Skill in public speaking can advance your career so much, even if you aren’t necessarily interested in a career as a professional speaker.
In my experience, speaking is absolutely the most effective professional skill for career development and advancement, followed closely by excellent networking skills. This is true for just about any industry. As you already know, career opportunities are tightly linked to professional visibility and the establishment of an expert professional brand.
Here are four ways you may not have thought about speaking before – it is memorable, self-sustaining, transferrable, and there are so many different contexts in which you can grow your career by being an effective speaker!
What inspired this video about how speaking skills can open career doors and really advance you professionally in a variety of ways? I’ve been working on some material for the upcoming Association of Women Surgeons’ Signature Speaker Series kickoff at their annual meeting this October – it’s a brand new program to level-up the speaking skills of mid-career, successful academic surgeons. They’ve asked me to be the coach, so that’s a huge honor and privilege. But, they only accepted ten physicians into the program, and I know there are lots of people who weren’t selected, or don’t happen to be surgeons or women, so I’m opening a special cohort of The Speaking Rx at the same time. This is a really great course, so come check it out – enrollment is open (at the time of this blog post), so get a spot early before we fill that too!
Not everyone wants to get paid to speak, and not everyone can (depending upon existing policies and contracts with your employer or partners). And, as you’ll hear me say many times, there are lots of benefits other than money to be had from public speaking. On the other hand, speaking can be very lucrative, which can lead to more professional flexibility, the kind of career balance that prevents burnout, or even an entirely new career (or satisfying physician side gig). Lots of people are surprised to learn that experts such as Forbes and the Harvard Business Review say even brand new speakers can easily charge a few thousand dollars for their time on stage. Moderate experience (say, 10 or more presentations under your belt) can jump you quickly to $5,000 – $10,000 range. Once you have a few keynotes or some international experience, $20,000 for a single talk is not at all unusual. That kind of compensation is not only attainable, but is potentially life-changing. So, it’s well worth the investment to learn a bit more about highly polished presentation skills, and perhaps more importantly, the business of speaking, which is what we do in The Speaking Rx.
