Lessons from Speaking on Stage

Alright, so this weekend was the incredible conscious investor growth summit that my amazing friend Julie Holly put on. Jamie and I, we flew out there on Thursday morning and then I spoke on Saturday night and we came back on Sunday evening and we had this wonderful four days in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho at this event with probably it was much, much smaller than the event that I spoke at a couple weeks ago at raise fest in Phoenix, which probably had around 1000 people. This event, I think, was probably close to 100. So much, much smaller, much more intimate. And in a lot of ways, that’s a little bit more stressful. I don’t know what it is, but something about speaking on a smaller stage, it’s a different energy, it’s a different vibe, there’s a different intimacy to it that I felt a different kind of pressure. And so in this video today, I want to recap three of the big lessons that I took away from this weekend. Because it’s not every day that you spend months and months and months rehearsing and practicing and dialing in a presentation, and then you get on a stage and you give it.

In life, by the time we get out of school and outside of sporting events, there’s not too many instances in our adult lives where we have this singular event that we’re training and preparing for. Everything that we do in life is just kind of like another day, another dollar, another grind, right? We don’t have these big landmarks in a lot of cases that we look forward to. And I think this is one of the reasons people love marathons, is because the marathon serves as a mile marker, a road sign off in the distance, to say, I’m preparing for a thing and it adds a seasonality to one’s life that kind of gets lost after we get out of school. I think there’s a lot of value in adding those artificial milestones into our lives to give us something to train for, give us something to look forward to. And if maybe you’ve struggling through life or your business right now and you’re like, it just kind of feels like a monotonous grind, maybe that’s what you need. Maybe you need that light off on the hill to seek and be targeting. So figure out what that could be for you. Now.

