Speaking Up

“Speakers influence, encourage, motivate and communicate to the spirit.”
– Dottie Walters

In the summer of 2008, I decided that I wanted more speaking engagements. As a published author, I was occasionally invited to speak to clubs and at conferences, but as a spirit I decided that I wanted to be more proactive about creating speaking engagements, rather than simply waiting for them to come my way. I would occasionally ask marketing people I met if they could help me with this, but none of them knew much about it.

Then at the end of the year, my husband and I were invited by several friends to join the local chapter of a national club that helps people be better public speakers. This seemed like a good idea, and a response to my intention to increase my ability and activity as a public speaker. We were having great fun giving our speeches, learning new skills, and making new friends.

Even though I had spoken in public many times before, I had never had any training. While my audiences enjoyed my speeches, after joining the club, I could see that I didn’t have the professional polish needed to feel completely confident as a speaker. I liked to speak, and I did speak when I was invited, and I was even paid to speak, but I was not doing anything to generate more speaking engagements. I basically considered myself to be a writer, not a speaker.

After I gave my third speech to the club, the next morning, I suddenly felt “alive” as a speaker, like my identity as a speaker had now been activated. I felt like “I am a speaker!” now, it was something I confidently knew how to do and could use. I even wrote in my journal, “I communicate: I write, I speak.” Speaking became a medium of communication for me as a spirit, a mode through which I could create.

I wanted to get out into the community and speak at local venues, and get others from my club out speaking too. I was very excited about this and started making notes on what I could do to make this happen. As a spirit, I was very enthusiastic.

A few days later, I was talking with my husband Larry about this and he asked me what were some possible places I could speak. I listed off some local clubs that I knew had lunch meetings where speakers were invited.

One of the clubs I mentioned was a club I had been thinking of joining a few years before. I had decided against joining this club, mostly because I didn’t have the time to devote to it, but at the time, I had given them my card and told them I was an author.

All of a sudden, just one day short of a week later, I received an email from this very club, inviting me to speak!

This was such a dramatic demonstration to me of how intention works. I could see that the possibility to speak at this club had been there for several years, yet, it laid dormant, like a seed underground, until my intention to speak activated it. I just casually happened to be very specific about speaking in my local community and mentioned this club in particular, and they contacted me within a week–without my doing anything in the physical universe.

Following this, I remembered a book I had purchased many years ago about the business of public speaking, not how to speak, but how to get speaking engagements and manage your public speaking business. I had not read it in well over ten years, even though it had been sitting on my bookshelf, available all that time. Suddenly, I was inspired to read it, and was delighted to find that it contained, step-by-step, everything I needed to do to become a successful public speaker. The information I had been seeking was right in my house all along, and I had chosen it years before I realized that I, as a spirit, am a public speaker.

That the world works this way just continues to be amazing and wonderful to me!