Transcripts
1. Intro Video - Communication Skills for Beginners: Are you looking to improve
your communication skills, and you currently rate
yourself a beginner? You've come to the right place. This course is going
to give you a lot of shortcuts on how you can get a lot better when
it comes to presenting, giving speeches,
talking to the media, all the ways you have to communicate when
you're speaking. Now, it's primarily about
spoken communication, not how to send emails more effectively or how to do
fancy graphics and music. You'll notice not a lot
of sound effects here, not a lot of special graphics. This is going to be about
human beings speaking, how you can communicate more effectively when you
have to give a talk, a presentation, a speech, an interview to help you in
your own career and in life. I'm TJ Walker and I have devoted my life to helping people communicate
more effectively. I'd love to work with you.
2. Quick, Ethical Ways to Cheat Your Way to Communication Success: Your time is valuable,
so I want to give you some quick wins to help build your communication
skills right away. You may be thinking
that, if you're nervous, uncomfortable giving
a presentation, how do you remember what to say? Well, you should cheat. With this, a cheat cheat. I never give any speech without a single sheet of
paper, very large font. So I can look at it without having to put my glasses
on or bend down. It's a single sheet of paper, so I don't have to
turn the pages. I don't have to pick it up. It's a simple little thing.
Nobody ever does it. Everyone's thinking about, Oh, I have to type up all
these long bullet points on my PowerPoints.
No, you don't. You can have a cheat cheat. It's amazingly effective, and you'll give people the impression that
you're confident, authoritative and not just a beginner when it comes to
your communication skills. Another quick, easy thing to do. Let's say your boss
or someone has given you a really boring
PowerPoint presentation, and you're afraid of
putting people to sleep, and you want them to focus
on something you're saying. Well, if you have a slide up
and you're in PowerPoint, all you have to do
is hit the letter B, instantly blacks it out. You can now talk, everyone
has to look at you, focus on you, hit
any key whatsoever, comes right back to the screen. Very few people know that, but it's a way for you to come across much
more commanding and confident when you're giving a presentation and when you're trying to
communicate with people. Another quick tip, doesn't matter if you're
doing a TV interview, radio interview,
giving a speech, going on a job interview. If all of a sudden lots of ums and uhs and s come out,
it sounds unprofessional. Here's a quick tip.
I use this when I'm conducting training sessions with presidents of countries, prime ministers, Nobel
Peace Prize winners. I just type up the word
that they say too often. That verbal tick, the I
type it print it out, draw a red circle around it, and a slash, you know, the international red
no sign for no parking, no left hand turn, no dumping. It now is a little sign
that says no Um or no, or no, or ya no or like. I cut it out and just tape it to their cell phone or their watch. Or a computer screen. And after a week,
it will reprogram your brain so you don't have
that annoying verbal tick. Cost you nothing, highly, highly effective, and you don't have to hire me for a day. Final really quick tip to help you with your
communication skills. Doesn't matter if it's preparation for
important phone call, a conference call, a TV
interview, a speech, practice. With your cell phone
using the video record. Now, it's the simplest method. It's the most effective method. It costs you nothing if
you already have a phone. It's also not very popular because people don't like
to look at themselves. Hey, I didn't tell you every tip in this course would be popular, but I can tell you
it's extraordinarily effective and it will
cost you nothing. More tips like this to come.
3. You Are In Great Company Find Out Who: If you're a beginner
when it comes to your communication skills, you probably look
around at celebrities, people on TV, superstars in your own industry
and think, Wow. They're just so composed. They're so compelling,
confident. They must be just natural
born communicators. Well, I'm here to
tell you they aren't. Let me tell you a little secret. Everybody is scared and nervous when it comes
to communication, giving speeches, presentations,
going on TV interviews. I've seen people who
you think of as really advanced and great and their hands are
shaking beforehand. I personally train presidents
of countries, leaders, top CEOs and all of
them confess to me that they think
they're not really very good speakers.
They were a natural. It's harder for them
than other people. Everyone thinks they're
uniquely bad at this, and most people are scared and
nervous and uncomfortable. So if you're uncomfortable with the idea of giving a
speech or for that matter, just raising your hand to ask a question at
a staff meeting, it means you're
completely normal. The reason you're
uncomfortable is no one's trained you on your
communication skills. Sure, you may have had
training on how to write. You can write an email, a resume, a memo, but you haven't been trained on the most important
communication skills, the spoken communication skills. That's what this
course is all about. And I just want you to realize you're in good company.
