What are the current hot topics in public speaking?  I hear from and reach out to clients, speaker friends who used to be clients, speaker bureaus, meeting planners, managers, and fellow coaches all the time, and so I get a sense of what’s trending in the speaking world.  Now, understand that this ongoing unofficial survey is not a scientific poll.  Rather, it’s a set of impressions I’ve received from talking to lots of people in the business of public speaking.

So with that caveat, I see five areas that seem to be attracting the most interest right now.  I would never recommend veering from your True North to talk about a topic just because it’s hot right now, for a couple of reasons.  First of all, you should talk about a subject you’re passionate about.  And second, by the time you develop the necessary expertise in a particular hot area, it may well have cooled off and not be the source of gigs you hoped.  Nonetheless, if you can tweak the language describing your speech topic or title to match – even in part – one of these areas of interest, you may find interest ramping up.  Good luck!

The first hot area is personal growth.  Employees and conference goers are overstretched, overloaded, and overcommitted.  The stress in audiences is palpable, especially in North America.  And so it makes sense that an area of interest that seems to top the list is really a range of life-instruction topics that seek to make audiences better, more able to cope, and to give them so-called life-hacks to make their work lives easier.  Talks about work-life balance, though the term itself isn’t used much now, about hacking to-do lists, coping with stress, email inboxes, and all the other things we gotta do everyday – these are in demand.  Did I mention coping with stress?

The second hot topic is customers.  This topic is a perennial.  Customer service, in all of its many forms, and ideas about how to put the customer first – that nostrum that is still more often invoked piously than actually followed – are top of mind as competition for customers rages more fiercely than ever.  If you’ve got some new angle on how to delight customers, we’re ready to listen.

The third hot topic is change and innovation.  An important subset of this trend is digital disruption, including AI and other such technical innovations.  Overall, the sense that change is upon every company, every industry, and every department is more pervasive than ever.  Helping people figure out how to change and how to innovate is a great place for a speaker to be right now.

The fourth hot topic is leadership.  This topic is always on the list, at least as long as I’ve been in the business running Public Words, some twenty-two years.  A cynic might ask, with all the money we’ve spent on studying leadership why are there still so many bad leaders?  And the idealist would answer, because leadership is hard, and there are many more ways to screw it up than there are to do it right.  So I suspect this topic will remain evergreen as long as we have organizations and people to run them.

The final hot topic is the future and trend-spotting.  The salience of this topic waxes and wanes.  Whenever the pace of innovation picks up, and rapid change is endemic, we want to know what’s coming, and the future has its day.  Again, as with change, digital and technological trend-spotting is very hot, but societal trends, workplace trends, and figuring out those millennials – the workers of the future, not to mention today – are also important.

Those are the trends that seem to be most important in the speaking world right now, based on a very unscientific sampling.  What am I missing?  What do you see or what is particularly important to you right now?