For Youth Speakers About Youth Speakers

Kinship is the best way to describe how I feel about others who have chosen to speak to youth for a living, and this blog is for all those who share my passion for this profession. I always get so excited when I have the opportunity to spend time with other youth speakers and my thought was to create a place to share that passion so that we could share ideas, elevate our profession and be united in our challenges and successes as we deal with the youth of our nation. Tonight was one of those nights as I had the opportunity to have dinner with Rhett Laubach, Kelly Barnes and Paul Moya. Paul is a former FFA National President, and we were supporting him in moving forward in the profession as a youth speaker. He is currently a senior at Notre Dame, he has a great stage presence and is gifted in his ability to connect with teens. The subject eventually got around to: "How do I put dates on the calendar.?" It is a great question, that we all have opinions on, so my thought was to have that be the first topic of the Youth Speakers Blog. We came up with three things for him to start doing: 1. Rhett Laubach: "Since you are a former national officer the best thing for you to do is to leverage your contacts you made as a national officer and talk to those who you met during your time of service. Call FFA contacts to find out when they hire speakers and ask them what you would need to do to be considered as a speaker for an event" 2. Bill Cordes: "Utilize social networking and email contact programs to bring value to those who have seen you speak in the past so you can remind them that you are an option in the marketplace." 3. Kelly Barnes: "The best way to get speaking engagements in the future is do deliver a quality program every time you speak." All of this is great advice for all speakers what I would like to hear from you is what advice would you give to other speakers rookie or seasoned professionals about how to stay viable in the marketplace? Please post your comments so we can all learn from each other?