Soft Skills: The 11 Essential Career Soft Skills

1. 0 Promo Video The 11 Essential Career Soft Skills : like it or not, your career is not likely to be defined by how maney advanced degrees you have on the wall or how maney formal languages you speak. They're intangible things that are often much more important. The soft skills decide whether people want to work with you or not, whether you are the first to be hired or the last to be fired. This course is about teaching you the things they often don't teach in high school and college. The things that are really going to help you keep a career, nurture a career and build a career for the long term. I'm T. J Walker, and I'm here to help you learn the soft skills you need so that your career will flourish. Go ahead, sign on in. 2. 1 The Soft Tech Savvy Way to Always Be Essential: you want to be that person when there's a new promotion open, you're the first person considered for that. You want to be the last person any boss considers when the boss has told we have to fire 20%. Get rid of the least productive people. You don't want to be on that list. That's what having strong soft skills is all about. It's about protecting yourself and really making yourself indispensable for any organization and for any industry and for any career. You don't remember all 11 skills, but think of it this way. If you have a colleague who has to travel across the country three days of business trip, how do you get to be that person that is indispensable for this trip? How do you get your colleague to say, Oh, yeah, we need that person with us for a variety of reasons, not just because you're funny or likeable, but because you're absolutely indispensable. That's what this course is all about, and I want to start off an area that may surprise you. I want to talk about technology skills now. I don't mean computer programming and learning. C plus plus R html. I'm assuming that even if you have those skills, that's not why you're in this course. These air the soft skills that things that don't show up on the resume, where you would put computer skills. But when I say technology skills, I mean simply being more patient and being better able to use the technology in your office and in your industry. Here's a simple fact. If you're the only person who knows the password into your office database, you'll never be fired. Here's simply seen as too indispensable. If you were the only person who knows how to get into the Twitter account for the office and there's a crisis, you're going to be seen is indispensable. So what I mean by technology is simply learning the basics and not being the last person to the party unless you're really young. We all know people who had to be pulled into using Facebook. Oh, I don't want to mess with that. I don't have time for that. And, of course, they all eventually got on Facebook or Twitter. Some of you may be old enough to remember those who refused to use texting or even email. Don't be the last person to use communication technology, Be the first person, be the person in your office in your organization who knows how to help other people do that. Think of it this way. 100 years ago, someone showed you a toaster. You look at what is that? I don't know how to use this technology. This is crazy. Where's the electricity? But now, if someone hand you a toaster, you know what to do. You don't think of it is Oh, I'm now using the toaster technology. Let me plug it in. Let me know. You just toast your bread to you. It's not technology. It's just a toaster. Well, increasingly, with so many technology tools used in a career in an office, whether it's Facebook, whether it's Twitter, whether it's the database, whether it's auto responders for people who use it every day, it's just Facebook. It's just Twitter. It's not fancy technology. You need to really be on top of that, a head of everyone else. And guess what? It doesn't require Ah, computer science degree. Quite often, it just requires a little patience. It requires going to a frequently asked questions. Section one young man, I hired many years ago right out of college. He had no computer skills other than he used email and a word processor to write term papers. But what he had was patient. So every single time we got new software for shooting videos or recording her editing, he was the person. When I said How do we do this? You said, I don't know, But I'll find out. What did he do? Did you goto Community College and studied computer science programs 12 hours a day? No, he simply went to the website. Read frequently, asked Questions Section. And he had the discipline and the patients to call an 800 number for help. These days, when it comes to most technology that you're gonna need in your office in your career unless you're a computer programmer, it's not about knowing complicated technology. It's not about knowing complicated computer science programs or wildly sophisticated databases. It's just about patients, a willingness to learn willingness to call an 800 number occasionally, ah, willingness to go toe frequently asked questions section. So this is an incredibly important skill. Too many people have the idea. Well, I'm not a technology person. I'll tell you what. A lot of bosses here when you say I'm not a technology person, what they really here's I'm lazy. I don't wanna learn. I want to be able to sit back and let someone else handle my problems. That's not impressive to any, but now the boss, maybe the same. I'm the same way. Sometimes I get lazy. But if you want to focus on helping your career, you've got to cut through that. You've got to really get to the point where you might not be the earliest adapter with new technology. But you are going to be earlier than other people in your office. Other people, then we're already in your industry. That's the way you stay ahead. So here's theme. The exercise for you Right now, I want you to look at some aspect of technology you already know. It could be how to create a Facebook group page. Nothing very hard, but something you think might be of interest other people in your office. And then just let them know Friday at lunchtime, you're gonna be giving a little demonstration for 15 minutes. It could be and the office lunch room. It could be at your desk. You'll take questions because if you pick the right topic, there will be people who are more senior to you, your boss, your boss's boss, other people within your organization who want toe learn. This is well, and they don't have the patience to go to a website or call an 800 number. This way, you start to show you're technologically savvy. You're not the technologist. You're not the I t department, but you're someone who is a little quicker, a little faster at learning things so it could be had to put up a Facebook page. It could be how to do a simple Facebook live video, something I teach people on. Doesn't matter what it Issa's, long as it's using technology some way and you're comfortable using it, and you can show others do that, and that's a soft scale that's gonna help you for the rest of your career. 3. 2 Not My Job And I Am Happy to Do It: Hey, that's not my job. Not my problem, not my job description. Those words in the modern era are career kiss of death. You have to realize you have one job. Your one job is to please your boss and related to that, please customers, police clients. Now I'm not asking you to do anything illegal or immoral, and if you think you're in a oppressive situation, that's a whole different issue. For a different course. I'm assuming that you have a perfectly fine relationship with your boss and you want to make it even better. Well, one way of doing that is by constantly exuding the attitude that this is my job. Anything you want to throw it may is my job. When you look at so many people who have become wildly successful, talk to anyone who worked with them earlier in their career, certainly, and their attitude is always the same. I'll do anything anything I could do to learn anything I can do to help the organization. If you look at any of the top network news anchors major TV networks around the world, the people who are the prime time network anchors so often when they were 23 24 just starting off in their news network. Their bosses will tell you the attitude was always the same. I'll do any story. I'll go anywhere. Ah, hop a plane. Teoh the most remote part of the world with two minutes notice. That is their attitude. Certainly you can be hired for one position and be given a task that you think is way beneath your dignity, way beneath your educational credentials and background. And legally, you may have a point, but do you want to fight legalities? Do you want to be litigating your career? That's typically a sure fire path to career death. Now I'm not suggesting you should. You have to go to the bosses home and on your own free time, cook and clean the boss's house. I'm not suggesting anything like that, but when it comes to any organization, any industry, any office, there's always a lot of things that are not technically in anybody's job description. And if you can fill the void, that's a way for you to provide more value, meet more people and really display the fact that you have certain competencies could be starting a trade organization that no one thought up. It could be just as simple as putting a label on the trash cans. Which one is for recycling and which one is for trash. If you really keep your eyes open for things that need to be done to advance the organization, you're gonna be a 1,000,000 things that are not officially your description. Now this relates to the first soft skill we mentioned a moment ago on technology, simply learning the technology, being comfortable with the databases, being comfortable with new social media, whether it's Facebook, live or whatever is relevant to your career. It's certain related to that. But it's related to everything that goes on in your office in your organization, because no organization is so big and has so many people that they have someone with a title for every single task that needs to be done. That's why it's critical for you to have an open mind, have your eyes open and always be looking for things that are important. But you don't really want to do it, and nobody else does, too. So that's your exercise. Look around your office right now. Find some task that you know needs to be done that you don't particularly want to do. Do it anyway. You don't have to brag about it forever. Eventually, people will know, and you'll develop a reputation as the person who does things, even though it's not officially their job. When you build a reputation as someone who does stuff that isn't just your job, that is career gold right there. 4. 3 You Can Become a Master Communicator: Do you know what the number one trait is among wildly successful people in every industry doesn't matter of its business technology, the sciences, politics. It's not necessarily getting up early. Some work late tonight. It's not necessarily being a teetotaler. Some like to drink. It's not about religious belief. You see the whole spectrum, the only thing that's remarkably consistent. I'm a wildly successful CEOs, political leaders, major leaders of industry. They're excellent communicators. They have figured out a way to communicate what it is they do to the rest of the world. It's often the biggest differentiator between those whose careers peek out at middle management and those who get to the very top. When people in any industry or any organisation are trying to figure out who we promote, they're often asking themselves. Do we see this person speaking on behalf of the entire organization, the entire company, to the outside world, to the media, to all of our investors toe all of our most important clients? You may have the best work ethic in the world, but if you can't communicate, if you appear to be someone who scared, nervous and uncomfortable speaking to more than one person that is gonna severely restrict your long turn career potential. So if you want a really unleash your potential, you're gonna have toe Learn to be comfortable, confident, successful speaker doesn't mean you have to become the next Anthony Robbins or the next Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton. But you are going to have to communicate what it is you dio what it is your organization does now, before we even get to that part, an essential ingredient to communication that's often bypassed often for gotten. It's listening. Before you can even tell people what your organization does, what you do, you've got to really develop a habit of listening carefully to everyone you work with. Your boss is your boss's boss's, your colleagues and those who are newer than you are into your industry. Too many people can get good at presenting and pontificating, and they're comfortable, but they never You don't want to be one of those. You've got to first start by listening really listening and figuring out what's truly most important. But then you've got to have the ability to communicate effectively, and these days it's not just with one other person or in a conference room talking to five people. You could, at a moments notice, be asked to present 2000 people around the world through a Skype video hookup. Are you ready for that? You could be asked to substitute for your boss at the last minute and deliver his or her power point presentation at an industry conference because your boss got sick. Are you ready for that? You don't want to be one of these people's? Oh, you know, I'm not a public speaker. You are a public speaker unless you want your career to end out at the lowest possible level. If you know how to talk and you've ever talked to more than two people, guess what you are a public speaker. Now I have more than 100 other courses on you. To me that talk specifically about how to give speeches, boardroom presentations, how to use a teleprompter. But let me sum up what's truly most important. If you want to be a great communicator, the most important thing is figure out. What is it you want your audience to do? Whether it's an audience of one, your boss or five colleagues figure out what is it you want them to do, then figure out what the top? No more than this. Manning 51 handful of messages that would make them want to do what you said, then come up with examples stories for each one. If you're going to use power Point and not suggesting you do most of the time, use images, not text, and the most important part of communication practice it may be a simple is a board meeting or weekly conference meeting. And you know you're going to just ask one question. Practice that, but practice in a specific way. The number one way. Great communicators get better and better as they practice just using their cell phone. You can talk to yourself in your car before you get out to go into your office. You can practice in the hallway in a bathroom. You can practice pretty much anywhere these days. Number one way to be comfortable is a speaker to be confident. As a speaker, it's not meditating. It's not drinking green tea. It's toe actually practice on video until you can look at the video of yourself speaking and you like it. If you do that then it's gonna be almost impossible to be uncomfortable or nervous. Here's your communication homework assignment Right now. I want you to just in 60 seconds or so. Explain what it is. Your company. Your organization does record it. Look at it. Figure out. What do you like? What do you not like? Re do it. You don't like your voice? Keep practicing it. You'll get used to it if you think what you're saying Sounds boring on interesting and like something right off a Wikipedia page will redo it until you find it interesting. You have a lifetime of experience of hearing people give boring presentations. Boring talks boring videos. Use that to your advantage if you think it's boring. Yes, what it is. Keep practicing until you like how you look, how you sound and the message. Do that right now. Just with your own cellphone. I pad or laptop 5. 4 Feedback Video for The 11 Essential Career Soft Skills: by the way, part of being a good communicator is always getting feedback. Always ask your audience. How are you doing? Test your message. Just test your presentations and figure out what's actually working. Wanted people remember it. And you know I'm gonna practice what I preach because in a moment if you haven't already received it, you're going to get a page popping up from you to me, asking you to rate this course. I do want you to rate the course, and I want you to rate it honestly. But here's the thing. I want your opinions toe. Have even Mawr impact if you see anything about this course that you'd like to see improved because hey, I'm not perfect. Send me a message right now. You can hold off on your review. Send me the message. Give me the opportunity to improve it. I want to make you happy. And I want to be successful in my own communication. So let me know directly now exactly what you like to see improved on this. If you don't think it's already a five star course, if you think it's already great, go ahead and review, but otherwise send me a direct message. And I promise you I'm gonna do whatever I can to improve refining this course and make it even better. 6. 5 Your EQ Will Beat a Higher IQ: you've heard the expression before that emotional intelligence beats actual intelligence. E que beats i Q. In many cases, certainly that can be true for many people in their careers. What is emotional intelligence? How smart are you when it comes to managing your own emotions and understanding and being aware of other people's emotions? That's all it is. It sounds simple, but we're all human beings and it's not. First of all, everyone in the world gets angry. Everyone gets pissed off. But guess what? Most people in most offices and most organizations don't like working around someone else who is angry, disproportionately or annoyed or unhappy. So you're going to have to learn to control your emotions. It doesn't mean you have to be a robot and be stoic. But when it comes to negative emotions, being upset, being angry even a little bit too much of that in most organisations and most offices is going to be a downer. And it's not going to help your career. You've got to be highly selective of where you're gonna be angry about what you're going to be upset about, because if you're angry all the time, then people just want to tune you out. This shows up in a lot of different ways. Are you someone who, when you're angry, you curse a lot? Are you yell some people? That's how they grew up. No big deal for other people. It is. It's almost traumatic being around someone who curses on now. I live in New York now, so I'm kind of jaded. But I do remember drawing up in a conservative traditional household in the South and being around a football coach when I was in fifth grade, about 11 years old, and for the first time in my life, I'm hearing someone curse, and it was almost like I was being hit. It just was not something that was used to, So you got to be aware of that. If you don't know everything about everyone you work with, you need to avoid things like cursing other things. You just need to be highly sensitive to every organizations, little different. Every culture's different. Every city can be different. Every country can be different. I work in a lot of countries all over the world. My day job is teaching people how to communicate, how to give speeches, and how to speak to the media. And so I have to be keenly aware every country I go to in some countries. It would be rude for me to shake a woman's hand. You kiss on the cheek. Other countries you kiss on two cheeks. Other countries. Believe it or not, it's three cheeks I've got toe look carefully wearing now. In certain countries, people of the opposite sex do not touch or kiss. They don't shake hands. You've got to be aware of what the cultural norms are, so you don't violate them and you don't upset people. Part of emotional intelligence is simply not being selfish. It's not thinking about yourself all the time. Let's face it, the easy thing the default position for any human being is to just think about Mimi meat. If you want toe show emotional intelligence, you have to think about others in your office, in your organization, in your industry and a lot of times that's just about asking them how their day was, how their weekend waas, how their vacation was and actually listening. A lot of so called smart people with advanced degrees well, so I don't have time for that. I got my work to do. Guess what? This is your work. Getting along with people showing emotional intelligence is a part of your work. If you want to have a career and if you don't want to be seen as someone who's easily dispensed with, you need to find out what are the names of the spouses and the Children of the people you work with what's going on in their life to you. You may be someone 27 the idea of having a family and kids may seem bizarre to you. Well, you may have a coworker or a boss who is 47 has a kid trying to get into college. And that's the number one thing they're thinking about life. You need to find out what they're concerned. I don't mean be a busy body and try toe. Find out everything going on with your life. But certainly if you have a coworker who was on pins and needles waiting to find out if their son or daughter gets into the college of their dreams, try to find out. Congratulate them that there's good news, express sympathy. If something bad happens whether it's on the college front or an illness or death of a close family member. A sympathy card goes a long way when someone has just lost a loved one, and maybe no one in the office seemed to even care. So you've got to be emotionally insecure not to be the office shrink. You don't have to bay the inner Oprah for everyone but listening to other people finding out about what's making them happy said. Going on in their life, being connected with them is going to help you in your current immensely. It's also going to make life more interesting and make you enjoy your experiences with your fellow colleagues in the office and in your organization. So here's your homework. Now I want you to find out either. The birthday are the anniversary of three colleagues. Make a note and you don't go out and get him a big cake. But just a simple email Facebook post recognizing them on a special day. That's your homework 7. 