Transcript

Episode: How to Elevate Your Public Speaking with Pat Quinn

Michael Hyatt: Hi, I’m Michael Hyatt, and this is Lead to Win, our weekly podcast to help you win at work and succeed at life. Today, we have some real help for you on a problem every leader faces and many are afraid to tackle. What’s that? Public speaking. It’s a lot of people’s greatest fear. In fact, most people say they would rather die than have to give a speech in public. Certainly, I felt that way for years myself.

Today, I have two special guests to introduce to you. Pat Quinn is a master at public speaking. He coaches business leaders to Olympic athletes to New York Times best-selling authors. In fact, he has coached me on my speaking. Best speech coach I’ve ever had, by far and away. Pat, welcome to the show.

Pat Quinn: Thanks, Michael.

Michael: We also have Pastor John Adams. He’s one of Pat’s top clients, and he’s going to get some live coaching from Pat on one of his speeches. John, welcome to the show.

John Adams: Thanks, Michael. I’m delighted to be here.

Michael: I remember when Pat came in. We had to give a signature talk in front of Pat. It was several of us in our company who had to do that, and I was never more scared. I was saying before we got on the show today, if you give a speech before thousands of people… I wouldn’t say it’s easy, but after you’ve been doing it for a while, it’s not that difficult. The biggest thing I fear is a small audience.

So, to be in front of Pat, this expert, legendary speech coach, and have to give the opening to my signature talk… It was scary, but it was fun, because I learned so much, and we’re going to have an opportunity to do that today. John, I’d love for you to say a little bit more about yourself. You’ve been a client of ours. You’re a pastor, a triathlete, and a police chaplain. Tell us what else we need to know about you.

John: Well, some of the great things… I’m a husband, father, and grandfather, and I enjoy those kinds of things. I love a lot of outdoor activities. I like to stay busy doing a lot of things in addition to the different hats I wear. As you all know and teach, having those outside things is one of the ways we can de-stress, which is one of the things I want to try to help pastors learn how to do, to survive longer in their career than the average national tenure.

Michael: And we’re not talking just about giving bad sermons here, but we’re talking about all of the other things related to ministry.

John: Absolutely. The things nobody teaches anybody in seminary, and everybody tells me that.

Michael: That’s awesome. Could you tell us a little bit about your history, your journey in public speaking? Can you remember back to the first time you ever gave a sermon in public?

John: Well, it was before I became a pastor. I was at a local church and had just become a believer. I had been asked to deliver a small sermonette, if you will (that’s what they used to call them), to a youth group. I did that, and obviously, as most of us know, that very first time, you’re shaking and your words are not flowing like you want them to, and you think you have something that’s going to last for 15 minutes, and 3 minutes later you’re done.

Now I’ve been pastoring for over 35 years. I thoroughly enjoy speaking, but with each new chapter there are always new challenges, different topics, different people. I speak to officers. I speak to a number of different groups, so it’s always different, but much more enjoyable now.

Michael: Okay. I don’t want you to pull out a calculator for this, but how many sermons or public speeches do you think you’ve given over the course of your career?

John: Oh, wow, Michael. It’s thousands.

Michael: Yeah. That’s amazing. So, by now you should be an expert, which is awesome, but there’s always something to learn. Right?

John: And thanks to you for having that affiliate challenge to be part of Pete Vargas’ group, the one Pat was a part of. There was something about that that drew me in to try to help my speaking. I have to tell you, after even doing it thousands of times, I am so thankful I signed up for that class, because it really helped to listen to Pat Quinn and some of the things they talked about and then to be able to get that signature talk. Now here I am live with Pat Quinn, the “speech whisperer” he has been called, and to listen to some of his pointers, and you as well, Michael. It has been a delight to spend a year with you in executive coaching as well.

Michael: Awesome. Before we get to the live coaching, I want to ask Pat a couple of questions. Pat, public speaking is the greatest fear most people have. Many of us who have continued to do it over the years still get a knot in our stomachs every time before we take the stage. What would you say to those people, to those speakers who experience that fear, sometimes debilitating fear, before they get on stage?

