How To Become A Fearless Speaker And Leverage Speaking To Grow Your Business

Does the thought of public speaking terrify you? If so, you’re not alone. Here’s the thing, if you are in the business of selling your expertise - coaches, consultants, and professional service providers, I think speaking is a skill you must acquire. We've got Tom Bailey from Succeed Through Speaking with us today. He is going to help you become fearless speakers so you can leverage speaking to grow your business.?

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How To Become A Fearless Speaker And Leverage Speaking To Grow Your Business

Tim Fitzpatrick: Does the thought of public speaking absolutely terrify you? If it does, you are not alone. But here's the thing, if you are in the business of selling your expertise, you are a coach, a consultant, a professional service provider, I believe that speaking is an absolutely essential skill that you must have. And that's why I have a special guest with me today, and he is going to help us become absolutely fearless public speakers so that we can leverage speaking to grow our businesses. Hi, I am Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing where we believe marketing shouldn't be difficult. All you need is the right plan. I am super excited to have Tom Bailey with me today from Succeed Through Speaking. Tom, welcome and thanks for taking the time.

Tom Bailey: Tim, thank you so much for setting the scene and the introduction. I'm really looking forward to diving deeper into this topic with you.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yes. It's nice to switch sides of the mic. You had me on your podcast. Gosh, I don't know, I think it was three or four weeks ago. So thanks for coming on and switching sides.

Tom Bailey: Of course. Thanks for having me.

Tim Fitzpatrick: I want to start by asking you some rapid fire questions. Help us get to know you a little bit. You ready to jump in with both feet here?

Tom Bailey: Of course. Let's do this.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Okay. So when you're not working, how do you like to spend your time?

Tom Bailey: Just had our first child, actually. So when I'm not on my laptop, I'm normally spending time with him.

Tim Fitzpatrick: How old?

Tom Bailey: Just five weeks now. So I'm.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yes. Brand new. Are you sleeping much?

Tom Bailey: No. Not at all.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yes. Well, you're good at hiding it.

Tom Bailey: Absolutely.

Tim Fitzpatrick: That's awesome. Congratulations. What's your hidden talent?

Tom Bailey: So my hidden talent is really coaching and creating high impact training solutions for my clients.

Tim Fitzpatrick: That's a great talent to have. What's the best piece of advice you've ever been given?

Tom Bailey: One of my early mentors said, stop trying so hard to fit in when you were born to stand out. And for me, that's such great advice because we do spend so much time trying to fit in and fit the mold. But really, we want to be speaking up, standing out and really raising our profiles.

Tim Fitzpatrick: That is an awesome piece of advice, because I think so many times when we start our businesses, there are people that are telling us we need to do certain things and we inevitably, even if we know inside, they're not a great fit for us and our personality and what we're like, we go down that path, and inevitably we realize, why am I doing this? This isn't me. And I think we can all succeed being ourselves. That's an awesome piece of advice. What's one thing about you that surprises people?

Tom Bailey: So you may not have guessed it with me being here right now, but I spent the first 30 years of my life with a crippling fear of public speaking and social anxiety as well.

Tim Fitzpatrick: So a speaking coach that used to have a fear of speaking.

Tom Bailey: Yeah. Strange, right?

Tim Fitzpatrick: Hey, you know what? It's all good. What most people don't know about marketers is most marketers have a struggle to market their own business. They can do a great job of helping clients, but they really struggle to market their own business. So what does success mean to you?

Tom Bailey: For me, it's something that's quite hard to define, but I always think of it as setting a goal, a target, and achieving that goal or target. That, for me, is success because you've succeeded in that goal that you'd set yourself.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Where's your happy place?

Tom Bailey: So I think for me, it's as cheesy as it sounds, it really is being with my clients and really helping them find distinctions and changing things in their lives of business, which goes on to lead to them achieving success. And that makes me happy.

Tim Fitzpatrick: What qualities do you value in the people you spend time with?

