Entrepreneur, award-winning author, innovator, speaker, futurist, and highly sought after thought leader, Anand Tamboli became a professional speaker by accident.
It was about ten years ago during a conference in Singapore when Anand put his hand up to fill a speaking slot for one of his managers. Since this first international speaking engagement, he enjoyed the stage time so much that he has continued to actively seek out more opportunities and has spoken around the world ever since.
Coming from a training background, he says that the way a speaker and trainer address a crowd can be quite different, but his experience in training gave him the important understanding of knowing your content well. If you know and understand your content well enough, you will naturally have the confidence to deliver a more impactful talk.
Unlike a day or few of training and workshops where there is time for questions and clarification, a speaker needs to be able to take compact content and package it into a much shorter and impactful talk.
With the new landscape of virtual speaking, Anand put his mind to seeing what the opportunities are for his speaker business to best leverage and pivot from a virtual perspective. As a speaker on innovation, he was forced to question how he can innovate deeper. Not just for the pandemic today but for any possible circumstance in the future. How can we continue to make the impact… in a sustainable way?
When lockdown came into effect he had to adapt to the virtual world, but carefully considered how he could differentiate himself as a speaker from the crowd. Speaking in the virtual world, there are the obvious elements speakers should consider such as, lights, camera’s and audio, but he says to never forget WHY you speak and to consider how you can you stand out from the clutter.
Anand says that people are looking for the entertainment factor. We cannot engage audiences the same way and need to adjust our style so that we do not deliver just another boring lecture or webinar. As speakers bringing content across in a fun and engaging manner should be a top priority.
He also says that if a speaker can educate and entertain and bring inspiration to their audience – they will remember and implement what you said. Our input needs to be entertainment and education and inspiration needs to be the outcome.
Although as speakers we are ‘competitors’, Anand firmly believes that we are also competitors against the problems and challenges in our industry. Exchanging feedback, learning from others and sharing feedback in our communities is how we can be supported and make our industry stronger together.
Do not miss the exciting Innovation in Speaking summit from 9-11 April where Anand will join the ‘stage’ amongst global innovators and speakers
He will be showing us how to use technology to assist the purpose we are trying to achieve with our audiences and why and how we need to compose our craft as speakers. Get ready to take your speaking from standard to entertaining and impactful in a virtual world!