Are you communicating something interesting to your audience, whether it is a colleague, a customer, a client an audience member in a speech a friend, a date. Are you saying something interesting?
Now nobody likes to think of themselves as a bore but how many speeches, presentations have you seen have, I seen where someone stands up and proceeds to tell you about their background, their company, their credentials and your responses. ((ah! L) let me check my email.) We hate it when other people do it but yet we do it ourselves too. I have been guilty of it. Here is a general rule of thumb and forgive me if this sounds harsh but here it is. Nobody cares about you. Now I do not mean to say, it is a harsh cruel world and you do not have family and friends.
Of course, you do but what I do mean is most people in business customers, clients, prospects, people you are dealing with. They are thinking a lot more about themselves then you. So if you have a chance to communicate whether it is a conversation, a pitch, a presentation, a speech, a talk, your job, it is always going to be to think (am I saying something interesting to this person now?) Not what is important to me but what is going to be interesting and important and relevant to them and then ideally you can bridge that together blend that, in with stuff, that is important to you because here the thing if you talk to people, if you communicate with people enough about stuff that interests them. They become interested in you. They will want to find out more about you, many speeches and presentations. I see whether it is a business speech a personal development guru whatever it is the speeches have fine elements but the order is all messed up the person feels obligated off with.
(well I am happy to be here today. Thank you for having me here. When I was preparing my speech blah, blah, blah!). It is boring. It is me me, me me, me. Again nobody cares about you. They care about themselves so that is why it is critically important that the first thing you say is interesting to your audience but it needs to continue along that path. You cannot just say something interesting, a funny joke at the beginning and then bore people with details about yourself. You have to make them want to care about you. You have to make them see the relevance in learning more about you. I know plenty of people have told me they have been out on dates and their date just could not stop talking about himself/herself typically himself and it was me me, me, me.
(let me tell you how great I am.) 😉 now the person might have been great but they were so boring because all they did was talk about me, me, me me, me. The same can be true of a business, presentation a new business pitch, a sales presentation, a speech at a conference in your industry. If you are talking to people just about yourself. You are going to bore them and, these days everyone has a perfect solution for boredom. Let me check Instagram 😉 or Facebook or twitter. What is driving this? So much of it is insecurity. I have clients come to me all the time and say (well TJ you know, I know what you are saying I need to be interesting throughout the speech and right at the beginning but I need to establish my credibility. So I have to tell them where I went to college and where I got my master’s degree. Where I did my post doctorate.) No you do not you have to be interesting, you have to give people ideas, information, it is interesting to them, useful to them and memorable to them.
If you do that, now you have got their attention. You have heard the expression; we live in the attention economy. Well everyone else is fighting for their attention and you may think, they are sitting right there in front of you, of the second row, the third row but mark Zuckerberg is fighting for their attention too. – he is he is crying for them saying please please, pick up your phone, there is notifications from all your friends about cool stuff going on Facebook. Please open it up and look at it and by the way you can look at my ads which is going to make me worth more and more, billions of dollars. So mark Zuckerberg is going after the attention of anyone you ever speak to, any client, customer, colleague prospect date and such as mark Zuckerberg. It is everyone in the world certainly, everyone the online world, everyone is going for everyone’s attention.
Now I actually do not believe the research that says human beings now have an attention span less than a goldfish of three seconds whatever. If you are interesting people will listen to you for hours, if you are boring, three seconds is too long. If people even sense that you are just going to get up and give them your marketing boilerplate. That someone was paid to do a focus group on two years ago and now it is in your marketing document. (so it is part of our brand. So we always say it and that is how we started our presentations and here where our logo is.) Guess what people are going to ignore you. They are going to zoom out, zone out instantly.
So part of my challenge for you is to think about how can you consistently be interesting in any form of communication, social political, business and put yourself in the shoes of the other person or the other people. This takes some confidence can be insecure person says (what about me, I feel naked up here. If I do not show all the bullet points of my credentials and if I do not tell them how many years’ experience I have) you gotten, get over it. The number one way to build credibility with any audience in the world is this: be interesting. I am firmly in the belief that audiences care about that more than anything else more about whether you agree with them or about your race color, creed gender at this any of that stuff.
I am not saying that is not important to some people but what they care about most is it is just going to get a bore man, is this woman going to bore. Is this person going to bore me? Am I going to hear something interesting this is what goes on any time, someone hears another person speak. Does not matter if it is a job, interview, a new business pitch, a convention speech at a political conference with 10 million other people in the room. This is the mentality I have it, you have it. So you have got to recognize that. Every single time you have an opportunity to communicate, yes every time you speak, but also email for that matter talk about their concern. I like to do it right in the subject line telling the person exactly what the purpose is about them the benefit to them and not just this is an important message from TJ because ultimately nobody really cares about TJ or you or anyone else they care about themselves.
That is okay but ultimately they will care about you when you are interesting. I am TJ walker. See there I plug myself on my name. I did not say that at the beginning. I did not start this off by welcome to my YouTube channel. I am TJ walker. I am a pi. I did not do anything. I went right into content of interest to you. Now and only now do I say I am TJ walker. Thanks for joining if you are watching this on YouTube. Please hit subscribe. If you are watching this on Facebook, please hit like and join the page that this is on. Now is the time to promote after you have already given value.