Tom Bailey: That's two things, and that's ambition and drive. And really, it's all about advancement and learning, growth and development. That's something that just fires me up.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Love it. So before we get into helping people become fearless with public speaking, tell us a little bit more about just you and what you're doing with Succeed Through Speaking.

Tom Bailey: Yeah, absolutely. I'm sure we'll get into this more as we go. But I would say that I spent the first 30 years of my life becoming an expert at avoiding public speaking. That was avoiding presenting or even speaking in front of just two or three people because I really did have this crippling fear of public speaking, social anxiety, and even a few years back would not have been here speaking to you right now. So one thing that I found as I went on my journey was that the more I built my confidence as a speaker presenter, I was able to stand up and speak in front of people, the more success I had in my career in relationships, in business and entrepreneurship. So that's really where Succeed Through Speaking was born quite organically. And I was my first client. I figured out how to overcome this fear of speaking, use it to raise my profile, and that's now what I helped my clients to do as well.

Tim Fitzpatrick: I love it, man. My freshman year in College, I took a speaking course. I was terrified of it, but I was like, "Well, hey, I'm putting myself out there. I'm in College. It's my first year. Let's do this." And it was a really good thing for me because the more I did it, the more comfortable I got. And that's not to say that I was an expert speaker at that point. I certainly was not. But I just found that the more and frankly, with my business, I use speaking, which is why I'm really looking forward to having this conversation. Speaking is in the top two ways that we generate new business.

Tom Bailey: Absolutely.

Tim Fitzpatrick: It is a very powerful way to generate leads. If you can get past that fear.

Tom Bailey: A lot of my clients, I call them the best-kept secrets in their industry because they're amazing at what they do. But because they're not talking about themselves or speaking, presenting, podcasting, they just remain hidden. And it really does limit their growth potential.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah. Okay. So before we get into the first question that we're going to talk about, I have a feeling that you define speaking very similarly to how I do. But I define it fair, pretty broad. So when you talk about speaking, what types of activities do you throw into that?

Tom Bailey: Yeah. So I specifically work with solopreneurs, entrepreneurs, coaches, consultants. So for me, when it comes to speaking, it's anything from podcasting to creating video content, for example, on YouTube or social media, going live on Facebook. It could be speaking on a virtual summit from your own home into a Zoom Webcam. Or equally, it could be speaking on a stage in front of 2000 people. So there's quite a lot of when it comes to speaking. And I guess the only thing that it doesn't really cover is how to have one-to-one relationships with people or how to have conversations with people. I'm talking about speaking and sharing your message with the world.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah. Cool. I think the first place most of us default with speaking is I'm on stage talking in front of a bunch of people. Now, obviously, with the pandemic that's changed dramatically. And so our first instincts there may have started to shift, but yeah, podcasting, workshops. What I found is even though virtually you can certainly get in front of a lot more people, what I found is for me, at least it's actually easier for me because I'm not seeing people. I know they're there, but I'm not seeing them. Now, some people may have a harder time with that because they may feed off seeing people, and that may bring them energy. But I don't know. That's just how I found it.

Tom Bailey: Yeah. Exactly. When I talk about the fear of public speaking people who just avoid it at all costs. With a live audience, you've not only got 20 people in the room, you've actually got 40 eyeballs staring at you. That's quite a lot of pressure when it comes to speaking and presents. If you've got that fear of speaking.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah. So that's a good lead-in to our first question. What's the biggest roadblock people have? How can they overcome it?

Tom Bailey: So there's I guess, two major roadblocks when it comes to speaking. One of them is fear. And we'll talk about that in just a second, and then the other one is limiting beliefs. So when it comes to fear, what I want you to think about is the what if questions that come up in your mind. So what if I embarrass myself? What if I sound stupid? What if I make a mistake? All the technology fails on me? And then a big one that I encounter quite a lot is what if I'm asked a question on stage and I can't answer that question? Ultimately, these what if questions prevent us from taking action because we fear the consequences of what happens if we do make a mistake? And then on the other side of that is limiting belief. So when you think about this, it's those stories that you tell yourself. So who'd want to listen to me? I'm not a guru. So who am I to speak on this subject. Or a big one for me was at the time I don't sound like a public speaker. I don't look like a public speaker. Who am I to think that I could go and do this when I don't necessarily have the confident voice to go out there and speak? So these things just stop us in our tracks and ultimately hold us back from where we want to get to.

