TJ Walker Giving Advanced Strategies for Communication Skills Success

Tailor your communication style to different personality types in professional settings. This is something a lot of people grapple with because they're fearful that, oh, I'm going to be too abstract, too intellectual, not professional enough. I'm going to appeal to this person here, but not the main decision maker over there. So it's a very legitimate concern. Hi, I'm TJ Walker. This is the TJ Walker Success Channel, where we teach you how to be more effective as a communicator, how to have more confidence in your communication skills, and to be more effective in all communication. So I want to give you some very practical tips when you're really trying to think about how to tailor your message for various people in your audience. In business settings, the biggest mistake of all is, is to simply say, well, I don't really have a choice here because I've got all the data, all the facts. We've been working on this PowerPoint slide for three months. Or the marketing department or the new business development department sent me this PowerPoint slide. So, hey, I'm handcuffed. Nothing I can do. I gotta go through the motions. That far and away is the number one mistake most people make. The problem with that particular style is there's simply no evidence it works on anyone. Be one thing if you were appealing to 10% of your audience, writing off 90%. But that's not what most of us do. Most of us write off 100% of our audience because we're just doing a boring data dump. Fact, fact, fact, number, number, number, complex slide graphic which you can't even read from where you are. You'd have to study it like this, really close on your computer, and even then it would take five minutes. These are the mistakes people make. Now, the first thing you've really got to do if you want to truly tailor your message, your communication style to your audience, is before you start with the first slide, before you sit in front of a computer, you need to step back for a moment and ask yourself, what is it I'm really trying to do with this audience? Is it just create a connection? Is it to motivate them to invest in me? Is it to get them to approve a budget? Am I interviewing in front of four professionals at a new corporation? I want them to hire me. What is it you really want them to do? That is the first thing you should be able to summarize this in in one sentence. Do you want them to hire you, invest in you, buy from you? What is it you want them to do? If you don't have a clear, crystal clear sense of what you want people to do, then everything else is frankly a waste of time. Once you've done that, you've got to really think about, okay, these people in the audience, what messages are going to resonate with them in such a way as to motivate them to want to do the thing I want them to do. And this is where you need to really think about their personality, who they are, gather as much information as you know about them. I mean, if you are in fact pitching a venture capital firm and you know their last 10 investments are all in artificial intelligence, and everybody you're pitching has a PhD in statistics or computer science, and you know that they are very, very mathematically driven, you better have some solid numbers behind you, but be able to tell the story behind it. If you are talking to four people interviewing you for a job hunt and you've never met them before, you're going to have to make certain assumptions. You need to really look at what they're advertising for. If you found this job in an ad, you need to listen to them, ask questions about what they're looking for, what is the ideal thing? So in some presentations, the real key is asking enough questions. Certainly this works for job interviews. For one on one meetings, small group meetings, the most important skill you have is asking questions and then listening to figure out how do people talk? Are they using a lot of emotion? Are they using a lot of data? Are they talking about pure facts? Are they mostly talking about their frustrations? It's not that you want to mimic them or pander to them, but you do in fact need to figure out how to communicate with them on their terms. Now, for a lot of presentations, it is scheduled in advance. You know you're presenting, you may only have 10 or 20 minutes. It's a specific amount of time and maybe it's more than 10 people. So you don't have the luxury of having a one on one conversation with each person. But that doesn't let you off the hook. In so many situations in the business world, you do have the ability to simply pick up the phone. I know this is a radical idea to some of you. You do have the possibility of simply picking up the phone and calling a couple of people that you'll be speaking to later this week, asking them what their concerns are, trotting out your ideas, trotting out what your objective is, getting their feedback. Now not everyone will do that, but certainly if it's people within your own organization, people you're friendly with in your industry. If you're speaking at an industry wide event, most often cases they're happy to share with you, they're actually pleased and flattered that you're seeking out their opinions. So much of the problem with it comes to communication for people in the business setting is they're just in their head too long. They're just thinking about, here's my presentation, here's what I want, here are the slides I've created. Timeout. It's not your presentation, it's the presentation for your audience, whether that's one person, five, 50, 500 or 5,000. So everything you do needs to be looked at through the lens of what is interesting and useful and memorable to them. Now, there has been a lot of talk for decades now about how there are three types of learners. People who learn by listening, people who are visual, people who learn by doing. It turns out that research has been debunked. The most effective way for people to learn new things is, is to do all of those things. They hear it, they see it, they act it out. So certainly if you are speaking to people and it's say more than a half an hour and you have an opportunity to teach a skill, the faster you get people standing up and doing things, the better. In my case, teaching people public speaking skills, media skills. The sooner I get people to stand up, speak, and I'm recording them with a video is always the best way for me to really connect with them, regardless of what style they think they have. The other thing that's come out of this research is that people who think that they are oral learners really aren't any more orally based than people who think of themselves as visual learners. Our own perception of our learning style isn't necessarily accurate. The most powerful way you can communicate is by being interesting and relevant to as many people in your audience as possible. This is where you've got to use judgment. Think of examples. If you're talking to a bunch of school children, you probably don't want to talk about the problems of paying your mortgage. To illustrate one of your points about dealing with difficulty, they can't relate to to mortgages, their children, they don't have mortgages. So the most important thing you can really do is to stop and think about what is of interest to these audience members and what messages are going to resonate. Therefore, what stories, what examples do you have that they can hear, think about, reflect upon and relate to. That is what is most important. And it's fairly easy to do if you don't automatically know. Ask some in advance. By the way, if you're getting any value out of this video, can you please do one thing for me which is hit like right now? Now if you want to do more than that, go ahead and subscribe. Go ahead and sign up for notifications, and most of all, leave a comment. Does anything I say right now make sense to you? If so, what is it? If you think I'm way off and believe me, sometimes people do, then say so right now. Don't just swipe away and say, this guy's an idiot. If you think I'm an idiot, tell me. I really do want to know. So post your comments right here in this video. Post your suggestions. Post your disagreements. I would like to hear from you now. Other tips to help you tailor your message to the particular personalities in the audience. Talk about them. Everybody cares about themselves most. Talk about their needs. Don't talk about, well, we want more business so we can expand. Talk about how you're going to make their business expand. Whatever it is you want people to do, you need to guide this through the channel of what is going to help your audience do something better for their life. That's such a problem so many people have with their presentations is they start off well. Let me tell you about all of my credentials. Guess what? Nobody cares. Let me tell you about all the offices and place cities we're in around the world. Guess what? Nobody cares. They're in their city. That's all they need to know. Let me tell you about the history of our company and where we plan on being in five years. Again, nobody cares. Talk about one idea at a time that's interesting and relevant to your audience members. If you do that, you're going to be in great shape. You will automatically have tailored your messages and your style to your audience and that is what will dramatically increase your success. Thanks so much for watching this. If you got any value out of this, please do me a favor, hit subscribe. Our own research shows that so many people who come to this channel watch a video, even like it, never bother to subscribe. So please. Oh, I didn't hit record at the beginning of this. You know what? We'll use this one anyway. So note to editor, I meant to hit record on the master mixer and I forgot to anyway, so thanks so much for watching. If you got value out of this, please, you're not going to want to miss this next video right here. Okay? So good morning folks. I was sort of starting off doing a long version question and answer and I completely forgot to hit record on the master. Now the quality of that is probably good enough to turn into a YouTube long form. I want to say good morning to Mansoor who's joined in. Joined in. Hope you are fine and healthy. Yes, Mansour, definitely fine and healthy. Today had a fantastic weekend. It was one of those weekends that just could not have been more beautiful here in South Florida. Morning started in the high 50s, the days went to 75, 78 degrees, sunshine, light, light breeze. Wonderful day to be out playing pickleball, going to art art festivals here in South Florida. So wonderful time with my family and friends. So today I'm going to be answering questions generated by chat GPT about communication skills. That was the first one and I'll also be answering your questions. In fact, your questions take precedence. So what I'm doing here is sort of a long form answer to a question that could be turned into a long video and that's typically anything longer than 60 seconds for YouTube. But to really be as helpful as possible and to sort of service the YouTube algorithms and be more helpful to you, it's generally better to be eight minutes or longer. So that's what I'm striving for. So, and then I'll also do a version that is typically less than 60 seconds that could be done as a short. So before I forget on that particular topic, I'm going to make a note of exactly what I did here so that when my team edits these together, They'll know what to do. Okay, so I'm going to go to camera two. Excuse me, I've got a little bit of junk in my throat. As you know, I like to drink a lot of water. But go ahead. I'm not ignoring you. I promise if you post a question today, I'm going to have time because we're here for three hours today I got a little bit of a late start, started at 9:15am Eastern time and so we'll be going to about 12:15pm Eastern time today. So it's a fairly unstructured day. I'm going to be answering questions about communication skills and later on I will be making product review ads for Amazon Influencer and showing you the process of exactly how I do it. Okay, so and Mansoor, if you have any questions, you're first up, so feel free to leave your questions. Okay, so first thing I've got to do is I'm going to hit record. For this so that I will have the content ready to be used for the short form. Videos. Again, the question is how can I effectively tailor my communication style to different personality types in a professional setting? Get note to Editor I have I think a very high quality long form video on this topic. I forgot to hit the record button so you won't be seeing it in the the higher quality. It's only on the streamyard version, but I do think it should be used. Okay, so how do you really tailor your communication style to the specific personalities in your audience? That's easy. Just don't do the number one mistake everybody makes, which is dumping data fact after fact after fact, because that doesn't appeal to anyone ever. The easiest way to tailor your communication style is to really think what ideas are going to be of the greatest interest to most people in this audience. And now let me give interesting examples and stories one at a time for each one of these points. Do that and they will connect with you. Okay, so that is sort of the short form, the short form version that may be edited into a final video for YouTube, TikTok, Facebook and other social media platforms. So those of you just joining us, thank you so much. I'm T.J. walker. This is the T.J. walker Success Channel. This is the place where I try to help you and as a community we try to help you learn more skills in your communication and also to be more confident in your communication skills to achieve more success in life. That is all we're about and I try to provide more resources than anyone else in the world on this. We're typically coming to you live three hours a day which to my knowledge is more than any other communication expert in the world is attempting to do. If I'm wrong, please let me know. There are a lot of great communication skills experts who do post videos on YouTube and other social media platforms. Obviously a number of them I have respect for. I am trying to do something a little different here. I'm trying to be a real time resource for you so that you can know any almost any day of the week, Monday through Friday, you can come here and ask a real question in real time. Now I've also posted a link if you would like to join me on screen. We do interview well known celebrity authors and experts from time to time. But this is an open forum if you want to come on right now. I have posted the link to join me. It is in the community tab of my YouTube channel. Again the YouTube channel is YouTube.comjwalkersuccess. you then go to the community tab. You'll see the link for today. It's the most recent link. You click it and you are able to show up on my screen. I add you, and then you can talk to me. We split the screen. It'll be shared time. I'm also more than happy to critique any, any video you have. If you have a video on YouTube or any other social media, we can play excerpts of it right here. And I'm happy to give you feedback. Other members of our community can give you feedback as well. Dhamma has stopped by to say hello. Dharma, Sweetie says hi. Hello to you. I hope you're having a great day wherever you are. And Dharma, if you, if you want to join us, feel free to number one. Number two, if you have a question, feel free to just type in in the chat, in the comment section, your question. But best of all, if you want to just join me here and ask your question live, that's always the best way. We do give precedence to anyone willing to show up and speak out, which is frankly my number one tip in all of my courses. You want to be a better speaker? Use every opportunity you can to speak. The more you do it, the better you get at it, like anything else in life. Okay, So I will I will be monitoring questions and comments as they come in. What I'm also doing is using the power of artificial intelligence today and using Chat GPT in this, I have asked chatgpt to give me not the most common questions people have about communication skills, but sort of the second most common. What I did when I typed in the prompt is say don't give me the obvious top 20 questions. People always ask about communication skills. What do I do if I'm nervous? How should I start a speech? Because I've handled those a lot and you've probably heard those. So what I've asked it to do is to really mine social media, mind the Internet and look for conversations, to find the sentiment of people out there of deeper concern and then provide me with questions. So the one I just did is an example of that. So I'm going to go on to more of those. I see Sandish has stopped in and says communication is so much tiring, so how can we make it smoother? Is there any shortcut? Oh, Sandish, that is a question I absolutely love and I do want to talk about that. So let me sort of launch into a long form on that short form. If you want to come on and talk to me. As I mentioned. You know what, I can go ahead and post it here as well. I believe you can see it. So I'm going to post if you want to join me today. I have just posted the link and you can come right on to the screen with me and ask questions. We can have a conversation. But the question you have is definitely something that has tremendous relevance to a lot of people around the world. So I'm going to hit record on my mixer so we can use this potentially for a long form. 1. Okay, you've got an opportunity to give a speech or presentation, but your first reaction is, oh, this is going to be so tiring. This is so tedious. I really wish I didn't have to do it. Time out. If your first reaction to having to give a speech or a presentation or a talk to colleagues, clients, customers is, this is going to be a lot of work for you, you're doing it all wrong. If this is some big, laborious process like building a warehouse and you see yourself with a wheelbarrow going out and gathering all these facts and all these PowerPoint slides and all these data points, if it's depressing you because it seems like so much work, so tiring, so tedious, guess who else is going to think it's tedious? That's right, your audience. Because they don't want to be overwhelmed with facts and data and numbers and more and more charts that they can't process. The number one flaw most business people, most professionals make when they're speaking. It's not hand motions, doing weird things. It's not us and ums, and it's certainly not just fidgeting. The number one problem is they're making this a tiring, tedious affair of dumping way too much data. Now, the solution is very easy. Don't go into a presentation thinking, oh, this is going to be one big, long slog. I'm not looking forward to this, but I've got to do it because my boss or someone asked me to give this official formal presentation. Stop. There is no such thing as a formal presentation. Remember, there's only two types of presentations in the world. It's either interesting or boring. It's either memorable and interesting or boring and instantly forgotten. So your challenge is to figure out very quickly before you start, before you open your mouth, before you write the first note, before you create the first slide, is, how can you make this interesting? How can you figure out what you want them to do? And then how can you figure out what ideas are going to