There are a lot of great resources available today on how to be a motivational speaker. What’s more, I have personally tapped into many of these resources in my own career as a professional speaker. I’ve attended conferences, read books, hired coaches, join organizations, and even purchased dozens of lunches and dinners for other speakers as a way to pick their brains on how to be successful as a speaker.
However, a common shortcoming of some of these resources is the tendency to give 80 percent of the focus to the mechanics of speaking and only 20 percent of the attention to strategies for getting hired. Yet as someone whose livelihood comes from being a professional speaker, I’ve discovered that to be successful you have to actually flip those percentages around. In other words, proper speaking mechanics plays a 20 percent role in being successful as a speaker. The other 80 percent comes from knowing how to positively reach out to and proactively serve prospective clients.
Don’t get me wrong. To be a successful professional speaker, your product must be good. You must be a good speaker. But in reality, that’s not where most people get stuck. I’ve met a lot of talented speakers who are doing very little speaking. Where most people get stuck is knowing how to brand their message, how to niche themselves in a particular market, and how to market their speaking in a positive, “I’m-here-to-serve-you-and-your-audience” manner. In my book, this is the biggest challenge in learning how to be a motivational speaker.
What I love most about being a motivational speaker is inspiring and empowering my audiences to live it forward in the most important roles of their lives. I love daring audience members to go in the oppositie direction of the norm in order to experience real success!
But a close second to actually being on stage is the rush I get from serving and adding value to meeting planners who are interested in hiring me. I love reaching out and communicating my heart for serving. I love adding so much value that the meeting planners end up getting tons of compliments for the event they hosted (always remember that as a speaker your #1 job is to champion the meeting planner’s purpose and goals). These are the skills of how to be a motivational speaker that so often get overlooked.
Jeff Jones, the drummer for Big Daddy Weave, was recently trying to crack the code on how to be a motivational speaker. He heard about the Speak It Forward Boot Camp and decided to attend. In this video, Jeff shares how the Boot Camp helped him clearly discover that success as a professional speaker has a lot more to do with discovering your message, determining your target audience, and developing a solid marketing plan than it has to do with the mechanics of presenting.
Question: Are you interested in learning how to be a motivational speaker? What’s holding you back from moving in that direction?
