Jodi Orgill Brown is an expert in anti-fragility, resilience, and interactional leadership. As a brain tumor survivor, she has become an award-winning author and national speaker, and is now a proud EWTS Certified Guide.
She’s on a mission to help leaders and teams make a greater impact through their interactions, become more resilient, and grow through change.
In this blog, she shares her advice on exactly how to start your speaking career, sharing ideas such as topics to talk about, how to craft your keynote, and how to identify the right stages for your expertise.
When Should You Start?
Becoming a professional speaker can happen organically, just like with Jodi, who began after being invited to share her inspiring journey with people.
Originally, people came to hear her story, and she was happy to share it. However, over time, her message became broader as she learned how to contextualize her life experiences into practical ways of helping others.
Speakers become speakers for several reasons, but it always starts with what you are saying and if an audience wants to hear it. If you are serious about public speaking, then your message should always be your starting point.
Best Practice For A New Speaker
Now you have your message, what’s next?
A good speaker can define what they are speaking about. If you cannot define what it is you are talking about, then no one else will be able to.
Speakers who approach their craft with the attitude that they can speak about anything often end up speaking about nothing.
A good rule of thumb is to quiz those close to you about what you represent. If your best friend can’t say in one sentence, here’s what you do, and here’s why someone should hire you, no one else will do it either.
Make sure you understand what topics and expertise you can bring to the table.
As mentioned earlier, Jodi’s growth was organic, and it started with people wanting to hear her story.
But as time went on, she realized that people were connecting with her story more than her story; it was how her story made them feel. It gave them hope, inspiration, and practical survival tips.
Her audiences could put themselves in her shoes.
What can you offer your audience? Whatever it is, it’s got to be something with gravitas.
If you’re unsure what your thing is, you might not quite be ready. Jodi’s top tips to assess this are:
- Who are you speaking to? Who is going to pay you for your message?
- What are you speaking about? If you don’t know your message, then who are you advertising to?
- What problem are you solving?
Once you can answer these questions, you’ll know what lane you are supposed to be in.
Do You Have To Stay In Your Lane?
While it’s great to know which lane to be in instead of erratically jumping from one to another, it doesn’t mean you’ll stay there indefinitely.
You could navigate back and forth.
People often recommend choosing a lane because they need to understand who you’re marketing to and who you’re trying to get in front of.
But assuming you know these things, you do have the chance to expand.
Once you understand who you are marketing to, you can use the whole freeway and jump into whichever lane you need to at a time.
You might, for example, assume that you’ll be in healthcare forever like Jodi did. She thought that because people saw her as a patient and because she could talk confidently about the power of interactions between healthcare providers and their patients. For a while, she believed that was her only lane.
But as she started to get better and stronger, people started asking her to talk about resilience and what she likes to call anti-fragility, which is not just bouncing back to as good as you were but getting better and stronger from the things that challenge you.
The notion of anti-fragility has opened up a whole world of possibilities for her, new audiences being one of those opportunities.
This all started with a book she read about anti-fragility during COVID-19. This book contained very high-level thinking, such as the anti-fragility of government, software, and commerce. As she devoured the message, she couldn’t find the part that applied to her as an individual.
She kept reading, but it never came. So disappointed with this, she decided to do it herself.
She took the high-level principles, broke them down into their most basic form, and started applying them to her work. The Chamber of Commerce asked her to make a Zoom presentation to 40 people about this topic, and from the 40 people who attended, she got 5 paid bookings.
At this point, she knew she’d found something special with this particular topic. Based on this, she has developed and grown the content to a huge scale. That one little 40-person audience led to four years of content, and anti-fragility is one of her topics that caught like wildfire.
You might be in the same stage, wondering what topics are going to get you the best traction and allow you more versatility.
Her advice is this: pay attention to the questions people ask you. When you’re having conversations with others, and they mention their favorite parts or ask to learn more, this is your indication that there is interest there.
Jodi’s Top 3s
A successful speaker needs to know what to say and who to say it to.
Here are 3 areas that will help you identify this.
3 things that a successful keynote speech needs:
- Be a good storyteller. Take someone with you in that moment so that they remember it. People are 22 times more likely to remember a story than statistics alone.
- Have seamless transitions - Can you seamlessly take us from one topic to another without it seeming clunky and following a checklist?
- Will the audience remember your message? And will they implement it?
3 ways to easily create opportunities:
- Join your Chamber of Commerce - they often need experts who can support local businesses.
- Approach your local communities. Talk to the professors in the area where you want to be or where you are working, and offer to give a guest lecture.
- Approach your local service organizations, Rotary Clubs etc - anyone who might be looking for regular guest presenters.
3 questions to ask yourself:
- What are the key points that you want to make?
- What are the messages that you have?
- What does the audience need to know to successfully do their jobs?
Becoming a speaker is hard but incredibly rewarding. Try implementing these easy steps as you start out and see how much you can grow your career.