6 Become a Leader Without the Title or Formal Authority: leadership is a topic that gets a tremendous amount of discussion there, gazillion books on the subject and management gurus. And, yes, it could be an overworked subject. But what does it really mean? Especially if you don't have the title of CEO or president or some official title? Leadership means you see a problem. You brainstorm on solutions. You come up with something working together with other people or your own idea that you think is the best possible way of solving the problem. And then you work to solve the problem. And then you try to encourage other people, and you get other people to share your vision of a solution and solve the problem. That's whole leadership really is. Now. If you're Abraham Lincoln and you're trying to keep the country together, United States, that's one set of problems. If you are trying to solve the problems of not having enough toilets in your country, that's a completely different problem. But their problems everywhere and their potential solutions everywhere. So if you really want to help your career, you need at an early age to develop a reputation as someone who shows leadership. Now, unfortunately, and a lot of parts of the world and a lot of industries. Leadership was defined as the tallest white guy who's oldest and maybe has a little gray hair. That's not the reality, not saying there isn't sexism or racism in the world. But that's not the main thing that determines leadership in most organisations anymore. Leadership is much more diffuse and more organizations. And if you have a solution and if you can convince other people of your vision and to help you, that's going to make you a leader. Get it could be something as relatively simple is starting a recycling program at your office. Maybe it doesn't have one. It could be beautifying a courtyard in the back that could be used at lunch time for people to simply enjoy their time working together more. It doesn't have to be something as big as solving wars or solving world hunger. Coming up with a new computer chip that is going to be a $1,000,000,000 industry, it could be something small if you solve a problem that's causing a problem for coworkers or clients or customers and you get other people to share your vision and you make it happen, you are going to develop a reputation for leadership. And that is a prized commodity that is, unfortunately, unfortunately, why CEOs air often pay 304 100,000 times more than what a line worker is paid. Now that's a topic for a whole different course, and whether that inequality is fair or not, that is the reality. Now, if you are seen as a leader and if you're someone who could actually convince other people to do what you want them to do and you've solved the problem. The sky is the limit on your career. But here is the challenge for you. Many people make the mistake and said, Well, I'm just a junior person. I've only worked here for one year, five years or 10 years or I'm I'm a low level cog here. Don't write yourself off. Leadership has nothing to do with your formal position or formal title. Get there exceptions in certain industries where you may face discrimination, but in general, many, many organizations and industries around the world. If you show initiative, you can get other people to follow you. You could make some difference. You now have a track record. And maybe if you apply for your next position, your raise your higher open position, you're more likely to get it even more important. People are likely to seek you out without you applying for anything because you've already established one of the hardest credentials to ever established the credential of leadership . So that's your assignment right now. Pick something almost the smaller the better. Pick some problem that effects either other people in your organization, in your office or in your industry, and come up with a solution to get almost a smaller problem. The smaller the solution, the better. Try to convince other people to work with you and solve the problem. 8. 7 Building Your Winning Team: imagine you're watching the Academy Awards. You see your favorite actor winning the big award, the best actor award, what they always do. They thank their entire team. They have a huge team around them. Quite often. It's people who've supported them, worked with them, nurtured them for 10 2030 sometimes 40 years. You need a winning team, too, and it can't just be the person in the cubicle next to you. And it can't just be your parents. Although they could be great team members, you always need to be on the lookout for people who believe in you. Believe in your mission, believe in your career and want to help you. Now they might not want to. At first you've got to display real value. Quick tip on one way of building and network. Find 10 people in your industry, and maybe only a couple of them work in your organization. Find 10 people you really respect. You think they do great work. You want to be them or like them at some point and follow them on Twitter. But here's the thing. Don't follow them once and just start writing them. Hey, can you get me a job. Hey, can you buy me lunch? No. Here's what I want you to dio follow them on Twitter, Find another 10 on YouTube. Follow them. Or maybe you want to do in Arlington. You can pick, but I want you to just follow them. I want you to just read them. And here's the trick. Once every couple of weeks or so, comment on something they wrote are on one of their videos talking about why you think what they said was so insightful or so helpful. So you're not picking a fight. You're not starting a debate. You're not just saying nice. You're not just saying hello. You're not asking them for favours. You're not asking them for introductions. You're not asking them for jobs or internships. You're just commenting on the stuff they're putting out that you think is interesting, useful and insightful. And I can tell you the vast majority of people, unless they are already Bill Gates or Oprah or so wildly famous and followed by billions, most people in most industries will notice that, and they'll start to think of you is a very savvy person. They'll start to think of you is a very smart person. You'll form a relationship because you're giving your retweeting their stuff. You're adding comments to their linked in post or their YouTube post, so you're helping them by giving them a larger spotlight. Your you're showing their step on your own Facebook page on your own social media outlets. So you are showing the world you like them. You're aligning yourself with them. You are showing you respect them and do this for weeks. Do it for months. Ideally, do it for years before ever asking for the first thing I could tell you I have people all the time. Hit me up just cold bone unlinked Hey, T j, Can you get me a job? Well, hey, T j, can you give me this free? What? Can you come train me for free? Can you Can you give me a free book and you give its get gift? Who are you? I don't know you, But if I have someone who has regularly praised my public speaking training videos or media training videos or written nice reviews of one of my other public speaking your communications course, it's only human nature. It catches my eye and I feel that there is somewhat of a little bit of a relationship there , and then that they do ask me for something. It's not told it's not just out of the blue. Networking is something you need to do throughout your career. You don't have to have an email list of 10,000 people or even 1000 people. In fact, some of the most successful people limit their network to 20 people, but they talk to each person every month. Sometimes the smaller the network can be the most powerful. You want to get to the point where you're showing up and you're walking into your office at 8 30 on a Monday morning, and all of a sudden the doors were padlocked because your companies gone bankrupt or out of business or the governments to shut it down. You want to get to the point where you're on your cell phone, walking back to your car, walking back to the subway, and you've got six meetings by lunchtime because you're already so connected with people in your industry, not just those in your company, and not necessarily even those in your town. You want to know the most influential people in your industry, and you want to stay in touch with people who have helped you. I can tell you personally, I've work with some people for more than 30 years. Sometimes five years may go by between them hiring they or us working together on a project , but I still stay in touch with him. I still connect with that. We sometimes exchange birthday greetings or even Christmas cards. It doesn't have to be this big phony. I'm gonna be on social media blasting 20 tweets a day. So everyone in the industry knows who I am. It's not about quantity of communications or how many people you're talking to. It's more about quality. Is is it someone? Have you developed a relationship with someone who would take your phone call if you called ? Are you developing a relationship to the point where someone would say yes if you said, Can I meet you for coffee or meet you for breakfast? So don't think of it as I've got to get to 100,000 Twitter followers or 200,000 likes on my Facebook page. That's a different issue, and certainly you can build a social media following. But the network I'm talking about is riel. People who will take your calls. People. You have their cell phone numbers, so if you send them a text, your name is there and they will respond back to you. So homework assignment. I need you to isolate 10 people in your industry. No more than three of them in your current organization. Follow them on Twitter or Facebook or linked in or YouTube. I'll let you decide and get in the habit of just saying nice things and complementing, but with really incite commenting in a highly specific way on these 10 people and do that a couple of times a week for the next month, That's your homework assignment. 9. 8 Make Every One of Your Seconds Count: time management is a crucial, crucial soft scale that can have a huge impact on your career. Now we have a worldwide audience here in you to be, and I do realize I want to be sensitive here that there are different perspectives on time . Now. I have worked in more than 30 countries. I know there's some differences here, so I want to be sensitive. But I do want to give you what I think is the best general advice that's going to help you in most organisations most of the time, and you want to filter through any other cultural restraints or issues here. You've got to make every second count, and by that I mean show up on time. The last thing any boss wants to hear is that there was traffic. Well, guess what? There's traffic every day. Nobody cared. I don't mean to sound mean or nasty or unsympathetic, but I could tell, you know, Boss in the world cares that you had traffic and that's why you're 15 minutes late. Plan Plan for traffic. Give yourself extra leeway and get there early, and no one's upset if you're there early. That way, if there is traffic and you left early. You still show up on time. So time management is critically important. And unfortunately, high school college. Yeah, you may have a teacher, so why aren't you late, but doesn't really affect your grade most the time? Well, it does affect your grade in the real world. If there's a staff meeting at nine and everyone is there and you walk in at 10 after nine, people are going to notice that you're not going to seem professional. You're not going to seem like someone is competent. And this is something that you're gonna have to learn. Everyone's got their own style. Some people I know for me I put things on Google calendars where I'm sent an alert 10 minutes before something I give myself extra time. Always assume there's traffic, and that way you're not going to be late. I can tell you there's countless countless times when I'm dealing with subcontractors vendors. I was saying 95% of the time, no one ever shows up on time. Do I still use them and work with them from time to time? Yeah, I have no choice. But when given a choice between someone who shows up on time and someone who's later calls a so there's traffic on the highway. Today, I always pick the person who's on time. People like their own time. They respect their own time. They worry about their own time more than yours. If you're late, even one minute, you're now wasting someone else's time. So if you're not an early morning riser and everyone in the office shows up eight, you've got to somehow take a nap. Early evening. Do whatever it takes to get there. Now. Every office, every culture can be different. There are Wall Street cultures here in New York City, where everyone shows up at six. If you show up at 6:15 a.m. You're the crazy slacker. They're other offices, a lot of law offices, even high tech offices where the normal work they doesn't start till 10. But everyone is there till eight PM or nine PM You have to know the rhythms of your industry of your organization. What you don't want to do is be the person who shows up late and who leaves early or leaves right on time. Don't be such a hurry to get out the door the second. This isn't Fred Flintstone where the bell is being pulled right at five. The steam is going off and everyone runs out that second. If you are in a particular industry where you've got a punch in and out, that's a different issue. But for most people in most industries this days, these days especially freelancers, especially subcontractors, you can't seem like you're just there punching the clock. You have to seem like you're focused on the job at hand, the task at hand, working with people. So my advice get there earlier than everyone else not two hours earlier, but 5 10 minutes earlier, a few minutes earlier than the boss. It's a cliche. It's something they show in Hollywood movies and Broadway shows how to succeed in business . But it really is true. You don't have to get there, and you have cigarette butts all over your head like you worked all night every night. No one's expecting that, and no one is really impressed by that anymore. But certainly being there a few minutes early will go a long way. Other aspects of timeliness are you managing expectations. If your boss gives you a project and you say, When can this be done? Don't just blindly say tomorrow and then you realize, Oh, it's gonna take a week. Do you think it's going to take Ah week? Perhaps you say I can have it in seven business days. That way, if it takes five, you've beaten expectations. If you tell somebody I can have it tomorrow and it takes you four days. They're steaming and they're unhappy with you, even if the result is fine. If you tell someone, it's gonna take you five days and it took four days. They are impressed that you beat expectations that you delivered not only on time, but you delivered early. So again, this is something that isn't taught in schools, is not taught in books, but it is a fundamental soft steel that's important for you in your career. Other aspects of titling this how long does it take you to return a phone call or an email ? Every organization is different in some organisations of the boss sends an email after five . You're not supposed to answer it until the next day. Legally, it's not even supposed to get to you in other organizations. If the boss send you a text or an email at 11 at night, you don't respond by 11. 05 Your career is pretty much over. You've got to be aware that you've gotta ask people. You've gotta get a sense. You've got to really pay attention to how people are reacting to time. Everyone else working on Saturdays. Well, you're gonna have to be there, too, If other people are doing things. It doesn't mean you always have to work 10 more hours or 20 more hours or put yourself into an early grave. But you do have to be keenly aware of how people relate to time in your organization, your colleagues, your bosses, your subordinates, your customers and your clients. You cannot be a lot slower than other people and expect to succeed. So here's your homework assignment. Do whatever it takes to get to the office or get to your place of business 10 minutes earlier. Then you're used to just do it for one week, see if anything bad happens. Also see if anything good happens. Oftentimes you're the 1st 1 there. You can get that call from a great new prospect or something else happens. That's good. You're you're there when someone really needs something and you're able to demonstrate your utility, your usefulness and your leadership. So that's the homework assignment just for one week. Do whatever it takes. Drive earlier taken earlier. Train. Get to your office 10 minutes earlier. Even if it's your home office, get to your your computer 10 minutes earlier than you're used to for one week and see what happens. 10. 9 Unleash Your Inner Anthony Robbins: Okay, here's the part where you think I'm going Teoh be cheesy until you put on a happy face all the time. Run around, say rah rah rah, unleash your inner Anthony Robbins. That's not quite what I'm talking about here. I do think you need to exude a positive attitude about your work, your career, your profession and yourself. It's a simple fact that most human beings don't like to be around somebody who seems down in the dumps crabby, Complaining negative doesn't mean you can't have a biting wit. Doesn't mean you can't be sarcastic and go after other people in your industry don't like you can still have your own personality, but in general, you've got to exude some positive sense of why you like being there. In general, people, especially bosses, like to have workers around who actually want to be there. If you seem like of God, it's Monday morning bloods and this horrible I can't wait till Friday. You're not going to be showing ah boss or anyone else that your real value that you want to be here your negative you're draining people. You're a downer. You don't want to be a downer I'm not asking you to be a fake phony, but you can look at any glass and say it's half full or half empty. Focus on what's full focus on what's working. Believe me, I have had jobs before that. I didn't love every aspect of it, but it was better than unemployment it. So here's the challenge for you. I want you to imagine that you're at a college fair, a job recruiting fair, and you have to pitch your company, your organization, what you dio to a young college graduate or whoever might be an entry level applicant for a company or organization like yours, I need you to sell it. Don't be fake. Don't be phony, be riel, but focus on trying to convince someone who could have any kind of job, why they should work with you. What's exciting about your organization in what you dio and I want you to actually practice by recording it on cell phone. It only has to be 60 seconds or so, but imagine you're talking to one specific prospect who isn't necessarily even interested in working with you. Record yourself and look at it and ask yourself, Would you want to work for you? Would you want to work in your organization after watching it? That's the test. Do it now. 11. 