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

What would you think of a celebrity or a politician who spoke exactly the same way each time? Didn't matter if it was a eulogy, a graduation ceremony, a political rally, an acceptance speech on tv. Always the same, always the same amount of time. You probably think that's crazy and yet a lot of us are guilty of that when it comes to how we speak online. The reality is every online platform is a little bit different. Right now I'm speaking to you on YouTube, Facebook or LinkedIn most likely, and they allow a certain time format and length. But just a few minutes ago I was on the platform of TikTok. You only get 15 seconds there. Then I went to Instagram, I had a one minute video presentation live. Then I went over to Twitter. There you get 2 minutes and 20 seconds. Every platform is a little bit different and the most successful communicators tailor a message and a link for each one. You can't push one size fits all. And I understand the desire to do that. I want to do that. I'd like to just shoot one video, be done with it. Unfortunately, that's not the best way to really connect with meaningful audiences in each places. The guy who's probably best at this, Gary Vaynerchuk, if you haven't followed him on social media and you want to know more about Internet video, I would recommend you check him out. I've been guilty of this before, of wanting to make just one video and let's distribute it everywhere. It doesn't work that way. Now one of the things you can do is to get better at this is to just do it live, do it in one take. That takes confidence. You don't have the luxury of telling some assistant, well, edit this out, edit that out, get the script here, get the teleprompter. There's no time for that in the modern social media world if you want to be serious about communicating with people on video. So that's the, the quick win for the day is you've got to be aware of all the different time formats and adjust accordingly. No one cares about what you like, it's about what the audience likes. Now, I don't know much yet about the audience on TikTok or TikTok, I don't even get the name straight. It is a Chinese based counting, very popular with kids social media and you only get 15 second clips. But there are business people like Gary Vaynerchuk on that platform. So I'm giving it a try as well. Today you have got to get to the point where you couldn't care less. Think of it this way. Think back 15 years ago if someone said to you, you have a choice. You can give an hour long speech at a local library and have 20 people there or you can go on the Oprah Winfrey Show. It's an hour long, but she's only going to talk to you for three questions and you're going to get about three minutes on the air. Which would you rather do? I think you'd rather be on Oprah Winfrey, wouldn't you? Back then, at least, the audience was so huge. So remember, it's never just about the total amount of time. It's about the audience and what will have the biggest impact. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks so much for joining me today. Today is not live. I'm trying to do more and more live shows, but I still don't have everything set with my studio. So I apologize because that means I'm not going to be able to take your questions here live today. But if you post your questions about any aspect of personal development or public speaking right here, whether you're watching this on Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, I will answer your questions, I promise. Most likely I'll answer it in the next video I do, which will soon be daily but will at least be next week. Checking over a couple of other things. I wanted to put a spotlight on these segments each time I come to you on a creator of the day. We live in a world where it's never been easier to be a creator, to communicate with people. And someone caught my eye. This is courtesy of the New York Times and I will put the link in the show description. Nolan Eubanks, he's still a teenager. He was just a kid living in the suburbs of Atlanta, sort of goofing around on Vine. Well, these days he has 5 million subscribers. He started a TikTok account. Now he's the new face of Kyra TV. It is a YouTube channel. He's in Hollywood. He's living the dream. He is living a world where he's completely creative, he has an audience, he's able to do fun, entertaining things. He's controlling his brand. And if you have 5 million subscribers, he is presumably making a lot of money. Now, some issue that has come up recently as more and more parents are talking about is it even responsible to let your kid have a YouTube channel be active on social media? I do acknowledge there are some, some cons as far as taking a child away from traditional academics. But look at what this young man has learned. He's learned how to think creatively, how to plan, how to forecast, how to market, how to write, how to do public speaking. I don't care what career he ends up doing. These are all incredibly important skills. Not to mention the fact that he's seemingly making six or possibly seven figures. So whatever business he wants to go to or if he wants to go to college, he'll have all the money he needs for that. So hats off to Noah Eubanks. And I've not seen his show on YouTube yet, but you may want to check it out. He's doing something right. Even if the content might not appeal to my demographic or yours. He is in fact doing something interesting also. Communication issue that struck me as well, something worth contemplating today. Again in the New York Times, major story about the rise of cdb. This is the extract from the cannabis sativa plant. This is legal in most places. It's become wildly