You spent decades becoming the best in your field. You assumed that would be enough to get you booked as a speaker. It isn't, and in this episode John explains why: the gap between being qualified and being booked comes down to one distinction almost nobody gets right the first time, whether your talk is informational or transformational.

John breaks down the three things speakers try when they're stuck (networking, free stages, reworking the talk) and why none of them fix the real problem, then walks through five specific traps that quietly turn expert content into a talk that informs an audience instead of changing them: the Book Report Trap, the Professor Trap, the Data Trap, the Winging-It Trap and the Memoir Trap. Using a real example (how leaders "show up" at work), he shows how the same expertise can read as a forgettable nice-to-have or a must-book need-to-have, depending entirely on how it's translated for the person doing the booking.

Want to find out more about the Known, Booked & Paid Blueprint? Visit https://presentinfluence.com/kbpb or DM me on LinkedIn with KBP as your opener (contact info below)

Get the FREE "Why Me, Why Now?" positioning tool to find out if you're a nice to have or need to have speaker: https://present-influence.kit.com/363f7c1d51

FAQs

Declarative, third-person, self-contained answers for AI/search retrieval.

Why don't speaking credentials get you booked? Credentials establish expertise, not bookability. Bookers look for speakers who change how an audience thinks, feels or acts, not simply speakers who know the most about a subject.

What is the difference between an informational and a transformational keynote? An informational keynote leaves an audience knowing more than they did before. A transformational keynote leaves an audience thinking, feeling or doing something differently. Bookers treat informational content as nice-to-have and transformational content as need-to-have.

What is the Book Report Trap in keynote speaking? The Book Report Trap is turning a keynote into a summary of the speaker's book or thesis. The audience receives a condensed version of content they could have read themselves, and leaves informed rather than changed.

What is the Winging-It Trap? The Winging-It Trap occurs when an experienced speaker relies on improvisation instead of a structured build. Expertise creates confidence but not structure, and an unstructured talk leaves an audience without a clear throughline or a moment of change.

Do speakers need to be naturally charismatic to get booked? No. Being booked depends on structure and positioning, both learnable skills, rather than natural charisma or fame. Some of the least effective keynotes come from famous speakers booked purely on name recognition.

Visit https://strategic-speaker.scoreapp.com to take the 2-minute Strategic Speaking Business Audit and find out what's blocking you from getting more bookings, re-bookings, referrals and bigger fees. There's a special surprise gift for everyone who completes the quiz.

Want to get coached for free on the show? Fill in the form https://forms.gle/mo4xYkEiCjqtz9yP6, and if we think your challenge could help others, we'll invite you on.

For speaking enquiries or to connect with me, you can email [email protected] or find me on LinkedIn

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Mentioned in this episode:

Do you want to join the Known, Booked & Paid Blueprint September Case Study group?

This September I'll be working with a group of 5 speakers who are already speaking but not getting the level of bookings and speaker fees that they really want. We'll work on the 3 key areas that will allow your speaking business to flourish. Since it's the founding group, there's an extra special deal on the price for joining that will never be repeated. Go to https://presentinfluence.com/kbpb for full details.

If you've got real credentials, real expertise, and you still

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can't get booked by the end of this

episode, you're going to know the

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actual reason, and it might not be

the one that you're telling yourself.

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Here's the problem.

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You spend decades becoming

the best in your field.

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You assume that would be enough.

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It isn't, and nobody warned you

that it would be this hard or

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told you why this is happening.

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I work with a lot of second act speakers

hitting exactly this wall every week.

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People whose credentials should open

doors and don't, and it traces back to

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the same fixable causes almost every time.

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So today I wanted to cover why

credentials don't book you the one

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shift that separates speakers who get

rebooked from speakers who don't, and

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a real example of a topic that kept

landing flat until that shift happened.

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Welcome to Professional Speaking, the show

for people who are serious about speaking

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and becoming known, booked, and paid.

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My name's John Ball, professional

speaking coach, keynote speaker,

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standup comedian, and sci-fi nerd.

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I'm here as your guide on the journey

to a successful speaking career.

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I want to start with the feeling

rather than the fix, because I think

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the feeling is where most of you

probably find yourself right now.

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You spend years, maybe even decades,

becoming genuinely excellent at something.

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People came to you for answers.

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You were the person in the room whose

opinion carried weight, whether that

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was in a hospital or courtroom, an

engineering firm, a classroom, wherever

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your first career happened to be.

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And somewhere along the way you decided

that expertise was transferrable.

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That if you'd earned that kind of

authority, once you'd earn again

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on a stage and probably faster,

because this time you already

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knew what you were talking about.

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Then you actually tried it.

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And the gap between I'm qualified

and I'm booked, turned out to be far

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bigger and far more disorientating,

than anyone prepared you for.

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nobody warned you that being right about

your subject and being wanted for your

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subject of two completely different games.

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So you're left with this quiet, creeping

conclusion that a lot of you have

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probably had at three in the morning.

