134: How I Prepare for In-Person Speaking Engagements

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Show me what this group most needs to hear or help me be a messenger for what this group most needs today. This is an offering. This is me setting that intention in the morning that the best thing I can do is get in that room and help deliver what they most need to hear.

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Hello Hello Free Timers. I am recording this episode just on the other side of returning from my very first paid in person speaking gig for free time. The first one for free time since February 2020. Can you believe it? In February 2020 I spoke at the World Bank. I was talking about pivot free time. The book was nowhere on my radar yet and in another nod to irony, I had recorded an interview with Grant Baldwin from my hotel room of that event on becoming a successful speaker. So he and I were talking about travel tips, how we prepare, how we get clients. That was in February 2020 and I don't think I would have believed it if you told me then that my next paid in person gig would not be for two and a half years. So it's a little funny to be recording an episode on how I prepare for in person gigs, but I figure things are starting to pick up a little bit, albeit nowhere near the cadence that they were pre pandemic that if any of you are looking to do paid keynote speaking or paid interactive workshops as I often like to call it, because I don't really love to just talk at people. I wanted to share some of the ways that I prepare because we all might be a little rusty. On the morning of this most recent event I was having coffee with a friend and he asked me, do you still get nervous? Now I've been doing professional keynote speaking as a Main source of income for 11 years, probably minus two, counting the pandemic. Although I did a lot of virtual and then even prior to that I did training and development during my time at Google. So I've been in front of many rooms. This is something that I'm used to. And like so many speakers, I still get nervous, especially because I was feeling rusty. The format of this event was completely joyful. It was Fireside Chat style, which meant that someone was asking me questions in front of the room. I didn't even have to be standing on a stage struggling on high heels that I haven't worn in two and a half years with a clicker talking at people. That's really not my jam. Anyway, as I mentioned earlier, I like to do things in a much more interactive way, but but this was a relatively low stakes format and still when it came to game time. When this Fireside chat started, my heart was thumping out of my chest. I know to expect surges of adrenaline for an event, but still I felt like I had two and a half years of buildup. I didn't know if I still had it. I didn't know if these concepts of free time would resonate with this group, which was a company setting. And so I had a lot of nerves and I felt like there was a lot riding on this. I really wanted it to go well so that maybe that could lead to more work in the future. And I'm thankful to say it really did. It was a huge success, but a lot of prep went into making it a success, even if the format seems really casual again, in this case Fireside Chat style. So today I want to share with you how I prepare for an event like this. Now in episode 126, I share my seven strategies for creating Time Buffer. Time Buffer is a big part of preparing for a keynote for me, especially an in person one. I leave a lot of abundant time leading up to the event. I don't see a lot of people. I usually don't tell anybody I'm in town if I'm going to another city. I spend a lot of time by myself. I don't often say yes to things like a happy hour the night prior or lunch with attendees on the day of. I try to really contain and conserve my energy. So in this I'm not really going to talk about Time Buffer, but more how do I prepare the content to make sure that when I do get on that stage that what I'm sharing is maximally helpful to the best of my ability with that group of attendees. The first thing I do is price abundantly. Now this is not quite related to the nitty gritty of preparing for a speaking gig, but abundant pricing is important. And remember from the episode on time buffer, I am not pricing based on my time. I don't price and say what is one hour of Jenny's time in front of a room worth? It is pricing based on the value to the organization of the content that I'm delivering and multiply that by the number of attendees. So what's possible if 100 people become 5% more efficient within this company or 500 people become 1% more efficient? Or in the case of Pivot, if it helps five people stay engaged and stay in their role, that might help prevent more turnover and further recruiting and