Unlock Your Content Creation Potential with TJ Walker

Hello, TJ Walker Success Channel where we're all about helping you become more successful by improving your communication skills and by building confidence in your communication skills. Today is going to be kind of a live workshop. I'm going to be creating videos here for the on demand section of my YouTube channel, other social media platforms, but I'm going to be showing you what I do. Most creators do it when no one's really looking. They record it that they mess up 10 times, 30 times, you never see it. You're going to see my mistakes, you're going to see the blunders and you're going to see how relatively easy I think this is and how maybe we're all making too much of a big deal out of this. What I hope to do is to motivate you to make more videos of yourself. Speaking Now, a quick note to my editors. This is the section of today's various videos where I hope to have a lot of short form content that can be edited for future short form videos on YouTube, TikTok, places like that. It's also going to be the place where we have longer videos. Now, I was doing this earlier today and I'll just share with you what I'm doing. I have gone to Chat GPT and asked it to come up with suggestions of common questions people have about communication skills and presentation skills, especially personal communication. So I'm not farming out my entire channel or everything I do to Chat GPT, but I am using it as a starting point. Everything out of my mouth is going to be from my own brain, my own ideas. But the questions, Chat GPT I think this is a perfectly good way of using it to create content. It's pulling from data sources from everywhere in the Internet and giving me a good synthesis of actual sentiment out there. So I, I think that is actually a very good way of using artificial intelligence, which is what I'm trying to demonstrate here today. Okay, so we're going to do a couple of different camera angles. So I've got this one, I'll be doing this, this one for when I'm doing the short form video because it seems like people like it when I'm not looking at the camera and it's more like I am looking at an audience. Okay, so I'm going to read out to you these questions. I might not like some of them, I might not do some of them. I might not feel like I have any great insights on some. We've done the first two earlier today. This next question and I'm sharing These with you in real time. This is the first time I'm seeing them. I effectively challenge my specific worries about public speaking. Okay, that's. It's phrased a little differently. You know what? I forgot to hit record. So. So I'm now recording this and this. This is a note to my editors. The section you're seeing here is, is going to be what I think is most useful for the short form content and the long form content. So I'll be doing lots of specific ones here, specifically keeping in mind that they can be used for editing for short form content. Okay, the first question, how can I effectively challenge my specific worries about public speaking? I'll do a longer version of that. So how do you challenge your worries about public speaking? Let's step back for a minute and ask how do you do that with anything else in life? If you're worried about swimming, how do you get over that? Because most kids worry about swimming if they've never been in a pool before. If they've never had a swim lesson before. Do you handle it by saying your whole life, oh, I'm not getting near the water. Oh, no, wrong camera angle. We'll have to do that again. Okay, sorry about that. And I see a handful of you have joined me again. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks for joining me. This is sort of a workshop we're doing. I'm taking you behind the scenes of how I actually create content, whether it is content for my YouTube channel, for TikTok online courses. We'll be making new ones right here. And it's all going to be in real time so you can see it, words and all mistakes, as I just did. I had the wrong camera angle on and it's interactive. If you have questions, you can post your questions. If you want to join me on camera to ask your question, you can do that. I have posted the link to Streamyard. If you want to talk to me live, it is in the community tab of my YouTube channel. So you would just go to YouTube, type in TJ Walker Success, hit the community tab, and you'll see the most recent link there. We'll link you so you can come right in and talk to me and ask questions, give your own perspective and analysis as well. Okay, so right now I'm recording content that's going to be used for edited YouTube videos, social media videos. Most people do this without anyone looking. I want you to kind of see how I'm doing it, to see the process. Because in part, I want to motivate you to make your own videos. I love that you're watching mine, but I want you to make your own videos, too. And I have to learn how to get better at switching the cameras. I'm going to come over here now, have a little drink, and we're going to do that one over again since I messed it up. So again, we're on the topic of challenging your worries about public speaking. So we're going to start this from scratch so the editors have something they can work with. So how do you challenge your own worries about public speaking? Let's step back for a minute. How do you challenge yourself and any other worries you have in life? If you're a little kid, chances are you are worried about going into a swimming pool. If you've never gone swimming before, if you never had a swimming lesson before, it's scary getting into a swimming pool. So how do you handle it? Well, unfortunately, a few people handle it by staying away from swimming pools, staying away from the ocean, staying away from a pond their whole life because of that fear of drowning. But that's not what most people do. At some point, you sort of stick your toe in, you get a lesson. Maybe a family member teaches you informally. Maybe you go somewhere and get official swim lessons. At some point, you get in the water. At some point, a swim instructor has you put your face in the water. It feels scary, but you blow bubbles. You blow bubbles. You get used to the water. It's steps. No one just learns how to swim instantly. Of course, there are stories about people who say, well, my father was so tough, he just threw me into the deep end and I had to fend for myself. But. But really, that doesn't work very well for most people. I don't want you to learn how to be a more comfortable public speaker by putting you on stage in front of 10,000 people for your very first speech. That's not good for anyone. What I do think is you need to get over your worries when it comes to public speaking, exactly the same way you got over your worries of anything else. If you are 12 and you've never driven a car before, and I hope you haven't, chances are you might be a little nervous if your parents just tossed you the car keys and said, hey, I'm feeling lazy. Drive to the grocery store, buy all the groceries and come home. Now. If you're 12 and your feet can't even touch the gas pedal and you've never had a driving lesson, that's going to be insanely scary. It certainly would be for Me. But if you have had driver's lessons, you've been to driver's ed, you've gotten a