S10E5: Building Trust in the Spotlight: How to Become a Trusted Professional Speaker

I applied my relative trust model and trust habit process to many different jobs, roles, and relationships, but somehow I never applied it to my own profession: public speaking. In 2020, I gave a speech at the Meeting Professionals International (MPI) annual conference. When I prepared for that, I found a few interesting things: one, I found a CNBC article that, based on a survey, found that the 6th most stressful job in America is an event coordinator. Two, I conducted my own survey and asked what is the biggest concern for event planners. At the top place, with a significant distance from the second place, was “dependency on other people.” Think about an event planner. Planning an event for 5,000 people (I spoke at events like that). The speaker doesn’t show up. Or delivers less than the 5,000 participants expected, and they keep talking about how the keynote speaker bombed. Do you want to be that event planner? Event planners have to trust the speakers. How can we, professional speakers, help them trust us? That’s what I will cover in this episode.