What skills are needed to make a Professional Speaker be respected, recommended, admired and paid big fees?
According to the American National Speakers Association a professional speaker needs to be proficient in three areas. These three industries are interconnected and each of them is as important as the next one. A professional speaker is constantly learning and improving all three of these areas.
Expertise: A speaker needs to be an expert in a specific industry or part of an industry. He needs to be ‘a celebrity’ in his niche. He needs to be the best and the ‘go to person’ on a specific topic or subject matter. He also needs to be able to understand what part of his expertise he can package into specific keynote, workshops, seminars etc.
There are not many pages on your-public-speaking dedicated to this skill. You will have to develop your own material. It can be in any industry or subject matter our fantastic world has to offer. Choose something that you are really passionate about. Choose something that you willingly spend hours and hours learning and practicing.
Eloquence: The professional speaker keeps his audience on the edge of their seats throughout his whole presentation. He is unforgettable; the audience remembers his teachings, suggestions, and stories long after he has stepped down from the stage. He knows how to write, prepare and stage the perfect presentation for particular audiences. Many of the pages of this site your-public-speaking are dedicated to eloquence. Use and practice the tips; and please participate! Send me your comments, or post them yourself on the different interactive pages.
Stories are the most important skill to master in this category. You can join my workshop in Bahasa Indonesia.
Enterprise: A professional speaker is an entrepreneur, a business owner who is familiar with the running of a business. He has set up his administration, book-keeping, booking system and most of all marketing in a professional way. Developing effective and efficient marketing tools and understanding the sales funnel are some of the most important skills a professional speaker needs to acquire fast and early in his career.
You will be able to get a DVD of my seminar pretty soon. Contact me if you are interested.
The most important sales tool starts and ends with a speaker’s presentation. He needs to be able to sell his ideas, his recommendations, his stories and his products and services to his audience. That is the easiest way to be recommended and gain income on the spot even during free presentations. I will dedicate quite some pages to persuasion or selling, since it is a very important skill to have.
One more Thing
Ethics: A professional speaker needs to adhere to strict ethical conduct. It makes sense doesn’t it? If we want to stand in front of people and ‘teach’ them it makes sense to be good role models in moral conduct first and outmost. The first thing we need to observe is ‘practice what you teach!’ And then again, I just experienced a situation where a well known speaker teaches something and does the opposite. Your audience will eventually get wind of it and you will fall from grace.
A very good example of this is our famous and loved Indonesian preacher AA Gym who urged people to observe good family relations and respect each other in a marriage. Then he married a second wife in secret. He immediately lost all credibility and fame. His followers turned their backs on him.
I truly hope that with my site your-public-speaking I can help many of you achieve your dream of becoming a professional speaker. It is a journey, not a destination. There are always more things to learn and to improve. Times also change, what was common some years ago might be considered old fashioned today. Let’s keep up with the latest does and don’ts. Please participate and give me your views on all the different issues I am discussing.
Monika Sugiarto
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