license, and you've been driving for years, and someone says, can you drive to the grocery store and pick up some groceries? Why not? That's not going to create any anxiety whatsoever. You're going to be relaxed. You're going to be comfortable. Why? Why? Because you've done it many times. You have a track record of success. You've done it. Your own success helps you build confidence. It becomes virtually impossible to be nervous about driving to the grocery store now. You might not want to. You might think, there's traffic. I'd rather do something else. I'd rather relax at home. There's other feelings you could have if someone asks you to drive to the grocery store, but it's going to be really difficult to feel worried about it. Exactly the same thing happens when it comes to public speaking and giving presentations. You need training. Now. You can get training for free on this YouTube channel, a million places online. You can take inexpensive courses. You can hire a public speaking coach like me. There's plenty of places to learn. But you've got to be willing to learn, willing to admit this isn't something people are just naturally born with. You have to learn how to speak. So that's the first step. Next, you've got to speak. You've got to actively look for opportunities to speak if you want to become a good swimmer. It's not enough to go to a swim lesson once or watch a video. You have to go to the pool. Maybe not every day, but you've got to go to the pool. If you want to learn how to drive, you've got to figure out some systematic way of driving on a regular basis. It is exactly the same thing with speaking. And if you speak often enough and you help people enough, it becomes impossible to be nervous. Right now, I'm relaxed. It's not because I'm convinced you love me. It's not because I'm convinced that this video is going to go viral and have 10 billion views and I'll make millions and millions of dollars. But I'm relaxed because I know I'm coming across the best I can. I'm relaxed because I know I'm conveying the ideas I want to. I'm relaxed because I know I'm helping at least a few people. I'm relaxed because I know I can't really do any better. And it's not because this is the best speaking engagement anyone has ever delivered. It's because I'm doing the best I can and some good things are happening from it. That is how you eliminate worries and tension about speaking. Okay. Note to editor, I think that one can be used and I see Young Issy has written and says respect. T.J. walker. All right, thanks. Appreciate you joining me. Now, if I get any, if you got any value out of that. I almost said if I got it, I know I got some value out of it. Let me know what you like. And I appreciate my tie is crooked. I appreciate you saying respect, but why? What do you respect? And it's not that I'm fishing for compliments, but I do want to know what is resonating with you that works that you perhaps want me to do more of. One of the things I found out in the last five months of really escalating my content on YouTube is that people really like several things. They like anything that helps people deal with nervousness. And that's one of the curse of knowledge. I've been speaking for so long, it's harder for me to relate to being nervous about speaking. So it's really good that I get feedback from people like you. The other thing is people love seeing mistakes pointed out. They absolutely love anything to do with mistakes being pointed out. So that's something I've learned. I'm a much bigger believer in model what works so people can do more of that. Not gotcha, gotcha. This was wrong. That's wrong. But there's a difference between what people want and what works in a training. A live in person training especially versus what people want to watch when they are just online. So that's something I have to learn. If you're just joining us, and it looks like we have a bunch of people who did join us live. Thank you. I'm T.J. walker. This is sort of a live workshop here. It's me actually showing you how I create content for my YouTube channel, social media channels. I'm doing a combination of long form content, which is really anything over 60 seconds plus short form content, anything less than 60 seconds. And for me, the sweet spot has been in terms of viewership videos that are 12 to 18 seconds. Essentially. One thought. Now before I forget, I want to do a short form version of that same question. And if you have questions that you want me to answer, post them right here and you'll go to the front of the list. I don't have to rely on chat GPT. I'd much rather talk to real people. And Young Issy says I Just got into chat and wanted to pay my respect in a way to introduce. However, to answer your question, what I what I learned a lot from you. What up. Very much appreciate you being here and you can ask a question, you can tell me anything that's valuable, you can share anything you want, you can offer a criticism. You can tell me what you like and don't like. About my new set here, one of the things I don't like is I have not figured out how to have these lights stay on the same color. They're changing. I hope it's not too distracting. But the idea was they would all be sort of a light blue and now like that one's green and they're different colors. But what Young Issy says is, I learned a lot from you is your media training. So glad that you're learning there. And I see my colleague Barb Tomlin has joined. I don't know if you are hoping to come on, Barb. I don't want to put you on the spot. Maybe send me a message and let me know. I'm going to do a quick short version for my YouTube shorts of that. Last question of how can I effectively challenge my worries about public speaking? How can you challenge your worries about public speaking? Well, step back a moment. How do you challenge any other worry you have? If you were worried about learning how to swim when you were 5 years old, what did you do? You didn't just say, I'm never going to go swimming. You took a swim lesson, then you stuck a toe in the water, then you took a lesson, then you swam more and more until the point where you were comfortable with it. It's exactly the same with public speaking. Take a lesson, practice. Do it more and more and more. Okay, I'm hoping that was a version that was usable for my editing team for a YouTube short on the same question. And Barb, I. And if I missed you, love to have you back. I see you popped in to the room and back out. And I see we have more than 10 people with us live. So thanks so much for joining me in an impromptu moment. I just tossed this on. We're still kind of testing out the new set here, the new camera angles. As you can see, we've got one camera, camera two camera three, testing out relationships to the microphone, various backdrops. And what I'm doing now is going through questions, common questions about communication skills in public speaking. These are generated by ChatGPT, but it's generating it by pulling from the Internet, public forums, social media and Elsewhere, I'm reading these for the first time and giving you sort of impromptu, unscripted answers the best I can. Now they're impromptu, but that's not to be confused with me just making up stuff off the top of my head. Pretty much any question about public speaking or communication skills