10 Avoid Being Uncool: There's one whole category of soft skills we put under the category of professionalism. Now this could mean a lot of things to a lot of people. It is arguably subjective, but I want to tell you what I think are some of the most important things. Part of it is our do you make it easy for people to get hold of you and communicate with you. So these days most people use their private cell phone as a part of their business. That's how their boss gets a hold of them. That's where their colleagues get ahold of them. Several things you need to be aware of. Number one and you're going to say, Well, T. J, you're just some old fart. But there are a lot of people who do work in companies, some of them bosses, CEOs who do look more like me than a lot of 25 year olds. So here's my recommendation. Have a voicemail. Don't have one of these phones. Your boss is trying to get all of you. There's something urgent. You're out to lunch and it just says you have reached 917 But because whoever is calling you now has to think. Gash tonight. Get this person. Is this an old cellphone? Maybe that was their cell phone from six months ago. They haven't number. Leave your message. Make it professional. Doesn't have to be funny. Just state your name so that people know they actually call the right number. Very important unless everyone you work with is under 30 and no one ever leaves voicemail again. Every culture is a little different. Every industry is a little different. But there very few industries were nobody of influence with nobody who has the ability to help. Your career is under 30. There are exceptions. So that's why I would say, make it easy for people to know they got the right person. When they call you next with your voicemail. Make sure there's space in your voicemail, Miss, nothing's more annoying than calling someone. It rang seven times. Now you get the voicemail, and it's his long voicemail. You have reached nine ones, Bob, blah blah. But the sound of the tough you go through all of this, you're ready to leave him and said, Hey, teacher coming back And the person's voice mail is full and cannot take it just wasted a tremendous amount. It's not professional. Someone's trying to get a hold of you and maybe they don't want to text. Not everyone loves to text, and now they can't leave you a message when it comes to texting phone calls. If you want to be a professional and you want to have the soft skills that will help your career the most, you're going to have to learn to communicate the way other people want to communicate again . I realize that I sound like an old fogey here, but if someone calls you on the phone, call them back somewhat emails. You email them back. If someone texts you, text them back. Ah, lot of people absolutely cannot stand texting. A lot of people can't stand phone calls, either. I get it. If you want to have the most successful career you have, you have to forget about what you want, what you like, and you have to focus on how do your colleagues, your bosses, your clients and customers want to communicate? I would much prefer that prospects of mine who are interested in hiring me for public speaking, training and media training, call me, but I had to be flexible, too. So my ads on Google now give my cell phone so that people can just text may for a request for a proposal for a price list, and I have to deal with that. So everyone's gotta be a little more flexible. You can't simply take the attitude of Oh, you know, voicemails, dad or phone calls or debt e mails for old losers, you have to use every single communication tool that other people want. It's not about you. It's about your clients, customers, colleagues, bosses. You got to communicate on their terms. You need to think about how to be professional and every level also return calls when you answer the phone, state your name, don't you? While what you want a sound like a professional? You don't have to sound hollow. I This is Jim from Global Bobo Ball. You don't have to sound phony or fake, but just state your name. Someone calls my cell phone. I'd say T J Walker Media Training Worldwide. Just short, simple. That way they know they've got the right number. They know where they're calling, and it's simple and easy when you're truly professional your thinking about how do you appear to others? Are you saving their town? Are you making life easy for them? Are you coming across? A. Someone they would want to deal with Now will touch on this subject in the next lesson. Are you dressed professionally? That means something different in every industry will talk about that in more detail. If you have your own company and you're out networking, you're at a networking event. Do you have a business card? I realized in some industries that would be the kiss of death. Oh my gosh, this person's must be 80 years old or certain high tech industries where if you don't just trade information on a cell phone, that's the only way to do it. But for many, many industries, the easiest way to meet someone at any kind of a networking event, business event, social event give them a business card. It shows you're a serious person in a professional person, so all of these elements fit under the category professionalism. Every industry is different, but you need people that you respect to respect you as a riel professional. So here's your homework assignment. It could be updating your LinkedIn page. It could be getting a business card. It could be creating a business page on Facebook, but just lets people know about your professional. I do something today that really upgrades your professional. Is your professional image either business card, updating your linked in profile or creating a Facebook business page. 12. 11 Clothes Can Still Make or Break Your Career: dress for success clothes make the man or the woman I didn't know that die the 19 fifties and 19 sixties. Isn't that old passe? I mean, aren't we about being expressive, being individual now? Well, yes and no. The days are gone when men had to wear a grey flannel suit and women had to wear a boxy blue male looking suit in a big boat. It's not about everyone looking the same. It's not about having a set uniform, but it is important that you have a sense of how you dress, how you come across your hygiene, how you style yourself so that it works for you in your industry. Every industry is a little different when I go and conduct a live media training workshop or public speaking workshop with certain large banks or mutual funds. I'm often in a suit and tie because that's how my clients air dressed. And that's how they're dressed when they're going on CNBC or making speeches at major financial conferences. But when I'm in Silicon Valley and I working with high tech companies and start up companies, I have to make sure I leave the tie at home. I leave the suit jacket home. I've got a dress more casually. To show up with a suit and tie at a high tech Silicon Valley company would be an instant mark of someone unsophisticated, frankly, unprofessional. No styles change. Certainly, when I was younger 20 years ago, even 15 years ago, beards on men sent an unprofessional message. These days, it almost seems weird. Almost unprofessional, not toe. Have a beard. Just so happens I don't look good in a beer at all. So I'm not suggesting everyone has to be clean cut and traditional. You do need to know what the expectations are in your field and in your industry. If you're trying to get a job at Goldman Sachs, having a tattoo on your face is probably not going to help your job prospects, and you're interviewing prospects. On the other hand, if you're trying to get on ink or some other TV show about tattoo artists and you have a tattoo parlor, it's probably gonna hurt you. If you always wear a conservative tailored suit and a tie and a white shirt, it's probably going to really look weird to be dressed like that. So every industry has its norms. You need to dress in a way that express is you and your individuality. I don't want to sound like I'm trying to make you boring and bland, but also is consistent with what you're about and doesn't confuse people. If you tell people that you are a heart surgeon and you're going on TV and you're wearing your bathing suit and a tank is just going to confuse people. If you've just won International Surfing Championship and you are wearing a suit and tie, well, that's going to confuse people. So you need to have something that doesn't confuse me. Why I am wearing this now is I have a lot of different clients and customers and trainees all over the world, all sorts of different industries. I don't want to wear a suit and tie and and seem irrelevant to stodgy for casual industries and younger industries. So I have something that's just somewhat innocuous, doesn't scream out, doesn't call too much attention, isn't too casual. It's not a short sleeve shirt showing a lot of skin. This way I could get people just to focus on what I'm saying. That's why I'm dressed this what you need to have a rationale as to why you're dressed in a certain way. And why is your hair styled in a certain way? Now it may seem odd to you getting hair styling advice from someone like me again. There's no one perfect hairstyle. But if you're wearing something that just strikes, everyone in your industry is odd or weird. It could be a problem. Other issues of just personal hygiene get This is the part. It's too awkward for your coworkers dimension. So I'm going to mention it. Does your breath stink? Here's the thing you probably don't know if you don't go to a dentist every 4 to 6 months and brush your teeth every day and get really good regular dental care. Your breath could be horrible, and no one's gonna tell you. But they're not gonna want to be around you. Does your body have any odor again? They're different cultural norms on this. But if you are in an industry and you want to be a part of the global economy, you're going to meet some people who have very high standards of what's considered acceptable body smell. You need to know that, and you need to plan for it accordingly. My advice is you've got to find somebody who will really tell you straight to your face. And sometimes this is a family member, even a spouse, and you need to ask them to look you up and down. Is there anything about you that looks odd? That looks weird. That looks unflattering. That smells bad. And you need to address this because it's a big world. People have a lot of choices of who they want to do business with. And in general, they don't want to deal with someone who makes them uncomfortable. Certainly is unpleasant as faras smell body odor, breath smell you've got to take. It may seem obvious, but for those were the problem, it's obviously not obvious to them. No little detail is two great overlook, So pay attention to these issues of dress and hygiene. So that's your homework assignment. Find a close family member or friend who is not afraid to hurt your feelings. To really look at you to get close enough to smell your breath, to smell your body and to give you honest feedback 13. 12 Conclusion The 11 Essential Career Soft Skills: Congratulations. Have you made it this far? And you've actually done the exercises I've asked you to do, including recording yourself, talking about your job in your industry. You are in much better position to really help yourself. Your soft skills will be toughened up and will be there for you as you explore your career and built in advance in your own career. Remember learning new computer skills or great computer languages or great learning new aspects of science and technology or wonderful. But at some point we're all human beings. We have to work together. We have to get along. We don't have the love each other, but we have to kill along and work together. And that's why these soft skills are so important. So you could break any one of these rules or not be great at one of them. But if you're constantly focused on how you can be someone interesting, easy to work with, someone adds value to an organization. Someone other people like to be around and like toe learn from it, like to work with your career will be in great shape. Good luck to your career. Thanks so much for spending time with me. If I could ever help you, Please let me know. You can send a message here if you have any questions I didn't address. Go ahead. Post your questions right here. If you got a lot out of this course, please leave an evaluation. If you see anything that's missing from this course, I would ask you rather than posting in the evaluation right now, send it to me. See if I can change it. And that way, when you do evaluate it, it will in fact, be a course that meets your standard of a five star course. I'm t J Walker. Thanks again. 14. Developing Your Career Secret Sauce: Here's the 11th soft skill you really need in order to thrive in your career. This one is not talked about as much. It's a little more of the secret sauce, but here it is. Are you an interesting person now? This could be hard to quantify. One person's interesting could be another person's boring. But here's the one thing we know about other people are co workers, the stuff going on in their life and their head and their hobbies. That's the most interesting thing to them. So the more you can talk to them about their interests, the better. Too many of us, especially after a certain age. We get stuck in ruts and we spend all of our free time either watching footballer, watching soccer, just watching one type of show reading one type of book. The problem with that is it just makes us boring to be around. So my advice to you is you've really got to figure out how can you talk to your colleagues , other people in your industry, your boss, your coworkers in ways that are interesting to them. Now I have friends of mine, great buddies. I like them. I like hanging out with him, but they can Onley talk about one type of professional sport might be baseball. It might be foot book, but that's all they could talk about. So when they find someone else, another co workers and when they're trying to network with and that person on Lee likes talking about opera or Broadway shows, conversation falls flat. There's a lot of let's look at the time here, and they're just not interesting. So again, a lot of your career success can be determined on whether the boss wants to spend four days with you going to an important industry conference in Las Vegas. The C s conference, for example, and maybe the most can pick anyone. They might pick you just because you're more interesting person to sit next to on an airplane for three hours. Believe it or not, that is often how careers are made and not made. Are you interesting enough to sit next to the boss on an airplane for a three or four hour trip? If all you can do is talk about one sport or you only watch the Kardashians, nobody is gonna want to sit next to you on a plane that can impede your career. So my advice is try to prod in yourself. First of all, find out other interests of people in your certainly in your circle, at your office, your work, your career, your bosses, other influential people so you can have common reference points. But beyond that, when someone asks you, What did you do this weekend? Don't just say, Oh, the same old same will watch the game. That's boring. I'm not asking you to create a whole new persona and do things just so you have something interesting to talk about Monday morning, but living a more interesting life will make your career better to. It will make you more interesting person to hang out with. So try to have something to talk about other than watching TV. If you're really into sports, try to go to a ballet or a drama or a musical. Expand your horizons. People said what you do on your vacation. Well, if you just say I went to Disney again for the 12th time, nobody's gonna want to hear about it, so you may actually want to consider a vacation to a different place in part it'll expand your mind. You have something else to talk about because, remember, life can be very short. I know that's a cliche, but people do have choices as to who they work with, who they hire as a contractor, as a client, as a vendor who they hire as a subordinate, who they hire is a colleague board of directors gotta decide they want to hire as a CEO, and there is a lot of leeway. It's not all cut and dried very rare. Do you get resumes? And they're all stacked in priority. And one person just on the points is obviously the person you have to hire. People get to hire people and promote people based on part of Do they like them? Are they a likable, interesting person? The fact that you have more things to talk about and that you are more interesting will increase your odds of being hired and seeing yourself promoted. So here's your homework assignment. You need to pick something new to do a new hobby, a new genre of book, a new type of music to listen to a new sport, to play and do it enough so you can actually talk about it in the office. It will make you a more interesting person 15. 1 Quick Wins! The High Tech Way to Perfect Communication: Let's hop right in with a quick win. There is a simple, high tech solution that will dramatically boost your communication skills. It's right in front of us, and yet most of us never use it. Here's the tool. It's a cell phone, But wait a minute. Here's the trick. If you have to communicate to a prospective boss about a job or a raise, or you're trying to raise money from investors, or you wanna ask people for their vote for public office, here's the key. Practice what it is you want to communicate on video. Look at it. Figure out what you like. Don't like. Once you've got a version on video that you like here is the thing that you're not going to have done before. I promise you email that video to a friend or colleague. Ideally, someone who's mindset is similar to the person you're trying to communicate with and then ask. Your friend called them. Text them, ask your friend and say not. What do you think? But what do you remember? What messages do you remember if they remember the messages that were important to you? Ah, now you can relax, you know you are communicating. But if they're not getting it, it's not their fault. It's your full time to practice again. Come up with new messages. A new style for communicating this one technology. Well, really dramatically help you. Most people are doing it, but now you can. 16. 2 Listening is key (and why this isn't just a public speaking course): you could be a great public speaker. Ah, fine. Alright, Er, you can have tremendous charisma and guess what? Still be a lousy communicator. Your communication skills can be poor because of one thing. You're not listening. This is a communication skills class. Of course. I'll cover a lot of fundamentals and advanced steps for public speaking and power point presentation skills. But so much of being a great communicator goes deeper than that, and so many communication opportunities in life. It's about listening. The best communicators in the world are often the best listeners, people who are really great at making the one on one sale the best sales pitch, sometimes the best politician to get the votes. It's because they are the best at listening now. Later on. In this course, there's an entire section on listening skills to really help you build the listing skill. But it's something I want you to think about right now. It really applies to every single type of communication. Whether you're asking for a job, a raise, a budget to be approved, you need to listen to what other people say. I've been in countless pitch meetings with a client where PR firms were pitching them for their business, and the ones that lost talk the most. They had the most slides up. They stood up and gave the most formal presentations. The PR firms, that one. They asked questions. They sat back and they listened. And then they reacted quite often with another question. So this applies to personal communications with friends and families, colleagues, bosses Rather than just pushing out all your preordained ideas, you can't really listen. And great communication isn't something you just created. Working until midnight in a power 0.3 weeks ago. You're there present with the person or with the group. You're communicating with your constantly listening, recalibrating and adjusting. Believe it or not, this even applies to public speakers. The best speakers in the world pause. They're looking for responses from their audience. Sometimes it's just not. It might be a look of confusion. That's a type of listening if you are the speaker, So we're gonna be covering more on listening in this course. Just realize so much communication has nothing to do with your lips moving or even your eye contact. It's really hearing the messages coming out from other people so we can respond to it. Let them know we've heard them react to it and deal with their concerns ideally, before we deal with our own concerns. 17. 3 Become part of the top 1% of communicators right now!: a very famous movie star and director, once said, 90% of success is just showing up. I want to apply that to communication. Now all of us communicate all the time with friends, family. But so many of us just stop communicating when we get outside of our comfort zone, were afraid to raise our hand sometimes at a classroom. Sometimes if it's a board room and they're intimidating, people around were afraid to call that talk radio show. We're afraid to post our comments on a newspaper comment section. We're just afraid to communicate our ideas. So I want to put something here right in front of this course for you to chew on, to really think about beyond all the skills, framing messages, the right way. Good I count and we'll get into all those style and mechanics. So much of being a good communicator is just having the willingness to speak out, even if you're not quite comfortable. So I want to give you a tip. Right now, you can automatically zoom up to the top 1% of communicators for this class just by doing one thing. I want you to communicate with me right now go to the Q and a section of this course, and you'll see it right at the top in the middle of the page. Once you click the dashboard and I want you to communicate, you can do it in a text format and write and tell me what you want. To get out of this course, you can post a video you are. L put it on YouTube posted here, telling us a little bit about who you are, what you want to get out of this court. You could make an audio recording and upload it to a site and put the audio there. You get to choose do what's comfortable for you. But most of you, sad to say, are not going to communicate it all. You're gonna sit back passively click. Let's go to the next one. Let's get through this course. Let's see if we get to the bottom and get her certificate. That's not really learning. And it's not communication. So asking you politely please communicate with me right now. Let me know specifically what you want to do to get the most out of this course, and even though this course is jam packed. There's 550 lectures in this course. I can still delete one to add something new if more of you want that. So communication has to be a two way street and too many instances in life, whether it's in school, whether it's in a big corporation, a big government were used as your sort of sitting back passively receiving. And we buy into this idea that we don't have the right or the credibility or the standing to communicate back. Well, that's just not true, especially in the modern world of technology, Internet, social media. It's never been easier to communicate in any format we want. So please take a moment. Communicate something with me right here. Even if you want to say D. J, you're born, we get on with it. That's OK. Post your communication now 18. 