How Powerful Men Speak—And the Secret to Gaining Influence That Lasts | T. D. Jakes (Fan Fav)

Our country's in trouble right now because we're not listening. We're talking. We're all we're all talking. We've got every kind of gadget imaginable to help us to talk, but we're not listening. So we talk at each other and not to each other. Cost you your job, cost you your company, cost you your marriage, cost you your son, cost you your daughter. That's too expensive. This is not just about being a great orator on a stage or doing a TED talk. This is the survival techniques that you need to sustain the things you love about your life will only be sustained through what you say out of your mouth. Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Impact Theory. I am here with the extraordinary Bishop TD Jakes. Thank you so much for joining me today. Oh, Tom. I'm pleased to be with you, and thanks for having me. Man, of course. And I'm super excited to talk about the new book, Don't Drop the Mic, a truly legendary orator stepping up and giving the recipe, as you call it, for how you do what you do. I know you were really apprehensive about writing the book and trying to put sort of scientific language behind it. But the book ends up being extraordinarily powerful in that it felt like a sermon. If I'm completely honest, it was so full of parables and stories. And one thing that really stuck out to me is this idea of the power of a man with a microphone. Talk to me about that, and what made you wanna write the book? You know, it started for me as a little boy born in the hills of West Virginia on the side of a mountain. My mother was a school teacher, and my father was a janitor. My father ended up opening up a business with 52 employees, but he started with the mop of the bucket. So he was working all the time. He was seldom home. And when he was home, he was generally asleep. This particular time, he was awake, and, the 06:00 news was on, and doctor Martin Luther King was on. And and I kept looking at doctor King and what he was doing with the microphone, and I kept looking at how my father was looking at him. And I don't know what you moved me the most, the the admiration and gaze of my father or the articulation and the in-depth way in which doctor King had that cadence that cadence way of speaking, you know, that that mesmerized the country. Even people who didn't agree with him had to listen at him because he was such a tremendous orator. At that point, it planted the first seed of the power of a microphone. And and and and I mean that literally, but also figuratively, the power of a platform in general, and understanding the dynamics of the breadth of that platform, and how …