I've heard before, I've thought a lot about and, and I've already talked about it. So some of you said, well tj you're articulate. That comes across easily. Well, it's not any easier for me than anyone else. It's just I'm talking about it a lot. Anything you talk about a lot is going to be generally easy for you to talk about with other people as well. Oh, and Barb says she's troubleshooting, so thanks so much for doing that. Oh, you're in the other live. Okay, thanks so much. I do appreciate it, Barb, appreciate your time and your in demand and a lot of different live scenarios. We appreciate any time you can give us here. Okay, let's go to the next question. Again, unreading the same time as you're hearing them. How can I maintain focus on my material during a presentation rather than my anxiety? And Matthew Pate has just signed in and says, good morning Matthew. Good morning to you wherever you are. Really appreciate you joining us. If you have any questions you want me to answer that relate to communication skills, we go to the questions from our live audience first. I'm reading out questions that were created by Chat GPT. So I'm going to answer this question now is how can I maintain focus on my material rather than my anxiety? And that is a question that I think a lot of people can relate to. So we're going to do the long form note to my editors. This is a long form video on this particular question. So how do you maintain focus on your material when giving a presentation? Rather than focusing on, oh, I'm feeling nervous. The way to do it isn't really to focus on your material or to focus on your anxiety. The secret is to focus on your audience. You need to be looking at your audience. You need to be empathizing with your audience. What knowledge do you have that's going to help that person improve some aspect of their life, their business, their finances? Anytime you're speaking, you need to really put yourself in the shoes of one audience member and think about if I could just sit there over a cup of coffee, have a one on one conversation, what knowledge do I have that could really help that person the most focus on them. That requires a certain amount of selflessness. The best speakers in the world exude the sense that there's nothing in the world they care about more than helping this one person and this one person and this one person, because they are trying to help help the audience. When you're fixated on helping your audience, you don't have time for anxiety or worry or nervousness. And if you're really trying to help them and you've prepared as you should, then the material will come more naturally to you. Now, a couple of stumbling blocks that hurt people. If they go into a presentation and they've got some big list of a script or tons and tons of slides and they're thinking, oh, no one asked me questions, I have to go through my presentation timeout. It's not your presentation, it's the audience's presentation. So part of what's making you nervous in a lot of situations is you didn't prepare adequately. You may have written out a 10 page, 20 page speech or a 30 page slide deck, word for word. That's a bad way of preparing for a presentation. You need to boil things down to a simple outline. If you're using screens, fine. They should have visuals, images, not text. You need to be able to glance down occasionally. A simple outline that fits on one page. So you can focus most of the time on this audience member and this audience member and all of your audience members. That way you don't have the luxury of focusing on the fact that, oh, I'm nervous or I'm uncomfortable. You're not going to be focusing on, oh, where's my material? Did I cover that on page seven yet? No, it's a conversation with the audience member. Now, they might not be talking to you, but they are communicating. They're looking at you and maybe nodding, or maybe they're ignoring you and staring at their cell phone. That's communication means you're doing something wrong. It means you're not interesting enough. So shake things up, maybe ask a question from time to time. You can create a dialogue, even if it's just a rhetorical question. You want people to think, think for a moment. You rarely see rhetorical questions written in a PowerPoint slide deck because it's typically fact, fact, bullet point, bullet point. That's not a dialogue, that's a way of asking people to tune out. So focus on making this an interesting conversation. Although it's one where you're doing most of the talking. Focus on really helping audience members. If you do that, you're not going to have to worry about. Oh, how do I focus on my material versus being nervous? Okay, that's the end of that long form segment on that one. I see that Najmuddin has joined us. Najmuddin, thank you so much for coming. You've got a question, Please, by all means, ask the question. Young Issy has written a question. Maybe you list a couple of tips on how to focus on the idea that it's a conversation and not a presentation. Great. Excellent subject. I will do that next. Since I just did the long version of that for my editors to keep a track, I'm going to try to do a short version of the topic that I just did. Again, what I'm trying to do is to make my ideas and insights more accessible to more people in different formats. Right now we've had 10 or 12 people join us for the live session and I very much appreciate you. That's one way of reaching people. When I do an in person workshop with one person, one on one for a full day, that's a very intensive way of really helping someone at a major level. But it's only one person. If I do a short form video, sometimes it's eight seconds long, it might help 7,000 people because that's typically the easiest way to generate a lot of people viewing it because it's short, it's packaged, it may have a little music, it's fat out in the by the various algorithms on YouTube and TikTok. So there's a lot of different ways reaching people. What I'm doing in this live session, and I'll be doing on pretty much a daily basis here, is trying to cover all those spaces, create it in such a way that it can be sliced dice used to help people in many, many different ways to increase the odds of having a positive impact. Matthew, I'm going to get to your comment in just a moment plus the questions. But before I lose focus, I do want to go ahead and create this short form video on the last topic. Okay, so it's how to maintain focus on material during a presentation rather than your anxiety. So how do you focus? Let me redo that over. So you're going to see from time to time that I'll start something and say that's not quite right. I edit myself while I'm doing it and just hit delete rather than trying to stitch it all together in post production because it's faster and easier. So how do you stay focused on your material when you're giving a presentation and not obsess over the fact that I'm feeling a little anxious. It's very simple. Don't focus on your material. Instead focus on your audience. Focus on helping one person in your audience making an idea come alive to that person to mean something to that person. Put yourself in their shoes. When you do that, you won't have time to feel any anxiety for yourself. Okay, so note to editor. I think that will be a usable short that we can do. Okay. And I've