Pat: Thanks, Michael. The first thing I would say to them is “You’re not alone. You are not the only one who’s nervous. It’s very normal. Don’t forget to breathe.” The number one thing speakers forget to do is breathe, because they get nervous. A couple of deep breaths in through your nose, out through your mouth. Let your belly expand, and the shaking will go away.

The second thing you absolutely need to do…this is preparation before you go on stage, before you go online, before you step up in front of any audience, from one person to a thousand people…is have total clarity on one big issue: What is the problem you’re solving for the audience today? Here’s what will happen. If you do not have clarity on that issue, you’re going to go out in front of that audience, whether they’re small or large, thinking you need to be the smartest person in the room and you need to solve all of their problems.

I tell you, I never go into a room being the smartest person in the room, and I never think I can solve all of their problems. If you go into a room and think, “I have to know more than anybody else in the room on every topic,” of course you’re going to be nervous. If you think you have to be the smartest person in the room or be able to solve all of their problems, you should be nervous.

But if you have clarity on “This is the one problem I’m going to solve here today, and that’s all I’m here to do. By the way, I’ve been doing this for 20 years. I’m really good at this. I’ve done it for people who look just like my audience today. I’m good at this,” a lot of the nerves go away, because you don’t have to solve all of their problems and you don’t have to be the smartest person in the room. When I stand up and speak on the topic of presenting, which is the topic I present on the most, I don’t go on thinking I’m going to be the smartest person or I’m going to solve all of your problems.

I say, “Today, I’m going to help business leaders grow their business and attract new clients through speaking. I’m going to help them improve their presentations. I’ve been doing that for 20 years. I do this every day for business leaders who look very much like the business leaders who are in our audience today, so I don’t need to be nervous about that. I’m good at this.” That’s a huge shift for a lot of people who walk in the room and think, “Well, some of these people know more than me.” Of course they do on some topics, but not on the problem you’re here to solve today.

Michael: That’s good. So, in other words, you consider yourself an expert but on a narrow range of content or topic.

Pat: And that’s all you’re being asked to solve today. That’s it.

Michael: That’s fantastic. Okay. This is a question that sometimes I get about speaking, but I wonder how you respond. What’s more important to your success as a speaker, your content or your delivery?

Pat: It’s a great question, and I wish it were… It’s a beautifully posed two-choice question. One of the tricks we use in speaking is to pose a two-choice question. “Do you want to buy my product or do you want to be a failure in life?” That’s a classic two-choice question.

Michael: Hey, I learned that from you.

Pat: But, of course, most two-choice questions have way more than two choices. I would say this. Your content overall has to help people, and if your content helps people…really helps people…solve a problem they have, the audience will be very forgiving. The audience will be forgiving of “ums” and “uhs.” The audience will be forgiving of you talking too fast or talking too slowly if they’re loving your content because it’s actually helping them.

Now, if they recognize that your content is just a tease, just a description of the problem again and again and again or just a bunch of stories that don’t actually help…they’re just a bunch of stories…that’s when you should be nervous, because the audience will not be forgiving of anything. They’ll point out that the shirt you’re wearing is too tight. They’ll point out that your socks don’t match your belt. They’ll point out that you’re using “ums” and “uhs.” They’ll point out everything.

I find that your content helping people is what makes the audience more forgiving. That being said, Michael, if your delivery is terrible, there won’t be people who are accessing it and your message won’t get out to as many people. So, they’re both important, but my overall answer is that good content makes the audience much more forgiving.

Michael: That’s good. This question just occurred to me as you were talking. Is it possible to be too polished?

Pat: Absolutely. One of the things we talk about in the opening of any presentation is that you want to be ordinary. You want to be like the audience. Robert Cialdini calls this pacing and leading, pacing before you lead. Everybody wants to stand up and lead. Everybody wants to stand up and tell the audience, “This is what you should do,” but before an audience will follow you, before an audience will be led, the audience needs to be paced.

