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

Why are the property brothers, Jonathan and Drew Scott so successful?

Speaking the show about effective speaking in public, to the media, at work and in life. Speaking with TJ Walker.

Now, if you still watch any traditional cable TV and are flipping around almost any time of day or night, you have stumbled across either HGTV or some of the home improvement channels. You've seen these two guys, they are identical twins, Jonathan and Drew Scott. Very, very good looking and have the perfect head of hair, the whole bit, six, five, muscular. And they are seemingly everywhere. They are on every channel, they're on the Today show, they are on other people's podcast. By all accounts, wildly successful, huge presence, making tons of money. Why are they so successful? Many people, I believe, just assume, well, these guys are good looking and it's kind of a shtick to be twins. And you know, they got lucky in the right place at the wrong time. At the right time, wrong. Now, there may be some. Everybody who is successful has had some luck in their life, but it goes much deeper than that. And that's why I think it's important to really analyze their career and how they have perfectly positioned themselves as communicators, as star communicators. Because when you own your own TV show and you're on every kind of network, you are first and foremost a communicator. So I did a little digging for you into their background and watched them talk on podcast about their career and what they've done. And when you look at their background, they have almost the perfect background to be star communicators and to be TV stars. And by that I don't mean they were just genetically blessed with good looks and are extroverted and like to be in the limelight. No. Although that certainly doesn't help. But you know what, let's just, let's deal with the looks issue right now. Yeah, those guys are easy on the eyes, more so than most people you see on tv. But Emeril, Julia Child, Al Roker, are these really the best looking people? They're all wildly successful people. So all things being equal, the looks are one part of it. But most really wildly successful people on TV are not especially good looking. They have other talents. But I want to talk specifically about these Property brothers because there are many things they did to prepare themselves for communication success, for TV success that have nothing to do with their looks, that are relevant to all of us. For starters, at a young age they learned acting. They acted in every kind of production they could. They took acting lessons, they went into stand up Comedy, which is the absolute hardest type of presentation you could ever give. With most business presentations, most talks, the audience is rooting for you. As long as you don't bore them to death, they're happy with you. With stand up comedy, many audiences take the attitude of, if you don't make me laugh every 10 seconds, I'll be angry at you and boo you. That's a hard, hard audience. In fact, that's probably the one big form of speaking I have failed at. I've taken a public, or, excuse me, a stand up comedy class before. I never got to the point where I thought it was even mildly credible of even doing an open mic. So I have tremendous respect for anyone who is a stand up comedian and for people like the Scott brothers, the Property Brothers, those who've done time with stand up comedy, even if they didn't become wildly successful. So that's in many ways the hardest type of public speaking. Speaking on a podcast or a TV show was easy compared to speaking to a bunch of drunk college kids Saturday night at a comedy club. The other thing the Property Brothers did, one of them became a magician and illusionist. So he learned a tremendous amount about how to communicate visually. Well, television is a visual medium. When you're showing a house being torn down, a cabinet being pulled apart, new marble going on to account, it's inherently visual. And I have to believe that background as an illusionist was extremely helpful to him in what he does every single day now. Because beyond that, the Property Brothers did something that I think was really smart, is they really, really went deep into an area of expertise. They went deep into the niche of real estate. They didn't just go to acting classes and say, oh, I want to be rich and famous, I want to have my own show. A lot of people try that. And for the most part, they're all miserable failures. They had a plan B. Their plan A, according to their biographies, is they wanted to be professional actors. Plan B is, let's not be the starving artist to starving actor. Be rich real estate magnets. If the whole acting thing doesn't work out. So they really took the time. They became licensed while in college, when they were 18, they rehabbed a house, sold it, made $50,000. So they really, really went deep, learning every aspect of how to put together a home, how to refurbish, how to sell home, how to make money, real estate. So that's what I see is so smart of what they did. They went really deep into a subject matter. People care about homes, and they did all the other things to help them get better and better at communication, even when it didn't seem directly relevant. How is being an illusionist, how is being a stand up comedy guy really relevant to having my own show on HGTV? It doesn't seem 100% relevant at first blush and it's actually incredibly relevant now. The other thing, According to one of their recent reviews at Apple, one of the Property brothers talks about how he still performs an act in Las Vegas once a year. He still does and I forgot now, forgive me if it's comedy or magic. Either way, what I respect about that is it's taking him out of his genre of I'm the Property Guy and putting him back into something that's a little bit out of his field of expertise, of what he's known for, something that's pure entertainment in many ways considered a higher level skill. And he's still doing it, not afraid to fail. You learn from those experiences. So I have tremendous respect for the Property brother. I'm not a Mr. Homer. I've had to learn a lot more about home repair in the last two years since I've owned a home and a 50 year old home at point that I don't know if they really know everything or they're the greatest practitioners of home repair. But I can tell you, as communicators, as professional communicators, as people who've poised themselves for success and prepped themselves for success, they are excellent, excellent role models. Let's look at some more examples of what they do right.

Body language.

