TJ Walker Live: News and Discussion about Communication Skills

Be here on and off for the next three hours. We try to do that every single day, Monday through Friday, non holidays, non travel days, vacation days for me. So happy that you could be here. Wanted to dive right into some news that directly relates to communication skills. This is a survey that came out from Adobe. It's now a couple of weeks old. They survey people around the world on what sort of side hustles they were looking for. And a couple of interesting things jumped out at me. Australia was the country that had the highest percentage of people looking for side hustles. United States number two, Canada number three, New Zealand number four, and United Kingdom number five. Now, number six was Japan, which was a little surprising to me. I still think of Japan as a place where most people work for big corporations and have a certain stability, but certainly a place like the United States where there's not as much of a social safety net, then it does make a lot of sense. We'll talk about specifically the specific types of side hustles that people are most interested in. We've got some comments coming in and says this is from Uniform Closure. I want to offer promotion of your channel, viewers, followers, views, chats, bots. The price is lower than any competitor. So first of all, thanks for reaching out. Second of all, let's talk about that because I do have people come to me all the time and say, hey, TJ, I'm starting a YouTube channel, I'm starting a podcast, and how do you really sort of gig the results? How do you sort of juice things? How do you jumpstart this? How do you game the system really? And I have to tell you, I don't really think it can be done in the long run. So no offense to our friend right here who just hopped on, on, I believe, on Twitch, happy to have you here, but you can buy followers. The problem is the algorithms are smart enough to see, okay, you had a million follow a million people watch this video today, not a single one watched tomorrow because it was just a computer that is actually going to make you worse off in the long run, or you've somehow gained a million followers and lo and behold, they're not watching. Leaving comments, interacting, liking any of your content. Again, that sends a signal to social media channels, whether it's YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, any of these that, hey, this is just bs. Now, it might be enough to fool your friends, it might be enough to make you feel good to say, I've got a million followers on this channel, but it's not going to fool anyone else if you try to pitch yourself to an advertiser, a brand, a sponsor, and say, you should spend $10,000 a month advertising on my YouTube channel, my podcast. They'll be, oh, okay, maybe let's look at the numbers. And they're going to go to your channel and see, oh, well, you know, TJ has a million followers on, on Twitch, but lo and behold, he's got one comment every other day on his content that's gonna, that's gonna tell them, oh, he doesn't really have any followers. This is just a made up, you know, he bought this. It's a scam. They're trying to trick us, they're trying to fool us. And you will get $0. So, Mr. Uniform Closure, sorry if that isn't exactly what you wanted to hear, but I try to be transparent here. This is a channel that's about communication. What's a little bit different about it is I'm trying to not just give people finished, polished videos, which I do three times a day on this channel, but to sort of literally, metaphorically take them behind the curtains and let them see what really goes on in the life of a creator, in the life of someone who's creating video for online courses. I have a couple hundred courses in the life of someone who's on a lot of different platforms. I'm on probably a hundred different online learning platforms, not to mention all the social media platforms. I don't have it all worked out, but I have put together a nice living for myself and a nice little business here, something that a lot of other people are trying to figure out how to do. And I am my own boss and I can take off what I want, travel when I want, and do what I want, and work when I want. So to that extent, I do consider myself very lucky, very fortunate. And success at my level. I'm not a billionaire. If you define your success as you have to be worth a billion dollars, you might be miserable your entire life. Because as much as conversation in the media is dominated by this billionaire, that billionaire, this billionaire. There are 8 billion people on planet Earth. They're only a couple thousand billionaires. It's still extraordinarily rare. It's not easy, obviously, becoming a billionaire. And if you think you have to have a billion dollars to be happy or successful, I dare say you could be worth 10 billion. You will never be happy. You'll never truly consider yourself successful. Thanks for those joining us. I know several of you had posted questions at the end of our live session yesterday. And we just didn't get to it, but we have an open floor. I've deliberately left this unstructured. Our first 45 minutes of day, I am going to have to take a break, do a private live session for my students on the Udemy platform. That happens at 10:00am Eastern Time to 10:30am Eastern Time. Today at 10:45, which is a little more than an hour and a half from now, we'll be coming back