Les Brown: This Simple Strategy Can Earn You Walk Away Money

I struggle with using humor when I speak. How did you get good at it and what advice would you give?

Don't struggle with that. Laughter is the lubricant that allows us to handle and navigate our way through life. Don't struggle with that. I don't tell jokes, but people say that I'm funny. So you find things that you can use that will trigger laughter, and particularly if you're a presenter, because when you are, when you use humor strategically, case in point, you know, ladies and gentlemen, how many of you know, people say money won't make you happy, but everybody want to find out for themselves. And I remember a time in my life I was so broke, I'd walk past the bank and tripped. Deal off. And then I had a moment. I got a call. Leslie, my sister, Margaret Ann, are you sitting down? What's wrong with Mama? Margaret? Mama's got breast cancer. She's got breast cancer? Yes, I'll be there tomorrow. Leslie, you don't have to do that. You just got elected for the third time. Listen to me. I promise her, if anything happened to her, I will be there. How many of you have somebody that you love that anything ever happened to them, that you would be there for them? Raise your hand if you know what I'm talking about. And so, ladies and gentlemen, I want you to write this down. Earn, walk away money that I had a job in LA. I was making over $220,000 for two hours on a radio station, on CBS radio station. And I walked away. I left. They said, are you crazy?

Mm.

I said, my mama needs me and I'm gonna be there for her. But you notice the laughter before and how I came to that place. Write this down. Never make a point without a story and never tell a story without a point. So rather than doing the stuff like our friend, friends that we know in the industry that's pushing, getting planes and boats and making a lot of money, I said, you know, you want to be in a position if something happens to someone you love, that you can be there for them, that you can do more than just pray for them. Does that make sense? When I asked that question to the audience, and James is right about the power of questions. Now I've created an opening in the presentation so that they now are participant in the story and the presentation that I'm creating because we're orchestrating an experience in this audience. Now, there are audiences inside of each audience, people who are going through some stuff. Some people need humor, some people need content, some people need passion. And energy. And so when we are talking to people who, separated by education, by the things they've gone through, that as presenters we have to create a presentation that will allow us to make that audience, those audiences inside of the audience, one audience, by listening to the listening of the audience and then using your stories strategically so that your story becomes their story and you create an experience where you take them to a place in themselves where they can't go by themselves. That's what I'm doing now at this stage of my life, because there's no success without success. Training speakers on how to take their life, their story, their skills, their hunger to make a difference, to make their mark, to live a life that will outlive them and be able to make a difference in people's lives, to promote themselves and knowledge in their companies, you.

Know, to speak to.

You could probably articulate this, which you're already doing pretty well, is that my version of this is somewhere along the way I was reading so many books and trying to figure out how to learn more effectively. Like how does one accelerate learning? And so for years I would share with my service business clients. Early on, when I went from dead broke carpet cleaner to learning how to make that business work, then taking, wow, I figured out a bunch of things that work and now how do I share them with other people? And I'm definitely afraid of speaking, so I don't want to go speak, you know, and then I would like force myself to be in situations where I had to present, although I was a nervous wreck. And then I started going to Toastmasters and that was incredibly beneficial. And then it dawned on me like, wow, I am learning this stuff so much quicker because I'm now putting myself in a position to have to teach other people. So I would then, you know, later share three ways to learn something. You learn through the school of hard knocks. You just don't ask for directions. You know, before gps, you know that whole, there was that whole stereotype of men never ask for direction sort of thing. You know, you just bumble your way through life, you figure it out, you'll learn stuff, but you're going to fail a lot. It's going to be painful. So that's one way to learn. Second way to learn is you learn through the experiences of other people. You read their books, go to their seminars, buy their courses, learn, get educated. Not education in school, but education out of school, right? Real life education. And that's a more effective way to learn.

That's why I read a lot of.

Books that's why I've gone to a lot of seminars. That's why I've hired a lot of people. So then the third way to learn, which is the most accelerated, fastest way, is you start teaching other people, because then you have to integrate it at a whole other level.

All righty. Why do you speak? When you get an opportunity to speak, whether it's to a podcast, a stage, live, virtually live on site, or why do you speak? Now, some of you in here are going to tell me. Well, Mike, I love the juice from the audience. I love the standing ovation. It just pumps me up. Right? That's a lot of people in this room. All those of you are like, what? No, no, no, it's about the money. How many books get sold back of the room? How many people sign up for my services after I speak, or the check I get when I walk on that stage? Both of those not focused on your audience. Some of you will say, but, Mike, no, no, no, no. If I sell lots of books, that's going to help my audience. Yeah, but your goal when you walked on stage was to make money for you. Your focus was you. Even if you took all the I's out of your speech because of what you were focused on. The focus. Biggest mistake people make by far is they've got the wrong focus when they walk in front of the room. The wrong focus. What's the right focus to impact and empower? Mike, I got to impact. I know we're always taught to impact, but what do you mean by empower? Well, here's the sign. You didn't empower. If you've ever been to a big event, you've seen what I'm about to see happen. See, the speaker impacts by digging into your wounds, into your pain point. So much so that the audience has a codependency relationship with a speaker when they walk off stage. They must buy your book because they're in a place of pain or hurt. You left the audience in a deficit from where they walked in. It is unfair, it is manipulative to do that. To empower means I am a better human being the moment you finish speaking than I was before I started talking. Now, what's the difference? Well, if you get surveys after you speak, this is what you're going to love. If you fall into the first two categories we mentioned, you're going to love comments like, well, the best speech ever. The speaker was a 10 out of 10. Notice who they're both about. The audience isn't even talking about themselves. In the post event survey, what does it look like when you impact and empower? More words like you're about to see on that screen. Like for instance, how about this? Real. Because it was real to my life. Life changing. Because I changed my life because of something you shared. Everything's about the audience. It enriched me as a human being because of what you shared with me today. That's what we're looking to do when we step on a stage. And by the way, that will sell you more books, that will bring you more clients. You just don't focus on those things when you're doing this work. So what does it look like when you have these conversations? How do you impact and empower? First of all, we got to know what you need to impact. Empower. And there's three things we need if we're going to impact and empower. And that is timing, quantity and the formula. Now what do I mean by timing? Look, timing is everything. Timing is everything. I'll give you an example of bad timing. You see it a lot with slides and what it is is a person will say, hey, I'm about to give you. Ah, the slide gave it away instead. The slides talking. Wait, wait. The audience isn't ready for this yet. Because you're not going to buy in. Because I'm talking while it's saying it. How many are frustrated right now while I'm doing it to you? Because you don't know who to look at right now because that's talking while I'm talking about the same things I'm talking. It happens all the time. And here's why you chose to use the slides as your guide because you don't know what you're saying on stage. I'm just being honest.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video and I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can, you can wait till the end of this video or you can Simply go to joesfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