got to pay attention, make sure I'm not getting too close to the camera. I probably want to be back here when I'm doing these shorts to look to frame it more the way someone would be framed if they're doing something for a typical conference. Okay. Matthew writes, I found your channel when searching. Let's get the right camera on. I found your channel when searching for Amazon Influencer. Great content. For Amazon, the rule was a person to watch at least 30 seconds of a video. Any tips from a communication standpoint? Okay, so it's a little confusing with Amazon Influencer, my understanding is yes, the best way to get compensated is for someone to watch 30 seconds of your video. But if you have a video shorter than 30 seconds, then if they watch all of it and that's the last thing they did before buying something, then you get compensated. Amazon also has something known as Amazon Inspire, which is just for phones. It is vertical video only and it's meant to be like TikTok and there supposedly the ideal length is more like 15 seconds. So it raises the question, well, how do I get compensated if I had to make a video if someone has to watch my video more than 30 seconds and yet I supposed to do a 15 second video for Amazon Inspire, I don't know 100% the answer, what I'm trying to do is cover the basis. So every product, if you saw me earlier making videos for my Amazon Influencer account, I do one short form vertical video, meaning you're, you know, you're holding your phone up and down and I do that about 15 seconds with the idea that that increases the odds of it getting on the Amazon Inspire. Now some of those vertical videos also show up on the Amazon product page. I do another one that is typically I try to do it just a little more than 30 seconds in a horizontal format so that it would be ideal for the Amazon product page. I then do a third video that is really as long as I want that I feel no constraints. I try to share a little about who I am and why this product resonates with me. And if it's two and a half minutes long, it's two and a half minutes Long. If it's 39 seconds long, it's 39 seconds long. So I do that one thinking, if someone wants to go in depth, watch more, even if they only watch half of it. If it's three minutes long, I've cleared the 30 second hurdle. And the reason I'm doing it that way is I'm trying to now use all of my powers of persuasion, presentation skill and just sharing everything I really like about a particular product. Now, some products I'm much more effusive about than others. Some products I may want to talk about for five minutes. I don't think I've done anything longer than about three minutes so far. But at some point I'm going to have a product and I just want to tell people lots and lots. I think you can go up to about 60 minutes if you want to. So I wouldn't worry so much about the length. To me, it's more helpful to do that variety of lengths and then you've sort of covered all your bases. But full disclosure, I've only been in the Amazon Influencer program for, I think about five weeks. So I'm learning, I'm trying to learn faster than most people. Right now I've got, after today, about 200 videos and photos in. And I think, you know, most people who've been five weeks maybe have half a dozen. Not because I have any more skills than anyone, it's just a particular strategy I'm following that I believe anyone could do, which is one reason why, why we are here today, doing this live so you can see kind of behind the scenes how someone actually does this. So some more comments are coming in and I do, I do want to be responsive to people who've posted specific questions because as much as I love technology and ChatGPT, I'd much rather answer questions directly from you on a regular basis. So let me get my mouse back here and make sure I didn't miss anything. So, Najmuddin, you said you had a question. When you post the question, I will answer it live. Right here. Young Issy says may you list a couple of tips on how to focus on the idea that it's a conversation and not a presentation. Okay, so let me just do a little video on that right now. Answer your question. So again, I'm trying to, trying to kill two birds or three birds with one stone. A. I want to actually be respectful of you. You took the time to come here. I want to answer you in a way that's helpful to you and helpful to anyone else who's joined us live. I also want to answer the question in such a way that that answer can be packaged in a YouTube video or a video for other social media, so the people who couldn't join us here live today can benefit from it, and people could watch it, in theory, anytime, for the next 10 or 15 or 20 years. I also want to give a condensed version of an answer to this question so that it can be used as a YouTube short. So let's just take this one right here. How do you make your presentations more like a conversation and not a presentation? So let's do that. How do you make your next presentation seem more like a conversation and not a speech or an official presentation? Because, let's face it, we've all had conversations with friends that have lasted five, six, maybe 10 hours, maybe all night long, and we're having fun. It's interesting. There was never a boring moment. There was give and take. And yet we've seen people stand up. I'm now going to give this boring formal presentation, and before they've even gone 10 seconds, we're thinking, oh, my gosh, this is going to be awful. This is going to be boring. This is going to be painful. What do we do if we're not on the front row? We pull out our cell phone and we check social media, email and text. That's clearly not what we want. For your next presentation, for your next speech, for your next briefing, for your next talk, whatever you want to call it, keep in mind your audience doesn't want to be bored. So be lazy. What do I mean by that? Be lazy in the sense that do what's easy for you and what's easy for your audience. And that means make it more of a conversation. In conversations, if you talk to a friend and say, hey, what did you do this weekend? It's Monday morning. They don't stand up and say, well, at 6:01, I woke up at 6:02, I went to the kitchen at 6:03, I started the coffee machine at 6. No, nobody does that yet. That's kind of how most PowerPoint presentations are delivered. It's kind of how a lot of official speeches and briefings are done. A linear way of fact, fact, fact, bullet point. It's boring. That's not what conversations are. When you're having a conversation with a friend, several things are happening. You're trying to say the most interesting thing possible right now, right? You don't say, hey, this really interesting thing happened last night. But before we do that, let me tell you about everything I had for breakfast three weeks ago. No, that's not what you do. So you're trying to focus on interesting things. If a little humor can come in, you share it with friends in a conversation. Because everybody likes a good laugh. Everybody likes a chuckle, right? You don't try to overwhelm someone by how smart you are. You may have friends like that. You don't invite them to your parties, do you? You try to make it go back and forth in a good conversation. You talk and you listen. Does the other person want to say something? Now you're standing up