Calling all brilliant and wise experts!! Become public speakers and gain the priceless benefits of the rights you have earned and deserve:
– to uplift and inspire those who need your light
– to share the core values that accelerate innovation in your field
– to give courage to people so that they can do what’s right.
Indeed money will follow effortlessly and in abundantly. It will come uninvited and you will choose whose money you want and whose work you need to decline. People will chase you for the goodness in your work.
In my book, Find Your Everest before someone chooses it for you, I have said that if you don’t choose what you want, someone else who is clear about her/his goal will have you build her/his dream. If you are not clear about becoming the best speaker in your field, you will not rise to your potential.
In the speaking business, the sponsor puts his/her reputation on the line to engage, entertain, inform or inspire the attendees. The speaking business puts you on stage, naked. You have no place to hide. You are on stage. Be prepared, otherwise, your speaking career will end before it starts.
No one will pay if you are not authentic about your message. When you are authentic, your customers will recommend you as a speaker. Every talk will earn you another paid talk and every event will open more doors.
Three Dos:
(1) Invest in your authenticity. Be the champion of your message. Be a master and show your genius. If you can’t show that you know more about risk than others, you will not be valued. If you can’t demonstrate the genius of turning risk into opportunity repeatedly, you will not earn respect. Get your feet planted firmly in the content that you want to speak about.
If your intention is anything but pure service to uplift and serve, you will likely fail until you embrace this truth. Inspire and serve, and you will build a valued place in people’s lives.
Write blogs, speak at industry events, chair conferences, facilitate discussions, mentor professionals, and prove that your ideas work.
(2) Earn your credibility. Prove to respected mentors, advisors, and industry gurus that you have a legitimate claim to share your message and that your message can cause a positive shift. Listen to their feedback. If you don’t have your mentors and advisors really excited and positively charged, reexamine your plan. Find out what’s missing and fix it.
You will not rise until you have clients and mentors investing in your progress. Earn their respect.
One growth strategy is to always seek feedback from all your attendees, young, old, new and experienced. Ask: what could I have done better? If the feedback is not helpful directly to improve your speech, test your thinking about why someone asked you that question. Don’t blow it off. If the feedback is useful, embrace the recommendation right away, initiate research to improve your message, and retest at the next opportunity. Keep asking and keep improving.
(3) Practice until you perfect your message, and then keep refining it. Test your expertise, inspiration, and encouragement at every opportunity you get. Pick something that is your passion. If you’re not passionate about your topic, someone else who is will overtake you effortlessly. Take every opportunity to present, listen, reshape and serve up your message.
Become a volunteer, mentor, or collaborator, and contribute. Don’t worry about giving up your insights. If they are truly unique, patent or trademark them. Otherwise, focus on continuous improvement.
Don’ts
Until you do the above three steps, don’t waste your time and money on paying anyone: story writer, speechwriter, web designer, PR agency, presentation skills coach, slide deck designer or another kind of “we will get you ready” to be a professional public speaker expert. Once you do the above, you will engage all of them purposefully and with a clear understanding of outcomes.
The good professionals will not pitch you expensive programs. They want results and will not sign up if they can’t see success. They will also tell you what you need before they can start pitching you to event managers to take a risk on you. So save your time, energy, and money and do the right steps first.
My evolution into a public speaker
I feel blessed that my work inspires people and companies to discover and rise to their Everest. They want to do what I do, serve others through speeches and consulting. To me, this work does not feel like work. It is joyful service that resonates with my core. But I never planned to inspire people through my speeches. The talks are an evolution of my life’s experiences. For twenty years, my professional mentors at IBM and Xerox, and my role models at Boy Scouts and Toastmasters, and other organizations taught me how to earn trust while transacting billion dollar market initiatives. The values that my
For many years, my professional mentors at IBM and Xerox, and my role models at Boy Scouts and Toastmasters, and other organizations taught me how to earn trust while transacting billion dollar market initiatives. My parents role modeled our hot desert village values and culture where I grew up. This gave me a solid foundation.
