3 Myths about Starting a Public Speaking Career and Business
In any industry, myths tend to come before real knowledge and it’s time to expose some of those false ways of thinking and false bits of information. Myths can hurt any professional speaking career because they often present themselves as obstructions for a growing and thriving business.
I am often asked the same kinds of questions over and over - how to make more money with motivational speaking or how to get bookings for professional speaking. The people don’t realize is that the answers to all of these questions come when they deal with the three myths below.
The first most common myth people in the world of professional speaking have is that money is bad. These people end up picking only low paying speaking engagements or worse yet working for free because it’s all they think they can get. These are the same peoples who are asking me how to get bookings for professional speaking. There is a difference between these people and the ones who use free speaking gigs as leverage to get their foot in the door or to build credibility and notoriety in their niche as an expert. These are the people who seem to think that money will come to them despite not ever being paid before.
What I’ve learned is this. If I got serious about learning how to make money with public speaking, I would need to get “myself” out of the way. Once the old ways of thinking and doing are taken out of your public speaking career, you’ll find that there were people who were willing to pay you a ton of money just to speak. This is the revelation I came to and the revelation you need to receive today!
The second most common myth in motivational speaking I hear is that motivation is all you need. Wrong! I have an acronym that I teach people about that kind of thinking - MDPYM (Motivation doesn’t pay your mortgage). One of the things I learned early in my speaking career is that just because I was motivated didn’t mean I could pay my bills!
I now teach people to get rid of this kind of thinking because it simply isn’t going to do much for them. I teach the people I mentor to get motivated in the different ways they find to get people to give them money. As these people learn how to make money with professional speaking they also learn to start the cycle of earning to help more and more people.
The last common speaking myth is that one must work harder in order to make more money. This kind of thinking is wrong! My father was the hardest workingman I knew in my entire life and he never made more than $29,000 a year. He didn’t have the kind of pay that matched his effort, but he was a model hard worker.
I then learned about working smart, which is really only half of the picture. Working right is the other half of the picture. The truth is it doesn’t matter how smart you work, you need to also be working right. In the professional speaking industry, people are often trying to fulfill their egos instead of filling their pocketbook. I often find people who don’t have a clue about the kinds of needs their target niche has and as a result, they don’t market themselves correctly.
Dealing with these three myths will get your professional speaking career off the ground!
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