By Mike Domitrz, CSP, CPAE |
“How many events do you speak at a year?”
“How much do you make?”
“How much have you diversified your speaking income?”
“What are the hot topics I should focus my speaking business on right now?”
Have you ever heard any of these questions? Have you felt the pressure to have answers that will impress your speaking colleagues? I have. Sometimes the questions are being asked from within. My own mind is putting this pressure on me.
- Will I hit a specific dollar amount from speaking this year – an amount that is way above what I need to survive?
- Do I NEED to write a book or do more consulting or have more online courses available?
If you are like me and your mind ever starts asking these questions, you know what happens next. You feel a little “off.” Maybe really “off.” You feel a sense of quicksand where you are stuck and not doing ENOUGH. You feel pressure.
What did I do when this happened? I did MORE. If I learned a new way to add revenue from a colleague, I did it immediately. Friends in the business started calling me, “Mr. Implementation” because I was implementing the lesson as my speaking colleague was teaching it from the front of the room.
What was I accomplishing? Doing more! That’s what. It filled my days and nights and sometimes early mornings. What it didn’t fill was my soul. I was “doing” to “do.”
Was I good at all these projects? Yes, for about 90% of them. Good to great in fact. What I was not was sensational at them. I was not in my Zone of Genius. Speaking was my Zone of Genius. Coaching was my Zone of Genius. Sharing my passion was my Zone of Genius. Launching a new website was NOT. Uploading to social media was not.
If you ask me today, “Mike, what would you tell your younger self?” My answer is consistently, “Do less, better. Do what FILLS your soul.”
Why? What I have learned is that doing less better keeps me in my Zone of Genius and my Zone of Genius keeps my soul being refilled over and over and over.
Is this focus always easy? NO!
I have an ADHD-wired brain that is built beautifully for numbers. And so, I can get into the numbers of the speaking business. What I’ve realized is that while my brain is great with being focused on numbers, my soul is not. It simply doesn’t care about numbers.
Consequently, when I get focused on revenue as my target, my restlessness goes up, my anxiety goes up, and my moodiness goes up. What has NEVER gone up by leaps and bounds with this focus is my actual revenue. LOL. The irony.
Don’t get me wrong. Tracking and staying in touch with your numbers is important to running a business. And being RUN by financial numbers will rarely fill the soul – at least not for people wired like me.
EVERY time I’ve found myself focused on “getting more bookings to get to a certain dollar amount of revenue,” I am not my best self. And my business is not as strong.
EVERY time I focus on serving my mission and fully living my mission, I am happier, more fulfilled, and somehow my speaking calendar fills up.
Let’s get real. My calendar doesn’t “somehow” get filled. Anyone who I have coached or who has attended one of my retreats has gotten a behind-the-scenes look at my business and knows my business is almost completely systemized (run on detailed, templated, and automated systems). I have found having such a systemized business enables me to stay out of the weeds and be more focused on what I love. And you guessed it – allows me time to follow my soul.
I have over 36 email templates for daily use in my business along with daily triggers in my CRM for when to send each one. Why? If I don’t have to think about what to say or when to reach out, I can use that time to serve my mission in my Zone of Genius (SOUL-FILLING). If getting a contract out only takes two minutes from the time I get off the phone with the client, I have way more time to do what I LOVE.
Why does any of this matter?
For decades I didn’t focus on soul. I focused on a balance of living my mission and getting booked to do so. What that led to was me being on-the-road more than 99% of speakers. What that led to was me routinely getting up at 3:30 a.m. to catch a flight to go speak on the SAME DAY and then repeat that schedule each consecutive day of the week until Friday when I flew home. While I had rules in place to be home for my kids and family events, I was BUSY.
Then suddenly as I was beginning my 50s, the pandemic hit. Like many in the speaking business the first two months were scary. Then I decided to just serve my clients by doing a free webinar on Zoom. That webinar would blow my mind. We had over 80% of registrants attend and we maxed out my Zoom account. All I did was share from my Zone of Genius. Zone of Genius is always soul-filling for me. NO SELLING or PROMOTING during the webinar.
In the end, that webinar led to clients (and people who would become clients) thinking and saying, “I didn’t know live virtual could be this interactive, thought-provoking, and skills-based at the same time.” Suddenly we were getting calls and inquiries that were packing the rest of 2020 and 2021 with live virtual events. Why? I was focused on serving THROUGH my Zone of Genius. Thus, doing the work of the soul.
Smooth sailing ahead, right? Maybe. Maybe not. Find out in Part 2 of this blog.
Mike Domitrz, CSP, CPAE, Host of the Soulful Speakers Retreats at www.PeakImpactEvents.com and Founder of www.CenterForRespect.com
Looking forward to Part 2 🙂