live on the channel you're watching on right now. And typically we. We broadcast live every day on a couple of Facebook pages. YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitch, and let's see if I missed one. Yeah, Twitter, Twitch, YouTube, LinkedIn, and two Facebook channels. So really trying to make this as easy for you as possible to connect with me rather than forcing you to come to my platform, which, if I could choose, would be YouTube because they make it easier for creators to build, grow, and monetize. But life isn't all about me. I want to be flexible to you. I want to make it easy for you to connect with me. We learn together and we form a community. So that's why I do broadcast on all these different channels. If you want to join me today live on camera, I've made it easy to do. So all you have to do is go to the community tab on my YouTube channel. The most recent post that says join me Live. There's a link, you click it. I then see you right here at the bottom of my screen. I click a button and we share the screen. So you can ask me a question, you can ask me to analyze one of your videos if you like. All sorts of ways of connecting. I see Janice has dropped in for a couple of minutes. Hello to Barb. Tj Janice, always great to hear from you. And Janice would love to, frankly promote you and your business. So if you have a moment to just tell us about who your ideal client is, about who you like to work with, who you help the most, and in what format, we'd love to hear from you. It's a big world out there, and I know you're one of the top trainers and experts in Canada. I'm here in the United States. We have people from countries all over the world. And a lot of times people could work with any one of us from anywhere, virtually through zoom. But a lot of times people want to really work together in the same room, the same city, the same town. And you're going to be more convenient for people in Canada than I am and vice versa with respect to Florida and where I live. So Very happy you're here. When you do have a few minutes and I realize today might not be a convenient time, I want to continue with the story I started with today. This new research coming out of Adobe on what people want to do, what they like to do, what they're aspiring to do for their side hustles, ways of making money. And some things really jumped out at me. This was a worldwide survey and I want to share with you what people aspired to do. Now, the most popular side hustle was as an Uber driver. Now, I do get that it's flexible. If you have a car, basically you're qualified or I guess it has to be a relatively new car. And there's no boss, you're not having someone stand over you, you're not in a dirty kitchen, you don't have bosses or co workers harassing you, things like that. So I do get why Uber driving is a popular interest in people looking for side gigs. I personally, it doesn't appeal to me. I don't like to drive, but that's just me. The second most popular side hustle that was searched for in the last 12 months, Amazon seller. Now that is interesting to me. Now there's a million different ways of selling on Amazon, but those of you who have been following this channel the last couple of months know that I'm a part of the Amazon Influencer program. So there are a lot of different ways you can sell your own merch you can, you can deliver for. There's a lot of ways you can make money for Amazon. What I like, the model I like, which is in some ways the simplest, cleanest. There's no inventory, there's no production, there's no shipping. Is being an Amazon influencer where you essentially make ads and product reviews. We'll be talking about that more later today. So that was the number two one. And if you're posting any comments or you want to come on, I'll come back to you in just a minute. I'm on a different screen so I'm not seeing your comments. So rest assured I will see them as soon as I finish going through this list. The number three most popular side hustle that's been searched for in the last year, being a TikTok influencer. Now, I'm going to try to connect the dots as I see it through the lens of what I do in just a moment. But interesting that being a TikTok influencer is the third most popular search number four app developer. I can relate to that. I've. I'VE developed apps. I have an app called Ultimize which I love for you to check out. U L T A M I Z E look at the second version, Ultimize 2. It's in all the app stores, so I can certainly relate to that. That's the fourth one. The fifth one is being a YouTube influencer. Well, that's what I'm trying to do right now, essentially influence you to have better habits and practices for your communication skills. And occasionally I might try to influence you to attend one of my seminars or workshops or buy an online course or buy an in person course. So YouTube influencer comes in at number five as the fifth most searched side hustle by people around the globe. Number six, Instagram influencer. Are you seeing a theme here? Instagram, obviously. Wildly popular website and social media platform. I do post these videos on Influencer on Instagram every single day, so I can relate to that. Number seven, website developer. People are always going to need websites. It's getting easier and easier. You can have AI do it, but at some point you still need a human hand to connect the dots to get a website up and running. Unless you already