popular. And now it's not just oils or something you smoke. Now they're apparently putting and branding cbd toothpicks and apples and napkins and all sorts of things. This is not necessarily regulated by the fda, so people can make all sorts of claims. Here's my communications challenge and I don't know the answer. I toss it out to you. I certainly have friends who enjoy cbd, think it's great, think it's very relaxing. The Times did a story today. Here's what they found. A double blind study found that healthy volunteers administered CBD had little to no change in their emotional reaction to unpleasant images or words compared to the placebo group. If it's a calming drug, it should change their response to stimuli. That's the author of a major study from the University of Chicago. She's basically saying this may smell good, it may be nice. People think that it makes them feel better, but there's no evidence that it does. So here's the communications challenge. If you want to help people, if you want them to get the best information possible for their health, and you talk about double blind studies and no evidence, in my experience, you're instantly written off as some sort of right wing crank, a stooge of the American Medical association, someone who's blind to anything other than Western medicine and out of date because you're just not with it. That's the traditional criticism leveled against anyone who wants to talk about CBD in a negative way or really any alternative medicine that doesn't really pass the double blind test. Now, I happen to think there are a lot of problems with Western medicine, but I Don't think that asking new drugs, new solutions to pass a double blind test is one of them. So that's a challenge I have for you today. Can you think of a more effective way of communicating with the public, with people who care about wellness and care about these issues? Other topic of the day I'd like to talk about. Part of what I try to do here is not just communications issues and public speaking issues these days, although many of you know me from my public speaking training and workshops and online courses. But I'm also about how do you speak to the most important audience in the world, not your investors, not your boss, but yourself. And that's why I've devised this whole methodology known as ssp, the selfie speak programming method. That's where you simply speak to your own cell phone, record a message, and then you listen to it each day to try to give yourself a new habit. So one of the habits I recently tried to build is the habit of not answering my phone. These days you get so many telemarketers, it seems like sometimes a week can go by and not a real phone call comes in. So it's a real challenge in that I don't like to be rude. There's always a chance, oh, it's a good friend I haven't heard from, or it's an important prospect or client calling. But the reality is it wastes time, it creates multitasking. It takes me away from writing or creating a course or being deep in thought in some creative process. So ultimately it's a horrible, horrible, horrible distractor to be answering your phone all day long. So my new goal, and this is a relatively recent habit I've acquired, is to not answer the phone ever, unless it's a prearranged conference call or it is a phone number I recognize and I want to talk to that person at that time. What's happened is it has allowed my, my productivity to go way up. I'm able to get much, much more done in my deep work periods of the day, which are typically from 9am to noon when I'm writing, creating new online courses, creating videos for courses. So this may sound obvious to you, you may have stopped answering your phone years ago, but I was still guilty of trying to be polite, thinking maybe there's something there. So I created a little audio where I just tell myself, tj, you do not answer the phone during the day unless it's a pre arranged conference call or a phone number you referenced. I also then have it written down in a personal development folder just in the memo section of my cell phone. So it's the one, two punch where I hear myself every day in my little audio telling myself I'm not going to answer phones. And then I do a little check where I look in my personal development folder and I just note the date and that I did it. And by doing it only takes a couple seconds each way. It saves me massive amounts of time throughout the day by not having to listen to some spammer or say, take me off your list, it just goes to voicemail. Typically they don't leave one. I hit delete. So it saves massive amounts of time. As I mentioned, starting next week I'm going to be doing longer format shows. These will be seen live on YouTube, on Facebook and about 30 other platforms. So if you have a particular platform you really enjoy and it's not one of the obvious ones of YouTube or Facebook, please let me know. Post your comments right here. We're coming up to the end of this segment and forgive me for one housekeeping matter. Joanne, I'm going to need you to come up and turn off the camera in just a minute. Talking to my director of photography, producer and also my wife Joanne, who's with me here today. The SS question of the day. And that is SS short for self serving. Not just yet. The self serving question of the day is tj, what's new? What's new with you? I'm glad you asked. What's new is my selfie Speak boot camp. If you really want to take up your skill level when it comes to public speaking, then check out selfiespeak. Com. We've got some upcoming webinars there also. You can dive right in. Now, you get a lot of hands on feedback from me directly and it's all done virtually, so it's inexpensive. So please check that out. I'm TJ.