Author: Lucy Bloom
Lucy Bloom is often asked how to crack the speaker circuit by aspiring professional speakers at least twice a week, so to save you buying me a coffee, here are my top ten tips for how to get your story on the stage, paid. 1. We all have a story to TELL but are you […]
Lucy Bloom is often asked how to crack the speaker circuit by aspiring professional speakers at least twice a week, so to save you buying me a coffee, here are my top ten tips for how to get your story on the stage, paid.
Take a long hard look at what you would like to speak on and do a feasibility study on whether your story and your area of expertise has a market with a budget and how many others are speaking on this.
Develop three or four really fantastic, UNIQUE topics that you can adapt and deliver to just about any audience. Be the only speaker who does what you do.
The easiest way to do this is to contact all the clubs nearby and offer to speak at their next meeting. There’s Rotary, Soroptimists, Probus and others. Tee up a speech every week for a whole year to perfect your delivery. Do not offer to speak for free at major conferences and cannibalise your future income.
The funnier you are in this business the more you will be paid. Professional speakers are entertainers first and educators second. Practice your humour in conversation before you try it on an audience and pepper your speeches with humour so that you don’t have any long, hard-going stretches in your content. Remember that every single person in your audience has a high-powered entertainment device in their hand, competing with your speech for attention.
And only very brief notes. Without these to lean on, you will know your content so well that your voice will glide like a conversation. It also means you can’t have technical problems.
Your mum doesn’t count. I have a professional voice coach and I send her a voice recording of every single speech I give and she gives me her feedback so that I can keep perfecting my delivery. Don’t believe the lady who tells you after your speech that you are the best speaker she has ever heard. Get professional, critical advice and keep improving.
As Will Smith says, he meets people every day who say they wish they could be an actor but those people have never DONE THE HARD YARDS. Do the work if you want to be a professional speaker: practice, get some coaching, go to toastmasters, read every book and blog on speaking style and presentation techniques, watch the best of the best on YouTube but avoid TEDx for style guidance. TED speeches are recited word for word, for a camera crew. A live audience wants engagement rather than a recital.
Hold off from contacting a speaker’s bureau until you have all your ducks in a row. You need good video footage, a slick website and a long list of killer testimonials before you go looking for representation.
Events are quite high pressure so no matter what happens backstage or in the four minutes before you speak, be the most charming version of yourself. Roll with the hiccups, be a delight to work with and your reputation will follow you. Say thank you to the people you work with.
This is always my tenth tip in listicals. Don’t do it if it isn’t fun. The 30 minutes right before you go on stage don’t count. That is always nerve-racking and I hate it. The rest is a lot of fun. The speaker circuit has taken me to some fantastic destinations and I have met wonderful people all over the world. Good luck!
ARTICLE originally posted on Lucy’s blog
Contact Us at WeSpeak Global and follow us on Twitter
Author Profile
The articles, video and images embedded on these pages are from various speakers and talent.
These remain the property of its owner and are not affiliated with or endorsed by WeSpeak Global.
What do you do if you hate your job? You have three options: you can stay and suffer, you can look for a new job, or you can change the way you view your work. The best choice is to focus on yourself and what makes you happy. This way, even if you’re still at […]
Excited to share the big news that I’ve been talking with many of you about already! The Launch You’ve Been Waiting For. How to Get Results #NoMatterWhat, It turns out there’s actually proven science around how to get results #NoMatterWhat. It’s all too clear that this is still a really tough time for many people […]
Do you remember THE BAIT SWITCH DOES NOT WORK and the first time you were disappointed by a large organisation? My earliest memory of corporate greed (we all have those, right?) was what I recall being a few months after Smarties Mini Eggs were launched in South Africa. As a lifelong fan of the traditional […]
You can turn an unpredictable world into predictable results. It comes down to the practices we have in our businesses and with those around us. Even though we might not be able to predict the exact timing of a breakthrough, the practices create the conditions necessary to have a breakthrough, even making that breakthrough inevitable […]
If we are going to do new things to survive in the Industrial Age, we are going to meet uncertainty. If we are going to meet uncertainty, we are going to discover risk. A show of hands… How many people, when you were 12, 13, 14 years of age, had a mother or a father […]
The world much better. The world is awful. The world can be much better. All three statements are true. — Read on ourworldindata.org/much-better-awful-can-be-better “It is wrong to think that these three statements contradict each other. We need to see that they are all true to see that a better world is possible. by Max Roser […]
One of the most common buzzwords of 2022 on how to Create a Working Culture has to be the word ‘feedback’. My sense is that leaders and managers for the most part want to get better than this, and it could therefore be a major goal for 2022. As you might expect however, there’s a […]
To unlock employee motivation, you may need to change how you communicate special requests. These are things like important changes to operating processes or customer service procedures. You need people to embrace a different way of doing things. It has to be done right and it needs to be executed right away. But you notice […]
Our Mission
© All rights reserved 2024. Created using VOXEL THEME
1902 Wright Place, Carlsbad, CA, 92008
