Leveling up
A while back, I went to a two-day conference to develop my public speaking skills. One of the owners and leaders of the event, Michael Port, wrote a book called The Referable Speaker. In the book he gives guidance to people like me who have gotten to a place in their career where they have given enough speeches, led enough workshops, and owned enough breakout rooms where they have seen success. However, for people that want to get to the next level it can be quite difficult because the speech you give in a breakout room is different than the speech you should give from the main stage. We find ourselves in a catch 22 where we keep delivering small room speeches which result in small room gigs.
The advice he gave is that if you want to deliver a keynote then you need to write your keynote; this means you are writing a speech for an audience that may never exist. You are practicing and fine tuning something that is meant for thousands but may only be heard by dozens; you are practicing and honing your skills before they are ever needed.
This advice is some of the best I have ever received to improve my speaking skills, and it is applicable for any area in life where we want to level up. It is also counterintuitive to what we think should happen; we want someone to say hey, you’re great, come join me up here. But that rarely happens because they are seeing you do lower-level work and to master upper-level work you need to do the work when it doesn’t exist yet; you have to write a speech you may never deliver. It is essentially dressing for the job you want rather than the job you have; it is the idea that to get to the next level, we need to level up before we are ever invited.
If you want to get to the next level, you need to level up before you’re invited.
Leveling up is writing the speech when no one’s listening; it is the athlete that is sprinting on the field when no one is watching; it is the person who sits reading when no one has assigned the book.
You just need to ask yourself, who do I want to be next year, next month, next week? What does that person look like? What does that person do when they wake up in the morning? Once you’ve made that list, once you have an image of what it looks like at the next level, pick one thing from that list and start doing it today.
Every little thing you do today will build your own set of stairs. Before you know it, you will be at that next level not because someone saw who you could be and pulled you up, but because you made it impossible for them to deny who you are.