onboarding costs. So I'm always pricing based on value. And the reason I mentioned pricing at all as part of the preparation is I think it's important to charge abundantly so that you want to go the extra mile. It's really important. If you're the hiring organization, you also want to pay abundantly. You might be working with limited budget. However, you don't want to negotiate someone down so low that they're not motivated or they feel a little resentful or they don't want to put in the extra work to make the event a huge success for me. By the time I say yes, at whatever fee, of course I'm going to give it the best that I have beyond pricing when I price an event. First of all, I learned from fellow speakers, I don't separately reimburse for travel expenses like hotel, ground transport, food, none of it. Who wants to do that? That's a total pain. So I will just say one number and I take care of all travel within that. When I book a keynote speaking engagement, it comes with one pre event strategy session and one post event follow up call. This is really important because earlier in my career I used to have clients that they would book me for an event and then they would say things like great, let's have a weekly sync now between now and the event. And that's easy for them to say because they're getting paid for their time no matter what, so why wouldn't they want to do a weekly sync? But for me, I realized I need to have more boundaries around how much an organization gets to interact with me before an event. That pre event strategy session is really important and I lean on that heavily. I don't need to have that until a week or two prior to the event, but Sometimes we do schedule it for a month out. What's most important about that is asking what would make this a smashing success for you, the event organizers and for your attendees. So how do you want people to feel when they leave the event? What do you want them to do differently? How will you be measuring the impact of an event like this? The most important part for me that actually helps me shape what I'm going to say when I get there is what challenges is your group specifically facing? So whether we're talking about pivot or free time, I know that they're bringing me in to talk about one of those two big umbrella topics, but they might be facing a unique set of challenges. And certainly the last few years, everybody, the challenge level is ramped up to 10x what it was previously. For example, let's say with free time, they might say, well, people are feeling overwhelmed. Okay, and within your group specifically, how does that show up? Or how are you hearing that in employee survey feedback? What language are people using? And then that lets me know that yes, we're talking about free time. But for this group, it's not so much that they're struggling to prioritize, it's that they feel overwhelmed with too much to do or we want to focus on the well being aspects of free time less around uber efficiency. Maybe they've already got that covered. So this pre event strategy session is really vital for helping me hone in on the parts that I want to emphasize most. And I'll also ask a few logistical questions like what the rest of the day looks like if I'm part of a larger summit. Are we going to do handouts? How are we going to set up the room, and so on. Then leading up to the event, I will start to look at the slide deck. Now this is really important. Not everybody does this, but I only have one slide deck and I have mine in Google Slides. That way I can pull it up from any computer in any presentation room. There's never issues of trying to upload and download and send hard files like a PowerPoint. With the decks in Google Slides, one for pivot, one for free time. I am not creating a new deck for every client. That's really important. The slides are simple enough that leading up to the event I will just go through the deck and hide and unhide the sequence of slides that I would find most helpful if I'm going to do slides at all. The handouts usually don't change either. I like to print handouts double sided color on cardstock, hat, Tip to my friend Tor mbs, who I think just does a brilliant job with his handouts. The reason I love handouts are because it allows for some individual reflection time within a session, even if it's a keynote speech. I'm not really the Grant Cardone, you know, razzle dazzle, have a wad of cash. Like, have this sizzle factor on stage. That's not really my style. Or you could even say Tony Robbins. I don't know some of these really flashy speakers. I see myself much more as a facilitator. Yes, I'm going to deliver some content. But then the thing that people are most craving to connect with is themselves. That's what's so rare in this world. And that's what's really rare with busy people who have