Where Personal Development Ends and Professional Speaking Should Begin

John: 00:00:00

If you are building a serious speaking business, you are operating in a

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marketplace where hype, pseudoscience, and

motivational mythology are often sharing

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the same stage as genuine expertise.

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In this episode, I'd like to draw a

line not between growth and cynicism,

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not even between inspiration and logic,

but between influence with integrity

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and influence without evidence.

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This episode is not going to be

for everyone, but it is gonna be

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for speakers who care more about

long-term credibility than short-term

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applause and guru like following.

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Let me be clear right from the start,

I'm not anti personal development.

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I'm not anti-transformation.

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I'm not anti-energy,

anti-emotion, anti-storytelling.

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I love all of those things.

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I work in this world,

but there is a problem.

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Speaking is a persuasive medium.

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It always has been since Aristotle,

even since long before him.

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Personal development is emotional.

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It always has been.

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When you combine persuasive communication

with emotional intensity, you create

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something powerful and anything

powerful is vulnerable to abuse.

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Over the years stages have

quietly started to become delivery

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vehicles for untested claims.

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Mystical certainty, sciency sounding

language, the sort of trust me, bro.

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Authority.

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You've seen it.

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Quantum this, quantum that,

neuroscience, this or that.

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Law of attraction framed as quantum

physics, triune brain theory,

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presented as settled science.

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The idea that we only

use 10% of our brains.

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Things like this have been

thoroughly debunked or a very least

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superseded in the scientific world.

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Some of these were oversimplified from the

start, and some were never evidence-based

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at all, but they sounded good.

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They were repeated often enough.

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They sounded technical.

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If the speaker was particularly

charismatic and the room

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is warm and emotional.

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They stick.

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As the late, great Carl Sagan

can put it, extraordinary claims

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require extraordinary evidence.

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A little bit of healthy

skepticism is sometimes needed.

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The stage is not a religious revival.

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It's not cult recruitment.

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It's not theater for selling

metaphysical certainty.

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It is a professional

platform and that matters.

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Here's the uncomfortable truth.

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Anecdotes Are powerful.

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They're also the lowest standard

of evidence, A personal story.

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Proves that something happened to you.

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It doesn't prove why it happened.

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stories bypass our conscious resistance

and it goes straight to our emotional

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core, much as music can as well.

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We are wired for narrative and we are

wired to tune into stories and naturally

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want to know what happened next.

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And once the emotion is activated,

our level of scrutiny and resistance

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and skepticism starts to drop.

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Our critical thinking goes on standby.

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High emotional arousal also lowers

skepticism and rational thought.

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Confidence tends to signal competence.

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We usually associate the two even when

competence isn't necessarily there, and

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that's not a moral judgment, it's just

a cognitive bias, and we all have it.

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I have them.

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You have them.

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We all have cognitive biases.

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We could all benefit from

having As Edward DeBono would've

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said a more beautiful mind.

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Cleaning up some of our cognitive

biases, challenging some of our beliefs,

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identifying logical fallacies that we may

be, perpetuating that we could actually

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improve our thinking and the level

of truth and certainty we have in our

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beliefs by investigating them a little

more and giving a little more scrutiny.

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Ted built his reputation

by curating experts.

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They then licensed the brand and

launched TEDx, and that shift mattered.

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When you stand on the red dot,

there's a transfer of authority.

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The brand itself confers credibility

and the audience trusts the frame.

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And when the frame is trusted, scrutiny

softens, we assume that someone has

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done the work of scrutinization for

us, and that a level of trust can be

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given as it has been conferred to the

person on the stage by the organization.

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This means that weaker ideas

can sometimes enter respectable

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rooms wearing borrowed authority.

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I don't say this as a TEDx attack.

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Many speakers still get

value from doing TEDx talks.

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Many people still seek it out.

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It's more of an observation of how

branding and perception work and it should

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make us cautious because if credibility

can be borrowed, it can also be diluted.

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If the market starts associating

speaking and speakers in general

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with hype and pseudoscience and guru

theatrics, three things start to happen.

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Corporate buyers end up

becoming skeptical of everyone.

