TJ Walker #1 USA TODAY Best-Selling public speaking author and presentation trainer to past Miss Universes, Super Bowl Winners, Nobel Peace Prize Winners presents the 1^st annual Snoozy and Snazzy awards to the best and worst speakers at the Academy Awards.
For video analysis from TJ go to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUvRcScaAGI

SNAZZY AWARD:  Best speech

Sandra Bullock, Best Actress

“She nailed it last night. This is an actress who can poke fun at herself but she was also emotional, funny and she specifically thanked every single woman in this category.

It was classy, funny, everything you could want in an acceptance speech.”

SNOOZY AWARD: Worst speech

Christoph Waltz, Best Supporting Actor

“He came out and gave a laundry list of 15 names and mentions, too long for a 45 second speech. Not enough humanity or stories. In short there wasn’t anything entertaining in his speech.”

AVAILABLE For Interviews:

TJ Walker will offer his unique take on which winners put the audience to sleep and which speeches were worthy of their own golden statue.

Attention TV producers throughout US and Worldwide: Walker is available for live and recorded TV interviews anywhere in the world from his Manhattan remote broadcast studio (there is no fee or expense for TV stations)
For video analysis from TJ go to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUvRcScaAGI

TJ Walker is one of the leading media trainer/crisis communications counselors in the world. For more than 25 years he has coached president s of countries, CEOs, Prime Ministers, Nobel Peace Prize winners, Miss Universes and thousands of corporate executives. He is CEO of Media Training Worldwide www.mediatrainigworldwide.com

Walker Electronic Press Kit http://www.mediatrainingworldwide.com/epresskit.html

TJ on CNN, Fox, Headline News, Comedy Central and other TV networks http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18jagMi5cBU

MEDIA CONTACT:

Availability: Walker is available for live and recorded TV interviews anywhere in the world from his Manhattan remote broadcast studio (there is no fee or expense for TV stations) (remote via Skype over a business class 5 Mbps upstream connection. Other streaming options also available, including LiveStream and iChat.)

To Book, contact Ryan McCormick at (516) 901-1103 Ryan@risingsunpr.com, Mark Goldman (516) 639-0988 markgoldman73@gmail.com, Mike Bako at 212-764-4955 or TJ Walker at 917-204-9490 tj@tjwalker.com.

The following is an excerpt from my upcoming book “How To Give a Pretty Good Presentation” (Wiley 2010)

What are other common timewasters that I can avoid when preparing for my presentation?

Giving presentations is in some ways very similar to managing your personal finances and losing lots of weight—there is tons of bad advice out there and anyone can have an opinion!
I’ve tried to gather all the advice that, if followed, would waste lots of your valuable time.
The following are instructions that you will NOT have to follow because they are either bad advice in general for all presenters or bad advice for you in particular to your goals of giving a pretty good presentation:
• Memorize the first minute of your presentation.
o This is tough to do and isn’t worth the effort. It’s a great way to create stage fright and panic.
• Practice your presentation while looking at yourself in a mirror.
o A waste of time. Guaranteed to make you obsess over your crooked nose or receding hairline. The one thing you don’t have to do when giving a speech is look at yourself.
• Visualize your audience naked.
o Terrible advice. Depending on your audience, this is either too disgusting or too distracting.
• Limit your PowerPoint to no more than 10 slides.
o More than 10 slides won’t necessarily help you, but in the real world, people who use this artificial constraint of 10 end up cramming 4 slides worth of content onto one slide. Nobody can read it!
• Write out your entire speech word for word.
o There is no need to do this—just have a simple one-page outline using bullet points.
• Obsess over the size and color of your PowerPoint font
o Generally, a complete waste of time.
• Worry about moving your hands.
o Actually, you should move your hands when you talk. Only nervous people freeze or hold their hands when they speak.
• Cramming every single fact, number and data point on what you and your department have done in the last six months into your presentation.
o If the people you are presenting to really had to know every single thing you do, then they’d have your job. It’s your job to tell them only what’s truly important to them.
• Brainstorm on every single possible question that could be asked by an audience member.
o Sure you need to be able to answer most questions, but there are an infinite number of questions that could be asked. It’s a waste of time to worry about hypothetical questions when the bigger danger is that you haven’t prepared anything interesting or memorable to present in the first place.
• Worry about the sound of your voice.
o Nobody cares or notices your voice. As long as you can be heard and understood then it is highly unlikely that your voice is a problem you should concern yourself with. Besides, there is nothing you can do (easily) about your voice!
• Obsess over special effects, dissolves, and builds in your PowerPoint.
o Even if people notice your special effects they won’t relate it to the messages of your presentation. Special effects usually become a big black-hole time drain. Far better to spend your time preparing something interesting to say.
o
• Put off giving your presentation until you are more seasoned or experienced.
o Quit conning yourself. Giving presentations is makes a person seasoned and experienced.
• Gathering more and more research.
o Enough already. Chances are you already have enough research and raw facts. The longer you stay stuck in the mode of gathering data, the less time you have for processing the data, shaping the data, highlighting the data, preparing stories about the data, and rehearsing your presentations.
• Using a thesaurus to find big words.
o This is great if you want to look like a pompous fool. Use the simplest, shortest word you can think of.
• Anything that takes you away from focusing on a handful of key points with examples and stories to make each point come alive and delivered in a conversational manner.
o Everything else is BS!

