Your Communication Skills Questions Answered by TJ Walker

Hello and welcome. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks for joining me today. It is Friday, February 23rd, 2024, and this is going to be an Ask Me Anything Friday. I know Agenda Friday. A lot of times I come on to you and there's really hot button news I want to talk about and certainly there are some things in the news that relate to communication skills. Maybe we'll get to them later. But what I really want to do is have one day where there's almost no structure at all other than you asking questions and me trying to be helpful and other members of our community being helpful. So if you're joining us today on YouTube, on Facebook, on Twitch, on LinkedIn or Twitter special, hello to you. Thank you for joining us wherever you are. If you want to come live and ask a question, the easiest way to do it is to go to my community tab on YouTube where I just posted a link as to how to join me. So feel free to do that. If you want to come on and share the screen with me or you don't have to turn your camera on, you can just speak to me. If you don't want to come on camera or speak directly, you can always just post a question right in the comment section. And you can also send a private chat on social media, some of these platforms. But I would love to hear from you and find out exactly what's on your mind as it relates to communication skills. And we're defining this broadly but primarily through spoken communication and with body language. So I'm not an expert on how to write forms that that could be a type of communication. I'm not an expert on how to use the right form function keys when you're creating a PowerPoint slide. What I'm an expert on is how to speak effectively and how to use your body language and your voice to do that so that you look comfortable, confident, relaxed, authoritative and you can communicate with people on exactly the ideas in your head and try to get it to them as well. I see we have several people who joined us already wanted to say hello and and thank you for joining us. You've been nice enough to put some heart icons, so very much appreciate the positive feedback. One of the things I like to do from time to time is to delve into questions that really deal with the sentiment across the globe online. And the way I'm able to get that these days, it's easy, it's free. I use Chat GPT and everything with ChatGPT involves how you ask the questions, what the prompts are. So the questions I asked Chat to give me the answers to is what are questions that people around the globe have as it relates to communication skills? And can you go deeper than just the most common obvious questions like what do I do if I'm nervous when I'm giving a speech? So that's what I've attempted to do, is to go deeper and try to go deep and broad as it relates to communication skills. So I'm going to share these questions and share them with you in real time because I've not read these in advance. I'm going to look at the questions and then give you my best honest response as if we were here in the same room and you asked it. The only caveat is I will stop using the Chat questions if you ask a real question. Always happy as talking to real people. So let's dive in. Here's the next question that comes up. How can I manage my fear of making mistakes during a presentation? Okay, so that is something I've heard before. And Chat did live up to its building. It gave me something that isn't the most obvious question. So those of you joining us for the first time may think this is a little weird. What I'm doing now is I'm gonna, I'm gonna hit record and do these in a couple of different versions because I'm here live with you. This is sort of my workshop where I share what's going on right here. And I'm making videos that can later be used for edited long videos on YouTube and social media editing and short form videos as well. So I'm trying to get multi, multi use out of this. I want it to be an interesting experience for you who joined me live. But I'm also trying to create content for my social media challenges channels that can be experienced in different formats, whether you're here for three hours or six minutes or 30 seconds or sometimes. I think I have one YouTube short that was eight seconds long that actually did well. So trying to be appealing to people in any format, in any place in order to reach more people and help more people. Barb says hello and she's got a few things going on, but listening. Barb, always good to hear from you. And Barb, thank you for your note. I did more research what you were saying that the Bluetooth I'm using with my earpiece has been interfering with the camera. And I've talked to some other experts. What they're recommending to me is that I use a different set of earpieces that Connect right into the computer with a separate, I guess, separate Bluetooth attachment that isn't using the same Bluetooth frequency as other things that are messing up the camera. So thank you very much for that tip. I appreciate it. I think we've come up with a solution. Okay, so I'm going to hit record. The question is, how can I manage my fear of making mistakes during a presentation? And I'm going to go to camera one. So how do you manage your face fear of making a mistake while you're giving a presentation? Because you may have practiced, rehearsed, have a good script, but then you stand up, you speak, and all of a sudden you're thinking, oh, this is the part I always mess up. And the sheer fact that you're thinking about messing up is going to increase the odds that you actually make a mistake. Plus, it's going to create a tentativeness. We're doing this live, so I'm going to redo certain sections of these and add. Ask my editor, cover that up with B roll. Plus, there's the problem that if you're thinking about that mistake you're trying to avoid, it's taking you out of the moment. It's going to make you seem a little artificial. It's going to seem like you're not actually here in the present with us. You're going to seem like you're thinking about, oh, here's this curve around the bend. I'm going, and I don't want to mess up and fall off the cliff. It's going to take you out of the moment of the presentation. Great presentations, great speeches don't seem like big prepared speeches. It just seems like one person's having a conversation with you in the audience. Doesn't matter if there's only two people there, 20, 200 or 2,000 great speakers make you feel like they're just having a conversation with you right now. So how do you get to that point so that you're not thinking about, oh, I could fall off a cliff at any moment. I might stammer, I might forget this word. I might mispronounce this word. There are all sorts of mistakes that you could fixate on that will mess you up. You've got to realize nobody cares about your mistakes. Nobody's going to notice your mistakes. Most of the time, the real problem with mistakes is not the mistake. It's not that you said a word a little bit wrong or you made a simple grammar mistake, or that you started a sentence, didn't finish, and went back in another Direction. Most of the time, your audience doesn't remember that. What they remember is, sorry, oops, apology. They remember your reaction to your mistakes. That's what people remember. Because quite often, that is the most emotional moment in your entire presentation. So the key is not to suddenly be perfect. It's not to suddenly figure out a magical way of never making mistakes. The key is to realize it's okay to make a mistake. And I'm just going to keep on going, and I'm going to keep on acting like I am. Comfortable, confident, relaxed. I'm going to keep on focusing on delivering interesting and useful information to my audience. And I'm not going to second guess myself. I'm not going to be a critic in that. You can't be a great Broadway show and be the critic of that show at the same time. If you're the actor on stage, you have to be in that moment delivering your best performance. Now, the difference when it comes to speaking and presenting is you don't have to memorize anything. There's no play right there. There's no director who's going to get angry if you say the words a little differently. So there's a much lower threshold for success. There's much less pressure. Realize that, embrace that, because it does make it much easier. Now, the ultimate way of not obsessing over mistakes when you're in a presentation is to rehearse. But to rehearse the right way. A lot of people rehearse simply by reading the speech out loud or silently, or reading it in a mirror, or practicing on video and watching it once, saying, okay, I'm now comfortable with the material. No, none of those things are actually going to reduce your nervousness and help you to stop obsessing over mistakes when you're in the middle of the presentation. The number one thing that's going to help you stop obsessing over mistakes is for you to actually have the confidence of knowing not only you can give a great speech, but you've already done it. And where you've done it is in your rehearsal. So the key is to practice your presentation as many times as it takes until you can see on video yourself. Giving a really good presentation doesn't mean it's perfect, doesn't mean it's completely devoid of mistakes. But you get to the point where you realize, wow, that's pretty good. That's good. If I can be that good, I'm going to be the best speaker at this venue next week or tomorrow. Whenever you're giving your speech, the Other thing it does is when you're watching a video of yourself, sometimes you realize, oh, that was the part I was really nervous and upset. I'd use the wrong word. Now that I'm looking at sounds perfectly fine. It wasn't exactly the word I was planning on using, but it made perfect sense. No one would even notice. I barely noticed. I'm obsessively trying to critique my. So that's what reduces your nerves, that's what gives you legitimate confidence, is you've done the work, practicing rehearsing on video until you like what you see. Now you say, well, teacher, I don't ever like what I see. I'm not saying you have to love your waistline or your hairline or anything like that. I need you to compare yourself to other speakers in your industry, in your field, people you're competing with. You got to get to the point where you think, wow, that person's interesting. That person seems comfortable and confident. That person's delivering interesting, memorable ideas. Because very few speakers ever do that. If you get to the point where you do that, that's going to fill you with confidence. Now you're no longer obsessed with, oh my gosh, I could make a mistake. Now what you're going to be obsessed with is, wow, I love speaking. How can I get another speaking gig? How can I speak to more audiences? That's when you know you're no longer worried about making mistakes in your presentation. Okay, so that was a sort of long and I should have tracked the time there. That was what I call a long form video, meaning really anything over 60 seconds. So I did that there to provide opportunity for my editors to edit that down, add some B roll sound effects, a little music, some graphics to make that kind of a polished video. And again, I didn't track the time. It was maybe five, six minutes. I'd really like to get over the eight minute threshold and that's something I'm still working on. Everyone has certain communication skills, goals they're trying to achieve and get better. I'm trying to get better at in one take in an extemporaneous way, unscripted, deliver really great information for an eight minute period of time. The reason for that is eight minutes is that hits a certain threshold with YouTube, which in my view is the most important video social media platform now. I post on all the top major platforms, 8, 9, 10 of them. But YouTube is still the way for most people who are delivering how to information, business skills, communication to the widest audience. YouTube also provides the most Tools, the most number of tools to help creators monetize. So that's why I do say, okay, all social media platforms are important, but some are a little more important than others. And YouTube is sort of first among equals, shall we say. If you have a question about public speaking, presentation skills, communication skills, interview skills, media skills, post them right here and I'm happy to talk about them. I'm also happy to have you meet me right here. Now, I posted it on my YouTube channel community tab, the link here. I'll also post it in the comments. And I'm not. Apologies, I'm not quite sure who sees that, but if you see that link and you want to come on live and talk with me, I'm happy to have you here. Now, before I forget, I want to do a short version of that last question. I want to check it off so I don't repeat it. So now my goal is to do roughly a 10 to 30 second version of answering that question that can be put together in a short form. Video for these. Did I. I forgot to hit stop. Okay, so I'm recording all that. I got to hit start again. I'm trying to make life easier for my editors and. And just recording on the mixer, sort of the master feed that takes in the 4K video version of everything I'm doing today on three different cameras. So now I'm going to hit record again. I've got to try to remember to stop it. I got to get the camera, too. I'm going to try to reduce the visual clutter when I'm doing these. How do you reduce your fear of making mistake again? These are going to be edited down so nobody's perfect. Every take. I try to get it right maybe 90, 95% of the time, but sometimes I realize that's not exactly what I wanted. Just hit stop. Delete. If you're recording it and it's not live. So how do you stop from obsessing about mistakes while you're giving a presentation? The easiest way to do that is to have already seen yourself give a presentation where you feel good about it. And the secret there is practicing on video. You cannot be giving a presentation and be your own critic. When you're speaking to people, you. You have to focus on them. The time to think about yourself is in the rehearsal phase, not while you're speaking. Okay, So I don't know if I really like that that much, but we're creating it. We can take a look at it, we can edit it and figure out later. Do we Want to post it? Do we want to test it? There's a lot of different things you can do with social media video these days. I do think it was good information. There's always a challenge of thinking. Okay. But the longer format gave people so much more insight and depth. I really want them to watch that. Well, we can't control what people do. There are plenty of people in the world who will only watch a 15 second video because they're scrolling on YouTube shorts or TikTok. That's how they want it. Nothing I can do about that. Some people will watch a 30 hour course of me giving insights and tips on communication skills. Thank you very much. But I realize not everyone is going to spend 30 hours. Some people will spend three hours with me in a live show. Thanks, I appreciate that. Some will watch an eight minute long form video on a social media platform and some will watch a 15 second video. I think in the modern world if you have ideas, insights, services that help people, you need to make your ideas as accessible as possible in as many different formats as possible. So that's what I'm trying to do here and I'm sharing with you my journey as we go. So again if you have questions, comments, I do give preference to real people but otherwise I want to use the most sophisticated artificial intelligence insights available to me today which is available to you and everyone else through chat GPT and I'm going to share with you questions that chat has said. These are common questions business people, professional people have around the globe. And these are not the most obvious questions like how do I not say or how do I not get nervous or how do I start a presentation? So that's what I'm going to be sharing with you here. Okay, so the next question is how can I practice my public speaking skills in a safe and supportive environment? I like that question. This is going to be fun. Okay, let me hit record. So how can you, you know what, what I'm going to do, I'm going to try to get a sense of timing right at 20 minutes. So how can you practice your public speaking in a safe and supportive and environment? The first thing you got to do is realize don't practice in front of your actual live audience. The number one mistake most speakers, presenters, communicators make is they procrastinate on ever practicing or rehearsing. They'll say of course I'm going to rehearse, of course I'm going to practice. I just got to finish rewriting this section. I just have to finish Tweaking this bullet point. I just have to move the logo from here, here to here on my PDF, on my PowerPoint, and before you know it, it's two minutes till showtime. Getting up on the stage or getting up in front of the board and speaking, and then you can say, well, I wanted to rehearse, but there was no time. Liar. We're lying to ourselves when we do that. There is always time for anything that's important. No matter how important it is for you to send out a press release during a crisis or to send a cover letter to someone, there's always time to hit spell check and review it. Right? You don't say, oh, there's no time to see if it's spelled correctly. No. You go through a due diligence process. Well, it's exactly the same when it comes to your speeches and your presentations. So you do need to rehearse, and it is important to do it in a safe place environment. The most dangerous is the actual audience for the final speech, as I mentioned. But be careful about this. I want you to feel good. I do. I'm on your side. I do not want to add stress to your life, but if safety and support is all you're looking for, you can rehearse in front of your dog, who's just happy and smiling at you. Your goal shouldn't be safety necessarily. Your goal in rehearsal should be, how do I make the most dramatic improvement in my presentation so that I know when I'm giving the actual presentation it's going to be great? That's what you want. Now, of course, you don't want to just bring three colleagues from the office in to watch your rehearse and you know, one of them is just goomy gloomy Gus. And all they ever do is say, this is awful. That's awful. You don't want them bringing you down. But it depends on how you ask questions. You can get valuable feedback from anyone, even the gloomy Gus's in your office, if you ask the right questions. So when you're giving a presentation, in practice, in rehearsal, what you want to do is ask anyone who's watching you whether they're in the same room with you, whether they're watching you online, whether they're watching a video of your rehearsal. You want to ask them, what do you remember from my presentation? What ideas, what stories, what examples? That is the most important question you could ask because they may say, well, I hated your voice and you used your hands too much. But then they remember all of your key Messages and points, in which case you're in great shape. I don't care what they say about my hands or voice. If they were remembering my ideas, remember. The biggest danger by far for 99.99% of