What Disney Taught Me About Public Speaking

Way back when my kids were young, I used to give a lot of speeches. For those of you not familiar with the lecture circuit, companies will actually pay you to come and speak to a roomful of people.

I don't know why they call it a lecture circuit, because the last thing anyone wants is a lecture. No, they want a series of amusing anecdotes loosely arranged around a few charts—we call them frameworks—that elevate common sense observations into The Land of Intellectual Property (IP).

If you have IP, you can charge people $10,000 to have you come and talk for 45 minutes. If you have Hot IP, you can charge $25,000. If you ran for president and lost, you can charge $100,000. If you actually were a president, you can charge up to $1 million, more if you have a Foundation That Does Important Stuff.

The odd thing is that these same companies who will pay you $25,000 to speak for 45 minutes will only pay you $5,000 to consult for them for an entire day. This is how you know they will NEVER do any of the things your speech suggests they should do. Anyone dumb enough to pay you five times as much for 1/10th the work will never be able to tackle implementing Hot IP ideas such as Changing Your Culture or Disrupting Your Industry.

Much as I enjoy pontificating to a roomful of strangers, I used to get nervous during the first few minutes of each speech, especially at Disney, where there were often 500 to 1,000 people in the audience.

During one stretch, I spoke three times at Disney World without taking my kids there. (If you want to have a difficult family discussion, try explaining to your kids why you are going to Disney World AGAIN without them.)

The night before my third speech, I was walking through the park and a little girl actually yelled at me. "Hey, mister!" she screamed. "Where are your kids?"

She was a good hundred feet away from me, so I just smiled at her. "Hey, mister!" she shouted again. "Where are your kids?"

Her Dad just shook his head in disgust and pulled his daughter away from me as fast as the kid's legs could spin, perhaps slightly faster.

The next day, just before?I went on stage, nerves struck again. I decided to use fear to my advantage.

The host introduced me to a crowded room, and I tried to act even more fearful than I felt. "If I seem unsettled to you, I started, "It's because The Disney Psychic Kids Network has me in their sights."

I told the audience that this was my third time at Disney without my kids, and that kids all over the world have the ability to know when parents are going to Disney without them. They then band together to track down and intimidate the offending adults. It was a ridiculous tale, but the audience bought it, and my nerves were gone by the time my IP took the stage.

This leads me to my One Important Point: you gotta sell what you got.

If you are so scared that your toes are shaking, sell the fact that you are scared. If you left your prepared remarks on the plane last night, sell the fact that you are speaking off the cuff because you respect the audience's intelligence. If the speaker before you said exactly what you want to say, sell the fact that those last points were so important they bear repeating.

Bruce Kasanoff is the author of?How to Self-Promote without Being a Jerk.