have some level of tech savvy coming in at number eight, according to Adobe, with worldwide searches for side gigs. Small business owner. Now that can mean a lot of things. In fact, you could say an Amazon seller, a TikTok influencer, an app. All these people are in fact small business owners. So that can mean a lot of things. Number nine, an Airbnb host. If you have a home, you got an extra room, a guest house, it can be a way of making extra cash. Certainly we've all seen that rise in recent years. And I have friends who do it, love it, feel like it's found money. So that is a very popular side gig. And then number 10, drop ship retailer. You get people to buy stuff and then you ship it out. Or maybe you have other people ship it out for you. I'm not sure I completely understand it. To me it personally sounds very tedious and a lot of details and it's not something I would enjoy doing, but it is top 10. Now they do give a breakdown by country as well, but there's a lot of similarities. So here's why I point this out of these top 10 things, several of Amazon seller. If you include being an Amazon influencer, TikTok YouTube influencer, Instagram influencer, all of those, those four things are massively, massively dependent on speaking skills, actually speaking to people, speaking to a camera. All the More reason to be here on this channel and learn how to get better at speaking and more comfortable speaking. So it does show in my mind. And again, everyone is self interested and looks at things through their own lens. But I see this as such a huge need for speaking skills, for presentation skills, and yet it's not taught in schools. Now, looking at it more broadly, you know, Uber driver, you don't really have to talk to the passengers. I'm not going to try to spin that and say, well, you got to talk to them to get them to give you good reviews. But Amazon seller TikTok, as an app developer, you need to be out evangelizing for your app, perhaps raising money, perhaps doing interviews. So that requires a lot of speaking. So as I'm looking at this list, app developer could require a lot of speaking skills. YouTube influencer, obviously, unless you're just doing video graphics and slapstick requires speaking skills. Instagram requires speaking skills. As a web developer, typically you have to spend a lot of time speaking to the client, listening to them, talking them to figure out how to translate that into what they want in their website. Small business owners, you talk to any small business owner, they spend most of their time talking to prospects, talking to clients. Now, they may have a lot of time in solitude writing or coding, but they have to spend a lot of time speaking. Airbnb host. Okay, you got me there. You can be a perfectly fine Airbnb host and not do any speaking because ideally, from the perspective of a lot of users, you're gone when they show up. And at this point, from what I've seen, and my family uses Airbnb, so much of the sales process is the pictures, it's the review, it's not the host getting on and speaking about the house. And then drop ship retailer, you don't have to really speak for that. So as I add it up, it's really about seven of the top 10 most searched side gigs all involved speaking. To me, it's not completely surprising, but it is fascinating to me in part because this isn't what business schools teach. It's not what other schools teach, it's not what fancy private schools teach, it's certainly not what public schools teach. And yet here we are, seven of the top 10 gigs people are looking for. It all involves speaking. Sabu says hello. Nice seeing you from India. Sabu, thank you so much for joining us again. If you'd like to join me today or ask a question, be a part of the conversation, I have posted a link and you know what I can do it. I don't know if it pushes it back out or not. Let me try. But I will try to simply post the link. Yeah, I. So if you want to join me today, if you can see that, then all you have to do is click it and I will see you right here on my screen and we can have a conversation. And it doesn't have to be just me, but if you have a question about any aspect of communication skills, then I'm here for you. I'd love to chat with you. If you have a video of yourself speaking and you want an unbiased, disinterested. If you're not quite sure what that word means, it's typically not how most people use it. If you want a disinterested perspective on your presentation skills in a video, if you post it here, I will give that to you and it cost absolutely nothing. If you're one of my UDEMY students, please mention that. And I do typically put you to the front of the list. So I always appreciate when students come up. Our. Our friend and colleague Autumn has joined, but he's not connected. If you do want to come into. If you want to connect on streamyard just to listen, sometimes there's a better connection for people or to just sort of feel like you're on the inside in the green room, you're more than welcome to do that. If you want to appear on camera or speak, you need to connect your mic and give permission to your microphone and your camera in order to do so. So I'm going to see if Adam wants to do that while. While he's doing that. If anyone wants to join us, you can. I'm just stepping off camera for one second because I wanted to get a list that I created. What I'd like to do is mix it up here. I always give preference to