Earl Nightingale had it right when he wrote The Strangest Secret. “You become what you think about.” A friend gave me this cassette when I was a sophomore in college, and it changed my life. It made me aware of the internal chatter in my head, and all of the negative, discouraging things I had been saying to myself. That’s because I grew up in an abusive, dysfunctional family where I was told I’d never amount to nuthin’. My mother mocked me for wanting to go to college, and she was shocked when I won a scholarship.

My dorm roommate thought I was nuts. I started reading affirmations from a deck of 3×5 cards. Out loud. After nearly flunking out my freshman year, The Power of Positive Thinking turned me into a deans-list scholar. Then one day the psychology professor was lecturing about a study that suggested that most of our thinking takes the form of pictures, and that memories are stored and retrieved as pictures. That got me thinking.

A speed reading course had already taught a technique for remembering lists by turning them into pictures. For example, let’s say I needed to go to the store and buy toothpaste, beans, rice, coffee, sugar, bread, cereal, and bananas, I could conjure up a picture of a chimp with bad teeth, wearing a baker’s hat and eating a banana, while holding a mug full of corn flakes heaped with sugar, sitting on two burlap bags stenciled “RICE” and “BEANS.” You get the picture.

Our debate coach taught a variation of this technique, called the “loci method,” to organize important facts by visualizing a walk through the rooms of a house. This trick was popular in ancient Greece for memorizing long speeches and texts. It worked for Aristotle.

One afternoon, Denise, my wife-to-be, was working on a collage for an art class, and it occurred to me that I could put pictures together to represent my affirmations, and this might even be more effective than just words. So we each started building a scrapbook of things we’d like to have, places we’d like to go, and things we wanted to achieve in our lives. The format was simple: a cheep ring binder filled with plastic sleeves where you can slide in the pages. We cut photos from magazines and pasted them together into pages that represented our dreams and goals. We were too poor to afford a television, so we jokingly called our project “TomorrowVision.” We kept these books on the night table, and we’d review them together just before going to sleep when our subconscious mind would be most impressionable.

Years passed, and after a time we fell out of the picture-book-on-the-night-table habit. So much for applied psychology. We both had busy professional lives, then a son, and then another. We still followed the discipline of writing down our goals each month, and keeping a To-Do list in a DayTimer. But I completely forgot about TomorrowVision until I developed the film from Nassau.

One of those early life goals was to learn to scuba dive. This was represented in my scrapbook by a half-page underwater shot, torn from a magazine, of a diver with a big colorful fish on a reef.

When a client asked me to teach a series of seminars in Hawaii, we seized the opportunity and registered for pool classes, and finished our open-water certification in Kona. It was many trips, and many, many dives later that I rented that underwater camera on a whim.

As I was flipping through the dive pictures, I couldn’t believe my eyes. There was the fish, the SAME fish (which I now recognized as Holocanthus ciliarus, the Queen Angel). I called out to Denise, “Darling, do you know whatever happened to those old visualization notebooks we used to have?”

“Look in the pile of books under the bed.”

There it was. The picture in the TomorrowVision book looked as if it had been shot on the same roll of film.

Shock and surprise faded into deep satisfaction as I flipped through these pages. These images that had once represented life-long goals had already been realized: our home in the mountains in Colorado; writing a book; sailing the tropics; skiing with our boys; kayaking in Alaska; teaching at the University; cycling around Ireland; speaking in Mexico, Europe and Australia. I held in my hands a virtual scrapbook of the past ten years of our lives. The music from “Twilight Zone” started playing in my head.

Dr. Maxwell Maltz taught us that, “Your subconscious mind can not tell the difference between an actual experience and one that is vividly imagined.” By looking into our future through our TomorrowVision, we were programming our brains to seek out and recognize opportunities, large and small, that would bring us closer to those goals. Looking back, it seems as if those events were inevitable, because even our most incidental daily decisions were informed by deep, subconscious intent.

Over the past 30 years, leading experts like Louise Hay, Anthony Robbins and Depak Chopra have spoken passionately about the power of creative visualization. It’s no longer viewed as a mystical phenomenon. Today you can even buy an affirmation app for your iPhone. Psychologists and neuroscientists are looking deep into the brain, and can explain in scientific terms exactly how this seemingly magical process works.

I recently read how competitors in the World Memory Championships use variations on these same visual imagery tricks to perform mind-boggling feats, recanting long strings of numbers, like the mathematical constant pi (the record now stands at more than 80,000 digits) or memorizing the sequence of a shuffled deck of playing cards in less than a minute (30 seconds is the new Four-Minute-Mile). MRI scans of the brains of these mental heavyweights shows them lighting up areas normally used for visual recall and spatial navigation. The evolutionary explanation is simple. Presumably our ancestors found it particularly useful to recall where they found their last meal, or the way back to the cave.

