Should You Be Speaking?
When I was younger, my dad used to tell me, “If your lips are moving, you aren't listening and if you aren’t listening, you aren’t learning.” Dad was right. But something that is important to note here is that there is a point in your career where something switches and you’re leading people, organizations and folks want to hear from you. See, they want to hear the tools you used to get over those struggles, they want to hear what it feels like to face and overcome the challenges you’ve come up to and they also want to learn from you as a person. So there comes a time in almost every leader's life where you should be speaking publicly. Additionally, Brands need someone to be the public figure that can represent your company to the world and often, that is you, the owner.
This also becomes important for folks who are still doing some sort of sales within their organization. See when you speak, it gives folks a chance to get to know you, learn from you, and consider buying whatever it is that you’re selling…even if that’s not the point of why you’re on stage. Additionally, the goal of your speaking engagements shouldn’t be to “get more sales” but it is often a byproduct doing so. If that’s the goal, folks will feel that and pull away from you.
So here’s the question. Should you be speaking?
Maybe you’ve never considered standing on stage at a conference orating and that’s ok. Speaking to a live audience isn’t for everyone but if you’re going to be leading, it’s a skill that you should learn to be, at the very least, adequate at. Who knows, maybe you’ll be surprised with how much you enjoy speaking that it becomes a core part of your work.
If you’re a leader and you’ve not taken the leap to start speaking but it’s been something that’s bounced around in your head for a while and you’re unsure if you can do it, this blog is for you. I’ll give you all the structure that you’ll need to get dialed in and crush your first or 100th speaking engagement. Or, perhaps help you determine that you aren’t quite ready to get up and lecture.
Are you ready to start speaking?
The first thing you need to determine is, am I ready to start accepting speaking engagements? The easy answer to this is, do you have a perspective that is worth sharing? Of course, you as a person are unique, you hold inherent value as a human but have you as a leader put in enough time into your work to develop your own perspective of it? Maybe you have unique business experience that most of your colleagues haven’t had. Or, perhaps you see something that is happening in our industry, coffee related or not, and you think we should be taking some sort of action to remedy the issue. This is perspective!
So, do you have something to say? If the answer to this question is “YES!” Then you absolutely should start the process of seeking speaking engagements.
How do you go about getting a speaking engagement?
Most conferences want to host educational lectures, talks, fireside chats or panel discussions and in coffee, they like “free” speakers. So if you want to start speaking, this is where you have to get to work. You’ll want to reach out to the party planning committee i.e. whoever is putting together the conference or fest that you’re interested in speaking at.
You’ll likely begin by cold emailing someone at the conference or fest asking if there is a need for educational talks? Usually from there you’ll either be met with opportunity or you’ll get a quick, “No, we’ve already got it covered.” Don’t give up if you get turned down or you aren’t responded to the first few times. Just keep putting feelers out and letting folks know that you’re open to speaking and you’ll likely receive a positive response eventually.
Never done a talk? Here’s my process
But how do you actually prepare and write a lecture? Lucky for you, the rest of this blog is my process and should give you enough to help you develop your own process.
1. Find the Nail - i.e. what’s the thesis?
One of the key things that inexperienced speakers try to do is to have a bunch of points that they just try to share everything. This is a mistake. You need to hammer 1 singular nail for your whole presentation or talk.
Now, this does not mean that you only have one thing to say, but rather that everything that you say supports and points back to the main point. If you take this approach, the people in the seats will be more apt to leave learning that one singular thing you wanted them to take away from your talk.
Before you do any work toward getting a talk lined up find the nail of your lecture.
2. Support the nail
In the social media realm, this is called a hub and spoke approach. Meaning, there’s one hub (i.e. the nail) and your spokes are your sub points that support the hub. Now when you're building your talk that is what you need to do. You need to determine what sort of framework is necessary to support the larger structure.
All of your sub points should support and point back to your main point…the hub or nail.
3. Pound The Nail - once, twice, and 3 times
It’s human nature to forget what someone says if they’ve only said it once. So to help your audience remember your main point, you need to make sure that you repeat it 3 times at a minimum. No, don’t be a broken record and repeat your point 3x’s over and over. Find 3 different ways to restate the point.
Here’s an example. I regularly give a talk on roastery operations and my nail is that growing roasters have to iterate in perpetuity in order to move from a business that's surviving to a business that sustains itself. I begin by making the statement that survival thinking has kept their business alive but they’ll need to reject this thinking to reach a sustainable place. The way to reach this is through iteration and the sub points I use to pound the nail of iteration are:
An owner of a growing coffee roaster needs to iterate how they lead
An owner of a growing coffee roaster needs to iterate how the roastery operates
An owner of a growing coffee roaster needs to iterate how they make decisions
The nail is that owners of growing coffee roasters need to iterate in perpetuity in order to reach a place of sustainability. Now, I’ve said it 3x’s without repeating myself and boring the audience.
