Speaking on Stage with Tom Bilyeu

So about three months ago, this would have been in November. I get a call from my budy Hunter Thompson. Hunter is a fantastic killer entrepreneur who has built some amazing companies over the years. I have a ton of respect for him. And he reached out and he said, hey, bro, I’m putting on this conference. I’m putting on this event, and I want you to come speak. I was like, I’m there, bro. I’m there.

Let’s do it. But then he told me, well, I gotta let you know you’re going to be speaking right before Tom, Billy and I was like, oh, okay. So this isn’t some small time gig. This is going to be a big production. And in that moment, I made this mental decision. I made this commitment to myself that I was going to do everything within my power to get on that stage three months later and be able to deliver the absolute best keynote to my ability. And I put in so much effort in rehearsing and practicing and rewriting over and over and over this speech so that I could get up there on stage and deliver this thing and nail it. And I put a lot of pressure on myself.

I treated this kind of like my own personal super Bowl. I am not a keynote speaker. It’s something that I have aspirations to become a better public speaker, because I think the ability to communicate effectively, whether that’s through the written word, in video, or on a stage, or just in one on one communications, I think that’s a skill worth continuing to refine and hone. And I saw this as an opportunity to try and step outside of my comfort zone and do something in a way that I had never done it before. A lot of times when I do a keynote or a speech, I put effort into it. I work hard at it, and I feel confident when I get up on their stage. But never before have I put this much work into a particular 40 minutes presentation. I rehearsed this speech over 100 times.