Don't feel bad. Work with me and
we're going to get you to the point
where you're really comfortable and confident and relaxed anytime you have to use your communication skills because you're going to
know that people are going to understand
you and not be feel, Oh, is this person saying, they're going to understand
you and they're going to remember your messages. And ultimately, that
means they're much more likely to take action
and to do what you want. That's really what
communication is all about, and that's what the
communication skill is needed for to get people to take
the actions you want.
4. GPS for Your Communications: If you're a beginner, one of the hardest things to do
when you're trying to figure out how to communicate is to think, Where
do I even start? Whether you're giving a
PowerPoint presentation, a speech, whatever it is, there's the temptation
to sort of run around the office or run
around your home office, gathering more information,
more research, more study, getting
more PowerPoint slides created or from other people. There's gather, gather, gather. And certainly, you have
to do a little of that, but that's not what your
first step should be. Anytime you're trying
to communicate, whether it's communicating
in a job interview, a presentation to
five staff members or the most important
presentation in your life to 1,000 big customer prospects, you've always got
to ask yourself, what is the one thing I want my audience to do after
I've communicated with them? That's the starting point,
you need to be able to write this down
in one sentence. Do you want them to
hire you, buy from you, invest in you, endorse a budget for your
department, vote for you? What is it you literally
want the audience to do after you've communicated with them in your presentation, your talk, your briefing, whatever form of
communication it is. That's what you
need to focus on. So that's your first
assignment right here. I need you to write down
in the discussion group. Here and you to me, what is the one thing you want
your audience to do? And you can make up something. But the more realistic
you make it for your own particular situation at this stage in your
career, the better. It needs to be something you can summarize in one sentence. The more specific the better.
5. You Will Be Motivating, Not Data Dumping: Now that you've figured
out exactly what your audience should do
after you've communicated, what you really want them to do, now is the time to go
in the research mode. Brainstorm, dig,
look everywhere, look under rocks for messages, facts, numbers that will motivate your audience
to do what you want. It can't be just to educate
them on everything you do. Unless you're an academic or a professor giving
a college lecture, the people you're speaking
to in the business world, the nonprofit, the
government world, the adult, non academic world, they're not there to learn every single thing
about what you do. You've got to
restrict yourself and limit yourself to what
is truly most important. So you can brainstorm on
5,000,000 different messages, numbers, facts, data points. But then you've got to
do something crucial, and that is apply your judgment. So much of being a great
communicator of having strong communication
skills has nothing to do with the tone of your voice or the clothes you're wearing or what you
do with your hands. It has to do with your judgment. Too many people who are
bad communicators are bad communicators because
they use no judgment. They just try to tell
their audience everything. Remember, if your audience had to know everything you know, they'd already have your job. You've got to look
at all the facts, all the data points
and look at it through the streen of which
facts which messages, which numbers does my
audience have to know? Especially in order to
take the actions I want. Which messages are
going to motivate them to do what I
want them to do? And if you do that, you'll
find it's very easy to eliminate the vast majority of the messages,
facts, and numbers. You then got to put
them all in priority. You may come up with still
15 messages that are important would possibly motivate them to
do what you want. You've got to put
them in priority, and you've got to
narrow it down. You got to narrow it
down tier top five. Why do I say five? Well, based on my own
empirical evidence of working with more than 10,000 clients over the
last 30 years, I ask people. I ask them. Think of the best
presenter you've seen in the last year in your business or last five years or
maybe your whole career. Now, tell me every message you remember from
the best speaker, the best presenter, the best communicator you've ever seen. Quite often, the answer
is, Uh, TJ, nothing. Everyone in our
industry's boring. Sometimes it's one message, sometimes it's two,
occasionally three. Every three months or so,
somebody will remember four messages from
a great speaker. Every six months, roughly, somebody will remember
five messages from the best speaker, the best communicator they've seen possibly in
their whole life. In all the years I've
asked that question, I've never had anyone remember
more than five ideas. So don't be greedy. Don't try to communicate
every single fact. Don't have one of
those PowerPoint slides with 27 bullet points. It's not going to work. You want to be a
successful communicator. You want to be seen
as someone who has strong communication skills. Remember, it's not communication if it comes out of your mouth. It's not communication
if it's up on a slide. It's communication
if it comes out of your mouth in the ear
of an audience member, and they understand it, and they remember it
so they can act on it. If you want to do that,
you need to show judgment. Mark Twain once said, I'm sorry I wrote you a long letter. I didn't have time to
write you a short letter. It takes more thought to narrow your messages down to
just the top five. So that's your
assignment right now. Go back and look at all the ideas you thought of and narrow it
down to just five, write those five ideas, and each one should
be ten words or less. Write it down in the
discussion section of this course right now.