You got chosen to make an impact, not to show how much you know by following a guideline in front of you. You should know your material before you ever walk in front of that stage. It is critical. Now compare that to this timing. Watch this slide now here I'm going to intentionally try to make a point and reinforce it with a slide. For instance, Joe Polish is brilliant. Now of course, Joe didn't say that. I said that. But notice what happened. A few people just snickered. They laughed. Why did they snicker and laugh? Anyone in the room, why did they snicker and laugh? Because it was Joe. Right? If I don't let that sit for a second, you don't have time to recognize, hey, that was a little play on words, a little something he could do with that to catch our attention.

Go.

Did Joe really say that? Now some of you are going, Joe's capable of saying that. But no, I'm not going to take a shot like that at Joe. Of course not. So that's a way. You could use humor. By the way, how clean is the slide? Right? Super clean. We're not trying to overload information. Some people are going, well, that's for humor, maybe, or to catch their attention. What do I do if I really want to bring home a point? So I'm going to ask all of you a question right now. I ask every audience I speak in front of and I want you to answer from your heart what you believe to be true. If what I'm about to say is true, you're going to yell every. If it's not, you won't. Those live virtually. You're going to type it in the chat. If you agree with what I say. Here we go. Does every human being deserve a basic level of dignity and respect? If you agree every human being deserves that at some level, just yell every. Yeah, and every means every. Not 99%. Not anybody except our enemy. Now let's pause about what's happening on the slide. It brings home the message while inviting you into my Instagram. Because it's my Instagram shot. It's an actual message we shared on Instagram. So you get to reinforce your message and invite your audience into your community. Have a relationship with you long term, because you do care about the audience. You want that long term relationship. So those are examples of timing. Now some of you go, well, then, what's an example?

Quantity.

Well, we've all seen this too. Remember that. And we're flying, flying, flying, flying. There's tons of information, tons of information. And the slide looks the same way. This is a real slide from a presentation I followed. Real slide, massive overwhelm. Somebody going, I would never do that. I would never do that, Mike. I keep it simple, I keep it short. I talk about one thing and only one thing in those 10 minutes. And now we are confused because you didn't give us enough information. Here's how we know you didn't give us much information or too much. We have way too many questions. When you're done speaking and you think you rocked it because everybody's asking questions, the fact is, when you get really good, you'll pay attention to all the questions they were asking you afterwards, and you will answer them in the talk. Because here it works with Genius Network because we're going to get that Q and A sometimes. So that person's doing a brilliant thing by doing it in this moment, right? So, Kassem, you did a great job of that because you knew you had the Q and A coming. But if you only had an hour keynote with no Q and A, are the same results the same thing? Because they're going to be leaving the room and you get it. You agree with me. Like, yeah, I don't want them leaving the room with all those questions. I got to be able to answer those questions. So we want to be able to avoid all that confusion. So what's the right quantity? Right here it is. Three. You don't teach more than three. It's overwhelming. You don't teach less than three. The human brain has been taught to think in threes. Joe Polish is brilliant at this. Elf. What is it? Easy, lucrative, and fun. It's all over this room. The power of three. You get this right, so make sure your speeches are in threes. If you have an hour, three lessons. If there's going to be a subplot, only three things under those three, the brain learns in threes. Now, we got to the timing and we got to the quantity. We are left with the formula. What's the formula when it comes to speaking? Well, let's look at it. First of all, we're going to invite our audience in. We're going to reveal something they didn't see coming, and then we're going to show them the solution. How do you invite? You invite by investigating the audience live in the room. Wait, what do you mean? I was taught I'm supposed to research my audience, know everything about them before I walk in the room. But you don't. You think you know everything about them before you walk in the room. When you're really gifted, you'll walk in the room and start asking questions that your audience genuinely gets to answer. And that will give you all the fuel to reveal the false narratives they are clinging to. See, if you don't get to their false narratives, you could be brilliant and put it on an amazing show. They will never change their life because they walk out with the same false narratives they walked in the room with you must reveal their false narratives. So they're disgusted by them themselves. Like, I don't want to hang on to that thing anymore. And then you give them the show, then you show the solution because they want it. They're like, hey, I don't want to be what I was before that false narrative. What's the solution? And you just deliver the solution at that moment. So what does the show look like? Well, nobody wants to see that kind of show, that's for sure. And none of us want to hear about Joe's Tic Tac ever again.

Ever again.

That's not the kind of shows we're talking about here. Here. Right. We're talking about really showing them how to live the IRS formula. If you didn't catch it earlier, that's irs, folks. Some of you caught it. So I want you to have a positive viewpoint from now on. When you think of irs, you're going to be how I'm going to investigate, how I'm going to reveal and how I'm going to show. And I'm going to do that for you right now. I'm going to take in my last audience, and you're going to become them right here. That audience was ninth graders two days ago in California. 500 ninth graders in a gym. It's a great place to speak. You have 500. They've been told they're going to go to a speaker on sexual assault and rape. We're going to be told how not to rape, what not to do. We don't want to be in the room, just like you heard in the introduction. But they start having fun with me right away, and suddenly they're answering all my questions. We're having this great discovery. I'm about to take you midway through that discussion. I'm going to ask you to answer every question I ask with a verbal response. Because we are in the discussion business, not the telling business. Nobody wants to be told what to do. But they love to have conversations. So I'm going to ask you, and if you're live virtual right now, I want you to be typing away in the chat to every question I ask. And you'll see the rhythm. Even those of you live virtually how common our answers are in these moments. All right, here we go. Two people alone in a sexual intimate moment. First date. They've never kissed before, but they want to. Do most people stop and say, can I kiss you or do you think most people just go for it? Which one? Ask first or go for it?