I believe the 110th time I delivered this speech was the very first time anybody ever heard it. And that was on stage last week at this conference in front of 1000 people. And I wanted to share a little bit of the experience with you guys because I had talked about this a few times on previous podcasts, that I was taking this seriously and that I was putting in the work, and I shared a little bit of that journey. But now that we’re on the other side of it, I can look back and I can reflect and share some thoughts about it. So the first thought that I want to share is that I had this really interesting experience. When I travel, I get a lot of anxiety. Whenever I’m outside of my routine, my home, my hovel, I feel stress and anxiety. I love the idea of traveling much more than I actually like the act of traveling, packing and making sure I take everything with me.
And what if I forget something? Just causes me so much deep anxiety. And then when I’m there, I know I’m not going to eat well, I’m not going to sleep well, and all these things, they cause me a lot of stress, and I don’t like a lot of stress in my life, but when I go to speak at events, it’s kind of unavoidable. And this time there was the stress. But what was really interesting, I was reflecting on this and talking to Jamie about it at one point before, I think it was like the night before my speech, which was the next morning, I reflected that a lot of times when I go to these events, I feel the stress and anxiety, like wanting to get up there and do the best job that I can. But what is interesting about it this time was that I was stressed out more by the fact that I wasn’t stressed out. I felt this weird sense of, like, I should be more anxious about this presentation in the next couple of hours, and I didn’t really feel it. I felt the anxiety about the fact that I didn’t feel the anxiety, which is very strange. And I think a lot of that was the result of just having rehearsed and practiced that thing so many times that I had it down as well as I could possibly get it.
And with that in mind, I was able to get on the stage in kind of a very loose, relaxed state of mind and just be present and enjoy it, which was very cool. The other side of this, though, is that when I got up on stage, despite having put in all this work and effort and everything, there were still a lot of parts that were ad lib, which is really interesting. I just kind of made them up as I went. At one point in particular, I lost my train of thought. I made a weird connection in my mind. I started thinking about something else, and I lost where I was. And instead of panicking, I just went into a separate story that I had not intended to put into the presentation, but it fed so naturally into where I was at that instant that I just went with it. And I trusted that I would be able to find my way back to where I lost myself.
And sure enough, within just 15 seconds, I was able to honor it back into where I was, and nobody was the wiser. And that’s one of the big takeaways when it comes to speeches, is that nobody knows what you were supposed to say. They don’t know. And so as long as you don’t lose your cool and you just keep rolling forward, they don’t know what you left out or what you ad lived in. And that’s number one. So if you ever lose your spot, don’t stress out, just keep going. And that’s why we rehearse, that’s why we practice as much as we do, is so that everything can flow organically and we can start to improv in the moment. The improv only comes when you have complete mastery over the content.
You have 100% certainty that you know in and out, that you can work your way back in and out of any different story or any different section of the content. And that’s where I felt like I was in that presentation, which was a really good feeling. The thing that led me to getting tripped up there, actually, this is interesting, was when I practiced, when I rehearsed, I would always set a timer in front of me, and the timer would count up because I knew the presentation was 40 minutes. I wanted to get dialed in, make sure it came in right at 40 minutes on the dot. But when I got on stage, the timer wasn’t counting up, it was ticking down. So it started at 40, and it worked its way down to zero rather than the reverse. And that just slight mental flip. At one point, I was doing the math in my head at around 22 or 28 minutes to invert in my mind and be like, oh, am I on pace? Am I ahead? I’m behind.
And in that moment of doing the mental flip of the math, I lost my spot. We practice and we prepare as much as you can, but there’s always going to be things that throw you off on game day, and that’s okay. You roll with the punches as much as you can. What I learned from that is I need to practice both sides with the counter coming down, counter going up. I need to know it backwards and forwards. And so I didn’t quite know it as well on that because I hadn’t rehearsed it with the counter going down. Really subtle thing. It was tricky, though.
The thing that, the biggest takeaway by far is I had so many people come up to me after the speech and send us beautiful, nice, lovely words. It was amazing. A lot of people, I think, got a lot of value out of the talk, and it reflected back to me, the fact that the amount of work that we put in in private is, as Tony Robbins says, we are rewarded in public for the work we do in private and the work that we do in private. Those multiple hours, I could have stopped at 50 hours of rehearsal, or 30 hours or 20 hours even, and it would have been fine. But I put in close to 70 hours on this thing, rehearsing it, and I really do think that there probably wasn’t a ton of improvement between hours 40 and 70. But I think that little bit of time and energy that went into it took it from being as a good presentation to being the best I could possibly make it. And stepping on that stage, knowing that I had put in that much time and energy into making the next 40 minutes of those thousand people, making that 40 minutes as worthwhile for them as possible, gave me a lot of confidence that I had done everything in my power and made the whole experience just a whole lot more enjoyable. And I share that because I think sometimes we vastly underestimate the amount of work that it’s going to take to become good, if not great at a thing.
I don’t think I’m anywhere near being great at being a public speaker, but I’m really looking forward to where I can be with another thousand hours of practice and this process. I get deeply uncomfortable with traveling and speaking at events. It’s very hard for me because I put so much emotional weight in wanting to do it as well as I can. You only get that one opportunity on that stage, on that day to deliver. And I reflected in a tweet recently that fear is pointing in the direction of growth. And for me, the fear that I feel, I don’t have a lot of things in my life anymore. That caused me a lot of deep anxiety and fear. As your comfort zone expands and your capacity take on heavier and heavier weights expands, so too does your comfort zone.
And that makes it harder and harder to find the fringes of what you’re comfortable with. And that becomes difficult, because the importance of finding the edge of your comfort zone is that’s where learning and growth occurs. And as your comfort zone expands, it’s harder and harder to grow. And so you have to take these opportunities, when you find them to move towards the fear, because that’s usually pointing you in the direction of growth. And this is definitely something that I need to keep leaning into because it’s something that I feel this discomfort with. And that, therefore, is a reflection that that is where the growth is going to occur. So I wanted to share that with you guys. And if a few of you beautiful souls reached out and said some very kind words to me that you knew my speech was coming up and said, shot me some emails and dms and that meant the world to me, it was very lovely.

I appreciate it. Thank you. You know who you guys are. And so, yeah, I’m just looking for the next one. The next speech I’m giving actually is next week in Idaho and I have ten days to get that speech locked in. So we’re going to put in a little bit less work on this one than we did the previous one. We’re going to do our best to make it as awesome as possible. So stay tuned and we’ll give you some be back on how that happened.

But until then, in the meantime, I’ll see you in the next episode, my beautiful people. Stay hyper focused, my friends. Bye.