This is the latest in the Speaker Academy series, which started here, but it’s also intended for my potential speaking clients.

I do what I call “consultative speaking.” It’s precisely comparable to consultative selling, in which “the emphasis is on what the potential customer wants and needs.” In one sense, I learned this in industry when I worked in marketing – every speech to any meeting has to be focused on the audience’s interests and concerns, or they’ll dive into their emails. In another sense, I learned it from Kent Bottles MD, who said that he always asks clients, “What outcome would make you say that I really knocked it out of the park?” Today, thanks to Kent, with every speaking client I have what I call a “home run call,” and build my speech around that.

Today I’ve uploaded the video of a speech I did in December for The Leapfrog Group‘s annual meeting.

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There’s only been one post in this series in the past year, but for impact speakers, this book is real news. Best advice on how to have an impact I’ve ever seen. Not perfect IMO, but full of things I bet you’ve never thought about that can really help you up your game.

By “impact speaker” I mean a speaker who really wants to grab the audience’s thinking and have an impact. That’s not the only valid kind of speaking, and it’s certainly not the only valid way to tell your patient story. But if you, like me, truly want to change the world, it’s really useful to get people’s attention. And this book makes clear that how you go about it can make a big difference.

It’s full of examples on big topics and details. And it does it so well that I’ve decided to:

1. Blog about the book before I’ve finished it
2. Buy the Kindle version as well as the audio version. (Kindle is infinitely better for note taking and excerpts.)
3. Buy a copy for any Speaker Academy visitor (you) who can convince me they want it for good reason.

The author is Chris Anderson @chr1sa, founder of TED. When I first heard about the book I thought it might be some light fluffy cheerleading: “You can do it! Just be yourself!” Instead, it’s absolutely full of “This is what works,” “Do this; do NOT do that,” often including examples like “You might have done it this way:” followed by “But see how much better it is if it’s done this way?” Most points are accompanied by example TED Talks you can watch, and in the Kindle version those talks are even linked.

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