Yell it out.

Yes. It's what everybody says. Everybody goes for it, right? So why don't we just ask instead of going for it? Give me reasons. Raise your hand. Give me reasons. You think people do not ask why they instead go for it? What's that?

Permission.

Permission? What do you mean by permission? In case of rejection. Ah, fear of rejection. Yes. So whatever you do, don't give them a choice. Ooh, that sounds pretty awful, doesn't it? I'm not going to ask you because you might say no, so I'm just going to do it to you. By the way, if you agree that sounds awful, just yell awful.

Awful.

Yeah. Even if we did that before today, I think we all know no, we don't ever want to do that again. Right? So fear of rejection. We just debunked that. That's a really weak excuse. What's another one? Yes. Yeah, it's going to kill the moment. It's going to ruin the mood. Now, why is that funny? Because that means you actually think you're smooth. The fact is, you're already awkward. We all are. If you've ever been sexually active, you've been awkward. Ever heard of braces, by the way, that it gets awkward really fast? You're not afraid of being awkward. You're great at being awkward. Think about how awful it is, though, to think, I don't want to be awkward, so I'm going to take the chance to do something awful with their body so I don't look awful. Awkward.

Wow.

I think we all can agree that's not the approach. We want to be the person we want to be. Right? And by the way, the amazing part is, if you just go for it, you can be awkward and ruin everything and harm some. That's the difference. So then some of you going, well, then, Mike, what do we do? How do we ask? How do we get to that place? Well, some of you might be thinking, I'm still not sure I want to ask. So I'm going to ask you two questions I ask every audience in the world. Question number one. Does every human being deserve a choice before you do something with their body, sexually or intimately? Yes or no? Question number two, how do you normally give somebody choice? You simply ask a. We all believe in asking first. So how do you ask first one, look them in the eyes. It should be intimate. Number two, smile. It should be fun. Number three, ask the question. Question. Now, I need a volunteer quickly for this one. Could I volunteer you? Is that okay? Your first name is?

Marlon.

Marlon, could you Step up here and say, hey, Marlon. Marlon, you're gonna imagine that your partner is right where my hand is. It's more than a tic tac away, though.

So you're okay.

All right, so. So they're gonna be right there, and on the count of three, we're gonna have you ask that person for a kiss. As if you're the only two in the world. No one's near you, and you've been wanting to kiss them all night. Are you ready, Marlon? Alrighty. Let's count to three. Let's count to three for Marlon. One, two, three. All right, give it up for Marlon. Great job. Great job.

Easy.

Hey, Marlon, do you think that would be awkward if it was happening in the real moment?

No.

Why not?

It's completely natural just to.

Yeah, it's completely natural. Listen to that. Give a big, big round. Marlon did a great, great job. Room let'. You can sit down. Marlon, you did a great job, Marlon. You're gonna get a can I kiss you? T shirt for rocking that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. By the way, audience, could it be awkward if you ask yes or no? Sure it could. The better question is, does it matter? Let me prove to you it doesn't. You're alone with someone you want to kiss. You've been wanting to kiss them all night. They lean into you and say, can I kiss you? Are you gonna do this? You asked Awkward. Wound it. Or are you gonna be doing a woo hoo dance? This is about to happen. If greets are woo hoo. Yeah. Woo hoo hoo. Yes. What'd we just do, folks? Those same students who said they'd never ask, remember, we all go for it. What was the formula? We started by asking them questions. We investigated their world, right? And then. Then we revealed. Revealed the false narratives they're hanging onto. And then at the very last moment there, we showed them a solution. That's how you get results. Some of you are going, mike, how do you know those are results? I think our computer went to sleep on us back here because I was going to show you the results, but let's see if we can bring it back just so you can see it real quickly here. Yep, it did. So here we go. We'll share that again. All right, so there we are. Here are the results. Just quickly, because I'm wrapping up here. So we just went through the formula invite reveal show. Now. I said my last audience, ninth graders. So that is an average audience for me. So is US military, 40 year olds, though. But here's what the results actually look like. 96% of my audiences say they're more likely to ask first after one hour experience. 95% say they're more likely to intervene to stop sexual assault at a party. 96% say they're more likely to support survivors moving forward in one hour. That's not about me. That's about focusing on the audience. Like everyone in this room can do. Some Mike, that's just not enough proof for me. You got to have better proof than that. Well, remember those quotes that looked incredibly powerful earlier? Like real and bold enriching. Sounds like something the administrators would say. A general in the US Military would say. Those are the exact quotes from Monday's survey of ninth graders. Not my best stuff. Because that's what you should always be looking to do. Change lives, make an impact. Now it is everybody's in this room's turn to do the same. I've got a workshop for you to make it nice and workshop worksheet. That's one page and you can dive into this formula and start writing your next speech. You can start making your next one more powerful. Maybe you're just going to start with a part of that speech. Notice the survey link. How easy it is. Not SurveyMonkey mikesgift.com All survey links should be like that. I bought this for this event, right? But all my events are custom for that.

