A short live-stream excerpt where TJ Walker answers a viewer (Veronica) about how to engage an audience. He emphasizes substance over gimmicks or technology, advising speakers to say something interesting, useful, and helpful; he models this by immediately addressing the question and then briefly promoting his public-speaking workshops and video courses.
Chapters
Veronica writes in on Facebook earlier this week saying, tj, appreciate all the videos, great tips. But I'm still curious. How do you engage your audience? This is a question I get frequently and try to deal with. There are many, many, many techniques. The biggest thing I'd ask you to think about is what can you actually say that's really interesting and useful and helpful to your audience. You don't have to go for all the gimmicks. There are all these people selling technologies. Well, push this button and and give everyone a remote control in the audience and they can all vote and see their results in a PowerPoint. I'm not saying there's never a time for that, but people are too quick to want to latch on to technology to solve their problems. Ooh, if I have prezi and I have zooms and ins and outs and all sorts of flash and gizmos and special effects that will engage people. The first thing you need to think about is how can you say, say something interesting and useful to your audience. Do that and they will consider you an engaging speaker. So Veronica, I hope I engaged you with this answer because I didn't start off with my name is this and today I'm going to talk about. And before we start, go to my web. I just hopped right in by addressing your concern. That's what I think you should do as well. I try to practice what I preach. I'm TJ Walker. I do help people speak their best. If you'd like to improve your speaking, please look at our three main options. We have live public speaking workshops every month in New York City. We also do private workshops conducted in New York and anywhere in the world I come to you. And I also have live on demand video based courses as well. So check out the links below and give me a call. Thanks.