business speakers, communicators in the world is not that they fall down or say too many ums, or start sweating or freeze and run off the stage. That is not the major risk of any speech. The major risk, the biggest problem for almost everyone is they go through the speech. Everything is professional. Their suit, tie, dress is fine, their hands are moving nicely, they may have good eye contact. And as soon as they're done, if you went around the room and asked everyone, can you name two ideas? This person just said, I'll give you $1,000. You never have to give away any money. So let's stay focused on what the real risk is. The real risk is not you having a heart attack while you're giving a speech. The real risk is you go through all this effort and you accomplish nothing because nobody remembers your ideas. So when you are rehearsing, regardless of who your sample size is, family members, friends, colleagues, grumpy people, you want to ask that as the first question. What is it you remember from my presentation? How would you describe what I talked about today to a colleague who wanted to come, who was supposed to come, but got tied up in traffic? That is the single most important question. Really listen to that. If they are not telling you the ideas that are most important to you that you really wanted to get across, that is a signal that you need to go back to your presentation. In all likelihood, narrow your messages down, come up with more examples, tell more stories to make each message point more memorable. That's the way to really get the most value out of a rehearsal section. The next thing you could do is ask them, do you have any advice for me on how I can improve this? Now, I need you to be very, very careful about how you listen. This because people are well meaning. Generally, if they know you, colleagues, friends, they're not trying to make you feel bad, but you may find they'll say, well, you shouldn't move your hands. Ignore that. It actually is going to make you look nervous and stiff if you do this or hold a lectern or hold a pen. So ignore most people's advice on hand movement. Now, if they say, well, you may want to speak a little louder, I'd really listen to that. Because it's such a common problem when people are nervous or uncomfortable that their voice tightens up and their volume goes down, they can't hear that. So if someone says, can you speak a little louder? I would definitely pay attention to that. If they say, that story you were talking about, it was interesting, but I'm not sure I quite understood it. Make a note of that so you can give more details in the story. If you're using PowerPoint and they say, I didn't understand slide three, I'd figure out a way of improving slide three. Typically, the problem with slides, way too much data, too much complexity, too many bullet points. Graphics that look fine when you're staring at a computer screen this close, but when you're projecting it with overhead lights on, nobody can see what it is. So ask them for that. What isn't particularly helpful is if you ask friends, colleagues, family, associates, interns, what did you think of my speech? Because you're likely to get one of two responses. It could be, oh, it was great. Professional, really good. That's wonderful. Well, that might make you feel feel good. It is supportive in a sense, but it's not really helpful. They might have just been wanting you to feel good because they felt sorry for you. They might not have cared about your message. They just want you to feel better about it. Now, I'm going to be honest. I do care about you. I'm pulling for you. But if I have a choice between rooting for you, you feeling good, versus your audience, I'm going to root for your audience. I want your audience to feel good about watching you and listening to you. I'm rooting for your audience to really get the messages because it's entirely possible for you or me or anyone to give a speech. And I'm feeling really good and, wow, don't I look good today? And I'm so articulate and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and nobody remembers anything. I said I'm feeling good. So what? What have I accomplished? Absolutely nothing. The goal isn't for me or you to feel good while giving a speech or after giving a speech or feeling supported. The goal is actual communication. Can you get ideas from your head into the heads of your audience? Can they understand you? Can they remember your messages and know what it is you want them to do or what you want them to think about or to focus on. That's the real goal of communication. So the best type of rehearsal helps get you to that point. Never lose sight of the ultimate goal. The goal is not to be confident. The goal is not to be comfortable giving a presentation. The goal is not to get through a presentation without Making a mistake. The goal of a presentation is to actually communicate ideas. So everything you do with colleagues, friends, family, associates in a rehearsal should be designed and looked at through the lens of helping you reach that final goal. So by all means, rehearse in front of people, practice, record. You need to look at it and be happy with it. Get other people to look at it and make sure that your audience actually remembers your message. When you do that, it's going to be a relaxed experience for you and it's going to build you with confidence. It's going to be supportive because it will help you with your ultimate goal, communication. Okay, let's see how I. Okay, that was 10 minutes. So that actually is pretty much right, what I'm trying to do with length. So those of you just joining me, I am trying to do several things here today. This is a live session. Any questions you have, any comments you have, any criticisms you have, take precedence so you can join me live. I posted the link in the comments. I've also posted the link, the Streamyard link, in my community tab on YouTube. If you go to TJ Walker success on YouTube, you click the Community tab, then you will see a link. You click to it today and you can join me on screen with your video. You can do it just with audio. You can also just post your comments in and I'm happy to chat with you that way. So right now I'm going through common questions people have about communication skills, and these are aggregated from across the Internet because of the artificial intelligence powers of chat GPT. So I do find it an intriguing tool. I always prefer talking to real human beings, but let's not forget chat is simply aggregating human beings much faster at a greater scale than I can. So these are not things just cooked up out of thin air. They are reacting to sentiment expressed in countless places online. Okay, so what I need to do now is a short version of that topic I just did. So I'm going to go to camera two, hit record. And again, the question is, how can I practice my speaking skills in a safe and supportive environment? So how can you practice your public speaking skills in a safe and supportive environment? The key is not the environment as much as the questions you ask. If you ask people, colleagues, friends, family, how'd I do? They might say, well, I don't like that tie and I don't like the tone of your voice. That's not helpful. What you really want to do is ask them, what do you remember from my speech? If they remember your key Ideas, your key messages. It means you're doing a great job. Okay, so it is a little harder to do these short form videos after I've had the luxury of talking for 10 minutes. For me, it's easy to be expansive and to draw upon my reservoir of experiences working with people for the last 40 years on these subjects. And quite often it can be more challenging to really whittle it down into a soundbite mode. But again, not about what I want. Important lesson for all communicators, it's never about what the speaker wants. It is about what the audience wants. What the, what works with the audience. I'm not saying pander to the audience and tell them whatever they want to hear. That's not my point. But my point is you're going to have to package your ideas in ways that are useful to people. If you are a great creative thinker and you write novels, you can do that and just write novels. But at some point you, you might want your novels turned into a movie to reach a much, much broader audience. Now, you could write the screenplay yourself, you could sell the rights to your novel, but if you tell yourself everything has to be my way or we can only make a movie that has every single element of the novel, it's going to be difficult to do because an average novel, if you turned it into a movie, might be 30 hours long. You're not going to get a 30 hour movie into a movie theater. Now you might get it on a streaming service, but it's a different format. So let's go to the next question and. Well, I am having fun with this. I hope you're having fun. And if you're joining me for the first time, I'm tj. This is the TJ Walker Success Channel. This channel is devoted to, to helping you build expertise in your communication skills and confidence in your communication skills in order to achieve more success in life. That's really what we're about. And the rules are a little bit different here because here we're happy for you to promote yourself, to promote your business. If you have a video that you want extra attention to on YouTube or any other social media platform, you can post a link, we'll show it, look at it together, talk about what we like. I'll give you a few tips on what I think could make it a little better, especially the presentation aspects of what you're doing. So it's perfectly fine to promote a business, a cause, a campaign. Here we're not overtly political. We do try to avoid specifically US Politics, so that it doesn't veer off into completely different directions. But if you are involved with some public issue and a campaign and you want to talk about the messaging and how you serve as a spokesperson for that, more than happy to have you be a part of that. Okay, now, you may notice I am drinking a fair amount. I am drinking green tea. I tend to sip on hot green tea all day long, especially when I am speaking to you. I'm also drinking water. Now, this is sparkling water. I'm going to say this with the I have another cup for plain water. There can be a problem sometimes for some people, you drink too much sparkling water while you're doing a podcast or a live show. You could burp. I don't want to be burping. That would be rude and unpleasant for you. So I'm drinking it somewhat sparingly. I do personally like this because it creates sort of a full feeling and I'm not tempted to snack. And these days I typically have a breakfast and a fairly substantial dinner and I don't eat lunch. So this is something that works well for me. You've got to figure out what works for you. I do recommend that if you're speaking a lot, have water around. You may have seen some of the most famous comedians in the world on stage. They will stop every 5, 10 minutes. Drink, put it down. They don't talk about it. They don't apologize. They just do it. And guess what? Nobody cares. So don't be afraid, because when you're talking, even though I'm trying to talk in a conversational way, like I'm talking to one person, I am speaking a little louder than normal. That pushes more air over my vocal cords. My microphone is only about 12 inches away. It's right off the screen here. But I am projecting more. That puts more air over your vocal cords. It can dry out your mouth and vocal cords. So that's why it's important to drink. Okay, we've had a few folks say hello. Sandish says hello. Sandish, let us know where you are. It looks like you're coming to us from YouTube today and let us know what sort of presentations you give. Everybody gives presentations in the world. And I'm going to say this. I hope it doesn't sound in any way callous or crass. If you're a homeless person, you may be begging on the streets. If you are a billionaire, you're having to give instructions to your staff on how to take care of your mansion. So every. And of course Every CEO, every startup founder, every teacher, all if you're a kid wanting more allowance money from your parents, you have to give a presentation asking for that. So everybody has to give presentation. So, Sandish, let us know where you are in life, whether you're a student in business, retired, what you're doing, and how you use presentations. If you want to join us live, you can. Or you can just type in a comment as well. Barb says water with electrolytes is vital for singers. I assume that would be the same for public speaking, right? I don't really know, Barb. I've certainly heard of electrolytes. I'm always cautious because there's so many drinks out there, Gatorade, other things that purport to enhance performance for athletes and everything else. When I really dig down in the research, I find that plain water, tap water is so much better than all these other things. The biggest problem most people have, certainly in America and a lot of the Western world, is not that they suddenly have a drop of energy because they've been exercising too much and need more electrolytes or sugar or anything else. The biggest problem most of us have is we're consuming dozens and dozens and dozens, if not 100 pounds of extra sugar a month, excuse me, a year, than what humans did even 50, 100 years ago. So I'm very reluctant to ever give advice to anyone to drink something that has a sugar or a sugar substitute. So I'm very reluctant. There may be other scientific experts who would love to weigh in on that. If someone is training to be an Olympic athlete, a marathoner, that's different. I don't know about you. When I go to the mall or to Costco and I look at people, I don't see that many people who look like they are Olympic athletes. And their biggest problem is not enough calories or sugar. But we can save that for another day. Now, Sandish says he's a student. So, Sandish, let me know. Where do you present these days? It's been a long. I consider myself a student and read books every day. But it's been a long time since I've been a student in a formal classroom. So I would love to know. How often do you speak? I mean, simply raising your hand and asking a question in a class is a type of speaking. Do you give formal book reports? You have to stand up in front of a class. Does your class have three students, or is it a large lecture hall where there's 300 students and perhaps you feel a little pressure? So Let us know. Barb says, I agree with the sugar theory. I changed my sugar intake after reading Sugar blues in the 1970s. I've read a lot of books on sugar. I'm not sure if I've read that one, but there's a gazillion books, documentaries on Netflix and other places on just how awful sugar is to the body, how it's essentially a drug, and unfortunately these days, how it is in everything. I do like Costco because the fresh fruit is so fresh and it is in fact so much less expensive than the supermarket. But one of the problems I found with Costco is every single bread has sugar added. And that really, if you get whole wheat bread but there's sugar added, it kind of defeats the whole purpose of trying to do something healthy. So I'm not a healthcare expert. It is a subject that interests me when I do focus on personal development issues. But I will let, I will leave that to others today who are greater experts on nutrition and chemistry. Sandish says, can I use. Let's see. Sandish says student Can I use it at lower or one on one? Well, absolutely. So many of the tips we try to convey here, so many questions that I answer relate to how to speak to people one on one because so many conversations in life are important conversations or one on one. Arguably the. The most important conversations you ever have in life are one on one. Job interviews are typically one on one. Marriage proposals are one on one. And we're not going to spend a lot of time going into detail on marriage proposals here, but personal conversations that help you in the workplace, speaking to a mentor, talking to someone you want to impress to be your mentor, talking to your boss. Those happen a lot more often than the keynote speech at the industry conference. That may happen for some people once a month. For some it might not happen for 10 years. So, Sandish, if you could do me a favor, let me know what sort of one on one conversation would you like to get better at, especially if it relates to. I don't want to put limitations on you, but especially as it relates to talking to a teacher or professor or a work study group, something like that. The one area I really don't like to get into for a whole variety of reasons, is one on one and dating dynamics and romantic for a whole lot of reasons. There are other people who spend a lot of time on that and it's, it's, I do think it's hard for people to talk about that issue and be candid without being misconstrued and coming across as creepy. So I do not want to give advice to people on, for example, how men should talk to women if they're interested in dating them. That's not going to be a niche I focus on here. But if you have a particular question other than something like that, I'd be more than happy to hear from you. Okay, so let's go to the next question provided to us from Chat GPT. So there's a lot of different ways of doing videos online. Some people do massive research, a lot of data to figure out the perfect topic. They do the keyword research, they write a draft, they rewrite it, they edit it, they polish it, they shoot every line three different ways, edit together and spend two weeks editing that with more B roll and they can be very successful. If you look for example at charisma on Command Channel, a great channel. I like it. I go to it from time to time. Deals with communication issues. I think they're typically doing about three videos, highly edited and structured and polished a month. They do a great job. It's just not the style I do it. I like more freeform, more conversational. So the stuff I'm giving you is not scripted. Doesn't mean I'm just making up stuff. Everything I give you on this channel is typically based on real world experience. Having worked with thousands of people in the trenches, face to face one on one small group workshops and then also online for decades and decades and decades. So I'm bringing that reservoir of knowledge to you, but I'm doing it in a spontaneous conversational teaching way rather than structuring it all out. So that's why we're doing it. So I'm going to look at these questions and hear it for the first time when you're hearing it and then give you my immediate response. Okay, we've had a few more comments come in. Sandy says no, but conversation at professional if you could elaborate on that. Something got cut off. Clap for your writes in says how do you do workshops properly? Well, clap if you could let me know a little more about what type of workshop. I don't know if you are a workshop trainer, if you're thinking about becoming a professional trainer, if you are doing workshops as a part of your existing job and what the subject matter is. Because how you conduct a workshop teaching people how to use Excel spreadsheets is very different from how you would conduct a workshop on how to be a better speaker. I don't know how to train people how to use Excel