Good morning. Are we having some great ideas? Well, Joe told you that that can you've got is just a reminder of what you can do every time you have to make a presentation. So when you think of freedom of speech, we know that's one of our gifts as Americans, but we have people from 11 different countries. So basically freedom of the speech means what makes a great speech or speaker. What can you do to be even better? Well, there are limitations. You certainly can't libel anybody. You can't slander somebody. You can't yell fire in a theater and create incitement and you can't commit perjury. We should add a couple of other things. You shouldn't be boring and you shouldn't be offensive. And Michael Fishman talked about being open. I was offensive yesterday after lunch and I need to apologize. I made a comment when we come back. We should have had the robots serving lunch because we were so late. The speakers were on outside and the serving staff heard that and that was offensive. We have to be so careful what we say. It's something called the privilege of the platform. Our words have power. So I apologize to the staff if they're not hearing it. I'll go and tell them lunchtime. So what makes a great speech? Well, we've got to be open. So I've been doing this since then. I mean, that was 1974 and I've been paid, as Joe said, 3,000 times. I've coached so many people. And at all those smaller meetings that we have in Tempe, I have a handout of these ideas. So don't write anything down. There are three things I'm going to share with you. How do you have freedom of the speech? Freedom when you speak? First, be relevant. One thing be relevant. If the next 10 minute speech was working for the post office, how would you, would you be excited to hear that message? Is anybody here ready to quit their job and go to the post office? No, that's not a relevant topic. So here's the first. Is your message relevant to that audience? At that time Yesterday, there were 14 speakers on the stage. We had the panel at the end. Every one of them had relevancy to this group. I told you, the sponsors were selected by a survey. The speakers are selected by a survey. What did you want to hear? So these topics were relevant to the audience. So I made some notes about what happened in Relevancy. Peter talked about the future, the first three, Dan talked about procrastination. And Sean Stevenson talked about laugh, cry and get them to think those are relevant subjects. What if you asked yourself, is what you're saying relevant to the people that you're talking to and set it up in the introduction? Have the introduction say so. We've asked our speaker to talk about this subject and why it's so important to you is, hey, I hope you're enjoying this video.

And I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video or you can Simply go to joe'sfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

So before you even say your first word, the audience is mentally geared up to hear what you want to hear. That's relevancy. Second thing to think of is clarity. Is your message clear? What if the next speaker on this stage was going to talk about the top 10 top 10 lists on the top 10 websites? That is actually the title of a speech. Can you imagine how the audience felt when they heard that title? What is that all about? That's impossible to understand. So your goal is make it impossible not to be understood. How can you be so clear in your message? And when you have clarity, you hear the audience say this to you afterwards, I really could see what you meant. I see what you mean. It's a visual thing. I got the picture. When you talked, I could really see what you were saying. And yesterday we had speakers that did that. So looking at my notes, I want to use Peter Diamandis as an example. He had seven speeches. He had seven speeches. He talked about computers, robots, human longevity, artificial intelligence, energy, virtual reality and space exploration. Did you understand what he talked about? This is stuff we never even heard of. And how did he do it? Every message was opened with a title slide that was different from all the other slides. Now we knew we were on a different subject. Each one moved progressively through his message. And then he said, so what does this mean to you? And then he connected that with such great clarity, even though that it was such an innovative message. Doable is the third idea. And this is perhaps the most important thing for you to think of if you want freedom of speech in your message. Is your message doable? So what if our next 10 minute speaker was going to talk about how to finger text at 100 words per minute, when a recent study found that the average person in this room can text about 38 words a minute? Well, if you heard that, you might say, well, sounds good, but can I do it? So I happened to look in the Guinness Book of Records and I found the fastest finger texter is a guy in Brazil and He can do 83 words a minute. So how can we talk about you doing 100 words a minute? It sounds like a great idea, but it is not doable. So here's what you need to think of in your call to action, which is always a verb. What do you want the audience to do? Do, think, feel, say, go or buy? What action are you asking for? And if you would think in your mind, can they do that? Can they do that? So let me look at yesterday's closing 10 minute speaker. Craig Crazy Man Diswalt. Would you say he had energy and passion for his subject? Would you say he was loud and passed? Because that's why it was written in the introduction. So Joe has me write all the introductions. So we set it up that this guy worked with Guns n Roses. This is going to be a different kind of program. This is a rock star guy. So when he started yelling at you, you were already prepared. What are you putting in the introduction to prepare people about your accent? About your height. Big guy gets on the stage. Everybody's thinking, how tall is that guy? Put it in the introduction. And Fred is 6 foot 7. Okay, nobody's thinking about it now we've got the answer. So if you want to have a call to action, let's look at our doable speakers. If we had Craig back up here, he talked about six books that you could write. And I asked my table mates after he finished that, do you think you could do that? And somebody said, oh my God, I've been wanting to write a book. I never thought of that. I could have a book of quotes. I could use my own system. That was such a simple idea. My tips. I could put my tips in a book. I could do interviews, my blog posts. How many of you, when he gave those six thought to yourself, I could do one of those. Let me just see your hands. That's a doable idea. Are your ideas so doable that the audience says, I can do that? Because that's all accounts. What's going to happen when you finish speaking? What about reverse shoplifting? Now that was such a creative idea. You might say that would be great. But I don't think I would do that. That's not really me. But some of you could do that, so that's great. By the way, are these insights helpful for you? Okay, so what I'm going to do is Joe's arranged, I'm going to do a special follow up video on all the speakers you've seen and go into a lot more depth of what you've seen here that you could use specific things so you can use speaking to build your business and also position you as an expert. How do you get better as a speaker? Now, Joe mentioned I work with a lot of you coaching on the content. That's my strong suit. How do you organize your ideas so it's impossible to be misunderstood? But you can do that today and you do it by watching and listening. That's your job. Like these two characters up here. Just sit there and watch these speakers. We've got nine more coming today. Open up the handout. On your table. There's a white envelope that says, don't open until Joel tells you. Somebody find that envelope, open it up and pass it around. I wanted to use this idea. Many of you use handout materials. We have 350 people in the room. Open the envelope quickly. Pass those sheets around the table. Table. So we have 350 handouts that are already being distributed. Nobody has to go through the room. This is A simple idea. If you do events, put your handout material on the table and just put on an envelope with a little sticker like that. So if you would look at that sheet and on that first top it says freedom of speech. And there are the first two ideas. Relevancy and clarity. On the back of the page is the idea of doable. Let's go to the call to action at the very bottom where the can is. Take those three words. Is it relevant? Is it clear? Is it doable? When you organize your next message, study every speaker that you see and hear and ask what worked, what didn't work? And then follow up by watching that video I'm going to send you about relevancy, clarity and doability. How many were you in this room last year on October 26th or 27th? Raise your hands. We had 24 speakers. How many do you remember? What are you going to do as a result of what they said? There was one speaker that left more of an impact, based on the survey that I did and Genius Network did, and that was John Paul de Jureu. He runs multiple companies. He's worth $2.7 billion. How many remember that interview? It was impactful. He was quiet and calm. He said two words in 45 minutes that everybody in that room was left with and they could do. Be nice, be nice. So what can you do for your audience? Be relevant, be clear, be doable. You'll have freedom of the speech. And when you do those things and you're nice, it makes a difference. Now make it a great day.

