TJ Walker recounts an anecdote from the second day of an Anthony Robbins seminar, observing attendees who smoke and remain overweight despite attending workshops. He uses this to argue that no speaker influences everyone, and advises speakers to focus on being engaging—because some audience members respond more to entertainment and delivery than intellectual content.
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I was running late. I was about to dash into the huge auditorium in the Meadowlands in New Jersey. This was the second day of a three day Anthony Robbins workshop seminar. And I noticed there are all these people outside smoking, all of them. And I hope this doesn't sound like I'm being mean or catty or biased. All of them profoundly overweight, all of them chain smoking. And somehow I found myself talking, even though I was late. I talked to a few of them and they all said the same thing. They said, oh, Tony Robbins is great. We love his stuff, we go to all his seminars, we travel all around the country going to all of his workshops. And I think, I didn't say anything, but I'm thinking, well, it doesn't seem to be working because he spends a lot of time telling people how to use NLP to stop smoking, get to the proper weight, be successful. It sure seemed like it wasn't working at all. What's the point here? It's not to bash Anthony Robbins. I think he's very good at what he does. I don't love every aspect of it. It's a little too touchy feely for me. You know, turn around and give people you don't know massages. But still, he reaches a lot of people, has a huge fan base, he's truly a great public speaker. But the point is, nothing works on everyone. There have been people who've come to my public speaking workshops. I think I'm the greatest public speaking coach and media training coach in the world. But sometimes someone will come two months later, they give a speech and it's awful and it's boring and they didn't improve at all. So one message here is, you have to realize nobody's 100%, nobody is going to completely influence and transform every audience they speak to or every audience member. The other big message here to remember is some people who hear you speak are going to focus on the entertainment value for this group of people. I think, again, I could be wrong. I think they just enjoyed the show of Anthony Robbins. He is entertaining, he is interesting. There is funny, there is drama, there is emotion. Now, I'm not asking you to be Anthony Robbins when you're giving the quarterly finance report in front of your board of directors. But I do want you to think at least about how can you be as engaging as possible because some people are not going to absorb the intellectual part, but will take away a positive sense of how you engage them.