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Serious thinkers and experts

start to avoid the stage to

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avoid guilt by association.

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The profession starts to get

lumped in with the loudest voices.

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We kind of saw this happen with

coaching in the early two thousands.

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The coaching industry is still really

recovering, and many people still think

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it's all charlatanism due to things like

the low barrier to entry, high emotional

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persuasion, and market pollution by people

who had no idea what they were doing and

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were passing themselves off as experts.

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If we want speaking to be taken seriously,

we have to hold ourselves in the

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industry to a somewhat higher standard.

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I.

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My suggestion is not to turn

keynotes into academic lectures.

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How boring would that be?

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Let's keep the stories, let's keep the

energy and let's keep the transformation.

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These are all important, but let's

also check our sources, not take

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AI's word for it all the time or not.

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Just think that an anecdotal

story is in itself, proof.

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Stop using sciencey words that

we don't fully understand.

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Let's maybe challenge some of the

preconceived ideas that have been

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passed on by experts and may not be

as true as we thought them to be.

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We can start to distinguish more

between metaphor and mechanism.

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We could be a little more honest

about the limits of our claims.

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If something is your

personal experience, say so.

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If something is evidence-based,

cite it properly.

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if something is emerging or being debated,

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acknowledge that intellectual

humility doesn't weaken authority.

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it actually strengthens it.

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It shows that you are willing to

do the work and you're presenting

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things in a way that make your

statements even more credible.

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So here's the tension, certainty,

cells, nuance is a little bit harder.

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Confidence fills rooms,

humility builds careers.

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You may be slightly less electrifying,

adding caveats into your talks.

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You may get fewer standing ovations by

refusing to oversimplify things, but

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you will build trust and trust can build

your expertise and your reputation.

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We should also trust and challenge our

audiences to have the capability to

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understand and absorb what we're talking

about and not have to reduce everything

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to the lowest common denominator.

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So the point of this episode was

really not about attacking the

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personal development industry.

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I love lots of aspects of the

personal development world.

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I still work in that world to some degree,

and I do love the elements of personal

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development that are able to withstand

scrutiny and have been tried and tested.

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I do love the philosophy that a lot of

personal development has been built upon

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that contains years of ancient wisdom

that we can still benefit from today.

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So really, this is about separating

influence from manipulation.

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It's about protecting the integrity

of a profession that relies on trust.

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The speaking world in the

personal development world don't

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need a hostile divorce, maybe

just some healthy boundaries.

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If this episode has resonated with

you, then you're in the right place.

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But if you disagree, I'm genuinely

open to the conversation.

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Scrutiny is the point.

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You should question everything.

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not just question your cognitive biases.

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Question mine as well.

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Question what I say too.

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I actively want to encourage all

of us to question everything.

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We should all be unafraid to apply

healthy skepticism in our lives

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rather than lowering our resistance

to things that may not be true.

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I dunno about you, but I would rather

believe as many true things as I can

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believe and try and eliminate as many

falsehoods from my life as possible.

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It won't be perfect, nothing

ever is, but it will improve our

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thinking and our confidence in

the things that we do believe.

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Even when I was actively involved

in the church and often told not to

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question things, I always thought that

if you didn't really question your

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beliefs, you didn't really own them.

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They weren't really your

beliefs in the first place.

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They were dogma, they were scripts.

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the whole point of this episode

really then is being about how

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to think and not what to think.

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I hope it's had some value for you.

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Thanks for listening,

especially to our new listeners.

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Lots of new people coming onto the show.

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Welcome.

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What are your thoughts?

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Is this resonating with you?

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Am I making you mad?

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Am I wrong?

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Do you have something to

add to the conversation?

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Get in touch, and if you're enjoying

the show, leave a five star rating

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on Apple or Spotify because it's

a great signal to others that

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the show is worth checking out.

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Coming up on Professional Speaking, he's

got one of the top downloaded Ted Talks

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of all time, several great books and some

great insights to share on listening.

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He's also a personal friend and

his name is Julian Treasure.

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You won't want to miss it.

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And for now, have an amazing rest of

your day and week and I'll see you soon.