be interesting to them to make them want to do the thing that you're suggesting? Thanks so much for joining me. I'm T.J. this is the T.J. walker Success Channel. On this channel, I try to help you become more successful in life by communicating with greater skill and confidence. If you see anything you like here, get any value, please. Like this video right now. So where do you really go with this? How do you change your basic standard operating procedure? Because in so many organizations, there's just a set expectation. Okay, You've been assigned this presentation. It's the end of third quarter, and you're supposed to give a summary of everything that happened in third quarter. And everyone is used to you following a format of you've got all these 20 slides and you plug in numbers. This way you don't have to do it that way. Remember, with every presentation you ever give, there's a chance you meet expectations. There's a chance you fail to meet expectations and everyone's disappointed. But there's also a chance that you exceed expectations. There's also a chance you not only exceed expectations, but you're really interesting and memorable. And you increase the odds that some of the people in the audience do what you want. That is what you should be aiming for. Every single time you have an opportunity to stand up and speak or sit down at a conference table and speak, or sit in front of a camera and talk to people through Zoom or some other social media platform or meeting platform, you want to excel and exceed expectations. And it's really not that hard. If you are in the preparation of giving a presentation and you're finding that this is tedious, this is hard work, you're kind of bored. Guess what? Everyone in your audience is going to feel that doubly. So you've got to be a better editor. So much of being a great communicator, nothing to do with the quality of your voice or your hand gestures or any of that. It's simply being a better editor and figuring out that's not essential, that's not essential, that's not essential. Good writers call it killing your babies. Good speakers know that you have to edit out most of the ideas you could talk about. Remember, if your audience needed to know everything you know, they would already have your job. Your job when you're speaking is not to tell people every single fact you know because that's tiring to you and everyone else. Your job is to figure out of everything you do now what's most essential for your audience to know, to understand, and to act upon. Completely different from you telling them everything you need to know. So you've got to use judgment and no, I Don't mean thinking on your feet, I mean thinking on your seat before you ever stand up to talk to people or before you ever turn that zoom camera on to meet with colleagues around the world. Use your judgment when there's no pressure, when no one's looking at you, and to really try to narrow your presentation down to a handful of ideas. And then use your time, your creativity, coming up with specific, relevant examples to them to make the points come alive. Think of specific, relevant stories that are relevant to your audience. Not generic, feel good stories about your weekend or a starfish or something like that, but stories involving real conversations with real customers, clients, prospects about real problems, where you were, how they were resolved, and how you felt. That's what resonates with audiences everywhere around the world. That's the difference between this whole thing being sort of a tiring long slog for you and your audience versus being something fun. If you know right now you're going to give a presentation to people and they're going to find it useful and interesting and helpful and come up to you and talk to you specifically about the ideas you put out there that they found useful to them. Guess what? It's going to be fun for you. This is not going to be tiring at all. What do you think? I'd really like to hear from you on this. I've got my theories. Everybody has a theory. If you agree, let me know exactly why. Don't just say nice video if you disagree. I want to know exactly why you disagree. So post your comments here. We can have a discussion. I can make more videos as well to answer your questions, but let's make this a community. That's how we all learn more. I learned so much from you, from your specific questions and where you tell me I've lost you. That doesn't make any sense. That's how I get better and that's how you can get better too. So please get in the habit of asking people specific questions and for specific feedback. Whether you're speaking live, whether you're speaking online like this, and then really listen, it's going to make it more enjoyable for your audience and for you as well. If you got any value out of this, you're really going to want to watch this next video. Okay, so I am doing a couple of things here today as we typically do. I'm having a live session for you right here. So I want to say hello to Dama and Mansoor and Sandish and others who have joined us live. What I'm also doing is creating content that will be used for edited long form and short form videos on this channel. Wherever you're seeing it, run YouTube, Twitter, X, LinkedIn, Facebook and all the usual places. We're making long form videos and short form videos here. So most people just make the videos and don't show anyone, and then they only show you the final edited piece. I'm doing something a little different here. What I'm trying to do is pull back the curtain. I've used this metaphor and turned it into. I'm pulling back the curtain to show you how content is really made, how people make videos. Now, I'm not showing you everything. I'm not showing you the editing process because I don't know how to edit. And I do have other experts and colleagues who do that for me. So I'm not an expert on editing. But I do believe anyone can learn how to edit. And also anyone can find an editor to do a lot of good things these days relatively inexpensively. The hard part for most people is actually deciding, okay, today I'm going to speak, I'm going to record ideas and share it with the world and hit record. That's the hard part. That's what keeps people back. So that's why I'm doing this, because I want to motivate you. I hope in part because you can see, well, this guy can do it. He makes mistakes, he occasionally has verbal ticks, he screws up and has to redo it from time to time. If he can do it, why can't I? That's what I'm hoping you get out of this. So if you have any questions, comments, thoughts, criticisms, please feel free to post them right there. And Autumn has joined us. And if you want to come in through streamyard, we're more than happy to have you join us on camera. Some people like to do that. We have an actual conversation. Sometimes people don't want to show up on camera, but they want to have their voice on where they can ask me a question or put forth an idea. We can do that. And other times people just want to come in here. They like sort of being in the green room kind of behind the scenes. And sometimes there's a better Internet connection. Okay, now, I wanted to do a. A short form answer to Sandish's questions. Well, let me do that before I forget. So we're gonna go to camera two, I'm gonna hit record. You've got to give a speech, a presentation, but your first reaction is it's going to be so tiring. And tedious doing this time out. If that's your reaction, you're doing it all wrong. If preparing the speech and is tiring, it typically means you're treating this as a big opportunity to dump data. Stop doing that if it's tiring, boring for you to create the presentation, it's going to be boring for your audience as well. You need to simplify, narrow your messages down to a handful, then make it fun with your examples and your stories. Okay, so I think it's a little bit longer. It's a little bit longer than what has traditionally worked for me for my short videos. But I do think that it comes out that way. We talked about this a little last week where I've been doing the long videos first to sort of flesh out all my thoughts, straighten my tie here a little and then I do the short form. It may be that I'm better off doing a short form video first, really nailing what's most essential and then expanding it for the long form video. So I'm still experimenting with that. And by the way, if you're in Streamyard, you can always send me a private chat because sometimes people say, well, tj, I want to come in, but I don't really want to be on camera today. That's perfectly okay. Sometimes you have a question and you don't particularly want your name attached. That's okay as well. I do protect your privacy and okay, so I see the message from Adam. You have to email me that. That's not the sort of thing I can be thinking about while I'm doing live stuff. So send me an email. And you've got the other email as well, so. But very happy you're here and good luck, good luck with the exams. One of our, one of our students here who is an actual student, one of the things that's so fun to me about doing this live is we reach people all over the world of every age now. We have high school students, college students, graduate school students, and a lot of business people of every age. I personally have trained everyone from 80 year olds and 70 year old world leaders, CEOs, billionaire business people, as well as children, 6 year olds. I've trained people for their bar mitzvahs. So public speaking, communication skills, presentation skills are simply a part of humanity. It's something we all do. I mean, the second babies are born, they are communicating. It's typically crying and people are often talking until their last breath on earth. So it's integral to being a human being and people who never Learn to be comfortable. Communicators often feel that they didn't accomplish as much in life as they want. And I don't mean making more money. Sometimes it's about just being more outspoken as a community activist. It could be speaking up for injustices. It could be telling more people about your art, your novel, whatever it is. So every human being, I believe, has a desire to speak. Now, not everyone wants to be an extrovert. Not everyone wants to be the next Anthony Robbins, who's up on the stage in front of 10,000 adoring people hearing, I understand, I get that. But everybody wants to communicate better with someone. Doesn't matter where you are in life. Okay, we've got another private chat that's come in, and you may notice I'm fiddling a little bit with my mouse because I have recently configured my workstation in a different way, and I've got. I no longer have my three computer screens all next to each other because I didn't want the desk to be in the shot. So it is, frankly, slowed me down just a little bit when it comes to seeing where my, you know, where my mouse is because sometimes it goes to screens behind me. So, apologies. We're still working out the kinks. Now, those of you who've been with me regularly will know I've been very transparent telling you we're working out the kinks. I'm still trying to figure out, you know, why is this light green and changing to blue? And this was blue and it's changing to purple. We're still trying to figure that out. These accent lights that you see sometimes just turn off. And I don't know if I need to put them on a different timer through their remote. I think we have about the right distance. I have a very powerful shotgun microphone here. And so far, people have told me the audio quality is good. Now, it should be just as good here, but I'm a couple of inches further away. So if you detect much of a difference there, please let me know in the comments section. I would appreciate it because it may be that I need a slightly different angle. I just adjusted it. Now, you may think, well, tj, other people I see doing fancy shows either have the LAV mics pinned on or you have the big mic right in front of you. Why are you doing this? I'm doing it in part because I want to be able to stimulate, simulate. Not stimulate, hope to be stimulating here, but I want to simulate what so many of you have to do when you are giving presentations and Speeches on a stage or a platform. You have to walk around. I want to address the concerns a lot of you have about what makes you uncomfortable speaking. A lot of what makes you uncomfortable is you've told me, like, what do I do with my hands? Can I grab a lectern? Can I grab a pen? And my advice is, no, you know, let's talk about that in more depth right now, because that is something that comes up. I don't know if there's enough here for a long form, but there is. There is something here. Is it okay to hold a pen when you're giving a presentation? People ask me that all the time. Oh, tg, I'll be more comfortable if I could just hold a pen. That way no one will see my hands shake. Here's the problem with holding a pen when you're giving a presentation. Once you're holding a pen, you're freezing. This finger, this finger, this finger, this finger. This figure. Your wrist is more frozen, your arm is more frozen. You've shut down basically half your body. Why do you want to shut down your body language? It's going to make you look literally stiff, literally less comfortable. The other thing is, why are you holding a pen when you're speaking? It's a little late to be writing your speech. You're already standing up talking in front of people. So, no, I do not recommend you hold a pen when you're speaking. The other thing I think strikes me as odd is are you expecting yourself to say something so brilliant you need to write down and quote yourself? That seems a bit self indulgent and egotistical. My advice is put the pen down. But, T.J. what? People could see my hands shaking. Move your hands. It's common in every culture. People think, oh, it's just the crazy Italians that move their hands when they speak. Wrong. Human beings in every culture on earth move their hands when they speak. Now, some places it may be bigger, some it may be smaller, the movement. But when human beings are comfortable and relaxed, they move their hands. Now, if you doubt me, go to any sports bar anywhere in the world and look at people who are there with friends, colleagues, family, and they're watching a game and they're talking. Put some headphones on so you don't even have to hear what they're saying. Look at them. I guarantee you you're not going to see people saying, I don't like the last call that referee made. No, they're going to be, can you believe the call that ref made? It's crazy. It was awful. People move people their hands when they speak. Now, you don't have to be that expressive if you're standing up, giving a standard business presentation. But you do want natural movement. You may think, oh, I'll be more comfortable holding a pen. It's something for me to do. Here's the problem. You're looking at it the wrong way. It's not about you being comfortable, it's about your audience perceiving you as being comfortable. I might be comfortable standing here in my bathing suit. Well, that's not going to make you comfortable. You don't want to look at me in my bathing suit talking about these issues. So instead I dressed in a way that I hope would make you feel more comfortable about listening to my advice and learning from me. So don't be so selfish. It's not about you. Every presentation you give is really about the experience for your audience. But you know what? There is some benefit to you too. Because if you know in advance that your audience perceives you as more comfortable, as more confident, as more authoritative, as more relaxed, guess what that does to you. That's right. It's going to make you feel more comfortable. Have I made you more comfortable yet? If so, even a little bit, please let me know by liking this video one step up. Even better. Go ahead and subscribe now. If you really want to help yourself and me, ask me a follow up question. Is there something I've said here that seems unclear? Is there something where you're not quite sure what to do? Please let me know. I want to know. So post a question, post a comment, post a disagreement. If you think I'm full of, you know what, post the comment right here. I would absolutely love to hear from you to figure out how to make this better. So please, please keep your hands free. If you're delivering PowerPoint, you may think, well, of course, teach, I have to hold the remote control and walk around. And each time you don't even have to do that. What I recommend with PowerPoint is just use the spacebar on a laptop. You can walk around the room, say what you want to say, look at people, gesture. You can go to different parts of the room and be looking at people. Over here, you can be going over here. There's a lot of different range. You can get closer to people, but you simply do not have to say, well, I've got to have this remote control here because every five minutes I may have to touch it. No, you don't have to do that. The easiest thing to do is just have a laptop nearby. In fact, I have one right here. All I have to do is tap the spacebar. The spacebar is the largest bar on your computer and it will advance PowerPoint. So it makes it very simple and easy to do. So I'm begging you, if you're speaking, if you're presenting, if you're talking and you want every possible advantage working for you, put the pen down, put the pencil down, put the remote controls down and just gesture, move your hands freely. Your audience won't necessarily know why, but they will perceive you as infinitely more comfortable, confident and relaxed. Okay, so that was, that was a long form answer to that particular question about holding a pen. Now, I forgot. Did that, did someone post that or did that just pop into my head? Part of what we're going to do here in this forum on a regular basis is it is going to be an active workshop. I'm going to have some research that I prepared from ChatGPT. Other questions people have emailed in advance. A lot of times people come in live. Right now I see my colleague and our fantastic community manager, Barb Tomlin is with us right now. And Barb, if you want to come on, love to hear from you. If you have any new issues or topics you'd like me to address. Always, always love to get insights from you. And I see Adam says he can't join us right now, but we're very happy that he has stopped by. Barb. Barb's asking me. And again, I'm being transparent and just sharing with you things that come in. Do you want students in our Facebook community to have the link to join you in the studio for this session? Sure, why not? And my only, my only question, Barb, is I know that we want it to seem like a real community and not just the TJ show all the time, but what I am hoping is that people do see real value if they are a student in my UDEMY course or skillshare or any other course, that, wow, this teacher is actually more accessible than any other teacher in the world. I mean, even if you pay $80,000 a year to go to Harvard, no professor there is going to be available to you three hours a day, any, from anytime, anywhere to ask questions. That is what I'm attempting to do here. Now. We're still in an exploratory phase. We'll see how this works out. If it's continuing to work month after month, I'd like to do it possibly for the next 35 years. We'll see in part, it depends on how many of you find this useful and helpful. But sure, Barb, go ahead and place that. But if you could just put in the comment there, let them