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

It's November 12, 2015. It's now two days since the last Republican debate. Who is the consensus winner? As you heard me mention yesterday in my critique of the Republican presidential debate, most of the candidates did something well. There were only a couple of them who really did not help themselves because of their poor performance. Noticeably John Kasich. However, I did predict at the time that more and more people would find Marco Rubio's style winning, that he is a strong communicator. He came across more comfortable, confident, relaxed, authoritative and likable than the others. Now, I have said that about Marco Rubio in other debates and he did inch up a little bit after one of them, but there has not been a mad, mad rush to him. So this time there have been a lot more news stories and prominent publications like the New York Times saying that the establishment of the Republican Party now sees Marco Rubio as the logical person to coalesce behind it's not Jeb Bush any longer. I do think that Marco Rubio's performance helped him with this and will continue continue to help. So. But let's not forget folks, public speaking skill, communication skills. While extremely important, and I've devoted my life to the importance of communication skills, it's not the only thing that matters in politics. Otherwise, someone like George W. Bush would have never been elected president. George Herbert Walker Bush never would have been elected president. There's more to it. There is your political skill. There are factors such as your ideology, your positioning, your ethnicity. Now there's a school of thought that says a large swath of the Republican Party simply doesn't like the fact that Marco Rubio is himself from a recent immigrant family and they would rather have someone named a Mark Smith as the nominee. I'll leave it to others to make that judgment, whether Rubio and his ethnic name, his Hispanic heritage help him or hurt him. But I will say this, being a great communicator alone is not enough to win a nomination. We'll be continuing looking at all of the presidential debates on the Democratic and Republican side from now till election night 2016. It's going to be an exciting time. Shifting gears a Moment Part of what I do to help you is I look at every single blog, newsletter, story, squeeze that relates to public speaking so you don't have to I'm constantly amazed at the sheer volume of books, sites, content, webinars all related to changing PowerPoint 5 oh, the latest is this icon. The latest is this phone. This color is hot folks. I'm not anti PowerPoint I use PowerPoint. I use PowerPoints for years and years and years. To me, there's a fundamental disconnect with most corporations or no time, money, effort, resources, they spent PowerPoint versus something that would actually, and that is practicing presentations, standing out and looking at it. And part of my theory is this whole industry, this whole powerful industry, essentially as an avoidance mechanism for executives, leaders, salespeople, marketers, they're just too lazy or insecurity enough practice. So they tell themselves, let's just focus on the slides. You can't practice, you can't rehearse. Let's get away from the slides, get things in slides. Get away from the slides to come back. You're pulling yourself. You've got to get into communication. Your goal is actually communicating ideas. Very important. Your goal is not to create a PowerPoint slot graphics competition unless you are in the PowerPoint's graphics creation business and you specifically enter the competition. So please, please, regardless of how formal you think your presentation is, how important it is, do not spend one more minute and one more penny on graphics and the slide creation that you need to spend actually rehearsing your presentation. Keep it a one to one ratio and you will be a better shape. Another topic that I see constantly bandied about on blogs, Twitter, elsewhere, speakers who say their pet peeve is selling from the stage. You know what I mean? You've gone to some luncheon meeting, perhaps paid a nice fee to be at a conference. You get up there and someone just starts saying, buy my book, buy my book, buy my DVD package, buy my coaching package. And there's no doubt that is annoying. But I have to tell you, I don't think the problem is selling from the stage. The problem is when you are selling poorly. If you haven't really walked someone through value, you haven't made them want to know more how to get out of you, you've done a bad job. Now, let me just say, full disclosure, I'm not particularly good at selling from the stage. That has never been my forte. But I don't look down upon those who do. If you've ever seen Zig Ziglar on the stage and he was a master craftsman at the art. He sold from the stage and people walked away happy. They enjoyed his performance, they felt uplifted. A certain percentage of them bought his DVD or CD package. I was not one of those. It doesn't bother me that he tried to sell from the stage. Here's the challenge though. I'm seeing this and I face this all the time. Conference Organizers put on a convention, put on a conference, they invite attendees, they have attendees pay $100 registration fee, sometimes a thousand, sometimes more. And then they think, well, you know what? I'll increase my profit margins if I don't pay any speakers, so let's invite a whole bunch of speakers, and we'll have a lot more profit margin because all we have to do is pay for the hotel and the lunch. So the problem is, if you're a speaker, why should you just give the same quality speech you would give if someone were giving you a 10 or 20 or $30,000 keynote? Why should you essentially donate your time and get nothing back? I think it's fairly unethical for a conference organizer to ask someone to go to a meeting, travel at their own expense, quite often speak, not pay them, and not ask them to try to get any rewards. So I think there has to be a balance. I do think it's ethical and permissible and perfectly fine for a speaker to sell from the platform, especially if they're not being paid an upfront speaking fee. The whole key is to do it in a way where everyone feels good about it. They already