4 Good news, the problems we think we have, aren't real: I've got some good news for all of you. But first, let's step back for a moment. We all know that sometimes there's perception. Sometimes there's reality. They might be exactly aligned, but they may be skewed. So, for example, my perception is that I will never become a star professional basketball player for the N. B. A. The National Basketball Association. My perception of that, it's because I'm too slow. I'm too old. I don't shoot well enough and that shy of six feet. So I'm not tall enough. That is my perception of why I'm never going to be a star in the N B. A. Well, it turns out that my perception of my flaws are exactly aligned with the reality. Those are real flaws. Those will keep me from ever becoming an n b a star. Now, enough view by this course, I become a billionaire. Maybe I could buy a team, but that's different. I will never star as a basketball player because I don't have the talent, the physical talents at all, to do what it takes so many times in life. Our perception of our weaknesses are actually correct. I'm here to tell you when it comes to being a great communicator, it's not correct. I have worked with tens of thousands of people all over the globe in person really life for more than 30 years. So I hear time and time again people telling me O. T. J I'm not a good communicator. I can't give get speeches or presentations for the following reasons I say too many. Um, so I say, say too many us er's I'm not good looking enough. My accent is to Southern or to New York or its two Indian or it's too different from what people are used. Teoh people have this sense of all these problems that are holding them back. People have told me I know I'll never be a good communicator because I have Bell's palsy and my face troops. Meanwhile, no one else in the room even noticed it. So in my experience as individuals, we come up with all sorts of reasons as to why I will never be a great communicator. Oh, I don't like my voice. My voice is no good. Here's what I found working with training and studying with the top communicators, public speakers, presenters, communicators, TV hosts in the world. Now that matters. The things that make us great communicators. It's not just we didn't say ob Some of the most successful, highly paid TV stars in the world state on, um, constantly, its not necessarily about your looks. Some of the most successful TV talk show host and reality star host have less hair than I do and are 30 years older than I am. So it's not about being young and good looking. So I'm here to tell you, Relax, the things you think are making you a bad communicator. Really? Aren't those air not your problem? I'm not suggesting you don't have some challenges to overcome, but it's a different set of problems because trying to change your accent is really, really hard and can take hundreds of hours, sometimes thousands of hours. Do you have an extra 1000 hours? Changing the tone of your voice is extraordinarily difficult. I'm here to tell you, you don't have to do that. I've seen masterful communicators have high voices, low vice, screechy voices, accents that are not considered desirable or attractive, and these people are still great communicators. So I want you before we really dive in deeply in this course. It just kind of set aside these preconceived notions you have about what's holding you back . People like, Oh, I move my hands too much. I'm here to tell you I have worked with again for 10,000 people around the world, face to face for 30 years, I have never yet had an audience say about someone I'm training, though their hands were moving too much. Everyone's happened. I do hear people say, Oh, gosh, that person seems frozen in stiff and scared and nervous that I hear all the time. So we're gonna work on a number of issues to make you a better at better communicators right now, I just want you to relax. If you've ever had one interesting conversation with one friend, one family member, one colleague about one subject, and you felt good about it and the person you were speaking with felt good about it. Guess what? You already have all the skills you need to be a great communicator. We'll try to build those out, build your comfort level so you can do them in different situations. But you don't have to learn a whole new accent or lower your voice perpetually 19. 5 Communications skills are the most important skills for success and are the least taught: If you're this far into the course, I probably don't have to sell you on the importance of communication skills. If you didn't think they were important, why would you be here? But I do think it's important to kind of step back for just a moment and put it in perspective. When you look at the most successful people in any field, whether it's politics, business, high tech, finance, even the sciences, so much of what that person does all day long is they communicate. They speak to investors, to voters, to employees, to vendors, to customers, to clients. They have toe listen the concerns of their investors of their customers of their clients of their patients. The higher you go up in any career other than perhaps writing novels, it's about how will you communicate in a non written way Now, obviously, writing is a form of communication. That's the form of communication. We're going to spend the least amount of time here in this course because it is something that's taught every day in school your entire life. What's not taught is how to communicate by speaking verbal communication, nonverbal communication, basically any form of communication, other than writing or typing. That's what isn't taught. And yet, ultimately, that's what could decide whether your career ends here, here, here or down here. So I want to congratulate you for devoting sometime, investing your energy. Your resource is into improving yourself as a communicator, and I would just want toe redouble those efforts for you because it can. You look at the successful people you admire. They might not be silver tongued orders, but they are good communicators. Even someone you think of who is not your favorite politician doesn't give a great speech. Even people like that you see them in a small room, one on one or with 10 people. They can have contributors eating out of a palm of their hands. Now, you may have no interest in running for office or ever asking for money, but I guarantee you there are aspects of your life, your personal life, your professional life where you can benefit by being a better communicator. So that's why, as we go through this whole course, you're going to see some sections that will apply to you some that don't pick and choose as you see fit. 20. 6 Direct versus indirect communication: be direct. Get to the point. Be concise. Tell it like it is. Don't sugarcoat it. Just get to the point quickly. You've heard all these things your whole life, right? Well, guess what? It's not really true now. I'm not suggesting you. Why beat around the bush? But at every single opportunity. When you're trying to communicate with someone, you have to look at a number of factors. What's their interest in what you're talking about? How much do they trust you like you even know you? It's not true that the most direct communication is always going to be the most successful . Now this is not a course on dating and romantic relationships. But think back when you were in high school or middle school, there was typically always one person, typically a guy, and he would just call or text the 10 most attractive people in the school and ask them out on the day. Hey, you want to go out with May? What typically happened to that person? They all said no, it was just to direct. He was clear on what he wanted, but it just is to off putting, so it's not enough. That's why you typically don't see 30 minute infomercials as 12th commercials. An infomercial is a form of communication. It's one we like to make fun of, and people like to think it doesn't have an impact on them. But infomercials. The 30 minute long commercials spend a lot of time making the case, telling a story, telling benefits, bringing you in being interesting, talking about your concerns before they ever ask you to pull out your credit card number and purchase something. So I want you to go into this whole learning experience on communication skills with an open mind and realize it's not about being fast, concise, the most direct. It's about putting forth your ideas in the warmest environment possible so they can be received in the best possible way so that the person or persons you're speaking to really understand you and feel good about you end your messages so they're more likely to understand you remember your messages, Perhaps do what you want. Go where you want to go or join you in some greater enterprise. So I do want to just get you toe kind of scratch off. This idea that more direct is always better. Sometimes it is, but sometimes it isn't 21. 7 Let's hop in with something new: we're ready to hop right into the meat of this course. I wanted to start with something different. So of you have read books on communication, you may have taken other courses here on this platform. I want to give you something that I'm quite confident you haven't learned before. So this first whole section here is about a very particular type of communication. It's how you, as an individual consumer, can communicate with corporations, big corporations, little corporations, small companies and sometimes even governments. It's a different form of communication than just talking to an individual friend, family member, colleague, person at the office. So that's what this section coming up is all about. I think you're going to see some things here that you haven't thought of before. That can really make your life ah, lot easier. As a consumer, we're all consumers these days and most the time. You may have great experiences, whether you like to shop on Amazon or eBay or walmart dot com, but let's face it, we've all had some bad experiences and we just feel powerless. We just don't know how to communicate our frustration. Are we really going to file a lawsuit every time we think a company gave us a bad product. No, that's not realistic. But it is realistic to communicate to those companies effectively. The next section will show you how. 22. 8 Communicate your message to companies, big and small, to get them to take action: So in this section you're gonna learn exactly how to communicate with corporations, big corporations, especially when you feel that you need something redressed. Typically, this is when something went wrong, although you could communicate the company's when you're incredibly happy with them. I like to leave positive reviews on Yelp. Other places Google reviews for companies that I feel Treat me well, but let's face it, that's easy. The trickier issue is what happens when a company is sold your product. It's awful, and they're making it difficult for you to get a refund or you've bought, Let's say, a plane ticket. Now the trip was canceled, and they want to hold your money for three months before you get a refund. There's all sorts of things where we fall through the cracks as customers, and unfortunately, there is the expression the squeaky wheel gets the grease. We've heard that we know that this section I'm going to teach you quick, easy, simple ways of communicating your dissatisfaction so that you are the squeaky wheel. There's gonna be some new techniques here. I think you'll be surprised, but you'll be very happy with how fast and simple it is to communicate. Your message is with corporations large and small, so stay tuned 23. 9 One person can get a huge corporation to pay attention and make things right: I'm here to tell you. One individual can get a huge mega corporation. Pay attention. You can communicate with corporations and even get what you want. If you go about it the right way, let me give you a case study. This was earlier this year, and I don't mean to sound like I'm picking on one company. It could happen to any company at some point. This happened to be with my local sprint store, where I bought a cell phone and what many cell phones there. So I purchased the phone. I've had many phones from their purchased a case and I couldn't hear people could not hear me. I thought there was a problem. The phone didn't update. I thought it would work itself. It didn't. I took it. The apple, they said, Oh, they're your problem is the case. It turns out the Apple store didn't do anything wrong with Sprint Store had sold me the wrong case. I had made the purchase based on their estimate. I went back. I was very polite. Nice. I just said I'd like a refund. They wouldn't give it to me. And I was polite. I called as to speak to the manager went by, left my business car Nothing, I figured. Do I really want to waste time writing letters? It was only a $70 case, but still it just stuck in my crawl because at this point, I've bought many phones from this one sprint store here in Huntington, New York, outside of New York City. I just thought it was a really poor way of treating a customer, and I wanted to communicate that. But how do you do that? Typically, if you're in a store and you see a customer service, you see people in line and they're getting angry and they're yelling at some poor customer service representative and they're yelling. Sometimes they're cursing, and it's just easy to discount that person. Oh, you're just being obnoxious. Go away. So that's not what I did. I had a very specific strategy where I wanted to communicate my message in a thoughtful way . Ah, polite way and most important away that would get results. I want you to watch the video and I apologize. It's a little bit longer. It's about five minutes long, but this is a video I posted, and then here's what I did. I e mailed it to the local store manager, the Sprint CEO, from their website, the head of investor relations and public relations from their website. And it caused a massive snarl. And I got a lot of phone calls. I'll tell you about the results after this, but first, I want you to see the video. And then I will tell you why I did it that way. Why? I'm dressed that way. Why the approach ID shows worked. So take a look at the next video. Then I'll explain it. And then we'll figure out how can you do this in your own life? Because I'm sure you've ever bought anything if you've ever used it. Services of a cable TV company, your phone company. At some point you feel like you weren't treated perfectly. This is the solution for you. 24. 10 This video ruined the weekend of Executives at a major Phone Company: Hi, My name is T. J. Walker, and this is a message for TS Stewart, who is the manager of the Sprint store at the Walt Whitman Mall in Huntington, New York T apologies for this impersonal form of communication, but I've stopped by the store to meet with you. I let my business card for you to call. I've phone and left messages, and no one's returned the call, so I really don't have any other means of communicating. So the reason I went to the stores, I have what I thought was a small problem. For years, I've had excellent relationship with your store. I have purchased a this point half a dozen phones from you. I've lived in the area for the less than five years and have regular monthly contracts with Sprint for my phone. My wife zone have have purchased several phones have always had fantastic service. In fact, I've recommended my friends and colleagues to use your store and would frankly like to have continued doing that. Here was my what I thought was a small problem. A couple of months ago, I upgraded to latest iPhone eight, bought a Lifelock protective cover, which I've bought in previous years from your staff, and it's done an excellent job of protecting my phone because I tend to drop them. So I bought a new life lock jacket. I guess it was around $70 or so, and I noticed that microphone just wasn't working Half the time people couldn't hear May. People couldn't hear me on Skype calls. Certain people I called couldn't hear. I thought it was a problem with the iPhone. I thought it was a problem with software. I figure let me wait six weeks, get the latest updates from Apple. Nothing works. So I took the phone back toe apple, thinking it was a problem with the phone. They did a diagnostic. They took it out of the case and said, The problem is the case. You're using a case for an iPhone seven. It's concealing the microphones. Sure enough, we took the case off and the problem was solved. Having any problems since since I was at the store and didn't want to drop the phone. Break it, I asked them. They didn't pitch me on anything. I asked them if they had another case that would work, so I purchased another case a few days later. I then went back to your store, told them about the problem, and I said, Frankly, look, I've had great relations with your store, but I really feel like you're consultant gave me profoundly bad advice. They sold me a Lifelock case for a seven phone. I had an eight phone to cover up the mike, and the first thing your staff told me was, frankly, that I was basically an idiot because the case would have worked if I had the case door open at the bottom. How I would have known that was beyond may. Certainly no one told me that next they told me that I had not returned the case within the two week period. Therefore, there was nothing they could dio. Well, there was no rational way I could know there was a problem with the case in two weeks. It's not like the phone had broken. There was no way for me to know that was the cause of the problem. I again suggested the problem was your sales team sold me the wrong case. That gave me bad advice. All I'm asking for is a refund on the case, and I in fact, returned the case. Next, your staff told me that I didn't really need a new case. It was just apple Sit trying to sell me stuff, implying that one of your major partners, Apple is behaving unethically. I can tell you, the Apple store was so incredibly busy they would have been happy if I had just left. I had toe ask them for a case. They were trying to sell me this at all. And I just had to say, This leaves a very bad feeling in my stomach. I like to think I'm a rational person. I'm a polite person. I went in stating my case. It was instantly dismissed. I was essentially told I was a fool. I was wrong. Apple was unethical. Everyone was doing something wrong other than you and your sales team. And that just doesn't ring true to May. Now I have given your company many thousands of dollars at this point, and I'm essentially told I'm a liar and you don't return messages when I stopped by the store. My messages aren't returned When I leave a professional business card. My messages aren't returned When I call and leave a message with staff. So I am left with the conclusion that you just don't care about me and customers like me. And that leaves me very sad. If you have anything that you think I've missed, I'm more than happy to hear from you. Thank you very much. 25. 11 Here's what really happened: I hope you had a chance to look at that video. Is there anything special about of their special effects? No, it's just like this. It's just me talking. And it took me five minutes. I did it in one take, but what's the result? I posted it. I think about a day went by. All of a sudden, I'm getting calls from the local manager, the local managers, boss, the head of public relations, people in corporate from many states away. I'm getting calls on the weekends, and there was anything we can do for you, Mr Walker, can we give you more? Can we give you more money? I wasn't trying to shake them down. I wasn't trying to extort. Hm. I just wanted to be treated fairly. All I wanted was a refund for the $70 I got it and I got it like that. It wasn't some six week process. If they want to give it to you right away, they can't. Here's what I think really happened. Their goal was Oh my gosh, this guy is causing a problem because he makes us look bad. He's embarrassing us. How can we shut him up because this could blow up on social media now. It didn't blow up on social media. It was only seen by a couple of dozen people, and most of those were probably executives at Sprint. So let's back up a minute and walk through my thought process, my thought process. Waas Any reasonable person who heard my side of this story and I was sold a case. It was the wrong case. Wrong piece of equipment. I should get a refund, would agree with me. So I concluded that I really was on the right side of things. A fair minded person would conclude I deserve a refund. So the way I position the video is I'm thinking about not how can I really communicate with Sprint? But how can I communicate with other consumers who watch the video thinking this guy seems reasonable? Wow, sprints really awful. Maybe we shouldn't do business with them, so I don't want to make it sound so complicated like, Oh, it's three dimensional chess. But it is a little more community complicated than these, simply communicating with the sprint executives air the local manager because I am trying to communicate with the people they care about their customers. And the fear of looking bad with their customers, I think, is what would motivate them to really take a second look at my particular case and in this case, do the right thing and just give me the $70 refund. They probably would have given me $500 as, ah, way of making up for the inconvenience. I didn't ask for that, and I'm not asking you to use this communications tactic to shake down corporations or governments. I want you to use it as a tool to just help level the playing field and to help you communicate more effectively. So more specific things idea. I put on a suit and tie. I do believe it's just harder for businesses to discount someone who looks like a respectable businessman. And I realize there can be sexist and racist element classes, elements and that. But I did what I thought worked for May I happen to be an old man who own suits and can look respectable, so I put a suit and tie on, so I wanted to look the part of someone who is a good customer. Notice how I started off in a completely positive way. I stressed I had nothing but good dealings with your company. I'm a reasonable person. I actually said that. I tell them I've given their because their their business thousands of