know if they have any questions, they will be answered. And it's not just me lecturing, I like to lecture. I have 30, 40 hour courses on a lot of different topics related to communication skills. But it's even more fun to talk to. You have real conversations, give and take Q and A and have a community of people who are trying to figure this out together. I don't have the answer to every single question or necessarily the best answer to you. I do have some answer, typically if your question relates to spoken communication skills. I mean, just last week someone asked me about the best way of formatting bold lines on PowerPoint and I had to be candid and say I have no idea. Just not an expert on those technical aspects of slide creation. So it's not that I have the answer to everything, but if it's a question that relates to spoken communication and the body language and non verbal communication that accompanies you when you are speaking, then chances are I've thought about it a lot. I've read what other experts all over the world say. I have dealt with people who've had similar issues. I've tried to help people with those issues. And so chances are I'm going to at least give you some good food for thought. So I do feel very confident in that. So that's a long answer to your question, Barb. Yes, by all means, feel free to post the link to the Facebook group. But, but really just if you could just put a sentence there letting people know, hey, TJ's here right now live for you. If you have questions not, come watch the TJ show. Because as much as I wish I were as talented as Jerry Seinfeld or a lot of top comedians or entertainers, I'm not an entertainer. This is not something you should watch just for entertainment. This is something you should watch only because you want more success in your life. You want to be able to communicate more effectively and with more confidence. That's really the only reason to be here. Now I'm hoping that you do want one or both of those things. You want to be more successful in life by communicating more effectively and more confidently. And together we can in fact piece this out. Now let me see. I've had a few more comments come in. So those of you wondering, why is he fiddling about? We have a private chat function in Streamyard. We Also have a public comment section and let's see. Mope Key writes in hey, TJ recently started watching your videos and I'm absolutely loving them. How would you suggest one deal with stuttering and losing your thought in the middle of a sentence when public speaking? Profoundly important topic. I do want to delve into that before I do that, Pokey, if I'm pronouncing your name correctly, if the M is silent, before I forget, I want to give just a 30 second short vision short version of the question about holding a pen. So excuse me one moment. Is it okay to hold a pen while you're giving a speech or presentation? You might think, well, I'll be more comfortable that way. That way my hands won't shake. No, put the pen down and simply move your hands. What should really give you comfort in any presentation you give is knowing that your audience is going to get value from you saying something interesting and that you look comfortable and confident. So put the pen away. Okay, so that was the short form version for that. I just didn't, I didn't want to lose that. Okay, so pokey. Let's, let's delve into this question and if you don't mind, by the way, you're more than welcome to join us. I've posted a link in Streamyard. I'm going to ask some questions. If you can't answer them, great. It'll help me give more specific feedback. If not, I would simply ask that you think about it and let me get a little water here. So the question is, there are a couple of questions and they're related how to deal with stuttering. There are some people who are officially diagnosed with a stuttering problem and it is in all of their communication. It doesn't matter if they're talking to a large group of people or if it is one on one there there's always a stutter. And I'll say right out of the gate, I'm not an expert on that. I do not know how to cure people of stuttering. I do know that it's extraordinarily well researched and there are therapists who specialize some of them with amazing track records. So my first question to you, Pokey, if you don't mind giving a little more clarification. Do you mean you have a serious problem where even your parents, your best friend talking to you and there's always a stutter? Or do you mean normally when you're relaxed and you're comfortable and you're talking to friends, family, couple of other Colleagues, you're fine. But when you stand up to speak in more official presentations or formal presentations, then you feel a stutter comes out. Is that the situation? Because I do break things down to typically those two different scenarios. Of course, there can be variations. There could be a continuum. But Pokey, if you're still with us, I would very much love for you to give me a little more clarification because then I can give you more specific feedback. So now I have a question for Barbara. Pokey's comments have shown up to me in all gold on Streamyard with a big blue star on it. Is that something he did? Is it something I accidentally did? Is it something you did? Is it something YouTube did? Because he did something differently. So, Barb, if you're with me and you can hear this, I would love to know because I'm trying to figure, I'm trying to learn the Streamyard thing. And while I've done a lot of live broadcasting over the years, I've hosted syndicated talk radio shows live four hours a day. I'm still learning the ropes in doing this whole live streaming thing on a platform like Streamyard, where we're on five, six platforms all across the globe at the same time. So I want to make sure a I'm understanding interesting insights that come my way and if I'm doing something wrong or if I need to react in a different way, or if this is something else. Okay, so Pokey has written a clarification. Says normally when I'm speaking to my friends, I'm usually fine. It's only when speaking to a larger audience. Okay, that's what I was hoping for. That is a subject that I do have expertise in. So I would absolutely love to talk to that. Talk to you about that in more detail. Okay, so I'm going to do that. I'm going to do a recording for a long form video. You know what, let me mix it up. Let me do a short form video first. Maybe that will be a smoother creation process. Okay, so I'm going to go to camera two. I'm going to hit record. So what do you do? If you're normally fine talking to friends, family, colleagues, small groups, but you have to stand up or speak to a larger group than usual. And some that, some you're stammering, you're stuttering. What does this mean? What it means is you just didn't rehearse and you're trying to convey way too many facts and numbers. If you want to get rid of the stutter, practice your Presentation on video until you like what you see. Okay. So I couldn't go into much detail there. I do think you're going to find benefit from what I talked about because this is a serious and complex issue. I do think you'll find more benefit in what I'm about to do in this longer form video. Before we do that, let me just take care of a brief housekeeping matter because I'm showing you warts and all this process. I don't have some big team here. I don't have a camera operator behind camera three or behind camera water behind camera two. I don't have a full production team. I'm trying to do something here. You know, Barb helps me out from her end, but I'm doing this in a simplified form and showing you what I do, which I hope will make you want to experiment with these things. Maybe you don't go live every day for three hours on six platforms, but maybe you go live once a month on your Facebook page just for your own clients and prospects and people in your industry. So quite often my wife comes over, we just live five minutes from here and she helps me with camera work production for the Amazon Influencer videos. So I am just want to see if she says she's coming by. If not, I will make videos myself and show you. And I'm just going to send her a message. I may try a new technique today, so if you can't come, it's okay, comma, but if you can come, that would be great. So just letting her know that she would be appreciated. Okay. All right, so now I want to really give Pokey a much more substantive answer to this question about stuttering. And I want to say hello to Joffrey or Jeffrey who says, good morning members from Uganda, the Pearl of Africa TAA T Africa Foundation. So, Jeffrey, so happy you're here. And it really is frankly just a lot of fun to talk to people from all over the world on a daily basis. We have, we have a lot of people from Asia and specifically India who join us on a daily basis. A lot of people from North America, Africa, Egypt, for some reason is very popular with my Udemy courses and other online teachings. I've not been to Uganda. I have had the good fortune of conducting presentation skills training in South Africa a few years ago as well as trained in Egypt and Kenya. And there's one other country that just escapes my mind that I went to a few years ago in Western Africa. So fascinating place. Hope I get invited back. Okay, so let me Answer in more detail Pokey's question. Because this is something I have spent a lot of time thinking about and trying to help people with, so I'm going to hit record. So what do you do if when you're speaking to friends, family, couple of colleagues, people you're really comfortable with, you don't stutter at all. But the second you have to stand up and speak to people outside of your comfort zone, maybe they are people you don't know. Maybe it's a larger audience than usual. Then all of a sudden the stutter comes out. What do you do? Do you have some deep psychological problems you need to go to therapy for years and years and years? Well, no. If you can speak comfortably without stuttering to small groups, you can do exactly the same thing to larger groups of 2200, 2000, 200,000. It is about how you prepare. The reason. Quite often you find yourself stuttering when you're speaking to a group outside your comfort zone is you're nervous. You're nervous, so your body is sending adrenaline throughout and you're thinking, oh, this is a dangerous situation. How can I fight or flight? How can I run away? Is really what you'd like to do. But you can't run away in the middle of a speech or presentation. It would look awful. People would talk about it for years, and it just doesn't help you. And you don't have to run away from your audience when you're speaking because they're not literally going to come eat you or attack you. So that is not ever going to be a good solution. We've got to figure out together, and I hope we can do it right now. A way for you to be more comfortable so that you don't feel this nervousness and repeating yourself. Stammering. The number one way of becoming more comfortable is to practice your presentation on video. Now, these days, we've all got cell phones, they've got cameras. So you can't tell me, oh, teacher, I'd love to do that, but I can't afford going to a TV studio and camera. Guess what? That excuse doesn't work. That worked a long time ago when I was starting out in this business. That doesn't work anymore. That excuse you or someone you know, someone you live with has either a webcam or a cell phone that records video. So you can practice yourself speaking on video and watch yourself. Now, here's the thing. If all you do is practice your speech once, look at it, and it's okay in the practice, okay. And then you Go and give your speech then. Ham and I. You might stutter just as much. Practicing once, especially if you're glancing down at notes a bunch, isn't really going to help you that much. You want to get to the point where you're really comfortable delivering that presentation and you want to do it again and again. Maybe that's two or three times, maybe it's 10 times, maybe it's 100 times. I can't take tell you the magic number. But the magic happens when you've seen yourself give a presentation a whole bunch of times and you're no longer having to actively recall information. It's become internalized enough that it just easily flows. Think about if someone says, well, where are you from? Or what's your favorite hobby? Or tell me about your favorite sports team, or how did you meet your spouse? You can just talk about that. You only have to think about, where did I meet my spouse? You already know because you've said it a bunch of times. Now, very important. I am not talking about memorizing your speech. Someone asks you who your favorite sports team is or your favorite musician, or how you met your spouse, you didn't memorize it. You may say it a little differently every single time, but the point is, you've already thought about it. You already have grooves in your brain. It comes out easily, and that's what makes it simple for you. That's why there's no stuttering. Now, one of the problems people have that creates stuttering is they want to memorize a speech. They memorize the first point, they memorize the second point, and, oh, what's the next? What's the third one? I can't remember. And that's where the stuttering comes. Don't put that much pressure on yourself. I gotta tell you, it's really hard to memorize stuff and then say it out loud. I'm awful. Now, I speak to you three hours a day right here on this channel, but I don't memorize anything. Memorization is really hard. Meryl Streep went to the Yale School of Drama to get a master's degree to help her learn how to memorize scripts for Broadway shows and movies. Don't try to memorize. That puts too much pressure on you. Instead, just use the simplest word. You know, the first word that comes to your mind to make this idea that's interesting and relevant and useful to your audience come alive. Use simple words. Don't worry about the perfect word or the word you memorize or the word that was on A script or the word that's in a PowerPoint. Use simple words that come and if you occasionally get one wrong, guess what? It's very unlikely anyone's going to notice it. So focus on one word at a time, a simple word, one idea at a time, and really connecting with your audience. If you do that over time, what you will find is there's really no difference between talking to your best friend one on one over coffee versus giving a so called formal presentation to 20 people in a boardroom. It's exactly the same thing. You're trying to share one idea at a time. You're trying to make it interesting, you're trying to make it sound conversational, which means you put pauses in. You don't fill up the sound by stammering and stuttering and saying the same sentence or the same word over and over again. You are not afraid to pause. Pausing is punctuation. Pausing allows people to think. Reflect on what you just said. Pausing will make you appear profoundly comfortable and confident. That's how you want to fill the sound, with nothing, instead of with the stutter or the repetition. So if you want to get rid of the stuttering, my advice is practice on video and look at it not once, not twice, not three times, but as many times as it takes until you can look at that video and say, wow, that person really seems comfortable, confident, relaxed. If I can speak half as well as that person, I'll be in great shape. Now you have a role model for yourself. The role model is not me or anyone else, it's you. That's how you can get rid of the stuttering. Now here's a quick advanced tip. Everyone repeats themselves occasionally, everyone occasionally has a little stutter, a little stammer. Your audience won't notice it if you don't look or act embarrassed. Okay, so that is that long form answer to that particular question. So Pokey, was that helpful? I'm hoping you're with me. And if you want to come on screen, I'm more than happy to have you join me today. But that is something I've given a lot of thought to. That is advice I've given to a lot of people and they typically have found that useful. Ah, okay. So Barb has thankfully given a clarification and this is, I have to tell you, this is exciting to me, something that just happened. So Pokey gave me a super chat. That's something YouTube has done to create more community, to help content creators make money and make a real business out of this. So Pokey did. He gave me a super chat, which I think gives me Barb, you can correct me, or Pokey, you can. I think it gives me like a $99 or something like that. So, Pokey, you are the very first person to ever do that. And it was something, frankly, I was thinking about wondering. I didn't want to spend a lot of time begging people for money and actively soliciting it. So it is something I've thought about in the last three weeks that we've been doing this and working out the kinks. I was thinking, I was wondering when is somebody going to give me a super chat. So, Pokey, you are near and dear to my heart. You will go down in the history of this show as the first person who's done that. So very much appreciate you doing that. All the more reason I'd like to make sure I really helped you and gave you some value. So if you're still with me and with us, I should say, can you let me know if that advice was helpful, you mentioned it to a larger audience, I'd be interested in knowing what's the largest audience you've spoken to because I know even with myself as much as I do speaking sometimes it's several years between times when I've spoken to a group of more than 1,000. So I've noticed even with me as often as I speak, sometimes I get up in front of a thousand and there is a little tingle. Sometimes there's like a tightness in my ear that I actually feel. Now, I hope I don't convey that. I certainly don't talk about it, but you can get a physical reaction that makes you more nervous. Evolutionary biologists believe this is a defense mechanism because. Because in prehistoric times, if you're in the savannah and all of a sudden you are up and visible from every, every direction for miles, it's easier for saber toothed tigers to see you. Other predators, other tribes that could perceive you as an enemy. You're vulnerable and easily attacked. Your life could be at stake. So from an evolutionary biological standpoint, it's actually a good thing that you feel nervous if you can all of a sudden be seen by a lot of people. And that's why evolutionary biologists believe that we are programmed to have adrenaline pulsating throughout our body so we can run away, so we can get out of here, so we can get traction in the sand and in the dirt. That's why we have moisture coming out of our hands, our body and our feet. So it makes absolute sense. Unfortunately, it doesn't help us in the modern world because if we do all of a sudden have to give a new business pitch to 20 prospects, we can't run out of the room and still expect to get the business. We're just going to get laughter or maybe some sympathy, but that's not what we're after. So, Boki, if you are still with us again, thank you for your kindness and your generosity. And also I would like to know, was that helpful? Have you tried that? Okay. Barb has also commented that she, you know, she's on the YouTube. Oh, streaming on your YouTube channel. Fantastic. Oh, you're busy with other streams, so taking care of other things. So Barb, thank you so much. Always appreciate your help, your knowledge, your friendship and your expertise.