While at Xerox, I started speaking at industry conferences as new software functionality expanded profitable applications. I spoke to institutional investors to showcase our new products and potential. At headquarters, technology partners who worked with me to expand market share also polished my skills. When I presented new products to worldwide teams, I had considerable practice already. My sessions were rated at top by tough sales and technical crowd because I had many stakeholders, and they had tested and validated my content in advance. I had practiced my presentations with them many times before I got to share it with thousands of people across many national geographies. The stakeholders included salespeople, hardware and software engineers, Ph.D.s in Chemistry and Physics, and technical support experts. When I got on the world stages where UN translators translated my talks live, I did not need to look at my slides. I did not worry about any question that someone might ask. I had already been asked, debated, corrected, and set right. I was fearless on stage because a thousand hits of the samurai swordmakers had already beat out the impurities. Then I started my own consulting. Immediately I was partnering with very prominent companies in the US, India, Malaysia, and Singapore. I was already a known resource. Soon my consultations turned into workshops at industry and my own conferences. My workshops had more real-life stories and proven best practices than what the top consulting company professionals had seen. I now paid an army of researchers to test and compile data like I did in Xerox and IBM. My consultations and talks were solving conflicts and removing bottlenecks, but also clients found the framework and interactions very inspirational. Soon, my clients asked me to focus only on keynotes and inspirational interventions. I became a welcome coach to many executives and entrepreneurs who wanted personal guidance. This too was not something I had sought out. It was a result of the value the clients found useful. Then the clients wanted something to remember the stories from my talks. So they asked me to write a book. The book helps potential clients screen my values, insights, and work in advance. I needed a lot of help in narrowing my lifetime of lessons for the first book. My trusted colleagues, clients, and advisors became my guides, and my children rewrote and edited the book. It has done very well with people who want to seek their full potential. From doctors, engineers, and scientists, to teachers and students; and from retired executives to fallen professionals, more than 200 readers have shared their stories of how the book has helped them start a new business, revitalize their life’s mission, improve team performance, hire or remove team members, and select jobs. Some have even written about losing over one hundred pounds, and others have become more focused on their use of time, energy, and presence. This is what I speak about in my talks.
The stakeholders included salespeople, hardware and software engineers, Ph.D.s in Chemistry and Physics, and technical support experts. When I got on the world stages where UN translators translated my talks live, I did not need to look at my slides. I did not worry about any question that someone might ask. I had already been asked, debated, corrected, and set right. I was fearless on stage because a thousand hits of the samurai swordmakers had already beat out my impurities. Then I started my own consulting. Immediately I was partnering with very prominent companies in the US, India, Malaysia, and Singapore. I was already a known resource. Soon my consultations turned into workshops at industry and my own conferences. My workshops had more real-life stories and proven best practices than what the top consulting company professionals had seen. I now paid an army of researchers to test and compile data like I did in Xerox and IBM. My consultations and talks were solving conflicts and removing bottlenecks, but also clients found the framework and interactions very inspirational. Soon, my clients asked me to focus only on keynotes and inspirational interventions. I became a welcome coach to many executives and entrepreneurs who wanted personal guidance. This too was not something I had sought out. It was a result of the value the clients found useful. Then the clients wanted something to remember the stories from my talks. So they asked me to write a book. The book helps potential clients screen my values, insights, and work in advance. I needed a lot of help in narrowing my lifetime of lessons for the first book. My trusted colleagues, clients, and advisors became my guides, and my children rewrote and edited the book. It has done very well with people who want to seek their full potential. From doctors, engineers, and scientists, to teachers and students; and from retired executives to fallen professionals, more than 200 readers have shared their stories of how the book has helped them start a new business, revitalize their life’s mission, improve team performance, hire or remove team members, and select jobs. Some have even written about losing over one hundred pounds, and others have become more focused on their use of time, energy, and presence. This is what I speak about in my talks.
Then I started my own consulting. Immediately I was partnering with very prominent companies in the US, India, Malaysia, and Singapore. I was already a known resource. Soon my consultations turned into workshops at industry and my own conferences. My workshops had more real-life stories and proven best practices than what the top consulting company professionals had seen. I now paid an army of researchers to test and compile data like I did in Xerox and IBM. My consultations and talks were solving conflicts and removing bottlenecks, but also clients found the framework and interactions very inspirational. Soon, my clients asked me to focus only on keynotes and inspirational interventions. I became a welcome coach to many executives and entrepreneurs who wanted personal guidance. This too was not something I had sought out. It was a result of the value the clients found useful. Then the clients wanted something to remember the stories from my talks. So they asked me to write a book. The book helps potential clients screen my values, insights, and work in advance. I needed a lot of help in narrowing my lifetime of lessons for the first book. My trusted colleagues, clients, and advisors became my guides, and my children rewrote and edited the book. It has done very well with people who want to seek their full potential. From doctors, engineers, and scientists, to teachers and students; and from retired executives to fallen professionals, more than 200 readers have shared their stories of how the book has helped them start a new business, revitalize their life’s mission, improve team performance, hire or remove team members, and select jobs. Some have even written about losing over one hundred pounds, and others have become more focused on their use of time, energy, and presence. This is what I speak about in my talks.
