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

So how do you get a standing ovation?

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

For many speakers, aspiring speakers, motivational speakers, want to be motivational speakers. The question comes to me, Tasia, how do I get a standing ovation? And I have some mixed feelings about this question. Certainly if you're a speaker who doesn't love it when your audience stands, cheer. What performer, what actor on Broadway doesn't like a standing ovation? So I understand the desire for that and I have gotten them, although not every time. Here's the fundamental problem I have with going after a standing ovation. It's that it's about me, me, me, me, me, tell me I'm great. It's the speaker saying, I want you to tell me how wonderful I am, how great I am. If you go into a presentation with the idea that your top goal is having people love you and affirm you, I don't think you're really in this for the right reason. Sorry to sound all mystical and spiritual. Your heart isn't in the right place. Your goal, I believe, as a speaker, as a presenter, should be first and foremost, how can you educate and give new information to this audience in a way that is understandable and memorable so they can take action on or it can mean something to them. That should be your goal. Not about getting praise. Again, I'm talking about primarily business speakers, people in civic life, government life, professional life, acting, Broadway. That's a different issue. Musician, different issue. So here's the problem. I have been to countless speeches where I saw the speaker get a standing ovation. And I didn't think their speech was particularly good. I thought it was trite, cliched, kind of the same old stories that amounted to, aren't puppies cute? Shouldn't we love our puppies and neighbors? And for some reason, it ignited a few people in the room to stand. And then the people next to them saw them standing, well, I better stand. And then slowly it trickles to the back of the room. And then people are kind of like, well, everyone else is standing. I kind of feel manipulated. But you know what? It's an excuse to stand up and stretch. So, okay, I'll stand and give a half hearted applause. I've seen that. And not to cast any stones on anywhere as a general class, but Toastmasters conventions, I will say I've been to Toastmasters Conventions and seen speakers that I thought while technically had good chops, their content was trickly boring, cliche, and yet everyone gave them a standing ovation. There are certain organizations where it's just a culture where unless you're awful, you get a standing ovation. Certainly, if you're a great speaker and you really shared personal information in a way that's helpful to people, you dramatically increase your chances of getting a standing ovation. If you're the CFO and you're simply going over CL quarterly results and giving numbers in a professional, calm way, you shouldn't expect a standing ovation unless your sales records have gone up a billion percent. Well, then maybe investors would give you a standing ovation, but they'd probably give that to the CEO. So to sum up, I fundamentally believe it's certainly good to have high standards for yourself as a speaker. It's good to have high goals. But your focus, first and foremost, is to give new information, new insights, new ideas in a memorable way, to really help people focus on that, to do it in as interesting a way as possible, to use as many interesting stories as possible. If you do that, the standing ovations will come. But my other big challenge to you is don't let that be the standard of how you judge your speaking career, your presentation career. I can tell you personally what warms my heart the most. What makes me happiest is quite often I'll get an email or a call from someone I spent a day with training. So I did speak to them a part of that day of training. There was elements where it was me giving a speech and I didn't get any standing ovation from them. But here I am getting an email 10 years later, 15 years later, sometimes 20 years later, where they are referencing particular tools I gave them where they just aced an interview or they gave a fantastic speech because of very specific techniques I gave them that help them, that they are still using. So they obviously understood it at the time. They remembered it short term, but they're actually remembering it 10, 15, 20 years later. That's what to me is a lot more meaningful than a standing ovation. Because a lot of standing ovations are just kind of sugar highs. Someone talking about, I had this horrible experience and I was so down and out and I fought back. And since I did it, you can too, because your life isn't as messed up as mine was. I mean, that's kind of. Frankly, the easiest way to get a standing ovation is the traditional motivational speech where you talk about some massive hurdle you had to overcome in your life. But that simply doesn't work for most speeches. Most presentations most of the time. So that's my advice. Focus first and foremost on helping your audience, and then the ovations will come.

To hire TJ Walker as a keynote speaker or workshop leader for your next conference, call 212-764-4955.

Folks, I haven't done this next segment in a while, and I try not to be a negative person or seem like a negative person because as a basic presentation style that can turn people off. But every so often, I can't hold back.

Bad advice.

