for many people, I'm not saying you, but for many people it's an excuse to actually not do the one thing you need to do to be a better speaker. You need to speak to really improve as a speaker, you need to speak, record yourself, what, watch yourself, figure out what works, what doesn't work. Do it again. If you said, if I said to you, hey, I want to be a better swimmer, do you have any great books on swimming? Well, certainly there have been great books on swimming, but I'm pretty sure if you are a swimming expert and you say, well, T.J. i'm hearing that you want to be a better speaker or, excuse me, a better swimmer, my advice would be go to the swimming pool. Or your advice to me would be go to the swimming pool, put your toe into the water, put your head underwater, blow bubbles, take a swim class. That is how you become a better swimmer. That's how you Learn to swim. If you want to become more motivated and your, your goal is to be an Olympic quality speaker or swimmer, sure, read Michael Phelps biography. I assume he has one, his autobiography. But if you just want to learn how to swim, don't start with that's kind of my perception on books on speaking. And again I've spent a lot of my time and energy writing books, promoting books. This book in particular, I figured what's the best way to promote this book and sets a book about speaking. Why don't I speak? So what I did with my partner Jess Todfeld is we attempted to set a world record speaking about the book. So what we did is we went on 114 talk shows promoting the book in 24 hours. So we attempted to set the record the world the Guinness Book of Records for most talk show appearances ever in a 24 hour period promoting the book. And we did. And boy was I tired at the end of that lot of talking. But that's what I did because I figured that would be a better way of putting a spotlight on something speaking rather than just putting out more press releases, more and more blog posts or more text. So that, that's, that's what I did. And we did in fact get into the Guinness Book of Records, which was a lot of fun. Now someone did beat us eventually. So if you go right now, you won't see my name, but if you look at the history of Guinness, you will see that we were the world record holders for quite a while. May I ask, rag or rage, why are you interested in a book? And again, I don't want to sound like I'm talking against my own products. I do believe in the books. But let me know where are you in your own journey trying to become a better communicator? Because it may be there's nothing wrong with the book. It may be you're a great speaker, you're trying to get to the point of getting a TED Talk and you're looking for inspiration from the best TED speakers. Okay. There are a lot of good books on that. So it's not that books can't be helpful. But if you feel like you're just not a great speaker and you've never really learned, you're looking for the first big how to get over that first big hump. I would not start with a book. Okay, don't tell my publishers I said that. Fair enough. Okay. We've had some other questions come in from Angelica. I do want to address that. These are questions that have come in from TikTok. And I do want to say hello to Maison. Eddie has joined us. Jim Fredo, Mr. Hart, Music, Joe Felix. So many nice new friends joining us on the TikTok platform. If you want to see the full studio and what we're talking about, when I say the camera one, camera two, camera three, or if you want to join me on camera, then all you have to do is come over to our YouTube channel and you can click into our streamyard and you can join us live and actually appear on camera. So I do want to take very seriously the question that just came in or the really a statement that came in. And this is one reason why my friends on TikTok, I would love for you to. I would love for you to join us on YouTube because then I could see your comments more. Because TikTok, they do many things well, but they have so many messages coming in because they tell you, every single person who's joined the stream, that it's very hard to find a question after it's been posted. User5586 says, need help with this? And someone did come in today and say, I look like Joe Biden. Well, thanks again for watching. And I do want to again thank the viewer earlier who said I reminded them of Jerry Seinfeld, who is many, many years younger than Joe Biden. So I do appreciate that. And I just want to go back. Okay, here it is. Angelica said, is it wrong to want to run and hide when people talk to me? So let me take that very seriously. And I also see Rage says, can anyone be a good speaker? My mom from. Or my mom from Orange County. Okay, well, yes, I do believe anyone can become a good speaker. Let me address that one next. But Angelica wrote, is it wrong to want to run and hide when people talk to me? Okay, I'm going to record this. I am going to go to camera one and I'm going to. I'm going to try to give this in depth, thoughtful response. Angelica wrote to me and said, tj, is it wrong to want to run and hide when people speak to me? Well, Angelica, you're not wrong for doing that. But to me, the question is, what makes you happiest? What makes your life as meaningful and as enjoyable as it could possibly be? Now, it's okay to be shy. It's okay to think of yourself as an introvert. I thought of myself that way for most of my early life. But you have to ask yourself, is this creating the ultimate amount of happiness and joy for your life? Because as Human beings, we're hardwired to want connections. You talk to any 90 year old, 100 year old, what is the most meaningful thing in life? They all say the same thing. It's the relationships. It's time you spent with friends, with family, and they mean talking to them. They don't mean just sitting in silence watching TV together. I want you to have a meaningful life and therefore talking to people is a part of it. No, you do not have to go out to a business networking event every single night, pass out a thousand business cards in order to be successful. No, you don't need to do that at all. You don't have to go to a busy place like Times Square in New York City, stand there and wait for strangers to come up to you, talk to you, trying to selling you something, or get get your money, you don't have to do that. But when friends want to talk to you, I do think you should want to talk to them. When family members want to talk to you, maybe not after you've gone to sleep, or too early in the morning, or before you've had coffee, but at some point, people you care about want to talk to you. Yes, you should want to talk to them. And realize that talking doesn't mean you have to put on a show, doesn't mean people are judging you and judging the quality of your voice or what you look like. People talk to you because they want to be heard, they want to be recognized, they want your attention. So if you don't talk to people, if you don't let people talk to you, you're really telling them you don't care about them, you don't love them, you're not interested in them. That's isolating. We as human beings are not hardwired to go through life completely isolated. You've got to figure out who you want into your life. You and I might meet and you might say, I don't want TJ in my life at all. That's okay. But I want you to find someone. Some people you do like you do care about family, friends, close professional associates, people you respect. Where you want to hear them speak, you want to know their professional concerns, their joys, their personal concerns. In part because you care about them, but in part because you want to share elements of your own life. We all have personal turmoils, bad days, things we want to just get off our chest and share it with someone. We want someone to hear us. We also have professional goals, ambitions. Now, I don't know what your ambitions are, but Most of us want to accomplish something. Most of us would like recognition in the world and most of us want to make a living. Doesn't mean you have to be Steve Jobs and make so many amazing contraptions. You've changed the world. You become a billionaire. It may be you like to cook Briani in a particular way and you would like recognition that you make the best Briani in your town. Okay, well, talking to a customer, listening to a customer tell you exactly what they like about yours, what's different should be rewarding to you. Telling people about your passion for that dish should be rewarding for you. I want you to make this fun. And to do that, I need you to step back for a moment and ask yourself, why do you want to run away just because someone wants to talk to you? Now, as human beings, from an evolutionary standpoint, evolutionary biologists believe we are hardwired to not want to stand up and be seen by a lot of people. Because 2,200 thousand years ago, if you're on the savannah, if all of a sudden you stand up, all sorts of predators can see you. A saber toothed tiger could see you and come and eat you. So it made sense to crouch down, not be seen, not be heard. And for so much of human history, if someone heard you speaking and they're from a different tribe, they don't know you or trust you, they might kill you for fear that you could kill them. So it does make sense to have some fear speaking, people getting close enough to you to see you. I understand that. But in the modern world, very few people are going to hear you say hello or good morning and then all of a sudden kill you. It just doesn't really work that way. So there's very little downside if someone says hello to you and you say hello to them. However, there's tremendous upside. There's a tremendous positive side. If you do speak to people, if you do have conversations, if you do engage people, it could be just a more pleasant way of passing a half an hour when you're at a coffee shop. It could lead to a stronger friendship, could lead to a romance, it could lead to new business development, it could lead to a new job, it could go anywhere. But. But you've got to start the conversation. So I don't want you to get hung up on, is it wrong for me to want to run away when someone talks to me? It's not a right or wrong issue. It's really about what is going to make you happiest in your life. And for most people, and I believe for you, you're going to be happier talking to some people some of the time about mutual interest and things you have a passion for. Okay, so that was. And I forgot to hit my timer for that. So that was a long form answer to Angelica's question. I hope you found that useful. Angelica, let me know, was I on the wrong track or was I completely off base? Let me know. I would like to be as helpful to you as possible. I'm going to come to Rage King 3's question in just a moment. And also, do you mean Orange County, Southern California, which is, you know, there's been TV shows called the O.C. i guess it's a part of Southern California right below Los Angeles County. By getting my geography straight, let me know why you think there's something about that aspect. Or do you mean a county someplace else in another country where people grow a lot of oranges? I don't really know. Rage King, if you wouldn't mind elaborating there, because I would like to answer now. I see that BHY has joined us in Streamyard. I'd be happy to talk to you, take your questions live. But it says you're. You've not connected your devices. So for those of you watching on YouTube or Streamyard or anyplace else, or tick tock, if you click the link for streamyard, you'll come in. It will, I believe, ask you for your name and then I see you on my screen below. It will then ask you if you could allow access for streamyard to your computer to access your microphone and your camera. You don't have to. That is your decision. But if you want to speak to me and appear on camera, you would need to access your microphone and camera. Now you could just access your microphone, not access your camera. Okay. BHY is say, is with us from. While working in Sweden. So I understand if you don't want to come on. It's fine. Sometimes people like to come into Streamyard and you're kind of back in the green room of a show and you don't have to speak on camera, that's fine. But sometimes there's just a better reception, better connection. So Bhy happy you're there and more than happy that you're able to do a little multitasking and enjoy us while you are at work in, in Sweden. Are you in stock? I've not spent a lot of time in Sweden, but I think I've done an overnight in Stockholm on my way to Copenhagen in the Past where I've conducted media training and public speaking training. You're in Gothenburg. Well, great to have you with us today. Great to hear from you. I've not been to Gothenburg, but very impressed with a lot of aspects of Swedish culture and hope that I get invited back or just go there on a vacation at some point. Okay. I do want to address some other questions that have come in. I want to see if Angelica was able to respond if you're still with us and want to know if I was on the right track. If anything I said was helpful, if it was hurtful, let me know about