6. Getting Feedback So It Won't Hurt: If you're a beginner when it comes to your
communication skills, the idea of asking people for feedback is probably
a little scary. I don't want to hear
people trashing me. Don't think of it as a trashing. Think of that as them
being your editor, then being your coach,
then really helping you. You need to ask for feedback. That's the only way you improve. Many of the best speakers in
the world started off with a baseline of skill
lower than yours. Some of them were just awful, but they got used to asking for feedback and making
slight improvements. Now, in just a moment,
you to me is going to ask you for feedback
on this course. If they haven't already, they're going to
ask you to rate. If you think the course
is great and fantastic, by all means, go ahead
and rate it right now. But if you see specific
things you would like to improve that
you think it's lacking, then send me a direct message. And then, ideally, by the
time you finish the course, I've already made
the improvements because as much as
I think I'm great, I have given successful
speeches all over the world, and I've done communication skills workshops
all over the world, and I have more than
100 communication skills courses here on UTM. I'm still trying to get better. I'm still trying to improve, and that's why I need
feedback from you. So please send some feedback to me if you think the
course isn't great, and you can hold off your
rating till the end, you can always
change the rating. So a lot of people
do ask for feedback, and you see it at conferences, radar speakers 1-10 or one to five or four
stars or gold stars. And certainly some of
that can be useful, but I want to give
you an advanced tip, even though you're
beginners because this will shorten
your learning curve, help you save time and get
a lot better very quickly. The secret to getting
feedback isn't asking people to rate you on a one to five
scale or one to ten scale. It's asking them what do they remember from your presentation that's infinitely
more important? So I'm going to
practice what I preach. I'm going to do that
to you right now. I'm going to ask you,
what do you take away from this
presentation so far? What messages that
are helpful to you that you might actually want
to try is sticking so far. So please post that in the
discussion section right now. Give me your feedback so far, even though it's
early in the course, Go ahead and rate the course if you think
everything is great, and then any other feedback, you can message me
right here on to. And please please realize I
read every single comment, all feedback I look at
and take very seriously.
7. Yes, Even Beginner CAN Tell Stories: I was conducting a
media training in Midtown Manhattan
just two days ago, working with a bunch
of senior executives at a major media company. And I said to one of them. I said, Sam, I need you
to sit in the hot seat. I'm gonna interview you.
And he's like, What? He's like, No, no, no, no, I just want I'm here
to take notes. I'm like, Well, how
are you gonna learn? It's not a note taking
kind of a course. Please just come here
just for 1 minute. No, no, I don't think so. He starts to stand
up. I'm like, Sam, please, I'll pay you $100 if
you just sit in the seat. Now, I got him on, asked
him a few questions, recorded, played it
back, critiqued it. And we did this several more
times during the session. By the end, he said, Well,
TJ, this was so helpful. Thank you. I feel like
I've improved a lot. But, wow, did he not want to
be there at the beginning? So what did I just do
there? I told a story. Is it a true story? Yeah. Did I have to rehearse it and refine
it a whole bunch of time? No. I actually just thought
of it a moment ago, and it's the first time
I've ever told it. But I told the story because I do think it's an important point
for you to know. Everybody is nervous
about communicating, especially in certain situations out of their comfort zone. They may be fine
talking one on one, but put them in front
of a video camera, and it's very different. But the real lesson here is the number one thing
great communicators do consistently is they use stories to illustrate every single point that's
important to them. We as human beings
are hardwired to tell stories and to
remember stories. We are not hardwired
to remember facts or bullet points or a whole bunch of text on a PowerPoint
slide. We just aren't. So I realize that you
consider yourself now a beginner when it comes to your
communication skills. The easiest way to make
everyone think you're great and advanced and not a beginner
is to tell relevant, interesting stories to your
audience that will make your messages come alive and have them understand them
and remember your messages. It's not telling a