on a stage in front of 5,000 people. You can't have everyone ask you a personal question in the middle of your presentation, but you can listen to people. You can still ask a question and give people a couple of seconds to think about it. The rhetorical question is going to make your presentation more interesting. And if you're talking to a small group of people, 10 people or fewer, don't just make it a rhetorical question, actually ask a question and then shut your mouth. Look, listen, give people an opportunity to respond, to say how they feel, to share. That's what will make your presentation seem more like an actual conversation. Now, the problem people have is tj. I'd love to ask people questions and make this a conversation, but there's no time because I have all this data to go through. No, you don't. The people you're speaking to do not have to know any every single fact, a number that you do. If they knew everything you knew, they'd have your job. Your job when you're giving a presentation is to really figure out, out of everything I do know what's absolutely critical for this audience member to know. And then spend your time making that come alive. And one of the ways of doing it is to draw them into a conversation, to make them really think about it, reflect on it, to maybe get them to ask you a follow up question so you can go deeper to make sure they really understand it. So those are a few tips on how you can turn any presentation, especially a boring presentation, into something that kind of looks and feels and tastes more like an interesting conversation. Okay, so that was the long form video version. I hope you found that useful. If there was anything useful there, please let me know. Let me do a quick short form video on that to see if that's interesting. By the way, my colleagues and my editors are testing with artificial Intelligence, because there are a lot of AI programs out there that can take your long form video, your live video for three hours and and artificially turn it into a YouTube short and compress things and add. So it may be that I do all that from now on, but I'm still thinking that it's going to be better if I think about it, a little package it. Because I have had a number of shorts really go viral and do well. And I want to make it easier for the editors too. But we're going to experiment. It may be what I think think I'm doing here isn't really better than just letting the AI pull from the longer video. We'll see. So I'm going to do a short form answer to that question, which is how to make, you know, how to focus on the idea that's a conversation and not a presentation. I want to make sure. I want to step back a little, get my framing right. Are you worried you're about to give a boring presentation? Well, don't give the presentation. Instead, reframe things. You're going to give a conversation. We all like interesting conversations with friends, right? Your next presentation needs to have interesting examples, stories, questions, maybe a little humor. Do that. You'll never give another boring presentation in your life. Okay. I hope that that was usable. So we'll see. Back to camera three. Okay. Some more questions have come in. Matthew says, I found your channel. Oh, we already commented on that about Amazon Influencer, and I think, I think I did answer that already on Tips for Communication for Amazon. Young Issy is giving an emoji. I think it's flames or thumbs up. And maybe I'm showing my age here, but I don't really know what most emojis stand for, but I'm going to assume that that's good. Oh, and the next comment you had was, wow, real life examples. Matthew writes, have you considered doing Amazon Live? You would do well with your skill. Well, first of all, thank you, Matthew. It is something that's on my. I'd never heard of it till about five weeks ago, but as I was entering the Amazon Influencer program, they do make it available to you. So it's definitely something I'm planning on doing. My plan is, once I work out the kinks of doing this live Daily show, my hope is to come live to you on basically every social media platform three hours a day from 9am until noon Eastern time, Monday through Friday. That's the plan. So I've spent a lot of time building an actual studio so this is not a green screen. This is not. You can hear my voice getting faint. So there's some depth here. You can see me getting smaller. So this isn't the real studio that I've spent time and energy building and creating and completely rearranging my old office. The lighting, all of that takes time. Trying to make sure I'm using the new microphones in the right way. So the plan is the goal is to, to do three hours a day live. I'm trying to get like my first thousand videos and photos posted into the Amazon influencer program to get a better sense of what's really working, what's not working, what resonates with people. I mean, the conventional wisdom is I should do it on, you know, the $3,000 video camera and the high price things and not on things like a book, which I did in the last segment. So that's the conventional wisdom. So I'm testing it. So at some point I can't tell you if it's going to be two weeks from now or two months from now. What I'm hoping to do is probably one hour a week as a part of my three hour live session to do it on Amazon Live. So for those of you who don't know what Amazon Live is, you got everyone from Martha Stewart and Paris Hilton and really sort of old school influencers who've been famous for 25 years selling their products and now basically anyone can do it. If you are selling a product on Amazon, my understanding is there's ways you can do that even if you're not an influencer. If you're an influencer, you can go live. So I'm definitely aware of it, I'm definitely interested in it. I've started researching best practices, but I, but I'm not going to be doing it in the next week or so because I wanted to spend my time getting a larger database of products that resonate because then if I'm doing the live, I would have a lot of the products here and I would be able to go through one after another. I think people typically will go through like a dozen products in 30 to 45 or 50 minutes and it's best practice to be able to hold it up and show it. So that's what I'm planning on doing. And then what I'm really hoping, I don't know if there are any rules I'm breaking, is to kind of simulcast. So I would have my live session with YouTube and social media at the very same time I would be going Live on Amazon. So my subscribers on various social media would be able to see what I'm doing on Amazon Live and how to do it. It seems a little intimidating. As far as you've got to have this scrolling thing here. You've got to be clicking on this. There's some organization that has to be learned and I'm sure it can be done. It can't be that difficult. They are recommending, well, some people do it just with a cell phone and I do not like doing anything that complicated where I have to type and show a particular product on a cell phone. People are apparently Amazon recommends people use an obs system. I'm using a Streamyard system. So I may have to learn a new system which I'm happy to do. Maybe the two are complementary or maybe I can actually use Streamyard and I just don't know yet. So we'll figure that out as we