Every speaker has a touring system. It gets you where you need to be when you need to be there, connecting flights permitting. How you do the road tour is up to you, but never be shy about tweaking it a little to make your life a little easier. Take these top tips to tweak your tour and switch up how you handle a whirlwind of speaking stops.
Every minute is a money-making or money-losing opportunity. As soon as you finish one stop on a speaking tour, it's on to the next. The time in between needs to be used efficiently to keep your tour cost-efficient. Fail to plan, plan to fail, and this includes the little things.
Skip a cheap lunch at your speaking engagement, and you’re paying out of pocket for airport fast food in a few hours. You may be a successful speaker, but are you a convenience eater? Ask your wallet to find out more.
This three-hit combo will help you reclaim your time and money when you are on the road:
Get the basics right: Routine may sound impossible on the road, but you can set times to address life's regular concerns and frame the rest of your day around them. Eat properly, you need the energy so you can take it to the stage. Set clear, realistic timings to fit in your on-the-road housekeeping tasks. Plan laundry. Seriously, you'll thank me.
Practice the Pareto Principle: Use this one in your speeches if you want, it's a freebie. The Pareto Principle states that 80% of your success comes from 20% of your effort. Set yourself regular time to plan and organize yourself, and get a profitable ROI. Time is worth more than money, and that's the truth. Buy time with the Pareto Principle, and invest 20% of it in organization and scheduling to get your 80% later on.
Delegate and outsource: If you can, outsource tasks to an assistant. This used to be the exclusive accessory for the big boys in the business, the executive washroom of the speaker world. Now it can be yours for a small regular fee. Outsourced receptionist and personal assistant services give you someone to call when flights need booking, hotels need reserving, and just about anything else that keeps the tour moving.
Look at your laptop. Sat in its leather-effect, specially designed bag. Underneath the fabric, in a snug black satchel, lie the keys to your kingdom. Losing it would be a catastrophe at best, but just imagine your sheer frustration at it becoming a lifeless brick of plastic and silicon. Laptop management means resource management, and first on the chopping block is the hard drive. It's time to trim the fat and make some space to prolong its life.
The documents, presentations, handouts, and goodness-gracious knows what else you use on tour are all claiming more disk drive real estate than they need. Smart, tech-savvy speakers have some tricks up their sleeves to help. You can compress PDF files to save a shockingly large amount of space on your C: drive. The My Documents folder won't know what hit it, but we do. SmallPDF takes bulging PDF files out to the woodshed for a-whittling and a-whooping, bringing PDFs down to a sensible size. Giving your hard drive some breathing room will make your laptop run faster too. It's more-squared; Space x Speed = Productivity.
Batteries are fun, aren't they? Cocky and confident until you open another app, then they're on the ropes calling for their momma; the power cord. Power management can be the difference between getting work done, and barely working. Cut down on electron consumption by taking on the default settings of your operating system. Be the wingman the battery needs, and tell those apps not to mess with your buddy. Turn down the brightness, enable hibernation settings and sleep mode, and tell your laptop to let you know when its battery is tapping out. 25% battery or less is the minimum before it speaks up, in my humble opinion.
The biggest impact you can have on making your touring life easier is by getting the ball rolling on stage in seconds. Engaging and connecting with different audiences is difficult but necessary, and there is no one size fits all solution. Every audience is a unique experience. You may have the same things to say in your speech, but you shouldn’t make it exactly the same each time.
On many occasions, you will be introduced by a host or a previous speaker, but sometimes you have to make your own introduction, so have one ready. It can be hard to kick-start a speech for any experienced public speaker. Begin talking aloud, even if it feels like you are talking to yourself. Talk through your opening as if you were alone in the room. This makes it easier for you to settle, and if you're good at it you can completely dodge the stage fright that can happen to us all, and you know it. If the audience is in your head, there is no room for your thoughts.
Don't hide behind a podium either, move about. If you stand still the walls start closing in. Use your strides and steps to help build momentum and rhythm. Rhythm is a dancer, after all, so keep making graceful moves on the stage talking like you are alone under the spotlight until you feel grounded. Get the first minute or two right and you're off to the races. Don't worry, outwardly you will look confident and commanding; rolling into your flow from the get-go, striding on stage, addressing the audience without a waver.
Take care with your visuals and screen sharing. Electronic aids become a distraction from the main event: you. They should only ever be an accessory to your speech. Paint pictures with your words and no one will need to look at a screen unless it's a map or a chart. Use images like pictures in a kid's book, they're a fun sideshow, but the meat of the moment is in the words.
Translation; make time for mindfulness and maintaining wellbeing. It doesn’t matter how organized you are, how awesomely on schedule (never happens) you are, or how well your laptop is running. If you are a mess inside, the outside will soon follow and fall into chaos. Everything is connected by the energy of life, even the late-night red-eye flight from LAX to Dulles. All three elements are needed to function in harmony with each other and their individual needs. The rain falls from the sky to nourish the grass; it's all connected. Use your mind to nourish your body with what it needs: downtime.
Forget food. Except don’t. Eat, to be sure, but the most nourishing thing for your whole system is relaxation and mindfulness. These nutrients of existence make stress melt away both in the mind and in the body. They are the rain we dance in during the storm. Don’t let the stress of the road beat you down; make space and time for reflection, meditation, and a little bit of emptiness. Leave the stress in LAX and pick it back up again in Dulles, refreshed by a journey of restful mindfulness through the clouds.
Thank you for your time. Use all of these tips or none of them – it's your tour after all. If you do start to utilize these helpful hints and tricks though, you’ll get more from your tour with less stress. I’m calling you to action, will you heed the call? Happy touring.
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