story just to be funny. It's not telling jokes. The story I just told you, it's not funny, but it's real. It's true. And it had certain
elements. I had a setting. It had a character. I had a
problem. I had some emotion. I had a little dialogue, and it had a resolution
with a point to it. That's all you
need with a story. And it took less than
a minute to tell it. It doesn't take long
to tell stories. Here's the thing I
found remarkably true. It doesn't matter if
it's someone with beginner communication
skills or someone who's been communicating
professionally for decades, is that horrible communicators
never tell stories. I'd love to teach
you, but there's no time I got to go through
all the facts and data. Great communicators
consistently illustrate every single important point
they have with a story. So it's fine to be a beginner when it comes to communication skills,
but it's really, really easy to trick your audience and the people you're speaking to
clients, customers, colleagues into thinking,
you're an old pro at this, that you're completely
comfortable with it and that you're good at it. The key is tell a story and
doesn't need to be fictional. In fact, it shouldn't
be fictional. Just recount actual
conversations you've had with real customers,
clients, colleagues. Sometimes it may be appropriate to recount a story
with a family member, as long as the message resonates and is important to your audience and
important to you. So that's the assignment
now. I need you to think of. You don't have to write it
all out, but just think of a story for each one of your
five main message points, and then come up with
just a couple of words to remind
you of the story, so you can just say it.
That's the assignment. Go ahead and write it in the discussion section right now.
8. Powering Your Points With Images and Slides: There are a lot of different
ways of communicating. You already know how to write an email, presumably, a memo. When you're giving
a presentation, you may look at the option of giving a PowerPoint
presentation. Now, there's nothing inherently wrong with using PowerPoint. You've heard a lot
of people talk about death by PowerPoint, how they hate PowerPoint, how it's so awful and boring. Well, a lot of PowerPoint is, but it doesn't have to be. Power Point is just a medium. It's like television. If all you ever watch
is the test pattern on Channel 2000 or what's being served for lunch
at the local schools, and you don't have any kids
in the local school, well, that channel, that TV's
gonna be boring and awful. But if you love watching
Olympic ice skating or downhill racing and you can't be at the Olympics,
Television's great then. It all depends on what
you put on the screen. It's exactly the same
with PowerPoint. Now I want to give you some principles that
I think will really help you with your communication
skills and frankly, save you a lot of time. So many people go through all these lessons of learning how to put on builds
and PowerPoint slides, inserting bullet points, and changing all
the graphic size. I would submit to you, there's
no evidence that any of that stuff actually
enhances communication. Now, in my own practice
of working with people one on one and live in person in groups
all over the world, here's what I found
when I actually test real audiences everywhere. People remember images. They remember a slide if
it has one idea on it. They do not remember
complexity on slides. They do not remember
lots of bullet points. People come to me
all the time looking for some magic formula of, Oh, it should be just
three bullet points and seven words per
bullet point, right? Wrong. Now, that's better
than 50 bullet points in 1,000 words. But I don't have any evidence, and neither do you that having three bullet
points on a slide, seven words per slide actually helps the audience
remember your messages. The only thing I find
that works is an image, a picture, a graph, if it's really
simplified, a chart, if it only has one relationship
between two variables, but the best thing
is a picture or some type of drawing that
makes your idea come alive. The whole point of a
PowerPoint slide is that it takes some idea
that you're talking about and makes it more understandable than
you just saying it, and it makes it more memorable
than you just saying it. If it doesn't do both
of those things, throw it in the garbage can. Or you can give it as a
handout, email to people, have a PDF, put it
on your webpage, but don't stand up and
show it to people. Oh, but TJ, if I don't have all my bullet points through, how will I
know what to say? As we talked about, right in the beginning of this course, use a piece of paper
for your outline. Do not use your
PowerPoint as your notes, your outline, as the poor man's poor woman's teleprompter. The slides are for
your audience. If you need reminders, use a good old fashioned
piece of paper.
