I often get asked about the path to success for a professional speaker.  When you’re just starting out, you naturally want to know how others achieved their success before you.  You want to know what you should focus on in order to get to that coveted spot on the keynote stage faster.  And if you are really thinking hard, you’ll want to know the biggest pitfalls – the common traps that everyone else falls into  – so that you can dodge around them.  Here’s my short list of the most important things to think about early on in your career.

1.Don’t get paid before you are ready. This idea is counterintuitive, and of course a little frustrating.  Naturally, if your goal is to become a paid professional, then you’ll want to get paid as soon as possible.  But when you start speaking, all eyes will be upon you, especially the eyes of the meeting planners, the speaker bureaus, the coaches, the event companies – and all of them are likely only to give you one look.  If their judgment is that you are not ready for prime time, then they will forever assign you to the B-list in their minds and that will make it very hard for you to develop a steady business on ever-more-glorious stages.  The speaking world is a surprisingly small one, and an impatient one.  And there’s a lot of competition.  Your debut needs to be smashing.  Practice in a safe place. 

2.Be an expert first, a speaker second. I’ve debated this idea over the years with many smart people.  Some have insisted that you can be a professional speaker who is largely indifferent to the topic you speak on.  Like an actor, you might play one role on one stage, and another on a different one.  And I have had people tell me that speaking is what they love to do – they don’t care about what.  But two trends make that increasingly difficult.  The first is the increased insistence on personal vulnerability and authenticity.  You must come with a story to tell about why you are doing what you’re doing, and it needs to connect in a straight-line way with what you talk about.  The second is the increasing narrowness of expertise.  Knowledge is increasing so quickly that no one can know everything, or even very much about a few things.  So we are suspicious of people who claim that once-honored title of “Renaissance Thinker.”

3.Define success from the outset. I’m a firm believer in Stephen Covey’s timeless principles as expressed in his classic book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and this idea is a version of one of his best, begin with the end in mind.  Speaking success begins slowly for most people, and so it’s important to track your progress along a measuring stick you’ve already defined.  It will give you both strength for the journey and joy in the arrival.

4.Make yourself expert in your professional ecosystem. Having said you should focus on your expertise, the other thing you need to focus on is everything about the professional speaking world you’re going to be competing in.  And there is a lot of competition these days.  So, study successful speakers.  Reach out to them and get to know them.  What are they doing better than you?  And get to know everyone who works in the world you want to ace.  What is on the minds of the speaker bureaus, the meeting planners, the conference organizers, the association marketers who come up with the themes for the meetings you want to speak at?  The more you know, the more relevant you can be.

5.Work on your long-term game. Take an improv course, or an acting course.  Seek out opportunities to speak for free early on, in safe venues, in order to develop your chops.  Take the time out to write the book on the subject.  Temptation, in the form of social media, tinkering with your branding, or re-doing your sizzle reel, is hard to resist because it’s not wrong to do those things.  But in my experience the ones that succeed are those who know how to balance those kinds of short-term needs with long-term development of expertise and marketability.

If you plan and work for the long term, you’ll achieve your richly deserved success just the moment you are ready for it, and no sooner.  I hope it’s everything you have wished for, and more.