that as well. I'm always looking for ways of communicating. The thing about great communicators is they realize no speech is perfect. They don't wait for a speech or presentation to be perfect. You have to just sometimes get things out. And the other thing is every speech, every presentation, every talk, every live stream, every TikTok, every YouTube video you do is a great way of testing and learning to get better. You can use anyone who's ever commented on any speech, any video, any talk you've ever done. They now become a free focus group to help you figure out how to make your next one a little bit better. So you might as well use it. Okay, let me address the question that came in through stream. This is one from one of our friends on Twitch. Happy to have people on Twitch. I will say of the majority of social media, video platforms and streaming platforms, I'm probably most ignorant about Twitch. My understanding is a lot of people use that for games. Gaming. I'm not opposed to gaming. I'm just too old for it, frankly. I grew up in a time when you had to put a quarter in a machine to play Pac man and I could never afford more than a dollar a day. So I never played play video games for more than about 15 minutes a day and did not take up the habit as they went online and streaming. So I don't know much about Twitch, but I'm very happy that you're with us and I want to be as accessible as possible to people around the globe on whatever social media platform they're on. Now. Your question is, can anyone be a good speaker? My mom from Orange County. I don't know how to address the last part. Well, I say that I think I do. I'm going to give it a try. So I'm going to try to do a short form on that and then a long form. I'm going to hit record on my 4K. I'm going to go to camera two. Can anybody become a good speaker, a great speaker, regardless of where you grew up? Absolutely. There's no city, country or continent that has a monopoly of great speakers because most people everywhere are boring speakers. Okay, so I do agree with everything I just said, by the way. I never just say things because I think this is what people want to hear. Life is too short for that. If I just were willing to say whatever people wanted to hear, I'd be a political commentator of a particular political philosophy in the United States and I'd be a billionaire, or at least I'd be worth several hundred million dollars. Because I know people who like that and I've debated them. I just was on a different side. So I decided a long time ago. When I speak, I may occasionally hold something back because I think somebody might find it wildly offensive. But I'm not going to say something I don't believe just to pander to people. One, one reason why I'm not in elective office, because it's hard to do that sometimes without, without really conforming your own views to what's most popular with the electorate. So I'm sharing things that I genuinely believe to be true. That last short video, I do believe all that. I'm wondering if I came across a tad too gimmicky or over the top with the energy level and the hand motion. I'm not sure. We'll take a look at it. I do want to say hello to Glenda who's joined us. Back again, Match W has joined us. Rich Hart has joined us. Chris, Christine, Kathy, Jessica and and John. So many folks have joined us on TikTok today, joining our community here on YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn and so many other places. Quick program note. In the final hour of the day, we'll be continuing our series on being an influencer, specifically the Amazon influencer programming. So I'll do what I typically do here, not every day, but what we typically do at the end is I go live on Amazon. I don't talk about being an Amazon influencer. I actually do the influencing right here in front of you simulcast. I promote particular products that people can see and buy with one click on Amazon and then within the same show within a show, I'll make videos using my cell phone and at that point we have to sign off with our friends on TikTok and I will make short form videos, typically 15 seconds or less. Those are then posted right on to the Amazon website and it often within 5 hours becomes live and it goes on the product page and people can see it. So that's how that typically works. So if you're at all interested in being an influencer, this is one way. I'm not going to say it's the only way or the best way. Based on my research, it seems to be the easiest way to get into the influencing game if you don't already have some huge audience, community, fan base, follower base. So that's why we'll be talking about that. Rage King says, I think you would be a good auctioneer. Have you tried? Okay. I always tell people there's one form of public speaking I've never mastered, which is stand up comedy. I'm just not a good stand up comedian. I enjoy standup comedy. I go see Jerry Seinfeld, just saw him a few months ago. I go see live standup comedy frequently. I've taken stand up comedy courses, but I've never gotten to the point where I felt like I was even mildly credible. But I need to amend that comment because Rage King, you just brought up a second type of speaking that I don't think I'm good at and that is being an auctioneer. Now, there are different styles of auctioneers. Ones I've seen tend to be really, really fast because time is money. You've got an audience in front of you with cash in their pocket. So, so many of the best auctioneers I've ever seen, certainly ones you've seen on TV are really, really quick. It is an art form and the people who are good at it are typically good at it because they have done it for hours and hours a week, for decades. I appreciate you saying I would be a good auctioneer, but I don't have any experience with that whatsoever. I see Afghani is joining, attempting to join us on TikTok. Afghani, I would love to talk with you, share the screen with you. I can't do it on the TikTok app. I need you to come over to my YouTube channel or frankly any other major social media app and click the button for streamyard. That's how we connect with people on camera. So apologies, I do not want to seem like I just hear the lecture and you have to hear me the whole time and it can't be a dialogue, but I can't it on the TikTok app. It's just not integrated with our stream yard. But Danny, if you want to talk to us today, I'm happy to have you join us right here on screen. But I would need you to go to our YouTube channel and just go to YouTube, type in TJ Walker Success. You'll see the channel, and then in the comments, you'll see the link to Streamyard. You click on that, you come right in, turn on your camera, give access to your camera and your microphone on your phone or whatever device you're using, and then you can share the stage with me and we can have a conversation. So, more than happy to have you join us. Now, I'm curious, Rage Queen, why do you think I would be a good auctioneer? I mean, I appreciate anyone saying I'd be good at some form of speaking. And are you. Are you someone who regularly attends auctions? Now? I've seen them on tv, in movies, as we all have. I think I've only been to maybe a couple of auctions in my life where it was a professional auctioneer. At my daughter's school. Every year they have a fundraiser where there is an auctioneer, but it's really just a parent who's standing up and just talking about a product and do it and doing the basics of let's start off the bidding at $500. And I could certainly do that. But as far as really having the professionalism, I've only seen a couple of live auctions in my life. I have been to Sotheby's, which is one of the premier auction houses in the United States, if not the world, but I didn't see an auction there. I was just there for parties. Rage King says, because you're a confident speaker and you can think on your feet. Well, those are skills that, that help an auctioneer, but they're also skills that help a talk show host, a judge on the shark tank, an entrepreneur pitching someone for money. Being confident and being able to think on your feet is a skill that is transferable, that helps almost anyone in any career whatsoever. Now, you said and you could think off your feet. I'm guessing you meant think on my feet, but if I'm sitting down and off my feet, it's even easier. Sometimes that does relate to. One of my top tips for people is they come to me and say, tj, teach me to think on my feet. I always say that's hard. The first thing you should do if you're coming up with a speech, get off your feet, sit back. I like to prop my feet on the desk. No pressure whatsoever, and just do your thinking with a notepad in front of you. Or if you prefer, a computer screen or your cell phone. That's the best place to think. Coming up with a great speech, you should not be coming up with a great speech when you're in front of people. Maybe a new aside comes in a great answer to a question, but the meat of any prepared presentation, speech talk is something you should prepare in advance where you're not thinking of it on your feet. Now, what I'm doing here today is not a speech. This is just a conversation I'm having. So all the things we're talking about today are not things I've written out in advance, memorized or put on a prompter and saying to you. I am talking to you spontaneously, extemporaneously. But virtually everything I've said to you today is some derivation of things I actually have typed up and written for books or thought about and done in different versions of videos for online courses. So there is a processing there. It's easy for me to seem completely fluent and thinking on my feet, in part because I've done a lot of thinking about all this stuff in the past. Now that's what's harder about being an auctioneer is you may have some piece of artwork or some piece of sculpture you've never seen before by an artist you've never heard challenging. And that's where great auctioneers really special as you look at the top auctioneers at a place like Sotheby's and they often have master's degrees and PhDs in 19th century art, and all they do is auction off 19th century art. They're really bringing their knowledge to the conversation when they're an auctioneer. So let me talk, let me, let me try to do a short form on that and a long form because it is an important, important point. And let me just make sure I didn't miss any comments coming in. We've had hundreds and hundreds of people joining us on TikTok today. Always great fun to say hello to new friends on TikTok, many of whom are not followers of the channel. And that's okay. It's okay just to come in and get a taste. If you're new to this channel, we're all about helping you become a more effective communicator, how to build communication skills and how to build more confidence as a speaker. That is our only purpose here whatsoever. And thanks so much to our friends joining us on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn, Twitch and Instagram. And shortly, we'll be live on Amazon as well. So let me deal with this issue of how can you have the confidence to speak on your feet. Let me do a short form on that. I'm Going to go to camera two, try a different angle this time. There's nothing like seeing someone. Notes editor. Scratch that. There's nothing like seeing someone so confident they're thinking on their feet and thinking, wow, I wish I could do that. Well, here's the secret. When it comes to thinking on your feet, most of the thinking is done on your seat. Time to reflect, think, outline, to become so knowledgeable about something that you can share in a spontaneous way. But it's stuff you've already thought about and you know you have good ideas. Okay, so I'm not in love with how that short form video came out. I do think it hits the biggest points, but sometimes I'll do a short form video and I'll think, okay, yeah, there's something there. I hit a mo. An important point, but I'm not sure it was enough to really connect with people, to be truly meaningful. Now, if I had my choice, everyone would hang on every single word I say for eight or 10 or 15 minutes, or maybe three hours if it's a live session like this. But you can't control the audience. And I believe as a communicator you have to meet people where they are and communicate in different formats. Sometimes you might go live on your own streaming channel and connect with several hundred people and you might have an opportunity, as I have, to go live national tv, CNN or NBC. And you're only on for three minutes, but you can reach hundreds of thousands or millions of people that way. It's not about one is better than the other. It's about they both come together and they complement each other and that's how ultimately you can communicate the most. Okay, so let me, let me address this one and try to do it as a long form. So I'm going to go to camera one. I'm going to shift for our friends on TikTok so you can see what I'm doing. This is more of the studio and we've hit record. You've seen that person totally poised, confident. They are thinking on their feet. They're speaking to people clearly, thinking on their