Tj, that's not what I said.

Oh, what?

I said, I will join you whenever you're ready. I've been taking care of group.

Okay, I missed. Oh, I will join you is the next sentence. Got it?

Yeah, I have. It's been a rough Monday morning so far. I've been dealing with lots of robots, so it takes a while to clean that up. But one of the features of streamyard is that you not only can you stream to multi destinations, if your guest in the studio is a Streamyard customer as well, they can stream to theirs.

You know, I've wondered about that because I, I do get requests to do podcast interviews with people and interviews on their YouTube channel. And I would really like to do it, I think, the way Gary Vaynerchuk does, which he says, yeah, I'll do it, but I got to be able to capture it on my end too, too, so I can use it for my channel. So you're. So you're saying they have to be a Stream Yard user in order to do that?

Right.

Okay.

And they have to be re registered. They, that can be a free thing. They don't have to, you know, they don't have to have a paid account, but they have to be registered with Stream Yard. So that's, you know, it's got to be authenticated.

Now let's say they wanted to interview me for their YouTube channel just on their YouTube channel. Could I then add their channel with their permission to my streamyard account just for that day so that I could be going live to my audience, but they could be interviewing me and doing anything they want. If it's a straightforward talk interview without graphics and stuff, could they then interview me and it be pushed out on their channel? Does that make sense?

Yeah, I haven't had quite enough coffee. But the short answer would be yes, but there are, you know, you get it's not for the novice and I wouldn't want you to do that right now.

I don't have any immediate plans too.

It does take just a wee bit of training. We, as you know, because you're one of my partners on my channel, you have the ability to approve or disprove of a guest to stream to add to their stream if they have a streamyard authenticated account. If you're bringing something into streamyard that's going to be done from a screen share if they do not have a streamyard account and then you've got sound issues to be concerned about, you know, and if so, I would be very cautious in what kind of arrangements I made. But it is possible. The short story is it's possible.

And speaking of sound, I think you are correct, Barb. What was causing problems for me, for some reason it was doing it with Streamyard and not zooming up others. But as you correctly pointed out, problem did not appear to be streamyard. The problem appeared to be. And let me just show people what I was doing and I've got to walk away for one second, apologies. But what was happening is I was, I was not wanting to use the corded headphones earpieces I normally use because with the different camera angles, you know me over here wanting to demonstrate, I was afraid with this, if there's a cable behind me all of a sudden be tripping and I would be falling over and that might be good for views, but it would not be good for me. It would be a little embarrassing. So I specifically wanted wireless headphone or I wanted a way of hearing you or any other guest without it just coming out of a speaker. Because now when you speak through no fault of your own, it's coming through a speaker, I'm hearing you. But those sound waves are also traveling to this microphone and it creates a feedback. I know you know, but for others. So that's why I was wearing these headphones. And I'm intent. I don't even want to open it because it might automatically connect and throw it off. And thanks to your research, you pointed out this, this may use the. Having something else on Bluetooth can mess up the connection with the cameras and the stream yard because we had a number of problems a couple of weeks ago, or really just a week and a half ago where we would be doing a live stream. I'd have these earpieces on and all of a sudden the camera would freeze and everything was had to come to a screeching halt. I would have to restart it. So what I think the solution is is I'm going to get a different type of earbud that has its own receiver plug in that I will just plug right in to my computer. And I don't know technically if that's if its own Bluetooth, but it's not the main computer Bluetooth so it should not cause the same problem. What I like about these earbuds is they're basically the same color as my skin and I have it in just one ear and I could twist it, it was round. So I prefer it much, you know, much more than the, the AirPods, the app Apple puts out. The AirPod is a higher quality piece of machinery and its microphone is much better. But I like the way this blocks the hearing. I have a couple sets of these. I use this on a daily basis for listening to my ultimize affirmations, listening to my, my meditation, self guided meditation. So I do like these for that reason. But I certainly don't want to destroy the stream because as you may remember a week and a half ago we would be plugging along, everything's going well and all of a sudden there's just a freeze frame of me which did not do any good for anyone. So appreciate your help there, Barb.

Sure.

