Every day, I hear air talent trying to do Content that’s good, but the delivery is too hurried. Or jocks will try to cram too much into a song intro, and while it does fit the time frame, it doesn’t sound real or engaging because the inflection is lost. It’s not just in music radio, though. It happens in all formats, including Talk and Sports.

Obviously, bad training (or lack of training) can cause this, but there’s more to it than that.

Here’s one of the most overlooked factors:

Everyone has an internal clock. And often, your internal clock lies to you.

You can see this outside the radio world with a simple experiment: walk up to someone, put a microphone in front of him, and tell him that he has 30 seconds to speak. Some people will take their time, sounding very real and relaxed – but talk for 50 or 60 seconds; nowhere close to 30. Other people will rush as fast as they can, and even though they have 30 seconds, they’ll race to match their internal clock, then stop after 15 or 20, gasping for air.

Great voice actors learn what real time is, rather than perceived time. Tell my friend Beau Weaver, for instance, that you need a piece of copy to be read in 26 seconds, and he’ll nail it almost every time in the first take. But unless you’ve developed that uncanny timing that a great voice actor has, you’re going to have to work on it.

The cure is a simple one: rehearse. And rehearse OUT LOUD, because it always takes longer when you enunciate clearly and inflect words audibly instead of silently.

Start with real-life Content first (books, articles, etc.) and try to stop after 10 seconds, then 30, then 60. Then take that to what you do on the air. In a short time, the difference will be dramatic, and you’ll have more “command presence” as a result.

Plus, as with many things I coach, it’s like life after sex. Once you’ve done it, you can never go back to the perspective you had before it.

On the surface, it may seem that Howard Stern on satellite, great books, popular TV shows, and your favorite local radio personality may have little or nothing in common. But they all share one thing that I believe is the key to great radio: They all are INTENSELY personal, but still universal.

Both of these factors are important.

Many Air Talents are very personal, talking about their lives, experiences, and challenges. But if the subject only means something to them – if it’s not universal enough for Listeners to feel a common bond with, a “Boy, I know what you’re talking about” emotional connection – it doesn’t work.

The flip side of the coin is the Talent who talks about ‘top of mind’ universal subjects, things that everyone goes through, but doesn’t bring a personal element – a story that leads to an opinion – to the table. So there’s no emotional bonding.

I’ve often described great radio as open-heart surgery that you perform on yourself.

Choose the right subject matter, then POUR yourself into it.

Note: I have very specific tips for how to get into sharing things about yourself. Without learning them, it’s easy to just come across as self-absorbed.

Normally, these coaching tips are for air talents, and this one does apply to your air work. But it’s primarily for MusicRadio Program Directors, simply because I don’t want Air Talents to get in trouble with their bosses over something that I said. The old “it’s easier to get forgiveness than it is permission” thing isn’t really true in this day of Corporate Programming templates and marching orders from above. Now, all too often, “This is the way we do it,” good or bad, is the way of the world. So if you’re a PD, please just take a few minutes and read this through, then take a day and let it wash over you.

No matter what you think, to the listener there are only two elements:

1. Music.
2. Things that aren’t music.

“What about our Imaging?”

Well, it’s not music, is it? Your “Imaging,” to the listener, is just a commercial for you. So when you play a song, then a recorded Imaging piece, then another song, you do not necessarily have the image of playing more music, even though the deejay didn’t say anything. In the mind of the listener, it was song, commercial for you, song.

Go retro. Before this modern template of Imaging playing every other song, the jock usually talked over the song intro, or sometimes a jingle played between songs. (People will sometimes sing your jingle. They’ll never sing your voiceover guy’s Imaging liner.) At the end of a music sweep, we stopped down, did some Content – briefly – then went into a stopset. It was perfect, IF the jocks were concise, and had something to say that informed or entertained.

“But we have things we want to promote.”

When you allow the jocks to talk more often, things can be talked about. There are more opportunities for meaningful teases to be given, for the personality of each jock to emerge, and for true forward momentum to be the first impression a person gets of your station.

“We have limited resources. Some of our jocks aren’t all that great.”

