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.
People often ask me the same kinds of questions over and over – how to make more money with motivational speaking or how to get bookings for motivational speaking. What these people don’t realize is that the answers to all of these questions come when they deal with the three myths listed below.
Money is bad is the first most common myth that people in a professional speaking career have. These people inherently pick low paying speaking engagements or even worse yet they will work for free because it’s all they think they can attain. These are most of the time the same people asking me how to get bookings for public speaking. Now I’m not talking about the people who are using the free speaking gigs to get their foot in the door or to build credibility and notoriety in their niche as an expert. I’m talking about the people who think that money will eventually come to them even if they’ve never been paid a dime!
Here’s what I learned. When I got serious about learning how to make money with motivational speaking, I decided to get “myself” out of the way. Once I got old ways of thinking and doing out of my motivational speaking career, I found that there were people who were willing to pay me a ton of money just to speak. That’s the revelation I got and the revelation you need to receive today!
Motivation is all you need is the second most common myth in motivational speaking. MDPYM (Motivation doesn’t pay your mortgage) is the acronym that I teach people about that kind of thinking. I learned early on in my speaking career is that just because I was motivated didn’t mean I would be able to pay my bills!
What I do now is teach these people to get rid of this way of thinking because it simply won’t do much for them. In fact now I teach people to get motivated by finding different ways to get people to give them money. By learning how to make money with public speaking they learn essentially to start the cycle of earning to help more and more people.
One must work harder in order to make more money is the last public speaking myth I hear most often. This kind of thinking is incorrect! The hardest workingman I knew in my life was my Dad who never made more than $29,000 annually. My Dad was the model hard worker, but he didn’t get the kind of pay that he deserved.
You most learn to work smart, but that’s only half of the picture. The other half is working right. You cannot just be working smart, you have to be working right as well. People often are try to fulfill their egos instead of filling their pocketbook in this public speaking industry. Sometimes people are unable to market themselves correctly in their niche because they don’t have a clue about the kinds of needs that their target niche market has.
Dealing with these three myths will get your professional speaking career off the ground!
Filed under: Business