The same mechanism allows us to remember our future, and then automatically steer around life’s obstacles until we arrive. The life we’ve lead has been extraordinary beyond my wildest dreams. I have only one regret; what if I had kept up the discipline by changing out my TomorrowVision pages as each goal was realized, replacing them with new images and loftier goals? What more might I have done?

Today that old ring binder is sitting on my desk, awaiting a new set of pages, and I’ve included these two extraordinary photographs for your review. This simple technique can help you achieve your goals and live your dreams as well. Here’s proof that when we give our lives a roadmap, our deep intellect will eventually navigate a course to it, even if it’s hidden away on a reef, deep beneath some distant sea.
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The good ones see themselves as part of the larger team, and will share their wealth of experience to insure your overall success. The bad ones see themselves as the star-of-the-show, with little consideration for the needs of other (often non-professional) speakers on the program. Use these 10 guidelines to screen the mountain of material that your speakers or their bureaus will send you.

Content

A professional speaker should engage, educate, motivate, and entertain, and in that order of priority. Unless this event changes your peoples’ behavior in some measurable way, you’re wasting their time and your money. New skills, new information, and new insights produce new customers, new sales, and increased profits.

Authority

Wouldn’t you rather take advice from a published expert, who has invested the time and effort to thoroughly research their field and write a book, or two, or three? Ask for autographed copies. And beware of vanity press imprints. If a major New York house published their books, you know they’re the real deal.

Originality

Beginners often pirate others’ examples and content, sometimes even telling a story as if it had actually happened to them. I recently heard a meeting planner complain, “If I hear one more cliché out of this guy I will scream.” If you’ve heard it before, so have your people.

Delivery

Are you looking for an academic expert (who may put your people to sleep) or a stand-up comic (whose act could play a nightclub)? Don’t settle. Look for a pro who can engage AND entertain, delivering powerful content with passion and pizzazz. After all, you want your people to remember the point, not just the punch line.

Customization

If a speaker is going to presume to tell you how to run your business better, they better understand your business. Select a speaker who will take a personal interest in your industry, your company, and your people. Will they visit your office, review your collateral material, shop your competition, or spend a day riding with your salespeople? Will they fly in early to attend the whole conference? An outsider’s insight may prove priceless. A real pro is a quick study, and will customize until they sound like they’re from home office.

Certification

There are two conferred by the National Speakers Association: the Certified Speaking Professional (CSP) and the Council of Peers Award of Excellence (CPAE). The CPAE is an honorary designation, a lifetime achievement award, while the CSP requires a minimum of 250 presentations over a five-year period, for at least 100 different clients, at a substantial minimum fee, and must be renewed every five years. The CSP is your assurance of the highest standards of professionalism and excellence. An elite group of veterans hold both.

Technical Mastery

The days when a speaker could stand behind a podium and just read from notes are long gone. Top pros supercharge their speeches with multiple multi-media: computer animation, upbeat music, sound effects and video. And they bring their own computers, projectors and microphones. (BTW, this can save you a bundle!) After all, when take your car to a mechanic, don’t you expect them to use their own tools?

Access

Does a live person answer the phone when you call? Successful speakers travel constantly, but are always accessible through their staff. They use cell phones, voice-mail and e-mail to keep in touch. The real pros check both at least twice a day, and respond promptly, personally.

Video

They did include a video didn’t they? The pros all have at least one; or two, or more. Ask for the what-you-see-is-what-you-get version, shot live, unedited (except perhaps for opening trailers). And while the WYSIWYG take may be technically flawed, anyone can look good in front of a studio full of friends.

Audition

Are they coming to your area? The pros get around, and will gladly arrange for you to sit in. If that’s not an option, interview them by phone. Think of it as a live one-on-one audition. Ask them to advise you on a particular challenge or business issue, then ask yourself, “Does this sound like the kind of advice we want our people to hear?”

References

You should never have to ask for them. A professional will automatically include them in the press kit, along with a client list and multiple testimonials. Read the letters. Look at the dates; are they current? Check references on their LinkedIn profile as well. Then call at least two.

Deliverables

What will your people take away to help them recall and implement what they’ve heard? Can your speaker provide a textbook, a workbook, a cassette or two, an action list, a checklist, a laminated wallet card, or a free web e-zine. Some of these “extras” should be included in the fee. Can they post their handouts and PowerPoint slides on a web site for download? Ask. These minor extras add major impact and multiply the take-home value of the message.