So this is a bad advice segment. And again, we don't do this that often. Although I did earlier this week take to task Amy Cuddy, her speech and book about the whole superwoman pose, which I think is phenomenally horrible, misdirected advice. But that's not the subject of today. Subject of Today comes from Lifehacker.com which is a website that I subscribe to in my RSS feed. And it's a story entitled what yout should and Shouldn't do with youh Hands during an Interview. Now, this story, they they copied from Business Insider, which is a site that I used to read every day. But for every good article there, I found there's about 10,000 that are just listicles and garbage. But on this video, they purport to show research from John B. Molitor, Ph.D. and Barbara Baris on interviewing techniques. Here's one tip that was pulled out in the Lifehacker article. Show your palms. Revealing your palms evokes truth, honesty, and allegiance. If you're in a job interview, I think that's perfectly fine advice. I don't have a problem with that. Now here's the part that really jumps out at me. The next tip from this Life Hacker article. And that's where I saw it. I didn't see the original text. It says to steeple your fingers, quote, touching the tips of your fingers together like a politician or Mr. Burns on the Simpsons Shows confidence. Folks, I think that is phenomenally awful advice. Mr. Burns, let's not forget, is seen as an evil villain. So when he's doing this, and forgive me for those of you listening on the audio podcast, I am steepling my fingers. I'm touching all of my fingers together, splaying them, holding them upward. And this is what Mr. Burns does, in part because it's a symbol that he is a pompous, evil person. Why in a job interview or any sort of meeting, would you want to evoke the images of a cartoon character who's known for being pompous and evil. Now in this very same article it says put your fingertips together again like a politician or Mr. Burr, what do most people think of when you say politician? That's not a term most people use in a positive way. We think of somebody who lies. We think of somebody who isn't listening to us, but instead is thinking about how they can give their next little mini campaign speech and give us some canned argument. So to me, the refutation of this principle is right there in the text itself. It's saying do this thing as a good thing. And then its two examples are things everyone would argue. People, you don't want to seem like. You don't want to seem like a politician. If you're in a job interview, you certainly don't want to seem like Mr. Burns. And a job who would hire Mr. Burns again? He's already the CEO and owner of the company, the nuclear power plant in the Simpsons. No one's going to hire him. So folks, you've constantly got to be on guard for bad advice because there is bad advice everywhere when it comes to how to speak more effectively in job interviews, presentations, business meetings. Folks, I hate to sound like an anti intellectual because I'm not. And I'm not anti research and I'm certainly not anti academic. But some fields are better than others. I think research on brain surgery and physics, a lot of the sciences are done with great empirical diligence and relevance. My problem with so much of so called research in the academic arena is that they'll pick apart things that either aren't relevant or so easily distorted and they never really ask the most important question, which is, okay, you want to prepare for a job interview. How do you actually say things and come across in a way that's going to make the person remember what's special about you and how you're going to give value to that company so so that they want to hire you. That's really the goal. And I would be shocked. And full disclosure, I have not read all the research behind this, but again, I'm researching this every day in the field and I can tell you audiences perceive someone who steeples their fingers as uncomfortable and nervous and trying to be pompous because relaxed people do not steeple their hand. If you walk in Monday morning and you see a friend, you want to talk about the big game from last night, your friend at the office or down at the park, wherever you hang out at the coffee shop, they're not going to start off with, well, I really like the way the offense was they're not going to start off with their hands together, fingertips touching steeple. That is simply not how people speak when they are relaxed, comfortable and being conversational. It's also not how people listen. So I derive my research, my conclusions, based on research of how people actually talk in the real world when they're comfortable and confident. And I videotape people when they're giving presentations, but also when they're not aware of it and they're just speaking a training situation. So I can tell you, my own research shows that relaxed people just don't speak this way. So beware of academic research in the field of public speaking, because I routinely see bad research, whether it's saying you need to hold eye contact for 4.2 seconds or that body language is so much more important than what you say. And that's actually a distortion of some good research and in this case, that you need to steeple your hands together. Here's the best research that I can share with you based on doing this and those of you who are regular listeners, you can get tired of me saying this, yet most people still don't do it. You want to come across really well for a job interview, a speech, a presentation. Just practice what you want to say on video, look at it, figure out what you like, figure out what you don't like. Keep doing it until you love what you see. That, my friends, is what you really need to know and what the research shows of people who are doing this full time, actually helping people. I'm TJ Walker. As always, may your presentations in life be a huge success.

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