a lot going on. It is so rare to pause, step back from the day to day for even an hour or half an hour. The reason that I love handouts is that it gives people a chance to go inward and reflect on what I'm saying, apply it to themselves, spark new ideas, and I'm guiding them through that process. If I have 90 minutes of my session, for example, usually 15 to 20 minutes will be the TED talk style. Big idea. Pivot change is the only constant. Let's get better at it. Free time. It's that free time is a mindset and a verb. It's not just what you do with your time off work. It's how do we get better at doing more and more, more of our best work. Then There might be 15, 20 minutes of an interactive portion and then 20 minutes of Q& A. That's just to give you an example. And even as I said that, that only made for an hour talk. Bottom line is that the talk can be expanded and contracted. The general pillars don't change too much. In my case, there are some speakers who love to cram events back to back. I've never even had that much demand that I would be on the road and have one event every day for a week. Or these like real road warriors going to a different city, three cities in one week for different speaking gigs. So let me start by saying I've never had that kind of demand. Nor do I think I could keep up with something like that unless I was doing multiple talks in a week for the same organization, in which case that's super joyful because you're there, you can get into a groove. The reason I bring that up is that some speakers try to minimize the time within an organization. If you're paying me for an hour long keynote. I'm going to roll my suitcase in an hour before I go on stage and I'm going to roll my suitcase right back out and head to the airport as soon as I step off the stage. That's not me. If I am part of a full day summit, I like to show up for the very opening of the summit and I stay all the way through my session. I don't necessarily need to stay till the end after that unless there's a good reason to do so. I just find it extremely helpful to immerse myself in the language of this organization if I can. I never mind if that means signing an NDA. I find that attending those morning if the kickoff to a summit or a day long event, it's usually from higher level leadership than even who's organizing the event and they're sharing what's important to them. Why is everybody meeting for this? What are the goals for the year? What are the strategies? And I can start to pull in examples and relevant context and talking points into what I'm going to be saying later in the day. So I never ask for extra. This is not an add on to the event. I ask, in fact, if I can attend. In some cases that means I get to the venue at 8am and I'm there listening to sometimes what can be nitty, gritty, intricate talk about the organization or different groups within the company. But every single time it helps me feel much more prepared for when my session starts. Because I know people's names who've gone previously. I know I can pull in again some of their snippets and examples and what they've shared that's important. I feel that I get to steep myself like a bag of tea in the language of that company and little catchphrases or things related to the theme of that day of that summit. And that helps calm my nerves a lot to be in the room, also to be meeting people. Sometimes if there are breaks, I get to shake a few people's hands, say hello, familiarize myself with who's in the room and create, you know, some mini relationships before I go on stage. But most of all to absorb that context. I've said it already, but I will say like some speakers, there's just no way they would do that. They don't feel they need to do that. I love to do that. I feel that once you're flying to have me out, if I'm part of a bigger day summit or a broader agenda, I want to be there for as much of it as I can before my session. If I'm the kickoff, maybe that's a different story. But I generally feel, especially when an organization is hiring me, to travel, to go somewhere else and be on site once I'm there, I want to make the most of my time there, to make my session the best it can possibly be. Now, again, for me, that does not include things like mixers later in the day or the day prior, because for me personally, those tend to drain my energy and they take a little bit away every now and then. Attending something like that can be really helpful to again, just to understand what's on someone's mind, what's the collective consciousness of that group heading in. But I try to conserve my energy as best I can. That said, when I'm sitting at the back of the room listening and absorbing what's important to this group, that fuels me, that gives me energy, and that gives me confidence for my session once I'm on stage.