Add the word “yet.” With budget restraints, or a young or inexperienced staff, it’s tempting to not let them talk much. But that’s counterproductive, because no one can learn to ride a horse if they never get in the saddle.

There are only two elements. Play great music. And when you talk -which should be fairly often, but not lengthy – say something worth hearing.

One thing radio people are really good at is kidding themselves. I hear these faulty perceptions a lot:

1. The competitor beating you in the ratings isn’t really that good, but just got lucky and was in the right place at the right time. PPM/Arbitron diaries/Nielson placement or selection just fell their way.

or…

2. They’re living off their reputation, and don’t deserve the ratings they have anymore.

or…

3. The only reason the competition is rated higher than you was because they did a lot of marketing and you didn’t. If you had their marketing budget or promotional budget, you’d be beating them.

These excuses are convenient, but the truth is nobody falls UP.

It’s easy to fall down in the ratings. Just stop working hard, take your Listenership for granted, get away from what was working for you, or become a caricature of yourself.

But you have to earn up. Going up takes work. And focus. And being willing to change what doesn’t work anymore.

Hint: Sometimes, that means getting help.

Think about how often you’ve heard someone say that a performer, during a concert, looked RIGHT AT him (or her). This is not an accident. One of the biggest singers of the seventies told me once that he purposely, at some point in his performance, looked at all 9 “zones” of the venue: Left, Center, Right. Upper, middle, and lower seats in each direction.

He didn’t do them in that order; it was random, but this enabled every single person in the audience to think that they made eye contact at some point.

The truth was, because of the lighting, he couldn’t really see anybody very well. But the illusion was powerful.

It’s the same way in radio, except we have to make contact verbally. To accomplish this, you have to say something that is shared – something that your listener can totally identify with.

This means you can’t simply grab something from a prep sheet or Facebook or a website and basically just read it to me. You have to make it personal.

In every city, there’s a small number of jocks – maybe only 2 or 3 – that really make contact on a daily basis. You can always find them at the very top of the ratings.

The benefit of coaching is that there are very specific techniques that can help you get the hang of this in a pretty short amount of time. If you’re not getting that in-house, reach out.

A good portion of today’s radio listeners – and just about all of the next generation of listeners – want their audio media to adopt the style of social media.

Well, that’s not exactly possible. For one thing, radio is still the biggest social media phenomenon in history. Bigger than Facebook, bigger than Twitter, more social than TV or movies.

If you need proof, think about this: there are millions of people who don’t have Facebook or Instagram or Twitter accounts, but there is no one who hasn’t listened to radio. You don’t have to read it, you don’t have to post anything, and there’s just “like” (it’s on) or “unlike” (turn it off). It’s simple and pure, IF you sound like right now instead of like 1994.

So here’s how you still sound valid without coming across like children to your core demo, or like old geezers with bad hairpieces to your younger listeners:

Instead of announcing, just think about sharing.

Instead of presenting, try inviting.

Stop ‘selling’ things on the air. No one is buying.

You can either be my friend, riding in the car with me (or at my desk at work), or you can be the audio equivalent of pop-up ads on a website.

Choose wisely. The clock is ticking.

If you need help, well…I assume that’s why you’re reading this. There are people here that you can call. If you’ve never worked with a great Consultant or a truly focused Talent Coach, you’re just driving a car with no air conditioning and manual windows.

I think you deserve better than that.

This tip was originally one that I used in doing, then coaching, team shows. But it actually applies to any on-air conversation, like a contest winner call, for instance.

Here’s the key to having it all unfold the right way:

It’s like playing “leapfrog” as a child. Each thing said by you or the other person should move the subject forward – just like one person leapfrogs the other in the kids’ game.

Add to this the mentality of the 2 most basic Rules of Improv. They are:

1. YES.

2. “and…”

1. The answer to any premise is always “Yes.” (This doesn’t have to be spoken. It can simply be understood. The buy-in is what matters.)

2. Then you add your point, moving things along. For example, in Improv, if you say “I’m trying to grow a third arm,” I should answer with something like “Cool…!” then add something like “It’d be great if you could grow it out of the back of your neck. Then you could drive and scratch your back at the same time.”