Speaking and folks, we're doing this live. I just actually hit a wrong button. I'm not going back to edit it because that's my promise to you. If I were giving a speech to you, I couldn't go back and edit it. You can't go back and edit it. This is the first week of the show, so we are occasionally going to have glitches. But full disclosure, there's no big staff, there's no big technical team here. Even a show like Gary Vaynerchuk's AskGaryVee, a simple web based show, in some ways, this show is modeled after. He's got a team of five people and there's post production, there's editing. This show is just me. I'm in an empty room here and when you see things going back and forth, it's just me. Let me see if I can hold it up. I'm just holding a mouse and I'm clicking on and off the various whether It's a live feed on me or the pre produced video segments. So I'm going to try not to make blunders like that very often. But I also want to show you it can be done because I'm not really a huge techy guy, but I'm doing something that I just told you. It's a good thing the Property Brothers do. I'm outside of my comfort zone. I'm not a great techie, but I also don't want to spend $100,000 a year plus hiring a whole production crew in order to communicate with you when it's really just a bunch of pointing and clicking. Now back to where we were with the body language. What the Property Brothers realize is you can't just be standing there telling people how to rebuild their house. You have to show all of it. That moment where they take the sledgehammer and start beating it. Put the goggles on. Are people really learning that much about it? I don't know. But it's great movement. The more you move your body when you are speaking in general, the better. Now I'm doing a show about public speaking and I have one camera. But even in this limitation, I chose to do this standing so I can move a little more, I can lean in more, I can gesture. For those of you listening on the podcast, my hands are moving a little now. And even those of you who just listened to this on the podcast, and I'm glad you're here, the fact that I'm standing allows me to breathe more fully and to be even more expressive. I'm not saying you have to do that for your podcast, but I do want you to think about every aspect of what your body's doing, how you're communicating with your body. Now, the Property Brothers have also commented on the fact that their fans, their female fans, and I guess others too, like the fact that they are wearing tight jeans and they're well built guys and they're youngish size, certainly compared to me, they're under, they're under 40. So they are young and vigorous looking and by most people's standards, very good looking. So they have that going as a part of their body language. Just looking good, dressing in a way that seems appropriate. One guy who is the business guy shows up with a tie and the other guy with a sledgehammer is in the jeans and work shirt. So it's a nice contrast. So they do a great, great job of maximizing how they communicate not just with their words, but with their body language as well. Okay. Folks, let's take a moment out for this.

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Okay, so I also want to take your questions. A frequent question I get from people I work with at workshops, seminars and during speeches is, should I give up my day job? I just want a show. I'm tired, bored of my job. I want to be a talk show host. I hear this all the time from people who work on Wall Street. They are perhaps highly compensated, but they're bored out of their mind. I say, tj, I'd rather just quit my job, take a big pay cut and have my own talk show on cnbc. Newsflash, CNBC isn't hiring. If they did hire, they're not going to hire you. They're going to hire someone like Jim Cramer who's already really famous, already has a huge, huge fan base and can bring that audience to them. TV networks are not in the business of developing new talent anymore. They're in the business of capturing audiences that someone else has already built. So my advice to you is no, don't quit your day job. If you really want your own show, do what I'm doing. Just start doing your own show and talk about what it is that you know. Do that and build a following, build your skills, build your on camera presence. If you're doing an audio show, build your ability to communicate on microphone, your oral presence. That is far and away the best way to go about it. It's not just quitting your job, typing up your resume, sending it to a few networks, getting a few interviews, and then going to the post office one day, opening up a letter and Roger Ailes says, wow, you look great. Why don't you come on down and host a show for it Just doesn't work like that at all. Folks.

A question for you.

So now it's time for my question for you. Who do you like? Who do you respect as a communicator on hgtv other than the Property Brothers or any of the various home improvement networks or programs? Who do you think is a good communicator? Part of being a good communicator, in my view, is constantly looking at other speakers, presenters, talk show hosts, communicators, and sort of stripping away for a moment their substance and looking at the style of how they communicate. You know, you talk to any great novelist, chances are they read a tremendous number of other novelists works. They're always looking for ideas not to mimic, not to copy. But they want influences, they want to learn, they want to figure out what works, what doesn't work. You could talk to a novelist and they may absolutely hate Stephen King in general, but they might love a particular character in one of his books and they might actually read all of his books to get ideas on whether it's pacing or how to engage readers more thoroughly. So that's my advice to you, is constantly be on the lookout for good communication. So my question to you right now is, who do you admire? Who do you respect as an on air talent for HGTV or any of the other home improvement TV networks? I'd like to hear from you. So post your comments. Send it to me at Twitter jwalker or post it on the Facebook page or the YouTube page or Vimeo or wherever you're watching this program. I'd like to hear from you. And also, don't forget, I want to hear your questions about any aspect of public speaking. You don't have to pay me, folks. My clients have to pay me tremendous amount of money to spend a day with me and to ask me questions. You're getting to do it here at no charge. I can't guarantee you I'll answer the question the same day, but at some point if you ask a question and it's not one I've dealt with a bunch of times and it's not off topic, I will answer your questions right here. So send me your questions. You can post it on Twitter TJ Walker. You can also send an email infoediatrainingworldwide.com and I will answer your questions in a future show right here. Thanks so much for tuning in. Again, whether you're watching this or listening to it, we're coming to you on itunes on audio and video channels, plus video channels, YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook and a number of other platforms. I'm TJ Walker. I hope all of your presentations in life are a huge success.

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