There is a saying in India that without a teacher to
guide you nothing is attainable. Even the doors of heaven are opened only by
the grace of a teacher’s instruction. There are few more powerful statements
about the value and necessity of coaching in all endeavors. In the realm of
preparing for the TED stage, I realized at the outset that I need to find a
coach with a track record of successfully guiding students to land and deliver
their messages from the TED stage. As luck would have it, I found 3 excellent
resources to help me craft my skill. The first were Amy Dix and Dave Nitzel of
the Authority Speaker’s Agency. The second was Cesar Cervantes of Top Talks
TEDx Mentorship. The third was Evolve Benton of Speak4Profit Academy. Each has
a special target niche that served best for the path that I was crafting for
the purpose of taking my message about the power of human potential to a wider
audience.
Before January 2024, I was no stranger to speaking
before groups but I would not call myself a public speaker by any stretch of
imagination. The art of public speaking requires skilled coaching. The art of
storytelling requires many elements from the structure of the speech to the
stagecraft of your presentation. It requires you to practice posture, voice
modulation, eye contact and mental projection. It requires learning how to
craft your speech for maximum impact. You need to learn how to write your
opening hook. How to develop transitions. How to craft your through-line such
that the audience gets it from the beginning.
When you watch great speakers speak, you can see that
they grab the audience from the very moment they walk on stage. There is no
wasted effort. The best speeches reveal to the audience in the first minute
what the broad outline of the problem is. What is kept hidden is how the
solution will evolve, so the audience is interested and intrigued at the same
time. It takes skill to produce this creative tension, and this skill needs to
be taught. It needs to be learned and only a coach who has already travelled
this path can show you the way efficiently and effectively. Cesar Cervantes,
Amy Dix and Dave Nitzel each coached me in various aspects of speech crafting.
Crafting a TEDx talk is different than crafting a motivational keynote or a
signature talk. Cesar was my TEDx coach. While Amy and Dave each helped me hone
into my core value proposition for corporations in the area of Leadership and
High-Performance Team building.
Then came the aspect of actually landing stages and it
is here that Evolve Benton’s team of business associates helped me with my
development. There were so many aspects, my LinkedIn profile needed clean-up,
my website needed to be tightened on its message, social media pages needed to
be restructured.
Anybody can write a fairly decent speech and find
themselves on a stage to give a decent talk. But it takes expert coaching to
give you the training necessary to perform with excellence.
Look at it this way. If your message is worth
spreading. If your time is worth spending. Then it deserves to be performed
excellently and for that high-level coaching is no different than the
investment that people make when they go to college…. Only it is at a fraction
of what a 4-year college would cost and the rewards are a 100 fold greater.
Ravi R Iyer, MD
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