Be the next TEDx speaker

Do you aspire to be the next TEDx speaker? Do you wish to leave your audience with The Aha Moment? Then this is the blog for you. This time on The xMonks Drive, Andrea Sampson, a speaker coach, joined us to share her insights from finding your core idea and structuring your talk, to presenting it to your audience. This is a transcripted version of the conversation we had with her.
**Being an Entrepreneur**
“I was not an entrepreneur.”
Gaurav: When you said, “I was not an entrepreneur (https://xmonks.com/be-the-next-tedx-speaker/)”, what was the sense that you were making, from the word, being an entrepreneur that didn’t allow you to embrace that word fully and completely?
Andrea: When I say, “I’m not an entrepreneur”, it was because of the risks. For me, growing up in a corporate world, I had spent my entire career in that world, where every two weeks, there was a paycheck that was deposited into my bank account and I knew how much money I was going to make. I knew the process of getting promoted or if I wasn’t going to get promoted. I could go and get another job. The risk of not having that is unimaginable to me.
Entrepreneurs are the bravest people in the world. I never saw myself being that brave even though others did. People used to tell me that I had an entrepreneurial spirit. So in retrospect, I can look back and I can see that I had many of the attributes of an entrepreneur, like risk-taking. I took lots of risks in my business. I was always out on the leading edge, I was always the one pushing the boundaries for my clients, for example, we were doing email before email was really out there. We were doing full-on campaigns in the ’90s. We were doing variable landing pages. I was always pushing boundaries and getting my clients to follow me. People saw that kind of tenacity and saw it as bravery. I never considered it as bravery. For me, it was like “Well, you’ve always got to be looking at what’s coming. And if you’re, if everybody else is doing it, you’re too late. Because it’s done, you got to be ahead of that curve.” And that is an entrepreneurial attribute.