real people, especially real students and clients with specific questions about any aspect of communication skills. But I also like to be with the times, be up to date, and in fact use artificial intelligence. So what I have done is go to ChatGPT and use artificial intelligence to pull up the most common concerns people have. Yes, Adam? Yes. You're posting a question. Do you want to connect? Sure, I'm happy to connect. If you want to come on and chat, that would be great. And Giancarlo Wright says, I've completed your 50 hour courses and it was really great. Well, Gian, thanks so much. I'm glad you completed the course and thank you for saying it's great. But now let Me practice what I preach. I always stress to people, when someone gives you a compliment about your presentation, your speech, your talk, your online course, don't just say, thank you very much. Glad you like it. Say thank you. And then probe and say, tell me, what do you remember? What stands out? What was most useful to you? Were there specific examples that resonated with you? Were there particular stories that resonated with you? So, Giancarlo, let me do that to you right now. First of all, which course were you in and what, if anything, are you doing differently in your communications opportunities in life and anything you're doing as a result of this course? Because let me be careful here. I'm not looking for a compliment. I love compliments, everyone loves compliments. But what I'm trying to do is dig deeper and see what's working so I do more of it. You may tell me that a specific example I used way at the end of the course or maybe as an answer to someone's question, is what worked for you and resonated more. That's a signal to me that I should use that more in speeches and newer courses and updated courses. So part of being a great communicator is always trying to use every speech, every presentation, every course as a mini focus group to make the next one a little bit better. Always making incremental changes. That's what I try to do. So Jan writes, my communication skills are much better now. I'm very happy to hear that. That's wonderful. That's great music to my ears. But I certainly don't want to feel like I'm putting you on the spot. That's very generic, general and abstract. Can you tell me how you think your communication skills are better? What specifically has happened in your life? Do you find that you're raising more money because you're an entrepreneur? Are you getting more job offers because you're better at your job interview skills? Have you gotten promotions at work? Are your teachers giving you higher grades? And you're in school because of your oral presentations? What specifically, how do you really know your communication skills are better? This is a tricky thing because people, most people, I believe, when they're in face to face contact, want to be nice, want to be friends. Most people, even if they're throwing bombs and really nasty on the Internet, when they don't know you face to face, they. They're really very nice. No one, I won't say no, most people do not like being wildly confrontational and telling people things to make them angry because of that, you got to be careful about feedback on presentations, speeches, talks, because people want to make you feel good. Oh, great presentation, T.J. nice job. Fantastic. Really professional. Sure, I like hearing it, but it doesn't really mean anything unless I hear specific, tangible messages they remember that were relevant to them that somehow had a specific improvement in their life, doesn't really mean anything. So that's why I'm probing. And I certainly don't appreciate Giancarlo for being with us today. Don't want you to feel like you're under attack in any way because here's the thing. If you can't think of a specific area where you've improved in your communication, it's not your fault, it's not your problem. It's my problem. It's my fault because it means I didn't really connect with you in a way that made a substantial impact. So don't feel bad and think about this when you are asking follow up questions with people because people can, and I'm not suggesting g and you're lying or being disingenuous, but if you're giving a presentation at work to 20 colleagues and a couple of them come up to you afterwards, oh, good job today. They could be lying. Just because they're nice people, they want you to feel good and they felt like maybe you were nervous about it, doesn't mean you did a good job. Someone can lie about that. But when you ask them, oh, you say thank you. Tell me specifically, what could I have done or what did I do that had an impact on you? How would you describe what I said to one of our colleagues who wasn't here? They can't lie and make up your actual messages if they didn't hear it and understand it. That's what's really, really valuable feedback. Because if they do get it, then, you know, you really did connect with them, actual communication did take place. Okay, as I mentioned, we're live. I'm showing you warts and all. So I just realized I forgot to plug my portable drive into my mixer. So I'm at. Walk over here. Just one moment. It's not usually a good idea to walk off set, but I'm pulling and I'll show you exactly what I'm doing. The reason you're not hearing me very well now is I have a mic, a shotgun microphone, right? Oh, it's actually in the frame. It should not be in the frame. So when I walked away, I'm