get tremendous value. They've already learned a lot from the speaker. They have learned a lot, even if they don't buy more and it's done in a soft enough, delicate enough way that it doesn't completely overwhelm the whole time. If that's the case, I think it's perfectly fine to speak and to sell from the platform. It's a growing issue in part because more and more conventions, trade associations, conferences are realizing, hey, we don't have to pay anyone to speak. They'll pay us to speak. You get what you pay for, folks. And if you're not paying speakers, they've got to make a living. So at some level, they're going to have to make some pitch. Now, when I'm speaking for free, I typically use a very soft cell. And I just tell people, if you would like more of what I'm doing, I'll give you a free online public speaking course or a free online media training course. Just go to my website, mediatrainingworldwide.com and sign up for the free course today. That gets them into my database. I do in fact, give them a free course, but it allows me to communicate with them with my newsletters pitches to then sell them on private courses and private trainings and speaking fees at my normal rate. So that's what I believe is generally the most effective way to sell from the platform. But I have nothing wrong with someone who has a DVD or a coaching package. They can sell it for $2,000 and get money then power to them. And if speaking organizers really don't like it, you need to pay your speakers and tell them, don't try to sell anything, we're already paying you. In my experience, speakers will respect that pretty much every single time. Now a new segment I'm going to have here is sort of reporting to you from the trenches, the speaking world, the training world. As you know, most of what I do is not talk to you this way. I'm out in the trenches doing one on one small group workshops, medium sized seminars and keynote speeches all over the world on a regular basis. So I want to share with you some of my experiences so you can learn from those. One of the things I always stress to people, get to the venue an hour, hour and a half early, do a technical setup. While I was doing that, practicing what I preached earlier this week, I was at a major, major financial institution. The organization is a multi billion dollar cap company. I walk in, everything is new, modern, gigantic flat screen TVs everywhere. I go to the training room, it's a 25 year old TV now. I used to bring RCA cables to go into TVs like that and I just haven't seen one of those TVs in quite a while. So I no longer use and bring the RCA cables. I have an HDMI cable from my digital video camera to go into TV's monitors, screens and it's worked fine for the last couple of years exclusively. Well, I got to this place and the TV was a big old boxy. I say 20, 25 year old TV only with RCA. What do I do? It was panic time. I'm running around like a chicken with his head cut off, begging the organizers, please go to individual's offices, go to executives offices. Can somebody run to Best Buy and buy a TV for the day? We can return it to the end of the day, but we've got to have a tv. I can't do a training where I videotape people and show it to them if there's no tv. Finally, a TV was found a few minutes before start time. Everything worked perfectly well. But in this case, my blunder, my mistake. I need to do a better job of really, really specifying with the client in advance. I've got to have a TV with an HDMI and if they say they can't, then I've got to bring the correct cables because if it doesn't Work, I can point fingers, all sorts of things can happen, but ultimately the client is going to fail because they're not going to get the value out of it. And if that happens, I fail. So, as speaker, it's not enough to just assume people are going to have modern technology for you. It is your job to really connect all the dots and make sure that something is working. Switching gears. Other comments that I'm hearing, and I've heard this for years and years and years, but for whatever reason, in the last couple of weeks I've seen many notices of this on Facebook, Twitter, other online discussions. It's this whole idea of, you shouldn't strive to be perfect when you're speaking and it's bad to be perfect and you'll seem too slick. Let's deconstruct this a minute. What do people really mean when they say someone is too perfect of a speaker? Now, sometimes if you ask them, they'll say, well, it means they never say, uh, and, um, and, er, everything is smooth and perfect and flawless. I don't think that's what people mean when they say something is perfect. I think what people really mean when they say something is perfect is that it's too straightforward, too continuous, too consistent. On my next slide here, you can see bullet point one, bullet point two, bullet point three. In other words, I think when people say a speech is perfect, what they really mean is it's not perfect at all. It's too consistent. There's not enough variation, it doesn't sound conversational enough, it seems contrived, and it's almost as if the person were speaking and not in the moment. So in my mind, that isn't perfect, that's full of flaws. Now, the reason this is so important is I think once you tell yourself, well, I don't want to be too perfect, you're letting yourself off the hook. Because that's what people tell themselves when they're looking for an excuse not to rehearse, not to rehearse on video. Oh, I don't want to be too perfect. Let's wing it. Ask yourself, honestly, when you look at the last 10, 20, 30 speeches, presentations that you've heard at business conventions, trade associations, professional meetings, organizations, organizational speeches where you work, how often do you walk out of that presentation, say, boy, oh boy, the problem with that speech, it was just too darn perfect. My guess is that's really not a very common phenomenon. The more common reaction is, my God, that speech was boring. Wow. I couldn't for the life of me tell you anything that person said because it was just a boring data dump. Thank goodness I was able to catch up on my fantasy football scores. That's far and away the more common problem. So my challenge to any of you, don't worry about