spreadsheets. I've used Excel, but I'm sure I'm doing most of the things wrong. And I would not purport to hold myself out to having the expertise of teaching people. I am an expert on teaching people how to deliver speeches and presentations and talks and speak to the media. So I can tell you a lot about how to conduct a workshop if it relates to presentation skills. So, in fact, this is kind of a subject near and dear to my heart. I'm going to go ahead and do a long form on this one. And then if you could, I would ask you to give me a clarification on what aspect of a workshop you're most interested in. And I see, Sandis, you've asked a question. I'm going to come back to that in just a moment. So I'm going to hit record. Let's get to camera one. So what's the best way to conduct a workshop if you're teaching people communication skills? Well, there's the standard way. The standard way is someone who's quite articulate, stands up and lectures and gives demonstrations and talks and then asks the participants to stand up and hey, I'm going to video record. You get a 2, 3, 5, maybe 10 minute video of each person, play it back and then give it detailed critique. Here's everything you're doing well. Here's seven things you're doing well, TJ and now here's 89 things you're doing wrong. And if you're in the workshop, it's interesting because it's about you. You got that adrenaline rush of standing up and speaking. People are looking at you, you're being video recorded, you're thinking, wow, this is so much more interesting than last week's workshop on how to use Excel spreadsheets. So it's more exciting than a typical workshop. It's a little scarier, it's more interesting, it's more memorable. And when it's all done, you've maybe spoken, been recorded two, three times. You walk out of that training saying, wow, I learned so much today. That trainer, that trainer was fantastic. I got a great new role model. That trainer was dynamic and confident, smooth and professional. I learned a lot today and I really learned that, wow, I'm still doing 72 things wrong. I really learned that. I'm not a very good speaker. I really learned that. Yeah, this isn't really my thing. Well, if only we could hire that trainer to speak on our behalf. If that's the sort of workshop you go to, don't feel too bad. That's how Most people go to communication skills workshops. But here's the problem. It was a waste of time. If that is the experience you have in a communication skills workshop, not only have you wasted time and money, you've actually made yourself a worse communicator because now your self esteem is lower. That's not what you want in a communication skills workshop. The best trainers, when they stand up to start the lecture for the day, are brief. They speak very little. They get you to speak on camera. They record it, they show it to you. They get you to focus on what you like so you can do more of it. You focus on no more than one weakness at a time. Rather than telling you here's 89 things you're doing wrong, they'll focus on one thing at a time. Hey, tj, I can't quite hear you all the way. Your voice is too low. Can you boost the volume a little in the next one? And you focus on one thing at a time. And you do it again and again and again. In an ideal communication skills training workshop, you are on camera not one or two or three times getting critiques. You are on camera 10 times in a day. Here's the real magic moment of a communication skills workshop. You need to be able to, at the end of the day, point to the screen saying, wow, if I could sound half as good as as he does, if I can look and sound half as good as she does in the next presentation I give, I'm going to be the star of that seminar, meeting, conference, workshop. And you're pointing not to a video of your trainer, not to a video of Oprah or some famous speaker, but you're pointing to a video of yourself. When you've done that, you now have a new role model for yourself. The role model is you, and you are relatable to you. That is how you get the most out of a communication skills workshop. Okay, so that is an answer. That's something I feel very passionate about because there's certainly people in my industry that I have respect for who I think do a great job. Vin Zhang is one of them and he puts out great content. But I do think the vast, vast, vast majority of people putting on public speaking workshops are terrible because, hey, I can relate to it because I used to make the same mistakes. I would talk too much. And as you would probably suspect as someone who talks three hours a day online, that it's not hard for me to get into that mode of talking too much. But what I found is it didn't help people People are often shocked when they come to a day long workshop with me for public speaking, communication skills, media training. I don't really talk that much. They're the ones doing the talking. We recording them, playing it back and critiquing. Now that one I think I'm not going to do a short version of. It's some subjects are just a little too complex to do a short form video and also there are some topics where I think I can really deliver a great insight, 30 seconds or less. But there's just not enough there to really do a long form video. So I'm trying to be flexible and not automatically say every question and every topic has to be a short form and a long form. Okay, let's go to some more questions. Sandish says is there any way to and long a long conversation politely. Clapp says let's say for speaking engagements regarding company structure and entrepreneurship. Okay. Sandesh also says specifically some of close people maybe means someone you're close to like you're a family member. I realized I'm not engaging the audience for feedback. The adrenaline rush makes me choke a little. But I feed force it down. Fantastic questions you're bringing up. I want to deal with them one at a time. Okay Sandish, let's, let's talk about yours. How do you end a conversation, especially with someone you're close to, whether it's family member, friend or work. So I'm going to do a long form on that. What do you do if you're in a long conversation with someone you're close to that person, A family member, friend, close colleague. But come on, can we finish up? But you don't want to be rude. You want to be polite to this person. You don't want to hurt the feelings of that person. We've all been there. It's a part of the human condition. You don't want to get a reputation of being standoffish, rude, shutting people down and yet you got things to do and this is just going on way too long. What do you do? My advice is look at the person, say thank you so much for sharing. I really feel value that you would share this with me. I want to reflect on it and thank you so much for your time. I've got to go do X now. It's simple as that. You're acknowledging them, you're thanking them for their time. You're letting them know you're going to think about it. You're letting them know you have to do something else. Now this can work whether you're at a cocktail party and it's someone you just met. It can also work with a family member. Now, something else you can do is let them know you want to talk about it more and let them know a set time. I mean, let's say you've got a close family member who wants to talk about something. It's breakfast time, but you've got to get to school, you've got to get to work. You really need to leave in the next two minutes, but you don't want to be rude to them. Again, you can say, thank you for sharing this. This is important. I've listened to you carefully. Give me time to think about this. Let's talk about it tonight after dinner. Are you going to be free around 7 o'? Clock? That can work too, because then the person feels respected, they feel listened to, they feel like you're treating them seriously and there's a next step. Now, it doesn't always work that way. Sometimes you may have a colleague at work who's just really long winded and you're trying to get to the coffee machine and back without being stopped by this person because you know it's always at least five minutes. What I recommend then is to don't do the trick of just acting like you're on your cell phone. But look at them. Be polite, smile, say thanks for sharing that. Apologies, I've got to get to this call or this meeting right now and it may be a meeting with yourself or you've got a plan for another meeting in an hour from now. I don't want you to lie, but I do want you to be creative and giving yourself freedom to talk to people on your own terms and not let people just suck all the time out of you if it's not really helping both sides. So those are some tips of how to get out of a conversation that's just going on way too long with someone you're close to. Okay, so that is the long form version of that. Let me do a quick short form before I forget the topic. How do you get out of a long winded conversation with someone you're close to, a family member, a colleague, and you don't want to be rude. Someone, stop, smile, say thank you for sharing. It's important. I need time to reflect on it. I have to go right now and then go. That is the easiest way of doing it. Okay, so I don't know if I love that one. You know, sometimes, sometimes I'll do a long form one and fall in love with that and think that's great. Do the short one. And I think eh, other times I'll do a short form video. I think, well, this is really good stuff. Let me expand it to a long form and then I do the long one and I realize I don't have much to say after three minutes. Maybe it's not enough to be a long form. Maybe it should just be a short form video. So there is communication skill, there's variety in certain topics and how long, how short you want to go. Okay, we had a lot of good questions going on here and I want to be respectful of all of them. The good news is it's only 59 minutes into our start. This is a three hour session. So we're going to try to cover all of that. We are in the last, if not hour, 45 minutes, going to switch over into our tutorials of how to be an influencer, specifically an Amazon influencer, where I'm not going to talk about being an Amazon influencer. I'm actually going to make Amazon influencer review videos, show you step by step, pick one up, how do I say it? Record the video, the pictures, uploading, tagging, all of that. So if you haven't seen that before and you're at all interested in being an influencer, specifically an Amazon influencer, you're going to want to stay tuned to that. That will be probably around 10 minutes past 11 Eastern Time. So about an hour, an hour and 15 minutes from now is when we're likely to do that, which means we got tons of time for more questions. Okay, let me make sure I didn't miss any of these questions here. Let me go to the comment section again. If you want to appear on camera with me, I'd love to have you. I posted the link in the comments section. I posted the link in the community tab on my YouTube channel, which is TJ Walker Success on YouTube. Okay, so we talked about the how to end the long conversation. Elkatu says for speaking engagements regarding company structure and entrepreneurship. Okay, how do you do workshops properly? So I want to give you some guidance there, but I need a little more data from you so I can give you the most useful information. There's a work. You know, your workshop could be a week long, it could be a day long, it could be a half a day, four hours, it could be three, two or one hours. And I need to know a little more background on what you have in mind because how you conduct a one hour workshop in my view is very different from how you Conduct a one or two day or five day workshop. Traditionally for what I do, it's a full eight hour day workshop. If someone's coming to me for public speaking training or media training, whether they want private training or their corporation or their government entity or their UN agency wants training, it's typically a full day. Get in the room at 8:30. We have a soft warmup officially going on at 9. We finish at 5, sometimes 5:30. That's just one way of doing. By the way, if you are interested in live in person training or virtual training, you can find out more information@media trainingworldwide.com that's my main corporate training website and it is listed, I think in all of my social media handles, but I know it's definitely listed in my YouTube channel. If you just the very first thing. If you click up at the top where it lists all the social media handles, it will give you a link to media training worldwide. If you are looking for any trainings like that. Okay, so clap. If you could give me a little more background because you mentioned the company structure and entrepreneurship. To my mind, those are kind of different things. You are also talking about how to engage the audience for feedback and you're also talking about how adrenaline makes you choke a little. I can relate to that. It's been a long time, but I can definitely relate to that. So let me give you the best answer I can think of about engagement. Okay, let's talk just about engagement and then add more comments and I'll add to it. What do you do if you want to engage your audience, whether it's a speech, a talk or a workshop and you feel like they're just kind of sitting there. Is it the problem with them too early, too late? They're not interesting people? No, the problem, I'm sorry to say, is always right here. It's you, the speaker. If you are engaging, your audience will respond. You got to figure out how to engage. Now, the simplest way of all is to ask questions. I don't mean generic rhetorical questions. How many of you would like to be happier in life or make more money? I mean a specific question and the more you can name someone, you might not point them out if they don't want to be pointed, but mention them by name, whether they're in the room or online. If you can see their name, ask real questions. That's one way. If you're talking about anything that involves a physical skill, then get them standing up and doing it. For example, I teach people public speaking. Public speaking is something you do with your mouth and your face and your hands. So the way I engage people I speak to is I have them stand up, I have them speak, I video record them, I play it back, I critique them. Guess how many people are bored and tuned out when there's a video of them playing and everyone can see it? Nobody. Nobody's ever bored that nobody's ever checking their email while their own face is going in their own mouth and their own voice. People are completely engaged. Why is that? Because the number one thing people are interested in is not me, not you, the speaker, but themselves. So the more you can talk to them about ideas and issues that have a direct impact on them in a meaningful way that is consistent with what your mission is, the better you will be more engaging. The easiest way to engage people that most speakers miss out on is with the eyes. If you are staring at notes, staring at a script, turning your back to look at a bunch of PowerPoint slides, you are practically begging your audience to tune out. You are practically begging your audience to get disengage. You're practically giving them an invitation to pull out their cell phone, check Facebook, check Instagram, check email, check text. Why? Because you're ignoring them. Engagement as a speaker isn't that much different from engagement talking to a good friend or going on a date for that matter. If you're trying to talk to your best friend about something important in your life and they're just looking at the table the whole time, or they stare at a menu for an hour, if you've gone out to a meal, you're not going to want to share anymore, you're not going to want to talk, you're not really even going to want to be there. The eyes are important. So how do you use your eyes in the speech? Because you're thinking, well, teacher, easy for you to say, but I've got this whole speech and I got all these data points and my boss wants me to deliver the PowerPoint just the way they made it. Time out. You have got to focus first and foremost on keeping your audience even paying attention. Because if they're not paying attention to you, it doesn't matter what bullet points, numbers, graphs are on your slide that you're going through. It's just like talking to a brick wall. Nothing's actually happening. That's good. You've got to engage your audience. You got to be interesting to that. So you need to figure out whether you use a script, simple outline, Which I recommend, PowerPoint. You got to figure out how most of your time can be spent looking at your audience one at a time if they're in the same room. If it's a virtual audience, you got to spend most of your time at least 70% looking at the camera. Is it okay to glance down at an outline? Sure. Glance down at your notes? Fine. Glance at the next slide if you want to. Absolutely. But most of your time needs to be focused on your audience if you want to engage them. Now I kind of buried the lead. The number one way of engaging your audience is to do something radical. And what I'm proposing is actually say something interesting to people. That's right. The number one way to get people to disengage, to tune out, to tune off, to pick up their cell phone is to be boring. To give people a boring data dump, to try to just list fact after fact, number after number, data point after data point, slide after slide, stuff, and just bombard them. Here, take another one, take another one, take another one, take another one. They disengage. So focus on making your presentation interesting, your idea, making your ideas interesting and memorable to your audience. That's the number one way of truly engaging them. Okay, so that was the long form answer to how do you engage people? Hope you found that helpful. Before I forget, let me do a short form on that one. Go to camera two. What's the number one way of engaging your audience when you speak to them? It's not about being funny. It's not about being dramatic. It's this. Say something interesting and useful to them and look at them. If you just do those two things. Sorry. So again, this is real life, folks. I'm showing you real life here. Something happened. I just choked. I don't remember that happening in a long time. But I do remember once, about 30 years ago, I was hosting a talk radio show, and I couldn't stop hiccuping for hours. I was hiccuping on the show. It was horribly embarrassing, but after a while, it was just funny. Okay, let me do that one again. A piece of dust or something got in my throat and Barb has joined us. We'll bring her on in just a moment. But I do want to capture this one again without choking. The number one way of engaging an audience is to say something interesting. The big problem most speakers have is they just convey fact, fact, bullet point, data. It's boring. The second most powerful way to engage your audience, look at them. Your eyes should be looking at people 70% of the time. The remaining sure, you can look at Notes. Okay, so that's the short form for that. And Barb, feel free to join me if you like. Otherwise I'm going to try to answer more of these questions. Really enjoying and impressed by a lot of these questions and comments today. And our community manager, Barb Tomlin has joined us. Good morning, Barb.