feet, and you're thinking, wow, I wish I could do that. Well, let me tell you a secret. The people who are best at appearing to think on their feet don't do it that much. They think on their seat before they stand up to speak to people. They're seated maybe on a couch, maybe in their office chair, maybe a home chair, maybe at a coffee shop, and they're thinking, what ideas do I have that are important to me that are also going to be interesting to the audience I'm speaking to. And they'll take notes, they'll do outlines, they'll scribble, maybe do a little drawing, they'll brainstorm, they'll think, they'll contemplate on what will make their ideas interesting. Then quite often they will do an outline. Maybe they'll write the whole speech out, maybe it's an outline. But the point is they're doing real thought when no one's looking at them, when they're not standing up, when they don't have that adrenaline going through their body, thinking, oh, people are judging me. The thinking is done in advance. If you do that long enough and you give presentations to people and you can see you're connecting, you see that they're looking at you and nodding, you can see their understanding. Perhaps you're getting feedback afterwards where an audience member tells you what you said to them that helped them, either professionally or personally even. It gives you confidence. It makes it easier to say similar things for your next presentation. You start to build grooves in your brain. You're not having to look at your notes or look at PowerPoints or bullet points or slides or scripts. It starts to become internalized. After a while you get more confidence, more insights come to you as you get more deeper and deeper immersed in the subject matter. At that point you get to the point where any question that comes up, you can appear to think on your feet, someone can ask you a question and you know, I could speak for 10 seconds on that, 30 seconds, 60 seconds, five minutes. And I'm really going to give them a great understanding of that issue. And it's going to have start a middle and an ending and it's going to come across as cogent, interesting to that person. And it's not because you've said it exactly that way before. It's because you've given deep thought to the subject matter you've contemplated. You've experimented with different examples, case study stories, you've talked about it, perhaps in an hour speech, Perhaps in a 30 second short form video. You played with this enough that now it just comes to you and you appear to be completely confident, authoritative, relaxed, and you appear to be thinking on your feet. Yeah, you're standing. But remember, the greatest speakers, the most authoritative speakers, the most, the people who seem like they're thinking on their feet did most of their thinking on their seat. Okay, so that was not quite as long as I typically would like for a long form video. But again, my, my main standard Is not did I speak so long that I hit some magic algorithm and can therefore make a few more bucks with YouTube advertising? My main goal is have I answered somebody's question in a way that I've really given them the most value, I've helped them the most. I've given them the biggest insights, the most important insights I can think of. And that for me fit the category. It checked off those boxes for the last one. What did you think of it? Rage? Did I answer your question or not? Was any of that helpful? I realized it wasn't helpful in the sense of do this one little trick in five seconds, it'll solve the problem. Because the suggestion I gave takes time. It means thinking, preparing, contemplating. Those are things that take time. That the reason I appear to to be a confident speaker to you today. For those of you who think that it's not because I was born with any natural gifts as a communicator. It's not because I grew up in a family where we had these incredibly heated, thoughtful, analytical debates at dinner time with fascinating guests. No, dinner time when I grew up was a relatively quiet, simple affair. That's not where I learned how to be compelling speaker. It's because I've spent so much time in this subject matter of communication and it's because I've read a thousand books on it and taken other people's courses and been to trainings and then have conducted thousands of trainings over the last 40 years. That's what makes it easy for me to appear to seem like I am thinking on my feet. Cameron says okay. And hello Cameron, good to hear from you. Let us know what you're working on these days and your own journey of becoming a better communicator. BHY says it would be appreciated if you could talk about storytelling and how we can structure it. Okay, I'm happy to talk about that. Apologies for sending self survey. I'm going to answer your question. I do have a best selling course on storytelling. It's available on my website. You can check it out@mediatrainingworldwide.com it's also available on the Udemy platform and it is a, I believe a 30 hour course with 600 lectures. I'm going to try to give you a short truncated version of that right now. We will talk about storytelling. So Bhy, thank you for your suggestion. Let me bring that up. And Cameron, I'm going to do this thing on storytelling now, but if you have anything you want to share, please let me know. If you have any questions, please Let me know. I very much appreciate you stopping by. And I'm just doing a very quick scroll because we've had. You'll see hundreds and hundreds of people stopping by on TikTok today. And we want to say a special hello to all of you. Okay. The structure of stories. Okay, let's talk about that. I'm going to do that as a short form. What's the best structure of telling a story when you're presenting, the first thing is figure out what message are you really trying to convey and then look at all the things that have actually happened to you in your life. Find one specific situation and simply retell it as if you were there. Relive it. That's the perfect story structure. Okay, so that's the short version of it. I'm now going to go into a longer form explanation of how you structure stories when trying to communicate in business situations, a job interview, anything that isn't just trying to entertain your friends at dinner or in a relaxed atmosphere over coffee. And by the way, we're at our halfway mark. We have been live now for almost 90 minutes. I want to thank you for joining me. We're here for another 90 minutes. So I'm having fun. I'm hoping you're having fun. Whether you stop by and stay for, for three hours or three minutes or even 30 seconds, I very much appreciate you stopping by, especially if you say hello. If you don't have a question, that's all right. But do me a favor and just let me know where you are. And I see that Waldove just sent a rose. Well, thank you so much. I appreciate that. And you, you got the number one gift badge. I don't quite know what that means. Someone had that badge pop up the other day. I don't quite know what that means. If anyone wants to let me know, please leave a comment either on TikTok or social media. But I do want to take just a moment to let you know I appreciate your time is valuable. All of us have some level of money, but money you can always make more of. You can't get more time. It's a cliche to say, but it is, in fact true. So I appreciate you giving me time and giving me something that's actually more precious than money, your attention. So thank you so much. I want to earn it, I hope, by giving you consistent value and making it worth your time. So if you come spend three hours or three minutes or 30 seconds with me, you feel like, well, you know, I learned something from that guy today. That I can use either in my own professional life or my personal life. If you do get any value out of this, please do a thumbs up on whatever social media platform you're on. If you haven't yet subscribed, subscribe on YouTube, subscribe on TikTok, subscribe on whatever platform you're on. One of the things our research shows that the vast majority of people who watch the videos join us for lives, even ask questions and participate, don't actually subscribe. So you do help me reach a lot more people around the globe by subscribing on whatever platform you're on, because that sends signals to that platform that, hey, people are getting value out of this. Maybe we should show it to other people who are not familiar with this channel yet. So please do. That would be very much appreciated. Okay, and now let me answer the specific question that came in about how to structure stories. Okay, I'm going to do this as a long form. Going to camera one. I'm going to hit record on the 4K version shift so our friends on TikTok can see. And I got to be careful not to go too long on this because this is the subject again, I have a 30 hour course on storytelling. We don't want me talking for 30 hours today, so I'm going to try to hit about eight minutes. What's the best way to structure a story? If you're giving some sort of business presentation, whether it's in a job interview, talking in a meeting, giving a new business pitch, how do you actually structure a story? Well, first, for starters, let's step back a minute and ask ourselves the big question. What is the message you're really trying to convey to this audience? Whether it's one person, 10 people or 10,000, the starting point should be your message. It shouldn't just be, I'm a really interesting person, I'm going to tell interesting stories. That works if you're a comedian or a professional humorist. But for most of us, that is not the goal unless you're just with a bunch of friends shooting the breeze. But in a business situation, a professional situation, you should be thinking about, what message do I have that's important to me? That's also going to be interesting and helpful and useful to the audience. So that's the starting point. You need to think of a message that you could sum up in a sentence or so then what you need to do is be lazy. Don't write some whole new story, but just go into your database of memories and think about actual Live experiences. You have conversations you've had with a real person in a real place about a real problem. What it was, what that person said to you and what you said back, how it was resolved and what lesson was learned. That's really all a story was. But again, let's break it down. You need to have a setting. You need to have a problem. You need to have a character. You need some dialogue, you need some emotion, you need some resolution. And you need to explain what the point was. That's really all the structure is. And guess what? You already do that. Note to editor. Cut that part out. And guess what? Excuse me, let me grab some water. One second. And guess what? You already do that all the time, telling stories to family and friends and colleagues. What you don't do is just go through and deliver the facts. Now, too many people, when they're giving business presentations, just say, here's a fact, here's a bullet point. A bullet point. Here's what we did last quarter, the quarter before the quarter, and it's boring. That's not how you talk in real life. If someone said, how was your weekend? You don't say, well, I got up at 6, 6 o' clock Saturday morning. At 6:01 I went to the bathroom at 6:02, I brushed my teeth at 6:03 I pushed the coffee button. No, you instead focus on the most interesting thing you might say, I had the best weekend ever. We went to the beach. It was a beautiful sunny day, not a cloud in the sky. You go right into a situation where there's a setting. Now, when you're communicating for business purposes again, you got to have a message there. That's what drives it. Not just any interesting thing that happened to you, but the structure is the same. You want to paint a picture in the minds of your audience so they can see it. The beauty of a story is it allows your audience to see, to visualize what you're talking about, not to simply understand in an abstract intellectual level. So, for example, often I try to communicate with people that no one's a great speaker all the time. Everyone's going to have bad days. And the point is, you learn from your mistakes and go on, now, you understood everything I just said, but it's instantly forgotten. Nothing I just said was memorable. It was straightforward, it was abstract. How do I make that come alive? I'll never forget. About 30 years ago, I was going on a local talk radio show promoting a book of mine. I went into the studio and it was in South Florida, not that far away from where I am now. And I remember it was kind of odd. My chair was so low. I was sitting, it seemed like about 14 inches above the ground. The talk show host was in a very high chair looking down at me. This is a little odd or intimidating. I start to give my opinion on the politics of the day. And the host, Mr. Stick, said, I have more respect for a Klansman than I do for you. And he interrupted me mid sentence. That's a bit abrupt. I hadn't said anything that inflammatory, anything that disagreeable. And he just cut me off, attacking me. Now, even 30 years