Tim Fitzpatrick: How do you overcome these things?

Tom Bailey: Yes. There's two ways that I teach people. The first one is really to challenge these assumptions. And what if I make a mistake? Turn that on its head. What if I don't deliver this presentation and miss out on all of the revenue generation opportunities there are for my business? And that's all about weighing up the success versus avoiding failure. So challenge all of the worst questions with what if I don't and think about the value that you get back as a business owner from speaking. And then the second one is I also that confidence comes from competence. And it's just about learning any skills learning to swim or learning to ride a bike. Let's say swimming, for example. Your first swimming lesson isn't in the Pacific Ocean. It's in the shallow end with your armbands on. And so when it comes to building your confidence, start small, take away the pressure. And maybe, for example, do a 32nd video on your phone, which you can delete afterwards as you first step into speaking.

Tim Fitzpatrick: It's kind of baby steps.

Tom Bailey: Yes. Exactly. That's right.

Tim Fitzpatrick: You know, as you were going through this, one of the things that came to my mind was I think most of us have heard the definition of fear is false events appearing real, right? And so it's like we fear all these things. But the vast majority of things that we fear never actually come to fruition. And so for me, what I found was that just the more I did it, the more comfortable and the more confident I became, I'm still not perfect. None of us are perfect, right. And so one of the things you touched on was gosh, what if I make a mistake in this or that? One of the things that has always helped me with this, which I know a lot of people struggle with this. Some people never get through this. But the faster we can get to a place where we don't care what other people think. The chains come off and you can start doing what you need to do because everybody's always going to have an opinion and who cares? Okay. I don't resonate with everybody. You don't resonate with everybody. Whatever. If you don't like what I have to say, then go find somebody else. But there's plenty of people that do. And so if we can just get past that, I don't care what people think. We're in a much better place.

Tom Bailey: Absolutely. That's a great point. And one way to think about it is when you're speaking in front of an audience, just think 10% of the audience are going to absolutely love what I'm saying and hang off every word. 10% of the audience will just not be interested. They're just not going to connect with you and the other people in the middle probably aren't that bothered either way, when we speak, sometimes we hope that 100% of people in the room are going to love us and hang off every word. But it's just not realistic. And like you said, why does it matter if those people who aren't resonating with us aren't really listening or paying attention?

Tim Fitzpatrick: All it's doing is qualifying your leads before they even reach out to you and speak to you. The people that reach out to you from speaking, they already have a sense of you. They at least know you. They at least like something about you. They're probably starting to trust you depending on how long that speaking gig was. So you're just saving yourself time not having conversations with people that aren't a good fit.

Tom Bailey: And just one last point on that is that I would say that marketing is a disqualification process as much as anything else. And if you're not turning anyone off, then you're probably not turning anyone on either. So you need to get okay to split the audience because you really just want to find those ideal clients that you want to work with anyway.

Tim Fitzpatrick: That kind of goes back to the piece of advice you hit on in the rapid-fire questions. You just got to be you. And by being you, you're going to turn some people off. But you're also going to attract some people as well. So let's talk about signature talks. I think some people have probably heard about signature talks, but what is a signature talk and how can we leverage that?

