Speaking Strategies
Last year when I was inducted into the Speaker Hall of Fame, it was crazy how people kept saying, “He’s so young, he’s so young!”
And that’s because most professional speakers typically start maybe thinking about speaking in their forties.
Zig Ziglar started professionally speaking when he was like 47. And then it was really in his fifties that he started to catch on.
And then it was his late fifties and early sixties that was his prime.
And then he spoke all the way up until he was 80 years old.
And that was when I met him–in his late seventies.
Then he had an accident. He fell, hit his head, and started to lose his short-term memory, which was interesting. He knew long-term things, but he couldn’t remember short-term things. And that was really hard to be a speaker. And he passed away in his early eighties.
But anyway, people said, “Hey, Rory’s so young. He’s so young!”
It’s not about age time. I guess, at 37, that was pretty young.
The calculation is not about age time. It’s about stage time.
How long have you been on stage?
Nothing replaces stage time.
Darren LaCroix was the 2001 World Champion of Public Speaking.
And you know, Darren’s mantra is stage time, stage, time, stage time.
There’s nothing that we can teach you that will replace that.
Now we’re going to share with you some secrets that will literally cut years and years off of your curve as a presenter.
And if you practice and use them, they will position you to become one of the top 3% of presenters in the world.
But you still have to use them.
I heard Gary Vaynerchuk say recently that you can’t read about doing pushups. You have to just do the pushups.
This is very much like that.
In a way, it is a shortcut but it’s not something that is going to happen without any work.
The other thing I want to say right away upfront for you to understand, is that in the world that we live in today, stage time is very different, right?
I mean, right now, I do not have a single in-person keynote scheduled on my calendar.
Every single keynote I have scheduled has either indefinitely postponed or it has moved and become virtual, right?
So, this is the future.
It is not just get paid and stand on a stage.
When I started, I spoke 304 times for free.
The way I started as a speaker was this entire business model that we used from our last company, to grow to an eight-figure annual revenue, was speaking for free.
The entire model was built around going out, speaking for free, delivering an hour of value, and then asking someone to buy at the end.
And that was all the way back in 2006.
And when we exited that company in 2018, we had around 150 people who were doing that. They were out there every day, speaking for free, delivering value, and selling something at the end.
That model has worked forever.
That’s how you become president, right? That is how you get elected.
That is what a webinar is. You go out and you speak for free.
That’s how the civil rights movement happened. You speak for free to change the world and to make money.
Speaking Quote
In order to change the world with your message, speak for free and deliver value.
And even in a post COVID world, it’ll be interesting to see what happens with live events and stages and how long it takes them to come back. I feel confident they will come back, but even if they didn’t, we live in a world of webinars, online trainings, video courses, podcast interviews, and delivering speeches at weddings, graduations, social gatherings, etc.
And we used to call this event here at Brand Builders Group, World-Class Keynote Craft, and we changed it to a World-Class Presentation Craft recently because we realized that keynotes are a very small percentage of even our own customer base. What you learn at this event extends far beyond paid keynotes. It’s the craft of the spoken word.
Anyway, I’m excited because this is how I personally launched my career. Launched our first company and launched our second company.
Brand Builders Group is the same thing.
We go out and we speak for free. Typically, it’s on podcasts or we host webinars, but it’s the same model- speak for free, let people know what you’re about and what you do, and then offer them a to buy at the end.
What about you? Comment below if you speak for free and how it is working for you.
