TJ Walker says the fastest way to improve your presentation skills is to be the media: create and distribute your own audio and video instead of just practicing privately. He records daily in a small closet with basic equipment and reviews his own recordings to catch what needs fixing.
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Do you want to get better and better and better at your media skills, your presentation skills in front of a camera? I have the perfect solution for you. The best way to get better at the media is to be the media. So it's not about practice, practice, practice in front of a mirror. It's about actually doing. It's not 1972, folks. There are more than three TV stations and three TV networks. If you want to get good at the media, simply be the media. Do what I'm doing now. No one invited me here. No network executive says, get TJ Walker into the studio right away. I just built this. I created this video. For those of you watching on video audio, I'm in a relatively small closet, and I've purchased the equipment. I'm making this myself, and I'm distributing it through YouTube, iTunes, and a number of other online places. So people say, tj, how did you get so confident? Just by doing it and watching it and listening to it daily. Now you don't have to create videos every single day, although if you do, you'll get very confident and you'll get good quickly. It's virtually impossible to be nervous about something you do every single day. If you're an uncle or an aunt and you're only around small children once every five years, you're probably nervous holding your child. Now that I have a child, I'm not nervous holding a child because I hold a child every single day. It's like anything else in life. People who do things daily get comfortable with it. If you play tennis every day, if you do yoga every single day, you're probably not that nervous about doing either activity. If you do it once a year, then it probably will create some anxiety. Oh, I wonder if I still know how to do it, will people laugh at me? It's exactly the same thing with doing media interviews. So my biggest piece of advice is if you're going to be interviewed by the traditional news media or new media where reporters asking you questions, grilling you, don't wait. Ask yourself those questions and answer them on video in audio. Do your own audio podcast, a video podcast, a YouTube video. Put your ideas out there regularly. Watch them. If you don't watch every one, and I'll confess, I don't watch every single video. I do at least watch parts of them, a couple seconds of them. That way you know exactly what you're doing, how you're coming across what you like, and you'll know that you're coming across your very best.