being too perfect. Number one, I don't think it really exists. Number two, if it does exist, it's extremely rare of a problem. Your focus needs to be on being interesting and being memorable to your audience. That, folks does take practice. Doesn't mean memorization, doesn't mean getting every single word just right. But it does mean practicing to the point where you're really, really comfortable. Now, one of my clients wrote in earlier this week, dear T.J. i am concerned about my regional accent. I have a strong Boston accent and I know it's bad. I know I need to change it. What do you think? My response to this sort of thing over the years has been pretty consistent in history, and here it is. Don't worry about your regional accent. If you absolutely aspire to be a network anchor for ABC or cbs, maybe a little. Although Dan Rather had a Southern accent, Tom Brokaw had a little bit of a speech impediment. Even then, I wouldn't worry about it. Far more important, as long as people understand you say something interesting and memorable. Speaking of Boston accents didn't seem to hurt John F. Kennedy on his quest for the presidency. So it's a big country, folks. There's all sorts of accents. Deepak Chopra has a strong Indian accent. He's a lot more successful, richer than I am. Rosie o' Donnell has kind of a strong New York accent, more successful than I am, and probably you are, too. So don't worry about the regional accents. Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Southern accents didn't hurt their careers at all. Far more important to have something interesting, something memorable for your audience, focus on that, not the accent. In other news, again, one of the things I do for you is I looked at every single news story that relates to public speaking so you don't have to. And I am struck by how many public speaking competitions there are around the world. The 4H organization does it. The optimists do it. Optimist, oratorical, various industries, high tech industries. And of course, there's Toastmasters for adults. I applaud public speaking competitions. I do. In fact, one of my first tastes of public speaking as a teenager, I came in, I think it was second place at an Optimist oratorical contest. My father was a member of the men's civic group Optimist International. And I do remember getting a nice little trophy and practicing the speech and giving it. Did that lead directly to what I'm doing now? Well, it was a part of the whole path. Here's my challenge to those of you who are parents and I'm a parent. My daughter is a little more than two and a half, so she's not quite ready for public speaking competitions. But as many public speaking competitions as there are, it couldn't be even 1/10 of 1% of all the sporting competitions out there, literally baseball, football, soccer. So here's my challenge to you as a parent. If you have your kid in organized competition for sports, and I'm all in favor of that, certainly plan on having my daughter involved with that. It doesn't have to be equal time, but how about giving at least some time for your kid's childhood to be involved in organized competition for public speaking? Because here's the thing, I can tell you, the couple of years I spent in organized football getting knocked around, having coaches curse at me for my incompetence and non athleticism, that has done very little for my long term career, for what I do on a daily basis. But what I did preparing for the public speaking competition when I was 13 years old actually is relevant to what I do today. Let's face it, the chances of little Johnny or Susie becoming a professional football player or basketball player or soccer player, very slim. Not saying you shouldn't have them involved with competitive sports, but at least at some point have your kid enrolled in a competitive public speaking event. Could be their high school debate, could be for their 4H program. You could start your own public speaking competition. Have your child enter the competitive realm of public speaking. Because unlike all these sporting events, public speaking is something they're going to do for the rest of their lives. And getting good at it, getting comfortable at it as a teenager or as a grade school student helped them measurably reach their goals throughout their life. So something to think about for those of you who are parents with kids. And by the way, if you're not a parent, it's not too late for you to enter the competition. Join as toastmasters, if nothing else, and enter the world of competitive public speaking. You will learn a lot. And even if you don't, is it really a bigger waste of time than fantasy football? I doubt it. I close the show today by putting a spotlight on one of our online courses on crisis communications. Crisis communications, how to handle yourself in the media, no matter how severe the crisis is. If you go to mediatrainingworldwide.com click on the online courses. You can check it out. You can watch some of the videos on preview. This will help you really prepare those in your organization to get ready for a crisis. So please take a look at that course and go ahead and enroll if you could help your organization. The beauty of the online courses is you can do it on your time, anywhere in the world, any time of day or night. All you need is a computer, a laptop with some kind of a webcam and a the ability to record yourself. And you can learn many of the same lessons and learn the skills you've learned if you hired me to come to you for a day with much much less expensive so please check out that course, go to the online course section@mediatrainingworldwide.com and as always, if you would like a no obligation public speaking course, online video based course or media training course, there's no charge whatsoever. Go to mediatrainingworldwide.com or click on the link in the description and you can sign up for that course today. I'll send it to you right away. I'm TJ Walker. Please send me any questions you have that you'd like me to address at future shows, topics you'd like to suggest, and any other concerns that relate to public speaking or media training. You can reach me by posting a comment here. Whether you're watching this on Facebook, YouTube, or the blog. Thanks.