THE
VALUE
OF NOW
This is hardly news to anyone: The
economy is stuck in neutral.
The world has yet to recover from
the global economic collapse of 2008,
and as a result, the speaking industry
is enduring some hard times as well.
Mark Sanborn knows this. He knows
the industry has changed, and he
knows that more turmoil may yet be
ahead. But, Sanborn is not going to
waste much time thinking about that
potential turmoil, or even trying to
make proactive plans for what might
be,in another two or three or five years.
Instead, he’ll spend his time worrying about what he can control—how
he performs in the present. And he suggests other speakers follow his lead.
“I looked at the front page of The
Wall Street Journal today, and you know
what? I didn’t see any story there that I
had any control over,” he jokes. “I saw a
lot of things that may have an impact
on my life and on my investments. But
I’m not going to worry about it.”
In the end, Sanborn says, each of
us can only really control what we do,
and how we perform. So those are the
things we should worry about.
“I’m not a futurist,” he says. “I’m a
presentologist. I try to focus on what
I know for sure is happening. I’m not
speaking against the idea of looking
ahead. I’m just saying it’s awfully hard
to predict the future. “
He adds: “What do I know for sure?
I know for sure that people will have
always have difficulties and challenges
and will always need solutions. I know
that people will aspire to be better. If
I can help them solve their problems,
Sanborn has been delivering that
actionable narrative for 25 years, and
it has served him extremely well. His
list of more than 1,500 clients includes
such titans as FedEx, Harley Davidson,
KPMG and the U.S. Postal Service,
among many others. He is the author
of seven books and a member of the
National Speakers Association’s CPAE
Speaker of Hall of Fame®.
Now, it may not be entirely true to
say that Sanborn has succeeded only
because he knows who he is, and what
he’s selling. And it may not be entirely
true that Sanborn’s career has endured
for the past two decades only because he
knew the answer to those key questions
almost as soon as he hit the podium.
But that knowledge certainly hasn’t
hurt, he says.
Speakers who seek similar success
would be wise to follow his lead.
“In the world of speaking, we need
to provide cherry flavor in the cough
syrup,” he says. “You don’t buy cherry-flavored cough syrup because you like
the taste of cherries. You buy it because
you have a cough. The flavor just helps
the medicine go down. So for me,
I’ve always tried to make sure that my
speeches are not about what I did or
what I learned, but what my audiences
can learn and what they can do to be
more successful. That’s the information
the audiences really want to know.”
FUELED BY FEAR
To hear Sanborn tell it, getting to the
heart of what his audiences “want” to
know has been at the very center of his
speaking from the very start.
Sanborn had been making seminar
presentations for years before he
decided to make speaking his career—
he made his first speech, at the age of
10 during a 4-H contest—but even
though he was an experienced presenter by the time he went pro, he
was most definitely not an experienced businessman.
Only 27 at the time, Sanborn says
he understood on a very fundamental
level that, because of his relative youth,
his business-world audiences—men
and women with years of managerial
experience—were going to question
his credentials. Indeed, Sanborn recalls
feeling that sense of “doubt” hanging
over the room in those early days, with
grizzled old vets thinking to themselves,
“What can this kid tell me?”
“When I went full time, most of
my audiences were older than me,” he
recalls. “The average age of a manager
has come down over the years, but
back then, they were all a bit older, and
I always had this fear that somebody
would just stand up in the middle of
my presentation and say, ‘This is B.S.!
He’s 27, I’m 52, and let’s be frank, he
doesn’t have a clue!’”
It was, quite justifiably, Sanborn’s
biggest fear at the time—the thing that
kept him awake at night and kept the but-
terflies churning right up until show time.
But in the end, it was a fear that
served him well. Sanborn anticipated
questions he might be asked so that he
had solid answers, and he aimed to turn
himself into a true encyclopedia on the
topic of business management.
His goal, he says, was to make sure
that every time he took to the podium,
he was giving his audience something
they wanted to know. Sometimes, he
jokes, he probably gave them more than
they wanted to know.
“I had a fear that drove me like a
crazy person,” he recalls. “If anything,
I probably overwhelmed people with
good ideas. I wanted to make sure that
nobody left that room and said, ‘You
know, I sat through three hours and I
didn’t get much out of this.’ I would
rather hear them say, ‘I got too much—
my head is spinning.”
As a young speaker, Sanborn says he
was acutely aware that his career was
on the line each time he took to the
podium. He knew he had to deliver,