Fees

Worry less on what the speaker will charge; worry more on what your people will get. Does the fee include pre-event consultation, research, customization, travel time, travel expenses, handouts, workbooks, AV equipment, pens, markers or other supplies? A bad program is no bargain. If you’re investing half a million dollars to host a conference, you can’t afford a dud.

On the other hand, most pros will leverage their preparation by doing multiple programs. Stretch your speaker budget by asking for combined fees for a keynote, plus multiple breakout sessions, VIP receptions, panel discussions, etc.

I can’t BELIEVE how CREATIVE people get with my name! Orval, Orvil, Orvalle, Orville, Orvaille! It drives me NUTS! Officially, it’s a two-part first name: Orvel Ray. Like Billy Joe or Mary Ann. Hyphenate it if you wish: Orvel-ray. Or camel caps: OrvelRay. Most of my friends shorten it to just Orvel. Or even O.R.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not all THAT upset about it. But if you’re trying to be found on the internet, you have to be aware that people will butcher your name.

Guerrillas also know that when it comes to selling customers, they better get it right. Spell it correctly and pronounce it correctly. When in doubt, ask.

And if they have a suffix after their name, include it. I recently had an article published in a business magazine in Dubai, and they dropped the CSP from my by-line. The “Certified Speaking Professional” is the highest level of certification recognized worldwide by the speaking industry, and it was a lot of work to earn it. As trilled as I always am to see my name in print, this was a big disappointment.

Dale Carnegie said, “A man’s own name, to him, is the sweetest sounding word in any language.” Get it right.

–Orvel Ray Wilson, CSP

Home

Of course, with the corporate meetings sector cutting back and slashing budgets (as much as 30% by some accounts) we are all being called to account for results. One of the 10 Principles of Guerrilla Selling is “Measurement.” It’s easy, but most speakers don’t bother.

There are five levels of metrics that speakers and event planners should apply to every program, every speaker:

1. Did they like it?

These are the “smile sheets” that you collect after the applause. It’s relatively easy to get a standing ovation. In fact, I have a testimonial on my web site that says, “Yours was the highest-rated program we’ve ever had; 5.0 out of 5!” But for the most part, these numbers are meaningless. Every professional speaker should be engaging and entertaining. Otherwise you’re better off spending the money upgrading the lunch entrée from rigatoni to chicken.

2. Did they remember it?

Do you quizz participants after 24 hours, 72 hours, and at the end of a week, to see how “sticky” the material was. Most “motivational” speakers fall into this trap. People will recall that “it was a great speech” but can’t tell you one new thing that they learned. Really good speakers build their programs so that the audience remembers the point as well as the punchline. Otherwise, skip the speaker and splurge on the standup comic. I hear Jeff Foxworthy is available for about the same fee as an average NSA keynoter.

3. Did they use it?

Great information and innovative ideas are useless if they’re not put to use. An effective speaker should leave their audience feeling, “I can DO that!” They should take back practical guerrilla action items that they can use right away, and feel confident taking the initiative. If a professional speaker doesn’t change people’s behavior as well as their attitude, you might as well book the booze cruise instead.

4. When they tried it, did it work?

If the strategies and tactics that the speaker is espousing don’t actually work (and I mean in the REAL world) then they may do more harm than good. Your people will waste hundreds of hours and gawd-knows how much money. Professional speakers have the expertise to back up their eloquence. They can point to actual examples where their recommendations have been effective. And if they can’t, dump the DJ and bring on the rock band.

5. If it worked, how much was it worth?

Did you increase sales? Boost profits? Cut costs? Reduce turnover? Capture new customers? Leapfrog the competition? This is where you justify the “lavish” meeting at the “posh” resort to the accountants and the press. An effective speaker will follow through with the client long after the program (yes, even after a year or two) to monitize their impact.

Case in point:

Philips Medical was spending nearly $6M over 4½ days to exhibit at their industry’s biggest trade show. Twenty-six tractor-trailers full of fixtures and equipment filled a 10,000 sq/ft booth in McCormick Place. It would be staffed by 136 mostly technical personnel. At the pre-show briefing they invited me to present a three-hour custom training session on “Guerrilla Trade Show Selling.”

The seminar was well received. Ratings in the low fours. But ninety days later we looked at the numbers. Participants had applied their new skills to good affect. Qualified leads were up 144% over the previous year, and they had already closed more than $8M worth of new business. Today this training is required for every employee who might represent Philips at a trade show anywhere in the world.

If you take the time, and build this kind of deep evaluation into every project you do, you’ll never have difficulty justifying the cost of your meeting, or the speakers you hire to present at them. If you still have to cut costs, dump the golf.

–OrvelRay