TJ Walker (speaker) confesses a recurring failure: despite repeatedly advising students to practice their speeches on video (using a phone camera), almost none follow through due to emotional resistance to seeing/hearing themselves. He outlines why video practice reliably improves body language, vocal delivery, and content, contrasts forced in-person video practice (paid workshops) where participants improve dramatically, gives historical context about past camera scarcity, and uses an analogy (video rehearsal = spell/grammar check) to argue for taking presentations seriously. He closes by asking viewers for ideas to motivate learners to actually record and review their practice videos.
Chapters
Confession time. What's my biggest failure as a communication skills coach? As a presentation media trainer? I don't like to talk about it, but I'm going to be candid with you. I have failed miserably. And here's what it is. For years and years and years, I have told people, if you really want to become a better public speaker, a better communicator, a better on air person, a media personality, there's one thing you've got to do and that is to practice speaking. Your presentation, your talk, your interview points. Practice on video. And all you got to do is grab your cell phone, pull up the camera, hit video, record, watch it, figure out what do I like, what do I not like. Do more of what you like, less of what you don't like. Do it again and again and again until you love the final video. I've been saying that to my clients and to many of you for years, and the response is always the same. Great idea, T.J. love it. Fantastic. Wonderful advice. Oh, you're so insightful. Thank you. And whether it's a day later, a week later, a month later, nobody does it, or I should say 99.99% of my students don't do it. So I'm failing somehow. I don't feel good about it. Maybe you have a solution and you can let me know. Post in the comment section if you have some solution for how I can be more motivational to do it. Here is the problem in a nutshell. Intellectually, people can say it's a great idea, but emotionally, people do not want to have that camera on them, recording how they look and how they sound. Everybody, I mean everybody, no matter how good looking they are, something they don't like about their face, their hairline less than perfect here, their jawline less than perfect. Maybe they have beady eyes like I do, they don't like their voice. Everybody's like that. And so we tell ourselves, great idea to practice on video. I'll do it next week. And the thing about next week is there's always a next week. It never actually happens. And I feel frustrated. I feel like I fail my students because I've had a couple of million students around the world take my courses online. And far fewer than 1% ever do the first homework assignment, which is not to read a book or watch another video, but it's to record themselves on video, figure out what they like, don't like, and to keep doing it several times until they get to the point where they can look at their video. And say, wow, that's pretty good. If I can do half as well as that in the real presentation, I'll be happy. Because here's the problem. If you record yourself on video and you keep doing it, it's almost impossible not to to solve your problems of awkward body language. It's almost impossible to not solve the problem of whether you're speaking too loudly or too softly because you'll hear it. It's almost impossible not to solve the problem of, oh, wow, I'm getting a boring data dub. I wouldn't want to watch me. So it solves virtually every single problem that speakers, whether they're in the business world, the civic world, the political world, or student. It solves every problem. And I'm so frustrated that I haven't been more effective at motivate. I'm supposed to be a motivator, in a sense. I tell people every speech you give is a motivational speech. You're trying to motivate people how to do something, buy from you, endorse you, invest in you. I'm trying to motivate you to practice your presentations on video, because that's what actually works. That's what helps. When people hire me for 10 or $20,000 a day, that's what they get. I show up, I ask them to speak, and I hold a video camera in front of them. I hit record, we watch it, and we do this a dozen times in a day. And at the end of the day, they're looking at the video saying, wow, T.J. i love this speaker. This speaker is great. If I can be half as good as this speaker, I'll be the best speaker in my industry. And they're not talking about me. They're not talking about Tony Robbins or Oprah, Winfrey or Modi or anyone else. They're talking about themselves. Now, the reason that happens is they have no choice. They've already paid me a bunch of money, and I'm not giving them a choice. When I'm showing up and I'm in the room with them, I hit record. They have to do it. They can't very well back out at that point. They've scheduled the day. I've flown to them, they've flown to me. They've got the conference room, the TV has been rented. I'm there. They've paid a bunch of money. They have no choice. And every time, they get dramatic improvement and they're happy, like, T.J. you're a genius. I'm now a great speaker. Well, no, I'm Not a genius. I just got them to use technology as it exists in the current day in an effective way. Now, when I started out in this business decades ago, the only way to do this was to spend a lot of money on hiring a camera operator with a big 60 pound camera from a local TV station or a network. Because cameras were scarce. Not only were there no cell phone video cameras, there were no cell phones. But those stakes are gone now. All of us have a technology solution to becoming a great presenter. It's our cell phone and it's the video. It's not some special app giving us tips of the day. It's not an app telling us a perfect quote to use in the speech. Nothing wrong with those. It's the app that is your camera that records video. So I wish I had some nice, tidy, neat ending to this video to tell you how I finally solved this problem. And now every one of my online students is a thousand times better and they love me because they're all gotten 10 promotions and 10 raises and they're all famous, successful, multimillion dollar motivational speaker. I wish I could tell you that. But I'm being candid. I still don't have the solution for this. So that's my question for you. What is it going to take for you to treat your audience seriously and respect your audience? Because that's what it is. If you speak to your audience and you haven't seen your speech, I don't mean the text on a piece of paper or computer screen, the speeches you speak. If you haven't seen your speech, your presentation, you're kind of telling your audience, hey, I don't really care about you. I'm just gonna throw out my rough draft. What's it gonna take for you to treat this seriously and to practice on video? Because think of it this way, let's say you have a job opening in your organization and I dictate a cover letter and a resume and I send it to you. You can tell that I have a lot of relevant experience. But I just dictated it once. I didn't spell check it, edit it or review it. Spelling's awful. It's missing words because that's what dictation does. There's extra commas that don't make any sense. There's no paragraph breaks. And I just sent it to you. I didn't want to take the time to read and proofread my memo to you, my email, so I just sent it as is. Are you going to be impressed with me? Are you going to hire me? I don't think so. You can say, look, look at this clown. It didn't even take a couple of seconds to edit and review the email message and the resume and the COVID letter. That's what I want you to think about the next time you give a speech where you didn't rehearse on video. Rehearsing on video is the equivalent of using spell check and grammar check and looking to see if the right word is there or if the wrong word got put in. So that's what I'm hoping you'll do. If you have any ideas on how I could motivate other people to practice speeches, presentations, job interviews on video to actually do it and look at it repeatedly, please let me know. I would love to learn from you.