ago, I'm thinking of myself as I'm a great media communicator, and I've already done public speaking training and media training, and I'm not going to let him do that. So I'm grabbing the mic. He grabbed the mic from me. I'm pulling the microphone back, and I say, yeah, yeah, Mr. Stick. What I really think is, before I could finish, he reaches down under the table, pulls out a gun. Now, do you see my point, Mr. Walker? You know what I said at that point? Absolutely nothing. I was scared. Now, finally, after a minute or something, yes, Mr. Stick, I get your point. And I got out of there. Was it my best media performance, my best speaking performance ever? No, it was not. But I didn't let that one negative experience dissuade me from ever going on a talk show again or speaking again. In fact, I went back to that station two weeks later and guest hosted for another show. And I went back regularly. And it made me realize, okay, I'm in this for the long haul. I like communicating. Not every media appearance, not every speech is going to be great. You learn from it and you go on. Okay, so what did I do there? I told a story. It had a setting, South Florida radio studio, palm trees. You could envision that even if you've never been to Florida. Had a character, Mr. Stick, I changed his name, but a real person had another character. Me, had actual dialogue. Now do you see my point, Mr. Walker? And he's pointing the gun. Had a problem. There's a gun pointed at me. Had emotion, how I felt, had a resolution. I got out of there alive and I went back and it had a message, which is, no one is going to have every single speech go well, every time. You have to learn from it. I'm here not because I'm perfect and know everything and I'm always perfect. I'm here because I simply tried a lot and I've learned so that is in a nutshell, how you structure a story and how you tell a story to make it interesting and most important, memorable to your audience. Okay, so, you know, that was actually less than eight minutes, so I wouldn't have minded going a little bit longer. Oops. I think we've accidentally lost our, our tick tock audience. Excuse me one second. But I don't. I guess we just timed out there and we are going to go. Well, no, we're still on it. Just. That's odd. My phone went off. Let me. No, we did. We did lose the connection. So we'll try to get our, our TikTok friends back. But this is a perfect example of how doing live tv, live video, live streaming, you're not going to get everything right. If you wait until you've tested everything and you have all, all the staff you want and everything has been tested and vetted, you'll probably never start. A case can be made that, oh, tj, you shouldn't do these streaming until you've got a different assistant on every single platform who can monitor and there are people who do it that way. But there. But I don't have the staff for that. I certainly don't want to allocate the staff for that. And if I wait and say I'm not going to start until everything's perfect, I would never start at all. So some people can go too far. In the other extreme, if you go live and you haven't bothered to see if you have a microphone, then you're just wasting your time and you're not helping yourself and you could in fact diminish your reputation. Before I went live with YouTube or any of these platforms, I did spend about three weeks working with a production team, building the studio, testing the mic, making sure all the connections work, making sure things work with the mixer. So I don't want to make it sound like it's so easy. You just push a button. Never worry about anything. Although if you're going live on just one channel, like a TikTok or one platform or YouTube, if you're going live on just one place, quite often it is as simple as pushing one button, but then figuring out something you have of interest to other people. When I get up here and talk to you, I may occasionally weave in something that happened in my family life or personal life or pickled. But I'm very conscious of the fact that 99.99% of you don't care at all about me. We're not personal friends. Now, if you in particular, we may become one at some point. But I'm very conscious of the fact that really the only reason you're here is I better deliver something of value to you. So I try to make it so that 98% of what I say could be valuable to anyone who's interested in improving their communication skills so that you in fact get value out of it. I appreciate Step up giving me it looks like seven smiley faces. So thanks so much for doing that. And we got disconnected a moment ago on TikTok. I don't know why, but we did and I just reconnected. So some of you may have just gotten a notice a second ago and you've never even heard of me. Thanks for coming by. This is the TJ Walker Success Channel where we try to help people improve their life by improving their communication skills and improving their confidence in their communication skills. That's what we're about here. So if you have any questions about communication skills, one on one, talking small talk, giving presentations, speeches, PowerPoint briefings, speaking to the media, talking on camera. If you have any questions about that, post your questions either right here on TikTok or on Streamyard and using YouTube, Twitch, Facebook, LinkedIn or any other platform you're on. And I will in fact answer your questions, which I think I've done for a lot of people today. It's been a great day with interesting and thoughtful, thoughtful questions coming in and comments. Sushi says, how do we breathe during communications to stay calm? Do we slow it down? So let's talk about breath. And I'm formulating my thoughts on what I want to say there for a short form and a long form video. But let me ask you, Sushi, how do you breathe when you're having a conversation with your breast, your best friend? And what I mean by that is it's somewhat of a rhetorical question, obviously, because you probably don't think about breathing when you're talking to your best friend. It's an involuntary action. You just breathe, you breathe between sentences, you breathe. When you're looking for air, you breathe in somewhat normal pattern. But I get the point of your question. So many times people get nervous and they speak so quickly and they're talking and talking, talking and then all of a sudden they realize I ran out of breath. So let's talk specifically about how to deal with that. Sushi says I speak fast and rushed but don't realize it. But it makes me anxious, approval seeking, high pitch. So Sushi, there's a lot to unpack there. You can speak fast or rush. Typically, all you're doing is telling the audience, hey, everybody, I'm nervous, scared. I don't really have confidence. You probably shouldn't pay much attention to me or give me much credibility. So I apologize if that seems harsh, but that's how people with interact interpret rushed speaking. Hey, I'm nervous. I want to hurry up, finish this, sit down so I can get out of here so you don't laugh at me. And that's how it can come across. Great speakers pause. Great speakers do not rush. Now, there may be times when you're passionate about something, you're excited and you speak a little faster, but then you punctuate it by going a little slower and by pausing. I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me, let me try to give you a more detailed answer to that because there's two things. There's the breathing and then there's also the rushing. Great, great suggestion. So I'm going to do a short form first and I realize you can't see what I'm doing. I'm switching different camera angles. We're doing this on YouTube and this is going to be turned into social media content for other platforms, including TikTok. So I'm going to hit record. People ask me, tj, how do you breathe when you're giving a presentation? Same way you breathe when you're having a conversation with someone. You breathe when you need air, but what the person really means is, hey, I get nervous, I speak too quickly and I forget to breathe. You've got to calm down. And it's easier for me to say that than do it. But you've got to pace yourself. Just because you speak faster doesn't mean your audience processes information faster. So you need to breathe regularly the way you normally do. If you're out of breath, it means you're speaking too quickly, you're not pausing enough. So that was the short form answer. I'd say I'm not that happy with that. I think I lost some of the important points. I'm going to try to do a long form video on that and go into more nuance and I hope provide you with more value. So I'm going to go to camera one record in 4K. So what's the best way to breathe when you're giving a presentation, especially if there are more people than usual in front of you and you know you're going to feel a little nervous? Well, it's actually the same way to breathe when you're having a conversation with your Best friend. If you're having a conversation with a friend about something you care about, you don't have to think about breathing. It's literally involuntary. You breathe naturally during pauses in the conversation, pauses in your sentences. You say a thought, you breathe. You don't have to think about breathing. What happens when you're giving a presentation, especially if it's to an audience a little larger than normal, or if it's a high stakes presentation. Maybe it's a one on one on a job interview and you're just feeling tense. There's this desire to let me hurry up, get as many right things out, as many facts out as quickly as possible, and no one can accuse me of leaving anything out. And before you realize it, I'm out of breath. You've got to fight that impulse and realize that if you speak too quickly, you are stripping your words of their punctuation. I could convey more information to you on a page paper if I didn't use a single period, a space between words or commas or paragraph breaks. I could put more words on a sheet of paper. But would you get more out of it? Would I communicate more? No, it would just be this mass jumble of words. It would be too hard to process. Even though the person receiving it reads English, if there's no punctuation, it's too hard to deal with. That's the problem with speaking quickly and not breathing at the right time and the words come out faster and faster and faster and faster and the person listening can't process it. You need pauses for your audience to understand you. Now, the beauty of pauses is it also gives you time to breathe. You want to be able to breathe. You want to change the speed of how words come out of your mouth. Sometimes it's okay to be a little more excited and speak faster, but then contrast it with a pause. Contrast it by then speaking a little slower about a subject matter. Now you have time to breathe. I don't want you to have to spend too much time thinking about breathing when you speak. But if you find yourself out of breath, that is a fantastic warning sign to tell yourself, time out, going too fast, need to slow down. I need to breathe at my normal rate. Okay, I'm hoping. And hit stop on record there. Go back to camera three. I'm going to switch. And thank you so much whoever is sending all the hearts on TikTok. I do appreciate your nice thoughts there. So I'm hoping that answered your question. And I may have missed a nuance. If you want me to Let me know if that was helpful or not. And if you want any more addition to that, Tiana says, wow, thank you for telling me. I'm hoping that was in reaction to what I just said, but I don't know. Now, Sushi does have a second part to that, which is I speak fast and rushed but don't realize makes me anxious. I'm an approval seeking with a high pitch. Let me go into that a little more detail because that's, that's diff. It's related to not breathing enough. But those are separate issues as well. Texas Forever says panic attacks. We can talk about that. Tiana says, thank you. I appreciate all the other comments. Ah, now here's, Here's a topic. How do I ask my co worker out on a date? Okay. We have an international audience here and I am happy enough to point out without, I hope it doesn't seem like too much bragging, I have students. I have more than 2 million students online. I have students in every single country in the entire world other than North Korea. And I do know people who've been to North Korea are also my students. So arguably, you could say I've had students from every single country in the world. Romance dating in the workplace is something that constantly evolves. It's very contentious. Standards are very different from one country to another. They're different from one industry to another. They're different from one size company to another. So because of all that, I want to be very, very cautious here and not give you advice that gets you fired or gets you a lawsuit. Have there ever been successful romances that started in a workplace that went on to become fantastic, wonderful marriages, families, multiple generations? Yes. I'm not going to tell you. You should never, ever, ever ask at anyone in the workplace. But at least here in the United