4. Leave ‘em Before They’re Tired of You
A long time ago when I was a pastor, I was giving a talk at a summer camp and I went incredibly fast. I was supposed to talk for 15 minutes and I ended up talking for 6 minutes. My mentor happened to be there watching me talk and I apologized to him for going so fast. He looked at me and said, “Luke, no one is ever going to be mad that you ended your talk early.” That stuck with me and the key takeaway is that you should say what is needed in as few words as possible. Just make sure that you’re giving the people value however long it takes.
Manuscript, Record Runthrough & Repeat
Once I’ve found the main point and determined how I’m going to support those main points with sub points the real work starts.
Manuscript
I begin with a skeletal outline that I created through the above process of determining the nail/main point and the sub points I needed to support the main point. For every lecture I give, I will loosely manuscript the key points. For a 45 -50 minute talk, it’ll usually be around 10 single spaced pages long. I don’t manuscript every single word. Just the key parts, points, stories or illustrations that need to be shared word for word. If I was to manuscript every single word it would probably be 20+ pages long.
Every talk needs to feel fresh in the room. Like a made to order meal at a 3 Michelin star restaurant. When you receive a dish, you know it’s not their first time preparing this dish but you know it was designed, curated, and created just for you and it’ll be just as delicious as the last one that was served. This process of loose manuscripting allows me to allocate for pauses, for crowd interaction, and provides just enough structure to keep me and the talk on track without the talk feeling premeditated and regurgitated. It should feel made to order for every unique crowd.
Record Runthrough
Next, I do half a dozen or more run throughs and I record them. No, not because I like the sound of my own voice but because I want to feel what it’s like as a listener. I want to know if the points feel connected. I want to imagine what it would be like if I was listening to this talk for the first time. How would I feel? What seems left out? Was there something that was redundant? Was there something I should have pushed into deeper? These are the questions I seek to answer when I’m listening back through my run through. Typically the first 3 are pretty awful but that’s how they should be, because this is the refinement phase.
Repeat
Usually, I do the above about 6-12 times before I feel really ready to give a new lecture. The reason is that every run through I realize that there's something missing or an element that needs to be rearranged or cut all together. So this loose manuscripting and run through phase is a honing cycle.
Lock it in!
Once I’ve gone through this process of writing and rewriting my manuscript based on the recordings of my run throughs, I test myself to see if I have all the information locked in my brain. I’ll go through the whole talk without notes. If it’s easy and I have no problem hitting all my points, I’ve got it! If not, I go back to the manuscript and recording and run it through until it’s locked in.
Write a brief
Something that has been really helpful to me in receiving speaking engagements is having a brief handy. I’ve found that the more detailed the brief, the easier it is to receive a “Yes” than if I just have a topic. The reason? You’re probably inututing…it means you know what you're going to say, you’re prepared, and showcases the value it’ll add to the readers. It also shows that you’ve already put work into it and you aren’t just floating out an idea that you had last night on the couch watching The Bear.
Key things to include in your brief:
Some talk applications require specifics around what is in your briefs but here’s what I typically include:
Strong title
Detailed outline of the lecture
Outline of the main & sub points. *Bonus points if you add time stamps corresponding to how long you’ll spend on each point.
Clear learning outcomes for each main point
Handout Outline
Description of the talk itself with the main points listed
Build a Deck
Next, assuming your talk was accepted you’ll need to build a deck. Some talk submissions require you to submit a deck with your brief and application, however all the talks I’ve given haven’t required a deck submission until after the talk was accepted. If your talk needs a deck submission along with the brief information just make it simple, in line with your overall brand identity and include your main and sub points. You can put more meat on the bones once the talk is accepted.
Have a Speaking Press Kit
Folks don’t often talk about this but it’s saved me about 10+ hours this year alone. If you’re serious about this speaking thing, you should build yourself a press kit. You’re going to be asked repeatedly for the same assets, the same bio and the same business information over and over. So compile it in one succinct, easy to share, easy to navigate and easy to use document. Here’s mine if you’re curious where to begin. I know this is rudimentary but it has worked for me for the last few years and has saved me hours on every speaking engagement I’ve been on to have all this information compiled in one place.
So should you be talking? If you’re leading, the answer is probably yes. Just make sure you have something worth saying before you do and then GO FOR IT! We’ll be rooting for you over here at The Lev Co!
Got an idea? Drop us a line at hi@thelevco.com and we can set up a brainstorm session where we can come up with ideas to do this very thing!