One of the most powerful building blocks in becoming a great talent is not wasting words.

It’s kind of like learning to drive.  On one side is the curb – saying TOO little, so nothing was said that made your Content “pop.”  On the other side is the double yellow line – belaboring a subject where there’s nothing new left to say, but you’re still talking.  That’s a head-on collision waiting to happen.

The cure: prep to where you get what you want to say down to the most concise form possible.  Then just let it “breathe” a little when you do it on the air.

The Better Idea.  That’s what always wins.  Apple.  Streaming.  Social media.

As an air talent, limiting yourself to just trying to match the other guy, or just trying to do a decent job… well, that’s setting the bar too low.

What you should want to do is get better, get clearer on what you want to do, and get more proficient at doing it.  Here are three easy steps toward getting better in just one month:

Step 1 – be able to tell someone, in detail, what your listener’s life is today.  The more you know about the listener, the more relevant you can be.  Relevance is ALWAYS the better idea.

Step 2 – do what the format allows, but make sure that you come across as a person, not just a voice.  This is multi-layered, because we’re also voice actors, to a degree.  Start with trying to sound ON the air just like you sound OFF the air.

Step 3 – Reject the typical or the easiest thing to do.  Keep adding stuff all the time.  Burn material like jet fuel.  Try something this week that you’ve never done before.

That should jump start things.

You can’t MAKE yourself seem more relevant.  You have to just BE relevant.

No ‘slogan’ (like “Favorites of the Eighties, Nineties, and Today”) will do this.

And it’s not confined to radio.  A TV station where I live uses “On Your Side” as their slogan.  I wasn’t aware that I took any particular side, but after watching their hapless evening news team, I don’t WANT them on my side.

Kleenex.  That name probably has relevance to you.  Lysol = hugely relevant, especially as COVID-19 proved.

At some point, your NAME has to STAND for Relevance.

So remember that what happens when the mic opens – usually in the first 10 seconds or so – is what either keeps the listener here, or chases that listener away.  Say something relevant.

Watching one of the 700 “home renovation” shows my wife loves recently, I was caught up in what a worker said.

This is a guy who runs one of those machines that excavates earth at an alarmingly fast rate.  But he was interested in learning other things, too.  So, even though he’s just starting out in a landscaping career, he apparently has an eye for the future as he said, “The more you learn, the more you’re worth.”

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We’re in uncharted waters right now, because the Coronavirus is the #1 subject locally, nationally, and globally…

So let’s look at it both Strategically and from a Coaching perspective.

Strategy

These are the core ingredients in what we should want to air right now:

Acts of kindness
Stories of hope
Examples of self-sacrifice…

In short, be the “glass half full” station.  If that seems corny to you, grow up.  Negativity and Fear are everywhere.  If you feed them, they get worse.

Coaching Tips

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You want to be KNOWN for something.  Some quality – humor, relatable “just like I am” presence, unique vocabulary – SOMETHING that makes you different from everyone else.

But you don’t ONLY want to be known for one thing.

In the days of vinyl 45 rpm singles, the “A” side was why you bought it – at first.  But as the Beatles proved, the “B” side was often just as good.  It’s that way in everything.  Harrison Ford was Han Solo, but he was also “The Fugitive.”  Lebron James is a great basketball player, but what he’s given back to his hometown is what defines him as a human being.

To LAST, there has to be depth.  (This is something that people in the public eye need to pay attention to.  Today’s “trending” is tomorrow’s “Is he still alive?”)

Develop your main thing to the fullest.  Then add another thing.

This may seem academic, but I’m hearing a lot of that “bull-horn” delivery lately.

Finding the right volume isn’t usually something you just “get.”  It takes exploring different mic techniques, and learning as much as you can about your vocal “instrument.”  Being able to “caress” something, vocally, is important.  We’re voice actors, not just “personalities.”

Voice trackers, in particular, often sound totally out of touch with the music, because they don’t think about volume and intonation.  Or, as the great voice coach Marice Tobias calls it, “noticing” a word, rather than the typical instruction to “inflect” or “sell” it.

Let me try to quantify this for you:

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Content, Content, wherefore art thou?

Minutia, “filler” items, stupid lists like “12 things you can do with chili peppers,” reading vapid social media postings that a lot of people’s own relatives don’t care about.  Why are we settling for this?

I probably get asked about Content and Show Prep more than anything else.  It’s impossible to tell you what will be good Content tomorrow, but I do know the principle that makes it easier – and FAST:

You can’t MAKE something matter.  It either does, or it doesn’t.  If it doesn’t, blathering on about it or making stupid jokes to try and “dress it up” won’t work.

So how do you know what matters?  KNOW YOUR LISTENER.  Not some cold, hard, station profile; but who he or she is, what they look like, where they came from, what their lives are like.  The more you can put yourself in the listener’s shoes, the easier it is to serve subjects up like Bobby Flay fixing breakfast.

Hold your feet to the fire on NOT doing ANYTHING that doesn’t matter.  It’s magic.

In this era of voice trackers in one or more dayparts, multiple responsibilities that take time, etc. it’s not unusual for me to see stations where the morning team may have never even met, say, the evening air talent.

Although this might not seem to be an area for a talent coach to work on, it really is.  I think it’s essential for all the people on the air staff to know each other, communicate with each other, and share with each other.

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One of the main things I deal with as a coach is getting air talent to sound more natural.  Especially to younger demos, sounding “like a disc jockey” isn’t what they want to hear.  But that’s not all there is to it.

There are lessons everywhere, so here’s one with a visual aid.  It’s a YouTube clip of Carole King and James Taylor doing her song “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow”…

Two “old pros” pretty much knocking it out of the park, with what I think may be the best song ever written about teenage girl angst and hopes.  King and Taylor seem totally relaxed and the performance feels very natural, but it’s also EXPERTLY nuanced.

People work hard to attain that level in both of those areas.  So remember, it’s not enough to just be natural; there also has to be attention to Performance.