HOW TO ELEVATE MOTIVATIONAL SPEAKING INTO AN ART FORM

In this episode, we’re talking with two incredible motivational speakers: Dan Thurman and Josh Sundquist. This episode is not only a lot of fun, but it goes deep into what it’s like to be a guest speaker at a corporate event. These guys are true masters at making audiences think, laugh, and feel.

You can read the transcript below or listen to Episode 12 on the episode page, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

EPISODE 12 TRANSCRIPT

JEREMY: Alright, so I am here with two of the most incredible, phenomenal guest speakers I have ever had the pleasure to see at a live event. I've got the Man who taught me to be off balance on purpose, Dan Thurmon, and the Man who taught me to do one more thing, one more time, Josh Sundquist. Gentlemen, thank you so much for being on this podcast with me.

DAN: Thanks, Jeremy. Great to be with you.

JOSH: Thank you, Jeremy.

JEREMY: Now, I've had the pleasure of seeing you both and you're very different, but each of you did something to me that I think is very uncommon. It was when I saw both of you, I laughed, I was entertained, my perspective shifted, I thought about my life differently after having seen you, and I cried.

When I think about great art, I can't think of that many pieces of great art that make the audience do all three of those things, and each of you has that.

I would love it if you could just take a minute to sum up what you talk about in your presentations and maybe just a little bit of how you do that for those who haven't seen you.

Dan, why don't I kick it to you first?

DAN: Wow. That's an amazing compliment. Thank you so much. I really do see what we do as an art form. It's a synthesis of all that I am. The way I look at it is that I have one opportunity with that audience whom I will probably never see again, so when a meeting planner says to me, “I want you to give us action items and tips that we can use immediately after the program that we can apply,” they always want that takeaway value, which is important. My programs have that, but I see it much deeper.

It's not transactional for me, it's transformational, and I really hope that an audience member will feel and think differently. I want to make it impossible for them to revisit certain concepts in the same way after they've seen me perform. I talk about work-life integration. I talk about how to align your personal growth with your professional excellence and recharacterize the whole concept around balance. A balance should never be your goal. It's not what you get, it's what you do. I illustrate that in various ways through my own talents and background as an acrobat, juggler, and unicyclist.

There are these visual metaphors that I build, and I involve the audience in certain ways. It's very interactive. More recently, what I'm talking about now is chaos, and I've written a book that's going to be coming out early next year called Positive Chaos, which is similarly a flip on the concept of chaos. The same thing I did with balance, which is highlighting that it's not negative. It's not necessarily what you think it is. We can use the powers of uncertainty and randomness to our advantage, and it could be a really great thing for you in your life.

These ideas are distilled through an experience that impacts your mind, body, spirit, and soul. There's a lot to it, and it's a big deal. I love it. It's all that I am and all that I bring in one package.

JEREMY: I'm going to be the first online to preorder that book. That's amazing.

[DAN LAUGHS]

Josh, I'd love to hear from you. Tell us a little bit about what you do on stage and how you weave this magic of yours.

JOSH: Thank you for the high praises. In my more highfalutin moments, I like to pretend that I'm doing art and that motivational speaking is an art form. It's a different media or a different canvas than we traditionally think of when we think of art.

My speeches are basically about myself, so I am there primarily sharing my life's story. It's interesting to think from a perspective of conversations you have with meeting planners, as Dan alluded to because I think when people hire me, they know and expect that they're going to hear about how I lost my leg to cancer, how I became a ski racer, trained, and went to the Paralympics. My speech is that, but like I'm there primarily to tell you stories and relate those stories as a metaphor to you.

I think that's something similar to how Dan and I approach our talks. We are giving you a toolbox of metaphors so that the next time you encounter a problem, a metaphor I might give you is like ice patches. The next time you see a problem, you’ll think that it's one of those ice patches that the speaker talked about or it's like that speaker was talking about on the unicycle about getting off balance.

Ultimately, the kind of speech I want to give is like a movie, and it should take you up and down. You should go from crying to laughing like shockingly quickly. I want you to be laughing, and then laughter is like dying off. Then the next line takes you into this intense story, and you just think that this is quite an experience.