Tom Bailey: Great. So just a context-setting, I always say that the person still at the front of the room is normally the one seen as a leader. So you need to have this missing piece of your marketing puzzle, and that is speaking on stages or virtual stages. And the second point, just to really bring this to light is that I will say that public speaking is the oldest, most proven marketing method in the world. And if you've got any doubt about that, think of, let's say, religious leaders like Buddha and Gandhi, and all they did was speak to groups of people over and over again. And they had a following of over billions of people. So it's just to say that public speaking is important, and it's a great marketing method for you to have for your business. So to be able to say yes to speaking opportunities. The easiest way to do that is to be prepared to speak already. And that's when the signature talk comes in, because it's a pre prepared 30 to 90 minutes presentation. It's in your back pocket. You've got your slide deck ready to go, and you can deliver that to any audience anytime in any context and even at a short notice. And I will give the example of, let's say, an event organizer, the phone says, "Hey, Tim, we've got an event tomorrow. There's 20,000 people in the room. They're all small business owners, and you've got a 90 minutes slot. Are you ready to go?"

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yes.

Tom Bailey: You want to be able to say yes to those opportunities. And the only way you can do that is if you've got a signature talk that's pre prepared and ready for you to deliver to any audience.

Tim Fitzpatrick: With what you do, is part of your program helping them create that signature presentation?

Tom Bailey: Yes, it is, yes. The stage four is called Present In My five P Model, and that's all about developing this signature talk, and it's built in a let's say framework so that you can actually deliver it in five minutes. You can deliver it in 90 minutes, or you can deliver over three days, because ultimately, they're just chunks of content that you can do in a certain order that drives an audience to take action with you at the end of that presentation.

Tim Fitzpatrick: It's all about depth and detail, right? So if it's 30 minutes, well, then I'm not going super deep, and I'm not going into a ton of detail. But the signature talk is about what you really want to be known for as a company, correct?

Tom Bailey: Exactly. Yeah. There's a few things you need to do there. You need to be able to move people to action. So you need to look at a couple of things. You need to look at their pains. What's that audience currently struggling with, whether it's business owners or whether it's salon owners that you work with, whoever your ideal client is, you want to be able to bring that pain to life for them, using stories, case studies, questions, and then also, you want to be bringing to life what the outcome is that they can get. What is that end goal that these people want in the context of your industry. The rest of your presentations made up with then the stepping stones that take them from where they are to where they want to get to. You never tell them how you always tell them what and why. And you leave the how out, because that's what they've got to pay for, ultimately, to work with you as a coach. And there are other elements in there, like your story, some testimonials, just social proof say that this stuff does work. And this is some examples of why that works. And then, at the end, the big call to action to say, "Look, this is the next logical step. If you want to implement this in your business as well."

Tim Fitzpatrick: So I'll share how my signature presentation, what I talk about. And if you want to expand on this, then I want to try and give people an example of how this is structured. So I'm a marketing consultant. I want to be known for the fundamentals of marketing. It's where everything starts. So many people skip it. 98% of my guest podcast interviews. That's what I'm talking about. The marketing fundamentals. What are the marketing fundamentals? It's target market. It's having a message that grabs their attention and their interest. And then it's having a plan of how you're going to get that message in front of those people. And I can dig deep, or I can keep it surface level. But no matter how long it is, I'm talking about those things. I'm giving them actionable, "Hey, if you want to hone in on a target market, do this right now." Step one, two, three. Really quick. It's easy. It's actionable. But I can talk about that for 30 minutes. I can talk about it for 3 hours. It doesn't matter.

Tom Bailey: Yeah. Exactly. Have you got, like, a three-step system that's proprietary to your business? Like this is the Rialto Marketing three step system. For example.

Tim Fitzpatrick: We have a process that we take people through for our work. It's five steps. But then within each fundamental, there's either steps or there's frameworks. Right. So with target market at a high level, we want to look at your existing customer base and we want to ask three questions. Right. Like, who do you enjoy working with? Who's profitable? Who do you get great results for? That's how you start to Hone in on your ideal clients. Right. With messaging. We use the storytelling framework. Here's the framework. Here's how it works. Here's why we do it. And then from a planning standpoint, we look at marketing in 90-day sprints. Here's a simple 90-day marketing plan. Here's the steps. Here's why we do it. And so that's how I've broken it down.