dollars over the years, which is true, and they have that in the records. And here's the thing that most people forget. I told them I want to be able to give them more business in the future Now, assuming for a minute that I was wrong in this situation, I don't think I want. I just think a fair minded business would say, Here's a customer that's given us thousands of dollars of business in the past. Gives us business every year gives us business every month through the the Sprint Service Agreement is likely to give us thousands of dollars. MAWR, Even if we think he's wrong, let's given the 70 bucks back, just a placated again. I'm thinking all right, but I'm hoping there, at least in the worst possible scenario, looking at it from that perspective. So I'm incredibly positive. I'm not cursing. I'm not angry. I'm not imputing anyone's motives by stating my case in a straightforward way again. All of this is because I want the PR people, the managers, the managers boss to be thinking, Oh my gosh, she's making us look like idiots because he seems so reasonable. Most people, when they complain, I'm sure you've seen people at the airport. There's bad weather, a plane is delayed and some passenger wants to scream at the hapless person behind the ticket counter. And it's not that person's fault that it's raining or there's a windstorm. You don't want to seem like that. That's embarrassing for everyone involved. And let's face it, when we hear I know when I hear someone yelling at a clerk, it makes me want the clerk to say no, go away and you're not getting any refund. I want to be the opposite of that. And when you're trying to communicate with a big company, I think you need to be the opposite of that low key low energy. But calm with confidence, state your case and almost with a tone of a bewilderment of Gosh, I've been a good customer. I want to be a good customer. I don't understand why I'm being traded so poor like and what you'll find is people will jump through hoops because they don't want a reasonable person toe. Look at that and think, Wow, they really are treating their customers poorly. Other issues involved the distribution. I didn't just email that to the manager. I called up. And as for the managers, Boss got that person's email. And then I just went to the sprint website, looked in the press section and pulled on email address off of a press release. And I think I found the section on the head of the press off US investor relations. So I sent the email out 45 different places, ceasing everyone. So everyone saw what everyone else saw, and this actually went out on a late Friday or Saturday. So I'm getting calls from people in corporate headquarters on a Sunday afternoon. They're having to come into the office now. I feel bad a little bit ruining people's weekends, but I feel a little bad. I had to get at the store and call several times and get no attention. So this is a tactic that I believe is extraordinarily effective. When you are in the right, you can't lie. You can't make up. Enjoy. At least I don't believe you should and state your case calmly. Make a nice video. Anyone can write a nasty yelp review, which, by the way, I think I did that, too. Oh, the other thing. I posted this video on the Sprint Facebook page so you can just imagine all the different buttons. It's pushing by the way, I did all this in about 1/2 an hour. This is so much easier, Faster, quicker than you know, threatening a lawsuit and writing regular letters. It's quick, and it's easy. So to sum up corporation, big government agency, anyone who has to deal with a large group of public has done you wrong. State your case in a video ISMM or powerful than just a text comment and then distribute that video on YouTube. Twitter. Yeah, I put on there, right. I put it to their attention on their Twitter account to you hit them on all their social media contacts, and you email it to them. You will get their attention. You will communicate your message, so I hope you have nothing but good dealings with all your corporate purchases. But if not used this technique, Very few people are doing it. That's why it works part of any great communication, doing something a little bit different from what everyone else does. It cuts through the clutter. 26. 12 Never Let Any Company Have the Final Word with you again: Let's sum up what we've learned in this section. You do not have to let a big corporation, a big government institute, have the final word you could be. Communicating with them is easily as they can be communicating with you. And in this modern era, it's exciting because the playing field is level at least a little more level than it waas because you can communicate not just with the cooperation of the government entity, but you can communicate with all of their customers or their constituents, and that's what really makes it powerful. What people have traditionally done is they've written a long, angry letter that's 12 pages long and maybe hand written, that gets tossed in the trash or one quick, nasty review on Yelp. People just figure there's always some negatives. It'll balance out, or if you are really big corporation or a government entity, people sell you all the time. You have lawyers for that. It's easy to discount that and just put it in a box. But the fear of public humiliation does get people's attention again. Don't use it irresponsibly. Don't just say it because you want something for free. You're gonna ruin it for everyone because it won't have any impact if more and more people do this. This works when the facts are on your side. And when a fair minded person here's your story and the company's story, they would side with you. The other beauty of this is it's so easy to do. And so quick you don't have to have a studio like I do it. Professional lighting. Just pull out your cell phone, make a video, speak from the heart, state your case briefly. Try to do it even shorter than I did in the five minutes and then posted your page. YouTube Senate. Everyone in the company or the organization or the restaurant. Whoever it is you're trying to get attention to. Believe me, your message will be communicated. Good luck, but again, please use responsibly 27. 13 Here is how you get Exactly Want you Want: in this section. We're really gonna die deeper into fundamentals of communication that are gonna work for you regardless of the situation. But it's important to be well grounded in the fundamentals. Let's start at the very beginning. What is it you want? The person you're communicating with to Dio I need you to really ask yourself that now. I'm assuming in most communication you want somebody do something, you want them to hire you. You want them to give you a raise. You want them to invest in you. You want them to like you. What is it now? There are some purely social conversation time for your trying to communicate in. You're just building report and just having fun. There's nothing wrong with that. Most of the focus of this course is how to build your communication skills not just for business purposes, but to help you get things you want to help you communicate with people, toe. Leave them to where do you want to go? It may be How do you persuade family members to take a hike with you on Sunday morning rather than sitting around watching TV? It doesn't have to be anything specific to business or money or professional. But it is about communicating to motivate people to do something, so the very first step. If you want to have strong communication skills, you have to decide in your own brain. What is it? I actually want the people I'm speaking to? Two dio. It sounds obvious it sounds basic. But in so many instances, especially in professional life in the corporate arena, when people are giving speeches, briefings, talks, power point, they haven't thought this through. They're just trying to pass along this huge body of knowledge and everything gets lost in the shuffle. So that's the starting point. What is the one thing you want that person or those persons you're speaking to actually do ? After you've communicated your message it Maybe you want your child to clean the garage or his or her room? You know what the outcome is Now you got to figure out how to communicate that in a way so that it's understood remembered, and there's some kind of motivation to make it happen. So here's what I want you to do. Now. I want you to think of a particular communication goal. You have a specific scenario. Could be work could be professional, could be personal, and I want you to go to the Q and X section and just type up. You don't have to do a video, but just type up. What is the one thing you would like an individual you're communicating with to do or a group of individuals? What is it you want them to? Dio? Go ahead, type that in the Q and A section right now. 28. 14 Master the Key to Motivation and Persuasion: okay, you've isolated in one sentence What it is you want that person or those people you're communicating with, two dio, you've got it right in front of you. Now what I want you to do is to brainstorm on every possible message you have that might motivate them to do what you want to dio. Now, this could apply to a marriage proposal solicitation for a financial investment in a start up, a request for a raise for approval of a budget or trying to get your child to clean his or her room. It could apply to anything. But the important part is you kind of step out of your set ideas and all the things you want and you look at it through the lens of what's gonna motivate the people I'm actually communicating with to do what I want them to dio because what motivates them is different than what is motivating you. You gotta look at it from the perspective of the people you're communicating with. My recommendation brainstorm on every possible message and sometimes it might be simple. If it's getting your kid to clean the room, the only motivation Maybe you can't leave the House GOP A with your friends until you do it . Sometimes it may be that specific, but let's face it most of the time in life when we're trying to communicate with customers , clients, colleagues, co workers, bosses, government officials, others we don't have that coercive relationship or that position of authority that we might with a small child or a little older child, either. So we have to be more persuasive and speaking of more motivating way. So you've got to isolate every possible motivating message and idea that you could use to convince the person you're speaking. But but here's the thing. Here's the tricky part. Here's where people get hung up. I can't tell them everything. You can't overwhelm people with 189 ideas of why your vacation plans air better are why your plans for this new branding logo better than theirs? You've got to narrow it down. So much of being a good communicator has nothing to do with your eye. Contact your hand gestures, the quality of your voice. It's about judgment and really figuring out what not to say to that friend or family member or colleague or investor figuring out what is not essential. Instead, you have to focus on what is essential. Now. The rule of thumb I give all of my clients who are coming to me to help with their speeches and presentations is no more than five ideas, even if you have an hour to speak. If you're talking to a colleague down the hall and you're trying to get one quick decision on one relatively small issue, you may want to focus on just one idea. Whatever the most motivating message that areas, and then spend maybe just two minutes on that as you're walking down the hall. So there's a judgment call. You've got to really narrow it down many times. It's just gonna be one message. You're talking to the news media, and it's a full fledged interview. Three messages, a big speech presentation, no more than five messages are there times when you want to go into more detail. Sure, let's say you're trying to talk to a spouse about a huge life decision of moving to another continent or the other side of the country and Uprooting your life. That may be something that you talk about over a period of months. So maybe there are dozens, if not hundreds of messages. You have to figure out, How much time do I have to communicate with this person? How can I make the most of it? So what I want you to do now in this exercise is Look at what you're trying to get an audience member to do yours, or I don't want to make it sound like it's all about public speaking. It could be a family member, a friend, a colleague. What is it you want this person to dio now brainstorm on every possible message that could make them want to do it? And for the purposes of this exercise, narrow it down to the top three, Not three big themes with seven sub points, just three ideas. And I want you to write that down in the Q and X section so that you've got focus and I know what you're trying to dio 29. 15 Nobody Cares About You, and That's OK: Let me ask you when you signed on to this course and you watch the first video and you're sitting there watching me talk. Were you thinking pie? Oh, boy, I sure hope TJ's having a good day. I hope he's comfortable. I hope the studio isn't too hot. I hope TJ's having a great day and this is a great experience room. I hope he's making a lot of money from this. Is that what you were thinking? I seriously doubt it. Chances are when you watch this, you're like most people. You're looking at it through the prism of Am I gonna get something out of this Is just going to be valuable to me. Am I gonna somehow improve? You're looking at it through the lens of how this will help you Great communicators know that. That's why when I started this course, I didn't start off in the promo video saying Thank you for joining me today. Before we start, let me tell you about how great I am. I'm president of Media Training Worldwide. I've done this for 30 years and have all these bestselling books, and I have I didn't do that. Why not because I thought it would be boring to you. But I didnt talk about myself at all. Right at the beginning, in the video, what I talk about, I talked about you said, Imagine if you could go into every communication situation knowing that you look comfortable, confident, relaxed, that you get the message you want commute. I talked about you because I'm tryingto hook you and I'm trying to get your attention Onley Then should you even care about anything to do with me? So that's what I recommend and not just with big speeches or power point presentations. But any time you're talking to someone, it's much more powerful to talk about. The other person there needs first. Now, I have not been single for a long time, but I certainly remember single days and single friends saying, Oh my gosh, the date was horrible. All that person did was talk about himself for the first half an hour. How greater wonderful he was or she waas. Nobody likes that. They don't like dating. They don't like it in the professional life. They don't like it with colleagues. So if you want to be a great communicator, the first thing you gotta figure out is nobody cares about you now. I don't mean to sound like we're all Neeson throats, and there's no society or anything. But what I do mean is, when you're communicating, realized people are looking at this listening to you from the standpoint of how does it affect them? Yes, your closest loved ones. Your spouse is your your closest family and friends care about you. But in so many aspects in life, when we're communicating to a sales clerk to a prospect, a client, a customer, a patient, they care about themselves and about how we can help them. So if you want to be a strong communicator, you have to look at it through the lens of what's going to help them on Lee. After you've made the case that you can really help them and talk about yourself, I'll be talking about myself a little deeper into the course. But even now I don't want to bore you yet, cause I'm not convinced you care enough about me yet. But as we go on this journey together, I will we even a little more, and that's a lot more effective than giving you my whole bio. The first, the first lecture like it's the first day at Community College, just not effective. 30. 16 See It, Taste It, Touch It, Feel It, Be It Selling with Your Story: So what's the single biggest difference between great communicators and the average ones and the bad ones? It's not being better looking or a stronger voice or mawr commanding eye contact or gestures. It's not being smarter or better educated. It really comes down to one thing. Great communicators consistently illustrate every message point with a story. Bad communicators just say, Oh, there's no time for stories I got all this data to go through. I got all these messages all these faxed, overwhelmed people with, and they end up doing a data dump. Let's face it, At some point in your life, you've probably had a Monday morning staff meeting and you're just afraid to ask that one person what's happened in the last week because they'll just start talking for 15 minutes. Fact. After fact, after fact, it's overwhelming, and it's disconnected. Fundamentally, human beings process information through stories. We're hardwired through this for really wrapping on two stories and visualizing what is a story? It's just you re telling a conversation you had with one person in a particular place about a real problem, how you felt and that was resolved. It's not that difficult. Everybody tells stories in certain circumstances of your with your best friend and you're almost in a car crash on the way to the meeting. You're gonna tell that story to your friend, and it's gonna be easy, cause you're just gonna relive it in your own brain. So we all tell stories all the time. The issue is, if you're communicating something and it seems more formal, it's business or its professional or its corporate. Then we tell ourselves that, Oh, I can't tell stories now. I have to be serious. Wrong. Great communicators consistently use stories whether they're telling something toe one friend about what restaurant they want to go to or they're trying to convince an entire country to elect them. They use stories to make their ideas memorable. It is the single biggest difference. So I have a huge, huge section in this course on stories. So all your questions will be answered and their examples and I give tons and tons and tons of my own stories on key communication points to help you remember. So take a look at that for right now. I want you to think about you know what you're trying to get your audience to dio, you've isolated your top three messages. Now I want you to pick just one story that makes one of your messages mawr understandable. So think about a time when you've had a real conversation with a real person that relates to one of the messages you're trying to convey. And if you've never had a single conversation with a single person about that message, maybe it's not that important or interesting to begin with. So that's your homework. You know it's a record. Anything to write it down just in your own mind, be thinking about the story you want to tell to make that message come alive. 31. 