1 - What could YOU publish a book on to help others?

This first episode was intended to set the stage. It gave me a chance to give you a little background on how I got started as a speaker, and tips that you might find useful. But it's just the beginning. It was an interview I did, just after my book first came out, and it was conducted by Susan Levin's SPEAKER SERVICES. The actual interview lasted almost an hour and you'll hear more segments of it over the next few episodes. If you're interested in reading or listening to my book, you'll find it on Amazon and Audible under the title, FROM THE SOAPBOX TO THE STAGE. If you do, please consider leaving a comment there, good or bad, I'll gladly take it all. And if you felt the information was helpful, you're welcome to buy me a cup of coffee at BUY ME A COFFEE.COM /BILLC.

For more help with professional speaking, get the book FROM THE SOAPBOX TO THE STAGE, available on Amazon. Copyright 2025  Bill Corbett and The Get Paid To Speak Podcast. All Rights Reserved.

Transcript

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Thank you for downloading and listening to the first episode of my new podcast, getting Paid To Speak. I've been speaking nationally since the late nineties and internationally since 2014, but back in 2013, I noticed something interesting whenever I was interacting with my audience members, the most common questions I received weren't about my material or what I was speaking about. Instead, my audience was asking me how I got my start. In speaking. They would tell me that they were tired of their day job or their desk job and wanted to take what they felt passionate about and share it all from the stage. So with my wife's encouragement, I sat down and wrote the book from the soapbox to the stage. Now available in paperback, Kindle, and on Audible read by yours truly, this podcast is an extension of that bestselling book, and in fact goes beyond those pages to bring you the information you need to become a successful speaker and to start your own speaking business, either part-time or even while you're still working your day job. And as you listen to the things you'll learn in each episode, I hope you'll consider sharing your thoughts and questions with me by emailing me when you get the urge. Send emails to me@billbillcorbett.com. The email address again is bill@billcorbett.com. I'd love to hear from you this first episode you're about to hear. It's my radio interview that I did shortly after the book was published with Jean Noel Bacio are from Speaker Services. Speaker Services is a National Speakers Bureau started by Susan Levin, and you can learn more about them@www.speakerservices.com. Hi, and welcome to Speakers Community Teleclass, where we talk with guest experts for Susan Levin and speaker services. And I'm sitting in for Susan. I'm Jean Noelle Bass. You're sitting in for Susan today, and we have an amazing guest with us, bill Corbett, who is written from soapbox to the stage, how to use your passion to start a speaking business. And this is going to tell you all about how to follow your passion if you want to go out and speak and how to start a speaking business, which is something that is really valuable information is kind of hard to find out exactly how to do it. Bill Corbett is the author of that book, and he's an award-winning professional speaker since 1995. He has been on stages across the US for everything from brief lectures to keynote speeches to multi-day training events. And he's also a regular contributor to network television affiliates and produces and hosts his own television show. And he's the award-winning author of six books. He writes a syndicated national column. He's got many top-notch presentation skills, training videos, lectures on leadership and communication skills. He's a great resource and he provides coaching to anyone who aspires to develop their speaking business skills. So welcome, bill. Thank you so much for doing this. Great. Thanks. It's good to be here. I want to tell you that I love the way you emphasize passion. Tell that story about when you met that speaker that changed your life. One was a professional speaker who came to the company to do a presentation. His job was to inspire an entire audience of IT people. And just to lay a little groundwork here, because actually there is a great excerpt on Amazon from the book, but it didn't tell were you working at a company and did you have kind of a cubicle job or what kind of job, because I know you were kind of feeling you weren't doing what you really loved in life at that point, right? Yeah, I was a computer programmer and I had a Dilbert cubicle job. Okay, we know what that is. And so then the speaker came in one day. Well, the company was about to undergo changes, which was going to affect a lot of us. It wasn't job loss because this was quite a few years ago before the big layoffs and everything, but they were going to restructure. People weren't going to be happy with. So the leadership of the company wanted to bring in a high paid professional speaker to motivate the audience to be ready for change. But a lot of people were fascinated by him because he mastered the stage, did a fantastic job. And I'll always remember that even though it was many, many years ago, because it was my awakening for the fact that somebody could master an audience that way and keep everyone engaged and have to deal with a challenging topic. On top of that, in the book I talk about the first thing he did, his entrance, which I'll always remember, the guy came out from the side curtain, walked across the stage, he had