TJ Walker explains how to sound natural when presenting: pick one action you want from your audience, narrow your ideas to five core messages of 10 words or less, anchor each with a real story or example, and practice with a one-page outline instead of a script. Record yourself to iterate, then transcribe if you need written notes.
Chapters
So how do you keep from sounding so scripted, so memorized and rehearsed when you're giving a presentation that you seem phony or contrived? No one wants that, and yet you don't want to get up there, I forgot what to say. It seems like a balance, right? Well, here's the number one way you can eliminate the danger of sounding scripted. And it's this. Do not script out your speech word for word. It's one thing if you've won the Nobel Peace Prize and you know every word of your speech is going to be studied, put in textbooks, newspapers around the world. Let's face it, the biggest problem most of us have when we give a speech is not that people are going to be reading every single word. It's that people instantly forget everything we say. That's why it's essential to do the best we can when we're giving the presentation to sound fresh, conversational, interesting, and to not sound scripted. Memorized can. Now, the first thing so many people do, especially if it's a presentation that seems like it's high stakes, is they think, well, let me roll up my sleeves, get to work, get in front of the keyboard and write this speech out and rewrite it and edit it and refine it. Let's take this word out. And they think of their whole presentation as the stuff on the screen or the stuff on the slides. Let me get this bullet point just right. Let me get this phrase just right on this PowerPoint slide. Big, big mistake. Once you focus all of your energies on a written script, whether it is in a Word document or a PowerPoint document, once you focus on that, you kind of already lost the game. You're already down that path, sounding phony, scripted, memorized. Even if you didn't memorize it, it's gonna sound that way. Instead, I would ask you to start your whole journey a different way. What you really need to do before you write a single word on a computer screen, a PowerPoint, or even a piece of paper is ask yourself this. What is the one thing I want my audience to do after hearing me speak? Do you want them to take a particular action, vote for you, invest in you, hire you? What is it? That's the starting point. Then I want you to think about all the ideas, facts, numbers that might motivate your audience to do that. Write them all down. Now, I do want you to write, not in a PowerPoint slide. Could be just on a notepad. Write down brainstorm. Don't worry about order, accuracy, political correctness, Any of that. Just write them all down. Look at the. Reflect them. Now's the hard part. This is the difference between great speakers and awful speakers. You've got to go through this list of 20, 30, 40, 50, 100 ideas, messages, numbers, facts, and eliminate everything but the top five messages. That's right. You need to narrow your presentation down to a handful of ideas. Messages that will motivate your audience, that will resonate with them to either learn something new or to do what you want. If you want to be more successful, then improve your communication skills. The best way to do that, smash the subscribe button right now. Now what you need to do is to think of an example of that. Now we can start writing down. Write down on a sheet of paper or a computer screen, not a PowerPoint. Here are five ideas. And I don't mean five big concepts with 89 sub points. I mean one idea at a time. Something you can say in 10 words or less. One subject, one verb, one object, an idea, no commas. Once you have a comma, you're on to the second idea. I want you to really narrow it down to a handful of ideas. Put it on a screen or a piece of paper. Now I want you to come up with an example for each one of these points that will make your point more understandable to your audience. And ideally, you have a story, not a fictitious story about a starfish or walking on the beach and seeing fewer footprints. No, I mean a story about you having a conversation with a real person, about a real problem, where you were, how you felt, and how it was resolved. Whether it's with a customer, a colleague, a client, someone you work with. I need you to write down a word or two that will remind you of that situation and have a very simple outline. Now, I want you to deliver the presentation in your own home, your own office, in a private setting where you're recording it on video. Talk it out loud, try it on for size. Try these concepts on for size. And just be conversational with don't worry about words. Don't worry about the perfect phrasing. Just say it out loud. Do that once, look at it, figure out what you like, don't like, do it again. Figure out what you like, don't like, do it again. Do more of what you like each time, less of what you don't like. And now you've got your presentation. Now you've got a couple of choices. At this point, what you could do is have a simple outline on a sheet of paper. That is what I Recommend for most people in most situations, most of the time is to work from a simple outline, single sheet of paper, bullet points with two, three, maybe four words at most per line. And it's not about perfect wording, it's not about perfect phrasing. It's just a roadmap for you so you can talk for the next 10, 20, however many minutes it is by glancing down occasionally every couple of minutes. You will never sound memorized, phony and canned if you haven't actually tried to memorize a particular sentence, phrase, paragraph. If you're simply glancing down and it's reminding you of a concept and you use whatever word comes to you, then you're going to sound fresh, you're going to sound conversational, you're going to sound like a real person. And that is what's going to benefit you. It's going to benefit the audience as well. Now you may say, tj, that's all well and good, but I have to submit my speech for approval or I have to submit my speech to the organization or they say they're going to print the speech before or on the website. Okay, here's what I recommend you do. Do everything I just said. Then have your video and the audio with your video turned into a transcript. This is opposite of the way most people, most people want to type first. First speak from that. A speech presentation is about you speaking. So that is what should be first. Let's figure out what sounds good and looks good when someone sees you speaking. Once you've got that nailed down, you can turn through technology any video of you speaking into text. So go backwards that way. Now I will warn you, when you look at a transcript of yourself having spoken, you may see repetitions, you may see sentence fragments, you may see things that don't really read that well. That's okay. Your presentation is about you actually speaking to your audience. Now if it's going to be emailed to people after a conference two weeks later and you want some people to read it, you can change the written part for the ah, you can edit that, refine it, send that out. It's not going to be what you say. What you say needs to sound like a real person. The best way to do that is to not try to be a phony fake actor because chances are you're not a well trained actor. I know I'm not. The way to sound like a real person is to just use whatever words come to you. Use the simplest words and talk about the ideas you care about. Give examples, give relevant stories. If you do that, people will feel like, wow, that speaker was real. That speaker was genuine. That speaker just talked to us. I wanted to listen to that. I wanted more. That's how you avoid sounding scripted or canned.
