What a professional, professional speakers does, that an amateur doesn't

I want to tell a short story about the difference between a real deep thinker and someone who is only skimming the surface. I work with professional speakers and aspiring professional speakers, and I'm very supportive of the journey that many people go on to go from an idea and a concept through all the hard work to eventually delivering something of real value to people. But some people don't do that work. I'm going to change names and places and topics, but a number of years ago I had the opportunity to interview 2 people who coincidentally, and not through planning, were actually speaking about the same topic. We're going to just pretend that it was authenticity. One called themselves the Authenticity Doctor and the other was the Authenticity Whisperer. Unfortunately, I interviewed the Whisperer first, and this woman came in with such a deep understanding of authenticity. She could name it and define it. She could explain what it looked like. She could explain what it looked like when someone was pretending but was not authentic. She could explain the consequences of inauthenticity and deception in one's personal life and working with other people and in business, in terms of identity, in terms of the product of their work. She could talk about the practical elements of developing authenticity, exploring it for yourself, unpacking it, and allowing it to grow in your life. She had a number of different programs. She could coach on authenticity, you could do an online course, and she had some other ways to kind of engage with the work that she did so that people could experience that practically for themselves. Every time I asked a question, she had 4, 5, 6, 7 steps deeper to explore if we had the time to do so. And I was truly impressed and amazed at her work. I was inspired to create my own body of work that emulated hers in any way. Then the second person came on who was the authenticity doctor, and this person had not done the work. They had an idea and a concept. They knew that authenticity, or whatever it was, was a good buzzword. But this person just kept saying, you need to be authentic. You need to, you know, Be authentic. And we would talk around things, and I was trying to drag some kind of insight out of this person, and then they would come back with, there it is again, that word authentic. And he wasn't. And we, we had nothing of depth to explore. Everything that he was talking about was just that little buzzword right at the top. There was no depth, there was no experience, there was nothing that he could really bring to the conversation. Why do I share that? Because if you are an aspiring professional speaker, then be professional and get to know your topic. Dig deep, learn everything that you need to know. The minute you start learning, you're going to be way ahead of most people in the world. But if you really want to make it, if you really want to be respected, if this really is going to be the space you're going to work in, then do your homework. And dig deep. Make sure that you have an hour's worth of content for every minute that you're sharing on a stage or on a webinar or a podcast. Really know your stuff. That is how you are going to be respected in your space and how you're going to bring real value to your clients and to your audiences. And if you are somebody who is hiring speakers, then have a conversation around them and ask other people who know their work, to determine whether that person really has, really has the content, really has the value that you're looking for, or if they just have a really good marketing team. I have all the time in the world for people who are aspiring, who are starting out on their journey. Do what you need to do to get there, but don't take the kind of speaking engagement that a real expert should take until you are ready for it. There's plenty of other opportunities for you to use to develop your, your craft, but to develop your topic so that you become the expert that deserves to be on stage, to be financially compensated, and to bring real value and transformational change to your clients, to your audiences.