a milk crate in his hand, a plastic milk crate captured him his attention because why is this man in a three piece suit carrying a milk crate? And he walked over to the lectern, dropped it on the floor behind the lectern and stepped up on it. That's. Great. Because. He was short, he was shorter than most of the men on the stage. He took advantage of his physical situation to capture the audience and get them to pay attention. And I thought that was great. What a great way to open up gravity's attention because they all started laughing when he stepped up on the crate. That's brilliant, isn't it? It is. The. Next thing he did that I really loved was in his opening remarks, he pulled out a newspaper, newspaper tucked under his arm, and he opened it up to a couple pages in the paper and he was starting to talk about an article that he had found and how it related to an organization having to change. And the newspaper was our own hometown local city newspaper. And this man was actually from out west, but yet he used a local story to connect his message to us. So he really connected with us by using our own newspaper, our own local story. And I thought, that's amazing. I learned another great tip on how to connect with your audience by something that he did. Wow, that's really smart. It really was. So you went up. To. Him afterwards, and I remember you said you waited and you couldn't wait to talk to him. Right. Most people were filing out to get back to their cubicles, and I stayed behind and when the officers of the company were done shaking his hand and thanking him for his time and everything, I got his attention and he came over to the stage and I just told him how amazed I was with his presentation and that something had stirred in me that I wanted to do what he did. I asked him if I could have just one piece of advice when I met speakers and presenters over the years, I would always ask them for one piece of information that would be helpful to me as a future presenter and speaker and I would collect those over time. And he told you get mentors, right? Yes. He said, if you want to do something special, you got to go find people who are already doing that. Take them out to lunch, buy them a cup of coffee, hang out where they hang out and use that information, that opportunity. He said, everyone's not going to agree to do it, but some will. Don't let that stop me from asking. I just thought that was terrific. Yeah, that was a great question. And I began to look for people around me who were good presenters, better yet, who are running a business speaking and ask them for their time and their knowledge and expertise. And I know that since then. So then as you developed your career and in a way you've sort of done in this book, what will help people if they can't do what you did and actually get these mentors in person, although I'm sure that a lot of readers will find their way to that, but it sounds like in this book you've outlined step-by-step how someone can go to becoming a professional speaker. What is the first step would you say that they should take? Well, the first step is they've got to figure out what kind of marketable skill they have or what passion do they feel burning inside. I oftentimes speak to groups and I tell them, you may be in a job that you don't really love, that you don't feel any passion in your job, that you feel compelled that you have to work to put the bread on the table, but it doesn't mean you can't have passion. Go find something else that creates fire inside your soul and do that even part-time. Donate your time for an organization that can use your help, develop your passion off to the side. And what happens is you end up bringing that passion into your main job if you can't leave your job. That's interesting. So in other words, as you're going out and trying to get this thing going with professional speaking, how could that kind of come back into your daily grind? Kind of. As I revealed earlier, I was a computer programmer. I discovered my passion was working with parents with challenging children. That became my interest, and it started out as a selfish interest because I had three kids. I had to become a father I had never seen because I did not have a good father. So I had to become the dad to my three kids in a way that I had never seen before and only had in my mind. So I began to read everything I could on child behavior and what causes challenging behavior and how to build a stronger family, and realized how much it really caught me on fire inside to do this and to see the changes that were going on in my own home that I actually went off and became a licensed parent educator. So. Is that. What you started speaking about then? Yes, that's what I started on, and I would do that. So I was working my program in cubicle job and then nights and weekends I would disappear to schools or churches or counseling centers and do workshops and teach parenting classes. I was really doing it because I believe firmly in the philosophy of third person teaching. If you have to teach somebody how to do something, then it's only going to make you stronger and better and more skilled at what it is you're teaching. Because. You have to teach someone else. And I know you cover a lot of this in the book. So the question people will ask is, well, how do I go out and find the speaking gigs? How did you do it? How did you start? Once I had my passion, which was parenting and children, the next thing that I had to do is I have to figure out what would I talk about if I had anybody, if I could get anybody to come close to my soapbox and listen to