Discover powerful ways to become a professional speaker. Listen as celebrated keynote speaker and author, Grant Baldwin shares his secrets.
Grant is the creator of the Booked and Paid To Speak training program. His podcast and training site, The Speaker Lab, provides weekly training to speakers at all levels of their business.
As a speaker, Grant has given hundreds of presentations and has spoken to over 4,000 people in 45 different states through leadership conferences, conventions, and other events. His book and curriculum for students, Reality Check, is taught in 400 schools around the country. Grant, welcome to the show and thank you for being this week’s guest expert and mentor.
Excerpt from this week’s podcast “Powerful Ways to Become a Professional Speaker “
Q: Grant, what advice would you give a first-time author who wants to become a professional speaker to help build their author platform?
A: There are 3 questions I always challenge new speakers to think about. Why do you want to speak? Who do you want to speak to? What do you want to speak about? Why, who, and what. Let’s take that first question of “why.” Why is it that you want to speak in the first place. Just because you have a book, fiction or nonfiction or otherwise, why is it that you want to speak? What is it that you hope speaking will do? Is it something that, “I just enjoy it, it’s fun,” or, “I want to speak in order to sell more books,” or “I want to speak just to meet readers,” or “I want to speak to, maybe I have like coaching or consulting that I offer, and so I’m trying to pick up new clients that way”? What is the value in speaking for you? Really taking the time to consider that, because that’ll kind of determine the types of events that you might want to speak at, and which types of things might be a good fit for you.
Then the other 2 questions of who you want to speak to, and what is it that you want to speak about. A huge mistake that most new speakers make is that they would say…
Here’s how you can contact Grant Baldwin to find out more about his services and training programs
Down the transcript from this week’s podcast interview on “Powerful Ways to Become a Professional Speaker”