Ways to be known and visible 5 – Public Speaking

I won’t get tired of repeating over and over again that one of the best ways to accomplish our goals is by being known and visible. This is a strategy for the long run that will undoubtedly have its rewards and benefit us over other people. In the last three installments of this series I talked about accomplishing this goal by writing in Blogs, traditional media and even a book. Today I’ll talk about a different, yet complementary topic, which is doing public speaking.

One of the most effective ways that I’ve done to accomplish my goals and get to being know is by doing lectures and conferences in front of different types of audiences. I want to tell how I’ve done this and a little bit about my personal story.

In my nature I’m a quiet, introverted and shy person. However, when I was in high school I discovered I was a good actor and that it was easy for me to stand in front of a large audience. Additionally, I saw that I liked to improvise and hated to memorize lines. At the same time, I was still a shy and introverted person. Several years later, with my first major entrepreneurship I started to sell and saw that I was good at it. I never had formal training in sales, but it was natural for me to sell and convince people of my ideas.

Years after, in my current entrepreneurship, where I work in Internet, Technology and Innovation Strategy Consulting, I started to participate in lectures and conferences as a way to be known. My first experiences where probably not the best but with time I got better. I started to loose stage fear and results in general where great. In fact, today I’m a professional Speaker and I get paid for this job.

In practically all the lectures I’ve done, people have come to speak to me at the end because they want to learn more about my topic or even want to work with me. Currently, as a result of the evolution of my firm and lack of time, I’m not doing too many lectures.

Without a doubt, doing public speaking has open doors for me and a successful strategy to find clients and make my consulting services known. As I said before, several businesses have materialized thanks to these venues and I receive money from many lectures.

In my case, I discovered accidentally that I was a good public speaker and liked to share my knowledge. However, it is clear that this is a strategy for some people, not for all. For instance, I’ve met people who have a great deal of knowledge but are awful speakers and don’t know how to transmit their ideas. Others have stage fright and do a terrible job. Although this can happen, my advice is to try it once and see how you do. If I hadn’t done it this way, I might have not seen that this is one of my main talents and which has paid of exponentially.

Conferences, writing and other strategies I will talk about in this series are all complementary and one aids the other. I invite you to analyze all these strategies and take action on those you like and where you are comfortable. I’m sure that in the long run you’ll see the rewards of this effort and as you become know, you’ll turn into an authority on your expertise.

Image taken from Flickr.com