Grow Your Impact As A Psychologist With Public Speaking

I’ve been talking to a bunch of psychologists recently about how they’re growing their practices, and this is an idea I’ve heard a few times.

You can be really successful, but only if you know what you’re doing

Here are the two main strategies.

First Option: Become A Paid Speaker

This is what most people seem to want. Because it sounds like the easiest and most transactional. But it’s actually the hardest way to launch a speaking career and the vast majority of people will fail. Here’s why:

• Getting bookings isn’t easy. If someone is going to pay you for a speaking engagement, it’s because your name is going to put enough butts in seats to earn the organizer more than they pay you and the venue. If you’re relatively unknown, you’d need to invest considerably in building a profile before people will want to pay you anything more than a nominal fee for you to come and talk.
• Getting enough bookings to make enough money is even harder
• To make this worthwhile, you’ll need to travel a LOT
• If you want to maintain your private client practice, you’re going to be overstretched doing that and traveling to speaking engagements all over the country. And days of tele therapy on hotel wi-fi isn't fun.
• If you’re paid to speak, you’re not allowed to sell your services from the stage, so you're limited to whatever you can be paid for the talk.

For most people chasing this goal, it's a tough life.

The paid speaking approach is better once you’ve built a following and a profile for yourself. For most people new to the space, it’s years away.

Second Option: Speaking Engagements And An Online Group Program

This is much easier, and can be the way you build yourself up profitably until paid speaking engagements start coming to you. The thing is, this approach is so profitable that by the time paid speaking engagements do start coming, you’ll turn most of them down because you can earn a lot more money and leverage your time a lot better through unpaid speaking. Sound confusing? It's not... here's how most speakers make multi-six figure revenue streams with their work:

• Pick a niche that you specialize in
• Take all the unpaid speaking engagements that you want where the audience is likely to have people who are in that niche
• Weave into your talk anonymized case studies of people whom you’ve helped that have worked with you directly
• At the end of your talk, give a way for people to contact you. This should be a website link to get something of value, such as a free video that gives more detail about what you’ve touched upon in your talk. Don't overthink or overproduce the video. Make it using your phone. Make sure with the video that you also include a link to schedule a call with you directly
• People will schedule calls with you, having seen you on the stage they will see you as an authority and the answer to the issue they’re having that you can help with. After a little practice, more than 50% of the people who reach out and schedule a call with you will want to work with you directly
• Sell these people into a group coaching program that you run online, suggested price point $2,000-$10,000 depending on the program and the niche you work in.
• Serve the group via weekly coaching call(s), and an online community, and prerecorded psychoeducational content so your time is well leveraged and you can strike a reasonable work-life balance between speaking gigs and serving your clients.

What you’ll find is that you can make $5,000-$100,000 per unpaid speaking engagement this way.

And what happens when people master this model is that they no longer want many paid speaking gigs (unless it's the REALLY high profile ones), because unpaid speaking gigs make them a lot more money and help them make a much bigger impact with their work than paid ones!

Speaking of which, this is exactly what I teach psychologists, licensed counselors, therapists, and qualified experts to do in their practices. You can find out more at http://www.leveragedgroupprograms.com/watch-this-video  

Hope this helps!