TJ Walker explains how to communicate so people actually listen. Start with what matters to your audience, not your credentials. Hook them first, deliver value, then talk about yourself. Attention is scarce, so make every word count in speeches, pitches, dates, and emails.
Chapters
Are you communicating something interesting to your audience? Whether it's a colleague, a customer, a client, an audience member in a speech, a friend, a date. Are you saying something interesting? Now, nobody likes to think of themselves as a bore, but how many speeches, presentations have you seen? Have I seen where someone stands up and proceeds to tell you about their background, their company, their credentials, and your response is, Let me check my email. We hate it when other people do it, but yet we do it ourselves too. I've been guilty of it. Here's a general rule of thumb, and forgive me if this sounds harsh, but here it is. Nobody cares about you. Now, I don't mean to say it's a harsh, cruel world and you don't have family and friends. Of course you do. But what I do mean is, most people in business, customers, clients, prospects, people you're dealing with, they're thinking a lot more about themselves than you. So if you have a chance to communicate, whether it's a conversation, a pitch, a presentation, a speech, a talk, your job is always going to be to think, am I saying something interesting to this person? Now, not what's important to me, but what is going to be interesting and important and relevant to them. And then ideally, you can bridge that together, blend that in with stuff that is important to you. Because here's the thing, if you talk to people, if you communicate with people enough about stuff that interests them, they become interested in you. They'll want to find out more about you. Many speeches and presentations, I see. Whether it is a business speech, a personal development guru, whatever it is, the speeches have fine elements, but the order is all messed up. The person feels obligated to start off with, well, I'm happy to be here today. Thank you for having me here when I was preparing my speech, blah, blah, blah. It's boring. It's me, me, me, me, me. Again, nobody cares about you. They care about themselves. So that's why it's critically important that the first thing you say is interesting to your audience, but it needs to continue along that path. You can't just say something interesting, a funny joke at the beginning, and then bore people with details about yourself. You have to make them want to care about you. You have to make them see the relevance in learning more about you. I know plenty of people have told me they've been out on dates and their date just couldn't stop talking about himself herself. Typically himself. And it was me, me, me, me. Let me tell you how great I am. Now, the person might have been great, but they were so boring because all they did was talk about me, me, me, me, me. The same can be true of a business presentation, a new business pitch, a sales presentation, a speech at a conference. In your industry, if you're talking to people just about yourself, you're going to bore them. And these days, everyone has a perfect solution for boredom. Let me check Instagram or Facebook or Twitter. What's driving this? So much of it is insecurity. I have clients come to me all the time and say, well, tj, you know, I know what you're saying. I need to be interesting throughout the speech and right at the beginning, But I need to establish my credibility. So I have to tell them where I went to college and where I got my master's degree, where I did my postdoctorate. No, you don't. You have to be interesting. You have to give people ideas, information that's interesting to them, useful to them, and memorable to them. If you do that now, you've got their attention. You've heard the expression, we live in the attention economy. Well, everyone else is fighting for their attention. And you may think they're sitting right there in front of you, the second row, the third row. But Mark Zuckerberg is fighting for their attention, too. He's. He's crying for them, saying, please, please pick up your phone. There's notifications from all your friends about cool stuff going on on Facebook. Please open it up and look at it. And by the way, you can look at my ads, which is going to make me worth more and more billions of dollars. So Mark Zuckerberg is going after the attention of anyone you ever speak to, any client, customer, colleague, prospect, date. It's not just Mark Zuckerberg. It's everyone in the world, certainly everyone in the online world. Everyone is going for everyone's attention. Now, I actually don't believe the research that says human beings now have an attention span less than a goldfish of three seconds or whatever. If you're interesting, people will listen to you for hours. If you're boring, three seconds is too long. If people even sense that you're just going to get up and give them your marketing boilerplate that someone was paid to do a focus group on two years ago, and now it's in your marketing document. So it's part of our brand. So we always say it, and that's how we start our presentations. And here's where our logo is. Guess what? People are going to ignore you. They're going to zoom out, zone out instantly. So part of my Challenge for you is to think about how can you consistently be interesting in any form of communication, social, political, business, and put yourself in the shoes of the other person or the other people. This takes some confidence. Again, the insecure person says, what about me? I feel naked up here. If I don't show all the bullet points of my credentials and if I don't tell them how many years experience I have, you gotta get over it. The number one way to build credibility with any audience in the world is this. Be interesting. I'm firmly in the belief that audiences care about that more than anything else. More about whether you agree with them or about your race, color, creed, gender, ethnicity, any of that stuff. And I'm not saying that's not important to some people, but what they care about most. Is this guy going to bore me? Is this woman going to. Is this person going to bore me? Am I going to hear something interesting? This is what goes on anytime someone hears another person speak. Doesn't matter if it's a job interview, a new business pitch, convention speech, at a political conference with 10 million other people in the room. This is the mentality. I have it, you have it. So you've got to recognize that every single time you have an opportunity to communicate, yes, every time you speak, but also email, for that matter, talk about their concern, I like to do it right in the subject line, telling the person exactly what the purpose is about them, the benefit to them, and not just, this is an important message from TJ because ultimately nobody really cares about TJ or you or anyone else. They care about themselves. That's okay. But ultimately they will care about you when you're interesting. I'm T.J. walker. See there? I plug myself in my name. I didn't say that at the beginning. I didn't start this off by, welcome to my YouTube channel. I'm TJ Walker. I didn't do any of that. I went right into content of interest to you. Now and only now do I say, I'm TJ Walker. Thanks for joining me. If you're watching this on YouTube, please hit subscribe. If you're watching this on Facebook, please hit like and join the page that this is on. Now's the time to promote after you've already given value.