DAN: Josh, you do that so beautifully, you bring your stories to life, and invite us into your story. It's not like we're hearing about you and you're hilarious every step of the way, but you're bringing these poignant moments. I think your audience is in the story. They're living it with you, and they're drawing the analogies to their life in the context of watching you. It's happening at a subliminal level because you're a master at what you do.

JEREMY: I think you both hit it, which is the aspect of metaphor. I'm a theater guy, and I always say people don't go to see Hamlet because they care about Hamlet. They go to Hamlet to learn about themselves. I think you're right that it is that metaphor that you both give in very different ways that just really speaks to people.

To give folks a sense, how many of these live presentations have you given? Dan, what do you think?

DAN: Oh, it's definitely in the thousands for me. In terms of speeches, I've been speaking professionally for 28 years. It also depends on how far back you want to go. Before I was delivering professional speaking engagements, I was performing on stages for audiences since I was a kid. I learned to juggle at 11 years old. I was performing at Renaissance festivals. I was doing after-dinner shows for corporate events and all kinds of weird things before I found the world of speaking.

I've logged a lot of stage time, and I know that Josh has as well.

JOSH: Yeah, probably not as many speeches as you have, Dan, but I started as a speaker when I was young. I had cancer when I was nine and started doing fundraising speeches for my hospital pretty soon after that. The first time someone was like, “We want you to go on stage and talk for 20 minutes,” was when I was 12. I was like, “What?! 20 minutes? That's crazy.” Now if someone asks me to speak for 20 minutes, I'm like, “Why 20 minutes? Come on, give me more time. What could I say in 20 minutes?”

I've probably done hundreds of presentations. I don't know if I approached thousands of them yet but certainly in the hundreds over these last couple of decades.

JEREMY: If you've done that many of these, then you must love what you do. I'd love to hear both of you talk about what keeps you going, why you enjoy it, and what are some of the challenges. Josh, why don't we start with you?

JOSH: What I love most about being a motivational speaker is that it is a nexus of many things that I love or that interest me. Speaking combines being a performer with being a writer. Also, it allows me to work for myself and to do these things in a sector, a sphere, or create art that seems to help people, according to what people say about the speeches afterward. I think in any career, whatever career we're in, we as human beings are wired to want to feel like we're impacting people.

What's most challenging? People hire me because they heard from their friend how great it was, and their friend was like, “And he talks about doing one more thing one more time and his ski racing.” In the sense of being a speaker, you cannot change what you do on stage too much or too quickly.

In that sense, there is an expectation of repetition to what you do. It would be similar to seeing a band you really liked, and they played all new material. You'd be like, “No, I wanted some of the greatest hits. Some new stuff too, but the greatest hits.” I think the challenge is always how to marry the greatest hits, which in my case is like being a nineties cover band. There are a lot of stories about things that happened to me, literally in the 1990s with the new material and how are those synthesized.

JEREMY: You're talking about the effect that you have on people, which I would have to imagine is very meaningful. How do you know you're having that? What do people tell you? What do they say or do they write to you?

JOSH: When I first started as a speaker, as a teenager, I always thought that I'm changing people's lives. I think the reality is that people change their own life, and you're just kind of there at the right time to remind them of the thing that they already wanted to hear. What I mean is that people will get something out of my message which is X, and X is like nothing I said. It's like totally unrelated. They think that how I talk about this was so great. I'm like, “Wow, that's great. I love talking about that.” It is great because that's what a metaphor is. People take the metaphor and run in whatever direction they think they need to go in.

JEREMY: That's funny. Dan, how about you?

DAN: The challenge is that you default to saying travel is getting more difficult these days and the challenges of covid, which were exciting and different, but we pivoted really quickly to a virtual offering that was really unique. I loved being able to be in that space and serve clients in a different way. It helps me stretch and grow.

Josh nailed it in terms of all the things I love and all the things I'm about in one place at one time. I love the fact that you get everybody in one room, and you can go through it once and then they all know you. It's the perfect degree of celebrity because you travel anonymously. People don't really stop you and interrupt you too much, except now that my daughter's famous on TikTok.

BETHANY: This is behind the scenes Bethany breaking in with a fact check. Dan's daughter, Maggie, is definitely famous on TikTok with over 5 million followers. She is also an actress, singer, songwriter, and she hosts a podcast with Dan called Wholesome Chaos. We'll link to it in the show notes.

