CREATING YOUR VISION
As a speaker, you can create amazing change in people’s lives. In this section, you’ll learn about what it takes to become an excellent speaker and the importance of your unique story.
The Change You Can Make
At one of my seminars, I spoke to two people there that I remember in particular. Each of them was running a business on the verge of collapse. One had a family shipbuilding and repair business. When I asked him how it was going, he told me it wasn’t going great because of the current economy. They had been in business for over thirty years, and he had inherited it from his parents. He didn’t say very much else.
About a month later, he was talking to one of our seminar trainers, saying that when he came to the seminar, the business was actually going broke and he hadn’t wanted to admit that to me.
He had to fight with his wife and brother, who worked in the company, to actually get to the seminar. Attendance was $1,997 for one person and they could bring someone else, so he brought his wife. At that point, they had all but decided to shut the business down. This was their last chance. They figured they would come to this seminar, and it would be the last chance.
But after the seminar, they had so many ideas of what they could do with their business that they went back and called everybody together to tell them they would be doing things differently. In the month after the seminar, their sales were up forty-one percent. Their business — and their livelihood — went from a dying company to one now on fire.
This is the kind of change you can create as a professional speaker.
How Do You Start?
But how do you get started?
There are many ways to start. I actually wanted to be a trainer, and I backed into speaking. Most people start off with a twenty-minute talk and work their way up. Then they get a ninety-minute slot, and so they add a whole bunch of material to their talk. Pretty soon they get a half day, and then a full day, and sometimes longer. I started with two days and worked back to twenty minutes, even fifteen minutes.
There is a rule that I learned from the former president of the National Speakers Association, Patricia Frip, after I’d been speaking for about four years. She said that it takes seven years to become a successful professional speaker. I felt that couldn’t be true.
She was speaking to 1,000 people, and she explained her career and her history. She began as a hairdresser before starting to speak. It took her seven years to become an independent professional speaker at high rates. I decided that was not going to happen to me, and yet it also took me seven years.
What I learned later, based on years of research, is that it takes two years of looking for and chasing down every single opportunity for stage time in order to learn your craft. Two years of recording, critiquing, reviewing, and upgrading your skills. Many people quit speaking after two years because they realize they’re not good and they’re never going to be good.
It takes two more years for you to actually earn good money speaking. In my first two years, as I said, I went deeply, deeply into debt and almost into bankruptcy. I was able to avoid that by going hat in hand and begging my creditors not to foreclose on me. So in the next two years, I paid them all back.
The next three years are when you start to make money, and after seven years, if all goes well, you break out of the pack. After seven years of hard work, it is like breaking into the lead in a marathon. Malcolm Gladwell says the same thing in his book Outliers. It takes seven years and 10,000 hours of hard work to break into the top ten percent of your field. But if you work hard and persist, you will get there.
Remember The Four Ds To Speaking Excellence
As I said before, to become a 6-Figure Speaker you must have the four Ds:
Desire. First, you must have the burning desire to speak well. If it’s strong enough, and you want to master the art of speaking long enough, nothing can stop you from achieving this goal. But desire is not enough.
Decision. You must make a decision this very day, this very moment, that you are going to do whatever it takes and overcome any obstacle to become excellent.
Discipline. You have to have the discipline to plan, prepare, and deliver your talks, over and over again, until you are a master. There are no shortcuts.
Determination.. Finally, you have to have the determination to keep going in spite of any setback, obstacle, or embarrassment you may experience.
If you have these, then nothing will stop you from becoming the 6-Figure Speaker you desire to be.
But there is yet another component you need. You need to have a message.
Your Unique Story
As a speaker, your message is important. But another thing is also important: What makes you unique?
When you’re really clear about who your audience is and what they need, then be really clear about your special, unique, differentiated message. Why is your message different from that of everyone else? Why should people buy from you rather than someone else?
People will pay a dollar for a program with information, but they’ll pay $10 for a program with information plus a story. I began this message with my own story. I talked about how I began and what I learned and how it helped me.
Telling your own story about how you learned these ideas and the difference they made in your life makes your product unique, different, special, and incapable of being duplicated by anyone else, anywhere.
I suggest always starting off with your story and then lacing your presentations and programs with your story so that people are clear that this is different and better. What you offer should come from the heart. This is one of the most important things that you can do.
Summary
- You can change someone’s life for the better as a speaker.
- It can take up to seven years to become a professional speaker.
- To become a 6-Figure Speaker, you must have the Desire, you must make the Decision¸ you must have the Discipline, and you must have the Determination to succeed.