go. But Matthew, thank you much. Thank you very much for the question. Question. When should you use you or you all or you guys when speaking to a camera? Should you speak as talking to one person or many from a YouTube perspective? Well, there's pretty much universal agreement from all the experts and all people who are successful. When you are on YouTube or social media, you're much better off speaking as if you're talking to one person. Let's say you, you want that intimacy for that person feel like, oh TJ speaking right to me as opposed to my fellow Americans and all of you here, it's. It seems less intimate. It seems more off putting. There are exceptions. I can tell you my most popular videos over the last five months since I've really escalated my own content creation game are videos from an old speech. Now part of it is I had more hair and was, you know, like 17 years ago was like anyone a little different looking in a positive way. But it was a video of me in a speech. So that's why I was saying I'm doing this angle where I'm not looking at the camera now I'm looking down like I'm talking to an audience and I'm up on a stage. For me, the videos where I'm not talking to the camera actually gender generated a much, much bigger audience. So there are exceptions. I do think as a general practice saying you is better than all of you or the people or you audience today, the more people feel like it's an intimate thing. Now this works even when you're in person. You can be on stage in front of 5,000 people and the speaker is going to be much more powerful to say, I want you to think for a moment about a time when you had to stand up and present. I'll do that because I want people to actually think, oh yeah, what did that feel like? And when your great speakers don't look at the audience the whole time, they're looking at one person at a time. They're holding that eye contact for a couple of sentences, really one thought, but it's more like five seconds rather than doing all this. And that's creates a very different experience. Now you've touched on something else that's a little bit of a controversy. You mentioned you guys. There is a school of thought that when you say you guys, a guy is a, is a specific gender. It's not a gal, it's not a woman, it's not a female, it's a male. So there is a school of thought that says you're being sexist. I'm not calling you that, I'm just laying out popular thought these days. And in fact, there's a fairly well known public speaking AI program now that will actually flag your language. If you say you guys, it'll tell you that as exclusionary language, don't use it. I personally, unless I'm with three male friends in the same room or over a meal, I don't ever say you guys. In part, it doesn't seem that accurate if there are females, girls, women in the room. In part, I don't want to be accused of being a sexist. Now, having said all that, I have noticed that every single one of my little girl's friends, my daughter's 10, but this is true for the last five years when it's three little girls together when they were five, when they were six, they were seven, all day long they say, hey, you guys, let's do this. Hey, you guys. I don't feel like it's my role to tell them, hey, you're being sexist. You're girls, you're not God. To me, that seems condescending. If I'm telling other females and women, you shouldn't say guys. So I have some mixed feelings about it, but I personally try not to say you guys unless it's literally there are three other males in the room and that's it. So you'll have to use your own judgment. Okay. Should you speak as talking to one person? Yeah, I think I answered that. In general, it's better. And when you look at some of the most successful YouTubers, someone like an Ali Abdaal he's got this conversational tone like he's talking to one intelligent friend. Again, there are exceptions. When you see Mr. Beast, especially at the start of his videos, he's yelling and quite often there's an audience of what seems like thousands of people. So he's going for this sort of big, massive crowd effect. He does not sound like he's talking to one person at the beginning. For most of the video when you watch him, he is talking to like you know, one of the, one of his guys, you know, one other friend or the group of three or four who are sort of his posse. So a little variety and mix can be helpful. There, there. Great. If anyone else has a question post, I do give preference and if I skipped anyone's questions, please let me know. Type in the comments. And if you want to join me on camera and actually speak and ask for feedback, I can do that as well. But you would need to join on Streamyard and you can do that by going to my YouTube channel, clicking on the Community tab and the most recent post, which I did right before we started, gives you the link to streamyard. It stopped for a minute on my recording. So we're doing several things here. I have a mixer of all new cameras that record everything in the highest quality 4K. That's not what you're seeing here as it's being broadcast on Streamyard. It's in 10 ADP. If you don't know what these things mean, I don't really either. It's just one is higher quality than the other. But when I'm having things edited by my editing team, I'm going to start having them edited from this much higher quality 4k to give a higher quality experience for people viewing the videos on YouTube and elsewhere. So that's what, that's what that's all about. So I'm periodically record hitting the record button for sort of the master mixer version. There's also the version that is going out on YouTube and other places now through Streamyard. Little behind the scenes thing. Okay, we're going to have time for I think one more question and I'm reading these for the very first time time and sharing them with you because I want you to see the actual process of how a content creator does this or at least one. A lot of content creators, a lot of different approaches. Some people think of a topic completely on their own, do massive amounts of research, write a script, edit it, revise it, write it again, load it to a teleprompter, make the recording then spend hours and hours and hours, sometimes weeks, editing it. And there are people like that who are wildly successful, some of them infinitely more successful than I am. So I'm not in any way saying my way is the only way. I do want to show you what one creator does to give you a range of options. Because the problem with writing and rewriting and rewriting a script, loading up the teleprompter, doing lots of editing is it's such a high mountain. It just seems intimidating, it just seems overwhelming. And it's really easy to say, I'll do that next week. And then next week comes and you say, well, I'll do that next week. And it never happens. The beauty of my process is once you get over the initial reluctance, oh, I can't do that. I'm nervous. Well, I remember what to say. It's really easy. It's so much faster, it's so much less tedious because you're not writing everything out and scripting it and doing all these complicated things and all this editing. I mean my videos now, other than this live stuff, are edited, but I'm not doing the editing. So it's at least not boring for me. So that's, that's why I'm doing this. And I hope that it is in fact