What is pacing? Pacing is walking alongside you. Pacing is throwing my arm around you and saying, “I get it. I feel your pain. I understand the problem.” So, John is going to talk to pastors about some of the things that go on in the life of a pastor that shortens their career, and if he doesn’t start his presentation by saying, “Look. I get it. It’s hard. Sundays come every seven days, relentless, and there are people in your congregation that although you love them with the love of Christ, you don’t like them, and I get it. I get it. I’ve been there. I’ve done that…”

If you rush through that part of your presentation, they won’t be led. You have to pace before you lead. I always tell people, “You need to soak. You need to baste in the pacing, and you need to let them know that you get it and you get the problem.” So, your question is about being too polished. What I find is when a speaker is too perfect, if a speaker is too practiced and they make no mistakes and they don’t reveal any of their weaknesses, then the audience looks at them and says…

Like, if John comes out and is like, “Some pastors struggle with these issues, but I never did. Some pastors aren’t ready on Sunday morning, but I always was,” the audience is going to look at you and be like, “Well, then you can’t help me, because you don’t get me. I’m not like that. I roll in on Sunday mornings, and sometimes I wing it. I struggle with some of this stuff. Sometimes I hate my job, and you seem like you’ve never had those problems.”

It’s not as much about being too polished. I think it’s really about being too perfect. One of the best things any speaker can do to connect with an audience and to grow a following and to grow your business through speaking is to show your weaknesses, to stand up and say, “I struggle with this” or “I have struggled with this. I’m not perfect. I struggle. I’ve walked in your shoes.” That’s the opposite of being too polished.

Michael: Okay. So, John is about to give part of his speech, but I want to ask you the question, Pat. What are you going to be listening for? What are you going to be looking for?

Pat: In the opening of any presentation, we look for a speaker to do the pacing that I talked about. The three words we like to describe the start of a presentation are ordinary, extraordinary, and show your “why.” From ordinary, I’d listen to hear that John is like the audience he’s speaking to. He has some shared experiences with them. From extraordinary, I’d like to hear that John has solved some of these problems. I really don’t want to do business with a speaker who says, “Well, I still have this problem, but maybe we can figure it out together if you pay me enough.” That’s really not the type of expert I want to hire.

So, I want to hear ordinary, that he’s like me. I want to hear extraordinary, that he has solved a problem I have, and then I want to know his why. I want to know that he’s not just in this to get one more customer and one more paycheck, that this isn’t really a business for him, that this is a passion for him, that he’s on a mission here. I think if you can check all three of those boxes in the first five minutes of your presentation, the audience is going to be emotionally attached to you, they’re going to recognize your expertise, and they’re going to understand your why and really want to do business with you.

Our goal is never a standing ovation, although many of the speakers we work with get them. Our goal is never that people would send you an email afterward and say, “Wow! You’re an amazing speaker,” although a lot of the speakers we work with hear that. Our goal is that the audience would want to engage with you after the presentation.

Our only measuring stick for this presentation is: Does the audience member want to call or email John afterward and say, “John, can I work with you? Can I join your program, sign up for your newsletter?” or whatever next engagement John wants them to have…if that’s free, a free training or a free newsletter or free podcast to sign up for, or paid, a coaching program or to buy his products or whatever it is. Will they take the next step and engage with you further? That’s our measuring stick of success. Everything we look for leads toward that.

Michael: Excellent. Well, John, are you ready, buddy?

John: I’m ready.

Michael: All right. Let’s do this. Ladies and gentlemen, John Adams.

John: What thoughts go through your mind when the phone rings at 3:00 a.m.? You see, good news rarely travels at 3:00 a.m. for a senior pastor, and that’s doubly true for a pastor who also happens to be a law enforcement chaplain. I learn that an officer has been shot. Rushing to the ER, I find officers from every local agency, and I will never forget those heart-wrenching sobs, waiting for the news that the officer would recover.