Good morning. I have been taking care of our maintenance in our community on Facebook and Masoud, I think his last name is Abedin. But he asked a question that caused me to wonder if you were getting the questions in from Facebook. But he asked about preventing. How do you prevent a sore throat? After speaking a long time, I do.

See it and I was, I was too above that. So that would be the one I answer, not next, but the one after that. Okay, so very apropos. Giving, giving. My throat just choked out.

That's why I jumped and I thought, oh, perfect timing.

Yes. Yeah, great. No, I appreciate that. How is everything going? Barb, while I have you, if you don't stay on a minute. I wanted to really focus today mostly on questions and answers, but I was struck by the news that Vice was shutting down. Vice was one of the big sort of dot com era superstars in news and social media. And at one point I'd been given a valuation of I think $5 billion. And it's yet another one of these media companies that is either drastically retrenched or gone out of business. Business and the trends I'm seeing, it's not just newspapers that are 200 years old going out of business every day, although that's definitely happening. It's media companies that were the bright Young darlings 25, 2015, even 10 years ago, are now essentially evaporating. And you've got sort of two extremes. You have a lot of basically one and two person media businesses that are thriving and then you've got really old guard media companies like the New York Times that have sort of benefited from a winner take all mentality of. So many people say, well, I'm only going to subscribe to one national newspaper. It's going to be the New York Times, which is what I do. So you've got people at two extremes. The trend I'm seeing, whether it's with small town newspapers, especially weekly newspapers, or even Internet startups like buzzfeed and, and Gawker and some of the others that are all gone, is if you are relying on advertising revenue only, you go out of business. When you look at what I think of as a, as a modern success story like Sean Cannell's Think media. They have at least a dozen revenue sources. If you look at someone like, like Ali Abdul, he, he does videos where he outlines 16 separate revenue sources. And even the New York Times has a lot of different revenue sources. Yes, they have advertising, but they have content. People value so much, they pay for it. I pay them money every day, month. They've got all these specialty niches like their cooking recipe apps that people pay for. And they have affiliate marketing. Their wire cutter where they give product reviews is affiliate marketing, which is something Sean Cannell talks a lot about and is very successful with. So to me that's the, that's the real message. If you, if you are a media business and you are dependent on one primary source of revenue, you're basically walking dead. Just wondered if you had a quick assessment of that.

I think that's been the case for a long time and they haven't woken up. And I think that they're forced to now because their employees are leaving because of the worldwide issues that have happened. Consumers have said, well, that's not the truth. I question the validity of that. And the old guard publications like, But I'm the New York Times, it's got to be credible.

Well, but let's not forget, Barb, the New York Times is very, very profitable. They are one of the success stories. And it's not just broad news. It's something like a Sports Illustrated. Nobody's unsubscribing to Sports Illustrated because they think it's biased ideologically. It's essentially dying because they were reliant on advertising. What do you think?

I'm not for the traditional media publications. I've been there and done that. And I am one of those that very early on predicted that it would change to the consumer driving the story, that more and more major publishers would turn to five star editors and working with the public and getting the correct story because those who really believe in what they're doing want the truth to be out there. And so, so it will always depend whether the New York Times is good this day or yesterday or whatever. It always depends on the management of that organization, the people that they're hiring as communicators and how that is being communicated. I think that traditional publications in general don't realize the valuable content that they have and the repurposing of it and being able to put together formal, formal strategies of how to use that in the now to benefit their businesses in the now.

I don't disagree with any of that, Barb. I guess where we have A slight divergence is, to me, it's not about old media. It's media that are 10, 15 years old. It is Buzzfeed, it's the Huffington Post. I mean, their whole model is the. The consumers, the public will rate, write our columns and. And celebrities would. And it really has not worked out. That's been sold and resold and so devalued. I never hear anyone talk about Huffington or HuffPost as they rebranded themselves. And Buzzfeed is another one. Their whole. Their whole mantra was, we are completely different than old media. We're all about organic, natural, or, you know, embedded ads going viral. And they have struggled massively and are essentially gone. And Vice, of course, was we are complete opposite of traditional media. And as of yesterday, they are gone. To me, it's more about if you have to diversify your revenue sources and those who have heavy diversification, selling services, selling courses, as I do, personal appearances, training, affiliate revenue, other ad revenue spot. When you've got all those revenue sources, there's one of two ways of going. You keep your cost really low, as I do, and Sean Cannell and small, small media companies do, or you scale up so massively that you get such a huge audience from all over the world, as the New York Times does. The New York Times has never had a larger audience than it does today because of its worldwide brand. Hey, I apologize, Barb. I did say to people, we're really going to answer your questions no matter what. But I love talking about this. Let's switch back, because I do want to talk about the sore throat issue. But first, Clapp has mentioned the adrenaline rush makes me choke. Choke a little, but I force it down. So here's the thing about adrenaline. It's normal to get an adrenaline rush when you're doing something you've either never done before or you rarely do. When I jumped off a cliff attached to a paraglider a couple of summers ago in Austria, I got a tremendous adrenaline rush because all of a sudden, I'm looking down and there's thousands and thousands of feet. I am tethered to a pilot with me who's right next to me. But I'm thinking, oh, my God, he could. What if he blacks out or faints or I'm dead. So the adrenaline's going and I'm like, the whole time. I'm sure for my pilot who does that 10 times a day with tourists, it was as relaxing as me sitting down at my desk and doing email, because he does it every single day. So the single easiest Way to not let the adrenaline choke you up is to try to speak more often. Look for opportunities. They are everywhere. You could be at any forum. You could be in a classroom, ask a question. You could be at a public forum, they call for questions. Most people don't ask questions. You could be walking across the parking lot to the grocery store and you see a TV camera. I've done this countless times. I just walk up to the TV reporter and say, hey, what's the big story today? Nine times out of ten they'll say, oh, we're getting reactions to people about what they think of the super bowl ads or something like that. And what I do right then is I give them an interest. What I think is an interesting spontaneous sound bite. But I'm doing it specifically so they will say, hey, can I interview you briefly? It only take a second. I say, sure. So I'm using. There's opportunities like that all the time. Now you may be in a hurry and you're with kids and you got to get home and you can't stop for five minutes. Do an interview. You don't have to. One opportunity is just come on live with me as Barb did, and talk, put your camera on, put your audio recorder on and speak. Because it's just very hard to get an adrenaline rush about something you do regularly. First time I ever drove a car, there's all sorts of adrenaline and anxiety. But now if I've got to hop in the car to go to the grocery store, I don't feel an adrenaline rush because I've done it thousands of times. So that's the easiest way to get over it. Now, in the short term, the easiest way to not let that adrenaline shut you down and choke your voice is to practice on video. You've heard me say this before, but I'm going to hold up our trusty friend. Practice your speech on video again and again and again until you love what you see. Because then if you are feeling a little bit of an out of body experience, you are having that adrenaline, you are feeling a little weird. You've already said it enough times that it can just come out naturally. You don't have to think about it as much because if there's adrenaline pulsating through your body, it's much harder to actually think, to recall information we've all seen on the sitcoms and movies where someone is so awestruck by a celebrity and they say, what's your name? I can't think. Or they're so scared by something they don't know what day it is. That is how human beings are wired. So again, the way to get over that is to say it a bunch of times so you don't have to think about it. If someone says, what was the best vacation you ever took? Or where did you meet your partner, wife or spouse or husband? Or where did you go to school? You don't have to think about it a lot because you've probably said that a whole bunch of times and it just comes out naturally. It's not that you rehearsed it, it's that you've already said it. There's grooves in your brain and it comes out easily. Okay, let's go to the next question, which Barb thankfully wanted to make sure I didn't miss. And I will answer everyone's questions today. So we're not going to cut off early. We, we do have the luxury of time. And again, everyone has different strengths and weaknesses. One of my weaknesses, I don't have the discipline and the patience to do all the editing of a video that you see on charisma on command and looking through hours and hours and hours of file footage of celebrities on talks. I don't have the patience for that. That's a weakness of mine. I'm also not patient enough to be a world class editor or any kind of editor. But one of my strengths is I am willing to go in depth and give more. And I hope that you see some value in me giving massive amounts of time here. We're, we're this week, we're pretty close to right at doing 15 hours live this week answering your questions about communication skills. So I'm pretty sure there's no one else in the world giving that much free access to communication skills expertise. So that is what I'm good at and I hope to be world class at that, even though I'm not world class at editing and adding graphics to videos. Okay, so, so I did talk about the adrenaline rush, but what happens when you actually, I do want to give a short form on that. Let's, let's do that. What do you do if you're speaking and the adrenaline starts flowing and all of a sudden you choke? Here's the thing. Do nothing. Just stop. Put a little smile on your face, take a breath for a second, then keep on going. No one will notice. What you don't want to do is. I'm joking. Sorry, I'm embarrassed. Don't ever talk about the choke. Instead, stop, take a breath, keep on going as if nothing happened. Okay, so I do really believe that's good advice. I've seen countless times people make a mistake, they make a blunder. Nobody noticed, but they called attention to it. That's what people notice. They remember that part. And what's interesting is our own sense of when we make a mistake and stop, it feels like we're in suspended animation. It seems like 10 minutes. But then when we watch a video of was a second and a half, no one noticed. Great. Speakers pause all the time. So simply putting in a pause because you're choking, in a minute, people are going to know you're choking or you're pausing there for any specific reason other than just normal flow, normal, give and take. So that's. That is what I think is the best advice there. Okay, now let's talk specifically about sore throat issues. And then clap. I see that you have added the extra details on the workshop will come to that as well. Okay, so the question is, how do you prevent a sore throat after speaking for a long time on a daily basis, this is something I've given a lot of thought to, a tremendous amount of research. So I know I'm going to want to do a long form on this one. There's no doubt. What do you do if you've been talking a lot and you're getting a sore throat? How do you prevent getting a sore throat? If you have to do a lot of speaking, for starters, lubricate. Have a bottle of water around or a glass of water. Now you don't want to drink every two seconds, people will think you're nervous or something. But every five, 10 minutes, there's nothing wrong with stopping and taking a sip of water. Some of the most famous successful comedians in the world do just that. So keep yourself lubricated. Here's what's happening. When you are speaking a lot, you're pushing more air over your vocal cords. It's drying out your vocal cords. You're also banging your vocal cords together harder when you are projecting. All of that tires your throat. It's likely to give you a sore throat. Now here's the number one tip I'm going to give to anyone who speaks a lot, who has ever had a sore throat or is worried about it. It's going to seem a little weird. I realize this, but here's the tip. Use a wireless microphone and a speaker. Many years ago, about 20 years ago, I was traveling around the country. I was training all day long, eight hours a day, and speaking. And I was on airplanes. I was in different locations. It was Six straight days for an entire week. And by day five, I lost my voice. Couldn't talk. It was. It was just dried up and cracked. What had happened is I had a cold, took medication, antihistamines that dried me out. Plus, on dry airplane air, plus speaking more, all of those things came together, and my vocal cords were turned essentially to dust. So it made me realize I got to do something differently. Here's the number one difference after that that saved my voice, saved my throat, and made sure that never happened to me again. I used a speaker and a wireless microphone, but the microphone on here had a speaker in the back of the room. The beauty of that is I never had to project because I knew there was a microphone right here. So even if I was in a room with 50 people and somebody is 25ft away, I wouldn't have to raise my voice like this. I could just speak in a normal conversational tone of voice. That way I wasn't banging my vocal cords together harder. I wasn't pushing more air out over my vocal cords. And it made it a more relaxing experience for me. And. But it still worked for my audience because I had the speaker, the amplification, they could hear me fine. Because here's the thing, people say, well, T.J. i don't need the speaker. I speak plenty loud. Here's the problem. If you have to stand up and speak for 2 minutes, 5 minutes, even 10 minutes projecting, sure, that probably won't make your throat sore, probably won't matter, probably won't hurt. But if you have to speak for 20 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour a day, it will bang your vocal cords together. It will dry it out. You are going to have a sore throat. Beyond that, you're physically just going to feel tired if you're projecting all the time. Now, here's something that may shock you. Even when I trained people, two in a room, three in a room, I would still use the microphone and the speaker. Now, the speaker might be on a very low setting, but it was just enough to juice the volume. So I wasn't tempted to raise my voice. The way to protect your voice is to speak in a way that you're not having to project louder than usual. You want to speak almost like you're talking on the phone, because I'm sure you've talked on the phone before with someone for maybe two, three hours. Your throat was fine because you were only trying to project to the microphone right here. Right now. My microphone is right here. It's just out of the camera reach. But Because