Everyone in the room is in the content business, whether they call themselves a speaker, author, consultant, or coach. Those labels lock you into narrow roles and limit what you can do. Instead, think of yourself as someone who creates high-impact content and deploys it in whatever format works: speaking, consulting, coaching, video.
Actually, I would argue that we're all in the content business. There isn't anyone that would be in this room today if you're not in the content business. Would you agree with that? Yes. Okay, cool. So if you agree with that, then we've got to say, if you're in the content business, I believe words matter. So I think what happens is if you start to refer to yourself as just one limiting derivative of what that business is, it limits your actions and behaviors. So if you start calling yourself a speaker, you'll act like what you think a speaker acts like, which might be getting everybody to go woo-woo every time you come to the dinner table. If you call yourself an author, you might start smoking a pipe and wearing a tweed jacket, because that's what you think an author looks like, right? If you call yourself a consultant or a coach, right? So I think it's really, really important to say, actually, what I do better than anybody else is I create killer content that I can deploy as a speaker, I can deploy it as a consultant, as a coach, I can deploy it on an interactive video-based learning system at scale.