helpful. So let's go to the next question, which is how can I hide physical symptoms of my speech anxiety such as shaking or sweating during a presentation? Now this is a great question because I have had people ask me this before and I know it's a concern, but I don't remember giving anyone any videos on this in a long time. It's also a classic example of how someone can be out of touch. I mean, I have been speaking, I spoke in front of a video camera, making my first video in 1975. Yeah, 50 years ago. So I've been doing this a long time. And there's the so called curse of knowledge. When you've been so in depth for so long you can no longer relate to the average person's needs. So this is one of the reasons why I'm very glad to use this tool, Chat GPT, because it's polling data of what actual real people all over the world are saying and typing in various forums on the Internet. So let me, let me go ahead and do this. And we're coming up on an hour and this, we've already gone an hour and a half or so today. I think we'll end up about a total of three hours, which is my goal for 2024 to be coming to you regularly in sort of a workshop situation where we're together learning. You're seeing how I create and we learn and grow together. All right, so I'm going to hit the record button again. This will allow my editors to find a starting point. So now we're going to deal with a question. How can I hide physical symptoms of my speech anxiety such as shaking or sweating during a presentation? Okay, What do you do if you're in a presentation? You're shaking, you're sweating, and now you're nervous about the fact that people can see you shaking and sweating. Well, there's several things you can do. All better to do them in advance. If you're really, really nervous, let's go to the root cause. Cause it's not that you need to apply deodorant all over your face. Antiperspirant to every inch of your body to stop sweating. Let's go deeper and look at the real source of you sweating and being nervous. In the first point, you're probably nervous because you're not sure you're going to be interesting to people. You're not sure if they're going to want to pay attention. Well, guess what? You might be right because you might actually be boring. How do I know this? It's because most people who give presentation and I didn't switch the camera. Okay, so I'm coming to you live here today. That's a perfect example. You can be going on and on thinking everything is great, and then you realize, oops, I screwed up. 99.99% of YouTubers online course creators will never let you see that. Now, it's not that I'm so virtuous for doing it. I just made a decision. I'm going to try to do this where I'm killing two birds with one stone. I want to create a deeper connection with Matthew and the others who are spending time with me live and can kind of see my screw ups and realize I'm a human. We're all human. When you see people who seem like they're successful and they're screwing up, I'm hoping it motivates you to try as well, because I'm hoping it makes you realize I don't have to be perfect. You know, these big shots, they screw up all the time. I can try it too. If I screw up, I'll just do it over. I'm hoping that's the lesson you take. Okay, let me look at the topic again. Okay. How do I hide physical symptoms? Of my speech anxiety. And now I'm going to do it looking at the right camera. Okay, what do you do if you're so worried that your audience can see you shaking or sweating and it's in the middle of your presentation, that's only going to make things worse. Now you're going to be more nervous, which means you're probably going to sweat more and shake even more. How can you disguise that? Well, let's go deeper. The answer can't simply be get antiperspirant and. And cover your whole face and every inch of your body. Let's try to figure out what's actually making you so nervous in the first place. It's probably you're nervous about the fact that you're not going to be very good. You might bore your audience. They might find you uninteresting. They may pull out a cell phone and start reading their email rather than listening to you. Is that an irrational fear? Well, not really, because let's face it, most speakers, most presenters are boring. Most people go through a laundry list of facts or bullet points or something that isn't interesting to people. So if you want to address the problem, let's go deeper and actually solve the real problem. The problem is you have not prepared an interesting speech that you know is going to be good. I guarantee you your sweating will go way, way down if you do this one thing. Prepare a presentation, practice it on video, and look at it until you actually like what you see. I've asked my clients to do that for years, and their first response other than saying, I don't want to do that. Their first response after watching a video of themselves give a speech is, my God, tj, I'm really boring. I wouldn't want to watch that. What do you think? And then I have to say, you know what? You seem like a pretty smart person if you think that speech is really boring. Guess what it is. The answer is not to build more confidence. I don't care if I'm boring. I'm going to look confident and not perspire. That's not the answer. The answer is throw your speech away and come up with something interesting and useful to your audience that's going to make them want to pay attention, listen to you, maybe ask a question, engage you. If you know you're really interesting to your audience, it becomes very difficult to be nervous, which means it's very difficult to start sweating, which means your hands are probably not going to do this. Think about it. You're getting together with a friend tonight. For dinner, a good friend, maybe your best friend from high school or college. Something has happened about someone you both know and you know the story you're going to tell is going to make your friend laugh. Be happy. Get excited. Are you going to be nervous? Don't think so. You're going to be nervous telling them this story. No, you're going to be excited because you already know you got a message that is interesting and relevant to that audience. Do the exact same thing with any presentation you're giving. Now, there are some things you can do if you know you just are a sweater and someone who heavily perspires. For starters, get there early when you're rushing to an event. Even on a cool day, it's just easy to become okay, overheated. So that's a tip. Another tip. Don't just have water nearby. Have ice water. Have actual ice in the water. Next, dress appropriately. Make sure you do not have heavy winter clothes or heavy winter suit or jacket, even in wintertime. Because if you're in a room that is a regular temperature and you're already feeling overheated, you'll get hotter faster. Now, I'm not suggesting you show up in T shirt, shorts or bathing suit, but just think about wearing clothes that are a little cooler. Next, make sure you have a handkerchief or a napkin or something that if you do start to perspire, you can dry yourself. Put it down. Here's the key. Don't say, oh my gosh, I'm so nervous I've got to pat myself down. That is not going to help. That's going to make you more nervous. It's going to call attention to itself. If you pat yourself down once when you're