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

Have you ever thought of reverse engineering your speech or presentation?

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Most people, I believe, fail in their presentations because they don't have a singular goal in mind. They don't look at where they're trying to end up. So they start a presentation by gathering lots and lots of facts, lots and lots of details, and they start putting that on PowerPoint slides and before you know it, they become handcuffed. When you think about other things you're trying to do in life, that's typically not how you do it. If you live in San Francisco and you want to drive across the country to New York, you have New York as the end point. You want to get there and you may figure out, okay, I want to stop at St. Louis on the way, I want to stop off at the Grand Canyon. But you have the clear cut ending point and you may have a particular time frame. If you have a summer vacation and you're a student, you say, okay, I've got three months, I got to get to New York City at least six weeks from when I start if I'm going to get back and have the same amount of time. Unfortunately, too many people don't take that attitude when it comes to their presentation. Again, think of it as building a house. You don't just think of it as, well, let me buy a whole lot of lumber, whole lot of nice stones, get a whole bunch of shrubs and you'll see what happens. Let's just put it all out one day and see if it ends up a nice home. No, you start off with a very clear cut architectural drawing, blueprints of exactly what your house is going to look like. Sure, you may make some modifications, you may change the color of one wall, but for the most part you have a plan in place of what the desired outcomes are. Most people don't do that with their presentations. So my advice is always with my clients is before you start, before you create the first slide, before you put pencil to paper, before you start that first word on the word doc, ask yourself, what is it you want your audience to do after having heard your presentation? And if you don't know, don't do anything else until you figure it out. Start with the end in mind. Stephen Covey, well known motivational speaker, management guru, always talked about this. It's not my idea. And he's not the first one to come up with that either. But he certainly has been a major popularizer of that concept. Now, he talked about it in terms of life's major goals, your career, your family, life. I mean it to apply specifically to every single presentation you do. Once you've been able to identify in one sentence what you want the audience to do, the next thing you've got to do, I believe, is figure out what are the handful of ideas, and I mean literally one hand, five ideas that are going to motivate your audience to do what you want. So if you're giving a new business presentation and you're trying to raise venture capital or angel investor funds, you know what you want the audience to do? You want them to take out their checkbook and give you money, or give a term sheet and give you money, or say, I'm very interested. I would love to have a meeting with you next week to talk about funding your business in greater detail. You know what the goal is. You know what you want them to do. You've got to now step back, try to put yourself in the perspective of the audience and figure out what will actually motivate them. It's probably not knowing every single thing about your business, your personal history, the marketplace. They may want to know some of that, but they certainly don't want to know all of that. If they want to know all of that, they would be the one with this startup, they would be the one trying to fund this department. So if you really, really isolate in one sentence what you're trying to get the audience to do and then figure out what are the five things that are going to motivate your audience. It will completely, I promise you, transform every aspect of your presentation structure and for that matter, your delivery. More in a moment.

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I realize it sounds somewhat simplistic. It sounds almost like common sense. Well, the problem is it's not commonly done. The vast, vast, vast majority of presentations start off with, well, let me tell you about my credentials and who I am. Let me tell you about my organization, let me tell you about the history of this whole issue. And then let me tell you the 50 things we've done about this that are. And it's just a gigantic mishmash of facts, data points, random asides. Audiences get lost, they get confused. And in the best case scenario, they may think, well, this fellow or this woman seems intelligent, and they seem like they know what they're doing. They may have some general, fuzzy, positive impression of you, but why do we care about that. Again, your goal should be to get the audience to do something specific. Doesn't matter what presentation you're giving. If you're on a job interview, you want the person to offer you the job. If you're trying to raise money, you want a check. If you're trying to get your budget approved for next year, you want budget approval. If you're just having chit chat with a friend and passing time and having fun, sure the laws don't apply, then the rules don't apply. I'm talking about some form of business, political civic activity where you're trying to present an idea. So please, please, before you do anything, before you buy new public speaking software, before you buy another tick buster or download an app that counts, how many uhs and ums you say, which I reviewed recently and I think it's for the most part a waste of time. Just start off with a blank sheet of paper or a blank screen on your phone or your iPad. However you like to write stuff down or record stuff and just in one sentence sum up what is it you want your audience to do. Then build your speech backwards from there. Do that, you'll be in much better shape than most speakers. Next up, what do you do when you make a mistake?

Do you have a speaking related question for number one USA Today best selling author TJ Walker? For more than 30 years, Walker has been a public speaking coach and media trainer to presidents of Countries, Prime Ministers, CEOs, Nobel Peace Prize winners, professional athletes and Ms. Universes. Send your questions to infoediatrainingworldwide.com or on Twitter J. Walker.

Folks, what do you do if you make a mistake when you're delivering a presentation or you're in a media interview or creating your own medium? Everybody makes mistakes, folks. I have made mistakes. But if you make certain types of mistakes, your credibility is destroyed. Certain mistakes can be career ending. Other mistakes can open up a whole can of worms. Get you sued. The fewer mistakes the better. Now, not everyone is going to agree with you all the time. They might not like everything you have to say, but certainly you should go out of your way to be factually accurate and if you make a mistake, try to correct it. Now this happened to me just a few moments ago. 15 minutes ago I was taping the program that you would have heard yesterday. If you're hearing these in sequence and I was talking about a gentleman who was caught having an affair with an underling, someone who was a direct report and I erroneously described it as an adulterous Relationship. He was a 61 year old, influential president of an organization and he was dating a woman in her 30s who worked for him, reported to him. And I just was too quick, I was too glib. And I did the whole show and in the intro I described it as he was having an adulterous relationship. As I was labeling the show, I was looking at and I was going to put in the labels, is adultery a crisis communications issue? And then I thought, am I certain he's married? Because if neither party is married, it's not adultery. So I went and did some fact checking. I looked at a couple of other reports in other media outlets and it turns out, lo and behold, he's not married. The employee in question wasn't married. I was wrong. So I had a choice. I could put a little footnote in the notes of the show, but that seems, that seems to be bad form for me to put something out when it hasn't been distributed to the world and I know it's wrong. A correction when it hasn't been put out to me just seems a cowardly way out. I could edit that out, but I don't know how to edit video or audio. Folks, Everything I do here is the same as what you have to do in a real life speech, which is you have to simply speak. And once it's out, it's out. So what I did, and I hate to do this, in fact, I'm not sure I've done this for any other episode so far because the whole episode had been finished. I was about to upload it and I said, you know what? Number one, I don't want to be wrong. Number two, I don't want to be someone who has a reputation of, you know, smearing people or piling on when things aren't true. Number three, I also don't want to get sued. So I simply hit delete. I deleted the entire show and I did it again. Now, if you're giving a presentation, you can't do that, but if someone brings it to your attention, I would instantly issue a clarification. Or let's say you just know you made a mistake without making a big deal out of it, without beating yourself up and bloodying yourself up, simply state what you do know to be true and briefly, if it's appropriate, apologize. In this case, I don't really have to apologize because I didn't actually mention this guy's name and say that he was an adulterer because I hit delete. So that's really the crisis communications the media training issue and the presentation skill lesson here. Try to get your facts as accurately as possible. If you make a mistake, don't be afraid to issue a correction or apologize. But when it's your own media creation and you have the power to use the delete button, just do that. It makes things much simpler and easier in the long run, even though in the short run you got to do the whole show again. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks for spending some time with me. As always, may all of your presentations in life be a huge success.

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