Tom Bailey: And that's really important. This is the way that we avoid having to read a script or memorize a script when it comes to presenting. We have chunks of content. So let's say, for example, my five-step system is five steps. And behind each of those five steps, there's another five steps of content that sits behind those as well. So all I need to remember, I don't need to remember them. I've got a slide. I could say here's stage one. And here are the five steps to sit behind stage one. Let's now talk about those five steps. That will generate the content from my head because I know my five steps within each of my five stages. And then also let's take a look at stage two, which is all about X. And here are the five steps that you need to realize behind step two. And again, when I first started speaking because of my desire to be perfect, I used to memorize a 60 minutes script, word for word, and I wouldn't deviate from that script, but that creates a lot of pressure, a lot of stress, a lot of anxiety. So now using chunking, which is how we create our signature talks, it enables me to speak on stage without any notes, scripts or memorized sections of content.

Tim Fitzpatrick: And if it's shorter presentation, you're just not going to those lower levels.

Tom Bailey: Exactly. I might mention the lower levels. And I say the five steps that sit behind this are ABCD and E, but that's it. I just stopped there and wouldn't actually dive into the content behind them.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah. Well, in that case, you're kind of teasing the additional content. I've just always felt like I give away a lot of information, because if somebody's going to take it and act on it by themselves, then they're probably not a great fit for me anyways. But there is a certain percentage of people that you're going to provide value to, they might take that information and try to do it and they get into it and they're like, "Oh, my God, I need outside eyes to make sure I'm doing this right." I've always taken the approach. Just give away stuff. You're adding credibility. And there's always going to be people that are going to need that help. Frankly, even if they could do it themselves, there's people that value their time more than that. And they're like, I'm going to pay you to do it because I can make more money doing something else.

Tom Bailey: Yeah. Exactly. And if you do get a three-hour slot or a one-day full workshop slot, then by all means, give it all away. By all that content really add value. But if you do only have 30 minutes and you can only dive into a few of the points, it helps because let's say, for example, say there's five steps. We've only got time to go into the first two. That creates an open loop of I need to know what the other three steps are like. How do I find out where do I click to sign up and actually having less content sometimes does help you leave open loops for people that once they want to close.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yes. Well, in that case, too, it allows you to go deeper into those first two steps, which I think is going to be more valuable than just glossing over each step. Having the ability to kind of tweak what you're going to talk about, I think that's the power of having a signature talk.

Tom Bailey: It is. Yeah, that's exactly what it is.

Tim Fitzpatrick: It's almost like LinkedIn logs, right. You're like putting. Okay, this is the presentation. Here's what I'm going to put together for this one. But you're talking about the same stuff over and over again.

Tom Bailey: And every time we deliver it, you're getting better. You're thinking about key points, which you can just land that the audience connects with. Your first time you deliver will not be as good as the 10th, the 20th, the 30th time you deliver it.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Well, And this also touches on like, "Hey, you may be fearful, but, man, if you really know this content, the more you do it, the more confident you get. And you are just naturally going to get better and better and better."

Tom Bailey: Yeah. Confidence comes from competence, so just make a start and you'll get better as you go.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah. Love it. So what advice do you have for anybody that's listening that wants to amplify their authority?

Tom Bailey: Yes, I guess thinking of my ideal clients who are the best-kept secrets in their industry, if you're not yet seen as a go-to expert, then my advice is to start raising your profile, start amplifying your authority. And I mentioned it in one of the last questions. But you don't need a keynote speech in front of 10,000 people as your first gig. You can start small and just look what I'm doing now. I'm taking 20, 30 minutes out of my day. We're on a podcast, and it's helping me you speaking to get my message to a new audience, a new network of people that I haven't yet spoken to. After you've done a little bit of podcasting, you start to get your message out there. You can start to look at things like virtual summits, so it's very similar. You're sharing your message. But again, it's with a much bigger audience. We can sometimes get 20,000 people on a Virtual summit at least, for example. And then finally, once you're done podcasting and virtual stages, the next one is to start thinking about, where can I get myself a live stage in front of a live audience? And that will really help me to deliver my message and get more impact as well. So I guess the advice is start small, get your message out there and build your audience as you grow.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Guest podcasting, I think, is a great way. It's an easy way to do it. And the more you do it, the better your message gets. It's a great way to practice with very little stress.