You talked about formulas, so I'd like you to teach me as quickly as possible how to put together an entire speech. If you do have a formula.

Yeah, I actually do have a formula. And I'm going to show it to you with a visual aid. I got something right on the other side here that's going to help you. Yep, right there.

And begin.

So I want you to think about a speech totally different than you ever thought of it. Most people think about I gotta have points, I gotta impress them. I've gotta be. I gotta have a funny opener. Just put all that aside. I just want you to think about a speech in three simple blocks. Stories. They're the blue blacks, activities are the yellow blocks, and your points are the red blocks. And now you have the start of a speech. And depending on how much time you have, you can have as many of these three block chunks as you need. So for instance, if somebody says, hey, I need you to do a 10 minute talk like you do in your genius network meetings you might say, great, I'm going to start with a really funny story, get them laughing. Then I don't want it just to be about any old story, I want to have a reason for why I told it. And so I want them to be able to digest their story with an activity. So I might have them write something down on a worksheet or turn into a group of three. And now that's starting to get them to digest the material that you were teaching to the story. So now you have your activity in the story. And then lastly you have your point which is the whole tie in of the story and the activity. And the point is where you can have your facts, it's where you can show research, it's where you can reference interviews that you've done with other people to add credibility to what you were doing. But when you have a speech, just start thinking about, I need a story, I need an activity and I need a point. And in a one hour speech you pretty much only need, I call the SAP story activity point. You only need about three SAPs to make a speech. Three stories, three activities and three points. And when you start to think about, man, it's just blocks in my head. Well then when you're planning, you know, like you do multi day conferences, you're like, great, I need a bunch of blue blocks, bunch of stories to choose from. I need a bunch of different activities to pick from. A bunch of points, things that I want to teach, you know. Give me an example of a point in marketing that you would teach robotic.

Marketing how to can and clone yourself using sales letters or 24 hour free recorded messages.

Okay, so now robotic marketing you call it. Well, you could tell a story about the first time you ever can and cloned yourself right then. Now what would be an activity?

Creating a consumer awareness guide.

There you go. So now you have the start to your keynote. And if you want an emotional, you get an emotional story. If you want it to be just factual about how you came across something, it could be just a story just to establish the scene. But story, activity point.

I want to say this too.

So if people are thinking, well, you know, I'm not really super skilled at something because of course everyone is in something. But you can do talks on anything. Like for instance, remember that movie how to lose lose a guy in 10 days. I mean you can do speeches on something that almost everyone's done. How to destroy a really great relationship or how to go broke very quickly.

Yeah, you got stories on both, actually dozens.

It could be an entire series, a Netflix series. But the point is, you can actually take any sort of life experience using that model, and you can make a funny story. You can call it something to get someone's attention, but then within it are some great life lessons because you can tell people what to do. If you know what to do in certain areas, you can tell people what not to do. If you've learned what not to do, you can tell people how to do it. You can tell people how to think about it. I mean, you can use this for knitting. How to teach a parent how to talk, how to build and grow a business, how to get hired, how to walk away from something in your life that's not working, how to overcome pain.

And what's great about this model. And as a professional speaker, somebody pays you to show up and bring both information and entertainment. That's what a speaker is supposed to do. A speaker is supposed to shift emotion and transfer ideas. That's when a speech gets good. And sometimes you get to your speech and they say, joe, we're actually running late on time. We're going to give you an hour. Now, you only get 15 minutes. Most people would freak out. They'd be like, well, I planned out an hour. I memorized an hour. If you had your SAP model, you go, great, I'll just cut a few of those stories. I'll cut a couple of the points, or I'll just reduce one of those activities. And you can just mix and match, and you can be as flexible as you need to right before you step on stage. And I can't tell you how many times this simple model bailed me out over the years.

Let's talk about that business then. The whole business of public speaking. And why do people need to learn about public speaking? I mean, you know, is it business? You know, it's more than just go out and turn it into a career, but your, you know, your ability to persuade and move audiences. And, you know, people are definitely afraid of it at times. Some people don't know how to think about it. So let's just start from.

From the beginning.

I want you to name three great leaders throughout history that come to mind. Boom, boom, boom. What do you got?

Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy, Steve Jobs. Well, Steve Jobs was not great with some people, but in terms of humanity. Oh, absolutely. I mean, he.

Mother Teresa. Yeah. The people that you mentioned are incredible orators. Totally. And I'm a big believer that you don't need to speak. Well, if you're gonna play small in life. But if you want to make an impact, you're gonna need to speak well, and you're gonna need to not necessarily make an impact on the masses, but on the impact of your children or your spouse or your employees or your friends or your community, whatever group you're a part of. Your ability to communicate your ideas, your ability to influence them through the spoken word, that will always have a positive impact if you can really hone the skill. I've never met somebody that said, you know, I got really good at speaking and my life just went miserable. You know, when you get really good at commanding a presence and impacting a crowd, you can take it off and in so many different directions. It helps you with sales, it helps you in influencing a cause, a movement. My big thing in getting people to get comfortable with speaking is to see, as we'll talk more depth later, is that it's not about you. It's about the impact that you can have on those around you. So I really think it's important to be a phenomenal communicator and order so that you can spread messages that you think are important.

Why are people so scared to speak?