DAN: That happens more frequently than it used to. Then you go into a room, you're on stage, and then after you're done, everybody knows you. You're the big hero, sign some books, and all that's wonderful. Then you go back to anonymity on the flight on the way home, so that's fun.

Honestly, with that whole concept of who's in your audience and how you affect them, you never know who that next person is that will come up to you and say something. I agree with you, Josh. It's often like, “What? I can't remember saying that exactly, but I'm glad you got that and took it away.”

I talk a lot about the different spheres of your life, your work, your relationships, your health, your personal interests, your spiritual growth, and how they're all interconnected, so it’s going into those deeper places, talking about some soulful issues, and having people respond in terms of how that impacted them. I had one guy one time tell me that because of my speech and looking at those different spheres, he decided to go get a deep body scan and detected cancer really early. He was like, “Yeah, you helped me find my cancer early” I was like, “Wow, that's amazing. Didn't know that.”

It's just the repeated surprise of never knowing who's in your audience. That next person who wants to hire you, the person who becomes a really good friend, or just someone who introduces you to somebody they thought you'd enjoy. That surprising nature of the random, unexpected moments of how that goes, is just remarkable and where this profession can take you. It’s the degree of what people will say, and you realize that this is a company, a professional, a leadership team, or an intimate group where they're sharing with you what they're most proud of, what they're working on, and the things that they're struggling with at this moment. These really private moments get an up-close view, which otherwise would never happen. Those are all wonderful things.

Then in terms of challenges, the challenges for me are few and far between I love what I do. I think part of Covid was realizing how much time I had spent away from home. Our kids are great, and we have great relationships. However, there's no substitute for those moments that you've missed along the way. I think that kind of put some of it in perspective for me. When I did have that length of time at home, I got to see what that was like for a while.

JEREMY: For those of you who haven't seen Dan, when he says that the challenges are few and far between, this is coming from a man who gets on stage and rides a unicycle while juggling knives, hatchets, and axes.

[JEREMY LAUGHS]

DAN: That's a small percentage of my speech. That's the fun part, but I've been doing it a long time; tumbling across the ages, handstand pushups on the lecterns, all those things are fun.

One of the best parts, honestly, is working with people like you. Jeremy, when you get to really work with a phenomenal audio-visual team and production team on a set that's amazing and beautiful with the art that's put into the meeting, it just brings everything about the message to a whole new level.

When I have a chance to communicate with people whom I can understand and relate to on that level, it takes everything about it to a whole new level. Thank you for that.

JEREMY: Thank you, that's very kind. That serves as a nice transition because I do want to talk about how our side of the table can collaborate with you guys in the most effective ways.

You've done hundreds of these things, maybe thousands, and you're always coordinating with a production team, and I would love to hear from you about what people do right? What do people do wrong? What do they ask you that's really helpful? What don't they ask you that you wish they did? What are some of the good or bad stories that may really make a difference for you and your performance?

DAN: I never presume that anybody's looking out for my interests more than me. Very often, I'm walking into the room and there's not a phenomenal production team on stage. Maybe it's a couple of people at a table in the back of the room or sometimes I still get into those environments where it's a very small group. It's very fortunate that I know how to work a soundboard, usually, and how to basically run my own setup from figuring out the lights and all that kind of stuff because there are some technical cues.

In terms of setup, I love to have a conversation in advance with the team just so they know what to anticipate. Nothing I ask for is very complicated; it's all very straightforward. I get on a mic and do a quick Q to Q with my props and everything making sure it is good to go. We can get through that in about 15-20 minutes.

I think the thing that production teams appreciate about me is that I kind of understand their world a little bit. I can speak their language, I can phrase things in a way, and I treat them like equal participants in the orchestration of what's happening. I never understood why some people say they work with speakers who are like prima donnas and difficult to deal with. I can't even imagine how you would approach this business from that perspective. It's too great and too much fun, and you've got to be nice to the people around you because they can make or break your success.

JEREMY: Not everybody thinks that way for sure. Those people are definitely out there.

Josh, how about you? How do you feel when you're collaborating with a production team? What's useful to you? What isn't useful to you?