9. Practice In the Friendliest Environment of All: Okay, if you're with me,
we're making a lot of progress if you've done what
I've asked you to so far. You've isolated in one sentence what it is you want
your audience to do. That's great. You've
brainstormed 50, 100, 1,000 messages, but then you narrowed it
down to the top five. You've then come up with
interesting stories that flesh out these messages. So you have a story for each
message point, fantastic. If you want to use PowerPoint, you've come up with an image for each one of your
messages. That's great. Now it's time to put
it all together and do frankly the most important
part of this course. This is the single most
important thing that will dramatically get
you over the hump of being a scared, nervous, uncomfortable beginner
at communication skills, and to get over that hump and
not just become competent, but frankly be great. If you could go to a golf
coach who said, You know what? I want to be able to brake 150. And the golf coach said to you, I can have you shoot par
today. Wouldn't you do that? If you go to an ice
skating coach and said, I just want to be able to
skate and not fall down, the ice skating coach said, I can make you spin around, jump up in the air, fly like an Olympian in the same
amount of time in one day. Wouldn't you do
that? Well, that's essentially what I'm promising you if you do this one thing. Now, it's much, much easier
than being an ice skater. It's much easier than hitting a golf ball or
dunking a basketball. In fact, anyone can do
what I'm about to ask. The problem is it's kind of like cleaning
out your garage. It's not something
you want to do. It's not an enjoyable task. But the task is you've got
all these elements together. You have to practice,
and you have to pull out your cellphone
or an iPad or a computer, and you have to practice
on video and look at it. Now, let me say upfront. I know you don't
want to do that. Nobody likes doing that. All I can tell you
is that's what actually makes someone
a great communicator. But you can't just record
yourself on video. That in and of
itself does nothing. You can't just watch yourself
once giving the speech. Not only does that do nothing, it might actually
make matters worse because you just remember how much you hated certain elements. The whole beauty of recording
and practicing on video, you have to do it again and
again in a systematic way. You have to look at yourself, speak, figure out
what do you like? What do you not like?
Make careful notes. Whatever you like, do
more of next time. Whatever you didn't
like, do less of. Keep doing it until you're convinced it's the best you can do at your
current skill level. It might take five takes. It might take 50 takes. Guess what? Your
audience doesn't care. They simply want your best because if you're
not interesting for them and not
memorable to them, they've got a great solution
now to your boring speech. It's called checking
their email. And if you see anyone in the audience reading
their email, it means you're doing
something wrong. It's never the audience's fault. It's our fault. So that's what I
want you to do now. And I'm not going to spend
a lot of time begging you to do this because I've done that in the past in courses, and only one out of
1,000 people will do it. But if you want to get the
most out of this course, if you really want to build
your communication skills, that's the single most
important thing you can do, practice on video until you
like your communication, until you like your speech
or your presentation.
10. Test Tubes for You: If you had a really important press release or document or memo that you had to send
to all of your customers, all of your clients,
to regulators, to the media, would
you just wing it? Would you just dictate it
once and send it out as is? I don't think so.
You'd want to test it. You'd want to spell
check it, review it, possibly have a lawyer in
your organization look at it, or a trusted advisor, investor relations
person, you want other checks on
the process before you just send out your
text communication. Well, when it comes to
spoken communication, you can also test. So for example, let's say
you're giving a presentation, a sales presentation to 20 really important
prospects on Thursday. My advice is get one or two of your colleagues
together or maybe someone who works in a different
office down the hall to join you in the cafeteria
or empty conference room, give them your presentation, and when you're done, ask them. Now what do they think
because they'll tell you, Oh, you're wonderful.
They want to be helpful. Don't ask them what they think. Ask them what they remember. Do they remember your
most important points? Do they remember your slides and the message that is
contained in the slide? If they don't remember all of your messages, you
got a big problem. If they don't remember your
slides, you got a problem. The problem isn't get rid of those people and find
another test group. The solution is you
need to go back to your speech to make your
ideas more memorable. You need to throw
away the slides. They're not remembering
and replace them with slides
that actually work. Because if you test
on an audience and they're understanding all of your messages and
remembering them, and they're remembering
your slides and understanding the messages
embedded in the slides, then when you go into the actual presentation to
communicate on Thursday, you're going to be
filled with confidence. And it's not
confidence because of some a raw cheerleader
generic stuff. It's going to be
because you have actual evidence that the presentation you're going
to be communicating works. That's what's most important. Not just feeling good or
visualizing a standing ovation, but testing your messages, you're trying to
communicate in advance and having a sense that
it's actually working.