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We'll be right back just after this.

In the case of this recent event, because it was a Fireside chat, I got a few of the kickoff questions in advance. So another thing that I did while I was on the plane, I have a remarkable tablet. I think I first heard Amy Porterfield talk about hers, and then the New Yorker did this funny article about different productivity tablets. It's kind of funny because it's meant to be more streamlined than an iPad, which I have an iPad too. The Remarkable tablet is meant to mimic paper. So if this is neither here nor there that I'm telling you that I did this on a Remarkable. You can do this on a pen and paper. But the Remarkable was cool because I hand wrote those five or six starting questions and then while I was on the plane, I don't always like to have my laptop open because to me, laptop equals work and usually email or things like that. But with the remarkable, I could just by hand jot down key talking points and stories and examples. This is really important because it's one thing to have strong ip, a framework, pivot method, free time framework, but it's another thing to make it real for the people in the room through stories and examples. That's another element that I try to customize for the organization. So depending who I'm speaking with, I want to make sure that I'm pulling in relevant little micro case studies of how I've applied principles related to the questions that the organizer is asking me. My brainstorming started while I was on the plane, but then it continued while I was in the room and the summit started. So even while I'm listening, I'm still jotting down more examples. And this just helps because then I can review my notes in the days leading up to the event and absorb it goes somewhere deep into my consciousness. You know, I don't need to memorize anything verbatim, but the more that I've sort of scanned back over my notes, my shorthand, the better off I am. And even during on the day of, when I'm taking notes on what people are saying before me, I'll skim that again quickly before I go on. Sometimes there's a lunch break before my session and I'll take that lunch break to review my notes. The reason I brought up the remarkable tablet is that you can send a PDF to yourself. So I even printed out my notes. I studied them in a printout, which is so old school now, even my printer at home doesn't work anymore. And then I also emailed them to a tablet that I knew we were going to have at the front of the room that would have incoming questions from the group. So as I was tracking what questions were coming in from participants, we had some in the room, some that were attending remotely via streaming. I could also flick back and forth to my notes, and that was really helpful for just bringing up some of the key talking points that I didn't want to forget. Again, I usually don't rely on notes, but in this case, because we had the tablet anyway for the questions coming in, because I did my notes on the remarkable, I was able to send that PDF to the organizer who could then pull it up on the iPad. The point I'll make there is just that the more versatile you can be with your notes, your handouts, your slides, you have more optionality on the day of, you have more ways to engage with your notes and your content. And whatever elements the organizer is including as well. Starting about 20 to 30 minutes before I go on stage, my heart starts thumping out of my chest. And this happens every single time. I've shared it before, but I'll never forget. In the book Confessions of a Public Speaker, Scott Birkin says this is totally normal because anytime you're an animal standing alone on an open plain with no weapons and nowhere to hide and dozens if not hundreds of eyeballs staring at you, evolutionarily speaking, you are about to die. So I know that I still get nervous every time, all the time. I will get nervous. If I'm in a room of 20 people and I'm asked to introduce myself, my heart will start beating. It's almost. It's not a rational thing. There's no amount of just telling myself, oh, it's going to be fine. I've done this before. Some of that can help, but I know to expect a physiological reaction. The key that a lot of newer speakers don't understand is that they take that as a bad sign, a personal flaw or shortcoming, and then they start freaking out, oh my God, I'm nervous. And then that creates more adrenaline, the opposite effect of what you want. When this was happening to me for this most recent event, it was about 20 minutes prior my heart starts thumping out of my chest and that's when I'll start my yoga breathing. So if I'm in the back of the room, I hope that no one can hear me. I will make that oceanic sound so that keeping my mouth closed is slow and steady on the inhale.

And slow and steady on the exhale.