JOSH: Something that is useful is there being a great production team. As Dan said, you guys are like crème de crème of production companies, so my guess is you probably take for granted how good your events are compared to most.

At most events, the level is not there. There isn’t always a production team. Sometimes it is literally just a random person who is like, “I don't know, the manager said to bring out the microphone here at the hotel. Normally I'm the janitor. I don't know. Dan, the sound guy out today.” There's nothing and there are no lights.

[JEREMY & DAN LAUGH]

It's not like a Proscenium meeting where there are lasers, cameras in the ceilings, smoke, and cool videos of face hits. That certainly to me is the best. I am glad when there's a professional production company on the job, and to me, I just want to hear that their stage lights are great. Shockingly, often they’re not there. I know the client will be like, “Yeah, we paid millions of dollars to fly everyone in here, but the stage lights are going to be like another 500 bucks. Let’s not do that.”

I’m thinking, “You didn't get stage lights? You didn't get IMAG screens? You have 500 people and the people in the back are not going to laugh at my jokes because they're not going to see my face.” I'm not going to tell them that. I'm going to be like, “Oh, okay. Yeah, cool. Yeah definitely. The house lights are great. Love these house lights. Fantastic.”

[DAN LAUGHS]

For me, I want to communicate with everyone. I want to communicate with the production company or with the client and have a meeting to know that we're on the same page.

JEREMY: You said that you do like talking to the production company. You've done so many of these. I know, as you said, you're relying on your greatest hits, you do have things that you know are going to work, and that you're going to do every time, but I imagine that every show, client, and brand is different to some extent. You want to know who's the audience, who am I talking to, and what's the purpose of this meeting.

In terms of those conversations that are less technical, but more about preparing you, what questions do you want to be asked or what do you want to know so that you are prepared to do your best work?

JOSH: I'm obsessed with learning everything that I can about clients. Sometimes I think clients don't worry that much about us. They just want to hear about you, and here's a little information about us. I'm going to talk about me. That's going to be like 57 out of 60 minutes of the talk, but trust me, the extra 10 seconds here or there that are about you are going to blow away the audience. That's why your audience is not going to tune out in the first five minutes when they’re thinking that it’s just another sports celebrity who got off the plane and is reciting his word-for-word speech that he has done 5,000 times.

I can start referencing specific things that have been said in previous sessions like referring specifically to their culture or making inside jokes about other things that have happened at the conference. That's when people sit up and think that this is for us, this is for us personally. Instead of watching a movie, it's like having a conversation with an actual human, so to me it’s just wanting to know everything that I possibly can. To that extent people can just help me understand, that's what I love.

My preference is to always be later in a conference, and this is very quirky to me, personally. I like to be later in the conference so that I can go to watch the rest of the conference. I've seen Dan speak multiple times and had the pleasure of seeing him do his thing, so then when I get up and speak, I can refer to things Dan has done in his talk. I can keep referencing back to things like when Dan was juggling those glows-in-the-dark balls yesterday.

You would be surprised how often clients want to put me at the start or sometimes don't want me to know all of the corporate secrets. We can't let you in our sessions before I'm like, “Dude, I don't care about your corporate secrets.

[DAN LAUGHS]

It's not like I want to sit and listen to your VP of sales talk about your sales strategy.” It's not that interesting to me, other than what I can say in my speech. I guarantee you that I'm going to forget it as soon as the speech is over because it doesn't pertain to me in my life.

The more people can share with me the better. One of the greatest compliments I've recently heard from a meeting planner who brought me back to a different division in the organization is, “You spoke for us five years ago. Ever since you spoke for us and had this 45-minute call where you asked all these questions about the organization, we made every speaker do that. Before, we would let them get away with just a quick check-in about the lights. Now we make them listen to everything about our talk, and we tell them we expect to hear all this incorporated into their talk.”

That's what I want to hear. I want speakers writing me angry emails like, “Josh, my job used to be so easy. You work so hard on these speeches that now I have to customize it, and I can't get away with doing my word-for-word speech like I used to.”

What's interesting to me, is being able to figure out what's unique about this group. Who are these people? What's the culture of this conference, and how can my speech hook into all of these little facets of that? That's probably the piece of the job that I enjoy the most. I'll add again that I think you are probably not aware, as a production company, of how good you all are at this. You all are integrated into the content on a level that I don't see most production companies doing. You're a great partner in helping me to prepare and customize my talk for a given audience.