The following is an excerpt from my upcoming book “How To Give a Pretty Good Presentation” (Wiley 2010)

What is the Best Way to Handle Nerves? How do I handle pre-speech jitters?

It makes sense for most people to be nervous before giving a presentation. Most people give boring presentations and why should you be better than most? OK, I know I’m being depressing, but I’m just being realistic. It actually is quite rational to be nervous before a presentation. But the main reason most people are nervous before a presentation is fear of the unknown. If you haven’t actually seen yourself give your presentation, then you don’t know what you are presenting to the outside world. After all, a presentation is not what is on a PowerPoint slide or a chart, a presentation is you standing or sitting in front of people and you are talking. If you haven’t seen yourself on video giving your talk that means that the rough draft of your presentation is the one you give to your final intended audience. Ugh! Rough drafts are usually rough by definition—so it makes sense to be nervous if you are going to wing it in front of people.

If I were coaching you to become a world class, spell-binding orator, I would tell you that you have to rehearse for days and days and watch dozens of video rehearsals. But I want to make your life easier and save you time. So all you have to do is rehearse on video until you’ve seen yourself give a pretty good presentation. It doesn’t have to be perfect, you don’t have to generate a standing ovation, and you don’t have to reduce your ums and uhs to zero—you just have to be pretty good compared to all of the other people your bosses and colleagues compare you to. How do you know if you are pretty good? Just watch the video of yourself practicing. If you think you are pretty good, then you probably are. Great! Now you are good to go. But if you think you are incredibly boring, monotone, and tedious or confusing, you are also probably right. Practice your presentation again on video. This time, do less of the stuff you don’t like, and do more of the stuff you do like. Now, review the video again.

For a very high percentage of people—and I hope you are one of them—2 video rehearsals will often be enough. The first time you see yourself practice the speech you will hate it. Spend a few minutes tweaking your outline, and then do the speech again on video. Watch it. Now, you are likely to see something you can live with—congratulations, you are now virtually guaranteed to give a pretty good presentation.

Do the following:

1. Be interesting.
2. Be passionate.
3. Tell stories.
4. Tell examples.
5. Tell case studies.
6. Look at the audience.
7. Let people ask questions anytime.
8. Tell people why they should give a da*&!
9. Move your head, hands and body.
10. Finish on time (or early)

DON’T do the following:

1. Read your speech.
2. Do a data dump.
3. Show complex slides with lots of words and small graphics.
4. Stare at your slides and avoid your audience.
5. Be abstract.
6. Use big, complex words.
7. Use Jargon.
8. Be monotone.
9. Be boring.
10. Go over your allotted time.

The New York Times today has an interesting article on how middle aged adults learn. Surprise! it’s not by listening to a data dump. More confirmation on what great speakers already know. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/education/edlife/03adult-t.html?em

How to Give a Pretty Good Presentation

Introduction

Shortly after my book “TJ Walker’s Secret to Foolproof Presentations” went to #1 on the USA Today Bestseller list, I received a call from an editor. “Hey TJ, congrats on the book, but what about all the people who don’t want to give a “Foolproof Presentation?”