I'll try to do as many of those deep breaths as I can. The goal is to release the adrenaline, give it something to do. You can also clench and unclench your fists. You gotta get that adrenaline flowing. And putting your body back into its parasympathetic nervous system through slow, steady breathing is really helpful. Even if I have done that, I often still get on stage and in the first five minutes I still have that sensation of my heart pounding out of my chest. I don't mind, except for the fact that sometimes the nerves are so strong that it makes my voice shaky, or I'll get the shaky leg or the shaky hand. And that's when the self consciousness kicks in like, oh, they can tell that I'm nervous. How embarrassing. Or none of us want to sound like we're nervous. I try not to overly focus on it. I know that it will dissipate if I don't focus on it. So even in the case of this recent event, yes, my heart was thumping out of my chest, but I do my best to keep breathing, keep going, smile and remember to have fun. The last pointer that helps me prepare for in person gigs happens the morning of and maybe once again when I'm in the room just before I go on. And that is almost saying a prayer or setting an intention. And I just say, show me what this group most needs to hear or help me be a messenger for what this group most needs today. This is an offering. This is me setting that intention in the morning that the best thing I can do is get in that room and help deliver what they most need to hear. I don't always know what that's going to be. And there is this element of a spiritual sense of receiving almost intuitively what that is, asking that it be shown and holding the intention that that's what I can bring to this group. There are many times where I have stories come to me last minute in the room when I'm listening to other people speaking when I'm on the stage and I just trust to go with what comes to me. This is why I don't put a ton of detailed prep in in the weeks leading up to it. I actually like to do that preparation much closer to the event. And I will often be furiously writing out new notes or new ideas the morning of, because that is when start to understand the energy of this particular group on this particular day and time and moment in all of our lives. And certainly sitting in the room again listening to other people's talks helps with that. And so does my offering and my intention. It's not about please help me look good up there. That's not the goal. Please help me be a messenger for what this group most needs to hear. How can I be most beneficial to everybody here in the room on this day, in this moment in time? And that prayer, that intention gives me the last bit of confidence that I need when I'm going on stage. Because it's really a moment of surrender that I'm the messenger. I don't know how else to say it. I'm the messenger. I'm the vehicle for what can be most helpful. And therefore it's not about me, it's just not. It's not about what I'm wearing and how much weight I've gained or not, or it's nothing, or if am I nervous or not. It's how can I be of service? And one of the most special things about getting to do this kind of work, being on any stage at all is. It's a real privilege to have people's time and attention and even to be part of an important strategic day in their career for their team or be part of a day where they get to take time away from the day to day grind and hustle and all that. It's a real privilege. So I'm always doing my best to be present and meet that moment. And that's why I don't create a chaotic schedule for myself before or after because I'm really trying to receive energetically what is going to be most beneficial. And in order to do that, I need to be very quiet. I cannot have a lot of noise, I can't be rushing around. I need to go to bed really early. As I said in the time buffer, I try to stay on my time zone even if it means ridiculously going to bed at 6 or 7pm in the destination city. And I just get really quiet. I've shared that sometimes I feel guilty when I travel because I don't see very many people and my little gremlins say, oh, you should really be setting up networking coffees or seeing family and friends and all kinds of people. There's usually so many options when I'm in a city, but if I'm being paid for an event, I feel that my commitment is to that event. And especially with having fewer on the calendar these last few years, I'm also noticing it's a big energy exertion going in and coming back out. So that's just where I'm at. Some people don't have these energy considerations and it gives them energy to do all kinds of things in a destination city. And I really admire that that just happens to not be me. My approach is cool, calm, collected, quiet and that enables me to feel really focused and confident on the day of. Last but not least, this is not quite how I prepare for speaking engagements, but a lot of organizations and events will do a post session feedback surve. I really follow up. I try to make sure that I'm able to view that data because all the prep in the world you don't always know how things go. And so I love to see survey results whenever an organization is willing to share them with me. Did you enjoy this session? What were your key takeaways? How could this session be improved? Is there anything else you would like to share? Even the five star kind of net promoter style? Would you recommend this session to a colleague? I find this so helpful because then those are the notes that I might take into a future session to help me prepare and tweak the content even further. In the case of this recent event, as I mentioned, it was a huge success. I couldn't even believe it and I almost cried tears of joy and relief the next day when I was on the plane ride home. I'm so grateful to the organizer and I'm just so grateful to everyone who attended. There were a handful in the room and a lot more on live streaming. I just didn't realize how hard it had been business wise without this. This had been such a primary source of consistent, steady revenue for me in my business and for two and a half years it was completely gone. So I think I just had this extra sense of gratitude that I could be doing an in person event at all. I think the participants felt really good to be in the room again and have that dynamic sense of content, like content's not even the right word for it conversation. I'm really grateful to the organizer who brought me in person because I gave the option that we could do in person or virtual. It was just so special to collaborate in this way. And such a relief of the pressure valve of the last two and a half years just to know that, okay, there's a one again, there's a blip on the radar. I described it to a friend as a feeling as if I had been under a business fever for the last two and a half years of just elevated vitals, you know, vitals in orange alert zone. And then with this event, it was as if the fever broke and I felt so much relief wash over me and the relief of knowing, okay, I still got it, I can still do this. That free time resonates because this was a big bet, as you all know, if you've been listening for any amount of time, Moving in this direction was a really big bet. I invested a lot of money in this direction, a lot of time, energy, effort, and it has been so joyful. But I didn't know if that would translate to a corporate setting. So validating that as well and in such an abundantly positive way that people were asking, can we please have more like this in the future? Gave me a real sense of hope and optimism. So I can tell you that all these strategies I shared about how to prepare, they did work. The event was a smashing success and I owe so many thanks to my collaborator as well for helping make it so. I always try to keep names and clients a little confidential because some organizations are more sensitive than others about blasting their name all over the place as a client. But I really want to say thank you. You know who you are and big thanks to all of you who are here listening. I hope you found this helpful. I would love to hear from you. Is there anything you do to prepare for in person speaking engagements? You can always leave me a voice memo@itsfreetime.com.

Thank you so much for listening everybody. Have a beautiful rest of your day.

If you've listened this far, you get a gold star.

Thank you.

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