Well, I think there's a couple reasons. One, we'll just take on from a biological. So for a very long time now, this is only for the people that believe in science, okay? But for those of you that do believe a little bit in science, we went a very long time as a species in tribes, in groups that we survived in, in these tribes, and we roamed the earth together. And if you got thrown out of the tribe, that was not a good thing. And so we have millions of years of our brains saying, hey, let's not do anything to screw up. So let's not do anything to stand out. Let's not do anything that will have us be judged, because that won't go well. And I see how much fear grips people when it comes to public speaking. And I'm actually. This is side note. I'm glad it scares people because it allows me to charge what I charge and it allows me to help so many people. But the truth is the secondary, so that's biological. Now let's talk personal. Personally, I think the fear of public speaking is just being addicted to yourself, being so concerned about, what do you look like? What are they going to think about you? What if you make a mistake? You, you, you. It's, you know, the me, me, me, all, all about me. But I do this activity in my live event where I Teach people about speaking. And I don't know if you've seen this part. You've spoken at this event a few times. But what I will do, and I'll get somebody out of the audience who is deathly afraid of speaking. And just having them come up on stage, they're shaking, they're sweating, and I'll say, so tell me what's going on in your body. And then we will listen on the whiteboard all the things that are going on. And they're, like, just filled with all this fear. And then I say, okay, would you like me to get rid of that for you? They're like, oh, God, that would be amazing. Yeah, absolutely. I'm like, all right, I'm gonna need you to go into this corner of the stage. I'm gonna go talk to the audience. And then what I do is I roll to the edge of the stage and I talk to the audience, and I say, I need 10 people to volunteer for this activity. If you're going through some kind of pain right now in your life, not just a small pain, but, like, major pain, maybe you just lost your husband to cancer, Your child hasn't spoken to you in years, you just found out your business is crumbling, and you're gonna probably have to file bankruptcy. You're being evicted. Whatever is going on, I want you to 10 people to go to the mic, and I want you to just share with this person that's scared. What are you going through? And then just finish with, I need your help. So the 10 people get up, they go to the microphone. I go back over to the person that's scared, and I'm like, all I ask you to do is just look at this person as they're talking to you, then look at the next person. And these 10 people share, and tears well up. They say, you know, I just held my wife's hand in the hospital last week, and she's gone now, and I need your help. And then the next person. You know, my son was killed by a drunk driver seven years ago, And I gotta say, I haven't gotten over it. And it's now affected my marriage, and I'm probably gonna get divorced because I can't get my life together, and I need your help. The next person comes up and says, you know, I made a massive mistake as a stockbroker, and I lost millions of dollars from my clients, and a lot of them were my friends. And now I feel horrible that I lost this money, and my friends don't trust me. I need your Help. And it just goes on and on and on. And I just watched the physiology of this person that claimed they were afraid of public speaking change. And I then asked the person at the end, how do you feel standing up here on this stage? Now, you know what they say, Jill? They say, I'm calm, I'm grounded. I. I feel so empathetic. And I'm like, oh, but what about all that fear? You were just trembling up here about 10 minutes ago. They're like, I stopped thinking about myself. And so I think that when people say they have a fear of public speaking, somewhat is biological and that's fine. But, you know, biologically we can't fly, but we invented airplanes, right? And so the other is the personal is to realize you're not on that stage to just flap your lips. You're on that stage because people are in pain and you're able to help them.

Right? Well, I'll tell you, when I first did my first public presentation, I was scared shitless. I was sweating bullets. People said, after three to five minutes, you'll calm down. And the entire day I was just like a nervous wreck. And it's kind of interesting how I got into it because I had created a marketing program using strategies when I was a dead broke carpet cleaner living off credit cards. I learned marketing because I needed to survive. That's my whole story sort of thing in the early days. And I knew stuff that worked, but I had never communicated it live to an audience before. And I'd created a course that I had sold through direct mail because the Internet didn't even exist exist back then. And I started going to Toastmasters and doing things to try to get over the fear because I was very introverted growing up and I was very shy. And I mean, talking to one person was difficult for me, let alone groups of people. I mean, it was a giant fear. And I wrote a sales letter to do an all day seminar to carpet cleaners, and 52 people showed up for this thing. And I literally had no guest speakers. It was me all day and I sold this thing. And I was like, oh my. By the time I wasn't sleeping the night before. So not only was I scared, but I was exhausted at the same time. And so I literally gave this whole presentation, like all day just talking about the stuff, and I, like had no idea if it was landing. I was just like, just, you know, I was in my early 20s and, or mid-20s actually, and, and I was just kind of scared. And at the end though, I offered to Sell a marketing program. And I sold $12,000 worth of a marketing course. I was selling a $497 version called a basic package and a 597 version called gold.

That $12,000 cleared that public speaking fee right out.

No, here's what it did. Like, I was like, you know, I gotta learn how to do this. So you know what? The next speech was very scary and the thorough. But I was like, you know, I realize a saying that whatever you fear and don't face controls you. Whatever you fear and face, you can control it. Or at least you start taking steps to get better at. Not that. And to this day, I've never gotten rid of the nervousness. I mean, there were even estimates, like, you know, the late Johnny Carson would throw up once a week before every, you know, the Tonight show, at least once a week, his whole career. Like, he never got over it. But you know what? He showed up and he did it. And, you know, not only did it give me the ability to make money, but I realized that, you know, this whole time is money sort of thing. I mean, I understand what people mean when they say that, but relationships are money. And if you're going to go out and talk to people and communicate with people, you are so much more effective if you can do it in groups than just even one on one. And even if someone that's watching this or listening to us right now is like, well, I'm never going to do a public presentation. Actually, you are. If you ever want to make an impact in anything, it may be a webinar, it may be a podcast, it may be, you know, any sort of speaking that you do that's going to make you more effective, more clear, more persuasive. The ability to enroll people. You know, I tell people all the time, just go learn how to be a better public speaker. Because all kinds of aspects of your life are going to improve. And there are many people that have a ton of stuff to teach, but because they have this fear that they can't do it or they won't take steps to do it, they limit not only their ability to help themselves, but to help others.

Yeah, speaking and writing and thinking are the things that we could spend an entire life master mastering. It's not something that necessarily comes right away. Some of the students that I've been working with over the past four to five years in this business of teaching people about speaking, it's amazing to see their growth. The moment they believe they now have what it takes, I could tell them that they're amazing, but it's the moment they believe they're amazing.