I said “What?”

She responded, “Well, your book talks about how to give a Foolproof Presentation, and it seems like all the books on speaking are on how to get a standing ovation, an exceptional presentation or and insanely great presentation. What about the 99% of the world who don’t want to be the next Tony Robbins? What about the people who either don’t like giving presentations or fear public speaking and just want to get through the darn thing? What about all the people who just want to give a pretty good presentation, but not one that will set the world on fire…don’t they have a right to get what they want?”

And that’s how this book was born.

If you want to become the next Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama, or Winston Churchill, then this book is NOT for you. (There are already a gazillion books written for you) If there is nothing you would rather do than deliver a PowerPoint to 1000 people, give a toast to a wedding party of 500 or do a live interview on CNN, then this book is not for you (though you would be just like me).

This book is written for normal people (I readily admit I’m not one – I was the nerdy, dweeby JR High School student council President who loved giving speeches in front of 1200 students at age 13)

I’m not going to waste your time giving you time-consuming and difficult exercises in order to make you the next king of the motivational speaking circuit, as seen on late night infomercials. Instead, I’m going to give you the fastest, shortest, simplest ways of giving a pretty good presentation. Period.

I work with thousands of business people, political leaders, United Nations officials and beauty queens from 6 contents every year—and they have varying skills and goals when it comes down to their speaking abilities. Everything I’m going to share with you is based on real world experience helping people just like you—most of them sent to my presentation workshops reluctantly — usually by a boss who believed in them and wanted to help them gain skills needed to advance to the next part of their careers.

While there are a million different kinds of speakers and speaking situations in the world, I boil everything down into three main categories. First, there are the truly awful speakers: these people do boring data dumps. No one in the audience remembers anything from the message or the speaker other than that the speaker was boring and perhaps seemed nervous. This is the widest variety of all presenters in the world.

Second, there is the category of truly outstanding speakers. Whether it is someone on the international level like a Steve Jobs in business or Tony Blair in Politics, they have the ability to make any presentation truly memorable, engaging, interesting, and useful—plus they convey confidence, warmth and likeability in the process. At the local level, your own mayor or head of the Chamber of Commerce may be like this. This is a small group of people, typically less than 1% of all speakers.

There is also a third group of people. These individuals are able to speak much better than the second group, but not nearly as well as the first group. The third group is able to come across professional, competent and understandable. These presenters are able to get to their points in a concise manner and have their points remembered. No one was ever moved to tears after listening to someone in this third group give a presentation. But no one ever fell asleep while one of these third group speakers was presenting either. Members of this third group don’t spend days preparing and rehearsing their speech the way Ronald Reagan did or the way Steve Jobs does. They don’t spend days rehearsing because they have too many other demands on their time at work and home and giving a spell-binding speech simply isn’t a top priority in their life. But they are willing to spend between 5 minutes to one hour preparing their speeches because they know they have to in order to get what they want done for their career and in life. They want to eliminate the pain of giving an awful presentation and avoid the pain of dozens of hours of rehearsal. Members of this third group simply want to give a pretty good presentation—and they do it, every time.

If you want to be in the group, the third category of speaker who can give a pretty good presentation, then this book is for you. I promise you that if you follow the simple and straight forward lessons I have laid out for you, you will consistently be a pretty good presenter. You will never fail to get a promotion or win a new client, just because your presentation skills are considered substandard. You will never have to spend another sleepless night before a big speech worrying that you will bomb, because you will know that it will no longer be possible for you to bomb.

I am going to respect your time because I know that speech making is not your number one concern, so I am only going to give you the most important and least time-consuming tips to make you a better presenter.

Here’s what else you will learn: 1. the most common blunders in every speaking situation that plague most presenters. 2. The difficult and time-consuming advanced techniques that professional speakers use THAT YOU WONT HAVE TO USE. And 3. The simple, easy, fast way to give your presentation better than 80 percent of your colleagues so that you can sit down and get on with the rest of your busy life.

Shall we begin?