TJ Walker tells the story of a woman who went from nervous media trainee to successful TV pundit through persistence and professional training. He shares how deliberate practice and coaching transformed her career in broadcasting.
Chapters
I was in midtown Manhattan in my TV training studio, my presentation skills training studio, right across from Bryant park one day and had a group of people at one of my public workshops. One of them was a woman who'd been a political operative. She had some low level positions in campaigns in the Clinton administration, wanted to become a pundit, came to the media training course, put the camera on her, asked her a few questions. She started Talking for about 10 seconds, all of a sudden stopped, looked down, stepped back. Ugh, I can't do this. Practically in tears. She just seemed overwhelmed. And I had a little bitty camera and there were only a few people in the room. She was nervous, she was uncomfortable and was frankly not very good at it. But I encouraged her. Come on, let's do it one more time, let's do it again. We kept on doing it again and again. She even came back for follow up training. And before you know it, occasionally she was a guest commentator on the cnn, msnbc, the Fox News channels of the world, the major TV news networks in the United States, States based in New York City. She occasionally would get on and then she got better, she got more comfortable, she got on even more often and then more often. And then one of the major news networks, in fact the top rated news network, hired her as a professional analyst. So every single time she went on the air, she was paid. And after a while she was actually hosting in prime time, substitute hosting for some of the biggest names in the business. And she was on that network for a decade. She's since moved on to other major networks and continues to have column books, the whole bit. She is a major, major pundit and it's simply because she decided she wanted to. No one initially anointed her. No one says, oh, we want to hire you as a TV network, here's a bunch of money, go get trained. She decided herself that she didn't want to just be behind the scenes, work in the back rooms, be the behind the scenes operator. She wanted to have a voice on national affairs. She wanted to speak out and she took action. And it didn't matter that she wasn't very good at the beginning. She just, she kept at it and at it, Got professional training from me, others critique, learned as she went and worked her way up the media food chain. She did it. You could too. So why do I tell that story again? There's this sense so many people have that when you see someone on tv, some famous pundit, some famous talking head, that they're just naturally fantastic. They've been that way their whole life. They were the coolest kid in middle school. And always articulate. No, this is something people can learn at virtually any age, so that's why I tell that story.