11. You Have Earned a Professional Critique: Here's my offer to you. If you really are serious about dramatically improving
your communication skills, getting out of this
sort of beginner stage, and perhaps going quickly from intermediate
to even advanced, you can do it, and
it really isn't going to take you more
than about half an hour. Here's what I'm going
to ask you to do. You already heard me in the
previous lecture ask you to practice on video and to
get feedback from others, and be honest, how
many of you did that? Not very many, because I've been unsuccessful at
persuading people to do that in an
online environment. In a real world environment. I'm very successful
because I don't ask. I just point the camera at
people and they get on camera a dozen times in a day when
they're working with me, but I don't have that power over someone in this
online environment. So if you really want
to be successful at this and get the most
out of the training, what I'm going to ask you
to do is come up with that video of your best
presentation that you love, maybe that you've
tested with others, put it on YouTube and put the URL into the discussion page of this course right now. I promise you I will
watch your video, and I will give you
detailed feedback. You've already paid for it when you bought admission
to this course, so it doesn't cost you anything, and this is the kind of
thing people pay me a lot of money for in the real world, in the non digital world. So you might as well
take me up on it. Fewer than one out of 1,000
of my students do this. So if you want to jump to
the head of the class, get the most out of this course, that's what I'm
urging you to do. Give me your don't just do one and read off something, then
you didn't even look at it. That's wasting my
time and yours. I need you to really, really
look at it, D five, ten, 20, maybe 30 takes, get to the point where you're convinced you can't
do any better. Then post the URL of that
video, and I will look at it.
12. You have Now Mastered Basic and Beyond Communication Skills: Congratulations.
You are no longer a beginner when it comes to
your communication skills. Now when you want
to communicate, whether it's with
one person, ten, 15, 1,500, or 15,000, you're going to have
the skills to do it. You're going to have
a process to do it. You'll always start the same
way by asking yourself, What's my objective here? What's my goal in this
communication activity? What is it I want this audience to do after I'm done speaking? Then you'll ask yourself, What are all the possible
messages I can say on this? And then you'll narrow it
down to your top five. Then you'll think
of interesting, relevant stories involving conversations
with real customers, clients, prospects for each
one of these messages. Then you'll have a
simple paper outline. So you don't have to remember
anything in this speech. If you want to use PowerPoint, you can, but you're not going to throw tons and tons
of text up there. Instead, you'll come up with an image for each one
of your message points. And then you can
practice, practice on video, test with others. Do all that, you're
going to go in to this communications
opportunity with tremendous confidence
because your audience will perceive you as
comfortable, confident, relaxed. They're going to understand you. They're going to remember
your key messages, and they're going to take
the actions you want. You will be a master at your communication
skills. Good luck.
13. Extra Tips On How to Get Over Nervousness and Being Scared: I know some of you have gone through the
whole course now, and you're thinking, Well, Tech's making some suns. There's some good points. And yeah, I can try that. But still, I'm nervous.
I'm uncomfortable. I'm scared. My hands are
shaking. I feel for you. I want to give you
some more tips, but I do want to give
them to you in order of priority because I find people come up with
so many techniques. They want to do a shot of
booze or Beta blockers. I'll talk about
those in a moment. Meditation, hypnosis. I'm not saying all of those
solutions are always bad, but I want to give you my
sense of the clear hierarchy. The number one way to get over nervousness
when it comes to speaking is to have
actually watched yourself give the
presentation on video, and you're looking at it,
and you're saying, Wow. If I can be half
as good as he is, if I can be half
as good as she is, I'm going to be the star
of my department or my company or my
organization or my industry. Now you don't have to
visualize a good speech. You've actually seen
it with your own eyes. You saw it in advance
because you took the time to practice on your cell
phone, iPad, or computer. Far and away, that is
the number one way to get over nerves when it comes to public speaking and
presentation skills and communication skills. It's also the least
popular way of doing it. So I understand that. I spent a lot of my time
preaching at people on this, and when I'm working with them one on one
or small groups, in person, they
don't have a choice. But when I'm talking to
people and trying to help them through an online
environment, let's face it. You can just sit back,
click Next, click Skip. You don't have to
do any of this. But if you're still
nervous or uncomfortable, what good has the
course done you? So that is far and away the number one way
to get over nervous, to get over being uncomfortable. Other tips in order
of hierarchy, practice in the room where you're actually going
to give the speech. Sometimes you're traveling to a different conference room,
