TJ Walker explains why his public speaking advice works: it's simple, and most people fail not because the techniques are wrong but because they don't actually do them. Execution beats complexity.
Chapters
Is being a good public speaker just a matter of common sense? The reason I ask this is someone gave me a review on one of my online presentation training courses. Rick writes in, gave me a favorable review, said a very concise course. He said. You might think that the content delivered by TJ is a no brainer, but it makes a lot of difference when you take action on what he teaches. Now, I have occasionally received criticism for being simplistic. Here's what I gather from that and I always try to listen to all criticism because there can be, even if you don't agree with all of it, there can be a nugget there that's helpful. But quite often when people go to a high priced consultant or trainer, they're expecting all sorts of complexity and magic and wizardry. And so sometimes they are surprised by some of my advice. Because quite often my advice comes down to this. When you're preparing for a presentation and it's this, brainstorm on all the ideas you're trying to communicate. Narrow it down to your top five, throw away the others. Come up with a story that illustrates each one of your message points, where it's a conversation with a real person about a real issue and how it was resolved. Tell the story. If you're using PowerPoint, come up with one single picture, one idea per slide to get your main points across. And when you've done all that, practice on video until you like your speech. Now that's a 40 second version of everything I teach in my life and 10 books and a thousand training videos. Most of it, any issue is solved by that 40 seconds. Now some can say that's simple, overly simplistic, but if it's so simple, how come nobody does it? That's my question. If it's really that simple, how come every single convention I go to I see speakers standing up, droning on and on and on, doing boring data dumps. So my advice is simple. In the same way that if your golf teacher says keep your head down, swing smoothly, aim for the pin and hit into the pin, well, that's simple advice. But can you shoot par or birdie every time? No, it is about the execution. I would argue being a good speaker is infinitely easier than being a good golfer, but. And many times it's an even rarer skill. So yeah, it is simple advice. Wouldn't we all be better off if people followed it?