walking further away. So what I did is I went and got this SanDisk drive holds 2 terabytes. I'm plugging this into my mixer, which is right next to my computer. And the reason I do that is I can record. Everything we're doing here is being recorded on Streamyard at one level of quality. But with my SanDisk, I can record all the feeds from all three channels in a way. Which reminds me, I've not been using camera one much. It can record me at the highest 4k quality with all three cameras, plus the audio from a separate source so that my editors have a lot more footage to pull from so they can show a side angle. They can show, you know, this angle if they want to make it look more interesting. So that's why I'm doing that. Okay. So GN says, specifically, I feel more confident when I speak in front of people. Your course helped me to communicate better with my teammates. I received a promotion. Now I'm. Now I'm really liking what I hear. It always makes me feel good to think that some part of my advice or teaching actually help someone advance in their career. And now I have to talk with many more people. I feel more confident, and people understand my ideas in a better way. My presentations are more professional and people like them. Okay, Giancarlo, thank you so much. By the way, I realize it might not be convenient. You might be getting ready to go out to dinner, go to bed or something, but if you wanted to come on camera, I'd love to talk to you about it and hear more about your experiences. As it sounds like a lot of good things are happening in your career, that's fantastic. But this is what I'm talking about now. Most people don't do what I just did because I actually probed kind of three or four times it took. And Giancarlo wasn't trying to be evasive. I'm sure he had the absolute best of intentions, but he had to stop and think about it for a minute. I'm telling you, it's worth it. And I certainly hope I didn't annoy you, Giancarlo, with my probing. But the specific probing is quite often what gets gives you accurate information that's meaningful. Someone telling you you did a great job isn't that meaningful. Someone saying you gave me specific confidence. It got me a promotion. Now I get to speak to more people regularly. Is highly, highly specific. That is telling me that at least some of what I'm doing is on track. Now, Jan, can you tell me? Because I do cover a lot of different tips on how to be More confident in my presentation skills, communication skills courses, if you don't mind, if you don't have anywhere to go, I'd love to probe a little bit deeper. What specifically happened in the course that you tried on for size, do you feel had the biggest impact on making you more confident? Because confidence is one of those things where audiences can't really read your mind to know if you're confident. All they can do is make judgments about you based on what they see and what they hear. And some of you have taken my courses, know that I've. I've demonstrated this before by saying things like, I could be the most confident public speaker in the entire world, but if I come out and proceed to give you fantastic advice, doing this the whole time, it doesn't matter that I'm incredibly confident. You would perceive me as being incredibly lacking in confidence. Well, why is that? It's because instead of looking at you, I'm looking down. Instead of moving my hands naturally, I'm holding them awkwardly. Instead of moving in a purposeful way, I was rocking. So because of these three visual things, things I'm doing with my body, it wouldn't really matter how confident I am. Everyone watching me, whether they're in person or online, would perceive me as lacking in confidence. So if you are with us and you have time, Giancarlo, I would be fascinated to know what specifically happened in the course that made you feel more confident. And for that matter, if you want to just turn it into sort of your own tip. If you had one of these employees who now report to you that you manage, say, look, I'm lacking confidence when I speak, what is the number one tip you give to others? Because part of what I believe any instructor trainer should really aspire to do is to create an army of people. Not mini clones and mini me and vanity stuff. But you want. You want to empower people to help other people with some of the same principles and to help other people become successful, too. So your message grows and goes beyond what just you do. So that's certainly what I'm hoping for. So, gn, I am curious as to any advice you would give a younger version of you who didn't get to go through my course on how to be more confident when speaking. The other thing I'd like to point out is what Giancarlo mentions. Took a public speaking course, got a promotion, now has to manage more people. Part of managing more people is speaking to more people and more speaking opportunities in general, getting good feedback. So presumably we're on an upward trajectory in our career. That, in a nutshell, is exactly why we're all here. That's, frankly, the main reason to want to be a better communicator. Now, you might not have a traditional corporate career. You might. Sorry about that. If you're still with us, we had a power outage here in Florida and. And so everything powered down. My lights, cameras, everything. We will be back at 10:45am sorry about the technical difficulties. Took a while for the Internet to come back.