I know it's close. I don't have to speak like this to like I'm speaking to a big room. So I save my voice. That is absolutely critical. It's going to feel awkward. Could someone say, why are you wearing a microphone? That seems weird. They could guess what, Nobody ever does that. And if they think that, who cares? You're saving your voice. The other beauty of using a microphone and a speaker, even if you're just talking to five or 10 people, is it allows you to use the full range of your voice. If you're in a training room or a lecture hall or a conference hall and you're projecting, what that does is flatten your voice. Want to thank all of you for being here today. Hear how that's kind of a. A flat tone because you're doing everything up here. If you have a microphone and a speaker, you can go loud if you want to, but you can also whisper. Everyone will still hear you. So you give the fuller range of your voice back to yourself. It makes it easier for you. It protects your voice and it saves the voice. Other things, really obvious thing, don't yell, don't scream. I hope you don't anyway, but that is the problem. I won't mention his name, but there's an extraordinarily famous motivational speaker who has done so much yelling over his career, he's basically destroyed his vocal cords. And there is this frying sound in his vocal cords because of these high energy things he does to yell. So you really want to be very, very careful about ever yelling because it can do damage to your vocal cords. Now if you are speaking all day and you know you got to speak all day tomorrow and your throat is feeling sore, then be careful to give it extra rest tonight. If you were going to go out to a party or a loud restaurant and talking to people, maybe you don't. Talking over other people, talking over noise, talking over music is very stressful to the voice because again, you're banging your vocal cords together. You're putting a lot more air over your vocal cords. It's drying it out. So be very careful about that. Your voice is an instrument. Take good care of it. For so many professions, it is extraordinarily important. If you lose your voice, you could in fact lose your livelihood. So protect it. You probably protect your car. Wash your car, get maintenance, oil servicing for your car. You need to really cautiously guard your voice. Protect it, don't yell, don't scream. Things like smoke can irritate it a great deal. A lot of reasons, good reasons for not smoking, but protecting your vocal cords is one of them. Now if you do feel like you've over talked and your voice is sore, your throat is sore, be careful. I would caution you against using a typical drugstore spray that is alcohol based temporarily. It will take some of the soreness away. Hey, sounds good. Why wouldn't I want to do that? TJ the alcohol will dry out your throat and make it feel worse when you're talking again more so I'm not saying you can never use it, but if you finished a long week of speaking and your throat is sore finally at the end of the week and you know you're not going to speak for the next three days, maybe you you use a throat spray with an alcohol base. But otherwise if you're going to do any speaking, I would avoid any throat spray that has any alcohol in it because it might feel good temporarily but it will dry it out. It will make the problem worse. So keep your throat well lubricated with plain old fashioned water or filtered water. If you're drinking something warm, hot tea, something that doesn't have a lot of caffeine in it or other irritants is the best way to go. Take care of your voice and it will take care of you. Okay, so let me hit stop on that. I hope that was helpful because that is something. Now what I didn't say there because I didn't want to go into too much detail is, is I was so serious about this. I consulted doctors and all sorts of experts and actually came up with my own throat spray that I did use for many years. It's a throat spray that singers also use and it has glycerin in it which coats your throat but does not have any alcohol in it. I just found it too difficult to market it. And while I never had any complaints, I also didn't want to test the limits of liability and get sued because someone could use the spray. Completely unrelated fall over the heart attack. I don't want to deal with lawsuits so I don't personally deal with the sprays anymore. I try to talk less. The other thing I didn't say in that recorded video is what I have found. If my throat hurts too much, my voice hurts too much after a day of training, means I talk too much, means I didn't let other people talk enough. Now just in the last three weeks where we've been experimenting in this new studio, in this new format, in this live format, I am actually speaking a lot more than I used to. So I'm very consciously trying to make sure I don't over project now. My microphone is right here. It's just out of frame. So I try to imagine as if I'm speaking to a person this closely so that I'm not over projecting. But it's also why you do see me drinking a little more frequently than you probably see other podcast hosts, video hosts, people doing live things because I am doing it longer. I don't want to have a sore throat. I don't want to dry things out. Now, that may change over time because we're going to start adding other segments, having guests where they speak more. We're going to have ads running so I'll have time when I'm not on camera, when I can do that, so you don't have to see as much of that. Okay. All right, so let me go back to some of these questions and good to see Matt have joined us and a few other folks have too. It says Facebook user from what I see. So if you want to register with Stream, you don't have to, but if you wanted to register with Streamyard, then I would be able to see who you are, who you are. So I'm just getting my mouse here so I can go back and see if there's other questions I have missed. Okay, you know what? Let me do a short form on the sore throat because I do think that's important to a lot of people. What do you do if you speak a lot and all of a sudden you're getting a sore throat? You're throat actually hurts? What that means is you're not giving it proper care. You need to give your throat more water and stop talking as loudly. Use a speaker if you want to, but if you talk loudly for hours at a time, your voice is going to get sore. Listen to it. Okay. I don't know that I'm completely happy with that. Sometimes when you talk out for 8, 10 minutes, compressing it can be a challenge. So I'm still experimenting in my own mind. Maybe I start with the short version and do the long one second instead of what I've been doing. So I want to share with you sort of what's going on in my mind as a creator and how I deal with some of these issues. Not because I have guaranteed the absolute best system, but so you can at least see one process, thought process of how someone did it if you have to deal with these issues yourself. Okay, let's go through more of the questions. I want to make Sure. I didn't leave anyone out. Sanders says, thanks a lot. You made my day. And that was, that's in relation to the question about how do you end a conversation politely. I'm glad that was helpful. And if you don't mind, again, I'm not fishing for a compliment, but I want to know what was helpful about what I said. I mean, I certainly love hearing that I made somebody's day. You made my day for that. But if you could even be more specific so I could know what resonates. So when that question comes up again, what tip did I give you that you're actually going to use? Would be very helpful to me if you could share that. Okay. We dealt with a sore throat issue. Moonar says, tj, I would say you try all forms of content. It would help your content to reach more people. Okay. I mean, I. That's what I'm trying to do. So I'm doing ultra long form live. What we're doing today, three hours live. I'm doing the traditional long form YouTube, which is anything over a minute to typically 20, 25 minutes long. Doing one of those a day, although typically they're three to five minutes. I'm trying to get them up to eight to ten minute version. I'm doing the YouTube shorts and shorts that can be seen on other social media platforms. And so I'm trying to cover all the bases. If you feel like I've missed one, by all means, let me know. Not sure I completely got the nuance of the question. Clapp writes regarding the workshop. It's a one and a half hour weekly over 11 weeks with a course schedule to cover the design thinking process, how to make a company productization business plan, sales for the first five weeks. Okay, now that's the kind of detail I can work with. So Clapp has asked what is the best way to conduct a workshop in this case for business people that is an hour and a half long for 11 weeks and it's once a week and involves every aspect of a business, especially sales. So the number one thing you can do is, sorry if that's gross, I just bit my tongue. What I mean by that is learn the discipline to talk less. Now, since you have the luxury of speaking to them once a week for 11 weeks, I'm going to assume you can give some homework. This is where you need to speak them most. You need to limit the hour and a half so that 90% of the time it's their speaking, not you. And this is a, this is a very Hard thing to really grasp, especially if you've been training for fewer than 15 years. Because I was guilt. I was as guilty as the next person on this. I'm thinking, wow, I got opportunity to train. I want to show people how smart I am. I want to tell more stories and give more examples and more demonstrations and show them how compelling I am. I was guilty of that. Don't do that. Really advanced trainers realize you don't want people leaving the training saying you're a great trainer. You want people leaving the training saying they are now great entrepreneurs, ready to start their business or whatever it is you're training. You want the individuals you train to feel great about their knowledge, their skill set, their new abilities. Because when that happens, they can't help but think you are a great trainer after the fact when they reflect on it. This is why I tell people, don't worry about getting the standing ovation. For the most part, meaningless focus. Whether you're giving a keynote speech, talking for 10 minutes, or talking for an hour and a half or 11 weeks, focus on helping people transform themselves the most in a positive way. If you do that, everything else will work out very nicely. So that's really what I want you to to focus on. Now, the way to do that, what I would recommend in a workshop like that, is to have a flipped classroom. You know, I'm going to do this one from this angle, but record it. So what's the best way to really help people? If you're leading a workshop and for example, you're meeting with them an hour and a half a week for 11 weeks, don't fall into the trap of feeling like you have to lecture for an hour and a half. Big, big mistake. The best model these days is using a flipped classroom. That means when you're together, live, whether it's virtually or in the same room, the instructor, the teacher, the workshop leader isn't doing the talking. The lectures can be delivered in between the time you get together. You can do it in a video. You can do it through readings. You, as the instructor, can give your insights, your information to people that they can do as homework. They can watch videos of you on their own time. They can read your insights. When you're together, you want to help them the most. And most people learn by doing. If, for example, you're doing a seminar on entrepreneurship and people have to learn how to give sales presentations for their product for their new company, don't just talk about it, don't give them bullet points and a slide on theory, have Them literally stand up and give their sales pitch. Maybe bring in a few people from outside to act as the sharks to judge them, put them in the hot seat, let them know there's going to be pressure. Video record their sales presentations, get feedback from independent observers, have them critique themselves. That's something they'll truly remember. You can do this with every single aspect you teach. The majority of what you want to do as a workshop leader is you want to get your participants to do the work. I'm going to say something controversial, but I'll say it. The best workshop leaders, the best trainers in the world, are frankly kind of lazy. I know I am. It's hard work for me to talk for an hour and a half, two hours, three, eight hours a day and, you know, be this singing clown and this court jester. It's relatively easy for me to ask someone to stand up. Now tell me about your business idea. Now give me your sales pitch. Now tell me why I should invest with you and then shut my mouth. I'll sit down, I'll shut my mouth. Well, now listen to this participant. In some cases, we'll video record that participant. Watch it, learn together. Someone who listens to you say the most brilliant idea in the world may have some understanding of it. They might remember fragments of it. In theory, there's a chance they might act on it and incorporate it into what they actually do. But if someone takes your idea and actually has to work it out, demonstrate it, do it with their own hands, face, voice, mind, body, try to direct it to someone else and it becomes an experience, something they've actually, actually done. Now you've made an impact. Now they understand it intellectually, but emotionally, because they know how they felt when they did it. People can talk about, oh, I've got a great new concept for a business and I've got a great way of getting investors excited. It's easy to do that. Actually giving the presentation, asking people for money, even in a simulated manner, is much harder to do. But when you've done it and you feel good about it, now you have real confidence, you've learned something not just at the intellectual level, but the emotional level and the muscle memory level. Now you've had a real impact, and chances are you did that as a trainer by only speaking five or ten minutes out of that hour and a half session. Infinitely more powerful than speaking and training and talking for the entire 90 minutes. That's how you make the biggest impact as a trainer. Okay, so I'm going to stop the recording. There I hope you found that useful. I really do believe it. I understand some subjects. Some subject matters are harder to do that than others. If you're talking about financing of power companies and there's just a whole lot of really basic yet complex information involving billions of dollars in the way deals are structured and financed, you may have to do more traditional PowerPoint stuff. I still find that get people to do the work in advance. If they're motivated, if they want to learn, they will in fact do that. Excuse me, once. I think my floor map has changed. Some of you who have seen me do my Amazon influencer videos recently know I stand on one of these things which you may have in your kitchen. I stand on it to make it easier on my feet and just give more cushion. I think the, the mat actually changed positions, so I took a moment to just change it. There again, we're live here today. I'm showing you, warts and all, how not every content creator, but how one content creator, this one actually creates content. Courses, webinars, short form videos, social media videos, training pitches, advertisements. We're doing it all here. This is sort of a workshop. So following kind of the Gary Vaynerchuk model of what he proposes all the time, people do rather than create the finished product with all this massive creativity and sparkle. Document your process for people and let them see your journey and that can be helpful to them. Okay, let's go ahead with more questions. I think I dealt with with Hassan's clap. I think we dealt with that. New comments have come in and okay, so Madiffs wants to know how to eliminate filler words for a perfect speech and how to work on it. So that is a popular topic and I have a little device for it. It's come up before. I am going to step off camera for just a moment to show you the device I use because I do think it's helpful. I realize now I am straining my voice a little because I'm much further away from the microphone, but I just had to go over to my briefcase to get this little sticker which people really, really find useful. So I'm going to open it up. I believe I have one