sweating and you never comment on it, chances are no one will notice. Now, second issue of what do you if your hands are shaking? People ask me all the time, say, T.J. can I hold a pen because my hands shake? No, but TJ it'll make me more comfortable if I hold a pen. Guess what? I don't care about you. Now, I don't mean to sound harsh. It's not that I don't care about you, but I care about your audience more. I care about their perception of you. If you're giving a speech and you're holding a pen, it looks like if you're holding it this way, it looks like you could jab somebody's eyes out. Well, you don't want to do that. If you're holding it this way, it looks like you think you're about to say something so profound, you got to write it down to quote yourself. When you're holding a pen, it destroys your natural hand movements. It destroys your gestures. The thing to do that will make your hands look most comfortable and for you to look confident is for you to move your hands. Shaking hands become more noticeable if you're thinking, oh, I'm supposed to be professional and not move my hands. The second you hold your hands, you look nervous, you look uncomfortable. So if you do all of a sudden start shaking, then it jumps out at people. It grabs their attention. You don't want that. The thing to do with your hands when you're giving a speech or presentation is to do what you do all day long when you speak and are comfortable, and that is your hands move. There's a huge myth out there that professional people are supposed to stand with their hands like this or on a lectern or not move their hands. Wrong. Comfortable, confident people everywhere, in every culture and I've worked in 45 countries, their hands move when they speak. When your hands are moving, even if they are shaking a little, it's not noticeable because the little shakes are within the context of greater movement. How do you get to the point of knowing whether your hand movement is natural? You practice speaking on video until you like what you see. And if you really want to take it up a notch, you practice to the point where you can send someone a video of you and ask them to watch it without the sound. Sound on. And have them tell you what they think you want them to say. Looks fine. Didn't notice anything weird. If you're doing this or this or this or this, they're going to notice that you seem uncomfortable. So the secret to hand movement is move your hands. You can't do that without keeping your hands free. That means don't hold notes. That means don't hold pens. That means don't hold a lectern or lean on a table. You want your hands to move. So those are some tips on how to look more comfortable, sound more comfortable, even if you are feeling nervous. Okay, so that was the long form version. Answering that particular question. Just wanted to see. And we are going to sort of conclude after this. We've gone yet another hour today, which I'm having fun. So I'm saying I want to do this three hours a day. I don't know. I'm having so much fun. There are people who stream four hours a day. Howard Stern does, but he's got a whole cast of characters. By the way, we are going to start having guests on this show. So it's not just going to be TJ all day long. We are going to be having guests as well. So that's going to be a lot of fun. So now let me do the short version of that last segment. And you may have noticed I was choking up at one point, had a little cough, but I felt like it was good enough. I just kept going through it. And perhaps in retrospect, since we are editing these, I should just pause, cough, go back to the previous sentence, is probably what I should have done. I'm still sort of battling my own habits of. I'm so used to doing things live without any editing. I tried to muscle through it. So I don't know if that really worked or not, but at some point, I think there was enough good stuff there that we could use it. Okay, now I'm going to do the short form version. The symptoms of shaking or sweating. Okay? So got to remember to get the right camera angle. And I don't want to get too close to cut my head off. So I'm going to try to stay back in this range. Okay? What do you do if you're giving a speech and all of a sudden you're nervous that people can see your hands shaking or that sweat's coming down? Well, step back a minute and ask, why do you feel that nervous? Maybe you didn't prepare and actually come up with a good speech, an interesting speech. So the way to eliminate those signs is to be confident. You're giving a great speech. Now, here's another quick tip. If you move your hands a little, if they're shaking, they won't be noticeable. It's when you freeze your hands or hold your hands. That's when it becomes noticeable to everyone, when you're shaking, too. So natural hand movement will eliminate the fear. You know what? That one just. I don't normally do that, but I really didn't like that. So I'm going to do that one over again and again. What I'm hoping you're seeing is nobody's perfect in every take. Typically, I like to tell myself, and maybe I should need to add it up, that I get these right in one take. But every once in a while, that I get it, you know? Excuse me, 99 out of a hundred I get right in one take. It's only the hundredth I have to do over, but maybe it changes. And I've now been doing this for about three hours today. So even though I'm not consciously tired, maybe I am tired and I'm not operating at full capacity. But we're going to do that one over again. Note to editors, don't use the last. We're going to do this again. Okay, so the issue of the sweating and shaking. What do you do if you're giving a presentation and you're uncomfortable because you feel like people can actually see you sweating? They can see your hands shaking. Guess what? Nobody cares about you. They will love you if you just say something interesting useful to them. So focus on being interesting. And if you move your hands, they won't notice them shaking nearly as much. If you don't tell everyone, oh, I'm sweating so much, this is embarrassing. Chances are they won't even notice you're sweating. Okay, I do think that was a better take. I think that was a much better. And I note to editors, I think that was a usable one. Great then. Thank you so much. If you are still with me and I could see that we do have a number of people, it's okay not to have a question, but I would very much appreciate if you could do me a few favors or at least one subscribe to the channel, whichever one you're watching on today. We are on YouTube, we're on Facebook, we're on LinkedIn, I believe we're on Twitter and Twitch or X and Twitch. So wherever you're watching, please subscribe if you can. TikTok. Also, it would really be helpful to me if you could subscribe to the YouTube channel even if you're not on it right now. It would also really help to like this video and to leave a comment that helps. And to sign up for notifications that would help greatly. And tell your friends if you have friends, colleagues, family members who are trying to improve their communication skills, I don't think you're going to find any place else on the Internet, which means the world where you're going to find more content on a daily basis. Thanks so much for joining me. Hope to see you right here tomorrow. Thanks.