JEREMY: Thank you. What you're saying about the effect you had on other speakers is interesting. The effect that guys like you have on us is when we get you on the phone, we feel that collaboration, that you're listening, that you care, and that you're hungry for knowledge. We can relax because you get it. They're going to be great. They're asking the right questions. The audience is going to love them.

Sometimes you get on a call with a guest speaker, and you just feel it. They don't care. They're not interested. This is a half hour of their day that they want back. They just want to get through it. You can tell them whatever you want to tell them, but they haven't prepared. They don't even know who they're talking to on the phone. You're just one on the roster for them, and you get off the call thinking that this is going to be a problem.

Dan, I wanted to give you an opportunity to jump in here.

DAN: Unlike Josh, I like to know as little as possible. I don't want to know the name of the company. I don't want to know the name of the planner. I prefer not to even know the city that we're in. I like to arrive blindfolded and be walked into the ballroom.

[JEREMY & JOSH LAUGHS]

Then when I'm on stage, I look around and I try to customize based on the signs that I see. I try to make it look like I really know them, even though I don't. No, I'm kidding.

JOSH: Dan's joking, but I just want to be clear. That is actual advice that professional speakers sometimes give one another.

[DAN LAUGHS]

There's a very famous speaker who I will not name, but Dan would know who he is from this description.

DAN: I think I know who you're talking about.

JOSH: He sells his advice for a lot of money about being a great speaker, and I bought his like DVD set for thousands of dollars. His actual advice is don't change a single word of your speech. Do not even go on the conference call. Have your assistant go on the conference call because it's easier to get a new audience than a new speech, so don't change a single word. If you change a single word, then you open up a can of worms where you have to know who you're talking to, and what industry it is, it becomes very complicated, and you can easily make a mistake.

The most efficient thing is true. The maximum dollars per hour you can make is the same talk, and you try to hit multiple cities per day with no effort whatsoever.

When I was starting out transferring to being a professional speaker years ago when I was a teenager, I took that advice and tried to do that. I did not want to go on a tour of the client’s facilities. One time I was speaking to a rehab hospital, and they were speaking to me through my assistant. They said, “We will only hire Josh if he comes on a tour of our rehab hospital.” I went on a tour, and then when I went up to speak, I knew all this stuff about the group. It was a fundraiser, and I felt so connected to the mission.

I realized that speaker was so wrong. Doing this was so much better, and I'm so grateful to that client.

DAN: It's so much more fun too, but the reason why it's so important is because we get one chance to get it right. I say every time you do a show, you do three shows. The one you plan, the one you do, and the one you should have done that you think about on the way home. You don't want to be thinking afterward about what you would've said or the connection that could have made to what they're really working on. That's why it's so important because I have to understand the lens through which they see the world, not because I want to purport myself as a master or an expert in their organization or industry.

Then if I could present my content through that lens as it connects with what their life is like, what their challenges are like, what their jobs are like, and what's going on in their supply chain with their customers or competitors. You could maybe even do this, like what Josh said, by understanding what happened before me in the event, the flow of everything, and how it all hinges on this moment.

I think about what we do, Josh, in that regard. It's like they're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars or a million dollars on this meeting. A lot of that success, in terms of what people will remember, hinges on what we say, do, and how we make people feel about that experience. I'm not saying that we get all the credit for that. I'm just saying that we have to understand that we're a really important key in making that all happen.

JEREMY: I would go even further than that. From what I'm learning from you guys, maybe a lot of events are not like this, but certainly, from our perspective, we're not looking for a good guest speaker. We're not looking for a great guest speaker. We're looking for the guest speaker who is right for this conference and for this audience given this message.

Sometimes it's frustrating because we get asked to find a guest speaker before we know what the message is, and we can find one. I want one to be supporting the CEO, the message, and reinforcing what they're hearing. You might have the most entertaining way of getting at it. You might have a brilliant metaphor, you might make them cry, or you might be the most memorable, but it's all a part of a piece. That's when I think the magic of the event is really working.

I'd love to move on to our Lightning Round.