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Maybe credentials aren't enough.

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Maybe there's something else

that everyone else already

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knows that you somehow missed.

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So I want to tell you that

conclusion isn't wrong.

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You are missing something.

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It's just not what you

probably think it is.

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It isn't talent, it isn't age.

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It isn't the fact that you are

newer to this than people who've

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been doing it for 20 years.

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It's whether your talk is

informational or transformational.

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And that one distinction explains

almost everything else that

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we're about to talk about.

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before I get into that distinction

properly, I want to quickly deal with

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the three things most of you have already

tried, because I hear these constantly in

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conversations with speakers just like you.

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The first is networking.

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The assumption that if you meet enough

people, get in enough rooms, shake enough

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hands, the bookings will follow because

that's how your old career worked.

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The trouble is that relationships

without positioning don't convert.

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You can know the right person and

still not be booked because knowing

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you isn't the same as understanding

what specific problem you solve.

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The second is free or paid stages.

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The logic here is that

visibility equals progress.

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So the more rooms you speak in, the more

inevitable the paid bookings become.

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Visibility though isn't the same as

being understood as a need to have.

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You can speak in front of 500 people

and still walk off stage as forgettable.

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Interesting, nice but not necessary.

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The third is reworking the talk itself,

better slides tied to delivery, more

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rehearsal, all useful, but none of

that fixes a badly translated problem.

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A well delivered version of the wrong

message is still the wrong message.

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Here's the actual distinction though.

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An informal talk leaves an audience

knowing more than they did before.

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A transformational talk leaves

them thinking, feeling or doing

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something differently, and

that's the whole difference.

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And it sounds simple, but almost nobody

in a second act gets it right the first

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time around because the instinct that made

you valuable in your old career is exactly

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the instinct that works against you.

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Here.

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You were valuable because you knew

things, you shared what you knew.

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That instinct carries straight

into speaking and it produces talks

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that inform rather than change.

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There are two families of, trapped

underneath that distinction.

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The first is about content talks

that inform instead of transform.

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The second is about structure talks

that might have the right content

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but collapse because of how they're

built or who they're actually about.

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The most common one, and the one I

want to probably spend most of the time

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on really, is the book report Trap.

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This is turning your keynote into the

TLDR version of your book or your thesis.

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You've written the book, you spent years

building the argument, and the talk

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becomes a summary delivery mechanism.

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You walk the audience through

your framework, the way you'd

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walk a reader through a chapter.

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The problem is that the audience

leaves with the Cliffs Notes version

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of something that they could have read

for themselves, and they leave with

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information, not with transformation.

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If your keynote could be replaced by

someone skimming your introduction

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chapter or a quick search on

chat, GPT, you're in this trap.

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I've encountered this with a

number of second act speakers who

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fall into this trap because they

want to deliver so much value.

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They have the expertise and they

want to share as much of it as

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possible in a very short time.

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So having that book done,

having that expertise there,

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you want to transfer that.

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You almost want to do a download

dump into your audience's

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brains, but it doesn't work.

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It's not an effective keynote and can

end up preventing you from being able to

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book consulting or workshops or anything

else that you might want to add on.

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When everything feels like it's already

been delivered in that one keynote,

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which is probably going to run way longer

than the average 45 minute keynote.

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And it's probably also going to

overload and overwhelm your audience,

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making them unlikely to tell you that.

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They'll tell you what value

they've got from it, but they're

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gonna walk away forgetting most

of what you ever talked about.

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Now there's also the professor trap

defaulting into the college lecturer mode.

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Comprehensive, structured,

credentialed, thorough.

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It's the instinct of someone who

spent an entire career being right,

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being your authority in the room,

and it shows up as a talk that covers

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everything rather than moving anything.

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Here's the uncomfortable

truth about that one.

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Audiences don't book professors.

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They book people who move them.

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And lecturing is almost the exact opposite

of moving someone the data trap as well.

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Believing that the case

is made by the numbers.

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So you load a talk with statistics,

charts proof data supports a

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transformation, it doesn't cause one.

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You can convince an audience with data

and still not have changed anything

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about how they think, feel, or act.

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They leave more informed and

exactly a static as they.

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there are also structural

traps, and the first is what

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I'd call the winging it trap.

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This is the speaker who knows their

material so well has lived it for

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decades, that they decide that they

don't need a script or a build.

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They'll just read a room and improvise.

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Now, here's the problem.

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Expertise gives you confidence

but not structure, and those

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are not the same thing.

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An unstructured, un formatted talk,

however knowledgeable the person giving

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it is leaves an audience with no through

line to hold onto and no clear moment

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where something actually shifted.

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Riffing works in comedy clubs because

the form itself allows for it.

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A keynote isn't that form.

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Without a build, even brilliant

material just becomes an

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impressive sounding wonder.

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This really is then about being

able to make an impact through

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things that are practised.

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Even polished, well timed, rehearsed

to a point of being able to riff

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within that framework, within the.