States, it's a very, very contentious. I don't want to even use the word touchy because of the double entendre. It is a contentious issue because if you ask someone out and you have any place in the hierarchy above them, it can be seen as coercive and workplace harassment. You can be lawsuits. It can be extraordinarily difficult. So I don't want to seem like I'm giving you advice on that. The other issue is everybody has certain strengths and weaknesses. I have been married for more than a dozen years and I am a man of a certain age, shall we say? I'm over 60. At some point. Talking about dating and stuff coming from someone like me can seem a little creepy to people. I'M being brutally honest with you. So that is sort of the one aspect of communications I don't talk about and I don't like to give advice on because it's too easy for it to be misconstrued. And advice that to a lot of people sounds like perfectly good advice to other people could make it sound like I'm advocating something creepy or manipulative. So I try to stay away from that. I will give you, I want to give you some value, which is to say that the best way to ask someone out. I'm not saying in a workplace is to already be engaged in conversations with them about passions you have that aren't just about will you go out on a date with me where you're talking about something you're passionate about, whether it's a hobby like rock crack climbing. If you are an avid rock climber and you've just done the most exciting climb of your life and you're telling people about it, and maybe you have a YouTube channel about it and maybe you are running rock climbing groups in the act of talking about that. Quite often things naturally occur where the person's attracted to you because they're attracted to rock climbing. Things happen organically. You're spending more time together anyway, and it turns out you both have an interest in going on this rock climbing expedition. The easiest way to enhance your social I won't even say dating to enhance your social life is to be doing interesting things. And it can't just be, I'm going to go home and drink beer and watch the game on tv because that's really not that interesting to that many people or perhaps the people you're interested in attracting. I'm going to have to leave it at that. We're going to take a quick commercial break in part because I don't know if my air conditioner went off. I'm suddenly getting hot and sweaty, so I got to cool down for a minute because I don't want to be the person telling you how to appear to be confident and authoritative and look relaxed. If I am myself, I'm looking sweaty. So we're going to get a quick commercial break just for a couple of minutes. Stores a mountain of information. These straps are why I can play pickleball in the hot Florida sun and not worry about my glasses falling off. Hi, I'm TJ with the TJ Walker Success Channel, and I love exercise and I love being active. But it's tough if you wear glasses and you're in the hot Florida sun. That's why I always use these straps, because they just fits right on each side of your glass. It slips on. Then I can tighten this so that it's right up against the back of my head. So if I'm shaking things, I'm on the pickleball court. I'm running around, my glasses are not bouncing around. I don't have to worry about them falling off because this has happened to me before. I've been playing pickleball. Ball comes at me, I jerk out of the way. My glasses have fallen down and been badly scratched. I don't have to worry about that anymore. I don't have to worry about running and almost diving and the glass is just flying off. With these straps, I feel secure that my glasses are right where I want them to be and I can focus on what I'm really after, which is the exercise, the sport and having a good time. This 3M transport tape really does the job. I can put it on my skin, even sensitive areas around here, and it stays stuck as long as I want it, but I can peel it off. It doesn't tear my skin the way other medical tape have done in the past. So it's just the right amount of stickiness. I use it every single day. Regardless of how often you need to use medical tape. This is a very high quality product. This Talani Kids backpack is versatile. It works well taking any book you need to school. What do you like about this book bag? There's a lot of different like pockets. Like it? Place a lot of my folders and pencils in here and there's a lot of like there's a lot of space in here. So there you have it. Kids like it and their parents like it. I love these floating shells because they look modern, they look contemporary, they look elegant, they don't take up too much space. It's the perfect thing for my TV set. I've used the SHURE microphone for years for my podcast for my live streams. It is high quality audio. You won't regret it. Your fans, your followers, your tribe will enjoy listening to you with it. This Samsung 85 inch TV will turn any room in your home into a movie theater. It is gigantic and it creates a movie experience right in your home. I love them so much. I have not one but two. One for here in my home, one for the office. This Dell laptop is very powerful. I use it every day to simulcast my show on public speaking skills all over the world. I've had to almost overwhelm it, putting in cameras and mics and so many mixers, and yet it handles everything perfectly. I'm so pleased that I've not had any technical problems. It hasn't been overwhelmed. It doesn't just decide not to. We're back live. Hi, I'm T.J. walker. This is the T.J. walker Success Channel. And this is the place where we try to help people become better communicators, to learn stronger communication skills and to build confidence in communication. So what I try to do here on this show is to be transparent for you so we can make everything a learning moment. This is my live workshop. This is where I make content. This is where I make my online courses for students. I've got 2 million students around the world taking my online video based courses. This is where I make social media content, short form, long form videos for TikTok, YouTube and all the other platforms. So what just happened there does happen occasionally. For whatever reason, air conditioner is working fine. We keep it on 73 degrees Fahrenheit in my office. But for whatever reason, I was all of a sudden feeling warm and sweaty. So what I did is I took tissue and I wiped my face very hard. I wanted to wipe off anything that looked sweaty. Now I'm going to get close to you. You can see a shine now and you certainly see plenty of imperfections. But I've essentially wiped off the makeup before. That was trying to give me a smoother, more matte look. So now what I'm going to do now again, we're transparent here. You don't have to do this. But everyone you see on TV is wearing makeup. Every movie star is wearing makeup. I'm not trying to make myself look like a Brad Pitt or some glamorous movie star. But I do try to reduce shine to look more professional for you. So what I use is a simple mosaic powder, a brush. I get off the excess and then I'm just putting this on. And what it does is just evens out the skin tone a little. I'm not trying to make it myself look like I have a great tan. I'm not trying to make myself look more handsome or beautiful, but I'm just trying to reduce shine and reduce the splotches that, you know, people do invariably get, especially if they live in Florida and are over the age of, say, 30. So it's not a huge, huge difference. And I hope you can see I'm not trying to make myself look like I have a nice tan. I'm using a powder that doesn't really change the color of my Skin, so it's not a huge difference, but I'm hoping you can see it just looks less shiny because I don't want to shine. So that, that's the point of that and that's why we stopped. We're in our third hour, so thanks so much for joining me today. If this is your first time and you've just come and if you've been with us for the last two hours, I appreciate that. I thank you so much. For those of you on Tick Tock giving me nice hearts, there was a question that came up before we took that break, which I don't think I dealt with. And I see Sushi has written. What if we have mental lapses in thinking and can't flow information out? Awkward silences. We will talk about that. Max. As my father passed away at a young age, so I missed out on a lot of social training. So I appreciate you sharing with that. And I can tell you that here in the United States, many of the most successful presidents, people who are the most highly social people in the world, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, did not have fathers in their lives growing up. And they, they did overcome it. So it is something that anyone can overcome if you decide you want to. So there's you. You can make a social life for yourself at any point. Not suggesting it's not harder and not suggesting that there aren't certain advantages to having the ideal home life, but sometimes having adversity as a young person can propel you to, to greater successes socially, politically, economically, later on in life if you use it as fuel to inspire. So I want to see if I missed any. Okay. We talked about the question of how do you ask a worker out? Okay. And I apologize if I seem like I'm a bit mealy mouthed on that topic, but I do want to be careful not to give someone advice that's going to get them fired. Because there are companies, certainly in the United States, where you could have a co worker, you could not be their boss. They're not your boss. You're completely equals. You work in a different part of the building. You bump into them at the cafeteria or the canteen a couple times a week and you get the impression that they seem very interested in you and they're laughing and everything's fine. You ask them out on a date and next thing you know, you are in hr, you're in the human resources department and you have, you've been punished or penalized. You made someone feel uncomfortable in the workplace. I'm not saying whether that's right or wrong. I'm simply describing to you a current political climate and not even political climate, it's a business place climate. So that's why I want to be extra cautious about giving advice in that arena. And Maxwell says, wow, that was great advice. Thanks. I appreciate you giving feedback on that. And Machiavelli, regarding your father passing away again, I do want to express sympathy there, but I also want you to realize that you can become a great communicator at any age. It is a learned skill. Some people I was fortunate enough to learn how to swim when I was five. Some people I know didn't learn how to swim when they were 30. And you know what? They're as good a swimmer as I am now because I never got to some professional level of swimming. So you can learn to be a good speaker at any age. Okay. Now sushi says caffeine. I don't know what you want to talk about there. I would recommend for most people most of the time, if you have a big speech and you're already nervous, don't drink extra caffeine that day. Now if you have a cup of coffee every morning and you're giving a speech at 11am, I'm not suggesting that you all of a or let's say 2pm I'm not suggesting that you forego coffee that morning. Because if you now go to 2pm and you're used to having caffeine every single day and now you haven't had it for 32 hours, you're likely to get a massive caffeine withdrawal headache. And that could in fact have an impact on your presentation. So I don't want you to do that. But let a more common scenario, let's say you normally have a cup of coffee for breakfast and now you're at a luncheon. Let's say you're the luncheon speaker and everyone's having coffee and someone's coming around pouring coffee and you're about to speak as the after lunch speaker. In that case, I would not recommend drinking coffee because you're not used to drinking it. You may be a little jittery, a little nervous anyway. And sometimes with coffee, coffee, caffeine you get, you can get a little bit of a shake and I'd rather you just drink water. I would especially recommend room temperature water. The ice can sometimes chill your vocal cords too much. If it's boiling water, you could in theory scald yourself. So just having room temperature water as I drink now, I happen to drink sparkling water where I have A little machine that adds the carbon dioxide to it to give it a sparkle, flavor and sensation. But nothing beats just plain room temperature water before you're speaking in front of an audience. Okay, now the issue that's been brought up is mental lapse. What do you really do? Oh, the user, one of the users says the app store button is not working on your website. I appreciate you bringing that up. I will bring that to the attention of my colleagues who work on the. And if you don't mind telling me, which website are you on mediatrainingworldwide.com are you on TJ Walker.com because a couple of different websites, we are making radical changes to tjwalker.com today. Hope to have a, a major relaunch in just the next couple of days. So if you could