right here. And it's going to sound silly, almost trivial, and yet it really does work. What I have is a sticker and I have the words er. And I believe I have like the most common verbal ticks. At least with. It's a little blurry. At least with a layer we go at least with a lot of the audiences I work with that's blurred out a minute. I do have this on continuous auto. Oh, it's because my face is in front of it now. It should work okay. By the way, I have the video camera settings for a face for continuous auto focus. So now you should be able to see it because my face is blocked. But then I move this out, and it's going to lock onto my face, and that's why it becomes blurry. So what I have is the international red no sign around these words. So all I do is I put that on my client's watch, on their cell phone. Whatever it is. I'm just putting this back in my briefcase. Sorry to be rude to you, because what happens is we all look at our cell phone hundreds of times a day. Our watch, if you still wear a watch, I wear a watch. You could put it on your computer screen and it gives reminders. So if you get a hundred reminders a day, don't say, don't say. You're not going to stop saying instantly. After a day or two, you'll realize you're saying it. It'll still come out, but you'll have this sort of duh moment. You realize you said it. After three or four days, you'll almost catch the. The. The verbal, but it still comes out. But after a week of looking at this constant visual reminder, you will catch it before it comes out. You'll be tempted to say, ah. The image comes up. You can simply pause and say nothing and catch it. And now you won't say or. It's highly effective. I put this on the watches and phones of billionaires, Nobel prize winners, top executives around the world, and they all say the same thing. Wow, T.J. this really worked. It doesn't happen in one day, but you don't need it to happen in one day. You just need it to happen over the long run. So that's an easy quick fix. The bigger picture, though, is let's go to the root cause of the ums and ahs. Typically, it's because you're trying to give a speech. That's really boring. What I have noticed again and again working with executives, clients all over the world, is when they're just talking to me, the ums and ahs are not noticeable because they're so few. And then if they're giving a speech, they stand up, they give a presentation. I'm video recording it. And as you can see here, the next slide, lots of uhs and ums come out. And it's in part because they're putting all this pressure on their brain to remember a whole bunch of facts that are kind of boring and tedious and delivered in a way that they don't normally speak that way. So what's happening is you're putting a lot of pressure on your brain to remember a whole laundry list of data points. That's not the way you normally talk. It's not. Not the way you normally think. So you're putting this extra pressure. So your brain is saying, oh, hold on a minute, let me, let me get, let me get the next fact. That's what's happening. And the problem is not the odds and ums. The problem is you're trying to talk in an unnatural way. So the solution isn't necessarily my tick buster, although it does help. The solution is you need to stop with the massive data dump. Focus on one idea at a time. Tell an example, tell a story, flesh it out, and go to the next one. And that will solve your problem. The other problem that deals, that creates these uhs and ums is you feel this rush. Like, oh, the boss said be quickly. Yeah, hurry on, get it, get with it. You know, faster, faster. Be concise. Be concise. That's a problem because if you try to rush, you're upsetting natural speech patterns. You're preventing yourself from putting in a pause. Pause is punctuation. What's a comma but a pause in a sentence? What's a period? A slightly longer pause. What's a paragraph break? A slightly longer pause. What's a chapter break? A longer pause. What's a space between words? It's a pause. You would say you'd be more concise if you just crammed three paragraphs together and you took out all the commas, periods, sentence breaks, paragraph breaks, and all spaces between words. You could squeeze a lot more words on a page. Be more concise. Would it help communication? No, it would kill your eyes even looking at a page where every word is squished together. So that's a part of the problem with this idea of, oh, I just need to stop saying no. You need to stop trying to cram quickly a whole bunch of words into the air. The reason most people say be concise and be faster is because most people are too boring when they speak. So if you have a choice between being really long winded and boring versus being concise and boring, yeah, it's better to be concise, but that's not the real choice. The choice is another choice, which is be really interesting and take as much time as you need to make that idea that's useful to the audience come alive, be understood and be remembered. You do that, you don't have to worry about these other issues or being so concise. Fair enough. Now, I said most of those things before and I think I have most of those things in a video somewhere, but it occurred to me I may have said some stuff there that I would have liked to use for a future video. So maybe shame on me for not recording that. Okay, so Clap says, thanks, tj, Sounds great Facebook user, and I can't see who you are. It says, yes, I agree. And I'm not sure what you're agreeing with now because I forgot, Sandish says, I'm going to apply it on my colleague. Okay, great. And Sandesh, I believe, had written the comment about how do you get out of a conversation that just is going on and on and on, but boring? You don't want to be impolite to someone, but you need to end the conversation. And Claps says, wow, that is really fantastic. So thanks, Clap. I want to, I don't want to sound like I'm fishing for compliments again, but when someone says something is great, fantastic, wonderful, helpful, my inclination is always to say, well, thanks, but what specifically? So Clap, if you have anything that you can share that was really specific, that was helpful. Okay. And Clapp just wrote, I like the concept about the flipped classroom. Now, couple of caveats about the flipped classroom. There's always going to be somebody who doesn't do the homework. Okay, guess what? There's always going to be somebody who shows up late or leaves early or has a toothache and isn't paying attention. You cannot solve every possible theoretical problem when you're conducting a workshop, a training session, trying to help people. All you can do, I believe, is create an environment where you've done everything you can to increase the odds that as many people as possible get the most dramatic improvement. That's certainly what I try to do. So with a corporation or an executive hires me for a day of media training, what I typically do is we have a pre training conference call a couple weeks before we go over what we're trying to accomplish, make sure we're on the same track, and then I tell them, hey, if we're going to do this, it can't be theory and me lecturing. You got to come in with a specific media message. For a scenario where you have three messages and half a dozen sound bites for each one and you need to record it on video, should only take 90 seconds. It's not a big speech. So if you look at it once, record it, see a few things you want to change. Because I want you to send me one that you think is the best you can do. You do another one, look at it, see a couple of changes, do it again, look at it, make a few changes and you like it, you send it to me. That's only nine minutes of work. Surely you have nine minutes you could spend on homework before we get together, right? And of course they had to agree. And I said, look, if you have any questions about messages or sound bites, I'm going to send you. In this case, I send them a PDF of this book and I say it's got a short chapter on messages and sound bites. If you want more feedback or more help, I'm sending you a 30 hour online video based media training course. You don't have to do any of it, but if you want more tips on how to look your best on camera, there are dozen videos. If you want more tips on how to shape a media message, there's a dozen videos on that. If you want more tips on how to create sound bites, there's a section where there's another dozen videos on that, but you don't have to do any. But it's there if you want it. So that's what I put out. This puts massive pressure on them. They don't realize it yet, but they record themselves. They look at it and they realize, oh my God, this is awful. I don't know any of this, this is embarrassing. I don't want to embarrass myself, especially if they're doing the training with other colleagues. So what happens is instead of spending nine minutes, quite often they may spend two, three, four hours on it, but they're learning each time. So by the time they come into a training with me, they've already learned so much. And that's literally what they say. They walk in the door. TJ I've already learned so much because I put the pressure on them. Now. Do all of them watch all the video? No, but some of them watch some of the videos. Do all of them read all the book? No, but some of them read some of the chapters. And these days pretty much all of them do a homework video. And that advances the training so much faster because the old days and the way most corporate trainers do media training and public speaking training is the the individual comes in and you're starting cold and maybe they've never heard their own voice coming out of a speaker on video talking about Something professionally. So you're going into all these advanced topics and all these things and they're thinking, oh, my God, I hate my voice. I got to change my voice. Voice, waste of time. They don't need to change their voice. So that's in my own situation, doing media training and public speaking training. That's how I get the most out of this, is I get them to do all this work, get their brain working, get them thinking, get them learning with my guidance, but without me having to be there. So it gets a lot more out of the training day. Now, quick note. In a moment, we're going to be shifting gears and talking specifically about Amazon Influencer videos. So we are going to be going through more products. I'll be sharing with you as much as I can without breaking any Amazon rules. Sort of my journey of how you can be an Amazon influencer creator and make videos to make money from your own speaking skills. So that'll be coming up shortly. We'll be going through that. I want to see if there's a few more comments that have come in. And claps says you like the concept about the flipped classroom. Great. As well as the part for making other people feel good when learning the skills. So very important there. And I maybe haven't played this completely right in the past because sometimes I've been accused of being too harsh because someone will say, you know, what do I do about feeling nervous, feeling scared about public speaking? And I have perhaps been too glib because my stock response is, if you're nervous about, you know, in fact, let me do a video on this one. Okay, maybe I've been too glib in the past. People have said, tj, I feel nervous about public speaking. I'm scared, nervous. What can I do to feel better? My stock response has always been good, you should feel nervous. Just chances are you're going to be like most speakers, which is really boring. You're going to bore your audience. They're going to check out and check their email and look at their phone. You should be nervous. I wish more people were nervous about speaking. Maybe they would do something. People are taken back a little. I don't mean to be unsympathetic. I am sympathetic to you. I was once nervous speaking. But we got to go deeper and really look at what's the reason for being nervous. Do you get nervous doing something you know, you're great at? If you know your whole family loves your pot roast recipe and you've just made a pot roast, you know, they're Going to love it. Are you nervous when you put it on the table? Probably not. You're looking forward to them saying, this is fantastic. I love it. So the reason most of us are nervous about speaking or presenting is we're not sure we prepared the right way. We are afraid that the audience will find us boring, uninteresting. Well, guess what? That's a very real possibility. Think of how many times you sit in meetings, conferences, conventions, and the speaker is in fact boring. And you do in fact pull out your cell phone, get cold it up on email, texts, social media. So it's a very, very real problem. And a little self awareness should make us realize, well, if most of the speakers I see are boring in my industry, isn't there a chance people are saying that about me? So let's go to a real solution. The real solution isn't to meditate and visualize a standing ovation or visualize or fantasize about everyone sitting on the edge of their seat listening to us. The real solution is to be interesting, to have ideas that we convey when we're speaking in a way that's understandable and interesting and memorable. So how do you do that? The number one problem people have is they do a data dump. Fact, fact, fact, bullet point, number, number, slide with lots of bullet points. You already know that puts you to sleep. You already know that's not effective. That's boring people. So you should know if you have a speech that way, you should in fact feel nervous and uncomfortable and anxious because you know you're going to fail. I want to set you up for success. So the way to do that is to have an interesting speech, to have a clear, clear sense of what is it. I want this audience to do what are at most the handful of ideas. They're going to motivate the audience to do what I want or to help them in some way. And then to spend the rest of my time giving examples, case studies, stories, fleshing out these ideas to make them memorable. And then finally practice this speech on video until you like it. If you've seen a video of yourself giving a speech, you think, wow, that's interesting. I'd watch that person, guess what? When you walk into that speech, I don't care if the audience is 20 people, 202,000, 20,000, you won't be nervous anymore because you've already seen your success. Okay, we're stopping that one. Okay, so that is camera three. That's what I'm doing for that one. I think that covered it pretty well. If you got anything useful out of that, please let me know. I would love, I'd love to hear from you. I'm going to go ahead and start lining up my products and just giving you a quick preview of the products that we're going to be reviewing today for the Amazon Influencer program. I put these in my, I was going to do it yesterday, put them in my bag yesterday. We didn't have time because of so many questions and other activities with our live sessions yesterday I didn't get to do it. So I don't even remember what's in here. So let's pull it out and see what we're going to talk about. I've got a hydropeak thermos which I do use. You can see a dent in it or two that just shows I use it. I'll be talking about this. My daughter and all of her friends at school are absolutely in love with the Stanley thermos, so. And we did buy a couple of those, but I didn't want to do a review of it because there's been a lot of news lately about how Stanley thermoses have lead in them. Now, if you look at the fine print, the story goes on to say unless it's really broken or cracked or scratched, the lead can't get into you. So it doesn't appear to be a huge health risk. But I'm just not comfortable endorsing something or reviewing something where I've been given some evidence it might not be good for you. So we'll be doing this thermos again. Does anyone really need a review for me about toothpaste? This just happens to be the toothpaste I use all the time. I'm not going to say it gets rid of cavities or makes your teeth whiter. I'm just going to say that I use it. I like the taste and that's what I use. So again, what I'm looking at for in my product reviews is giving candid observations and insights about why a particular product benefits me. An Exacto knife, a well known brand. So much easier for opening boxes than just a knife. So we'll be talking about that. Here's a great little handy speaker that I use. We use this around the pool outside going to the beach. It is, I'm not