As the surgeon steps into the hallway, he painfully tells us the officer did not survive. We were hit by an unbearable wave of grief and pain, and in the ensuing months, some of those officers’ careers and families would not survive the pain of that loss. That was when I began to understand that it was the accumulation of emotional pain that took them out. Then it started to make sense to me why the average tenure for senior pastors in America is only four to six years before changing churches and is also why only 10 percent of those entering the ministry ever retire in the ministry.

Here’s what I’ve learned and know to be true: pastors, just like police officers, see, hear, and experience more emotional pain in a few short years than most others do in an entire lifetime, and every single pastor tells me that while their education prepared them to deliver a message, they were never told of the emotional pain they and their families would be subjected to. Listen. I get it. I’ve been a senior pastor for over 35 years in only two churches, and just like you, it has not always been an easy road.

As a law enforcement chaplain for over a decade, I’ve taught hundreds of officers and cadets to survive their emotional pain, thrive in their careers, and retire victoriously, and now I want to teach pastors my three-stage legacy framework. So, if you’re just starting out, been in the saddle for a while, or are headed for the barn, my 3D approach is for pastors just like you. The 3 Ds are disconnect, distract, and de-stress.

We need to learn to disconnect from the emotional power train of our career. It’s like putting our car in neutral. It takes the load off. Disconnecting allows your mental engine to idle, and to do that, we need life-giving distractions. Too many, unfortunately, choose life-taking distractions, things that rob us of our peace and potentially ruin our families and careers. So, we need life-giving distractions, and if we disconnect and distract, then we will be able to de-stress. De-stressing recharges our emotional battery, and without it, just like a battery, we can become so drained and damaged that eventually we’ll be incapable of a recharge.

I will teach you how to implement my proprietary 3D framework, and I will also teach you how to trauma-proof your heart and protect the hearts of your family and loved ones as well. I would be delighted to hop on a free coaching call to answer your questions about this process. I want to see how you like my three-stage legacy framework and how it could dramatically help you. As a special for the month of August, if you sign up for the 3D legacy digital course, I’ll give you a $50 discount, and that means I pay you for the call.

I sincerely want to help pastors just like you, and those who have applied my 3D framework tell me it has proven successful in their life and career. I want you to have this valuable framework. Why? Because you will be better equipped to help more people from a place of strength versus emotional bankruptcy. This proven framework will equip you, pastor, to not only emotionally survive but to thrive in your career and retire victoriously, because, honestly, God has invested too much in you for you to become a four- to six-year casualty.

Pat: Awesome!

Michael: Good work, John.

John: Thank you.

Michael: Okay. Pat, I want you to break that apart for our listeners and for John and just do some analysis. Do what you do.

Pat: All right, John. Well done, and thank you for sharing your story. One of the things I always want to applaud right off the bat is that you’re telling your story and you’re telling it with all of the ups and the downs. That takes bravery to do, and it really helps other people every time anybody does it. So thank you for doing that.

You opened with episodic storytelling, which is what we believe is the fastest and easiest way to be ordinary, extraordinary, and show your why. You take us right into a moment at 3:00 in the morning when the telephone rings. Most pastors will recognize that and understand that, so I think that’s a real unifying event there. You’re pacing before you’re leading, and I think that’s really good. Then you talk about some of the pain that comes out of that event and the accumulation of that pain.

I thought you did a good job. In a five-minute setting, you don’t have a lot of time to pace, but you did spend close to 65 seconds, 20 percent of your whole time, just pacing with the audience, which is really good. That’s a nice way to think about it. I want to soak in that, and I want to baste in that. The words you used that I loved there: just like you. “Just like you, I’ve felt this pain. Just like you, I’ve been a pastor.” Anytime you can add the words just like you to your opening, you know you’re doing it right, because you’re pacing before you’re leading.

Some other things I saw that you did really well… You have a proprietary process. You have a three-step framework that works for you. It separates you from other people who do what you do. Everybody listening to this probably has one or two other people or one or two thousand other people in the world who do what they do, and your proprietary process is what separates you and makes people want to work with you. You explained it well to us. You even had a battery analogy built into it to really help people understand what you were doing.

