Charlotte Kemp explores how to balance speaking as a business with speaking as an art form. She argues you need both: the business side pays your bills and builds your career, while the artistic side shapes what your audience actually experiences and remembers.
Now, this particular distinction that I make about professional speaking is something that I've developed as a concern for myself over the course of my career. We've already said that professional speaking means that this is a business. You are developing a business around your topic, and your speaking is just one element of that business. It's important if we want to be successful, sustainable professional speakers that we do see what we do as a business. We have responsibilities financially that we need to meet and we need to make that work. Of course, not every speaker wants to be a professional speaker or to develop their business, and that is perfectly acceptable. But if you are wanting to develop your business as a speaker, then this is a priority. It is essential. But on the other hand, the other kind of side of this coin is the fact that we are actually creating. We as professional speakers are creating so much art. We're creating out of our imaginations, out of our experiences, out of our learning. We are creating something for someone else to experience. It is in the course of our words that we share with an audience, the books that we write, the content that we produce, that we create new ways of thinking or experiencing the world. We are creating art. We are creators. We are casting spells with the words that we use. And the more we think of our speaking in terms of that artistic creative expression, the deeper and richer will be the solution that we actually have for our clients.
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