sure I'm pronouncing it correctly, Rihanna. Again, these are all products that I bought on Amazon, have used, have recommended to others. Although I don't know that I routinely recommend a toothpaste. But it is one that I really do use and then apologies if this seems overly personal, but this is just the Gillette antiperspirant that I use. Not going to do a demonstration, don't worry, will not be taking any clothes off. But this is one that I've used for a long time now that just works for me and I'll just share why I like it. So that's what we're going to talk about about in the Amazon Influencer section of our show today. It's a quick note and because sometimes I do these entirely on my own, can be done. There's no reason why you can't make all of your own Amazon Influencer videos by yourself. But typically I have been assisted by my business partner who happens to be my wife. She comes and does the holds the cell phone and that makes it go a little faster. And I'm just going to ask her again, this is real time. I'm just going to ask her. We're waiting to do the Amazon Influencer videos, period. Please come quickly. Please try to be polite. So I'm going to see if she's on her way over. Meanwhile, I'm going to get ready the production ready. Now I've got some super fancy Sony, I don't know if you call them a seven. I've got a lot of fancy cameras here. We're not using any of those for the Amazon Influencer program. In the interest of time and putting a lot out there, we're doing everything right on a cell phone. The other reason is that I want you to see that you don't need fancy cameras, that you can do this. You don't have to wait until you can afford a full studio. You don't need special lighting. By the way, my lights have turned off. If anyone knows how to make these not turn off automatically after two hours, it would be very much appreciated. Appreciated. So I'm now coming back and turning these lights on and hoping to give a little more polish to the studio, a little more accent to it. So I'm going to take my camera, I use an extra microphone now I have a shotgun microphone that's very, very powerful that I'm using coming to you today. But I'm going to use just a very simple microphone that I plug in that I put right on. And my business partner, camera operator, producer, editor and wife Joanne has just walked in. We'll be doing these in just a moment. So I'm putting this microphone. It lost its wind guard, so I'm putting the microphone, wind guard back on. I am Putting the receiver into the phone. So this allows me to not be tethered to a phone. We don't have to use wires. I'm putting this receiver right into the phone. I'm going to power the microphone on to get a green light. You don't have to use an external microphone, but it does make the quality of the audio much, much better. And these are so inexpensive. If you're interested in what microphones I use, I do have product reviews of them on my Amazon Influencer storefront, which you can find by going on my YouTube page. My about the about you section. I list my Amazon Influencer store. So I'm going to put this microphone right there. It's. Well, maybe I'll put it just a little bit higher. Okay. Sometimes I put it on a lapel to hide it more, but I think that's good enough. Okay, so I'm going to hand Joanne the camera and again I'm going to show you soup to nuts because there are a million videos out there on how to be a superstar on Amazon and the Amazon Influencer program. I'm showing you in live time, step by step, the fun part, the easy part, but the hard part and the tedious part of how you make these videos. Okay, so let's just go to the first product. And for those of you who haven't seen me do this before, we're just going to do it right here in front of you. You can see it. My wife may ask me to stand in a different place, but we always do the same format. I do a vertical video, a horizontal video, a vertical short form, typically 15 second or less video, and then a longer horizontal video and then a longer horizontal video with the idea that with basically five at bats with five lottery tickets, one of them will sort of make it into the distribution system on Amazon, gain some traction, get some views, get some clicks, which will result in revenue. So that's what we're doing. So I'm being quiet here because if I move my mouth too much, it makes it harder for her to take my picture. So again, I'm doing these unscripted. There are some people wildly successful who script, write, rewrite, rewrite, shoot a million ways, edit, B roll, graphics, music, good for them. I'm going the route of doing a mass volume, trying to get to a thousand product reviews as quickly as possible, typically in one take to see what works. I love my hydro plea cut. So again, it's not uncommon to make a mistake. Just hit delete, don't edit it out, just Hit delete and do over. I said hydroplique. That's not the name of it. I love my hydropeak thermos. It's big. It keeps my water cold. I use it every day on the pickleball court. So am I trying to appeal to everyone? No. There may be some people who hate pickleball and think I'm a loser for playing it. I don't care. I'm not representing the brand here. I'm just giving one person's perspective. Has my tie gotten crooked? A little bit. Okay. So we just did the first short form video vertical. Now we're going to do a longer horizontal. I love this hydropeak thermos. It keeps my water cold. Sometimes I'll forget to use it and go a second day to play pickleball. Take it. And the water is still cool in size. I love the color. I love the size. It's very durable. I've dropped it before on a hard pickleball court. There's a dent or two, but it still works perfectly. How long was that one? How long? 22. 22. So in general, I like to try to hit 30 seconds because there's a greater chance that someone watches it of me receiving some monetization or some affiliate fee. But I'm not going to go back and redo it. These are done mostly spontaneously. One take with the idea that it's better to get 100 ads up in a week, and maybe 80 of them don't make any money. But 20 of them start to do something than it is to get three that are perfect and have a lot fewer odds. Okay, now we'll go longer. This hydropeak thermos seems like a part of the family. I use it every day. I carry it with me to the pickleball court every day. I live in South Florida where it is hot and muggy, and it's important to me to be properly hydrated. I don't want to rely on a vending machine that's pedaling other stuff. I want to take my own filtered water. That's why I use this hydropeak. It does a fantastic job. It's durable. I've dropped it many times, have a dent or two in it. It still works perfectly. If you're looking for a thermos that is durable, sturdy, doesn't leak, I don't think you can go wrong with a hydropak. See, even that one I messed, I call it a hydropak. It's a hydropeak. I messed that up. We're Gonna go with it. We're not gonna redo that. We'll just keep going. So that's one. One product down. It's five separate ads. Now we're gonna do the exacto knife, Taking the. Short form vertical. I love my X acto knife. It's so much easier opening packages. I don't have to get a knife. It's simple, it's safe, and it's retractable. 3, 2, 1. My X Acto knife is very handy to have around the house. Packages come in from Amazon, other places all the time rather than just using a knife or scissors. This is easy to grasp, so much easier to open packages. And once I retract it, it is completely safe. The X acto knife does one thing well. It does it well every time. It's something that I can't imagine not having at the home or the office. How long Was that one? 28. 28. So I'm, I'm still trying to get better at this. I'm trying to get my length a little bit longer, but again, it's going to be good enough, I think. Okay. 3, 2, 1. The X acto knife, it's an old brand, but it's still as useful as ever in the modern world. I love using my X acto knife when packages come in from Amazon and other places. I no longer have to fiddle around looking for a steak knife or pair of scissors to open the tape or open the box. I get my X acto knife, put it out a little. One quick slip and the tape is gone. I can open the box and I can get that present for myself. What I love about it is it's simple, does one thing. I push it out, use it, put it back. It's retractable, so now it's safe. This is important to me. I do have a child at home. I don't want extra razor blades and sharp things just sitting around. So I like the safety feature and it does what it's supposed to do. A steak knife does what it's supposed to do. It cuts steak. Using that to open boxes really isn't a good idea. This does the trick whether I'm at home or the office. How long was that? One minute. One minute. So that's pretty much what I wanted to do for the longer form video for people who are interested in it, the subject, then that's helpful. Let's just see if we had any quick comments from anyone else. Clap says, sounds good. I'll try to comb through the slides, which consist of many pictures and Points on how to make questionable action items. Okay, so if you're using PowerPoint, I would suggest one image per slide. If you're turning it just as a book or a document, then you can have more if it's really meant to be red. Okay, next product. Okay, let me make sure it's anti. Antiperspirant. Antiperspirant. I call it deodorant. But technically deodorant and antiperspirant are different things, so let me try to use their name. 3, 2, 1. I love this Gillette Cool Wave Antiperspirant. I've used it for years. I don't know why. It just seems to work better on my body than other forms of deodorant. It goes on easily, doesn't stain my clothes. Always smells good. I'm saying I always smell good, but it always smells good and it works. Okay, so again, I'm trying to put in some asides. How long Was that one? 18. 18. A little bit longer than we wanted, but still still short enough that it could appear on the Amazon Inspire app. I love the Gillette Cool Wave Antiperspirant. It's something I've used for years and I've tried a lot of antiperspirants and deodorants. I like that it goes on easily, doesn't stain, seems to last a long time, and I just don't have any of the irritations or stains or coloration issues that I've had with other antiperspirants. I like the way it smells. I like the way it feels. If you're looking for an antiperspirant that goes on easily, we gotta stop that. I think I ate something this morning. There's just something a little bit in my throat related to some of the questions we had earlier today. What do you do if your throat gets sore from talking too much? Drink water. In that case, I drink water and hot tea. We're going to have to do that again. Was that the second one or the third one? Okay, so we're now doing the second. And. And forgive me, I realize I'm not in frame for you watching, but we're doing this for the lighting for the video for Amazon, so that's why it is a tad askew. Okay. And did you delete that one? Yes. I do recommend when you make a mistake, go ahead and delete it instantly because it gets very difficult remembering. Was that a good one? Was that. What I like to do is just have everything lined up where I know. These are the final ones. I'm going to use makes it much easier. The Gillette Cool way. Sorry, I'm thinking about. Do I want to maybe show a second? Yeah, we'll show this now. I can't use that angle. I just wanted to make it more interesting for the people watching. Sorry. Let's do that one again. This is the second video. The Gillette Cool Wave Antiperspirant. I've used it for years. For whatever reason, I just find it easier. It doesn't stick, it doesn't stain. It continues to work. It just goes on easily. It's a brand I'm comfortable with. I like the smell. No Health seems to be irritated by it. So if you're not 100% committed to one antiperspirant, I'd recommend you give this Koolwave antiperspirant a try. It really does work. Okay. What's that? 29. So close enough to 30. Okay, now for the longer form. Now this is one. It's a bit of a stretch to talk about why you like a particular antiperspirant, but I'm just going to go with the flow and see what comes out. I love this Gillette Cool Wave Antiperspirant. Hi, I'm TJ with the TJ Walker Success Channel. And I'm often in stressful situations, giving speeches, traveling around the world, conducting workshops. And I don't want to look like I'm sweating or smell like I'm sweating. So I use this Gillette antiperspirant every single day. I found it doesn't stain my clothes. It goes on easily. I personally like the smell. Nobody's ever complained about the smell. It's not overwhelming and it just works really well. It seems to last a long time. I buy them in bulk. It works very well for me. If you're open to looking at other antiperspirants, then you may want to give this Gillette Perspiration Cool Wave Antiperspirant a try. How long was that? So that's perfectly fine for what I'm looking for in a long form video. So we've now done three products correct, And I don't know what I did with the X Acto knife, but it's around here somewhere. Okay, now, I don't know how to pronounce this. Reanuk. Reanu. So here's another example. If I want to be very clear cut with you, I don't want to hold myself out as being the perfect Amazon influencer who makes, you know, $89,000 a day in commissions. I'm not that I'm Not I'm in the beginning stages. I am about nine weeks into this program. I'm following a particular strategy may or may not work for you. My Strategy is get 1,000, maybe 5,000 product reviews up and out and then look for signals to see what patterns, what, what's really working, what isn't working. And then I can invest more time in really making higher quality quality videos and getting everything just right. So I could probably spend a few minutes researching online how to pronounce this reanuk, but I'm just not going to because I want to continue this for you and get these up and out. Okay. And Clap has posted a few more comments. I just want to be respectful of him. Think of how missed out some words. Okay, I'm glad that was helpful. Okay, Lab will take the pictures. And I think I'm going to handle this issue by just not mentioning the brand name. It's not ideal, but I'd rather do that than alienate the brand by mispronouncing their name. I love this little speaker. It's great at the beach, it's great at a barbecue. It turns any ordinary gathering into a party. It sounds great. Now, I actually think that was pretty good. I am sincere. We do take it to the beach. We do take it to the pool. And it does sound good. And it does make things more festive. 