Soon after, my clients asked me to focus only on keynotes and inspirational interventions. I became a welcome coach to many executives and entrepreneurs who wanted personal guidance. This too was not something I had sought out. It was a result of the value that the clients found useful. Then the clients wanted something to remember the stories from my talks. So they asked me to write a book. Today, the book helps potential clients screen my values, insights, and work in advance. I needed a lot of help in narrowing my lifetime of lessons for the first book. My trusted colleagues, clients, and advisors became my guides, and my children rewrote and edited the book. It has done very well with people who want to seek their full potential. From doctors, engineers, and scientists, to teachers and students; and from retired executives to fallen professionals, more than 200 readers have shared their stories of how the book has helped them start a new business, revitalize their life’s mission, improve team performance, hire or remove team members, and select jobs. Some have even written about losing over one hundred pounds, and others have become more focused on their use of time, energy, and presence. This is what I speak about in my talks.
I needed a lot of help in narrowing my lifetime of lessons for the first book. My trusted colleagues, clients, and advisors became my guides, and my children rewrote and edited the book. It has done very well with people who want to seek their full potential. From doctors, engineers, and scientists, to teachers and students; and from retired executives to fallen professionals, more than 200 readers have shared their stories of how the book has helped them start a new business, revitalize their life’s mission, improve team performance, hire or remove team members, and select jobs. Some have even written about becoming slimmer to regain their lost mojo and losing over one hundred pounds, and others have become more focused on their use of time, energy, and presence.
This is what I speak about in my talks: clarity about our priorities, aligning reality with our own capabilities, earning an ecosystem, and rising to the top of our potential.
The treasure in my talks is the sum total of my life’s lessons: my hardships, losses, wins, and blessings. I know my life’s lessons like the back of my hands. I know what works and why, and I can see whom it will not help, and how to set the right expectation.
My messages are real because they are my life’s lessons:
- I took my first job in sales to cancel out any questions about my accent and appearance. Sales performance is binary. You met or did not meet the quota. I learned that great salespeople never sell anything. They are not flashy or flamboyant. They are diligent and sincere researchers. They uncover the customers’ needs and persuasively present a match to their offerings. I learned the tools to do this consistently as a salesman, and as a sales leader with over 100 salespeople carrying my product line. For three years in a row, my teams’ performance topped US sales. Lots of scars and trophies in learning here.
- I learned the application of collaborative tools to develop a shared vision. A shared vision removes distractions and creates synergies to use time and resources to produce positive results. My teams won international competitions to set new performance benchmarks. I know what works and when because I have failed and won many times. Great stories of loyalty and betrayals here too.
- My mentors taught me to earn trust to deserve the right to ask for time or resource for my projects. Companies are only paper identities. People are the real enablers of progress. I learned that if I don’t earn credibility as a legitimate candidate, I don’t have the right to earn a spot or opportunity. I can read when a person has an open mind and it’s a good use of my time to seek collaboration, and when I don’t have a chance of connecting and my time is better spent elsewhere. Lesson: look behind the eyeballs to test trust in the person you are working with.
- I learned that no matter what the credentials, people make decisions based on their own values. When we are able to reach their core, we no longer need to push. Their own passion reaches them to their excellence. Shining the light on their path is my passion, privilege, and blessing.
- My work delivered results and built bridges. My teams delivered great business results (market share, profits), earned trust with technology partners to share each others R&D visions, innovated like startups in big companies, and applied quality improvement tools to collaborate across the globe. I know how to build shielded tunnels in political firestorms to reach the teams to their destinations. This is the reason why I can help people make good choices.
My successes both cemented lifelong relationships and also angered very senior managers. They called me a bulldog who hooked an elephant to a house of cards, a bulldozer who would mow down anything in the path to success, and a man with balls of steel.
My most bizarre meeting was when a Chinese-American Ph.D. scientist and a (self-taught) bigot programmer refused to talk to each other. They disliked each other so much that they would not even look at each other and did not attend the same meetings. In one of my turnaround projects, I compelled them to sit in the same room and resolve a software compatibility issue worth $250M in sales revenue.
My most fulfilling consulting assignment action was to get an abusive manager fired from a $250K job. My intervention accelerated his exit. His interactive, conflict resolution, and motivational skills disrespected women.
My most fulfilling discovery is that humans are capable of rising above differences (race, color, gender, language, faith, food, and affiliations) to build the bridges of trust and amazing successes.
I am the perfect role model to evangelize a public speaking career. If I can do it, anyone can. Be authentic, seek validation, and perfect your message. When you do these, you will not be able to stop the universe from lifting you up. This is my guarantee! When you do work to serve, uplift, and inspire others, the universe will lift you up.
When you have taken the three steps I have listed above and are ready to get help from stellar resources, contact me. I will connect you to Betty Garrett to find you talk, Anne Bruce to fine-tune your messages, and Karla Jo Helms to do your PR. They will not sell you programs that don’t earn profits, and they will not take you on until you are authentic and on spot with your message.
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Raj Rawat
Co-Author: Find Your Everest before someone chooses it for you
Founder: Reverse the Chase initiative
Raj@RajRawat.com
720-585-6350