[AUDIBLE THUNDER]

This is just three quick questions. The first question is, who's your biggest get? A speaker, entertainer, or subject matter expert that you would either love to see at a live event or someone who you would love to coach.

JOSH: I would love to see Simon Sinek who wrote Start with Why. He's amazing. He seems like a really good speaker and has really interesting ideas. I've never seen him, but I know he's certainly one of the top speakers out there, an adjacent genre to us.

JEREMY: He's great. How about you, Dan? Whom would you love to see?

DAN: The first person that came to mind for me was Erik Weihenmayer. Do you know Eric?

JOSH: I would love to see him too.

DAN: He is the first blind person to climb the tallest mountains on all seven continents and also kayak the entire length of the Grand Canyon by himself.

Eric is one of my very dear friends. He and I did 13 events together for a big series of leadership meetings all around the world. I got to go climbing with him in Hong Kong, to a gym in Atlanta, and got to know his family. I even taught him to juggle. I taught a blind man how to juggle. It was the only time I'd ever tried that, and he pulled it off a little bit.

When I was president of the NSA, National Speakers Association, he came in as our opening speaker. Here’s one of these guys who could totally coast on his story. He's got the most amazing life experience that he could just wrap his metaphors around, show a video, and people would be just dazzled. He's also one of the most amazing speakers you've ever seen in your life. He’s as artful with his words as he is with where he places his hands on his feet as he's ascending a rock face; just a beautiful, poetic speaker, master communicator, and just an incredible guy.

JEREMY: Second question, what is one thing you wish presenters did more of or less of?

JOSH: Stop trying to be funny. A lot of executives think that they have to be funny, so they’re going to tell these jokes. It's so awkward. It will not be funny. Don't try to be funny. Just talk normally like a normal person, and if you can just talk like a normal person, maybe by telling a story, it probably will be funny.

JEREMY: That's interesting. That's great. Dan, how about you?

DAN: I was going to say something similar about just being present, being at ease, and not trying to affect anything, which is really hard to do. The thing about speakers who are really good at what they do, like Eric or Josh, is you make it look so easy, so everybody feels like they can just step on stage, it'll suddenly come to them, and they'll have this masterful presence about them.

It just starts with just being yourself and being present. If you are at ease, the audience will be at ease with you.

One of the things I wish presenters would just generally do more is, technical prep. Don't show up five minutes before your presentation and say, “Alright, where's my mic?” I'm sure you hate that or changing your slide deck at the last minute. That’s probably something you run across. It’s not as well as you plan, but I'm sure it still happens. Then when things go wrong on stage that are their fault, because they're embarrassed, they throw the tech team under the bus. That really upsets me when that happens because that's on them.

JEREMY: Yeah, I agree with all of that except the last-minute changes to their slide deck. If it's gratuitous then I agree, but I think people get last-minute numbers.

I remember we had an event and one of the executives came up and said, “I just got this email, and I really want to show it to everybody. Is there any way we could get in?” He was about to go on stage, but we did it. We got it in, and when he called for it, it went up and got a huge round of applause. He was absolutely right.

I almost have the opposite fear that people are afraid. Because there's so much tech and it looks so intimidating, they won't tell the story that they want to tell. We're there to support them. We want to give them what they need. We don't want them to not be able to do it because we can't make it happen. It's hard. We're all running around like crazy, but ultimately, I think it's for the betterment of their presentation.

I agree with everything else you said. Absolutely. You never know, but you are right. Sometimes they just want to change it just to change it.

DAN: Sometimes people think that's their crutch. Their slides are their crutch. They finished their slide deck, so they finished their presentation. The slide deck is the scenery and the background. They think that's their presentation and where you put all your time, instead of thinking about the audience or thinking just being present with their ideas.

The other thing presenters do is they write a speech word for word, and they tell their speech instead of the bullet points of the ideas that they want to convey. Just talk. And say what you want to say. That's why you're up there.

JEREMY: I agree. I love the bullet points.

Okay, last question, what is something, could be a book, a movie, a song, whatever you like, that was a big influence on you and particularly, if possible, influenced your professional career?

Dan, you got one?

DAN: Yeah, my mom was the biggest influence on me in my life. She's an artist and was showing her work at a Renaissance festival when I learned to juggle. Mom always told me, “It doesn't matter what you do in life so much as how you do it, and any vocation can be a work of art.”

