How to Start a Speaking Business

To start a speaking business, you need to have something to talk about. The more defined, refined and/or specific your message is, the more you’ll stand out from the rest.  Finding your message will come from taking a good look at things you already have; your skills, knowledge, experience, likes, dislikes, and passion. 

You also have an advantage that I didn't have. You get to start by asking yourself the right kind of questions.  Better questions make it easier to identify topics that inspire you. Jon Acuff asks his readers in his book Quitter to answer these five questions:

·         What do I love enough to do for free? 

·         What do I do that causes time to feel different? 

·         What do I enjoy regardless of the opinions of other people? 

·         If only my life changed, would that be enough?

·         Are there any patterns in the things I like doing? 

If you like what you're reading here, consider stopping by my website for more details on how to start a speaking business.  The answers like in my new book "From the Soapbox to the Stage: How to Use Your Passion to Start a Speaking Business." http://StartaSpeakingBusiness.com 

Think about the people who inspire you. What do they talk or write about? When you go into a book store, online or read a magazine, what kinds of ideas or information catch your attention first?  Whose name would you search on the internet to see if they've written anything new lately? What kinds of things do you research on the internet?

When I decided to become a professional speaker, I didn’t automatically realize that I was going to focus on children and parenting.  For me the process evolved a little differently because I didn’t have a book like this to guide me. It was the people I came in contact with that helped me progressively hone my skills and focus.

Not long after my first exposure to a truly motivational speech, I heard my second.  A close friend and co-worker suggested that I join our company’s Toastmasters club to develop my own speaking skills. I had never heard of Toastmasters before.  He explained that it is an international nonprofit educational organization dedicated to helping individuals develop their communication and leadership skills. Our company had an in-house chapter to help employees become more skilled and comfortable when they were required to speak in front of groups.

At the first meeting I attended chapter member Clyde Talley, took the podium to inspire us, his audience, to take responsibility for our individual emotions.  With a great deal of passion and in a standard 7-minute format he encouraged us not to allow ourselves to be pulled down by the negative people we came into contact with on a daily basis.

The passion he spoke with made it very clear how much he believed in what he was talking about.  The expression on his face, his tone, and how well his body language moved in unison with his words, it all pulled me in to listen to every word he spoke.

As strange as it may sound, I had never heard that message before. Like everybody else, I was a product of my upbringing and my experience was a circle of family and friends that reacted to whatever life tossed their way. I remember thinking to myself after hearing Clyde speak, “You mean, I don’t have to let others control my emotions?!”

How long would it have taken me to figure this out on my own if I hadn’t heard Clyde’s speech? How many people go through their entire lives without ever hearing a simple thought, idea or truth that could dramatically improve the quality of their life in such a short amount of time? Both answers are moot because I had heard him and now I was even more determined to become a speaker so I could help other people in the same way Clyde had helped me.

Over the next few months I felt compelled to attend more and more of the club meetings.  Every time Clyde spoke I saw and heard his passion.  In fact, I noticed passion when other members of the club spoke about things they really cared about too. It didn’t matter whether their talk was about their children, their hobbies, or their fight down at city hall; their passion was loud and clear.  You could see it in their eyes and feel it in the room and I wanted to learn how to project that as a speaker too.

I also wanted to hang out with these people more because they were just as positive and passionate in their real lives as they were at the front of the Toastmasters meeting room. This was who they were as people and their positivity was contagious! 

Author Jack Canfield, co creator of the Chicken Soup for the Soul book series said that during his first year of teaching in a Chicago High School he began to notice that he didn’t want to hang out in the teacher’s lounge anymore. The talk always seemed to come back to topics of negativity; what the administration was doing to the teachers, judgments about the challenging students, and how difficult their jobs were going to be. Instead, he stopped going to the teacher’s lounge and discovered a different group of teachers who focused on the positive aspects of their jobs. Jack reminds us that we have the power to choose who we spend our time with. 

If you’re having difficulty whittling down your list of topics, begin surrounding yourself with positive people who use their passion to inspire others, and distance yourself from those who generate negativity. Take an inventory of your circle of friends and family, and assess whether each one encourages or discourages you. 

One of the most difficult things my wife and I ever decided to do was to modify the guest list of who we invited into our home. The number of people we realized we actually enjoyed being around suddenly grew quite small.  It was a difficult task to complete but we knew it was necessary.  Do the same for yourself and don’t be afraid to say NO to invites from toxic people. As the amount of negativity you are exposed to starts to decrease, the things that you feel good about will start to appear and help you refine your list of topics even more.

Another thing that will help if you’re still struggling with finding your message is to try spending some time alone listening for the voice inside of you that wants to guide you. Some of us think of this voice as the Greater Power and some of us call it God. It doesn’t really matter what you call it, just take the time to listen. Your inner voice holds clues to what you may be passionate about. 

In the end, it was my three children who helped me find my unique message, unbeknownst to them.  After trying my hand at being a motivational speaker capable of speaking motivationally about a variety of topics, I quickly learned that there were many speakers like this. As someone once put it: “they are a dime a dozen.”

I started to wonder if speaking really was the right path, so I started spending time alone, in prayer and meditation to see if I could hear the guiding voice of the Greater Power inside of me.  Our family began attending a new church and I watched as my children began to develop a deeper level of spirituality.  As I watched them grow, an idea began to take shape and my kids were at the center of it.

After a series of enlightening conversations with my pastor, I realized how passionate I felt about being a dad and how important my relationship with my children was to me.  He told me that whenever I talked about them or spent time with them he saw the “fire in my eyes.”

My own father was absent in my life after the age of 10, and even before that, he wanted nothing to do with me or my 7 younger siblings.  My parents were finally and officially divorced when I was 14.  That experience made me strive to be the kind of father to my children that I never had when I was growing up. I realized how passionate I was about this and started feeling like this was a better direction.  I was getting closer to finding my message!

For some people, deciding on their message is easy because they’ve been thinking about it for their whole life. For other people, it might not be that easy because it’s been so long since they’ve thought about life that way; as if it were okay to do something they really believed in and enjoyed.  Either way, the following exercise will help you reconnect with ideas and dreams just waiting to be rediscovered.

What you've read above is an excerpt from my new book "From the Soapbox to the Stage: How to Use Your Passion to Start a Speaking Business."  Find out how you can get a copy of this book before it hits bookstores by going to http://StartaSpeakingBusiness.com.