The “Yes, and…” principle guarantees momentum. You’re constantly adding something, rather than simply agreeing with what was just said, or repeating it in slightly different words. (Remember, true momentum isn’t about pace. It’s about always moving forward, and in as straight a line as possible.)

You can apply this to solo work, too. Try to never let it bog down or repeat yourself. Once you master this, you make everyone else sound like they’re just rambling or babbling.

I once put up a sign on the Control Room door that said:

“I just got into town. I got into the car, turned the radio on, and hit the ‘scan’ button. It landed on your station. I don’t know what station it is, what the format is, what the dial position is, or who you are. You have thirty seconds.” (Now, PPM is showing that it’s more like TEN seconds.)

I base everything I coach on “first time” listening. If I just tuned in for the first time, can I get what’s going on here? Are you making references to things that I don’t understand, since I’m not a regular listener to the show?

All too often, the Air Talent assumes that the Listener has been there for a few minutes, or that “everyone knows” what he or she is talking about. I call this “The Eminent Danger of the Assumption.”

Reset the stage for the Listener. Don’t assume anything. Remember, I just tuned in.

Think of what was originally called the “Fox Block” – the little box in the corner of the screen when you watch a football game that tells you the teams, the score, the time left on the clock. (It’s now standard on every network.) Radio doesn’t have the visual tool that television does, so we have to do it verbally.

As you listen to an aircheck with your Talent, if you hear the “assumption” mentality, simply stop the audio and ask, “Who is this? What station am I listening to? What’s going on here?” The Talent will get it immediately, and start to police himself. Plus, he’ll start to ask those questions when he hears a competitor, and think that they’re lame for not knowing what he knows. That builds confidence.

Lately, I hear a lot of people doing things on the air that frankly, they’re not very good at. Traffic reporters trying to be personalities”. People trying to tell stories, even though they never seem to have an ending – or sometimes even a decent beginning. Jocks putting their hard-to-understand, marble-mouthed children on the air thinking that it’s “cute”.

It’s easy to think that being good at one thing means that you’re automatically going to be good at other things. But of course that’s not always the case. (Michael Jordan trying to play baseball comes to mind. Not pretty. His Airness became His Waving A Bat At The Air-ness.)

Here’s the way it works in radio, my friend: No one tunes in to hear you do your 5th best thing. Or even your 3rd.

Often, my early work with a talent is simply about shoring up fundamental stuff that may need work, that you may have never learned, or that you were taught wrong. But after that initial stage, I think the next job as a talent coach is to identify your biggest strengths – just one or two things – and then whittle it down to where that’s all you do.

So if you genuinely want to be a great air talent, start by asking yourself these two questions, in this order:

1. What am I good at?
2. Really?

Be honest. If you don’t know the answer to those questions – and most people don’t – you need a coach.

One of the things about coaching that I love the most is getting to work with young talents. Since there’s virtually no meaningful training anymore, it’s great to have a chance to head them off at the pass before they turn into faceless, shouting, liner-reading robots, and help them find ways to sound truly unique.

To a degree, it’s a “throwback” thing from radio’s past, but that’s like saying that a radio station’s iPhone app is a throwback to the transistor radios that people had 50 years ago. It’s the same, but totally different.

Recently, in a session recap, I wrote this to a promising young talent:

Real people just talk. They get excited, they get intimate, they get loud, they get quiet—but they don’t have that pukey “shouting-at-the-listener” delivery that everyone goes into when you ask them to do an impression of a deejay.

One thing that’ll really help you get your arms around this is to not try and cram too many words into a song intro. MATCH the tempo and the mood of the song. If it’s 100 beats a minute, you should start at that speed. If it’s faster, start faster. If it’s slower, start slower. But don’t go 300 miles an hour over a medium or slow song, because that makes you sound like you aren’t even listening to the song. In effect, it sends the message that the music we play is just a series of music beds for you to talk over—the opposite of seamlessly fitting into and being part OF the song as you talk.

You want to “ride” the song like a surfer riding a wave.

Surf’s up, Dudes. Let’s go have some fun!