Totally. And when you actually, like even the first time, when I did that all day presentation and I got the acknowledgement that even though inside I was super scared on the outside, these people still invested in my ideas.

Sure.

You know, and most people don't do that on their first seminar. I mean, in a lot of ways it was just. But I'll tell you, I had to gut my way through it, but thank God I did because it opened up a world of opportunities. And then within the first year of doing that, I ended up selling a quarter million dollars worth of marketing courses. And by the second year it was half a million. By the third year, it was doing over a million a year. And the year that I did a million in sales, $250,000 of those sales in 1997, that was actually came from speaking on stage at maybe like six or seven events.

I'll tell you a quick story that when you get up in front of a crowd, you might think you suck. Right? You might be hard on yourself. And because you hear the internal dialogue, you're not hearing the external dialogue like everybody else. You're hearing parts of what you're saying, but you're also hearing, that's kind of stupid or are they liking this? Or where's my hand supposed to be right now? You know, should I be leaning against this podium? And you're hearing the internal dialogue. So when you get off stage, it's very easy to believe. I don't know if I did very good. Because you have imprinted your internal dialogue on top of the external dialogue. They don't hear your internal dialogue. I gave a speech four years ago. I had just come back from Robin Sharma's event over in Switzerland and I was totally jet lagged. I probably shouldn't have taken the engagement, to be honest. And I got up on stage and I was doing my presentation. Nobody was really laughing at the funny parts. And the moment you get mad at your audience internally, that's not a good moment. You have to stay fluid in that moment. And so I get off the stage and I think, oh man, I want to refund them their money. I was not on my game. They came up to me and they were like, that was amazing. Because they didn't hear my internal dialogue. They didn't hear how tired I was, they didn't hear the internal chatter. And then I was telling one of my students about how like, yeah, that was one of my worst speeches in the last few years. And the student just said, wait a minute, when was this? And then I gave them the date and the place. They're like, sean, the only reason why I'm in your high end coaching program is because I was in the audience that day and thought you were amazing. And it was like this incredible Twilight Zone moment. I was like, wow, I thought I sucked. This person just paid me a lot of money to continue to learn about speaking from me on a day I thought I sucked because she didn't hear my internal dialogue. So you have to keep going. It's like you can't get off stage in the middle of your talk just because you don't think you're doing well. You got to push through it.

Yeah, well, and here's the thing, too. Like when you take people in your speaking training course, which I'll tell you to tell people about later, you actually have people go through. They see others do it. They can participate in it themselves. And what the audience sees and what's demonstrated versus what's going on inside are in some cases completely different things.

And that's so much life as well. You know, a lot of people feel like, ah, I didn't make a good impression. Well, you don't get to see what other people see. You see through your own eyes and your own feelings. And so you have your own interpretations based on the messy soup on the inside. But if you do a phenomenal job of sticking to a lot of the fundamentals, you can still, you know, like what some of my friends have said to me, sean, on a bad day, you're still amazing, you know, and it's because I stick to the fundamentals of speaking. So even, even on the days I'm tired, even on the days I don't feel well, I can get up there and act like the pro that I am. And that's what I teach people, are the fundamentals. So on the days that you're still dragging, maybe because of outside circumstances, the audience doesn't know.

Yeah. Well, let me ask you about this then, because there's this one saying that you got to take this in the right context, because there's probably some situations where may not apply, but anything we're doing in life is we're doing poorly in the beginning, meaning now, if you have to do heart surgery on someone, you don't want to do it poorly and you don't want to do it the first time.

Right. That's why they have flight simulators.

Right, exactly. But if you're going to do Your first public speech, maybe the worst one you ever do is your first one. If you're ever going to do a webinar, the first one you do may be your worst one, and then the second, second one may be a little bit better. But the thing is, if someone's watching this, they have to determine one is learning how to be a more effective speaker worth doing. And if it is, and you can say, yeah, the byproducts of that, the results, where it's going to take me in my career, where it's going to take me in my ability to influence others, where it's going to allow me to affect change, you have to be willing to do it poorly. You know, now in many cases you won't. It might be all in your head, but even if it is poor the first time, who cares? You know, because what person flew into flying? You know, you got to crawl, then you got to walk, then you run, then, you know, wherever that goes, right? You fly. So it's rare that anyone in any area of mastery started out very good. As a matter of fact, almost everyone that's world class can tell you stories about how they're very beginning sucked.

That's why you need a dojo where you can practice, whether it's in a group like that you hold here or in my groups, you need places that are safe emotionally to share and try things out and experience and then be able to course correct. Because if you, you don't want your first speech to be a paid engagement necessarily, you want to be able to go through a course where you can try out material. We have one speaker training that we do where they all come and get to speak, everybody gets to speak, and we break them into small groups and then we take the best people from the small groups and then they get to speak to the whole group. And it's, it's amazing because I don't really teach much at that event, but people always come to me and say, ah, this was amazing. I'm like, I didn't, I didn't really say anything. It's because they had a safe space, the dojo, like in martial arts, they had a safe space to practice, to try out material, to tell a story for the first time to a small audience. And that makes somebody feel like, hey, I can do this with a bigger audience.

Yeah, well, okay, well, let's talk about what people need to do and I'll go some rapid fire questions because there's a lot of things I could talk to you about, but you have an Entire training on this. So I want to cover some of the essential things. What are mistakes? What mistakes do people make from stage that they need to be aware of?

They get in their head. They don't have a clear set of bullet points of like an outline. They think that I'm just going to go up there and speak from my heart. Well, sometimes that works, but a lot of times it turns into a ramble. So I tell people, what if you could have some bullet points? You don't need to have your speech written out and read it word for word. What if you could have bullet points that you could look down at or maybe have on a sheet of paper off in the audience that you could just jog your memory and go from one idea to the next? Mistakes I see is when people, they don't do the rehearsal work ahead of time. They don't try it out on their. Their partner or a group of friends or even the mirror. You know, after all these years, 24 years of speaking, I still, when I'm trying out new material, will visually rehearse it. I will go through in my mind, seeing myself share that material and think, was that the right area to do that? How did that feel in my body? You know, so not having practice can make a big impact negatively. Getting caught up in using a pet phrase can really make you look like amateur. Something like I always say, I always say. Or, yeah, getting caught on a pet phrase and repeating it, looping it will make people go, oh, my goodness, that's 12 times they've now said, ladies and gentlemen, and it can be an awkward experience.