let me know very much appreciate feedback, that would be great. So let me deal with this issue of what do you do if you have a lapse when you're thinking and you can't have information flow out because that does come up lot. I'm going to do a short form. I'm going to go to camera three. I'm record. What do you do if you're giving a presentation? All of a sudden you have a mental lapse. Nothing's coming out. The normal human thing to do is to be natural and go. You're showing your frustration to people. Unfortunately, that can become the most memorable moment of your entire presentation and people forget what you're actually there to talk about. Don't do that. If you have a mental lapse, just stop. Keep a little bit of a smile on your face. Look at one person like you just said something so brilliant they need a couple seconds to think about it. Take a step or two like you're reflecting and then just say the first thing that comes to your mind that relates to your topic. No one will remember the time you spent saying nothing. No one will remember the lapse. Okay, so that's how I would. That's kind of the short form answer of that. I do want to give you a more in depth. I felt like I truncated things. I shortened it a little too much. I'm not sure if that short form one really worked, but we'll see. And user65, if you, if you could let me know which website you're talking about, I would very much appreciate that. So let me try to do a long form and then we are going to come switch to the next portion of what we do in this live show which will be talking about how to be an influencer, specifically demonstrating how to be an Amazon influencer. And even more specifically doing Amazon live and demonstrating as we talk about it. That's where we get to the point I like to call a show within a show within a show because we're doing the live show here in all these platforms. Then we do a live show on Amazon that's also on these shows. And then we also do little segments of short form videos that are going to go on Amazon later. And we show that to my friends on TikTok. That is where we have to sign up. Because I use myself, I keep telling myself, bring my iPad in and perhaps stream or I don't even need my iPad. I have another iPhone at home, I should bring in another iPhone and that way I could stream with you and make the Amazon influencer videos with the other phone. And I just haven't done that. So I apologize. Full disclosure. Okay, so we're going to go to this question. I'm going to do a long form. I'm going to go to camera one, hit record. We're going to switch the camera angle now. And I want to make sure my tripod doesn't topple over. My mats have shifted. One of you mentioned this just a couple of days ago and said, are you, are you on wrestling mats? These are mats that you've seen in restaurants, kitchens. I have in my own kitchen. It's a, it's a pad. So when you're standing for a long time, you don't get as tired. And since I do stand for these shows that we do because I want to be able to convey motion and movement the way people do when they speak. That's why I have these pads on the floor. It's not because I'm in a wrestling gym and it's not because I make how to videos on how to be a good wrestler. That's not it at all. It's just to make it a little more comfortable standing. Okay, so now the issue of the mental lapses. What do you do? What do you do? If you're giving a presentation, things are going perfectly fine and then all of a sudden it happens. Brain freeze. You have a mental lapse. You're thinking, oh no, everyone's looking at me. What do I do? Now it's panic time. What is the best way to handle that? Well, for starters, realize no one in your audience knows the full speech. They don't have the full outline. They don't know when you're planning on starting or stopping. They don't know what you'd plan plan to say next. So use their ignorance to your advantage. This gives you some leeway. Now you have two choices, really, when this brain freeze happens, the normal thing to do, what a lot of people do is they react in a transparent way. They say, oops, oh, gosh, this is all embarrassing. I forgot what I'm going to say. Unfortunately, while you get credit for being a real person and being transparent, it becomes the most memorable moment of your entire presentation because you put a spotlight on your mistakes. And for many people, it's the most emotional moment of your entire presentation because you're clearly feeling embarrassed. That embarrassment is an emotion that overwhelms everything else you've said in your entire presentation. Because if you're going through a PowerPoint or a traditional business presentation, you're dealing with a lot of facts, perhaps numbers, concepts, all good stuff. Maybe not that much emotion. So if all of a sudden your speech is going down the tracks and you forget, and there's this huge moment of, oh, my gosh, I'm so sorry, I forgot what I'm going to say, the emotion becomes the most memorable part of your presentation. We don't want your mistakes to be the most memorable part of your presentation. We want your message to be the most memorable part of your presentation. We want your stories that amplify your message to be what people really remember in your presentation. So. So here's the key. If you're going along, you finished one point, you finished another point, you're thinking, oh, no, I just forgot my third point. What am I going to do? You can think all that in your head. Don't show it with your face. Don't articulate. Don't tell anyone you forgot. Don't tell anyone you had a senior moment or a brain freeze. Don't even show it with your face. Sometimes people don't say it, but they're going along, they're speaking. All of a sudden, it's frantically looking at their notes. That's really just as bad because your facial expressions are conveying to people that you're hugely embarrassed. Here's what I want you to do. You've hit message one, you've hit message two. You're about to go to message three, and you realize, oh, my gosh, I forgot. I want you to look like you're completely confident and relaxed. I want you to look like you're in no hurry. Inside, you could be thinking, oh, no, what's the next point? What's the next point? What am I going to say? You can Be thinking all that. But realize no one in your audience can actually read your mind. So it's okay to think about anything you want to think about. Don't project it to your audience with your body language, your expressions. Don't project it with anything coming out of your mouth. Instead, simply pause. All great speakers pause regularly in their presentations, so pause. Give eye contact to one person for a couple of seconds. Look at that person like you just said something so brilliant they need a couple seconds to think about it. Do not look rushed, scared, hurried, or flustered. You look at that person and you're looking at them. You're not looking down at your notes the way most people do when they have a brain freeze. You're not looking up for the heavens of oh my God, please give me the proper message. You're looking at a human being. You don't really care about them in the sense that you're focused on them. You're using that time to think. Then you can look down, take a step, and say, this reminds me of. Or I'm often asked, go to another point. Knowing you can do that without looking nervous. Giving yourself that couple of seconds is often enough time to help you remember what to say next. But even if you don't realize your audience doesn't know what the third point is, you can simply go into another direction. Bring up another point you want to address. And this also brings up something that's critically important for most business presentations. Have a simple outline on a single sheet of paper with big bullets that you can read and glance down. So if you've been talking about something for a while, you forget maybe you finished it. You don't remember the next big point. You've looked at someone for a couple seconds. You have taken a step back or step forward glance down at your outline. Now you can see the next big point. And without any apology, without any sense of hurriedness, you go to the next point. Is it possible 4 seconds go by without you saying anything, and it's a little bit longer than normal? It's possible. But here's the thing. No one will remember that if you look poised and confident and relaxed the whole time. And that is how you handle a brain freeze. Okay, I hope you found that helpful. I really, really do believe in that advice. That is. That's the tip I've used regularly to great positive effect. And it really does help, because it's not the mistakes. This is a point I should have brought up. It's not the mistakes people. It's not the mistake people Remember in your presentation it's your reaction to your mistake. So if you made the mistake of forgetting, they're not going to remember that. But if you made the mistake of acting embarrassed about forgetting, that's what people will remember. Madif stops by to say hello and says, nice suit today. Well, thanks, Matt. I do appreciate your attentive bit of transparency. Madam. You may have noticed for the last three months I've worn a pocket square and I do like pocket squares. It's just a little bit of a flourish. It's one of the few areas where men can have a little bit of fashion creativity, a little bit of difference without it seeming too much like being a dandy. But I noticed the last couple of months it seems like it's always coming out and I'm messing with it in front of people. So I decided yesterday. Let me simplify things. Is anyone really gonna care if I wear a pocket square? Not so I took it out and I'm not gonna do it. I'll tell you the next big thing I'm thinking of. This is a, this is a real tie, as you can see, but it takes time to tie it every day. There's also the issue of I'm in south Florida, it's hot, even though I'm inside with air conditioning. And I've read this before, I haven't counted it myself. When a man is wearing, or I guess a woman you could say is wearing a traditional suit, shirt, tie, there are 36 thicknesses of clothes around your neck. Why do you want 36 thicknesses of cloth around your neck? So I'm going to tell you a little secret today. Don't tell anyone. Yesterday I ordered a clip on tie. Now I maybe call me a snob, I would never wear a clip on tie. Going to a business meeting, giving a speech, in real life, going out, meeting people because they're usually pretty easy to spot and they're just seen as tacky. But this is a video realm here. And my thought is a couple of things. If I wear a clip on tie when I'm doing these shows, it's not going to be noticeable, I hope to most of you. And there's going to be a whole lot of less cloth circling my neck so I'm less likely to get heated or overheated, number one. Number two, I save time, it does take time every day. And I'm only tying this tie for you for this show. I'm not wearing this the rest of the day. So the tie is supposed to arrive tonight. I'm going to get it tomorrow. If it looks okay, I'll get a bunch of different colored ones and I'll use those. So madam, I do appreciate you paying attention to detail. I am going to want your feedback on these clip on ties. Again, I'm not suggesting you wear these in real life. They are seen as tacky and cheap. But for my specific needs of what I'm trying to do, creating video for you, creating a show for you, I think it might solve me some problems, saves me time and makes things less hot. So I am going to want your opinion, Madam, give me honest feedback. If you say, wow, that looks cheap, cheap and tacky. Don't wear that. I am going to take that under advisement. Okay, Sushi writes, I wanted to make sure I didn't miss any comments from our friends on TikTok. Sushi writes, that makes sense. Don't project thoughts in a face if nervous. Thank you for the advice. I'm glad you found that useful because that is advice that I have given to people over the years, CEOs, presidents of countries even, and it has struck a lot of people as very, very helpful and relevant. So I do sincerely believe in that advice. Okay, we're going to take a brief commercial break. When we come back, we're going to be going on Amazon live, barring some technical problems. My colleague Ben helps me with this. I've not yet finished figured out there's a couple of different steps with Amazon. You have to sign on, get a confirmation code sent to a phone, then go on. It's thus far been just a step or two more difficult than what I can do live. So my colleague Ben, who is in another country, does that for me and then we go live. I'm going to see if I can get him in our control room and we'll be back in just a few minutes. Work one day. This laptop has worked for me efficiently, no matter what demands I put on it every day for the last year and a half. If you're looking for a reliable laptop, Dell really does know laptops. This hydropeak thermos seems like a part of the family. I use it every day. I carry it with me to the pickleball court every day. I live in South Florida with where it is hot and muggy and it's important to me to be properly