The job of a keynote speaker is, more than anything, to inspire the audience.

The definition of “inspire” is to “fill someone with the urge or ability to do or feel something, especially to do something creative”.

The thing with inspiration is that it is contagious.

The more inspired we are as speakers (ie, the more we are filled sig the urge or ability to do or feel something) the easier it is for us to inspire others.

That is why I, as a speaker, travel so much.
By traveling around the world I get to learn about different cultures, countries and people. I get to meet different industries, professions and experts. I get to see different places, different ideas, different ways of doing things.

Last year I worked in 22 different countries. This year I have, so far, worked in 15 – on 4 continents.

To be in Shanghai, Luxembourg, Cambridge, Madrid, Hong Kong, Singapore and Sweden in one months to speak to (amongst others) young leaders from developing countries, lawyers and insurance experts in one month (as I did in June) fills me with so many different insights and ideas that I can then transform to inspiring messages in my speeches.

But you can not always be inspired.

There is such a thing as too much inspiration.

Sometimes you need to do the opposite of being inspired.

It might sound weird but the best way to explain it is to look at the actual meaning of the word “inspire”.

To “inspire” literally means “to breathe in”. (From the dictionary: “the drawing in of breath; inhalation. crackling sounds are heard in the stethoscope on inspiration.”

And if we constantly breathe in we will die.
We also need to breathe out.

Or as the dictionary calls it: “to expire” – as in: “exhale (air) from the lungs. (as adj. expired) : the volume of expired air.”

Inspiration is “input”, but creativity is “output”

So to be creative we need to take time off from being inspired and instead focus on getting something out.

And to get something out we need time to do nothing.

The word “expire” actually also means “• (of a period of time) come to an end: the three-year period has expired.”

As a speaker my financial year ends on August 31st, and I make sure that I have had enough work to take me around the world in the first 10 month of the year.
The last two months (July and August) is my time relax, think and learn.

I guess you can say that: “My time of inspiration expires in June.”

So in July I did nothing, as in no work at all.

Zero dollar in revenue. Zero miles on a plane for going to clients (Well, technically that is not true, I did fly to do one (1) speech at a conference for speakers in Phoenix, Arizona… But you get my point.)

I spent 6 weeks on my island in Sweden doing nothing but playing with my kids, relaxing with my wife and fooling around with some simple gardening. I hardly opened my computer, and if I did it was to load Game of Thrones, not to check emails, write blog posts or research a new book.

I emptied my brain. Stopped thinking about speaking or work,

Yes, I did not work. For 1,5 months.

Above is a picture of the island paradise that I have built for our family to get away from the rest of the world to just chill and relax.

Now, after 45 days or so of doing nothing – of exhaling – my mind is as empty as my energy level is re-charged.

My subconscious have gotten the quite time that it needs to combine all the inspiration and inputs that I got from travelling the world for 10 months earlier in the year.

These weeks of non-work, of “anti-revenue”, of down time are what makes it possible for me to be a global keynote speaker for the rest of the year.

But now it is time to start breathing in again. Time to begin filling up those “imaginary lungs of creativity” with new energy in the form of inspiration.

So my advice to you as a speaker is: Get out there and be inspired – but do not be an inspiration junkie.
Do not constantly breathe in. Create the time and space to let yourself breath out.

In the long run I can promise you that it will make you feel more alive, make your more creative, give you a more fulfilling life (and – for the ones of you who question the sanity of having weeks and weeks of zero-revenue time – I will tell you that letting yourself breathe in AND out will also make you more money in the end.)

At least that is how it works for me.

(Svanholmen, Sweden)

I am in the middle of my two-months summer vacation/paternity leave period where I am at the moment playing with my kids on my private island just outside Stockholm.

But today I had a “working day” where I had 3 different meetings with 3 different people who in one way or another wanted to discuss the world of professional speaking.

One of the three asked me: “Why do you do these speaker mentoring sessions? What do you get out of it?”

I explained that the best way to learn is to teach.

And a good way to develop your own speaking business is to help other speakers develop their own.

By asking questions about how other speakers look at their speaking business I not only get to learn about how other speakers view this job. But in the coaching sessions we also go deeper to try to discover a glitch in their current way of running their speaking business, or find a new way of developing their business further.