me, what would I talk about? So I first had to develop what that was. To do that, the first thing that I did was to figure out who could I help and who would I speak to, who would be in my audience? And I even did this one little exercise of envisioning who would be in my audience. And then I went to find those people and I discovered that a lot of those people drop their kids off at daycare centers. I began to go to all the conferences, the parent conferences that these are not, I'm not talking about the conference. You go to figure out what your child's schedule is at school. These are conferences for parents and teachers to go and learn. And many professions, they have conferences for parents and teachers, but they're not very well publicized. So I began to do some detective work and see who I could talk to at all the preschool centers and say, where do your teachers go to get help? Or where can parents go to get help? And they directed me to a couple of organizations that put on little training classes or conferences. So I began to attend those so that I could hang out with the people who would end up being my customer, and I would look for opportunities to talk to them and say, what are your greatest challenges? So anytime I could get myself into a conversation with parents and teachers, I would always ask that question, why are you here? What is the challenges that bring you to a workshop or to a conference or a class? And they laid out three to five typical problems with challenging children, which end up being in what I call the terrific two years, which are one to six. That's an interesting spin on that. I collected three to five classic problems, and then I went away and began to study about those and going back to my books and even taking some courses so that I could develop that knowledge and understanding. And then I started putting together little articles, little articles that wouldn't really go anywhere except the file in my file cabinet. I just had this vision that I would write about this one day, or I would speak about it one day. And so having to write articles and content, those would become the core content for my future speeches. So you were actually kind of developing your presentations, which I guess would be sort of the second step is get clear on what you speak about. And it's really amazing that you hung out with your target audiences. You asked them what their needs were, meanwhile you were developing your presentations. So it sounds like you were just kind of doing all this work, like you said, in your spare time, but building a very solid foundation. And as a computer programmer, I worked quite a few hours, but probably nowhere near as what people probably worked today around the clock. So I had my evenings and my weekends to work on this, and because I had small children, I would try to fashion solution to these parents' problems, and then I tried it out with my kids. That's always. Good. And my kids end up becoming Guinea pigs in my dad lab. I would construct solutions to these problems and try 'em out on them to see if they would work. And sometimes they did, sometimes they didn't. And if it didn't, I'd go back to my dad lab and restructure it, rewrite it, and go back and do it again. That's really a good way. You're in good company. I interviewed Art Link letter once, and he did the same thing for kids to say the darnest things. It's always the best way to do it, right? Yes. And then what was your next step? Was this before the web? Because now in a way, or those articles that you were writing and filing away, I mean now of course, there's a lot of opportunities for people to just post them on the web all over the place, right? Yeah. This was before the web, unfortunately, and I it's dark cages. I think at the time was, I discovered when the first bulletin boards where you could go up, you could play games on them, but they were of course, with all amber screens or green screens, very blocky letters. Well, you were a real pioneer. But now people, if they follow the process, which I'm sure you outline in your book, then as they develop their presentations, they can also post these articles around because there's so many websites that are hungry for content, so they could. Start getting. Themselves, they could. Start. Establishing themselves as an expert even before they are an expert in a way. Yeah. In fact, back when I was doing this, there really was no soapbox. And of course for people who don't understand the soapbox, the soapbox was the crates that soap manufacturers would ship the soaps to, and then the stores would toss them out in the back alley and they'd get crushed up and destroyed. Well, some people who would want to be heard in the center of the square would grab a soapbox, put it right on the main street, and get up on it and start handing out hand bills and taking a stand against the government or city taxes or whatever. Thanks again for downloading this podcast episode. It gave me a chance to give you a little background on how I got started as a speaker and tips that you might find useful, but it's just the beginning. The actual interview lasted almost an hour, and you'll hear more excerpts of it in the next few episodes. If you're interested in reading or listening to my book, you'll find it on Amazon under the title from the soapbox to the stage. If you do, please consider leaving a comment there. Good or bad, I'll gladly take it all. And if you felt the information was helpful in any way, you're always welcome to buy me a cup of coffee. You can do that at buy me a coffee.com/bill. That's buy me a coffee.com/bill.