Now is there any, any other top issues that you think need to be addressed today day while we have you, Barb? So many news stories I see on a daily basis now all sort of reaffirm some trends I see that I think are so important to people in our community as it relates to the demise of traditional media, traditional advertising, and therefore more opportunities for people like you and me and others who are not on the payroll of gigantic TV studios and TV networks to reach people, communicate with people, help people, and yes, make money too, not only from advertising, but as our extraordinarily generous friend Pokey has did, which is actually give me a super chat. Again, thank you Pokey. I see you've come back and apologies if I missed that. Pokey says thanks a lot and I want to make sure I didn't miss anything. Thanks a lot. The tips you gave were helpful and I will soon start working on it and let you know on my progress. The largest audience I deal with is 50 people, which feels a lot. Well, 50 people is a lot of people. If you are used to speaking to one or two or three people. I mean if you're typically used to speaking to no more than five people, then this is what, a thousand percent more? It's a much higher percentage more. So it's only natural to feel uncomfortable, but try to do it regularly. Right now, you know, at any given day on YouTube, I'm not a YouTube superstar, obviously, I'm not Mr. Beast. I'm not a Sean Cannell for that matter. But I do speak typically to about 5,000 people a day on social media who see me collectively on my various videos and these different platforms. And that's something. If I had to walk out on a stage in front of 5,000 people every day, well, I won't kid you, I would enjoy it. But the first handful of times, I'd probably be a little uncomfortable. So the more you do any of this easier it gets. The more comfortable it gets, the harder it gets to be uncomfortable, which means you're not going to be as tempted to stutter or stammer again. Clarification. I'm not an expert on people who have been officially diagnosed as having a stuttering problem in everyday life. I'm just giving advice to people where it seems to come up. And as in Pokey's case, where it's when you're speaking outside of your comfort zone to larger groups. Pokey also says it's great to be the first super chat metal yellow, first red. I have been finding your work on YouTube very valuable, and I wanted to share a small contribution to your channel. Well, Pokey, you really do warm my heart. And it is an opportunity to not beg people for more money. But as an incentive to all of you thinking about maybe I should do this to realize YouTube is working hard to try to create ways for creators to make money to make a living. There are some people who never have an audience big enough to make more than $50 a month on advertising revenue. Their subject matter doesn't really lend itself to them making all online courses, but they develop real fans and strong fans who want to support them. And they do it through super chats, they do it through memberships. It's not something I have spent a lot of time focusing on in the past, but it is something I'm going to spend some time on in the next year to build a stronger foundation for this show. So I do want people to realize the days are gone. You may say, I don't ever want to shill for products the way TJ does and Amazon influencers. I don't ever want to have to take a meeting with Coca Cola to get their blessing. I just want to share my Craft, whether it's painting, whatever it is, and if my own fans can support me, as Pokey did, with a super chat or with a membership or a Patreon, that can be a fantastic business model for a lot of creators. So that is something I do want to talk about more and more in the coming weeks and the coming months. So folky. Again, thank you so much for your kindness and your generosity. I want to say hello to Angela, who stopped in to say hello. Angela says, just finished your course on corporate. It had a great impact on me, and I feel much more comfortable in public speaking. So thank you very much. I do have one question, though. What do I do if I don't have time to practice my presentation beforehand? Example, I have to take over a presentation from a colleague. Do I just wing it? So, look, I live in the real world. I know you're in the real world, and especially corporate executives. You're maybe busy flying around. You've got a colleague who just says, I got to give a presentation in an hour on Zoom, and my kid just got sick. I got to take him to the hospital. You got to fill in for me, and it happens in an hour. I realize you can't stop everything getting a time machine. Go back and practice for two days. I do realize that. What I would recommend is you at least practice the first 60 seconds, make sure you have a strong open. And I don't mean it. It's got to be funny. You don't have to tell a joke, doesn't have to be wildly provocative. But if you could just deliver one idea that's interesting, useful, memorable to that audience in the first minute, you're so far ahead of the game because most speakers, most presenters are. Are boring, and they give people an opportunity to tune out. Okay, today, everyone, thanks so much. I didn't think I was going to give this presentation today, but my colleague Barb called in sick. And I'm doing this and I apologize because I didn't really have enough time to prepare, but we're just going to kind of go through this, okay? Blah, blah, blah, blah. What did I just do there? I practically begged everyone to pick up their cell phone, check text, check email, check social media, and ignore me. That's what I just did. So whatever you do, please don't do that. Don't make excuses, don't complain. No one cares about your internal workflow schedule or politics or any of that. So always remember your audience is there and they just want some idea from you. Whether you had a year to prepare for this speech or you had two minutes, do the best you can. If you do have to prepare for a colleague or step in for a colleague at the last minute, and let's say they've given you a whole slide deck, I would ask them beforehand. Ideally, you can still talk to them even if they're in a taxi onto the way to hospital. Apologies, that seems crass, but if you've got a few minutes to talk to them, ask them, say, what do we really want to accomplish from this presentation? And then what is it we think is going to resonate the most with this audience? Because quite often someone does know the answer to those questions and it's not in the written speech or the PowerPoint deck that they've given you. If they tell you what it is, you can at least start the presentation that way. Email people the whole deck, try to turn it into a question and answer session, be as helpful as possible. And then, you know, maybe you get to some of the of the slides, maybe you don't, but you've still created real value. So I think that is really the best way to go in that situation. And do you realize that there's always some time? You know, I stress this with my media training clients. If you have a TV reporter could call you, or a newspaper reporter could call you and say, I've got to ask you about this. And you say, well, what's your deadline? I'll get back to you. And they say, my deadline is right now. You can always say, hang on, I'll be with you. And in two minutes, stop, think, write a couple of notes down, think of one idea, pick up the phone in two minutes. So there's always some time to, in fact, collect your thoughts. So please keep that in mind. Okay, I see TikTok has joined us. We'll. We'll. Or Tick Tick has joined us in the room. We'll come to you in just a moment. And I see that. So I want to make sure, Angela, that I you asked about just winging it. If you mean by winging it, that you're asked to speak on behalf of your company to pitch a new client, and you've done it a million times and you know a little bit about the client and you're very comfortable talking about why people should want to hire you, and you have certain stories and examples and you are not following the exact structure of what your colleague created, sure, that's fine. By winging it, meaning, wow, I don't even know the topic here. I don't know who I'm talking to. Let me just make up stuff. No, don't do that. You need a plan. Now, quite often the most effective way is to have a simple outline, five bullet points, one, two, three words at most, to really help you focus on what you want to say. So you're not reading a script, you haven't memorized it, you're not simply going through bullet points. It's not structured that way. But you thought about the big picture. The big picture is what is it I want this audience to do after speaking to them? What are in fact the core messages that are most important to them and me that I really want them to get? What stories and examples can I share to make those come alive? If you do that, you have a lot of wiggle room to do it in different ways and you will still be wildly successful as a communicator. Much more effective than if you're just going through a whole bunch of bullet points that a colleague prepared. Because they might not know anything about how to give presentations successfully. They may just be doing it what most people do, which is an incredibly boring data dump. Realize if you stand up to speak, it's your presentation, you own it. You can't simply say, well, I was called in at the last minute, blah, blah, this isn't my area. People like to make all those excuses. Guess what? Nobody cares if you're speaking. The good news is you get all the credit if it's a great presentation. The bad news is if you give a boring data dump and everyone ignores you and they pick up their phone and they start checking email. Oh, that's interesting. I'm looking at this. You get all the blame. So really, at some point you've got to personalize it to make it as good as you possibly can. Will it be as good if you have five minutes to prepare versus five days? Probably not. All you can do is the best you can do. Okay, so let's switch back to Moki who says I have to go for now. But. But looking hands yellow heart red forward to join your stream lab next time. Streamyard. Thank you so much and Boki, really do appreciate your act of kindness and generosity and I am glad that you're getting value from this. And please let me know whether you're joining us live or you just post a comment in the Community tab or on any one of the videos. I do read every comment and a lot of the videos that I do on this channel are directly in response to people like you posting a specific question. So there's Something you want me to go in more depth on? Please. All you have to do is let me know. Thanks so much. We've had a few more comments coming in. I want to make sure I didn't miss anyone and Barb is thanking everyone and appreciate that. I want to make sure I didn't miss any relevant. Okay, so, tick, tick. Do you want to join us on stage? Because you're in the green room. And Ticktick has also posted a video. I'll add you if you want to. And then I am going to hit share. Tic is one of our regular students who is frankly top 1% of his class when it comes to speaking skills. Why is that? Is he naturally gifted? Is he a born genius? I don't know. Maybe he is, but that's not why he's the 1% around here. He's in the 1% because he takes every opportunity to speak, to record himself on video, to get critiques from me and others. So that's why. Let's take him and see. He's posted a couple of other comments, but let's go ahead. And I'm going to share the screen and we're going to do a link to his video. I'm going to share the audio. Do entire screen. I hope to get the correct screen. I'm going to share the audio system. Audio again, I hit share. And now I'm going to.

What is the reason everyone is telling you to read books? What is the reason everyone tells you that Read books. Reading books make you leaders. What is the reason behind this? So in this video I will address this point. Books are the best friends we can have. Books do not criticize nor they enforce their ideas on you. Books are always patient. Books listen to our voices. Books give ourselves time, space and energy. We must understand to read books, we must make ourselves compatible with the habit of reading. Reading books is very important and we must read books to improve our knowledge. We must read books to increase our understanding. We must read books to increase our perspective because book reading is very, very essential.

Okay, so a lot of. Let me. Sorry about that. Let me get that. Okay, so now I hope I've stopped sharing. So tick, tick. I continue to see progress with what you're doing. Very. And if you want to come on screen, you can, but you don't have to, obviously. I like your energy. I like the volume. I like the enthusiasm you're bringing to this and I'm seeing it in your face and your voice. Increase confidence. And Barb, if you want to weigh in on Any of this. I'd love to get your opinion as well, if you have time to join us. So I'm loving all of that and I frankly love your message. I'm a big fan of books. Now, I have to be careful about saying this sometimes because I'm sort of biting the hand that feeds me, but my primary mode of learning is reading books. It's not watching video or listening to audio. It's not not listening to podcasts. I. I like to read books every day. So your message does really resonate with me. Here's where I think you would be even better. I would like. I would have loved for you to start it off by talking about one specific book, one specific author, one specific message you read in a book. You then apply it to your life and it helped you. Talking about that would be infinitely more powerful because I can sit here and say, you know, trust me, I've read a million books on public speaking and that's why you should listen to me. I could say that, but if it's left like that, it's generic. Part of the value I provide to you is I've read a gazillion books on public speaking. So I've gathered a lot of data. And I'll never forget, once, 30 years ago, I read Lillian Wilder's book on how to stop saying ah and. And she said that she would type up the word uh and cut it out, put a red, international red no sign on it and then tape it on her clients watches and lo and behold, they would stop saying and I thought that's a great idea. So I started doing the same. And then I took it to the next level. I actually went to a printing shop and had these printed up as stickers. And to this day I pull off a sticker of don't say and don't say and I put it on my clients self phones, on the front, their watches and their computers. Okay, so what did I just do there? I talked about why books are important and I like to talk about books. But then I took it down to a concrete example. I talked about one book, one author, one example. I learned what I did with it. That is what will make you much more powerful. So tick, if you want to respond, that I'd love to hear again, I love the fact that you're recording videos frequently. Barb, did you have anything you wanted to add there?

Tic actually responded in the insight internal messages saying that the book had an interesting quote. There are many ways to God as grains of seed. And I Just wanted to point out that when your guests on different platforms your, your quotes can't be shared no matter what the application is to your commentary can't be shared easily. So and I'm not sure where Tic is coming in from, but if he can post those kinds of things in the public chat on YouTube in particular is one of the best ones. Even we couldn't see LinkedIn. LinkedIn doesn't allow to bring the comments in to as well, so we couldn't see what an Angelica had responded here. I, you know I as far as books go these days, I think it's been five years that I've really read hardbound book, paper book from beginning to end. I prefer to get my books on Amazon and do that with the Kindle reader because as we age we can increase the type and all of that, you know, and it's actually a much more amazing immersive experience because many of the authors have produced Kindle books where they can provide more detail and links out to different resources they mentioned. So I'm kind of a this century book lover but I've, I've read books since childhood and I'm an avid book reader. But I think you know, it's, it's kind of the word trite, you know what that is? It's like it's the old way of doing everything. It's just like over and over we hear that even public speakers will grab on to that. You know, you got to have. Because that's one of their marketing tools and if they're with you in person, they gotta have a hard copy to be swinging at you. However, some of the new century speakers are swinging their Kindles. So yeah, and I think it'd be, you know, behoove them depending on what their audience is, you know, to have the various forms that their books are available on, examples of them to share.

