One of the surprises for many people early on in their professional speaking careers is how collaborative it is – or should be – if it’s going to work.  You imagine yourself alone up there on stage, with the lights shining on you.  You experience the excitement, the fear, and the glory all yourself.  It’s your performance, your career, your thought leadership.

Except that it isn’t yours alone.  Your performance depends on the A/V team to make you look and sound good, the meeting planner to schedule your talk in the right place in the day, and your therapist to help you get past rejection in your childhood to stand on the stage without curling up into a fetal ball.  It takes a public speaking village, whether you recognize it or not.

Recognizing that, I was doing some research on collaboration and distilled some ideas from that research.  In particular, I’ve leaned on a book, Radical Collaboration, by Tamm and Luyet, that has many useful ideas for budding collaborators in the public speaking world, or anywhere else for that matter.  Here’s what I found that makes for a good collaborator – and therefore a good public speaker.

Cultivate Self-awareness.  You can’t be a good partner or collaborator to work with unless you know yourself, what makes you smile, and what triggers you.  Do you have a thin skin?  Do you need your feedback sugar-coated?  Or are you tough and able to face your failures with your head held high?  Knowing these limits and triggers will enable you to take the advice you get along the way in the spirit it’s intended.

Practice Openness.  Public speakers must be life-long learners.  There’s simply no other option.  I once worked with a speaker who had been giving the same speech for 16 years.  Word for word.  Trust me when I say that the jokes were no longer funny.  It was time for new ones.  But the speaker struggled with the process because he had become closed to new ideas and input over time, and preferred irrelevance to the pain of learning new things.  Don’t be that speaker!

Let Go of Blame.  Things will go wrong.  That’s the nature of the human enterprise, especially when it involves a stage, lights, and many moving parts.  Let go of the idea of blame and just accept that whatever happens is part of the show.  That way you’ll save yourself a lot of useless rage, and you’ll be a much more delightful partner to work with.

Monitor Your Relationships.  For everything to keep working, you need to keep track of how your partnerships, relationships, and newest best friends are faring.  It’s never a case of set it and forget it.  There’s too much change and volatility in the speaking world to let things coast on the assumption that it’s all working well.  It may not be, and you need to know sooner rather than later.

Listen More Than You Talk.  You talk for a living, and that can lead to a tendency to talk all the time.  It’s a fatal habit for collaborators – and so too for public speakers.  You can learn to avoid rookie mistakes and errors of graver moment along the way by listening to the people around you (and whom you meet) for their wisdom about the successes and failures they’ve witnessed over the years.

Collaboration is key for anyone who wants to have an established, long-term speaking career.  It has to be predominately virtual now, because of the pandemic, but it will be face-to-face again.  So start now and make the journey better for you and everyone around you.