Tom Bailey: Yeah. Comfort of your own home and you can sit there a cup of tea next to you at home and you take away all that pressure because you just have a one to one conversation. But you still get any message to a big audience without the pressure of being on stage.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah. So you mentioned virtual summits stuff like that. What are some of your favorite ways and activities so that you start to get booked in on some of these speaking opportunities?

Tom Bailey: So amazingly, one of the benefits of podcasting is that you're building great relationships with people out there who are hosting events already. So 90% of the virtual summit I've spoken have been from me interviewing somebody as a guest on my podcast, getting to know them. And they just happen to let me know about a virtual summit that's coming up next week. And then another way, there are platforms out there. I think one is called Event Raptor, where you log in, and it just gives you a list of all the virtual summits that are coming up, and you can just

Tim Fitzpatrick: What's that called?

Tom Bailey: I think it's Events Raptor. Let me just double-check.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Events Raptor. Okay.

Tom Bailey: Yeah, that's it. So you just go into there and it lets you host summits, but it also lets speakers apply to speak on summits as well. So it's almost like a matchmaking platform for summit hosts and summit speakers.

Tim Fitzpatrick: That's a good one. We'll have to check that out. Event Raptor. Okay. So write that down, people. Event Raptor is a good place to go if you want to get booked on Virtual Summit. Yeah, I love it, man. This has been a fantastic conversation. You've dropped some serious value here, Tom.

Tom Bailey: Awesome.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Any other last-minute thoughts? Words of wisdom you want to leave us with?

Tom Bailey: Yeah. So I tend to talk about a famous quote from Michael Jordan and a few other people said this as well. I'm sure. But he says you miss 100% of the shots that you don't take. So I guess the advice there is to just go out there, take some shots. You're not going to score all of your baskets. But each time you do take a shot and miss you're learning something which you can apply to the next time. And it's really just get yourself out there and start taking some shots.

Tim Fitzpatrick: I love it. If people are interested. I'm telling you guys right now. If you want to take advantage of public speaking, I would highly recommend you do it. Tom obviously knows what he's talking about. Where can people learn more about how you can help?

Tom Bailey: Exactly. So the best starting place is just to go to succeedthroughspeaking dot com. You can book on some of my free masterclasses and workshops and get access to me. But in terms of a giveaway, I've got something called the Expert Authority Scorecard. And what this is an opportunity for you to fill in some questions and you'll be given a score on how well you're seen as an expert authority in your industry. And it also gives you a personalized report at the end. So you can figure out how to use speaking, presenting and authority building to really get your message to market with confidence and clarity and you go to expertauthority dot scoreapp dot com. Answer a few questions and you'll get that personalized report ready to implement in your business.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Awesome. I love it. And guys, we'll put those links in the show notes, so you have them. But that's experathority dot scoreapp dot com or just shoot on over to succeedthroughspeaking dot com. Tom, thanks so much, man. This has been a fantastic conversation. I hope you guys that are watching, listening got a ton of value from this. If you are struggling with your marketing, you're not sure what the next step should be, the next right step. You're trying different tactics. Nothing seems to be working. Hop on over to our website at Rialto Marketing dot com. That's R-I-A-L-T- O Marketing dot com. Click on the Get a Free Consult button. I would be happy to chat with you and give you some clarity on what those next steps should be till next time. Take care.

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Links From The Episode

• Succeed Through Speaking
• Expert Authority Scorecard

About the Host Tim Fitzpatrick

Tim Fitzpatrick is the President of Rialto Marketing. At Rialto Marketing, we help service businesses simplify marketing so they can grow with less stress. We do this by creating and implementing a plan to communicate the right message to the right people. Marketing shouldn't be difficult. All you need is the RIGHT plan.