But definitely great points Barb. And I, you know, I've sort of been all over the map on book formats because for years and years and years I only read real books, hardback and paper book and then I switched to all digital. I said oh, I don't want to mess up the environment. Let me be modern and hip and clear out my house and create room, not have, not have dust. I went to all digital and then in the part of my research on how to get better sleep I said I'm going to go back to physical books. So about four, five years ago I went to all physical books again and often would read two books a week and Then only recently, in the last couple of months, I've switched back to digital. The reason being the technology of the Amazon Paperwhite I found so effective because you mentioned yes, it can make font larger which I've got to use glasses regardless of how big the font is if I'm reading typically or contacts as I have now. But what I love about the Amazon Paperwhite is I can turn the. The brightness down. It's like I think it's 1 to 20 scale. I turn it to 6 and it's still bright enough for me to read without any other light in the room. And yet it's, it's not keeping me awake and causing the stimulation that a cell phone light would do. So I love Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night. I can't sleep. If I read on the paper white, sometimes for even 15 minutes, I fall right back asleep. If I try to do that on. A typical larger form tablet or on my Apple tablet, I'm awake all night. It's so bright. Plus it's connected to every email and text and everything else. I love the paper white because I'm not connected to anything else. And the font, I can make the font any size, but I can make it so dim it's practically lulling me to sleep. In fact, I was reading it last night before to bed I think I was so tired I only read for three minutes. So that's something people may want to consider. I do want to give Tick a little more guidance and be responsive to him. So you're saying because I'd asked you for more clarification, you had you wanted to suggest a book, Morals of the Heart by Dr. Bruce Lawrence. I'm not familiar with that book. He said the book had an interesting quote. There are many as there are many ways to God as grains of sand. So what made that interesting to you? Again, my number one suggestion for you of how to improve your video is talk about something that changed your life and tell us exactly what happened, why it was meaningful. So if you want to share that, let me see what you posted next. You said the only prescription for morality is this. Remember that every woman could have been your mother. Every girl could be your daughter. Remember that every man could have been your father. Every boy could be your son. When it comes to matters of the heart, that's all that needs to be kept in mind. Always, at all times. There are a few things I loved. It's a book beyond your imagination. It's beyond fiction and nonfiction. It's an excellent book. You'll love and have peace at heart. Well, Dr. Bruce Lawrence would be happy to hear that. You may want to consider posting that as a review on the Amazon page. I'm sure the author would appreciate that. Now, I think take you're in India and I don't believe India has the Amazon influencer program. But at some point, if it opens up in your country or similar countries, there's nothing wrong with you trying to help someone else in your and help yourself. So make a video saying good things about the book and become an affiliate advertiser. I'm not saying everything has to be reduced to commerce. But you like to speak. You're looking for more opportunities, reach more people. You could write a, you could speak what you just put in text there, review the book, help the author sell more and you could make some money. And I don't know enough about where you're located to know where you can be an affiliate, whether it's something the equivalent of Amazon or Walmart or Target in your country that would allow you to do that. But you might want to look into it because you obviously are very passionate about that book in particular and books in general. I would still ask you to go a little bit deeper because again, everyone has heard, you know, every religion has something to the extent of, you know, love. You know, love thy neighbor as thyself. Whether you're saying love a stranger the way you would your sister or brother, it's kind of similar. As far as I know, every religion has something similar to that. The golden rule. I want to know why did reading it here make it more meaningful? Were you about. Again, I don't know much about you and I don't want to presume, but did you have somebody on the playground or at school or someplace in your life where you saw them as different, different culture and you didn't want to deal with them? And you read this book and it made you realize, oh, this person could be my brother, let me go up and talk to them. If you could get to that level, it would be much more meaningful, would have a much stronger impact. So that's what I want you to think about, will strengthen your speaking. And that's what I tried to do by talking about not just I've read a thousand public speaking books and I'm so smart, you should listen to me. I talked in general for about five seconds that I've read a lot of books, but then I went just to this specific of one book, one tip in a book. But then How I took that tip, modified it a little, and then used it on clients, putting these little stickers. And I know I've said, I've shown you before, I'll show it to you right now. Want to drive this point home? I have to step over here. I'm stepping a little away from the microphone. Just a moment. But to tie that whole story together, I do want you to realize I'm not just making this stuff up. So here, here in fact, are the stickers. Now I've got to do this with my face not being seen. So let me do it like that. You can see that has a. And this one has like an er. And these again, you can see one of them. Well, I'll show you. On this one, you can see on this one, one of the stickers has been removed. I turned it into a sticker. I was holding that one. Okay, there you go. I may have been holding it the wrong way so you could see that. So again, what I'm trying to do there is show you, in fact, how a particular book was really helpful to me and how I take that knowledge to help you take. That's what I'm looking for is it's just not enough to say, oh, this book is a great book. And here's a nice lofty quote of, you know, aim for the moon and you'll at least hit the ceiling. And, you know, all sorts of nice warm, fuzzy, affirmation style quotes. Some people like them, some people say, okay, I've heard it before. What they haven't heard before are the specific examples of how you change your life. Most people I meet have not seen the sticker, the anti, anti, anti, like sticker that I have. So people love it. They also love it because it really does solve a problem for them. That's what makes it meaningful. Now, not everybody is doing a highly specific, practical, tactile skill the way I am. So I don't want to make it sound like you have to be that problem solving and specific, but I need something real that happened in your life. If you want us to believe that this book had something of a transcendent nature that you think was really useful, it would help it. Barb, thank you so much for joining us today. And by the way, I really appreciate the way people can sort of come in and pop out as they want. I'm not expecting you to be with me all three hours every day. What we're trying to do is be sort of like a. Not a xylophone, the instrument that you can Track, pull apart, that makes the sound so that it's flexible to you. If you've got three hours to join me, great. If you've got 30 minutes, great. If you got three minutes, great. If you got 30 seconds, well, we post not one, but two short form videos every single day on YouTube and other social media platforms. So I'm trying to be as flexible as possible to help people because it's not about me and what I want, it's about what really works for you and what's going to be flexible for you. Okay? So if you're still with us and it appears you are, I want you to, okay, you're here and you can just keep your voice on. And if you don't want to appear on camera, you may be doing other things, but tell me, can you go deeper the way I did? What specifically did you do differently after reading this book? Because that's. If you were going to do a review of it, that's what would have real power and impact on people. Because everything you said was sort of generic and abstract. It's not that it was a bad message. The problem is people don't visualize abstractions. They therefore don't remember them. If they don't remember them, how do they take action? Is that fair? All right, take. If you don't mind turning your microphone on and let me know and you may need to think about it for a while, that's okay. And if the answer is yeah, I don't really know yet, that's okay too. We're in this to explore and cultivate and see how we can make things better. And do you want to share again? I may have put you on the spot.

I want to take medicine.

I heard some audio, but I wasn't quite sure what you said there and I think I may have missed comment.

I'm taking a medicine.

Oh, you're taking some medicine. Okay, apologies for being distracting there.

I'll come back.

Okay, well, feel free to come back now. Creative Mind has posted more. Read Morals of the Heart by Dr. Lawrence Bruce. It's a very interesting book and will really make you feel more peace. It's a 700 year old book.

He is Creative Minds.

Okay, Tick. Tick is Creative Mind. Okay.

He's joining us from YouTube. YouTube. So that's that. That's great. His contribution there.

So great. Thanks so much. Hey, Barb, if I know you got to go, but I'm wondering if you could just give. Because you. I think you know more about it than I do because of your, your Intimate knowledge and your involvement with the live streaming community and your Facebook page. Are there certain live streamers that you know of who get a significant amount or a majority of their income from not only the super Chats, but their memberships and Patreon that you think would be good role models for some of our people to look at?

I'm really not prepared to go into that today.

Okay.

There are, as you know, I definitely am in, in tune with the major players and so much is happening right now. I don't know if you're aware of this, but Amazon terms are changing, the affiliate terms and that are changing here at the first of March.

Well, I received the note from Amazon that certain terms of service change and I, I thought I read them and I couldn't tell what had changed. Do you have any sense of what's significant that people should be aware of?

I. Nothing. I'm willing to, you know, it's all about interpretation. Of course, I'm not an attorney. Several of us were all cogitating over what we're reading and I think I've, I invited you and you are involved in the logie group, which logie is, is an Amazon partner. And just this last Friday we had a special guest in, in our logie community talking about how he had made, you know, 10 times the money through the Logie representation direct versus, you know, the Amazon program. So I think it's, we are in another revolution, revolutionary time if you will. Just like when, you know, we all got access to the World Wide Web. I mean it's that profound because we also have the AI tool to assist us now I this not to change your topics, but I wanted to let you know I had updated the, the top UDEMY course instructors list that I, I monitor or I keep and monitor frequently. But I had spaced it out since the end of the year. And one of the things, because I knew that 2024 is a big year on YouTube and yes, there are some updates on you that Google has made to YouTube that people should be watching for right now. But I grabbed their YouTube channels to see because that's, you know, one of the perks that you have as an instructor is you can put all your social destinations to meet you on. And I was amazed at who had over a hundred K subscribers and who did not, you know, and, and there's one of them in there that's got like 384K or more, you know, subscribers to each YouTube. But I kept their numbers. I'll share them in our, our community okay, great.

Fascinating to look at.

Yeah, because it's, it is that combination of things. And so that's where we are right now. And you know me, I keep harping on this word community. And right now I'm going through the cycle with meta again and working with a certified community manager program and they've got, you know, tests coming up the first week of March and it just brings home about how what I am learning in there, which I'm sharing, this thing of community that Barb's been harping about all this time is more critical now than ever before. And that gets us back to conversation and communication because you can't have community without communication. But communication is a two way at a minimum, a two way conversation. And it is. So that's why all of the large live streamers, like notable live streamers are many of them. There's like three top live streaming applications, but bulk of them are with streamyard because number one it's about the voice and two on the video side. But three, the tool you have to share your viewers commentary to invite them on stage with you, all of those kinds of things. And it's really as you found, when I'm not here with you, it's kind of hard to see some of the things come up and it's like which, which, which, which can I share and what can I not? And you know, all those kinds of things. So it's very difficult for a live streamer to be a solopreneur if you will. You almost have have to collaborate with other live streamers and that action in itself in learning about those live streamers and going into the, our live streaming family, so to speak, the strengths of each one we learn from each other is that goes clear Back to the 80s, the Zig Ziglar days. You know about the importance of networking because networking isn't a one way street. It's a two way conversation with feedback and sharing of your information. So it's an exciting time to be around. But as far as detail, I'm, you know me, I'm a lifelong learner and I'm going my thing on my YouTube channel is I just want, you know, I've completed over 700 hundred courses and yours, what you got what a fifth of them are yours probably. And so and packaging that for me is my big thing and tying that into my Amazon live story, my, well my Amazon influencer story and the live up because the live options on Amazon are changing too. So it's all happening here. We'll be ready to everybody's launching on the March 1, you know, and, and that's typically what happens online is that first quarter you're putting all your programs together. Then if you like Marie Forleo, Brandon Burchard and Tony so many of the big names, they launch these programs, programs that are really feeders into a much larger program that they're going to be offering in the second quarter. So it's a, it's a very exciting time to, to be involved. And I don't really have any more to add than that because it's.

Well, I would like to just add emphasis to, you know, one of your key points about things are changing. They're changing faster than ever. And any one platform, whether it's Amazon, Facebook, YouTube can change the rules right out of the gate or quickly blindside people. Something new to me, of course, and I do think it's prudent for people to not put all their eggs in, in one basket, as you mentioned correctly. And I appreciate you bringing to my notice Logie. It's, you know, a lot of people get excited, excited about Amazon Influencer. I've been excited. I've been making new videos. But the people who have the strongest business sense are not doing just one thing. They're, they're part of Logie, they're a part of other programs because they realize things change so quickly. And also there's just the factor that something just some people just work with some platforms and don't with others for whatever reason. I've done really well on Udemy, but there are plenty of people who've done a thousand times better than I have on YouTube, for example. And as you pointed out, you look at the top 10 people who are Udemy instructors, not a lot of them have, you know, the 1 million, 5 million followers on YouTube. It's, you know, they're a superstar that they have a couple hundred ,ousand or, or three hundred thousand. Each platform often has a whole completely new ecosystem of stars. And there's nothing new about that. The best silent movie stars rarely ever made the transition to the talkies. The radio stars verily rarely made it into the movies. Movie stars rarely became TV stars. Broadcast TV stars rarely, rarely became cable TV stars. And cable TV stars rarely ever became YouTube star. And you can go on and on. The Tick Tock and the, the vine stars were not the YouTube stars. Each one has new opportunity and new it plays to different strengths and weaknesses. So for me, to the extent I've figured out anything is just make as many small bet experiments as possible see what works. Gary Vaynerchuk always he gets frustrated with people when he talks about some new platform and they say well you know, what if it's not around in two years? He said, but what if it is? You get in early. And I have not always followed his advice. But if you, if you cast enough experiments in different places and you consistently create something, I do believe if you're really talking about something of value to people or you can really entertain people, which that's not my thing, you can find a home on the Internet in a meaningful way. And what really was not true for most of my human life is you can make a living doing this. I think maybe not everyone, but almost anyone who's consistently trying to create and use every platform available and does enough small, small born experiments and has at least some access to the Internet and a phone can make a living. Am I saying everyone is going to be Mr. Beast or PewDiePie and they of dollars? No, but I do think that it's certainly possible to make a median income if you put in the time it may take five years but if you put in the time you can make a median income for almost anyone. And to me that is profoundly exciting and just different about what's going on in the barb. I know you've got other things to do any. That was a little bit of a long monologue on my part. Everything you wanted to add to that?

No, I'm going to be paying attention, Stronger Attention to YouTube I looked at and I'm meeting with some of our, my fellow students from the Udemy track and I think, I mean because that is one topic I'm going to cover this quarter because it only makes sense to do that, you know from my connections, my people connections. So I, I'm actually looking forward to getting things done in that realm. And also the latest research statistics from the Internet. This is the time of year, you know, I'll mention it one more time. Social media marketing world, that's where all the great thought leaders in social media marketing gather every year and have since 2009, whether it's virtual or in person. The reports are coming out now from their feedback from that conference, their findings and they know people are going to be looking at them for actual statistics to back up what they're saying. And so the research outfits are all very strongly getting involved, you know in releasing their information. And that's what this last, I'd say the last 10 days have been pretty heavy in revealing information to help us have a good 20.

Is there any one big insight that you think was surprising to you or most people in the industry? Because I mean I have, I have, have not followed that conference. But certainly I look at the major trends which are all sort of traditional media viewership going down, traditional advertising to traditional media going down, audiences are going up for social media, rev money from brands and advertising and affiliates and Amazon influencer and brand deals and all that, that's all going up. In terms of, of the pots of money the individual creators and small creators can make. We continue to see not only 200 years old newspapers go out of business. I got to be careful, I just hit my microphone. I hope that didn't sound bad. But we also see 15 year old companies like Vice, Buzzfeed and others like that go out of business because they were so dependent, dependent on one primary revenue source, which is traditional advertising. Whereas the people who seem to be really successful like a Sean Cannell are getting money from super chats and affiliate deals and brand deals and conferences and a gazillion revenue streams. I mean that, that's certainly a trend you and I have seen going on now for several years. Is there any other big trend that you've learned only from this conference in the last couple of weeks?