The unlocking of new potential or the finding of a new approach to their speaking business is usually the most rewarding part of our sessions. Not only for the speaker I am meeting with – but also for me.

The best way to describe is it that I work as a “Chiropractor” who realigns the business of the speaker to a position that is more correct, more genuine and more authentic.

By doing that I get a deeper understanding of what the answer is for others around the fundamental questions like “Why do you speak?”, “Why do you speak on the topics you speak on?” and “What is the message that you want to communicate?”

Many speakers THINK that they have the answers to these questions but when you dig deeper you often come to the conclusion that the answers that where there were not the REAL answers, not the real drivers for why these speakers speak.

And by helping others unlock any of these real answers, I myself get better at unlocking them in myself.

Do not just sit down with other speakers to learn FROM them – but sit down to learn by helping them learn about themselves.

It might sound like a very a-round-about-way to learn. But it is very effective and powerful.

That’s why I decide to mentor speakers in the middle of my vacation when I get a chance.

 

ps. And the meetings seemed to have gone down well with the people I met too. This was the post from one of them – Pamela – after I had met with her.

So lets first be honest: being a global speaker does mean a lot of travel as a look at my last week will show.

March 16: 6 am flight Stockholm – Vienna and then train to Steyr to check in to my hotel.

March 17: Speech in the morning and then train to go back to Vienna to board a flight to London and then a new flight from London to Lagos, Nigeria.

March 18: Landed at 6 am. Spent 1.5 hour in car to get to the hotel. Checked in and topped up on an additional 3 hours of sleep in my room before I checked out again and went to the venue where I had lunch and then did my speech in the afternoon.

At 5 pm I was done and rushed to the airport to catch a night flight out of Lagos, via Dubai to arrive back in my home country of Singapore on the 19.th of March.

One might just see “Oh, that just looks like a lot of travel.” and pity me for a “Up in the Air”-kind of life.

(And sure, I visited 6 countries on 3 continents via 5 flights at 6 airports, and had a total traveling time (including transfers, cars and trains) of 50 hours in a span of 80 hours.)

But here is another way of looking at what I got to do in the same period of time:

Because the 16th was an off-day between speeches I could treat myself to a mini vacation in wonderful Vienna where I strolled through the old town, ate classic Austrian food, visited a national park and attended the design exhibition “Happy” by Stefan Sagmeister at the MAK Museum.

I then took an earlier train so that I could walk around in small, old town of Steyr that looks like it has been taken from an old movie set with castles, churches and old, beautiful houses and narrow cobbled stoned streets all build next to the fork of two rivers.

In the evening I had dinner in the most authentic of Austrian eating houses while getting almost an hour one-on-one time with the global head of the engine production of one of the most respected companies in the world. (Read about that meeting in a previous post.)

During my hours in Nigeria I got to experience the vast contrast in quality of life between (many) humans in Africa compared to (many) in Europe. (To be thrown between the image of the big, roomy multi story villas spread out in the Austrian mountain landscape to the crowded, bustling slums of Lagos Nigeria in a matter of hours is the mental equivalent of going from a cold ice-water swim into a sauna.)

But I also got to see how present the refugee crisis is in Vienna (for example the train station in Vienna has a WIFI-network called “Free WIFI for refugees” and another one called “Free Refugee information WIFI’ to help refugees coming by train from places like Syria and Afghanistan. (A simple and brilliant idea by the way).)

I also got the privilege to hear the new strategy for the next 10 years and beyond for one of the largest car companies in the world as well as hear how an African food company had been able to turn itself around and become a huge success due to very efficient management procedures in a country famously known to be difficult to work in.

All in a little bit more than 3 days.

Being a global speaker is not for everyone.

If you hate (business class) traveling you probably should not do it.

But if you do not mind the travel, you will quickly come to realise that the travel is just a means to an end: it makes it possible for you to have a job where you can get to experience the whole world in a deeper and more diverse way than – arguably – any other job on this planet.

What other job lets you visit 3 corners of the globe (A small village in Austria, a bustling and dusty Africa and the metropolis of Singapore) in 3 days to learn and see so much?