Speaking or Training: Opportunities to Give Back and Boost Your Career
Looking for a way to make a difference and enhance your personal growth? Consider becoming a speaker or trainer. If you have a wealth of knowledge to share and a passion for improving others’ lives, there are countless opportunities to give back to a profession or study that has enriched you.
There is a difference between a speaker and a trainer. You can be both, but you can also be one or the other depending on what you do and what you can share.
In an overgeneralization:
A speaker does a job well and can share that ability and experience with others. Speakers usually present as guests of honor, toastmasters, keynotes, before-dinner or after-dinner speakers, and single-event presentations that may last from ten minutes to an hour. As we think of it in standard terms, they emphasize speaking with slight verbal or actual skill-use interaction with an audience. They supply information and tips. They inspire. They get people excited. They get people to believe in themselves or whatever it is that is the speaker's specialty. Inspiring speakers who change lives naturally get called back to speak to the group again.
Trainers, as the name suggests, train people. They help people and organizations do a task better. Their presentations usually take several hours, firsthand, or maybe even day-long or weeks-long, because they take individuals through a step-by-step review of how they can change how they are doing things. When trainers are effective in helping a person or an organization, they are asked to help again. Trainers can make a tremendous amount of money and make an incredible difference in the performance and lives of individuals and companies when they work their way up through the ranks to that desirable spot in the Fortune 500 mix.
Some would disagree, but I don’t think speaking or training is about self-promotion. We reap what we sow, but the best speakers and trainers come to it from, as they say, a servant’s heart. Reach out to others and ask to be a part of their lives because you want to make a difference in them rather than promote yourself. As a person who produces a conference where there have been thousands of speakers, I can attest that those who come to serve are rewarded many times more than those who want to speak and train because of self-promotion. Indeed, sow valuable information into the mind of another and, like a corn plant, from one seed comes twelve hundred seeds back to you. Speak and train for unselfish reasons because you want to give and see if you don’t get back twelve-hundred-fold.
I know I have.
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