The most revealing thing from the conference for me and because I've been online since the, you know, early days and the very first thing that we all learned is, you know, that the email is king. Being able to contact people via email and back in the day, you know, an email newsletter was a big deal and because the connectivity wasn't consistent throughout the world, but if we could reach someone via email, that was a big deal, we could convert those conversations into sales for everyone. And I hated because of the work I did online, I mean I have 200,000 in my email but backlog, you know, so I, I have a filter kind of thing that I have to go through and just clean things out. So the number one thing that I took away from that conference is that email newsletters are back in. And not only are they back in, they must be a priority. And it just so happened that as that was being revealed the conference, I got an email newsletter from one of the top YouTube influencers. And the whole newsletter infrastructure was different. I could see the light just from the way it was designed and the content and it, the whole theme in that newsletter was one of community, let's get together and discuss, discuss this on YouTube, this such and such date, so forth and so on. So I think it's going to be the. For many reasons, the email newsletter is going to be golden this year because the platforms are all doing. They're making big changes. The platforms that we've all become loyal to, both YouTube and Facebook have more changes across come on March 1st. The old unfolding stuff, even on Streamyard, all of these third party tools, you know, if you, you have. We're going to be using RTMP to access those areas now we won't.

As far as comments, I apologize. Barb, can you tell people who are listening, what is rtm?

Rtmp.

Yeah, rtmp. What is that?

The real time, let's see message protocol I think is what it's what it stands for. I'd have to, I'd have to look at it.

I mean I've heard the term before but I'm saying because I want to know. I don't know what all the initials. Part of my job is when conversations happen. I want it to be understandable to the vast majority of our audience. So anytime I hear someone use an acronym or jargon, I want to put myself in the position of the audience and try to be helpful. So that's why.

But I believe.

Can't Google it while I'm talking to you.

Exactly. But I do believe that you as an instructor, teaching people to use video to communicate, teaching people to be online to share their speaking skills and all of that, that you have an obligation, obligation to stay on top of that. And I, you know, from that aspect, I don't believe it's going to be a situation of coming into a conversation where you are leading that conversation. You're viewed to be the expert and just expecting the students or the guests to be revealing that information. I think that the audience is much smarter now than we were in the last century. And it's like so because in the last century if you had that book, if you could speak well, if you could deliver it in person, you were an expert. Whether you were or not, it wasn't questioned because typically if your book got published it was through a mainstream publisher that, that people in that century recognize as being a credible publisher. And the whole game has changed certainly.

I mean when it comes to book publishing, you know, something I followed for a long time and I think I published my first book now more than 30 years ago, but certainly 35, 40 years ago there were about 40,000 books published a year. Now it's depending on how you count every aspect of self publishing, There are between 1 and 2 million books a year. So publishing a book, if you don't have community. As you point out Bart, in my opinion, it's not worthless. It's actually less, it's worth less than worthless because the time you spent with all that book, you could have been building a community, a tribe tribe, a fan base, a following. And now you don't. And so the vast, vast majority of people who go to all the trouble to publish a book, it, it's just a big time suck for them and it's nothing. Having a book these days is like having a business card. Yeah, everybody has can get a business card. Anyone can publish a book. You can't get a book that's read though. That's what's different.

Hold on, hold on, on. I've got to come back to that because I have helped other public self publishers and I basically, I didn't do it for myself, but they followed my advice because of my years of experience and so forth. Because I did make my first wad of money through self publishing, which was a major surprise to me because I was able to publish a publication for $0.50 cents and sell it for all five bucks, you know, and I just.

It was a good margins that I.

Didn'T have that many middlemen. And so I'd go in and make a very small investment at pit printing and, and get thousands of dollars, you know, and it's like what? And so that's like when, when Jeff came along with Amazon I said oh my God, this is going to change everything. And that it has. But in the public and at the core of Amazon is still the publishing business. And what is selling? What is creating community? What includes community is collaborating on books. And that's what that 100 live streaming, remember the book that we had Ross and we featured on our live streams. That's what it's about and all, but.

I don't think we're really fundamentally at odds. Barb but didn't he create a live streaming community? First he's in the field talking to people around the world every day. Then he did a book, didn't he?

He didn't create it. We were all a part of it. And we all started together in a beta experiment about conversing, you know, and creating a version community. And of course I was one of the leaders of that because I created the virtual communities with the tools we had at the time and worked with the major players and they were all transitioning as well. And video, audio, real time played a key connect. That's why podcasting had a prior, you know, it was really, really big before the video was, and now it's come back again. But the podcasting that we see today also includes video and YouTube is, has figured that out. They've got, you know, you can have a podcast tab where they're actually giving preference to advertising your podcast. But the most winning podcasts on there are community based. That means that there's being interaction all the time.

But again, to my point though, I don't think we're in disagreement. My point is so many people I talk to almost every day say I got a great idea for a book and they want to just write the book, publish it and they think they're going to get sales. What I think Ross did is he first was live streaming and building community and, and talking to people and building a community of people who cared about it. Then he published a book. I'm saying that's the way to do it.

I was there, I was there. I'm in the first edition. And the thing is that we all talked about it and I said everybody will be more credible if we work together on this. Somebody has to put the infrastructure together to put make that happen. We actually created that all together. That's why he has the loyalty of the leaders within that community. So you can't have a mayor in a community and get things done unless your staff supports that because they're your messengers going out to the volumes in the community. So it's not just a Ross thing, but Ross made a specialty out of it to actually profile and feature those people, those thought leaders who did that. I mean I'm offered every year he is offered Barb come back, add more to it and so forth. And you know, I have been busy helping folks like you get, get on the train as well. And sometimes you get those opportunities presented to you and you don't take action in time and they go by. And that's because you're not, you're not focused on the personal, conversational community side of it.

You know, it's just getting all great points. Bob. I was simply trying to make one point that I think is very important for people who watch this because I talk to people in real life all the time and, and I've, I, I get very frustrated with it because I have so many people who have talents and they just want to write a book. And I say, okay, how many are on your newsletter list or email? Oh, 10, I don't know, a newsletter. How many in your Facebook community? Oh, I haven't started that. How many, how often do you post on YouTube and how many subscribers do you have? Oh, I did a few a few years ago. And I'm going to start again. And in my experience, if you just try to publish a book, it could be the best book in the entire history of the world. It's talking about nonfiction here, although it's kind of applies to fiction as well. In 2024, if you simply write a great book and you haven't built the community you talk about, your book is guaranteed to suck massive amounts of time and money from you. That's a waste of time. And that's my frustration that I see people want to start with that. It's not anti publishing. I've published half a dozen books. What I'm saying is it's not 1974. In 1974, Wayne Dyer could be a professor. Just write a book. He's got no community. No one knows him outside of Detroit. He can go on the Tonight Show. All of a sudden the whole world knows him. And you know, 40 years later, he sold 200 million books. I'm saying those days are gone. Hey, Barb, I apologize. I think we're in agreement on most of these things and you bring in valid points. But I've got to get to today's Amazon influencer videos. So we're going to run out of time here, so. But I want to be respectful of you to. It's like we lost you. But if you had any final comments, let me know. Okay, I'm going to shift gears a minute today. I am going to make these videos on my own, which I do want to teach you how to. How to be flexible, how to do these, and so that you don't feel like you have to somehow be dependent on a team. So I'm going to get my tripod over here. And again, this is just a. A simple tripod, which I should at some point do an Amazon influencer video for this. I'm going to set up my studio, so to speak, which is really just my cell phone. I'm going to put the receiver into my cell phone. This way I can get better quality audio. I'm going to get the microphone to make sure I'm getting the correct microphone, because I have some for a different phone, my wife's phone, and some for me. So I'm going to first of all test the microphone. I'm pushing the button and I'm looking for a green light. Ah, there it is. Okay, so the microphone appears to be working. Try to get it as close as possible to my mouth. And then. Hey, Barb. I'm sorry if we lost you there for a minute because I did want to give you the final word before we switch over to Amazon and I don't because I didn't knock you out. But I didn't know if you had to just leave or you got disconnected. So feel free to.

I, I'm looking here because one of the things that if you're a guest in a streamyard live like this and you need to leave and you want to cut the stream to your channel, the if I'm a guest, you and I are both pretty much the same level in my account and I can't just stop the stream. If I remove it, I'm going to remove it from my channel when I leave the stream. So that was a new learning point for me. And I just, I think that using the tool, learning how to use the tools, I think this particular tool makes it extra easy for people in general. And, and I'm, you know, I'm all in. I still can continue to be all in on streaming live with audio and video. And I'm really excited about 2024. I think we got a lot going on, right?

I'm just setting up so I can do the Amazon Influencer videos today. And I think I actually grabbed the wrong tripod. So I'm now going to be doing these by myself. Now here's one of the things. I'll toss this out to you, Barb. I'm going to, I'm going to say this generically. I won't say it's about Amazon Influencer, so I don't want anyone accusing me of violating any confidentiality. I will say when I look at all of the videos and content that I create that could be a part of an affiliate program, so I spent a lot of time analyzing it this weekend. What I found is that, you know, you've heard of the Pareto principle and you know, the 8020 rule. What I found was that indeed 20% of my content wasn't getting 80% of the results. It was getting more like 95% of the results, 98%. So specifically the short form video, the short form vertical video is getting almost all of my views for affiliate video influencer stuff that I'm doing. So because of that, I'm going to try to be smarter and be flexible.

And.

Double down on what's working and to stop doing things that aren't working. So as of today, and I'm looking for my remote control, so I'll be doing these on my own and I Thought that I hung up it on one of my tripods, so. But that's the conclusion I made. Barb is posting photo because typically, as those of you know, who followed me, I've been doing five pieces of content for every product. I'm doing a vertical picture, a horizontal picture, a vertical short form video, 15 seconds or less, a horizontal longer one and a horizontal one where I sort of more expansive and go more than a minute. What I have found is I'm just not getting views for anything other than the 15 second ones. So now I'm going to try to do a lot more products and just do the 15 second. If you have a reaction or thought to that, I'd love to hear. Barb, if you could chat for a minute. Oh, here's my remote control. I found it. Great. Do you have any thoughts on that? Do you think I'm being unwise? Because I'm now basing this on hundreds of data points so it's not just like I did two and didn't get anything. Do you have any thoughts on whether that is a wise analysis or not?

You're saying that you get the most feedback from the shorter ones?

I'm saying that I'm getting like 99% of all of my views are coming from short, the short verticals. I'm not getting much from anything else.

But are you getting sales from that? Because Sean Kennel and you know, through Think Media and Brian G. Johnson just had a YouTube video on that, this very thing this weekend that, yeah, you're getting it, but it's not it. Again, we're working with technology as well as people here and, and YouTube. We have to play to YouTube where, you know, you being a YouTube partner and so forth, you got to be knowledgeable of what they're up to. And yes, you look at views but, but did they, did they actually turn into a sale?

And so here's my deduction process. I'm seeing with a number of these items, I'm getting maybe 50, 100, several hundred views for the short form. And I'm seeing literally zero views. The horizontal, the long and the picture. So it doesn't take a statistical genius to figure out that if there's zero views, then all of the sales have to be coming from the short form vertical. That's, that's what I'm doing.

Well, that's. Those of us who've been at it a while don't agree with you. And I'm just going to say that you going live for multiple hours continuously at a Time is working against you with the YouTube algorithm. So that's something you can search. Derral Eves has come up about that. Sean Kennel.

So that's it, That's a timeout. Barb, that's a separate topic. I'm happy to talk about that, but I'm trying to figure out the timeout. I just wanted to talk to you about the influence. Influencer videos. And I'm not specifying Amazon. How could it be that I could have all my views from one format, zero views for the other, and the sales not be coming from that one format? Just logically, how would that even be possible? Barbara, I don't know if I lost you again. I see you're on screen, but you're off of the main one.