hydrated. I don't want to rely on a vending machine that's pedaling other stuff. I want to take my own filtered water. That's why I use this hydropeak. It does A fantastic job. It's durable. I've dropped it many times, have a dent or two in it, it still works perfectly. If you're looking for a thermos that is durable, sturdy, doesn't leak, I don't think you can go wrong with a hydro pack. Are you looking for something light and easy to take around to bring your music to your next party? Beach, barbecue, pool event? This speaker does the trick. I've had this for several years, have used it countless times with friends, family members, gatherings we've had, and it turns any normal animal gathering into more of a party. It sounds great without me having to lug around big speakers or find outlets. It holds its charge, it lasts for hours. It sounds great. It syncs up easily and quickly to my cell phone. I'm not the greatest tech wizard, but it's easy, easy to use if you want a nice sounding speaker for your events. Home, office, 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, for me to have reliable lighting. That's why I keep these around the house, next to my bed, on 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 you. Okay, we are back live. I'm T.J. walker. We're going to switch to the segment now where we go on Amazon live. My colleague Ben is here who helps me with all matters technical and otherwise. Ben, we're going to go on. I've sent you the five products we're doing in advance, but I accidentally kicked over my book, so I don't know what the order is. What order do you have first? I have Sinclair Lewis, but I don't know if that was first or last. Okay, the first one we have is it can't happen. Which one? It can't happen here. That. That's Sinclair Lewis. Oh, it can't happen here. Okay, so. And then Homo. Yes. Rise of Superman, Marcus Aurelius, 10% happier. Okay, that. That's the great. All right, so we're going to go into these. For those of you just joining us, I am in the Amazon Influencer program and that means I'm essentially an Amazon affiliate. But it's one notch above. They let you make videos reviewing a product, and then quite often that video goes on the actual product page on Amazon. Someone watches the video and then buys the product. Amazon says, well, maybe the person in that video did something to nudge that prospect from the prospect category into a customer category. Let's give them a little extra. Let's give them a bonus part of that. An affiliate commission. That's essentially what it is. I have been doing this since really the end of December. So we're coming up on four months here. I've done more than 600 of these short form videos, longer ones, horizontal videos, some pictures, and just sharing with you my journey as we go about this in the hopes of empowering you to become your own influencer. Whether you're talking about your own products or Amazon's or Walmart's or selling things on TikTok or YouTube, I want to give you the tools you need to feel comfortable speaking in front of a camera and talking about things you believe in. So that is, in fact why we are here. Okay, so, Ben, you'll give me the countdown. I'm going to take you off now. You'll give me the countdown. We'll go live. And Ben, of course, if you can monitor Amazon, if anyone is nice enough to. To post comments on Amazon, if you can alert me to that. Right. You know what, before we start, I think my lights have timed out, so I'm going to turn my lights on again at some point. I need to figure out a way of, if it's possible, turning the timer off. The other thing I'm going to do is I'm going to turn this light off because when I'm making the videos from my cell phone, it's. It's a bit. It's just a little bit distracted. I'm even going to turn this one off because it just looks completely different on the set there. Okay. If you have questions about any of these products, I can take them with your. Excuse me. That just gave me an idea for a video. What do you do if you're speaking and all of a sudden you just completely choke up? So I hope to do that one soon. Okay. All right, Ben, let's hop right in. Give me the Countdown. 3, 2, 1. Hi to all my friends on Amazon Live, I'm TJ. This is the TJ Walker Success Channel where I typically come to you and talk about products that make me more successful in life, whether it's my reading list or just enjoy life more, whether it's products I use in my home or my office. Happy to be here with you. I want to go over some books today that have been meaningful to me. This first one is It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis. Now, this is a classic. This is not a new book. But it is more relevant today than ever before. He talks about a society that essentially crumbled. People figured, you know, fanatics, extremists, they can't take over our country. We've got a good solid country here. And yet it did happen. This is something that really resonates with a lot of people. I don't want to get overtly political here on this, this particular Amazon Live, but let's just say if you live in any democracy anywhere in the world today, I think you'll find this as relevant as ever. Even though it was written so long ago, Sinclair Lewis is a widely respected author. This is a true classic. The version I got is from the Signet Classics, but we've posted a link below in the Amazon Carousel so you'll see that. And those of you joining us from other channels, you can see the Amazon, the Amazon link there to get this to to go to my store so you can see us live right now on Amazon. So check out Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here. Okay? This is a more modern book. This is from one of my absolute favorite authors, Yuval Noah Harari, who is an Israeli academic and he writes these books so massively thick you can't even imagine reading it all. But before you realize it, you've read the whole book. He's also the author of Sapience. I believe he has a new one coming out. But this is Homo Deus A Brief History of Tomorrow. Sounds a bit contradictory, but he's so insightful in his analysis of history and trends and where the world is going. I highly recommend all of his readings. He's developed quite a following in the United States, especially in Silicon Valley, for his ability to really look at future trends, what's going on. I find him quite insightful. He asks for a lot of time and attention to get through one of his books. It is worth it, in my opinion. So the book is available in the Carousel. If you're looking for something to get you away from just the non stop stop, meaningless fluff that is all pushed to all of us Every day, through every social media phase, every social media site, the fluff, the trivia, the non stop entertainment, twiddle, twaddle. Dive into a book like this. It will help reshape your brain and put some, some sense of importance ideas into your head. This next book is by one of my favorite authors, Steven Kotler. Of anyone in the modern era, he is most responsible for really perpetuating this idea of being in flow other than the originator of flow concept, the famous Hungarian psychologist who has a wildly unpronounceable name. Forgive me for not pronouncing his name, but of, of Westerners in the United States. Steven Kotler is extraordinarily renowned for his ability to put prominence to this idea of flow and how human beings can work at their absolute best. This is a book, the Rise of Superman, Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance. And I like all of his books. I would recommend. Don't just click on the one below in the carousel. Look at everything Steven Kotler has written. Because every time I read his books, I feel like I have armed myself with tools, tricks, ammunition to make myself much more successful living and living a happier life, a more productive life. So check out the Rise of Superman because it's really about how all of us can become better. Someone might see that and think, well, that sounds a little bit like Nietzsche. That sounds a bit fascistic. That's not where he's going with this. It's about how all of us can become better, especially through the use of technology. So take a look at that. Now, let's go back a few thousand years. Marcus Aurelius Meditations, one of my favorite philosophers. Unlike for example Epictetus, who was a slave, Marcus Aurelius was an emperor. So that is one of the fascinating things to me about the ancient Stoic philosophers is they really could come from all aspects of life. This was originally his diary. This was not even meant to be published. But so many insights that have stood the test of time for thousands of years. People still find his insights, his reflections on life to be meaningful. I know I have. So there's a lot of different versions of Meditations. I mean, they're all taken from fragments of his writings. He was not intending, he was not intending this to be published. It was just his own personal journal, which makes it at some level even more fascinating. So check out Marcus Aurelius Meditations, a lot of his best work right there. The final book I want to bring to your attention, really our final product today is called 10% happier. And it's by the journalist Dan Harris. Now Dan Harris is well known to people in the United States because he's been an anchor on the ABC News Network, one of the big three TV networks. Before there was cable, before there was Internet, before there was web, before there was social media, there was ABC News. That was one of my three choices watching growing up and Dan Harris tells a very true story of how he had a panic attack on the air. Not a good thing if you are a network news anchor. You typically don't last long if you have panic attacks on the air. And he gives his own story about how he reduced stress without losing his edge and found self help that actually works. A true story and he's created a whole app and a whole movement around this and has really done a lot to power popularize meditation. What I like about him is he doesn't say, well meditation is so great, it's going to instantly transform your life from awful to perfect. And anybody who doesn't do meditation is a fool and idiot, deserves to be miserable. That's not his message. Unfortunately that is the message with a lot of self help gurus and he doesn't hold himself out as a guru. He's very revealing, talking about his own problems in life, his own shortcomings, his failures, his panic attacks, areas where he let down family and friends and talk specifically about how the practice of meditation has helped him. Now I am someone who kind of looked down my nose at meditation for many years. I had tried it really for the first time about 30 years ago, just found it incredibly boring. Wasn't for me, didn't see what the hype was about. And then about five years ago, maybe six years ago, I said let me give it another try. I used a slightly different version and now I just listen to a simple audio tape of 10 minutes of just my own voice saying relax, don't think of anything. Take a deep breath through your nose, exhale. It's just a simple self guided meditation, but with an audio of my own voice. And this book helped I guess, put me over the edge and realized, oh I can. There's a lot of different ways of doing meditation. You don't have to do 60 minutes a day of transcendental meditation or 30 minutes in the morning, 30 minutes in the evening. You don't have to cross your legs and be uncomfortable. There are a lot of different ways doing it. And his point is something that just makes you 10% happier. How many other things in life do that? Does the beer or the eight beers necessarily make you 10% happier? Not necessarily. Does a new giant 90 inch TV make you happier after the first month? No. Does it do 100 $200,000 car make you 10% happier in your life after the first month? Probably not. His point is meditation helps him on a consistent basis be 10% happy. Now that's obviously an approximation. Maybe it's a little more for some people, maybe it's a little less. Maybe it's more some days or the first year than last. But the point is he's not over promising and I do think it is important when you're looking at every any self development, human development, personal development program, have expectations, be optimistic, but be realistic. I love his realism built right into the title 10% happier. Especially if you can get it for the price of a book. Why not? So check out the book. For some reason it says Atlanta Fulton Public Library on mine. I did not stick steal it from the Atlanta Public Library, I assure you, because I haven't been to that I have been to Atlanta, but I've not been to the library in Atlanta for some reason. I must have gotten it used off of Amazon. I would recommend that you go ahead and buy the book. Whether you get it used, that's up to you. But it is available right here, right now in the carousel. So click below. Get the book if you've thought about doing meditation for years and if you're at all interested in improving yourself, I can't imagine you haven't thought of it. You haven't heard of it. You may be turned off by so many people