JOSH: Wow, full circle. Love that.

DAN: Circling all the way back to the art concept at the beginning, she gave me that lens through which to see what I do, and she was an entrepreneur. What she showed me is, there's a way to do art, but find the intersection where it's relevant and people want to hire it. They want to buy it. There's an economical art that you're not selling out; you're actually selling up to value. That was a huge influence.

With books, Richard Bach’s Illusions was a big book for me when I was a kid. Wayne Dyer was a huge influence on me as I started to learn about speaking. Anything Prince is awesome and amazing. A lot of jazz, Spyro Gyra, Incognito, and all that stuff feeds into my vocabulary of movement, music, sound, and I just like to get funky on stage.

JEREMY: Josh, how about you?

JOSH: Okay, this is a weird choice, but I'm going to say, Lance Armstrong. The early Lance Armstrong before all the scandals. He had this book, It's Not About the Bike, and it came out when I was a teenager. I was starting to become a ski racer and it really inspired me as an athlete. It gave me a template for a very honest and vulnerable type of storytelling that I think impacted my later career as a storyteller.

I think up until then, I had been trying to sound like other motivational speakers that I had heard. I even wrote a draft of a book that I shared with a professional writer, and he was like, “Honestly, you should start over. Instead of hiding behind motivation, you should try to be honest like Lance Armstrong in his book.” I'm so grateful for his honest opinion because it's hard to get constructive negative feedback.

I had read Lance Armstrong's book a lot, and so I understood what he meant, although it took me a long time to integrate that as a storyteller. That impacted me a lot because Lance Armstrong's book had inspired me a lot through the storytelling and his honesty, not through what I think I had seen a lot of motivational speakers do, which was be go on stage like I am the greatest, be like me. I should credit the ghostwriter of that book, Sally Jenkins. The storytelling in that book showed me inspiration through honesty and struggle.

JEREMY: Nice answer. I want to start to wrap this up. I do want to say that we will link in the show notes to your websites, your books, and everything you've done. I really encourage anybody out there to check out everything you can from these two guys.

One thing that I also do want to point people to is that, in addition to everything else that Josh does, he does these incredible Halloween costumes. If this were a visual medium, we would a hundred percent be showing them. You must do yourself a favor. We'll link to it. Go and check this out. You will smile, you will laugh, and you will forward it on to all the people in your life who you love because they're wonderful.

I'm so excited to see Dan's new book and what that is because Off Balance On Purpose was phenomenal. I can only imagine that the next one is going to be even better.

To both of you, I'm so touched. I'm so delighted that you both decided to do this. You've been so open and honest and shared with us. I really do feel that each of you has elevated what you do to an art form and people think they're coming to see a motivational speaker. They get so much more than just that. For the thousands of events that you've done and the people’s lives that you've already touched, they're very lucky. I hope you do thousands and thousands more and just share your gifts with the world because you really make the world a better place.

I really appreciate you taking the time. Thank you.

DAN: That's beautiful. Thank you, it's been a lot of fun.

JOSH: Thank you, Jeremy. This has been so fun.

JEREMY: Well, getting to talk with Dan Thurmon and Josh Sundquist about how to elevate guest speaking to an art form was so great. For me, there were tons of takeaways, but these are the four tops.

                     • Number four, it's really important to be yourself on stage. If you're at ease with yourself, the audience will be at ease with you.

                     • Number three, if you're going to have a guest speaker, make sure you have good lights and a good sound system because if the audience can't see or hear                                them, it’ll be all for nothing.

                     • Number two, make sure you have a conversation with your guest speaker ahead of time to work out any production issues and to give them some insight into                          the brand, the audience, and the messaging.

                     • Number one, when guest speakers make specific references to this specific audience, it makes a big difference. Make sure they have the opportunity to get the                          inside knowledge they need.

Look, I could talk about this stuff all day. If you want to talk to us about today's topic or anything about live events, check out our episode notes for more information or just go to proscenium.com to drop us a line. Send us a guest suggestion or tell us why you would make a good guest. We would love to hear from you because at Proscenium, we help presenters do their best in front of their most important audiences. As we like to say, we help brands perform. I have a sneaking suspicion that we can help your brand perform.