I'm sorry, I was taking care of things behind the scene. Let's see, you were saying if, if I'm getting all my views from the short ones. But you also said, and perhaps I missed that keyword when you said it was influencer videos. So. And what you're terming is your influencer videos. If you're Talking about Amazon, YouTube also has a program now. And so in those videos, I mean, that is what's the analysis is coming out now. You're still getting. Are they actually buying from the short video? And guess what? In these late. If you would have been in the logie meeting Friday, you will learn how important the photos are. Now. I, I had thought, give up on the photos, it's not a big deal. Well, guess what? Amazon is actually seeking our photos to insert influencers into a new program. So they are favoring. So again, it's staying up with what Amazon is doing, what they're favoring at the time.

But why am I getting zero view at this point? I have hundreds of videos in Amazon. I'm getting close to zero views.

Right? Well, I haven't looked at your account in a while because I've got my own story going on dealing with that. But when you're part of what's been going, what's been going on in the community, the whole thing has been that, you know, the videos have been pulled, pulling in the views. But are they pulling in the sales?

Okay, and I'm telling you now for the 10th time, I have evidence, I have evidence that I am getting some sales and I'm only getting views from shorts. Therefore it is logically an impossibility that the sales are coming from the longer form videos on that one format.

Okay, so that's working for you. And if you're happy with the number that you've got, you know, keep rolling.

Well, I'm always trying to improve and I'm trying to learn. So I'm trying to cast experiments and then do more of what's working and do less of what's not working. So for me, for now, the longer form videos, the horizontal videos on this one platform are not working. The pictures on this one platform are not working.

So that's why platform is Amazon.

Well, yeah, I didn't want to say that because they're all picky about, you know, we're not supposed to talk about Amazon and so I'm trying to be a little cagey on that. But yes, I'm talking about Amazon.

So you're saying that you somehow got the impression that you can't talk about Amazon just like we're talking about Amazon now. You can't mention it.

Well, you're not supposed to give insight or information. Information and what, what is in the account you could construe. What I just said is insider information because I am looking at my insider tab showing that I'm not personally getting sales from long form videos. So that's why I wanted to be a little cagey about it. I'm certainly open, I'm certainly understand the concept that there are plenty of people who do affiliate videos long form on YouTube and other platforms and are doing really well. I'm not in any way suggesting that people can't do long form videos and do really well with affiliate advertising. Obviously people do very well with, you know, 10 minute videos talking about products. Oh, Mo says hi and I apologize. I am really going to have to do do this now otherwise we're going to lose the whole window today. Yeah, Barb, thanks so much. We'll continue the conversation. I don't have all the answers. I am trying to experience cast as many experiments on a regular basis to try to learn and learn from mistakes and improve. Thanks so much Barb and thanks for. I'm going to pull out my grab bag of products that I brought with me today. Again, these are all products that I actually use that I've actually purchased. Where I am going to do today a short form video explaining why I like them. Okay, now I've got to see which brand this is. I did, I know that I did to buy these on Amazon. Okay. And I'll be able to link it up when I do it. Okay. So I'm going to go to video. I'm going to hit that. I am so I'm glad. Yeah, we framed this today so that you can see it. So I'm going to try to frame this so that we have the curtains in the backdrop. I think it's a slightly neater look than my regular studio. I'm going to try to get a rider out here and I'll be able to hold it up. I'm using a remote control that came with this particular. So you have to turn this on. I believe I'm going to do a simple test. I'll do it like this. I don't know if I've turned it on or if I need a new battery. I just got the flash. I love pickleball and these balls do the trick. A lot of people I play with are very particular. They like to say, oh, that's the wrong ball. That's an inside ball. These balls are just buy them by the pack, they last as well as any other and they get the job done. If you love pickleball, give them a try. Okay, now I can see that. I went 17 seconds. I'm actually going to delete that. What I have found is Amazon really seems to like the less than 15 seconds. So I'm going to just hit delete so I don't have to think about that one again. Okay, now I'm going to get it to camera. I love pickleball and these balls get the job done. I play every day. These are fantastic outdoor balls. If you want something that's going to be reliable and consistent, give them a try. Okay, so again, what's different today from the past is I'm not going to do three different videos and two pictures. I'm just going to do one take of a short form vertical. My camera is up. That way you can see the camera right there. It is up and down. Okay. I love biking. I love the thrill of speed, but I want to be safe. The last thing I want is to crack my head. That's why I always use this helmet. It keeps me safe and makes me feel more comfortable. Again, I try to do these things in one take, and now that I'm only doing things as verticals, it just simplifies the process. We're not having to do this and this and this and go from photo to video. It's much, much faster. I realize it looks a little dirty and stained. That's because I wear it constantly. So do other members of my family. This hat protects me and keeps so much sun off of me. Keeps a lot more sun off than a baseball cap. You're outdoors, give this a try. Really is. And this one is an aside. Sometimes I have to fight with my mother in law over. We have a couple in the house, but she likes this for gardening because it really does keep the sun off. Okay. This zinc stick sunscreen really does the job. I coat my nose, coat other body parts that I'm afraid might get too much sun. This zinc stick is the way to go if you want real protection. Interestingly, I've done this for another color, a tan color, and it is sold remarkably well for me. I love pickleball and this is my paddle. Now you can see it's a little beaten up. I am tough on my paddles. This one is reliable. I use it every day. Doesn't make me a pro, but it makes me have fun. This is my wife's Selkirk pickleball paddle. She loves it. We use it every single day. It's reliable, it's consistent. If you want a high quality pickleball paddle, this will work for you. So I'm already finding out that this is a, this is a much more efficient way of making videos. If you're only doing one and you're, you're not having to change everything else, it works well. I love these Adidas slip on slippers. They are comfortable. I can use them. Going to the beach, going anywhere here in sunny Florida. If you're looking for something a little classier than certain brands, this may be the ticket for you. Now, I was trying not to mention another brand. I wear Cross Crocs on a daily basis. I am using these as sort of my dress up shoes which may sound ridiculous to anyone else unless you live in Florida. It's definitely a more casual place. Okay. My 10 year old daughter is a budding artist. She does a lot of things that require glue. I love this Elmer's glue stick because it is neat, it doesn't spill around the house and it gets the job done. It sticks. Okay, so another pair of slippers. I don't think I've done these yet. Well, you'll hear about this in just a moment and thank you for joining me. This is sort of the tail end of our session today where we do Amazon Influencer, where we do Amazon Influencer video. So I'm sort of taking you behind the scenes, letting you know how I actually do this, how I make it. Different styles I've been experimenting with. And Mo says hello, I've joined a little late. Did I miss something advice today? Well, yes, we've been talking for three hours, Mo. So as soon as I finish this Entire thing will be available on demand. So all you have to do is hit the live tab on the channel and you'll see what we did today. Okay. I love these slippers. They're great for going to the pool, to the beach, and I wear them going out to restaurants here in Delray Beach, Florida. These are kind of my dress slippers because they look a little fancier than other certain brands. Again, I don't want to say it by name, but I'll wear these when I don't want to be seen in my Crocs because there are a lot of people who just don't like Crocs and think of it as something you should only wear in your bathroom, essentially. So that's why I have these. I love my daughter and I'm trying to encourage her to read. That's why we got her this Amazon Kindle for kids. It really is a great way of instilling the love of reading with a child at an early age. Okay, now here's a jacket. I can't remember if I got this on Amazon or not, so I'm actually going to take a second right now. Normally I don't do this. I'll just go ahead and do it. But we've. I'm at the end of our products for today. Although I may do some books. You can always do books. I'm just going to do a quick search and see if this brand is carried because if the brand is not on Amazon, you can't do an Amazon influencer video for it. Which is not surprising. But what a lot of people don't know is you can do an Amazon influencer video even if you didn't buy the product on Amazon. As long as you have the product and it's available on Amazon, you can do a video. So I see that they do have jackets. What I don't know. So the brand is on. So I'll probably figure that out later. This is the Free country lot and I do use this sweat jacket on a regular basis. I'm not going to take the time to demonstrate it. Here, put it on. I'm simply going to hold it up. So let me go back. But at least I know the brand is on. Every once in a while I may buy some something from a Costco and it's simply not available on Amazon, in which case it's a waste of time to make the video. Free country warm up jacket. Okay. I love my Free country men's warm up jacket. I wear it almost every day. When it's Cool. I live in South Florida so many months of the year I don't need it. But in the winter months, in the morning, this is the first thing I put on. So the other advantage of doing it this way is I'm so close to it, I can see the counter, the timing counter. So when you are. When you're having someone else do it and they're facing the. The lens and you're only seeing the camera, that they're facing the camera screen, they see the timing and I have to look at the lens. That's typically what happens when I am making these videos with my wife. Today it's just me and a tripod. And what hadn't really occurred to me till now is the beauty of that method is I can see the timing. So it gets close to 15 seconds. I'm trying to get the whole thing done because it does. I've seen dramatically increase your odds of success of getting views and getting placed on product pages. If you have the video 15 seconds or less. Now, you don't have to do it that way. And in many ways they encourage you to do videos 30 seconds or more because you get. You're more likely to be compensated if someone watched your video for 30 seconds. My understanding is that if someone watches your entire video, if it's less than 30 seconds and then they make the purchase, you get credit for that too. So that's why I'm doing that. We have a few extra. We started a little late today at 9:15. So we have a few extra minutes today because I do want to give you three hours. And what I am going to do is just do a few product reviews of books. Now I'm doing that not because I think I'm going to make a lot of money by doing product reviews of books. Although I have had a number of sales come in. Doesn't add up to a lot of money for my video reviews of Ali Abdal's new book that came out end of December. I think it's going to be a lot harder to make money from books that are not brand new. For example, I did a review of Atomic Habits. Well, Atomic Habits has been out for years and years and years. It's been on bestseller list for years and years and years. So nobody really needs to hear if they're interested in improving their habits. A review from me. So that one has not been wildly successful. Let's just leave it at that. But I do think that the more videos you do, the better you get. It is an art form. The more Doors that are open. Maybe I do one of these for a book and it generates no sales. But the author, and excuse me, the publisher really likes it and wants to somehow open a relationship with me, open doors with me. And maybe the PR team that sees me making a video for one of their authors then puts me on their radar and they want to have their authors come on this channel for podcast interviews and it opens up a whole new line of relationships there. So that's why I'm doing this in part because, well, if it's only a 15 second investment. So there's not much to lose. So I'm just going to take a couple of books that I really like and talk about these. I'll just do three right now. Try not to destroy my set in the process and we'll do these repeaters right now and I'll show you you what I'm doing. Remote control. Fall in Love with the Problem, not the Solution is a fantastic book. It really changed my whole perspective on being an entrepreneur. If you're at all thinking about starting a business, you owe it to yourself. Read this book. Okay. I think that really does. You've only got 12 seconds or so. Does sum up exactly why someone should read that book. Now can I remember how? Doesn't have to go in the same order, but I do want to make sure I don't make a mess of things as I put this back. Okay. All right. Martin Seligman's the Hope Circuit. If you're a fan of positive psychology, then Martin Seligman is the guy. He's the founder of the whole movement. This talks about his whole journey. If you want to know more, you really should read it. Okay. Is that the strongest review? No, I mean, he is a profoundly important thinker in the world of positive psychology. It's harder for me to be quite as effusive for the book because while his ideas are profoundly important, he's not the most engaging, interesting writer. So I don't want to oversell. I want to give people candid thoughts. Foreign. Newport is an extraordinarily important book. We live in a world where all of us are just so overwhelmed with more messages. Cal gives reasons, analysis and tactics for how to improve your life. Okay, so that's what we have. And this really is a good book. I'm not saying anything that isn't true on any of these reviews, but Cal Newport is really a savvy guy. I think I've read all of his books. Now, if you're looking for someone who is not. He's not some old guy who's just a curmudgeon about what's going on in the world. He really does know a tremendous amount about the state of things. And he's actually a computer science professor, Georgetown University. But that's not what he's known for, at least to me. He's written all these books about the modern digital world, how to be more efficient, how to be more productive. He's had a huge impact on me. I mean, it's one of the reasons why I try to spend no more than five and a half hours in my office a day and I do other work other times and I'm monitoring social media and doing other things like that and having to respond to messages at different times. But as far as really trying to be productive, he's a big thesis of the idea that humans can. You can't really be more. Can't be productive for more than about six hours a day. Yeah, you can squeeze in some email here and there after that, but you're far more productive with tremendous focus and doing one thing at a time. So I know you've heard that from other people and places, but the way he sums it up in that book is profoundly, profoundly useful, helpful and creative. Okay, we're out of time for today because we're now way past noon. I want to thank you for your time. I'm TJ Walker. Please join us here live tomorrow. But also please come back and watch our regular videos. We post typically three produced videos a day. Please like them, subscribe, leave comments and sign up for notifications. Thanks. See you tomorrow.