TJ WALKER - THE HABIT INFLUENCER - Personal Development | LIVE STREAM

29 Jan 2018 · 3 min

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2:48

A short excerpt from a TJ Walker livestream where he gives a public-speaking tip: avoid overusing production values (special effects, fancy slides, music) because they distract audiences and invite unfair comparisons to Hollywood production. He advises prioritizing clear explanation and connection over visual bells-and-whistles, then ends with a brief promotional call-to-action to mediatrainingworldwide.com.

Chapters

Public speaking tip of the day. Don't junk up your speech with production values. I see this mistake again and again at conventions, conferences. Someone stands up, they are fiddling around with their PowerPoint for an extra 10 minutes because things weren't just right. It gets ready to go, and you see splashes and special effects and zooms and dissolves. And maybe it's not as boring as just a few bullet points, but the audience is kind of looking, huh, huh, huh, huh. And when I ask people sitting next to me two minutes after the speech finished, hey, what do you remember from that speech? The answer is always the same. Not much. Here's the big problem with production values. It's never been easier to create fancy video productions and PowerPoint slide productions and have special effects come in and music and dissolve and have all the tools that Steven Spielberg had for years. That part's easy. The hard part is still competing with Steven Spielberg's of the World. If you're directing people's focus to special effects, to production values, at a subconscious level, they're comparing you to the Hollywood blockbuster they saw at the mall last weekend. I don't know about you, but that's not a competition I want to fight in. I'm not going to win that competition, especially if you spend all your time on that and you haven't actually figured out how to say something interesting. When you're speaking, people are listening to you and watching you. Ideally, it's your chance to really connect with them, paint a picture with words and leave them with something truly memorable and insightful. I'm not opposed to nice, fancy production values, but that should be an afterthought. Your primary focus should be, can you explain something? Can you talk to someone and get them to really understand your idea and your passion for it and why it's important. If you do that now, you're not competing with Steven Spielberg. You're competing with the boring data dump speaker before you and the boring data dump speaker after you. That's a battle you can win every time. I'm TJ Walker. I teach people how to speak more effectively. If you'd like to improve your own presentation skills, please go to mediatrainingworldwide.com and download a couple of my books at absolutely no charge. And check out our our live online courses.