Yeah, gotcha.

You know, so here's the thing. When Gina sent us this list, she went through, reviewed all of them, put them into categories, and said, by far the most important topic that people wanted to know about was lead generation. That was number one. The second most popular topic was profit activator number one, choosing your first target market. So she kind of summarized these questions here, and I can understand why those are the most common ones, because, of course, those are the drivers of everything. If you're going to grow your business, the thing that's going to fuel that growth is this constant way of generating new people for you to help. So whatever we're doing, whenever I do a live breakthrough blueprint event where we're talking about applying the eight profit activators, the first thing that we do is you cannot work on your before unit until you're crystal clear on what your during unit does. What is the thing that you can do better than anybody else.

Anybody else.

What's the thing that your business is most suitable to delivering? And we always talk about it in terms of a result. And the best way to clarify for yourself what that is is to ask yourself the clarifying question. And you've probably heard me say it before, but the clarifying question is what would you do if you only got paid when your client gets a result? Now that does. And I get people to just. If you can embrace that and think that thought, if you can think that thought silently to yourself without it being the way that you make your offer, you don't have to fully go out to the world with this yet. What I want you to do is just to think that thought, to think how. What is the reason that that question is so clarifying because it links your outcome with your ideal prospects outcome. And if we're doing the thing that if you're saying I'm only going to get paid when I get the result for somebody, it makes you feel like you are only going to do something that you know 100% that you're able to deliver for someone. Right? That's what it does. That's why we say that way for you. Now the greatest way to segue from that thought, once you figure out what it is that you can deliver for people, then the next thing that you get to do is you get to select the single target audience that you can deliver that result for. And so the biggest misconception that people have or the biggest thing that people make as a mistake going into the before unit profit activator one especially is that they put too much emphasis on, on positioning themselves to be selected versus proactively selecting your target audience. That's what select a single target audience is. I'm talking about you as the selector. If we're going to deliver a result that you are only going to get paid when they get the result, you get to select only the people that you know you're going to have the best outcome for right now. And it's kind of a thing where whenever you're delivering any kind of good or service in exchange for money, there's always an implication that you're going to deliver the result for people. So no matter what, even if you don't, even if you don't explicitly offer that you're only going to get paid when they get the result, the expectation is still there and you're still obliged to deliver the result for them. But where we often get sidetracked is when we take on this role of the external blame shifting of, you know, saying that you're. You thought you did your part and they have to do their part. Right? Where it's easier for you to externally place the blame on someone not getting the result when you've already been paid your money for getting it. You've been paid for your service, so you're less invested in somebody getting the result. And I'm just saying that that's just inherent in the way it is. If you really were only going to get paid for people getting a result, you'd pick better people to work with, the ones who are more suited to what it is that you do. You'd get better at delivering the results and you would get more efficient. You'd be doing it more and more often. Because as soon as you remove that friction, as soon as you remove the uncertainty that people have about going into a new situation, whenever somebody is entering into a relationship with someone, for a transactional relationship, there's the exchange. But if they give you the money first, now they're taking the chance on you, right? They're taking the chance that you're going to deliver. And you may go through and do that, but you may take money from people who you would know if you were betting on getting the result, that it might not be the right person for you. Right. And I guarantee you that you'll be able to charge more money for actually getting the result for the right people than you are in trying to convince people that you're able to get the result for them. So I think that's a big distinction, Joe. People selecting their target audience instead of trying to leave your options open and cast as wide a net as possible so that you have a bigger pool of people that could select you. It's really. That's the first thing that we want to focus on. What do you think about that?

Yeah, no, I think it's. I think it's very accurate. I was having a meeting earlier with a couple of my team members on Zoom. Imagine that, the Zoom meeting, right? And I was talking about, like, today being genius network with all kinds of different people in different industries, and then the carpet cleaning and fire and restoration niche where I started out at. And I was, you know, Eunice was on, and she said, you know, it was so much easier when we only had one target audience to focus on. And what's counterintuitive about this is the more selective you are, the better selection you have. But that doesn't seem to make sense if you haven't experienced it, because it is more. It seems more appealing to be all things to all people versus having to narrow your focus.

Well, it's the bigger pie syndrome. It's the bigger pie syndrome. It's feeling like if I just go after a bigger pie, if I make the pie bigger, of all the possible people that I could work with, I just need to get a smaller sliver of that bigger pie. It seems like it raises your odds, right. If there's more people that I can help or more different types of people that I can help, that it feels like you're going to raise your odds, you know? But the reality is, the more that you focus, the more that you narrow your focus to a single target audience, it's so much easier. Hey, look at this.

You see Michael? He had us in the background.

Background, Yeah.

I think it's kind of funny how people just start taking over our zoom.

It's kind of. It's kind of. Yeah, it's confusing to me. This is great.

Yeah. You know what's funny is we got Tarna. Tarma Tarna. I'm sorry I called you Tarma Tarna on my team.

Yeah.

I'm tired.

You know, Bear with me, everyone. If you actually knew how little sleep that I got last night, you'd be like, what the hell are you doing at meeting right now?

But I'm.

I'm actually quite tired. I couldn't sleep. How many of you by, like, waving your hands or having a hard time sleeping during all of this? I mean, it's.

Oh, man, I'm.

The truth is, shit is fucking crazy right now. It just really is. I mean, it just really is in so many ways. Okay. I hope you found that video awesome and useful. So if you want to get a free copy of my book, I want you to click here. And if you want to watch some more videos that will be useful and awesome, click here. Go ahead. You're over here. Do it now.

Come on.

Thank you. Watch them.