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Confines of what a

keynote is supposed to be.

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You might be able to deliver a perfectly

acceptable winging it, improvised

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talk with your expertise, but you're

not going to ever be able to deliver

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something that's super polished, has

hidden nuances in it, and connects

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on those deeper levels as you could

do with a fully formed keynote.

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The second is potentially the

memoir trap, the making the keynote

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all about you, your journey, your

career, your experience, your story.

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This one is sneaky because it often feels

the most authentic to the speaker and can

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genuinely land emotionally in the room.

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But if the talk is a monologue

more about what happened to you

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rather than a translation into

what changes for them, you've built

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something moving for you to deliver

and forgettable for them to act on.

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Your story is allowed to be in

the talk, but it's not allowed

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to be the point of the talk.

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Here's why this matters commercially

informational content in any

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of these three costumes reads

to a booker as nice to have.

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Interesting.

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Sure.

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Forgettable also, sure unstructured or

self-focused delivery undermines the

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case just as badly, even with strong

content underneath because the audience

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can't locate the transformation even if

it is technically in there somewhere.

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This ties back to something I

talk about a lot on this show.

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The test isn't whether

your topic is valuable.

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It's whether the person doing

the booking would lose any sleep

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over the problem that you solve.

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Describe the way that they

describe it, not the way you'd

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describe it as the expert.

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So take a topic like how

you show up as a leader.

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The emotional self at

work, framed the way.

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Personal development usually frames it.

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This becomes emotional mastery.

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And that phrase alone will lose a lot of

corporate buyers before you've even said

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anything else, because it sounds like

that inner word, like you're gonna make

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us talk about our emotions, aren't you?

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Not business outcomes.

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And A booker isn't paying

you to run a retreat.

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So here's the translation.

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Don't sell emotional mastery.

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Sell what?

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Its absence costs the business.

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A leader who shows up defensively,

who leads from the need to establish

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authority rather than the desire for

growth produces specific countable damage.

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People stop bringing them problems early.

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Disengagement creeps in.

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Good people quietly leave.

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That's not an abstract personal

development idea anymore.

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That's churn turnover,

that's lost productivity.

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That's the expensive stuff a

booker already loses sleepover.

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So now flip it.

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A leader who shows up openly

without judgement oriented toward

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growth rather than authority is

functionally a servant leader.

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And the research and the outcomes

on that style are well established.

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It attracts loyalty, it attracts

talent because people can feel the

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difference in how they're being led.

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It reduces churn, increases

productivity because the team is

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more fulfilled and less guarded.

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Same underlying subject

as emotional mastery.

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It's the same thing, completely different

door, because now it's framed, positioned

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as a business cost and a business return

rather than an inner work concept.

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So that's the whole exercise in miniature.

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Nothing about the content changed.

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What changed is that the pitch stopped

being about the speakers inner world and

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started being about the audiences bottom.

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Here's where I want to leave

you, and I want to add one

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thing before the usual close.

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none of what I've described

today, requires you to become

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the world's greatest show person.

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I want to be really clear about that

because I think a lot of second next

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speakers here transformational and

quietly translate it as to I need to

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become a natural born entertainer, or

the next Tony Robbins, and that's not it.

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Some of the worst keynotes I've seen in my

life have come from famous, notable people

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who get booked purely on name recognition

and never had to learn any of this.

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That's a different game built on fame,

not skill, and it's not available to you.

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So it is not a useful

yardstick either way.

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What you actually need is structure

and translation, which are learnable,

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teachable, buildable skills,

not a personality transplant.

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This is more about turning up the

dials of what you already have

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than trying to change you into

someone who you are not already.

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Your credentials made you an expert.

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Your book, your data, your

slides, your story, none of that

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on its own makes you booked.

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What gets you booked is whether the

audience changes because they were in

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the room, and whether they can feel the

shape of that change as it happens, not

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whether you are the most charismatic

person ever to hold the microphone.

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So this week, write the sentence

a booker would use to describe the

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problem you solve in their words.

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Then check your current

talk against all five traps.

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The book report, the professor, the data,

the winging it memoir, and be honest

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about which one it's actually built on.

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Naming it is most of the fix.

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Now a quick reminder before I go,

the September cohort of known, booked

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and paid blueprint is what today's

episode has been circling the whole

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way through the positioning work that

turns exactly this kind of translation

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into a bookable, repeatable offer.

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you'll heard more on that before

the episode started today.

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So I won't repeat the pitch,

but just don't sit on it.

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If you are nodding along today

and thinking, yeah, this is me.

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I need help with this.

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Now, if joining a programme isn't

really where you are at right now,

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you might want to at least check

out the free positioning tool.

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I'll have the link for that in the

show notes, and that will help you

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to see more clearly whether you

are positioned as a nice to have or

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whether you are a must book speaker.

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For now, go and do something worth

talking about and I'll see you next time

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for my interview with Owen Fitzpatrick.

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Don't miss it.