a different boardroom, a convention center, hotel, get into the space and
actually practice. Next, try to practice
in front of people, get feedback of what they
like, what they remember. Very crucial to build
your confidence. Now, other methods
that are out there, I find much, much less
effective than those. But one method is visualization. You can visualize yourself
having a standing ovation. But what good is a standing
ovation if people don't really remember your
message and act on it? Our goal unless
you want to become a professional keynote
speaker is not to get standing ovations,
especially as a beginner. Your goal was to
actually communicate, making sure people understand you and actually
remember your messages. Another common tactic
for getting over fear and preparation is
practicing in front of a mirror. The problem with practicing
in front of a mirror. We all have certain
things we don't completely love about our face or eyes or hairline or nose
is crooked or something. So when you're practicing
in front of a mirror, it's only human nature to
look at the things you don't like in your own face. Well, how does that help us get more confidence
for the speech? So I do not recommend ever practicing in front of a mirror. All it does is distract you, and you're not focusing on
what you're actually saying, you're focusing on
looking at yourself. So I don't recommend that. People ask me all
the time, Well, TJ, can smoke a little marijuana, which is increasingly
legal all over the world or do a shot of liquor
or wine or vodka. Here's the problem
with that approach, is it may make you more relaxed, but sometimes that can slightly impede your
ability to have recall. If you're already
nervous speaking, the last thing you
want is something that's going to slow
your recall down more, because when we're nervous, we don't remember things as well. If we've had a little alcohol, sometimes even one glass
or any other kind of drug, then it can slow down your ability to remember
what you're gonna say next. And if you're already
nervous about forgetting what to say
and you lose a second, then you end up on It
makes you more nervous. For some people, even
a little alcohol can make their face red
or make them blush. That can be distracting. Also, if you have
a drink or two, but I'll assume just one, people come up to you afterwards
to say good presentation, good job, good talk. They smell alcohol
on your breath, and this is the first time
they've ever met you. That may be the lasting
impression people have, so I don't recommend that. Sometimes people
try to get fancier. They want to use Beta blockers. Now, this is a
controversial topic, and I can tell you
when I've spoken on this on YouTube
and other places, I get massive hate mail telling me I'm an idiot
and a fool and stupid. But I want to be completely
transparent with you and honest based on what I think is actually
going to help you accomplish your goal of giving a presentation and looking comfortable and
confident in the process. There are drugs, Beta
blockers that will, in fact, reduce your
ability to get nervous. You just don't get as keyed up. You don't get as tensed up. So it does help your body. The problem is it doesn't actually solve the
underlying problem. The problem is that if you're not giving a
great presentation, if you're not giving
an interesting, memorable presentation,
you're likely to be nervous. If you're no longer
nervous about it, but you're still giving a
boring or awful presentation hasn't helped matters. I've had clients who didn't
listen to me on this issue, took a Beta blocker
before going on CNBC, and they were less nervous. Unfortunately, the
hundreds of thousands of people watching
them on TV saw this. Yes, I'm happy to be here today. And they sounded zoned out and zombie like and low
key and low energy. And they didn't come across
as comfortable and confident. So remember, it's not about
you just not shaking. You need to come
across as comfortable, confident, relaxed,
and interesting. The number one, I've been
saving this for the last. The number one way to not be nervous when
you're speaking is to simply focus all of your energies on really helping the
audience member. What are you doing
to make them better? What are you doing to
help their business, their organization, their life? If you're truly focused
on helping them, you don't even have time to
think about poor little ke. All of you have seen
news reports, I'm sure, of, you know, a child getting
pinned under a truck, and then people sometimes one person are strong
enough to lift it up, the adrenaline, they're focused on saving one child's life. Because they're not
thinking about themselves. They're not thinking
about, Oh, how does my pant line look? How do my shoes look?
They're just running, diving, trying to help. When you're speaking, that's
what you need to focus on. Now, you're not running and
diving on an audience member. But if you're so focused on helping your audience member
understand something better, you're not going
to be focused on, Oh, how am I doing? Am I scared? How am I going to
get through this? By the way, the one
final bonus bonus. You've heard the expression visualize people in
their underwear, visualize your audience naked. Horrible advice. Depending
on your audience, it's either too disgusting
or too exciting. Don't focus on your audience
and their underwear. Focus on one
individual at a time, helping them, making your
ideas come alive to them. Focus on that. You won't
have time to be nervous.
TJ Walker, Public Speaking and Media Training Expert
