TJ Walker says you can become an excellent public speaker in about 16 focused hours. His method combines homework with an intensive in-person session where you're video-recorded and critiqued repeatedly to build muscle memory. He emphasizes narrowing your points, using stories instead of data-dumps, and practicing on video until you get it right.
Chapters
So how long exactly does it take to become a great public speaker? I'm often asked by people, how long does it really take to go from a bad public speaker, average public speaker, to be an excellent one or even a great one. And people are asking this because they're kind of looking for an excuse to not start. There's this sense of, oh gosh, I'd have to spend five hours a week for the next six months. And who has that much time? Or I've got to go to school for a year, I got to go to Toastmasters once a week for the next five years. It doesn't require. It's not that difficult, ladies and gentlemen, if you had to pin me down precisely, I would tell you 16 hours. That's how long it takes most of my clients, sorry to sound self serving, but it is a legitimate question. People have and they come to me. And so the typical way I work with someone, I'd give them about eight hours of homework, a couple of my books to read, an online course to go through a homework assignment, practicing a speech, and then they get in a room with me in a training facility, their location or mine, and they speak. I video record it, we play it back, we critique it, we figure out what do we like, what do we not like. And we do this not once or twice or three times, but 10 times in a day. By the end of the day, the person is pointing to the screen saying, wow, tj if I can be half as good as that guy, half as good as that woman, I'll be the star of my industry. And they're pointing to a video of themselves. That's when you know someone really learned something. It's not an intellectual thing. It is a part of their muscle memory. So it doesn't take that long. Think of it this way. I know some of you are golfers, some of you are ice skaters. Imagine if you had to compete competitively for golf or ice skating, but your only competition was people who had never golfed or never ice skated. Now I'm a horrible golfer, I shoot 180. But if I'm playing against someone who's never been on a golf course, never had a single day of a lesson, doesn't even know what end of the club to hold, I'm going to win. It's that way with public speaking too. Because most people in the world have never had any public speaking instruction. Most people are awful because they do these horrible, boring data dumps. So with only a little of instruction, with only a few basic concepts, anyone can be better than about 99% of the competition. It all comes down to Narrow your points down to a handful of have a story example case study for each one, don't do a boring data dump and practice on video until you like it. You do those things and you can do it in even less than 16 hours.
