Speak to sell fitness by creating a presentation that inspires and educates. I’m not talking about your power point. The best presentations to those groups like Rotary, Chamber of Commerce, and corporations don’t use power point. They use heart. I speak to sell fitness opportunity must have the emotional factor. If you don’t touch emotion you won’t be remembered. 40-year Fitness business owner/operator Tom Durkin is here today- not to do a book review – we’ll be back with another book review soon and I’ll link to a few prior episodes here. Tom has been one of the biggest influences of fitness in the state of Iowa with multiple business locations in multiple cities. Uniquely he’s anything but a silent partner he’s operating general manager. That means during the course of a day he’ll lead management meetings, nursery meetings, hire and train personal trainers, work in the membership office, sign employees paychecks, approve ads, and make public appearances to any number of groups including the chamber of commerce, large corporations, small businesses to grow the membership and help people. He has over 300 employees and thousands of members. He speaks. He sells.   Looking back over 40 years, how valuable has public speaking been in growing your businesses and your “brand” as the fitness guy? Lot’s of people get asked to speak, some get asked back, and you’ve been asked back many times, what do you attribute that to?  You have over 300 employees – some in the position you were in when you began – but you are asked to give the presentation. Why do you think that is? Why don’t you send your employees? How would you describe the kind of presentation you give?  How do you prepare and plan? You’ve got to have a beginning, middle, end that includes some kind of offer and we’ll talk about that separately, can you lay out how your presentation might go? Story is a huge connector and it has the ability to 1) create an emotional imprint 2) be remarkable – people will retell a story who will never retell the way to build bone density or some esoteric reasons fitness changes lives … now, you’ve got an advantage of 40 years of story collecting… do you remember? When you first started what stories did you tell?  How do you structure your offer at the end of a presentation? More than one trainer or owner listening may resonate with your message and still be thinking, I could never do that, come on that strong, use those words… what would you say to them? You may be thinking, I don’t have 40 years to get good, collect stories, get confident… how can I get started now? The thing that stops more trainers from speaking to sell fitness is confidence. You have a message, you would like to reach more people. I’ve watched one trainer who trained one-on-one clients at a whisper because she lacked confidence and didn’t want anyone else to hear what she was saying – go from that to loving to speak. It took a couple years… of her following up with calls to clients, doing consultations and asking for the sale. Here’s the difference: confidence. Confidence comes doing things out of your comfort zone. So say you’re a basketball player and you’ve traveled all over in college, you started, you were great at it, you always got pretty good grades, did well in most things you tried. You don’t gain confidence from that. Why? Because it came easy.  In fact, if in your life most things were easy – at least doing them average was easy – you lack confidence when it comes to something new. If you’re not good at it right away chances are you push back. Case in point? What's Blocking Your Confidence? Look at your own high school or college athlete stars. Then look at the nerds who weren’t part of the popular group. Usually after high school those nerds blossom. The stars? Many of them played it safe and aren’t in very good shape any more. They go live at home where they can relive that old identity and are more likely to be overweight and out of shape. True story!