Show Notes:

3 ways to land a gig. “You’re probably not going to get an opportunity unless you are willing to pay to play, in which case you have to invest money in the form of a booth or a sponsorship and some of those include a 10-15 minute speaking slot where you can present at the conference while another main session is going on in the back of the room. I did this for years and it’s incredibly expensive, too, which is tough.There’s other ways to be able to secure speaking opportunities, in which case if you differentiate yourself significantly. Let’s say you’re an expert on law firms using artificial intelligence and you can go around and you can present on this content. Let’s say you conduct webinars on it, you write a book on it, you become known as a thought leader in a specific space. Now you’re going to be providing value to those conferences and to those events so they can bring you on and you can share your insights in some way where you can add significant value. Finally, you could start at many smaller conferences where everybody just books their friends. It’s the same people at every conference, but you just become friends with the people who are booking their friends. You can play that game, and you can start to build relationships with them, and then they’ll give you an opportunity if they’re the ones that are booking speakers.”

Practice makes perfect progress. “I’m going to let you in on a little secret. No matter what you do, you’re going to suck your first time, and probably the second time, and the third time, and the fourth time, and the tenth time, and the twentieth time. Nobody comes out of the womb a great speaker. It’s a game of reps. All the great speakers that you admire, that you see on stage, you say, “Oh, wow, they’re amazing,” well, they’ve probably given a thousand or ten thousand presentations and get better over time. There’s no way around that. You just have to get the reps in. Now I’m not saying you’re going to crash and burn and do horrible. It’s just compared to where you will go as you continue to get more reps in. That future version of yourself is going to be way better at this, but there’s no way around that unless you get a ton of practice in and it’s just going to require you to do a tremendous amount of speaking engagements. It’s going to allow you to become more comfortable and more confident, but there’s no way to shortcut that process.”

Value beats self-promotion. “Depending on the quality of the interviewer, you may or may not get a ton of questions because they want to be able to ask everyone a question and then people are going to give different lengthy answers. So my recommendation to maximize the value that you get out of being on a panel is to provide valuable insights to the audience. This is not the time to sell yourself, your service, or your product. Ironically, if your goal is to be able to get some value out of this for yourself – let’s say you want to get referrals from other lawyers, or that you want to sell your service or your product – the best way to do that is by not selling your service and your product, and instead providing actual insights that can be helpful to people and not asking for anything.”

Be helpful. Be humble. “This is not the time to try to one-up other panelists and try to make yourself look better than somebody else. I think if you bring humility, audiences can really see that stuff. You don’t have to play this ego game or anything like that. When you’re asked a question, try to provide the most valuable answer to someone. Don’t hold anything back. In fact, if you have secrets, share the secrets and just be valuable and insightful. The interviewer will appreciate that. The audience will appreciate that. It’s probably going to lead to you being booked in more in the future.”

RESOURCES & REFERENCES

The 2018 Game Changers Summit
The 2019 Game Changers Summit