17 The Ultimate in Confidence builder Seeing is believing: okay. Are you ready to not like me? I mean, seriously dislike me because you're not gonna like what I'm about to tell you. People always ask me, T. J. What's the number? One way to really build confidence before any speech, presentation, talk Any time you have to communicate. And they're really hoping I'm going to say something I owe. Just visualize your audience naked or in their underwear or stand like Wonder Woman for 30 seconds. Those things air Easy, quick gimmicks. I wish they worked, but they don't. There's only one thing I know that really works. And that is evidence that you actually have something interesting to communicate and you're communicating it. Well, how do you get this evidence? Put your hand in your pocket and pull out your cell phone. What I want you to do is to practice whatever it is you're trying to communicate and recorded on a cell phone. I don't care if it is a marriage proposal, a solicitation foreign investment in your startup, a request for a raise. Whatever it is you're trying to communicate, I want you to practice it on video. Now, here's the thing. I know you're not gonna like doing it. You're not gonna want to do it. Too bad if I go to my doctor and say, Doctor, I'm overweight. I need to lose weight I'm hoping he'll give me a magic pill. But instead she says, Well, T J you need to exercise more and eat less, eat fewer fatty foods and ice cream. I don't want to hear that. Unfortunately, it's true. It's good advice, and my advice for you is a little bit like that. It's not fund. It's not exciting and sexy, but it really does get the job done. It's not hard. We just aren't comfortable with the idea of recording ourselves and looking at ourselves. Peoples teach and like to hear my own voice. I don't like to look at myself. Too bad as I mentioned in a previous lesson. Nobody cares about you. You need to do it so that you actually have confidence. You're coming across the way you want. If you don't look at yourself on video, how do you know you're not doing this? Believe me, I could give you all the same advice in this course. But if I did this licked my lips nervously the whole time. By the way, that was disgusting. It would disgust you. It would bother you. It would annoy you. But guess what? I don't have to worry about the fact that I'm looking my lips too much while speaking to you because I've already checked everything I'm saying to you now. I have said before on video, and I looked at it, and this is in fact how I want to come across. So the rial ki confidence isn't just practicing. It's certainly not practicing in front of a mere. It's practicing on video, looking at it, figuring out what you like, what you don't like and then doing it again, looking at again, re doing it, doing it again and again and again, people say T J. What's the magic number of rehearsals is many as it takes until you like it. You might do it in one take and think, OK, that's how I want to come across. That's fine. It might take you 50 might take you 100 and 50. I don't mean to sound callous, but I really don't care. What I care about is will you be completely comfortable when you have to communicate. Whatever it is you're communicating, what makes us uncomfortable is this fear of thinking. Oh, what if I look stupid? What if I sound stupid? What have I seen? Awkward. But if I don't make sense, What if I'm speaking too softly or too quickly? Well, guess what, All of those air completely legitimate concerns. The way to satisfy yourself that you're not making any of those mistakes is to practice on video. Most people the first time they practice, they noticed they're nervous and they're speaking too quickly. So just do it again. Speak slower. Put in a pause or two. Your head is frozen. Move your head. Keep doing it again and again. Each time you practice, you get more comfortable with it. And that way you actually know how you're coming across. That's what we'll give you confidence. Think of anything else you do in life. If you were a great tennis player and you're confident that your forehand is going to go where you want to have good power and it goes in, it's typically because you've actually seen yourself hit hundreds or thousands of other forehands. You don't just get up once and say, I have never once played tennis or I've never done a forehand. Let me just hope that the 1st 1 is perfect in a match. It's not how you do anything else in life. You look for evidence when you are writing an important document, an email to a loved one. Even we typically run it through spellcheck. We look at it before using it and sending it to the person we're communicating with. It's the same principle with video. If you haven't seen yourself speak, then how do you know how you're coming across part of what makes us nervous when we communicate, whether we're giving a speech to 10,000 people or talking to one customer across from a table in a restaurant. Part of what makes us nervous is we just don't really know how the other person sees us. And when you practice on video, you now know you can actually see what the other person says. You can hear the same voice that your audience will see, and if you keep practicing that way, you eliminate the unknown were fearful of the unknown. If you actually know how you're coming across, there's no reason to be fearful. People are nice enough to write in on all my other unity courses that I seem really natural and they like the way I come across, and I just seem so confident and comfortable. I would say There's nothing I'm doing that you don't do already. When you're talking to a friend or a family member, there's nothing I am doing here. There's no skill I have that you can't develop really quickly in less than a day if you just practice. The reason I seem comfortable here and relaxed is I actually am comfortable and relaxed because I know exactly how I'm coming across in my perfect No, to some people, not like my beady eyes or my hair line. Sure some people don't like, but there's nothing I can do about that. So I don't worry about that. And I know that this is how I want toe convey my ideas. This is how I want to speak because I've done 10,000 other videos and I've looked at them and I've gotten feedback from others. So that's my challenge to you right now, and here's where you decide. Is this going to be a real course for you, where you actually learn, or is this just going to be kind of a sit back? Relax, push buttons do Facebook and email will have in the video. Go by and pretend to learn. You want to get something out of this course. Here's where I need you to step up. You've already isolated a particular thing. You want an audience person audience member to dio. When you're communicating with him, you've isolated a few messages. Ideas. You come up with a story. Now I want you to pull out your cell phone on your iPad or your webcam and record it. Look at figure out what you like, what you don't like and keep doing it. Don't just do it once, not look at it and upload it. I want you to keep doing it again and again and again before you show anyone. Try to eliminate things you don't like. Make sure you get to the point where you think it's good as you can currently dio that I want you to upload it, whether it's to YouTube or some video file sharing service and then put the U R L in the discussion section of this course, I will watch it and I will give you a personalized critique. A word of warning. Very few people do this. They don't get their money's worth out of this course. That makes me feel bad. But I can't reach through the screen and through the computer and force you to do this again. Getting back to what I said earlier. So much of communication success is just initiating just showing up so much of communication. Skill improvement is just doing this one exercise. I guarantee you. If you think it looks horrible, you can hit delete. No one has to see it, but if you don't start, you'll never make that first big step to improve yourself. So please record yourself. Now redo it. Keep looking at it till you're satisfied that uploaded to YouTube. Any other file sharing service post the U. R l. I'm looking forward to seeing you 32. 18 It's Easy to pass a Test when the Answer Is right in front of you: you're back so quickly. Are you sure you made the video and posted it like I asked you to let me look here again for it. Okay. I can't completely tell if you did this or not. But I'm begging you. Please record yourself on video and let me critique you. It's the way to get the most out of this. I always get a kick out of reviews because I have more than 100 communication skills courses online and invariably one out of 100. The person will say no worthwhile activities, no good homework activities. And they never, ever did this. They never, ever are the ones who record this themselves on video and let me record. So people are funny. It's like because they don't like to do it. They say it didn't exist. So I'm asking you. Please don't be one of those people. Okay? Now, where we going? I want to give you the ultimate test. If you pass this test, you will have supreme confidence With any communication you have to do in your life personally, professionally, at the family level, it doesn't matter. You heard me talk about practicing on video. You heard me talking about redoing it until you're comfortable with it. Here's the ultimate test. Figure out who your audience is and then find someone else who is close to that e. Mail them your video and then call and ask them What do they remember? What messages do they remember? So if you are pitching a new business and you're trying to raise angel investment funds and your going to be giving a pitch and you're gonna be communicating Teoh, let's say 10 angel investors at a local angel investing club. And none of them know you and your uncle or your neighbor down the street is also an angel investor. Then put together a video, not the slide deck, but the actual video of you speaking and presenting and record it. Send it to your uncle or your AMP. Send it to the person down the street. Who is an angel. Investor asked them to watch it, then ask them what messages do they remember and ask them what they conclude. You would hope that they would say something like, Wow, this is the greatest app in the world that is going to revolutionize the X Y Z business. It's clearly going to make a $1,000,000,000 begging. You take my check. I want in, too. I mean, that's sort of the ideal response you want if you are pitching for investment funds. Unfortunately, what you often find is you send your presentation to someone and they're trying to be helpful and they'll say something like, Well, you have good confidence and you're quite articulate for young man young woman. But I'm still confused as to how you make money. If you're hearing something like that, it's a big problem. Your aunt uncle, your neighbor down the street is trying to be helpful, and that is helpful. They dont understand your business. It means you did not communicate. You can do this with any communications situation. If you're going to be meeting with your boss tomorrow to ask for a raise, put together a video of yourself. You're not going to show your boss the video, but put together a video of yourself making the case as to why you deserve the Rays and then send it to a colleague and another company or another organization. Get their feedback Now here's the thing. That's part of the way But that's not the advanced step. The advance step is. You really have to listen to what your many focus group is telling you and make changes. You have to pull from them what they're getting and what they're not getting, and you've got to redo it. You may have to do it 234 times, and you may have to find a new set of years and eyes. But it's worth it, because when you consent a video of yourself communicating a specific message that you really care about, someone can watch it once and throw back right to you without prompting without having to dig what your message is and what they think you want them to do. Then you know you're communicating. You have no doubt it's virtually impossible to be nervous or uncomfortable or to do a bad job. So that's my real challenge, for you know, I can't force you to do that, But I would ask you the last video you did take that, share it with some colleagues, some friends, family members, associates and get feedback from them. Their feedback maybe a lot more important than a lot more insightful than my feedback, because they're gonna know you and your issues even better. So please do that now 33. 19 You Are Normal to Fear Communicating In Some Circumstances: if you ever get nervous. If you are fearful of some communication situations, it just means you're normal. After all the polls do show that people say public speaking is their number one. I don't really believe that. I think if someone said I'm gonna push you out of the airplane or give a quick toast to everyone, you would give a little mini toast speech. But still, it is something that creates anxiety and people. It creates fear. Evolutionary biologist, believe that we are programmed this way is a defense mechanism because thousands of years ago, if you're out in the plains and you're completely exposed lions, tigers, bears, other creatures can come see you exposed and attack you on each You. Whereas if you're a part of a heard your one of 1000 your odds are good of not being eaten . So when you stand up to speak, give a presentation. You're feeling this unexposed. These people could come grab me, eat me, kill me. That's why your hands air perspiring your body could be perspiring because you're your body is trying to protect you. Adrenaline is pulsating telling you to run. Get out of here. Unfortunately, if you're nervous or uncomfortable about sitting down with your boss to ask for a raise, are sitting down with your largest investor to ask for another $10 million round of investment. Sweating and having the adrenaline to run quickly isn't going to help you at all. It's actually the opposite. It's gonna make you look bad and be unproductive, so we gotta figure out a way of dealing with this fear and getting over it. But I do want you to realize it's completely normal to have some fear, some anxiety. So I mentioned to you in the previous section number One way to get over it is to practice . Tell you like what you see now I'm a pretty comfortable speaker. I enjoy speaking, actually seek out every kind of opportunity for giving speeches, presentations, trainings. I do more than 100 trainings a year live in person with people, so I like to think of myself as a pretty comfortable speaker. But still, I'm a human being to and with most people, if you take them out of their comfort zone, they can get uncomfortable. I remember about a decade ago I was a judge on a reality TV show in Eastern Europe, I was called out on stage, was asked to announce one of the winners, our first runner up. But everything was in a foreign language, and the name was written in a foreign language that I couldn't read. And at that moment I was nervous. I was how uncomfortable, and it was not my finest performance ever. But you know what? I get through it. No one really noticed. I smiled, handed it back to the emcee, and he read it out loud and no one else really remembered. So my point is, no one's a super human. I'm not a superhuman. Everyone is nervous if you take them out of their comfort zone. The key is figuring out how to make yourself comfortable by dealing all the various steps I've talked about so far in this course with Mawr steps to continue. So relax. If you feel uncomfortable, nervous or even fearful of speaking situations, it just means you're normal 34. 20 The Power of the Positive: I had to be candid with you. There are a lot of so called motivational speakers, power of positive thinking, speakers, the secret speakers and I don't really buy it this Oh, let's be positive, cheerful everything all the time. To me and many others consume saccharine can seem phony, So I'm not asking you to have a big smile on your face. With every communication you dio and Onley, look on the bright side of life at all times. Life is more complex. There are times when we have to communicate negative messages. You have to do an employee review and you know you're gonna have to fire the person. There's just no way around it. There's going to be some messages that have to be communicated. Having settle that, I do want to stress to you that any time you have positive messages, start with that. It's just human nature to shut down when you hear something negative, especially if it's negative about you. It's human nature to defend yourself in one way of defending shutting your ears. I don't want to listen to this person. Tell me what an idiot I am now. I'm assuming you don't have a lot of communication needs, telling people they're idiots. But you get my point. There is a tremendous power of the positive human beings respond to it better. They're more likely to listen to you. They're more likely to think you're credible. Then when you do have negative information, it softens the blow. So, for example, with all of my clients, when I'm working with them for live in person, media training and public speaking workshops all over the world, as I have done for many years, they send me a video of themselves speaking. It's part of their homework. I critique it. I tell them I'm going to critique it. They're expecting me. Teoh River More. They always say the same thing T. J let me have it ripped me apart. But what I do is I start by cataloging all the things they do well, because most people do a lot of things well or they're not making certain mistakes other people make. They may still have mistakes, but they're speaking. Speed is OK or their eye contact is OK or they're not fidgeting with their fingers. So I note every single thing they do well, then typically, I'll focus on just one thing where I feel they could really improve, and I tell them exactly how to do it. And it's very powerful because I've relaxed them because I've told him all the things they're doing well, they perceived me is a very intelligent person because I've told them things. They're doing well that no one else has told. Um and then I focus on just one thing. So it's much easier, intellectually and psychologically and emotionally to focus on just one flaw, and then I tell him exactly what to do to fix it. So I'm starting off with positives. I then focus on something negative, and then I focus on positives to fix it. Now it's not generic. Oh, Sally, you're a great, wonderful person. Everybody loves you. I have to fire you. Tomorrow, you're incompetent. But by the way, you have a nice smile and you're very pop. It's not that kind of fake, phony doughnut type of thing you've heard about other communications classes. It's highly tailored and specific to the issue at hand. So in my case, I'm cataloguing their strengths. A speaker is a communicator, pinpointing the area that needs to be improved and then being highly specific on how to do it. And then they focus on that and then they see improvement. So I've communicated with them because they understand what I'm saying, and they're able to take the actions I want and make improvement, and we keep on getting more and more improvement when were together in the actual day of training. And that's actually the approach I use when we're together live as well. So I do want you to think about how can you be as positive as possible. I don't want you to lie. I don't want you to come up to me and say O T J. You have the thickest, most beautiful head of curly black hair ever. That's not credible and I wouldn't believe you. But when you can say something positive, it opens people up. It brings the defenses down. It creates a little more sense of community and will open people up to your message. So I want you to always think about how can you place positive messages in even when there is some bad news and some negative messages to convey 35. 21 Debunking the Myth of Charisma: let me debunk one myth right here. There's this myth of the charismatic communicator, the charismatic speaker, something you're just born with. Well, that is a bunch of baloney here in the United States. Many people think of John F. Kennedy as this charismatic speaker. And no, he did give some good speeches, but he was considered a horrible speaker just a few years before he became president. I know people here in the York City who used to see him as a young congressman coming around asking for money and attending fundraisers, and they said he was awful head down, reading, nervous. All you saw was sort of this thick head of hair, nothing charismatic about him. It was a learned skill. Now I differ from some of my colleagues in the personal development space. I happen to think there's no such thing as charisma. What I think people really mean is somebody who's ideas I like for the most part, who is a great speaker that let me challenge you, think of someone that you perceive of as being very charismatic. Isn't that person also a really good speaker? Now think of someone who is an awful speaker How many people really view that person is charismatic. The two go together certainly in the world of politics, whether you think of Fidel Castro in his prime, whether or not you liked his politics or not, or Tony Blair when he was in power in Great Britain, where they both have in common, fantastic public speakers. So don't worry about trying to have some elusive charisma as a communicator. Instead, focus on being a good communicator, and people will start judging you as having charisma. This applies more and more when you speak to a larger audiences, because plenty of people seem like just ordinary Joes. When you meet them, talk to them in person. They can do the very same thing on stage in front of 10,000 people, but because they're comfortable, confident, relaxed, have interesting stories there, instantly perceived as charismatic. Well, they're just using good speaking skills, good communication skills. So my tip to you don't spend a lot of time looking for this mythical lamp filled with genies. To give you the charisma, Jean instead focus on being a great communicator and being interesting and memorable. Any time you communicate 36. 22 Never Fall for These Communication Gimmicks Again!: I want to save you some time, money and heartache because there are a lot of people peddling a lot of gimmicks out there to turn you into a better communicator. And I think they're either completely worthless or so difficult and hard that they're just not practical. So, for starters, that there's something called tapping. Where people have this there. If you just tap on your face often enough, you'll lose your fear and become a better speaker. Most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. Beta blockers again. You can take drugs so that you don't feel his 10 stop, but it can make you kind of look and sound like a zombie, and it doesn't cure the central problem of you. Don't look comfortable and you're not saying anything interesting, so I do not advise beta blockers for other people. They may want to use marijuana alcohol. I'm not opposed to those things, but don't use them before you give a presentation or a speech, because it's not really helping you come across more effectively to your audience. It's just making you relaxed. Well, if you're nervous, it's typically because you haven't rehearsed your presentation on video. Now there's hypnosis to help people reduce their stress again. I am not opposed to hypnosis. I know it helps some people not smoke, give up other bad habits. But if all it's doing is helping you give up your fear of public speaking. But you're using that as an excuse not to rehearse on video than it's a horrible idea. An L. P neuro linguistic programs. Some people are really good at it. Anthony Robbins has made a whole career out of it. I find most people after about five minutes the idea of mirroring someone. Oh, they tilt their head this way. So I'll do that. Most people just aren't going to do that. It's just too much to think about when you're trying to have a conversation and I don't find it really is effective for many people. It all a tiny percentage of people can actually discipline themselves to ever do that. There's this craze started by someone who gave it the third most popular Ted talk of all time, saying, If you just stand like Wonder Woman and tell yourself how great you and powerful you are, that will reduce all of your attention and fear you'll now be able to give a great speech again. Horrible advice, because you can feel confident and still give a lousy, boring speech. Don't go for these superficial things that are just about you feeling better because you can feel great and give the most boring speech anyone your audiences ever heard. You can feel great, and the person interviewing you for that job is thinking that your sleeper on drugs So it's not about you. You've heard me say this before. It's not about you. That's the problem with all these solutions. The NLP ease the face tapping the beta blockers. It's all about poor little me. I don't want to sound unsympathetic to you. I am sympathetic to I'm on your side. But it doesn't help you if it just masks the problem. If I tell you, I've got to go out and give a speech in the middle of Times Square and I think I'll do it naked. But I feel embarrassed because I'm not in good shape and I'm afraid I'm gonna be arrested. Are you gonna tell May? Well, T J Visualize is standing ovation, and it won't be that bad. And imagine the applause of the crowd. Are you going to tell me that to make me feel good? Are you going to say, Hey, TJ, why don't you put some clothes off? I would hope, and I would think that you would actually put some clothes on her. Tell me to put some clothes on. Every other week someone pitches me with some app that's going to solve all the problems because it will tell you how many words per minute you spoke. Well, you can speak at a consistent rate and still be awful. Same with devices. To get rid of your arms, you can get rid of all of your arms and be an awful speaker. All of these things are about attempting to solve one little piece of the puzzle, and often it makes it worse. These days, I get pitched by people peddling Virtual reality is a solution to making people better speakers and reduce their for years. We already have a technology to dramatically help you be a better speaker. It's just your cell phone. It's recording yourself on video. All these other things are gimmicks. Now at some point will there be some new device, some new pill that will turn people magically into great speakers. Maybe I'll be the 1st 1 to shout and endorse it and tell everyone, Don't take my courses anymore. Just take that pill. But I've never seen it happen. And I keep looking for it so that you don't have to. So, please, I beg you, don't fall for these gimmicks. If something seems too good to be true, it probably is holding your fingers a certain way. Visualizing people in their underwear just doesn't help at all. 37. 