Then your free call offer at the end I thought was really strong. We look for all presentations to have a singular call to action, one specific next step for the audience. A mistake a lot of people make when they don’t get the results they want from a presentation, as far as how many people engage with them after the presentation, is that they gave the audience too many choices. When you say to an audience, “You can buy this, you can buy this, or you can have this for free,” audiences become confused, they become scared, and they don’t really do anything.

What you did was say, “I’ve looked at you. I know you. I know the right next step for you, and that’s the only option I’m going to give you. Do you want it or not?” That’s how you’re going to get the highest response rate. Even on social media, I’m always amazed. People will get to the end of their Facebook Lives, and they’ll be like, “And you can email me or you can call me or you can direct message me or you can hook me up on Instagram or you can stop by my house or you can visit my website.” It’s like, “Please. You had me at ‘email me.’” Just pick one. Tell the people what to do. That’s what they want.

So, really well done. I know you put a lot of work into this presentation. I absolutely loved it. Let’s talk about some ways you could make this even more effective. Your moment in the first two minutes where you are catching the audience is when you want to tell them that it isn’t just this grief and pain that knocks them out of the profession but it’s the accumulation of this grief and pain. You came out and said, “This is what I know to be true: it is the accumulation of this pain that knocks them out.”

This would have been a great opportunity for you to create contrast. Instead of just telling us what knocks them out, tell them it’s not this but it is this. Or you could even do a technique called the Clinton not-not. The Clinton not-not is a technique Bill Clinton uses a lot in his speaking, which is to tell us two things that it’s not and then the third one that it is. He used it most famously at Aretha Franklin’s funeral when he did her eulogy and said, “We’re not here today because of [this]. We’re not here today because of [this]. We’re here today because of [this].” The truth is it’s all three.

What you could say is, “The reason most pastors leave the profession is not because they experience one 3:00 in the morning call. It’s not because Sundays come relentlessly every seven days. It is because of this accumulation of grief and pain.” That would create a nice contrast that would kind of highlight… It’s really the leverage point of your whole presentation, that it’s the accumulation of pain that makes the big difference.

If you want to get really geeky and in the woods… I want to give you my best stuff, so let’s go deep in the woods. You said, “I felt an unbearable wave of grief and pain,” was the phrase you used. The mistake you’re making there is you’re putting your adjectives before your nouns. That’s perfectly fine to do in written English. In written English, you can put your adjectives before the nouns because the brain can flip back and do it, but in spoken English, you should actually put your nouns before your adjectives.

Here’s why: because the audience has to picture this moment with you. The audience is following along, trying to picture it with you. So, if I tell you I looked out the back window of my house and saw a red, shiny… Right now you can’t picture anything until I say “wagon.” Now you have to go back and draw the wagon, then you have to color it in, and then you have to make it shiny. If I would have changed that and said, “I looked out my window and saw a wagon. The wagon was bright red and shiny,” that allows you to make the picture and color it in in the right order, and you never have to go back.

You’re thinking, “Well, how long do I have to go back? It takes probably less than half a second for the audience to go back and color in that picture.” But the truth is, in normal spoken English, in that half second you’ll say four more words, and now the audience is lost in the sentence. So, instead of saying, “I felt an unbearable wave of grief and pain,” you should say, “I was feeling grief and pain. The pain was unbearable, and it came in waves.” Give us the nouns first, and then follow up with the adjectives. It’ll make it much easier for the audience to process the information you had.

The only other change I think I would make is I don’t think you… Well, I’ll tell you two things. When you name your framework, I would not name the framework. I don’t think people are sitting around waiting for your legacy framework. They’re sitting around waiting for a framework that does something for them. So instead of saying, “I’ve put together a three-step legacy framework,” I would say, “I’ve put together a three-step framework that will help you…” And then give me the result of it.