That’s kind of what speaking on a stage is like. I had months to prepare for my speech at raise fest and the speech that I gave at Julie’s event was a different speech entirely. So I had to learn that one and get it dialed in with much less practice, much less rehearsal time than the first speech. But in both cases, I had it on the calendar to look forward to months and months and months in advance, and I have one more speaking gig that I have. I think it’s like in a month at the best ever conference, and then I’m done. I’m done with speaking for the year, I think, unless somebody slides under the calendar unexpectedly. But these speaking engagements are a cool opportunity to have this event that’s off in the future and then plan and practice and then go and perform for it. And so I just wanted to take this opportunity to reflect on three of the things that were top of mind coming off the back of this event.
Number one, is this a lot of the stress and the pressure we feel when it comes to giving a presentation, to stepping on a stage, and this doesn’t necessarily need to be a keynote speech. I think one of the reasons we struggle with public speaking in general, whether that’s in front of five coworkers at the weekly all hands meeting or in front of 10,000 people in a stadium, I think one of the reasons people rate public speaking so highly is because we get so wrapped up in ourselves, in thinking that this is about us, and we’re afraid what are people going to think about us if we fumble over our words, if we trip and fall, if we look weird, if we’re standing in front of the crowd, and it’s so easy to feel, if I screw this up, I’m going to be ostracized and kicked out of the tribe. And that’s a very deep rooted existential threat for a tribal species like humans, where if you got kicked out of the tribe and were ostracized back on our ancestors day, that was good as death. But the problem is we don’t really have that. If you get kicked out of this group, there’s tens of thousands of other groups and social media platforms that you can find your people. And so this threat of getting kicked out doesn’t exist, but our biological selves don’t know that. And so it can manifest itself as this really deep rooted anxiety when you’re stepping onto a stage. And one of the things that’s helped me, besides just practicing and rehearsing a whole lot, is a mental frame, as a mental shift away from thinking that this is about me as much as possible, you really have to dissociate, because I know it’s so tempting to think, oh, it’s just me on the stage, one person in front of a thousand.
So it must be about me. And you have to work so hard to shut your ego up and remind yourself, this is not about me. They’re not here for me. They’re here for themselves and what they can learn. And hopefully, maybe I can be the conduit to share something that actually makes a difference in their life and that can help them. I’m not here for me. I’m here for them. I’m here to serve my message.
What I’m delivering right now, it’s not about looking cool, looking good. It’s not about any of that. It’s about delivering the message in an impactful way so that it can make an impact on the person hearing it. That’s the goal. It’s to serve the people that you’re there. And when you take that servant mindset into the activity, it does, in fact, reduce a lot of the stress. Us, because you can go up there with your heart open and say, I’m doing the best that I can. It’s not about me, and I’m going to do the best that I can for them.
And yes, I’m going to stumble. I’m going to forget some stuff, and it might get weird and awkward up here, but I’m up here with pure intentions, and my goal is to serve. And if you do that, it reduces so much of the stress and the anxiety. And it’s been very, very helpful for me because I can get very egotistical and very wrapped up in my own head thinking, this is about me. I want to look good. I want to look cool. People come up to me afterwards like, that was amazing. You changed everything.
I want that because I’m an ego driven animal. But that ego also leads to a whole lot of anxiety and self doubt and unnecessarily, because, again, it’s not about you. So that’s number one. That’s the first takeaway. The second takeaway is that something I think Dwight D. Eisenhower said, is that plans are useless, but planning is essential. And this has come up twice now, both at raise fest and then also at conscious investor. I rehearse and I plan and I plan, and I do hundreds of hours of rehearsing, of a 40 minutes speech, of an hour long speech so that I can be as well prepared as I can, I can be as dialed as possible, so that I can show the audience that I’ve respected their time by doing the work and making it as worthwhile for them as possible.
Now, we plan, we plan, we plan, we plan. But as soon as you make first contact with the enemy, good plans go out the window. It’s like something Mike Tyson said. Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. This is true on the stage as well. At raise fest, this manifested itself in a very interesting way, which is simply the timer I rehearsed. I planned, planned, planned, planned, and rehearsed with a timer next to me, and the timer was counting up to 40 minutes. So at different points of my speech, when I was at 15 minutes, I knew exactly where I was supposed to be.
And when I was at 30 minutes, I knew exactly where I was going to be. When I was at 22 minutes, I knew exactly where I needed to be in the speech so I could pace it correctly. Well, I stepped out on the stage at raise fest, and the timer wasn’t ticking up, it was ticking down. So now I know where I need to be at twelve minutes. But where am I supposed to be when the clock hits 27 minutes and it’s going downwards? Suddenly I had to do a little bit of mental math. And in doing that mental math, at one point, I actually lost my train of thought and I had to Adlib an entirely different story off the cuff until I could find the onramp back to where I was. And so it’s a perfect example of we plan, we plan, we rehearse and everything, and then it goes out the window. So the plan itself is useless.
You have to be prepared for the fact that the plan isn’t going to work how you think it’s going to work, but the planning process is essential. It’s because I planned, and I was so meticulous in the rehearsal that I was able to keep my composure, keep rolling despite getting sidetracked, and then find the on ramp again. So the planning was an essential part of the process. And this happened again at conscious investor, not with the clock. This time it was something different. So this time it was around the slides and the technology that I was using. Now, I don’t love presenting with slides, but when the organizers ask that you use slides, I’m like, cool. I don’t mind putting together a slide deck.
I don’t really use it. I try to use big, gesticulating hand gestures to entertain people, not my slides. But I had a slide deck, and I did the majority of my rehearsal without the slide deck so I could have the content completely locked into my mind. And then a couple of days before the event, I put together the slide deck and sent it over there. And I didn’t do as much rehearsing with the slide deck as I should have, because I thought that they were going to have what’s called a confidence monitor. This is a monitor that faces the speaker from the floor. So you can look down and you can see your slide that you’re on and you can see which slide is next. So I was told that there was going to be a confidence monitor, and there was, but the problem was it only showed the current slide.
It didn’t show the next slide. And when you have 30, 35 slides, that can be kind of tricky to remember, like, oh, what was my next slide? And the way that I had organized or prepared for this was that I wanted to be able to push the button, have the slide dramatically appear on the right queue. I couldn’t quite do that, though, because I was having to do a little bit of mental math every now and then of like, oh, what is the next slide? And when I’m thinking about what’s the next slide, it’s taking me a little bit further out of the moment. However, because I had the speech so dialed in and I could deliver it on autopilot, that actually was a blessing because it frees up the mental bandwidth necessary to do that forward thinking and be like, what is that next slide? When do I do that? And so what was really interesting is I found myself in the middle of the speech, kind of going out of body for a second and just trusting that my body would go through the motions, continue delivering the speech while I did the mental math of what slides were, at which point, and everything was perfect. It went perfectly fine. But it’s because I’d done so much planning that I was able to have that kind of. I could dissociate for a second and just trust the muscle memory. So as Dwight D.
Eisenhower said, plans are useless, but planning is essential. And that proved very fortuitous in this particular instance. The last thing that I want to share with you that I took away from this event is that you never know what you’re going to say that’s really going to resonate with somebody. After my speech, people come and they talk and they share which parts they enjoyed, a little bit of their story, and it’s an amazing opportunity to hear people where they’re at. And it’s always interesting to take note of which parts resonated most deeply or what they recall. And I have the things that I want them to recall, like the big bullet points, like the big milestones. I hope they take this away from the speech. But a guy comes up to me afterwards and he’s like, listen, you said a lot of wonderful things up there.
But there’s one thing you said that he’s like, I don’t even know if it’s kind of a throwaway thing that you said it, but it really, really made a difference to me because he has a son who has ADHD and he’s going through a very similar situation. And the throwaway statement that I said it was around the larger idea. A larger idea is that you have to play the cards you’re dealt in this life, but you get to choose the games you play. So that was the larger concept, but the smaller concept was simply, there are certain games you are not designed to play and so you need to be okay not winning those games. For me, the throwaway comment was, I will never be able to win the game of organized education. Like, you could put me in a 7th grade english class and it doesn’t matter what tools or systems you gave me, I was never going to win that game. And that comment about being put into a 7th grade english class resonated with this gentleman because his son is in that situation right now with ADHD and he’s like, I don’t know how to let him know it’s okay and how to help him through this period. And it’s like the thing that I walk away from is this comes with all content and this comes with our products and services that we sell to our customers, is that you never really know what the thing is that’s going to impact them, what it is about your product that they really love.

You have some ideas about the different features and benefits and your stories and your content. You have some ideas about what the overarching theme is, but you never exactly know what somebody’s going to take away and what’s going to change their life. And so you need to be okay just putting it all out there and not self censoring yourself, not self judging yourself. The reason I think a lot of people don’t put out content is because they’re afraid. Like, oh, I’m just saying something that everybody else has already heard before. This has no value, right? It seems so mundane and rote to you, but to somebody else, it might be the thing that they need to hear that could change their life. So I encourage you, whatever your story is, whatever your product or service that you have, I hope you go share it with the world because you don’t know exactly who it could help and in what capacity. You have your avatar, you have your ideas, but until that idea meets the real world, you don’t know what kind of impact it can actually have.

So, please, I hope you take your ideas and you go and put them out into the world. Whether that’s on a stage, that’s in your writing, that’s on a podcast, whatever the vehicle is for you, I hope you take your ideas and you go make a massive impact. So that’s going do it for me. Guys and gals, I appreciate you. Thank you so much. We’ll catch you in the next episode, but until then, stay hyper focused, my friend.