23 Here is where You decide if You are serious about improving your skills: Okay. This is the last time I'm gonna really bag hard. This will be a test of my communication skills because I clearly failed in the last section . I didn't convince the majority of you to record a video of yourself numerous times and posted here. So lesson. Even if you're a skilled professional communicator, no one bats 1000 just because you have an idea and you can try to make it memorable that you think will help someone doesn't mean they're gonna do what you do. Because I fail as I failed with some of you. But I do wanna ask one last time here. There may be mentions throughout the course, but this is the last really big time. I'm gonna beg you if you did not post a video of yourself yet speaking. I'm asking you to do it here. Now. Just record yourself speaking anything you want to communicate. I mentioned three messages in one story. If you would have more messages, fewer messages, more stories. That's okay. I'll leave it up to you. But I want you to record something where you think you tried to incorporate as many of the principles I've talked about so far in this course and that you're happy with it. That's the ultimate test, not me giving you an A or a 97. It's Are you happy with it? Post the video on YouTube or somewhere? Let me look at it, folks. I don't get any extra pay for this. This takes extra time of mine. But I willing to do it cause I want to help you become a better communicator and a stronger communicator. This is, frankly, not something you're going to get if you just sign up with the course with a really, really famous name who has 100 million bestsellers on different topics. This is something I do here for you that distinguishes it where I think I can really make a difference. So post a video of yourself speaking, and I'll give you my personalized critique 38. 24 Here is How to Get the Most Out of The rest of this course: So congratulations. You've now finished this section. You finished all the core sections that really talk about the most fundamental issues when it comes to communication skills. The rest of this course is really a Siris of many courses, highly specialized courses. And my advice to you is take a moment and just look at the entire table of contents, the entire curriculum and see which ones are most interesting view most relevant to you If and I hope you don't if you don't have any family member dying and you're not giving a eulogy anytime soon, you can skip the part on how to give a eulogy. If you're not a kid and you don't have kids, you can skip the whole course section on public speaking for kids. So this course is for you. It's designed to be a reference tool, something you can frankly use the rest of your life. You've already purchased it. You have lifetime access to this, so you can think of it almost as back in the old days. Those of you old enough to remember a reference dictionary was this thick. It's not that she read it all the way through, but It's something you kept in your library or on your desk as a tool. You went back to our your The old encyclopedias was referenced for you for any time. He needed it. That's how I designed this course. Certainly, if you want to go all the way through, if you really want toe ground yourself deeply and principles that will help you for every single communications experience, there's nothing wrong with going in a linear way from lecture 1 to 550. But you don't have to. Now I designed the course, or someone could go right to the section on public speaking for beginners or write to the section on Power Point and not be lost because of references earlier things. So each course is done in a standalone fashion. Because of that, I will tell you and be very up front with you right now. There is some repetition, so that's gonna bother. You get ready for the fast forward button. Each course does have some elements that I believe are new and different and do stand out as distinguished from the other section. So I do think you will learn something in every one of them. But she will, for example, here in me on time from time to time, ask you to record yourself and post it for me to look at it. And I do that again because that's really the number. One way I can help you. But if you don't want to do it, you don't have to. Some people like to just watch think about it and process it. So if you like to read, you can go a long way to the bottom of this course and see not one or two, but five of my books if you want to read that. So I want to thank you for coming this far. In the course, we're all going to kind of go our separate ways. Now you can pick the sections that seem most relevant to you. And if I can ever help you, of course, all you have to do is message me. You can post comments anywhere here and let me know I'm here for you. Thanks. 39. 25 Quick Wins! The Secret to Using Speaker Notes Effectively: I want to dive right in and give you a quick win because your time is valuable. This is an advanced tip that's gonna dramatically help all of your presentations and your speeches. And yet anyone can do it, even a basic beginner. So what I have here are notes now, the beauty of these notes. It's one page large fought, so I don't have to stop and put on my glasses when giving a presentation. But here's the advanced part. It's not just that it's one page large fought. It's that I have not just one page not just to but three identical sheets of notes that I place around the room when I'm giving a presentation. What this means is I don't have to stand wedded behind a lectern or stand in one spot. I can walk around the room, and it appears as though I'm just speaking off the top of my head for an hour, and yet I have no idea what I'm going to say next. I'm constantly referring to notes, but by having three sheets around the room, I make the whole thing look professional. Addie's and the audience feels like I'm just speaking to them. This is a simple tip. It costs the price of three sheets of paper. Stay tuned. There are a lot more advanced tips like this that anyone can do to become a great speaker. 41. 27 Developing Expert Judgment for Your Public Speaking and Presenting Opportuniti: Let me ask you think of the best speaker, the best presenter you've seen in the last year. In your business, your line of work. Not a professional comedian or politician, but someone in your industry. Now tell me every message one. Think of every message you remember from that speech. That presentation. Go ahead. Give it some thought. Maybe nothing comes up. Think of the last five years. 10 years, maybe. Think of your entire life. Think of the best speaker you've ever heard. Now try to write down on a sheet of paper or a computer screen. Every message you remember from that presentation. I don't mean that you like their style, that they were funny or their commanding. I don't care about that right now. I just want to know what messages do you remember? Look down at your she. How awful is that? Did you write down 15 2030 messages? I doubt it. That's a question. I've been asking my clients all over the world because for 30 years at train presidents of countries, prime ministers, Nobel Peace Prize winners, lots of business executives in every industry. Athletes I asked that question and typically quite often people so teach. Everyone's boring. In my industry, I don't remember anything or they'll say, Yeah, teach. I remember this one speaker. Remember this one idea? Occasionally it's too. Sometimes it's three ideas, three messages from the greatest speaker they've seen. Every three months or so someone will remember four ideas. And every six months I'll have one of my clients from an in person training tell me they remember five ideas from the best speaker they've ever seen. And they may have been in the audience with Steve Jobs unveiling an iPod or something like that. In all the years I've asked that question, Guess how many times someone has remembered mawr than five ideas from the best speaker they've ever heard in their industry. That's right, Never. So my first really big rule for you after you've narrowed down. What you want your audience to do is you get ask yourself of all of the messages you could tell your audience wanted the five most important five or fewer. You are not being asked to speak to be the Wikipedia for your audience. They can just stay at home, go on their cell phone and go to Wikipedia or use Google. So much of being a good speaker, a good presenter, a good communicator has to do with judgment and really figuring out out of everything you know. What does your audience need to know in order to make the decision to do what you want them to do? So you have tohave focus So much of being a great speaker. A great presenter has nothing to do with your hand gestures, your eye contact or voice, or whether you say are, um, it's about judgment and figuring out how to eliminate most of the garbage that gets in most speeches. Most people adults in the business, world, political, world, government, world make the fundamental blunder of simply trying to convey way too many fax way too many numbers. Way too many data points. And it's boring. Your audience doesn't have to know everything about what you do in your job. If they did, they'd have your job. When you're giving a presentation, it's your job to focus just on the ideas that are most interesting, most relevant, most important and useful to your audience. So what you've got to do is brainstorm on every possible idea message you could say in this presentation in this speech and then eliminate anything that doesn't make it to the top five. If you have a message, that's just a boring fact, and the audience isn't gonna find it interesting or useful. Get rid of it. You can always give that as a handout. It's not something you have to spend your time speaking about more tips in a moment on how to really figure out what the best messages will be. 42. 28 The Radical Yet Simple Solution To Finding Great Messages: How do you know what messages will actually work on your audience? Well, here's a radical idea for you. Ask people. Yeah, I love Google on the Internet and all that. But sometimes just going up to people and asking them what issues are of greatest interest to them could be the most helpful. I remember many years ago I was working with a political candidate who was running for supervisor of elections in accounting and Florida, and this was after the whole situation where voting machines didn't work. The current supervisor of election was gonna be voted out of office. There was no doubt, and people were upset their vote didn't count. So all of a sudden there about 10 candidates running for this supervisor of elections position, my candidate had about the least money of any of the candidates. All of the candidates were running around town saying, Democracy is Paramount's. Your vote is essential, and I have a nice law degree, and they had nice and suits ties on. They looked professional. They all sounded like statesmen, and they were all sounding as if they were running for basically president of the United States. My candidate had to figure out a way of cutting through this. So I asked. I answer, What have you done? That's different from other people. So? Well, I actually went to the factory where they make the voting machines, and I got certified to fix it. Okay, that sounds it was a one day certification process. So I just went around and asked voters, What do you really looking for in a supervisor of elections? And everyone said the same thing. Did you really care about that? I wanted Someone will make the machines work. So my vote counts again and again. I heard that now this didn't cost any money. We didn't have money for extensive polling, but what we did is we got rid of all the messages about 15 years in the Kolanos. And you know, the Boy Scout membership cup, Masters representation leadership, is it? Get rid of all that in the candidates messaging. And instead, I on focused on a clear, simple message on the Onley candidate who's been certified to repair these voting machines . You vote for me, I'll make sure the machines work and your vote will count Three simple messages. He had less money than anyone. He won the primary. He won the general election, and now, actually, many decades later, he's still in office because of just asking people what do they care about and narrowing it down? In this case, it wasn't even five messages. It was three messages. So whatever you dio, it's not enough to just tell people all your credentials. Whether you're trying to get a new piece of business, new consulting, investment or being hired for a job, you've got to focus on what the person or people you're presenting to actually care about. 43. 29 Your Stories Will Make Your Ideas Unforgettable: Do you want to know what the single biggest differences between great communicators, people who are great public speakers, presenters versus the average ones, the boring ones? It's not about intelligence, It's not about looks. It's not this nebulous thing People like to call charisma. Is that the absence of bums? Us? Er's You knows it's not even about evening having a sense of humor. Although humor helps the single biggest difference between great speakers and presenters and everybody else, great communicators use stories to illustrate all their key points. When I ask people all over the globe whether I'm training a financial executive or a prime minister, I get the same response. I asked them, What do you remember from the best speakers you've seen beyond the fact that someone was comfortable or engaging or walked around? The only thing anyone remembers the stories. Now they remember. The message is associated with the stories, but they remember the stories. Now you're probably thinking, Well, that's great, T. J. But you know, I'm not a natural storyteller, and my industry we don't have. So it's all a bunch of excuses. It doesn't have to be anything particularly fancy. For example, a few years ago, I was conducting kind of a run of the mill presentation training a major health care executive. A CEO had flown into New York City to work with me for a day, and we were in my training facility in midtown Manhattan and his staff had called me in. Advance it, teach it. We worked on this speech for three months. Whatever you do, don't change it. It's been approved by all the different people. The lawyers, investor. Everyone signed off on it. You know, Let's try not to change it. I said, OK, we're gonna try to improve him the best we can in every way possible. So Jim gets there early in the morning, I started the presentation training, as I do with all of my just Adam. Get up and speak. I recorded it on video, so he gives Hiss presentation. It's about 15 minutes long. I record it, we play it back, and he asked me what I think of it, and his speech consisted of him sort of head down, going through a whole bunch of bullet points, reading, reading bullet points on a slide and totally normal presentation. No worse than any other presentation I've seen, but he's basically reading off a script. He's reading off a bullet points on the screen, and he wants to know what I think. And I said, Jim, I'll tell you what I think But I want to know what you think it again. I made him really watch his own presentation. When it was done, he turned to me, said home, I God teach. It's so boring I wouldn't wanna watch May. What did you think? And I understood. Well, Jim, you seem like a smart fellow. If you think it's incredibly boring, guess what it is. And we took his speech and we just weren't up in the little pieces. We fold it up and we threw it in the trash can. It's okay, Jim, Let's roll up our sleeves. Well, that's try, get We have a clean sheet of paper. We brainstorm on how many That's right. Just the top five ideas that we really wanted to convey to his audience for this presentation. And then he came up with little story for each one. An example for each one. They had a single shade of paper. We get rid of the slides because they were worthless. And this time he just spoke, focused on a few ideas. We recorded it, looked at it. Then he didn't even ask me what I thought. It's like, Oh my God, you It's 1000 times better, TJ, you're a genius. Well, I'm not a genius. I'm just getting people to stop boring their audiences to death. Okay, so what I do that I just told a little story happens to be a true story. There's nothing particularly glamorous or exciting about. It wasn't in an exotic locales just in my office in midtown Manhattan. There wasn't any great drama. Nobody cried, but it pulled a gun on me. That has happened before. Simple story. But it had a character had a problem, has setting. I had a little dialogue, had a challenge, had some emotion involved, and it had a solution. That's all the story is. So if you really want to convey your main messages, you need to package each message with the store. And the story wasn't for me just to be entertaining. It was to convey a very important point that you don't want to bore your audience. You don't want to just do this boring data dump. You wanna have narrowed your message down to five. But if I just said that in 10 seconds it goes in one ear and out the other by telling a story, and it only took a couple of minutes, it allows the audience to visualize it. That's the real power of Story is it forces the audience that you're speaking to that you're presenting to to essentially run a little moving real along with what you're saying that triggers the memory process. That's why story is so important. So it's not just about opening your speech with a story or a funny story to loosen people up. No, it's critical to the whole communication process. You need an actual, relevant story, a rial story, not some generic motivational starfish story, but a really story about a real problem, a real conversation you had with a real person, a client, college customer prospect and how the problem was resolved. If you do that, you're instantly going to be one of the best speakers your audience has seen today, possibly ever. So I need you to start thinking about your stories you're going to use for your messages for the presentation you're going to be delivering 44. 