The second of three articles inspired by The Marginalian.

One of the glories of the Internet is Maria Popova’s The Marginalian.  If you don’t know it, click on the link, sign up, and start having your soul fed every week in unexpected, thought-provoking, and beautiful ways.  Recently, she wrote about the sixteen things she has learned from sixteen years of doing her blog.  I was inspired by her wise list and thought how much of it – with a twist – was useful for public speakers.  So here, in no particular order, are some further public speaking insights inspired by her brilliant work.

Be generous with your competitors. One of the curious twists in the public speaking business compared to other businesses is that it is hard to retain customers in the normal sense of that phrase.  In a standard business, say, selling candles, if you make wonderful candles and find enthusiastic customers for them, those customers will come back to you for more candles.  In the public speaking business, you give a speech to, say, the Candle Makers Association of North America, and do a wonderful job.  The next thing that happens is that they don’t want to hire you back.  Because they’ve heard your message.  There are exceptions, of course, but on the whole every customer you land is a new one.  That makes the cost of acquisition high.  One of the ways to lower that cost is to partner up with other speakers and recommend them to your satisfied customers.  (“If you liked my speech, you’ll love Jane Doe’s.  She talks about leadership, too, with this different twist.”)  Then, they’ll do the same for you, unless they are real jerks, and if that’s the case, you shouldn’t be friends with them.  Thus, you create warm leads for each other.  It’s all about the abundance mentality, not scarcity.

Build stillness into your life. For public speakers who have just come off of 2+ years of way too much stillness, this insight may be hard to swallow.  I vividly remember sitting in disbelief in the waiting area in the Calgary airport, having just finished work with a client there, in late February 2020, watching the texts and emails roll in, canceling my schedule, which had been nicely filled out for the next 6 months.  My feeling was a heady combination of terror and excitement.  What would I do with that void?  I hadn’t seen that much white space in my calendar since, I dunno, the 8th grade.  The virtual rolled in, after a couple of weeks of nail-biting, and I was full of gratitude.  But most speakers crave the in-person speaking world, and it is slowly coming back, and your calendar will fill up with in-person work again.  And when it does, you will need to build stillness into your life again too, to counteract the travel, the busyness, and did I mention the travel?  As Maria says, so eloquently, “What could possibly be more important than your health and your sanity, from which all else springs?”

Don’t sacrifice presence for productivity.  The urge to make up for lost time and canceled gigs is strong right now.  Many a speaker is ready to cram that schedule as full as possible to get things happening again.  But see the previous note, and then recall that the difference, between a speech that just phones it in and one that changes the world, is presence.  Presence is challenging when your nerves rise, and your heart starts beating fast as you walk out on stage.  Speakers often report to me that they don’t remember much of the speech they just gave; it passed in a blur.  That’s adrenaline; the fight-flight-or-freeze phenomenon that we all have experienced.  It’s the job of every speaker who plans to make a career out of getting on stage to master the adrenaline as best they can and put it in service to presence, rather than being in thrall to it.

Again, thanks to Maria Popova and the Marginalian.  I think I’ll do one more post on her 16 insights from 16 years of blogging.