How to Use Your Story to Make an Impact with Bruce Van Horn

The Speaker Lab Podcast

The Speaker Lab

Authors, Public Speakers, Public Speaking, How To, Marketing, Smallbusiness, Coaching, Education, Entrepreneurship, Speaking, Business, Side Gig

4.8 • 575 Ratings

🗓️ 8 August 2023

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As a speaker, it’s often hard to find the balance between telling your story, building your personal brand, and serving your audience. No matter what your story is, you have to connect it to solving your audience’s problems. Otherwise, you’re just talking about yourself–and that’s a surefire strategy for failure if your goal is making an impact. On Episode 458 of The Speaker Lab podcast, Grant Baldwin invited Bruce Van Horn, a speaker with a pretty extraordinary story, to help you walk that very fine line.

Before Bruce was a speaker, he was a creative writing major who pivoted to a successful career in the software business. If you’re struggling to connect the dots between what you studied, where you work, and what you want to speak about, his path will inspire you to think outside the box and buck expectations.

Bucking expectations is a big part of Bruce’s mission. On top of being a speaker, he is also a life coach, author, and podcast host. Through his various efforts to promote positive change using words, he helps other people experience radical mindset shifts and get unstuck from negative patterns in their life. On the show, he shares some of those strategies and a sneak peek into what he calls his “victory routines.” His podcast, Life Is A Marathon, invokes a powerful experience of self-reflection and mindset shift he had while training for a marathon during a series of tragic life events.

You’ll also learn all about:

The drawbacks of basing your career choices entirely on money.
How Zig Ziglar inspired Bruce to kick his victimhood mindset.
What we can learn about from marathon training.
How to leverage a podcast to get you more speaking gigs.
The difference between passion and enthusiasm.
How to pick the parts of your story that will connect with your audience.
…and so much more!

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, friend, are you looking for ways to book more paid speaking gigs?
0:03.7	Well, of course you are.
0:04.4	Maybe you're just starting out as a speaker. You're trying to figure out what to prioritize in order to get booked and paid as quickly as possible. Listen, if that's you, I want you to join us for a free live training where you're going to learn how to create the number one marketing asset that you need to consistently book more paid gigs. This is a tool that one speaker on our team used to book over $36,000 in paid gigs before he even had a website.
0:27.2	This training is free.
0:28.1	It's live and we offered a few times a week so you can find a time that works best for you.
0:32.5	All you got to do is head over to thespeakerlab.com slash get booked.
0:36.3	That's all one word.
0:37.2	Thespeakelab.com slash get booked. That's all one word, the speakerlap.com slash get booked
0:39.3	and register right now. We look forward to seeing you on the live training.
0:46.8	Hey, what's up for? French, Grant Baldwin here. I'm so glad to have you here listening to
0:53.8	episode 458 of the speaker lab podcast for a conversation with Bruce Van Horn. Now, Bruce is a life coach
1:00.3	with an incredible mission to create positive change in the world through words, which he does
1:04.6	through speaking, writing, and podcasting. Now, like many speakers, he started out in a corporate
1:09.4	industry, in his case, software, and
1:11.4	solely found his way to speaking over several decades.
1:14.0	Today, he's sharing his story on how he shifted his mindset from following the money to making
1:18.1	an impact.
1:19.3	Now, here at the Speaker Lab, we often reiterate that speakers don't need a crazy story to make an
1:23.4	impact, but Bruce is one of those guys who actually does have a crazy story.
1:27.4	We're talking marathon training, cancer, family tragedy, anger at God, a lot of really sobering stuff that we're going to be covering. But Bruce came out of all of this, created something truly wonderful. And he's really had a radical mindset shift and wanted to help others reach that same place of positivity and introspection that he has reached.
1:44.6	I don't want to give too much away, but the story you're going to hear today is really, it's significant, it's moving, it's powerful. I think you're really going to dig it. But don't worry if you do not have a story like that. I, for one, do not. Bruce and I are also going to talk about how to take your talk and work with the audience and their needs, no matter what story that you tell.
2:02.8	His advice for building the right mindset for... how to take your talk and work with the audience and their needs no matter what story that you tell.
	...

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