30 Your PowerPoint Will Create Engagement, Not Slumber: We've got to talk about Power point and visual aids during presentations and speeches. Look, folks, I like Power Point. I use power point all the time. So my best friends or power point, But let's get real here. Most power point presentations are really dull. They're boring. They're excuses to put people to sleep or to encourage them to check their Facebook feed because it's so darn boring. Now they're more than 6000 books about Power point on Amazon. I've done entire courses on Power Point. I'm gonna tell you everything you need to know about Power point in just a few minutes. Right here. For starters, if you're thinking of giving a power point presentation time out right there. You're not giving a PowerPoint presentation. You are giving your presentation your ideas that you have to make come alive for your audience. The power point slides are just an extra. It's just an enhancement. The second you tell yourself, I'm giving a power point presentation for most people. It flips a switch and they become boring, robotic, incompetent speakers and presented. Don't let that happen. My advice don't create the first slide until you've done some of things we've already talked about in this course you really identified in one sentence, the one thing you want your audience to do. You've identified your five key ideas messages to resonate with the audience. You have a story for each one of your message points then, and only then should you think about having slides to back it up. Now here are the rules you need to follow if you really want to be successful using Power Point Rule number one one idea per slide. When you see three bullet points or 10 bullet points, it just doesn't work, folks. I understand that's how it's done. Your organization. You've seen other people do it, but there's no evidence that that helps people remember your ideas. If you want notes. Remember, I gave you a solution on notes. Already. Have a single sheet of paper Power Point slides are not for your notes. The next big rule used images not taxed. Now I love text. I've written half a dozen books I like to read. I don't have any evidence that putting text on slides that you are projecting actually helps your audience remember it. And guess what you don't have any audience evidence that that works, either. It's just got It's just that's how it's been done before. But you don't really have evidence, but putting text up on the slide while you speak to the slide works. So if you want to be effective, put one image. Her slide that doesn't have text on. I know, I know. This sounds crazy, isn't how you normally do it. You won't have lots of text. Email that to people in advance. Give it is a handout, but dont project it during your presentation. Next. When you're speaking, let people look at you. Don't have a slide up. You want people to look at the slide, but the slide up and close your mouth and let them look at it. One solution to that is if you hit the letter B on your keyboard, it will black out the screen. If you want people to listen to you, let them just look at you. Don't have anything up there. Any key whatsoever brings back the power point to wherever it waas so you could be in complete control, even if it's someone's bad power point. Your boss just gave you a horrible power, Point said. Deliver this in five minutes. You can still control what people look at and when they look at it by using the letter B hitting at once, blacks out the screen hit any key whatsoever. It goes back, and you can advance to the next screen. Here, the two rules you need to apply to every PowerPoint slide. Two questions need to ask. Does this slide actually make my idea more understandable than Major saying it? And does this slide make my idea more memorable than me Just saying it. You can't say yes to both of those things. It is a horrible slide. Do yourself a favor to your audience a favor and throw it in the trash can. I know that sounds harsh, but you know what else is harsh being in the middle of your presentation and you look around and everyone the audience is doing this. I'm trying to help you avoid that harsh reality. And just because you can use PowerPoint doesn't mean that's always the most effective visual aid. Someone like Steve Jobs had unlimited budgets for presentations. Known as a great presenter, he is the Apple version of power point keynote, but he didn't rely on that exclusively when he wanted to unveil a brand new laptop that was extraordinarily thin. He didn't just put up a slide and put the statistics of how wide it WAAS unit that did. He walked over to a table, picked up an envelope, he said. How thin is this new laptop? He picked up an envelope, reached in and pulled the laptop out of the envelope. It was such a powerful message because it was a powerful image. Wow, this laptop is so fin, it goes right into an envelope that's much more powerful than just writing the facts and the specs on a slide and quickly going through the numbers. So remember, you can use props. What did this cost? Steve Jobs. 20 cents. So look around you and ask yourself, What tools do you have? What images do you have? What things in real life do you have that will make your ideas come alive for your audience ? If you're just looking for the poor man's the poor woman's teleprompter, you are not looking in the right place. There's nothing like a good old fashioned a piece of paper. If you just need notes for what you want to say, 45. 31 Building an Ethical Cheat Sheet Just for You: okay. I've been easy on you so far. I haven't asked you to do a lot. Now it's time to put some of these things together. It's time to create your own cheat sheet for your speech. For your presentation. I never speak off the top of the head. Let me get a little secret. Have a horrible memory. I could never remember what my next point is, where the next light is. But guess what? I don't have Teoh. I'd sheet simple sheet of paper. You've heard me talk about this in the first video. Amazingly simple tow. It cost five cents or less. And yet most people don't do it. They feel his need toe when they work hard and try to remember and memorize. Or let me put all the notes on the power point slide, which is the worst thing. No, or let me wing it. Not wing it. Have a plan and stick to it. This is a plan. So what I want you to do is to really isolate your five might main ideas, right, thumb down type thumb up, and then a word or two for your main examples. A couple of words to remind you for the stories. You have a particular statistic. Fact our number. You're afraid you'll forget. Put that down. But it really should be is tight. And this folk This is an hour long keynote speech, these air all the notes that I need. So that's what I want you to do now. This is, frankly, 1000 times easier than writing out a speech word for word. For most people in most situations, you are far better off having this as a starting point end. The final thing you do, rather than writing out the whole speech, trying to memorize it, trying to tweak every little word. If you are a president of a country or a major finance minister, and any one wrong word can cause a scandal or destroy businesses or an economy or start a war will. Yes. Then it makes sense to write out every single word and have it vetted and looked at. But for most people, 99.99% of the world, the big problem is not that we get one word wrong. The big problem for most of us is that nobody remembers anything we said because we were boring and we didn't deliver in a compelling, captivating, interesting, engaging way. Having notes on a single sheet of paper deliberate you will make you feel so much more comfortable, more relaxed when you are speaking and will create a better experience for your audience. Now I recommend you make it in large fought. This font is large enough for me to read, so I don't have to sort of fumble around in the middle of a presentation and put on my glasses and do all this large fought bold it and do not use the whole Roman numeral one. Little A. It's too hard when you're standing up speaking to people to try to look at different levels of indentation. I just have everything all far left indentation and number it that way. It's much easier for the eye to look down, see where you were, see where you are. You can have one that tells you what every slide is. Now, if you find yourself needing more than a single sheet of paper, the problem is not that you need another sheet of paper. The problem is, you haven't really narrowed your messages down enough so That's a good check right there. If you can't narrow it down to a single sheet of paper and with large font, don't narrow it down. But have you know four point thought where you've got 10,000 words on a single sheet that's cheating. You've got to be able to use this piece of paper and to use it in the way you can. When you're standing and speaking, you're standing and speaking. You don't want to hold your notes because that takes you out of the moment of speaking with people. If you have your notes down on a table or a chair, sometimes even the floor and you continue to move your hands, walk around, the audience won't even know you're using notes, and they will perceive you as smarter, more competent, more intelligent or capable. And it's right here for us, and most people never do it. So that is your assignment right now. Come up with a one page for notes, and please don't use your iPad. It looks ridiculous. Toe holding Hold a big piece of technology when you're up speaking. I am not trying to kill all the trees in the world, but one sheet of paper won't hurt. I'm not anti technology, but this little thing has never asked for more battery power. It's never asked for compatibility. It's never gone on the fritz. It's never needed another wire. Good old paper has never let me down. This is also great if you are using power Point, and all of a sudden the power point doesn't work. You don't care because you have your notes. So that's the assignment. Create your one page notes for your presentation right now. 46. 32 This Is The Do Or Die Moment For Your Speaking Improvement: Okay, here's the part of the course where big decisions have to be made. You can sort of sit back and be theater critic and treat this like you're watching Netflix . Although, believe me, they're better things on Netflix and said, Well, I didn't like the T. J didn't have more slides and images and music, or you can actually learn how to be a great presenter. It's not gonna happen unless you do the next thing. I need you to take your one page of notes and practice speaking on video recorded. I know you don't like doing this. I know you don't enjoy it. I know you don't feel comfortable, but guess what? Nobody in your audience cares, hoping to sound mean or cruel, but it's just a fact your audience wants your best. If you're not willing to practice, then you really, really know if you're any good or not. That's what causes people to get nervous or uncomfortable or fearful or have sweat the number. One way to be confident when you speak is not to visualize your audience, giving you a standing ovation or visualize the audience in their underwear. Bad idea for a lot of reasons The number one way to get over fear. To be confident to actually be a great speaker is to practice speaking on video until you love it. So the answer is not just to practice on video. If you practice your speech on video and don't look at it not gonna help it'll if you practice your speech once on video and make detailed notes of all the things you didn't like. Guess what? That's not gonna help. That's actually gonna make you worse because you're going to be fixated on Oh my gosh, I said, I'm twice. That's the end of the world. Don't say I'm don't say I'm a momma. You're gonna trip yourself up. That's not going to help. The solution to being fully confident to be fully prepared for a presentation is to practice on video as many times as it takes. Until you can look at that video, whether it's on your cell phone, your iPad, your laptop and you like it and you think you're coming across the best you can possibly come across in terms of style and substance. My recommendation. Don't wait anymore. Don't fast forward to the next video you're gonna be tempted to do this right now. Look at it and then focus on what you like. Not just your weaknesses, but also look at what you don't like when you re record it tryto improve just one area at a time. So if you notice, for example, that your head is frozen and stiff the whole time, give your presentation again, this time specifically moving your head. Now you can do this with another colleague holding the camera. And don't worry about what type of camera doesn't matter. What type of camera, any cell phone, any $10 webcam. You're not making a movie here. This is just a training tool to help you figure out what do you putting out to the world? Because if you think your presentation, your speech is really boring, guess what it is. If you think you're coming across boring monotone, guess what you are. The answer is not to not look at it or toe wing it. The answers keep practicing until you love it. The greatest speakers in the world are often the ones who spent the most time practicing on video. The people you see on Ted talks quite often have given their speech hundreds, if not thousands, of times before you actually get to see it. And they practiced on video. Someone like a former president, Ronald Reagan of the United States, would practice his speeches, major speeches like the State of the Union for an hour reading and out loud every night for a week and then spend an entire day doing video taped rehearsal. Why did he do all that? He did it so that when he was reading his teleprompter, it didn't sound like he was reading the teleprompter of all of the tips I'm going to give you in this course, this is far, in a way, the most important. It's also the one people are least likely to follow. So I'm begging you. Practice your speech repeatedly on video until until it's perfect. But until you think it's the best you can dio with your current skill level, it's gonna make all the difference in the world. So of you are gonna want to say, Well, T J, you didn't give us enough practice. Practical tips in this course, it's not long enough. You could spend 12 hours just on this if you wanted to. You don't need mawr tips on the angle for holding your hand or what? Whether your hand should go in your pockets or not if you haven't done this basic element of practicing your presentation on video, so before you advance before you rate the course or do anything else, please practice your presentation on video repeatedly until you think your great 47. 33 There Is a Perfect Test for Your Speech Or Presentation: public speaking presentation skills, these air soft skills. Sometimes you never really know what's gonna work. You're on. One day you're off the next time out. I'm sure you've heard that I've heard those things. Let me tell you, that is absolute garbage. That is baloney. That is complete nonsense. There's nothing soft about public speaking. Your presentation skills. It is. Every bit is quantifiable. Is any aspect of physics, mathematics, chemistry. You can in fact, test these things. If I'm an engineer and I designed some bridge, I'm gonna want to test it before human beings air going over in their cars and collapses to their death. I can't just say, Well, let me wing it that day and I had an off day building a but no, you test your bridge. If you're an engineer, guess what. You contest your presentations, you contest your speeches. Here's how to do it. Take the video that you just made that you're now confident you look your best and sound. Your rest email that video 22 or three people who are similar in mindset to the audience. You're going to be speaking to send it to them and then call them up or tax them. Here's the thing. Don't ask them what they think. Your friends, that your colleagues they're going to sell. You were great. You were fine. Good job, Very professional. Completely worthless feedback. That's not what we're after. You want to ask them what stands out? What do you remember? How would you summarize this presentation to a colleague who didn't hear me? And here's what you're listening for. Did they tell you the five or fewer ideas? The messages you really cared about when you prepared this presentation? Can they throw them back in your face? Maybe a different order? That's fine. Different wording. That's fine. But can they in fact, remember your messages and talk about them and throw it back? If they can't remember your messages? Guess what? You failed if you're using slides, asked them what slides they remember. If they say, Oh, well, the slides were really professional. Guess what? Major slides were useless. They can't remember your slides. Throw them in the trash cans. You need to find out what stories they remember, what messages they remember, what slides they remember. And do they feel compelled to take the action? You wanted them to take when you started this whole process, so test this now. Sometimes you could be in an organization office. You could test with three or four colleagues at lunchtime or in the morning. While people are having coffee test in front of live, people get feedback. We're not so much concerned about them saying, Well, you touched your pinky wants or you said one, Um, people are gonna give you a lot of advice. I would disregard most of it. But what you do really want to pay attention to is what do they remember? Remember the biggest problem most people have in their giving a speech or a presentation? It's not that they freeze, have flop sweat and are so scared it's a disaster. And they had a horrible impression. Biggest problem most people have is they made no impression they stood up dress professionally. They went through the presentation smoothly, professionally. Two minutes later, no one remembers anything of what they said. You don't want to do that. So that's why it's critical to test in advance when Ted picks great speakers quite often. The speakers spoke at a 10 X first and tested at the material showed there was demand showed people like it showed the audience resonated. Al Gore, before he gave his famous Ted talk on global warming, gave that speech thousands of time for years before it attracted a huge audience on Ted and then turned into a movie. So test your presentation on your audience, a sampling or a subset of your audience in advance, because when you see that speech you've prepared and delivered, two or three people who didn't know it was ended in advance can understand it and remember it. Then, when you're going in to give the real speech, it's virtually impossible to be nervous. You're gonna have confidence, but confidence based on reality. Confidence based on legitimate proof. That's what we're after. 48. 34 I Will give You a Personalized Professional Presentation Critique Right Here: Let's recap You've identified in one sentence what it is you want your audience to do. He brings stormed on messages that might motivate them. To do that, you've narrowed it down to your top five. You've come up with a story for each one. You've come up with a slide or an image or a prop to help each message. One. If you want to use visuals, you have a single sheet of notes to help you. Remember, You've practiced your speech on video numerous times until you've liked it. You then showed it to other colleagues, and you've improved it and refined it. Even Maura, until your colleagues are not just liking you, is a speaker, but remembering the key messages and the ideas that are really important to you now that you've done that, now that you actually have a presentation that you know works, I want to look at it and give you my professional critique, and others here in the class will give you their feedback as well. So upload the video to YouTube or any other file sharing sites you want posted in the discussion section or the Q and a section of this course. Anyway, you can get it to us to look at it. I will personally look at this video and give you my critique, my feedback on what you're doing well and where you need to improve. I'll tell you, most people don't take advantages. I don't get paid any extra for it. This is something people that have a lot of money for me to do in real life. And you can get this right here now for the low cost of what you paid to be in this course . So take advantage of it. Don't just watch videos and think you become a better speaker. That's not how people become better speakers. You don't become a better swimmer by reading books or watching videos on swimming. You have to get in and swim. That's what I need you to do, so to take it to the final level, I need you to post your speech. Your presentation right here 49. 35 Continuing Your Path of Public Speaking and Presentation Skills Impro: That's it, folks. That's really all you need to know to be not just a competent or beginner, but a great public speaker, a great presenter. It doesn't take years and years and years. You don't have to watch my 30 hour courses, although I'm happy if you dio. But please don't write in the reviews. Wilder should B'more length or its short I know it's short. It's in the title. It's a one hour course, but this course is what you make of it. If you just sit back and watch, you probably didn't get much out of it. If you actually practiced on video. Unconvinced, it will dramatically improve your speaking skills. You're presenting skills for life. Speaking is funny. If you just do a few things well, near your messages down have interesting stories. You're gonna be a standout. You're gonna be so much better than other people. If you have the occasional, um, make a mistake. People are not gonna care. They're not gonna remember. I have made at least this many half a dozen mistakes stumbles in this course so far, and yet I'm doubting it bothered you too much. Part of it is I wanted to prove to you it's not about being perfect. It's not about having an absence of stumbles or never saying our but I made this whole course for you in just a little more than an hour. How did I do that? Why did everything in one take? Because that's all you get when you're speaking in front of people. There's just one take and it's not hard, especially if you practice in advance. This is easy for me to do, because I've made 10,000 other training videos for you. As you improve your speaking skills, you're presenting skills. It just gets easier and easier the more you practice on video and the more times you speak . If you follow the basic principles we talked about in this course, I'm convinced that every time you speak, you're gonna come across is comfortable, confident, relaxed because you're gonna have watched yourself and you're going to notice. If you seem stiffer scared, you don't like it, you will have fixed it by watching yourself in making small changes. You're going to be understood by your audience because you'll have tested it on audiences in advance. Your audiences will remember your ideas Because you have tested it and you'll know. And because of all those things, it's a much greater likelihood your audience will take the actions you want. They will buy from you, hire you, vote for you do that, do that consistently. And you will be a great speaker and a fantastic presenter for the rest of your life. Good luck.