They actually don’t care about the name of the product. A lot of people probably sign up for Michael’s workshops and don’t even know what the names of them are. A lot of people sign up for our programs and don’t know what the names of them are, but they sure do know what they’re going to get when they come to the program. They sure do know why it will help them and what the outcome is.

I know this is a five-minute presentation, so we’re trying to cram in as much as possible, but in a 45-minute keynote, you would never want to name your program in the first half of it. You can talk about the fact that you have a program and it has these results, but you’re way too early to be pushing a product on them or pushing a named product on them.

The last thing I’d say is you offer a free call… Our experience is that free offers, whether that’s a free consultation, a free call, a free appointment, a free Zoom meeting… You will get much higher results if that free call has a concrete deliverable that you hold up in front of the audience. So, if in that call… “We are going to fill out this two-page plan for the next 10 years of your ministry. You’re going to walk away with this plan filled out,” and if you’re on video or live in the room, you hold it up and show them one of them.

You’re going to double the number of people who take advantage of the free call. The thinking here is that most people know that free call is going to be part helping them, part sales call, and they’re weighing if they should do it or not. When you hold up a concrete deliverable, their thinking changes. Their thinking changes to, “Whether I buy something or not at the end of that call, I’m going to walk away with that. I’m going to walk away with something of value for sure.”

These need to be really tangible. They can’t be like, “Oh, you’ll learn some things” or “You’ll walk away with purpose.” No. “You will walk away with the three next steps you need to take this month to change the way you are doing ministry.” And if you can hold up what it will look like… “We’re going to put those on a card” or “We’re going to put those in a booklet” or “We’re going to put those somewhere, at the start of a plan for you,” or something, that’s going to change how they view that call from something that’s free to something that’s very valuable, something that might be a sales call to something that’s really going to deliver the goods for them.

Michael: Yeah. Overall, I loved it too. The one thing I thought might be missing (and I’d love to get your response to this, Pat) is I was kind of looking for a little bit more vulnerability, like, a time perhaps when he was ready to walk away from the ministry or seriously considered it, where it was a real thought. To me, that sort of normalizes everybody’s experience. I just wonder how he could do that. I mean, it might be as simple as adding into that story about that officer the fact that that wasn’t the first time he’d heard that, and he wondered, “Does it make sense for me to walk away at this point?”

Pat: Yeah, Michael, I love where you’re going with that. One exercise I give to every business owner, to every speaker I coach is “The night before someone would hear you speak, the night before someone would be introduced to you for the first time, what were they lying awake at night thinking? What were they saying to their spouse at the dinner table the night before, and what words did they use?”

A great exercise for everybody is to write down three complete sentences, with quotation marks around them, that your audience said last night at the dinner table. I coach people who work with women, and I always ask them, “Is my wife your ideal customer?” Sometimes they’re just like, “Yes!” and I’m like, “You don’t know my wife. How would you know?” Then I ask, “I had breakfast with my wife this morning. What would my wife have said to me at the breakfast table this morning that would let you know she was your ideal customer?”

So, to John, what would a pastor have said to his spouse or to his best friend or a brother last night at the dinner table? Once you have these three sentences down, I’ll tell you exactly where you put them in your presentation. You put them near the end of your story. So, if John writes down a sentence right now, and the sentence is, “I think I want to quit…” Like, maybe he just writes that down. That’s what the pastor said to his wife last night: “I think I might want to quit” or “I can’t do this for another 10 years.”

That would be a perfect sentence for John to write down, according to him and what he’s telling us about pastors and their struggles. So, when he gets to that point where he says, “I had an unbearable wave of grief and pain,” which now reads, “I was experiencing grief and pain. It was unbearable, and it came in waves…” “Right there, I thought to myself…” Now he can give us all three sentences, actually. “I thought to myself, ‘I can’t do this another 10 years. I think I’m going to quit. I hate my job.’”

Michael: That’s powerful.

Pat: The exercise of writing those three sentences of what your ideal customer, what your audience member said to their spouse or their best friend or their brother last night or what they fell asleep thinking about isn’t just an exercise that you throw away. You actually, at some point in your opening story, stop and say, “I thought,” and you take us into your stream of consciousness now in the moment, and you repeat those sentences back to us.

