TJ Walker argues that audiences don't care how confident you feel inside, only whether you deliver interesting and useful ideas. Focusing on confidence while neglecting content and clarity, like reading bullet points, wastes everyone's time. Skill matters more than feeling sure of yourself.
Chapters
I hope this doesn't hurt your feelings, but I've got to put something on the table. Nobody cares if you are a confident speaker. Why do I say that? I often have clients come to me and they want to talk exclusively about their confidence. I want to build my confidence. I want to build confidence. I'm confident here, I want to get more confident there. Sure, I love them to be confident. But you've got to realize no one in your audience cares if you are confident. What they care about is, do you have ideas that are interesting to them, relevant to them, memorable and useful. If you do that, they will love you. If you do that, they are going to think you're a great speaker. If you do those things, they're going to think you're a confident speaker. Now, this is important because if you spend all your time focused on building your own confidence, it's entirely possible that you don't accomplish any of those other goals of actually being interesting and memorable and understandable and actionable for your audience. If all you're worried about is confidence, well, you might be more confident if your entire outline is in bullet points on your slide and you're reading it. But if you put everyone to sleep and they're thinking, well, he's just reading, I could have gotten that if he'd emailed me a deck and they start checking their email, what does it matter if you're confident? So, sure, I'd love you to be confident. But just realize that's only the first step in this process. If you're learning how to write in first grade with a pencil, you want to be confident knowing if they still use pencils. I don't even know. You want to be confident knowing you can hold a pencil correctly, but if you can't write the letter A or B or C, just being confident holding the pencil doesn't really matter. I'm TJ Walker. I help people speak effectively. If you would like to be not only more confident, but actually more effective as a speaker, then check out some of our options below. Every single month, I have LIVE workshops in New York City. Live online demand courses where you can learn from anywhere in the world, plus private workshops, one on one, and group workshops that can come to you. Give me a call.