3, 2, 1. I love my cell phone, but I don't want to hear music just coming out of the speaker of my cell phone. That's why I love taking this speaker with me. Whether it's to the beach, to a pool, to a barbecue. The quality of the sound turns the event into a party. If you're looking for something that's really light, portable, that holds a charge, this speaker does the trick. Okay, again, I'm not following anyone's marketing talking points. This is how I actually feel about this. Are you looking for something light and easy to take around to bring your music to your next party? Beach, barbecue, pool event? This speaker does the trick. I've had this for several years, have used it countless times with friends, family members, gatherings we've had, and it turns any normal gathering into more of a party. It sounds great without me having to lug around big speakers or find outlets. It holds its charge. It lasts for hours. It sounds great. It syncs up easily and quickly to my cell phone. I'm not the greatest tech wizard, but it's easy. Easy to use if you want a nice sounding speaker for your events. Home office out at the beach. This speaker Will do the job. That was the long one. Okay? I saved the last. The. The hardest product for the last. And maybe I really shouldn't do it, but I'm going to anyway, so. And again, it's not because I have qualms about the product and it's not because I'm going to make healthcare claims. You've heard of Crest for decades. You've heard of Scope. The two have come together and it tastes great. I use this every single day. 3, 2, 1. You don't need me to tell you about Crest, but you might not have used Crest plus Scope. This is toothpaste that really tastes good. Now, it's not sugary, sweet good. It's something that really makes my breath fresh. I use it every single day. And let's face it, we could all use a million different types of toothpaste. You've got choice. This is the one I like and use every day. If you haven't tried it yet, you really should. And now, long form. Hi, I'm TJ with the TJ Walker Success Channel. It's important for me that I look my best and that I have good breath that doesn't smell bad. So I do brush my teeth every single day with this toothpaste. Crust is a brand name I trust. Scope is a brand name I trust. Put them together, you've got something that does, in fact feel good, tastes good. Now, I'm not here making any medical claims. I don't know if one toothpaste is really better than the other. All I can tell you is I enjoy brushing my teeth with this and it tastes good. And I haven't had many complaints saying my breath smelled lately, so it must be doing something right. Okay. So I try to be a little light hearted, not. Not sound like I'm trying to be a medical doctor. All right, so we did those in about 20 minutes. So I'm trying to constantly get better. I'm going to go ahead and take off this microphone and say thank you to Joanne. Thank you very much. I'm going to go ahead and upload these and then I will see you at ready for pickleball. And not that long time says, so you've heard me talk about pickleball. It's not just something I say to sort of sound like I am current with the times. I do like it because it's so much more enjoyable exercise than going on a treadmill. So I'm turning off this microphone now. I'm still seeing the green light. Now it's off. I'm going to place it over here. I am going to pull out the receiver on the phone. So what I'm going to do in our remaining time, I will make an exception. If any of you clap if you're with me, Barb, Sandish, anyone else, if you have any questions, I will take your questions. We do have time finishing out the week here. It's been such a fun week and we've had so many great questions and created a lot of good content here. But otherwise I'm going to now do kind of the tedious part. Shooting the videos is one part, but you've got to get it online, you've got to get it in front of people. You have to get it into your Amazon Influencer store. So that's what I'm going to do right now. And I'm going to show you step by step exactly how I do it. First thing I do is I pull up a browser, I type in AM and I look for my page. I click my page, I hit Create content, I hit Post video, I go to photo library and I hit the last video I just did. I go done and it's now uploading that video. The other thing I'm going to do, it is Friday and I appreciate you being with me. I am going to lower my standing desk so you're going to actually see the video camera go down again. I want to, I promise to take you behind the scenes and show you everything. So I'm going to bring my chair out. Some of you have seen this before because I did an Amazon Influencer video promoting my Herman Miller Aeron chair, which I am a big fan of. Then I've now had it. Oh, it's, it's probably at least 15 years I've had this chair and it's as comfortable today as the day I bought it. To my eye, anyway, it looks the same. You know, so often you see chairs and the armrest is kind of falling apart and things are all garbled. And I can't imagine that I deserve any credit for being easier on a chair than any anyone else, but it still looks good. Anyway, so I'm now sitting down in front of you. I can't show you everything step by step because it violates Amazon's rules. But I am going to try to be as forthcoming as possible, as transparent as possible, in part because I'm hoping to motivate you to become an influence if you want to be. So it's uploading that now. This is slightly unusual. Well, I can't show you that I'll show you this part and I'm getting a weird symbol saying there's a problem, I guess uploading it. So I'm gonna, I'm going to go out, we're going to start that one over because I do in fact want to make sure that I've signed on to my, to my WI fi. There's always the possibility that for some reason I was not on the. Well, and I am on the high speed WI fi, a very high speed WI fi at my office. So that wasn't the problem. So anytime you're uploading to a big corporate website, even one that's in the store storage business, there's always a possibility something can go wrong. So I'm going to start again, over again, going to my Amazon store. I hit post video, I hit photo library. I'm hitting the first video I see, which is the last one that we just shot. So it's now processing that video. This takes a few seconds. It will be uploading that. Once it does that, I will label it, give it a summary description or a title if it's a picture, and then hit submit and then do it again. So as I mentioned to you, it's not that I have figured out everything with Amazon Influencer and that I'm making a billion dollars a month. I can tell you, I think without violating any policies of Amazon, I am making some money. But like a lot of new businesses, you know, if you go into a new business, and that's what this is for me, if you go into a new business thinking I better make a whole lot of money, I better make $10,000 pure profit the first month, you're typically going to be disappointed. I have been, I think it's not false modesty to say I've been very successful in the online training course world and have a couple million students, but I wasn't successful in the first week, the first month, the first year, or even the first decade. It took me a long time to get to 2 million students. And what I'm trying to do with this has become a lot faster. I don't want to spend 15 years becoming successful with this, but I do want to take the necessary time to make sure it has a chance to succeed. All right, so now I'm, I'm labeling it. It's uploading it now. I don't know if I bought this on Amazon because sometimes my family, we buy things like toothpaste from Costco or Publix. So I don't see it in the Orders. I'm now going to go to the Browse. Browse Amazon in general. I'm going to dictate Crest Scope. It pops up Crest. I see the product, I see product. I hit tag. I hit done. Title. Crest and Scope are two brands I trust. Done. Now in that case, I didn't capitalize the S for Scope since it is a brand name. I hope they're not offended, but I not I'm not going to go back to redo it because it is Friday afternoon as we're recording this and I'm trying to get up and out and let you get on with your day as well. So now I do another one. Hit Create content photo library. Hit the second one. Hit. Done. It is now uploading. And it's the uploading the videos that take the the longest as you're doing this. And it does seem to change by phone because when we're doing this on my wife's phone, it goes up, it uploads much, much faster. And it may be because I have a setting recording the videos in a higher quality than they need to be. In general, I'm a fan of using the highest quality that you can of any particular video, but you don't necessarily have to do it that way if time is of the essence so it's uploaded, I go to browse history, search, dictate Crest Scope toothpaste. Tag the product. Done. Done. Title. My mouth and teeth thank me every day. Want to be very careful to not make any health care claims or Amazon could reject the video. What I've seen, more likely they just don't show it. They don't post is anywhere. So you don't even know you're being essentially banned until you look at data later. Create content Video Photo Library. Now I'm doing the short form vertical video. I hit done. And for those of you just joining us, we're sort of finishing the tail end of three hours of Live today. I am going through now the tedious aspect uploading Amazon influencer videos that I made in the last half an hour right here. So I'm going to browse history. Crest Scope Toothpaste. Finding the product. I hit tag for the product. So Amazon connects my video ad review to to the product. And so when someone clicks on it, takes them to the product, they buy it, I get a commission. Your mouth and teeth will thank you. Hit done. Submit. Go to storefront. Create content photo photo library. Now I hit the first picture. Browse History. Crest Scope Toothpaste Tap tag. Done. Caption A marriage of two great brands. Go to Storefront. Now I'm going to do the final picture for that last product where I made an ad photo library. Select photo. Done. It's uploading. Browse history, select dictate, Crest, scope, toothpaste. Find it, tag it. Done Caption. Now I can use Scope and Crest together every day at the same time. That may be a little redundant, but I think it, it makes the point. Go to Storefront. Create content photo. I think I did both pictures. Sometimes I can forget, so I'll have to go back and check. So now I'm going to go to the next product. The speaker. Done. It's uploading the speaker and I need to pull it up here so I can make sure I spell the name correctly. I'm pretty sure I bought this on Amazon because I'm not saying this is a good thing, but I'm. I don't really like going to stores and parking and shopping and walking around and dealing with traffic and dealing with potential of a parking fee or fine, something like that. So I do tend to buy things through Amazon. I realize that might not be the best thing for local businesses or the environment, but I also am saving gas, not driving to stores and, and saving a lot of time, which I like to think I'm helping other people with more time to do things like this. So that video is uploading now. I wish I knew how to pronounce the name of this product. If I start selling something, I'll then take the time to figure it out because I want to tell people about the products I've sold. Okay, that's uploaded. Go to your orders. So that time I smell that didn't show up. Let me go again. Speaker. Okay, so it did show up. That's unfortunate because it says it's currently unavailable, so typically you don't want to do. It's also interesting in that it has 96,000 reviews of a 4 1/2 rating. Wait a second. So when I tap on the Reanex, it's sending me to an Amazon. Oh, there it is. Done. Tag product. So it's a little bit unusual to see a product. They may have another one that's very similar. So I will look for that in a minute. High quality comma lightweight comma speaker to take anywhere. Done. Submit. So sometimes what happens is they have a. They've retired one version. There's a newer version that has a slightly different name and you can link to that one because the product is so similar. So I'm going to for this next One I'm going to see if that is the situation. Post video photo library. I go to the second video on this speaker. So this time I will in fact search to see if there is perhaps a slightly newer product that's close enough where my review would still be relevant. Because I don't want to mislead people. I don't want to show this video and then the newer version is 10 times bigger and white and square. That. That wouldn't really make sense. Nor do I think Amazon would allow that. So this is uploading and now I'm going to do something a little different. I'm going to hit browse history. Now I'm going to type in the name. And I misspelled it Renux speaker. Okay, so they do have a couple of other versions. Oh, that says ort says reunix. Here's one that looks very, very similar. It looks the same. It has 20,000 reviews. Four and a half stars. I'm not associating myself with something that's a shoddy product. Great little speaker for the pool and the beach. Hit, done, hit submit. Go to storefront. Create content. For those of you just joining us, we're sort of at the tail end of a three hour session today. Hi, I'm TJ Walker and right now I'm walking people through, step by step, the process of what you actually do as an Amazon Influencer. Earlier live right here, I made 25 different Amazon influencer product reviews. Some were videos, some were photos and I did it in 20 minutes. So it's not that impressive to do 25 ads or product reviews for Amazon. Anyone can do that. A lot of people have done it. But what I tried to do to be unique and helpful to you is I did it in 20 minutes live in front of you. Now I'm showing you how I upload code, label and put these videos into a store so that people can see it. So I hit browse history reenter speaker. And so this is one of these times where you can't simply dictate. Because it's not a word commonly found in the English language. It's a made up brand name. Nothing wrong with that, but it slows me down a little. Great value in a speaker for parties and picnics. Is that the best caption? Probably not. I could use ChatGPT to come up with the perfect titles, but at this stage of my own Amazon Influencer video career, I'm going for volume to test things, basically throwing things against the wall to see what works so I can then Refine it and do an even better job with future videos. So we've done the three videos for that particular product. I'm now going to do the pictures features of the product. Those go up much faster. Reannox speaker. I find the speaker, tag it. Done. Caption A great little speaker with big sound. Hit Done. Submit post Go to Storefront. Create content. Photo post photo library. And now I go to the last photo, the vertical photo of that product. Hit Browse history. I have to type this in. Re Annex speaker tag Product Done. The perfect size and weight for a portable speaker. Submit post Go to Storefront. Okay, so we're done with this product. Product. So we've done everything from select the product to shoot the video, to edit the video. In our case, the only editing was hitting delete if I made a mistake to uploading it, to tagging it, to putting the caption, to submitting it for approval to Amazon which they typically do in about five hours or so. Great content Vote photo photo library. Now I go to the next product. Which is the deodorant, the Gillette antiperspirant. And for those of you just joining us, don't worry, I'm not going to demonstrate this. I'm not going to be taking my shirt off. So that's the last thing anyone wants to see. This is a very G rated, business friendly program and service we're trying to do here. Which is why you see me in a suit and tie and I will stay in that mode of dress typically. Quick note, even though I take the weekend off, I hope you do as well. We do post new videos, typically three videos, seven days a week here, two shorts, one long on the TJ Walker success channel, whether you're on YouTube, whether you're on Facebook. So I do hope that if you have a spare moment or two this weekend or maybe everyone else in the house is asleep and you're just looking for a little enrichment, you'll stop by the channel and watch a video or two, ideally comment on it, leave a question like the video, sign up for notifications and subscribe to the channel. Would mean a lot to me. Okay, browse history. Gillette. Cool wave. Okay, so this one I believe is one that I bought on Costco, but it is available on on Amazon. It's exactly the same product, so I will tag it again. Also has four and a half stars. I feel very comfortable recommending something that has thousands of views and four and a half stars. I found it's very rare for anything to have higher than that. And it's, it's rare to be really disappointed. I can only think of one time I've ever been disappointed by something that had four and a half stars and more than 500 reviews. It was a particular book, it was an author. And I have the book over here. I'm not going to mention her name. She's a wildly successful podcaster, video YouTuber speaker, but she has such a fan base that she was able to put out a book that was horrible. But I did buy it. So that's the only time I've personally ever been burned by a four and a half star review. Okay, great. Antiperspirant that goes on clear and doesn't stain. Clear and does not stain. Reason I redid that is I used a contraction and Amazon doesn't like you using contractions in the titles. It's okay for. Oh, that was a caption. I actually could have done that. So. No, no, I'm sorry. That was a video. That was not a. That was not a caption for a. A. Okay, so now I'm going to go create. Hit the button for create content. Hit post video post library. Go to the second video for that product. It's uploading it right now. And this, you know, we're now past our three hour mark. I do want to thank you so much for joining me this week. It's been a lot of fun, fun. I appreciate all the questions. I appreciate the feedback. Thanks so much. I'm TJ Walker. I hope to see you here video on demand later today, tomorrow and the next day. But I'll see you here live on Monday morning. Thanks.