If the audience is not nodding their heads when you do that, you have the sentences wrong. When he says to an audience full of pastors, “I can’t do this for another 10 years,” if they’re not bobbing their heads like bobblehead dolls, he has the wrong sentence. He’s solving the wrong problem. But he knows they’re going to because he was there, because he has felt this. That’s a great exercise for anybody to do, and there’s a very specific place to put that right into your presentation.

Michael: The powerful thing about this… As a listener in the audience, if I get so swept up into John’s story that I’m actually in my story because I see my story in his story, and I forget that I’m sitting in the audience, and I’m having this moment where everything has become clear and I can’t continue, then he has got me. I’d buy anything because he understands the problem.

Pat: That’s why occasionally throwing in the cue “Like many of you…” or “Just like you…” At that point, if you’d say, “Like many of you, I sat down in a chair, put my head in my hands, and said, ‘I can’t do this anymore…’”

Michael: Powerful stuff.

Pat: When his story becomes your story, it’s over. It really doesn’t matter what the next 45 minutes of his presentation is. They’re going to become customers. By the way, the opposite is true as well. If he doesn’t connect like this in the opening five minutes, it really doesn’t matter what the next 45 minutes of his presentation is. They’re not going to become customers.

People always ask me, “Is the end the most important part of your presentation? Is the content the most…?” It’s not up for debate. The opening five minutes is the most important part of your presentation, because if you don’t do that correctly, they’re not even going to listen to the rest of your presentation.

Michael: This was, for me personally, the single biggest takeaway I got from working with you, Pat: to engineer that story, not in a manipulative way, but to get to the essence of it so that my audience could relate. It changed everything in terms of how they listened and, most importantly, how they responded as I went through the speech. So, John, I would love to get from you, as we come to a close here, what your top two or three takeaways are from this time with Pat.

John: Thanks, Michael, and Pat as well. I mean, obviously, I do have to say in the beginning that the only reason there is anything in my talk that even sounds remotely good is because I took Stage to Scale with Pete Vargas and Pat Quinn. So, the things that Pat said, “Yeah, I like that, I like that,” were things that Pat taught.

Pat: That’s why I liked them so much, John.

John: See? But seriously. You have to learn and listen, and I’m going to implement some of these things. Obviously, this was a shorter time frame, and as a keynote or something, you’re going to have 30 or 45 minutes and can weave more of those things in there, but it’s putting these things in here too. The two big takeaways are, first, thank you that I’m at least starting to get there, and second, thank you for helping me even to take a step closer. Anytime you want to make that call, call me.

Michael: Love it. Okay, guys. This has been fantastic. I could go all day too. John, where can people find you online? If they have a bunch of pastors who need to hear you speak, where can they find you?

John: Well, right now I have a website. It’s pastorjohn.net. I have some blogs up there. I’m going to be working on some video logs. Also, on pastorresources.com, they are currently publishing some of my articles to help pastors. They’ve been so gracious to do that. So, those are two places that they can receive some input.

Michael: Fantastic. Pat, how about you?

Pat: You can learn more about our Signature Talk workshop, where we help people write their signature talks and grow their businesses through speaking, at advanceyourreach.com.

Michael: Fantastic. We’ve been through that, and it was enormously helpful. Any final thoughts, Pat, as we bring this to a close?

Pat: My final thoughts to everybody listening are just to get out there and tell your story. When you tell your story, other people benefit. Other people learn that they’re not alone, other people learn about the solutions you offer, and other people have a connection to you that doesn’t just make them say you’re a good speaker; it makes them say, “I want to do business with you.” Telling your story and having a good signature talk, I believe, is the best marketing tool your company has and that you have, and every time you tell your story, other people benefit.

Michael: Amen to that. Well, thank you, Pat Quinn. Thank you, John Adams. Thank you, guys, for joining us this week on Lead to Win, and we’ll see you right here next week.