The other day, during a session, we were talking about what to do for Mother’s Day.  I mentioned having my mother do my show one Mother’s Day years ago, and the talent I was working with said, “I could bring my daughter on with me… which she would hate.”

I replied, “And that – her being resistant to it – would be something EVERY listener could identify with.”

Continuing, I suggested that she act out – complete with sound effects – her dragging her daughter into the room.  Like… with a chain, scraping across the floor.  Dripping with reluctance.

So here’s the lesson: Don’t be afraid to make things theatrical.  The more you create that “theater of the mind” thing, where the listener can PICTURE it, the better.

Unlike real life, JUMP INTO THE POOL.

DON’T look to see if there’s any water in it first.

Because all people are going to remember is that you jumped.

Note: My friend Ron Chapman, legendary Dallas morning man, once jumped out of an airplane on the air.  THAT was GREAT radio.

Because of a recent conversation with my partner and friend John Frost, maybe it’s a good idea to talk about why coaching is so essential to an air talent’s growth.

When I first set out on this path more than 20 years ago, I had only heard of two people that specifically worked on coaching talent – Valerie Geller and Randy Lane.  Each of them has credentials a mile long, and I’ve learned things from each of them.  Valerie is the Great Guru of Talk radio, with clients all over the world, and – among others – Rush Limbaugh as one of her first projects.  Randy is a master psychologist, with a gentle touch and a large dollop of personal magnetism.

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In the last tip, I referred to basketball coaching legend John Wooden’s “Pyramid of Success” – something you should read, if you haven’t already done so.

Here’s another prime tenet of his teaching: Team Spirit.  About that, he says “The star of the team is the team.  ‘We’ supercedes ‘me.'”

So ask yourself this: When’s the last time you even MENTIONED someone else on your station?  And even if you did, did you offer any real insight as to why I should listen?

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This tip is for music stations.

If you don’t know who John Wooden is, you’re probably not a basketball fan.  Wooden, called “The Wizard of Westwood,” won TEN NCAA national championships in a 12-year period as head coach at UCLA, including a record seven in a ROW.  (No other team has won more than four in a row.)  Many of his players became NBA stars, often Hall of Famers like Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Gail Goodrich, and Bill Walton.

Wooden’s “Pyramid of Success” has become the Bible to dozens of present-day coaches, and one of the things adjacent to it is his list of “12 Lessons in Leadership,” one of which is “Little things make big things happen.”

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This is what I hear a lot of the time nowadays: A jock stops down in the middle of two songs for no apparent reason.  Then he or she reads some idiotic story from the internet that most people saw five days ago, adding a C-minus punch line.  (Or the jock does some piece of trivia, or some “cheerful thought for the day”.)  Then they lurch forward into another song.

But back in the day, when radio had tons of forward momentum and much bigger ratings, there was this thing called the “Q” format.  It was somewhat the same as the Drake format, in that jocks talked over song intros (and at the end of a music sweep, the jock talked at the end of the last song, of course, and did some Content into a commercial break).  But the Q format was often thought of as screaming, hundred-mile-an-hour jocks cramming as much as they could into an intro before the vocal hit.

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Telling a story is like being on a see-saw.  On one end is that you want to share something.  On the other end is not wasting the listener’s time.

Here are some rules to help you NOT be the person who takes a long time to tell a story that doesn’t matter:

The first line or two will be what “tethers” your subject matter to the listener – or not.  Start abruptly into something that isn’t timely or relevant to the listener, and you’re dead in the water already.  Spend too long getting into it, again… dead.

Add only the essential details, and let vocabulary and attitude, fueled by Emotions, fill it out.  More facts than we need, names we don’t know, too much setting up who someone is, etc. will kill the story.

End with something we DIDN’T hear earlier in the story.  The ending should surprise, delight, or inform.  Try not to use cornball punch lines.  The “that’s what SHE said” type of line is beaten to death.

Here’s an example, from a team show I worked with:

T: Oh, check your mail today.  You may get the coupon that I got yesterday.  It was for a new product, called “Spam lite.”

B: What do they leave out… to make Spam lite?

T: I don’t know… the snout?

That’s how easy it is, and how little time it takes, to serve up something that the listener will REMEMBER.  (On the air, even with the station’s name, artist, song title, and the team’s name leading off the break, this took only about 20 seconds.  But it’s never really about length.  It’s about IMPACT.)

Believe it or not, there are some instances when a really good talent will foul the ball off his own shin.  It happens to baseball players, and it most assuredly happens to air talent.

Case in point, recently a wonderful talent spent time (a setup, followed by two phone calls) setting up a little factoid about how we really only use about 13% of the things we learned in school.

Right at the outset, there are several things wrong with this:

1. It’s not particularly timely, which means it’s largely irrelevant, because it’s not top-of-mind TODAY.  (Where does this rank on the list of the things that are most important to your listener today, 150^th? 250^th?)
     
2. It relies on using a percentage, which automatically makes it sound “left-brain” driven, as opposed to something more “right-brain” and visual and creative, and…

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Here’s a little something that happened in a recent session with a great morning team in Austin.  I always try to do video sessions, and during this one, they were on location somewhere.

As we talked, I could see people behind them looking in the window.  The people were just curious, wonder what they were doing, and what the two of them were like.

And that’s what happens every time someone tunes in, too.

It’s kind of like a remark that Garry Shandling made to Jerry Seinfeld in a “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee” episode when they talked about seeing Robin Williams for the first time: “You don’t remember what he SAID so much as you remember what he WAS.”

So think about who YOU are, to the listener.  Are you just another person “broad stroke” over-performing, larger than life – but not in a good way?  Or are you someone I can identify with, who’s entertaining, but also surprisingly down to earth and someone I’d like to hang out with?

What you project is a choice.  Choose wisely, because Shandling was right.

One of the prime ingredients in all truly great talents is that they connect with the listener on a daily basis.

And one of the keys in getting to that place is:

Stop TRYING to be noticed.

Instead of constantly trying for punch lines, or “talking points” that just get the same five people to call in with the same types of reactions we always hear, the ‘Real Deal’ is to just be part of the listener’s life each day.  Talk about things that we all have in common, then put your individual spin on it.

Think about this… the more you try to be noticed, the more it’s just about YOU.  But the more you just try to be part of something that we share together, the more it’s about US.

And that’s what gets ratings.  If you build your show around having something going on that I can relate to each day, I’ll come back – over and over again.

Here’s a short, but really powerful tip.

Give a subject two segments (in Talk radio), MAX.  If it doesn’t “catch fire” by then, give up and move along to something else.

The same principle is true in Music Radio – give a subject two tries, and if there’s no usable reaction, punt.  If it hasn’t “happened” by then, you’re just firing bullets into a dead body.  This is both boring and desperate-sounding.

This is why I always over-prepped each day.  Just having “enough” to cover a show might not actually BE enough on a given day.  And as you know, it’s impossible to predict when something might inexplicably fail to connect with the listener.  (Although, now that I think about it, this could simply be because there’s not an Emotion at its core.  Might want to think about that, too.)