A TJ Walker livestream episode about improving presentations by mining material from your own spontaneous Q&A answers and personal anecdotes. Walker illustrates the idea with a Skype talk to high‑school students where holding up his Croc shoe produced strong laughs (auditorium ~300). He advises speakers to treat each presentation as a mini focus group: note what gets laughs or strong reactions, capture those moments, and reuse them in future talks to increase relevance and memorability.
Chapters
Are you looking for a great source of new material, new anecdotes, even new humor to spice up your speech or presentation? Have I got the solution for you.
Speaking the show about effective speaking in public, to the media, at work and in life. Speaking with TJ Walker.
So where is this great new source of material humor for your presentations? The answer is you should steal it. Now some of you are scratching your head saying, tj, that doesn't sound very ethical. Well, it depends. I'm saying you should steal it from yourself. What do I mean by that? Oftentimes the best things we say that really resonate with an audience, it comes from our answers to questions after our speech. After our presentation, we may work. And I try not to write out a stiff formal speech, obviously, but I have found even with myself, there are times when I've answered a question and I give an example that somehow resonates or gets a laugh in that part of the presentation better than anything I prepared and gave in the so called formal speaking time. Let me give you an example. Just the other day, I was giving a presentation to a bunch of high school students, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th graders. This was a speech as I often do through Skype video. Not surprising. I'm standing here in the same studio in New York giving this presentation to students in Charlotte, North Carolina. And I thought I'd given them a great presentation. But when I spoke to the organizer afterwards, the organizer said, yeah, tj, they loved your speech. They thought it was incredibly funny. They really, really laughed the hardest when you held up your crock. I was like, when did I do that? Then I remembered one of the students, the whole presentation, by the way, was how you picked your career, how your education shaped your career, what you like, don't like about your career. So one of the questions after the presentation is, what else do you really like about your job? So I said to the student, let's call her Sally. Sally. What I like about my job is I can work from home. For example, right now you see me in this suit and business shirt, but actually I am wearing shorts and I'm wearing Crocs. And I held up my Croc, a blue, sort of tacky, ugly looking shoe. Those of you watching on YouTube and any of the video platforms, you can see me hold up the shoe. It looks frankly, almost clownish. And apparently the entire auditorium of 300 students started laughing. I couldn't really hear it because I was speaking through Skype video. Those of you listening on audio, just take it from me. It's a very ugly, unattractive, non business shoe to wear. But it's incredibly comfortable. And since I do work from home and nobody sees what I'm wearing, I get to wear whatever I want. So now I know if I'm ever presenting to people in the future and I have to talk about what I like about my job, or why you should have your own home TV studio, or the advantages of giving presentations through live Skype video. There's many, many applications. I know I can get a laugh by holding up my Croc that I'm probably wearing because that's pretty much the only thing I wear when I'm at home, much to my wife's chagrin. More on this in just a moment.
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So folks, let me be candid. I'm not a great joke teller. I actually did take a stand up comedy class about 18 years ago in New York City. Never got to the point where I thought it was really worthy of subjecting audiences at a stand up club. So that's not one of my gifts. And it's also not something I was willing to spend the hundreds of hours it would have taken to really refine. But all things being equal, with any presentation, it is better to have humor in it. But it doesn't have to be a joke you stole from a Milton Berle joke book or a Jerry Seinfeld book on observations. It's best if it's spontaneous or appears to be spontaneous if it's somehow relevant if you're making fun of yourself. So I think the reason people laughed when I held up this blue and yellow crock is it was a surprise because they see this so called middle aged or old. I'm 53. I guess technically I'm not even middle aged. I'm old. They see this old guy in a traditional business suit. I wasn't wearing a tie at the time. They think of someone like that wearing proper business shoes and lace up shoes, leather bottoms. So holding up something that looks silly, it was the act of surprise. It's also surprising when someone was giving you a speech to actually hold up a shoe to bend down out of the picture, hold it up. It's also kind of making fun of myself. Like hey, I don't take myself too seriously. I can wear goofy ugly shoes. Generally people like it when the speaker shows he's not or she's not taking themselves too seriously. So you put all those Things together, the surprise element, the silliness of the visual, the not taking yourself seriously. You put it all together and that's why it worked as, I won't say comedy. And it wasn't joke, but it got laughs and people remembered it. And it also drove home the point of why I like my career. So it certainly was relevant. That's why it works now. I can use that in the future when I want to. At that point, it won't seem spontaneous or it won't be spontaneous to me, but I think it will still work. Because it's not a joke that you see in a joke book. It's not something other speakers are doing. It will seem fresh to that audience. And that's the thing people don't realize about their favorite comedians, as those of you who are regular listeners and viewers of this program know. We talked earlier this year about Chris Rock's highly successful turn as master of Ceremonies for the Oscars of 2016. And what we talked about is the little known fact that he practiced all those jokes many times. Every night for two weeks when he performed at small comedy clubs in Los Angeles. He wanted to practice in front of people. Listen, see, did they laugh? What was the reaction? And if he tried out jokes and nobody laughed, he then cut it out of the script and didn't use it the night of the Oscars. If he had material and it got a lot of laughs from the audience, then that increased the odds that that material would get into the final broadcast that he was putting out to 100 million plus people around the world. So that's the beauty of listening to people, figuring out what works. Now, you and I are not stand up comedians. We can't practice every speech every night for two weeks in front of comedy clubs for any one speech we do. But what you can do is always ask people after the fact, not just what do you remember, but also what stood out, what did you like? What did the audience find particularly interesting? And you will be surprised at how often it was something that you said in the Q and A, because there is a tendency with most people when they're preparing their presentation, they tend to get abstract. They tend not to give interesting examples and stories as much as they should. But when someone asks you a specific question, something clicks in most people's brains and they automatically go into a conversational mode where they think in terms of examples, case studies, stories. It may be, and I've seen this a thousand times, someone who gives a boring, dry speech, abstract data dump is asked a question in Q and A and they go right into a compelling story with a problem dialogue, a setting, an outcome, a resolution that's far and away the most interesting moment of their entire presentation. What they need to do is capture it, model it, and use that the next time they're speaking on that topic. One great secret of fantastic speakers everywhere is they use every single speech, every single presentation they give as a mini focus group to make the next one that much better. Something gets a laugh. Use it the next time. A story is something that sticks and people remember. Use it for the next time. And again, some of the very best stuff will come from your answers to questions you're not necessarily going to know. Now, it's easier if you're face to face and you see people laughing. But even in my case when I was speaking to them through Skype video, I couldn't see my audience. I also couldn't hear them because when I was speaking, no audio is coming back. All I had to do was ask and I found out that what worked. So please remember that and whatever you can do to make your presentation more interesting. And by the way, itunes Audience, I'm holding up my ugly blue and yellow croc again. Do what it takes to connect with your audience. I'm T.J. walker. Thanks for joining me. As always, may all of your presentations in life be a huge success.
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