An open letter to all my professional speaking colleagues

When I was in college, I remember playing in an intramural basketball tournament.

Rabbi Creeger is an orthodox Rabbi who loves playing basketball and whom I knew well.

I’m sure to the teams he was playing against, seeing his long flowing beard as he dived for loose balls was a sight.

During a break, I was talking to him and asked him an age-old debated question in sports, “Do you love winning or hate losing?”

As I waited for his response… he paused and said, “Well, I actually just love playing the game. And since this is a tournament, the more you win, the more you get to play. So it’s really about just finding more ways to play.”

And I was really floored by that when I heard it.

If you love doing a thing, whatever the thing is, you have to figure out all the ways you can win so you can keep doing that thing you love.

As professional speakers, we have a desire to get on as many stages as possible to share our message, grow our speaking business, and expand our impact.

There’s something about the stage that calls to us.

Think about it. It’s estimated that 75% of the population has Glossophobia, or a fear of public speaking.

But we love it.

We embrace it.

It’s a passion like none other.

Speaking is our thing.

So figuring out as many possible ways you can win so that you can get on more stages and do your thing is what matters.

I’ve spent the last two months doing something I’ve never done before and it surprised me a bit.

As the co-founder of Talkadot , we have thousands of speakers in our community, and I kept getting the same questions at a high frequency.

It revolved around how do we as speakers win more stages so we can do the thing we love.

I had put together content about 10 years ago called the True Speaking Success System that I would give to our Talkadot users, breaking down all the steps.

The videos I put together are from when I still had hair!

But what I did was analyze what I’ve been doing for the last 18 years and, more recently, what I have been doing in my speaking business post-pandemic.

In doing so, I made a huge realization that there were specific things I was doing that felt so natural to me, I never really mentioned them to people before.

It’s kind of like how I would imagine a bird describes how it flies. It’s a bit hard, but when you can step out of yourself and truly objectively observe yourself, you can see things in a new light.

So I spent months capturing what I’ve done and am doing now and put it all together in a way I never have before.

I created some training and SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures). I wanted to create something that I could just hand to anyone, and they could repeat the steps, and it would be idiot-proof to do.

Here’s the thing.

I’ve never shared what I’m doing in this way before, so I don’t know if it could actually help people.

I truly believe in my heart it can, but I want to see with my head if it’s true.

Ok. Here’s what I’m doing, and if you are a professional speaker, this is going to be something for you.

I want to teach and give away these systems to my fellow speaking colleagues to see if what has worked for me can work for you too.

Here’s who this is good for:

Professional speakers who have booked at least 5 paid engagements in the past (this means that you have the basics already down).

This training is not for introductory speakers; this is more for established speakers who already are clear on their message, their branding, and such.

If you don’t have the basics down, this will be too advanced for you and go over your head.

For Clarity:

I don’t have a coaching program to upsell you to; this isn’t some bait and switch. I’m genuinely just looking to see if this content can be as useful to others as it has been for me, and I need, for lack of a better word, “test subjects.”

This is not a fluffy training that’s going to be about how to “get hype toward your dreams” or anything like that. This is going to be actionable, specific, and detailed steps to take, broken down in a very easy-to-implement way. In fact, I think most speakers could just hand this info over to their VA, and their virtual assistant could do this work for them!

If you happen to be tagged in this post and don’t know much about me as a speaker, very quickly, I have spoken to over 750,000 people in 48 states and 5 countries, I have hosted a TV show on Disney+, been invited to speak at the White House twice, the TEDx stage 3 times, and am a member of the Million Dollar Speaking Group (MDSG) of the National Speakers Association (NSA), which only has a little over 100 members out of thousands who generate 7 figures or more in their speaking business. I grew up in the projects on welfare in Brooklyn, NY. So I didn’t start with a silver spoon or anything.

I am just a guy who fell in love with the art form of public speaking and have learned everything I can simply so that I can put myself in a position to do it more. I love speaking; I think it’s the quickest/fastest way to impact someone’s life, and it’s just fun to do.

If you would like to join me in this little testing ground RSVP in the link below or if you have a speaker friend who you think would like to join this, please tag them in the comments.

RSVP Here:

https://talk.talkadot.com/c/special-training/black-box-speaker-training-by-talkadot-826b7157-efd0-4636-bed2-2822211939bb

There will be 3 live zoom sessions: June 24th, July 1st, and July 8th at 4pm EST. If you can’t make those dates, oh well. That’s when they are being held, and again, this is free and a test. If you can't attend all of the sessions, the recordings and SOPs will be available for Talkadot Pro users fyi.

I’m hoping this training will shed light on the black box that is the speaking industry that even tried and true veterans would appreciate.

Looking forward to seeing who takes advantage of this opportunity to join so they can win more so they can share the thing they love with more people.