saying, oh, you gotta meditate. You got, you don't have to meditate. There's plenty of people in the world who are happy, successful people who don't meditate. I can tell you I'm not a social scientist, but when I look at popular culture, it just seems like there's never more than a couple of months that go by where I don't see another new study by reputable psychologists, psychiatrists, social scientists showing how meditation does make people feel better, does make them happier. I'm not a scientist, this is not a science health show here. But at some point when there just seems like there's more and more research coming out all the time about the benefits of meditation. Plus the fact that when I really look at the biographies of almost every really successful person, it seems like so many. It seems like the vast majority of them meditate. Some of you I know are fans of Tim Ferriss's podcast where he really goes deep into world class performers and it's frankly rare that I hear anyone who's really successful, whether they're rich and famous or just really successful, it's frankly rare that I don't hear them talk about some meditation practice. So if you're looking for a way of starting, I think this is a good place to start. Start so 10% happier by Dan Harris so that concludes our new products that I want to share with our Amazon Live community. If you're watching this on my storefront on Amazon Live and you have a question about any book, I'll do my best to help you so you can go ahead and post your comments. If you're watching from any other place and are part of the larger Amazon Live community, if you want to post your questions, I'll be happy to answer those as well. So now what I'm going to do is a bit of a refresher, a bit of a recap. I'm doing this for our Amazon Live community, but I'm also doing this for the people who like to shop on Amazon and are not watching live right now. So what I do is just a quick, typically 15 second or less summary of why I like the book and why I recommend it. I guess I'm going to put my finger over this because I don't want people to accidentally think that I stole a book from a library, even though I assured you I bought it used. So I'm going to turn on my remote control so I can start and stop the recording on my phone without having to edit that later. So I'm going to attempt to turn on a remote. There we go. Would you like to be 10% happier? Who wouldn't? Dan Harris really makes a compelling case that meditation doesn't solve every problem in life. It's not going to make you perfect, but if you do it regularly, it could make you 10% happier. Okay, that's the first product. Now I typically like to hold the remote in my right hand. Again, if you're joining us live on Amazon, feel free to ask any questions or comments. If you've read any of these books and you want to share your own insights, feel free to share that as well. Marcus Aurelius Meditations this has stood the test of time. Insights from thousands of years ago still relevant to human beings today. Check out what this leader had to say. The Rise of Superman by Steven Kotler Cutler is one of my favorite authors. He's really done so much to popularize the notion of flow and teach people how they could be at their absolute most effective Check out his book. So again, I'm trying to do these in about 15 seconds or less because I have found, at least for me with my own Amazon influencer videos they get 98% of the views. So I used to do a lot of long, I occasionally do long forms as well, but that's why I'm doing these longer form ones. Okay, now I. I've heard his name pronounced. I'm hoping I'm pronouncing his name correctly. Yuval Noah Harari I believe is how you pronounce it. Yuval Nova Harari is one of the foremost intellectual in the world. His books are thick. If you're used to seeing everything on tick tock for five seconds. This is going to reshape your brain, but it's worth it. An old book from a long deceased author but Sinclair Lewis's it can't happen here. As relevant today as ever, whether in the United States or any other democracy in the world today. Okay, so just quick, simple ads. We're doing product reviews for our friends on Amazon and this has been our Amazon Live for today. Thanks so much for joining us on Amazon. I appreciate your time. Hope you got some value out of that. If you have any thoughts about any of the products I've been recommending, feel free to post them. I definitely would like to hear from you. We're going to sign off from Amazon right now. Thank you. Okay, so we've signed off of Amazon but now I'm still here live with you and I'm not going anywhere. You know, we had a few questions and things pop up but in the shuffle of things I lost the connection on TikTok, so we're just going to have to resume that tomorrow. What I want to show you now is again step by step exactly how you make a bit something go from a concept in your mind to an actual advertisement seen by potentially thousands of people around the globe. Where it can result in a sale, where it can result in money for you. The first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to pull out my receiver, I'm going to turn off my microphone. I certainly hope I should have checked my audio quality. Sometimes I do all this and it turns out I didn't have audio on. So I'm going to. First thing I'm going to do is, okay, so my audio is working today. So I'm going to show you step by step exactly how you go from concept to getting an add up. So the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to on my cell phone. I do it all on my cell phone. I don't want to spend the time with the workflow going from a camera to a drive to uploading it to editors. Because then before you know it, I've spent even not putting any value on my time. I've now spent a lot of my time and perhaps $100 of staff time processing this. So if I don't make $100 in revenue, which would in some cases would mean I'd need to make $1,000 in sales, the ad would lose money. By doing it all quickly, easily, with as few steps as possible, I eliminate all my hard cost and I reduce my time investment to any one ad to, I hope, typically less than three minutes total. You saw me shoot it. I do it in 1 take, 15 seconds. So the first thing I'm going to do is go to my Amazon store and I thought I had it typed in. I'm going to go to Amazon. There it's I click on it now. I go to create content. I hit post video. I go to photo library. I hit the most recent video. I hit done. Amazon is now processing my video, uploading the video. I would show it to you step by step. Amazon says we're not supposed to show anything in our private storefront because they don't want their competitors to know, presumably. So it is uploading the video. Once it does that, it is going to then go to my product page. I hit, in this case, I'll hit browse history. It can't happen here by Sinclair Lewis. I dictate because I'm simply much faster, faster dictating than I am typing. I also make fewer mistakes, so I've tagged the product. So Amazon knows that this particular video is promoting this particular product on their store. It's connecting it. So if someone buys it, I get credited. Yes, comma, it can happen here, exclamation point. And then I sort of titled it, I've submitted it. So it's off to Amazon to be reviewed, presumably by an algorithm. Ultimately, if it seemed like there's some problem, a human might look at it, but typically it's approved within five hours and that it then is eligible to go on the product page. So I'm hitting create content, post photo library. I go to the next product. It's uploading. This is a harder name and title. So I'm going to type this one in. Because when you're using dictation, if it's something that isn't commonly used, this is the Yuval Noah Harari book. So it's uploading the video right now. And I do realize this is a little bit tedious. Yeah, it is. But it gets you into the game of being an influencer and you don't have to be as famous as a Kim Kardashian. You don't have to have any tapes of your, shall we say, private life out to generate interest. You can simply be a professional person, talk about products you like and help other people and help yourself a little as well. Okay, so I'm going to type this one in and there it does in fact pop up. I see the book. 35,000 reviews, four and a half star review average. You know, a lot of people really liked it. You can't, you can't fudge something like that. Every now and then I'll get a book and I do like to check Amazon reviews. And I bought. I won't mention the author. She's someone where we're in sort of some of the same professional circles. She had about 700 reviews, four and a half stars. I'm like, well, I can't go wrong. I bought it was the worst book I'd ever written, assume, ever read. It was something where the concepts would have fit on a three by five card. But she has such a huge blog following and podcast following, her supporters just bought it and gave her great reviews. You can fudge that up to a few hundred or maybe a thousand. You can't fudge it with 35,000. It doesn't work that way. This book is truly seen as a masterpiece by a lot of people. Read one of the premier intellectuals of our time. Exclamation point, Go to storefront. And now we're going to go to the next book. Create post photo library. I tap the video, I hit done. It is uploading. So I think you can see I'm doing five. We've done the live then thing, which is sort of its own long form ad which is on Amazon presumably forever unless they kick me off or something or Amazon goes out of business, which I don't see happening anytime soon. And then we've done four ads for these four books. So we've done all the aspects of production, labeling, uploading, submitting, all of that in half an hour. So I guess if you look at it that way, it's 6. 6 ads, 30 minutes, you could say up to 5 minutes. So if they make a little money, great. If they have. If they don't make any money, at least I've created more how to information for you. So that's how I look at it. Am I telling you this is an easy get rich quick? No. Am I telling you if you just stay with it every day for three months, you'll make a ton of money? Not saying that either. What I am saying is it is a way to get into the influencer game and not feel like you're completely wasting your time. The way for most of us, if we just started blogging or a brand new YouTube channel today would feel like we're talking to ourselves. I do know that this is getting in front of a lot of people because I see the data. The Rise of Superman by Steven Cutler. I. I had it, I saw it and then it took me to a different place. Let me. There we go. I don't know why I thought I clicked. So I see it now. I'm adding product, I'm hitting done. Now I get to title it. The future has never been so exciting. Exclamation point Submit. Go to storefront. Create content. Post photo Photo Library Tapping. Done. Uploading, processing and I do want to thank so many of you who stayed with us through three hours. I do appreciate your time. Whether you're here with us for three hours, whether you're here with us for 30 minutes, three minutes, 30 seconds, sometimes even three seconds, I appreciate you stopping by just to say hello. Browse History Marcus Aurelius Meditations. And I did that out of order. But it didn't matter. Okay, there are several different versions of this and I don't know how much that matters, but ideally I try to pick the existence exact one so that it looks the same. Marcus Aurelius is as relevant today as ever. Exclamation point. Done. When I did that it seemed oh, did I go too long? Because you're supposed to do it in 60 characters or less. It was only 45 characters so that was fine. And now the final ver. By the way, Dan Harris is someone who would make a great guest for the show. So one of my secret agendas, frankly of why I'm doing reviews is to build relationships with authors and people I respect because he is a world class communicator. It'd be hard not to if you've been a network reporter and news anchor for 30 plus years. So I am hoping to get Dan Harris on our podcast and on our live show here soon or at least in the next year. Okay, post photo library. I picked the book, I hit done processing and it looks it's just now hit 12 noon on the east coast. So it looks like we either be exactly on time or just one minute late today. Concluding so it is nice to try to get out on time and I appreciate those of you spending time with me today. So the video is uploading. It's processing. 10% Happier by Dan Harris. The book shows up, add products. Hit Done. Title Meditation can make you happier. Now exclamation point. Done. Submit and we're done. Thank you so much for joining me today. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks for being a part of this channel. Remember, if you have questions about any aspect of communication, you can get them answered here live almost daily, Monday through Friday. So join me back here tomorrow. Also, check out our videos that are posted. We post three separate videos every day, so watch the videos, leave comments, post questions, subscribe and share. Thanks a lot.