I am doing a lot of public speaking lately. One of the roles of a CEO is to be a spokesperson. Technoplanet last week. I spoke to about 125 people at a Guelph Enterprise Centre event on Monday. The topic was "9 Success Habits". Today I am the keynote speaker at a venture capitalist's seminar run by Quorum. The topic is "Bootstrapping a Business (even after you have venture money)". Both will be fodder for future blog posts.
The more I speak, the easier it is. I am a big advocate of Toastmasters and Dale Carnegie - both of which I have done. I do not write my speeches (and no one else does either). I do however prepare for them and make some notes.
Speaking is a lot about networking. In networking, I tend to give without expectation of return because what I have found is I tend to get huge returns in the most unexpected places over time. Of course I am a time use person so I try to network in the right crowd (EG in my case computer resellers/vendors is a good crowd). And from a time use prospective, I like to speak to large groups. Ideally over 100 but I do sometimes do just 50.
Part of me also feels I need to give something back to the community so speaking would be a part of it.
Off for a busy day.
Another great course is the Christopher Leadership Course in Effective Speaking. It's a non-profit organization and the instructors are all volunteers, so the cost is reasonable (about $160) and they run courses throughout Canada. Highly recommended! http://www.thelumen.com/
ReplyDeleteThe speaking part is easy for me - but the networking feels unnatural. I have had to adopt the idea that I only network to help others - I just couldn't do it the other way.
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