The #1 Skill You Need to Build a 6-Figure Speaking Business with Clinton Young

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

🗓️ 29 April 2025

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

“Ultimately, you don’t need to have any certification. You need to have some level of experience where you can speak authentically and congruent. It’s gotta be congruent with how you feel about your knowledge.”

Clinton Young knows what it’s like to hit rock bottom—and how to turn that experience into fuel for an inspiring speaking career. After losing his business and confidence during the 2008 financial crisis, everything shifted thanks to a tough-love moment at a seminar and a game-changing podcast episode. Now, as a sought-after speaker and coach, Clinton helps others build clarity, confidence, and the systems they need to get booked and paid to speak.

Clinton’s secret sauce? It’s all about systems—the thing that separates hobby speakers from true professionals. Instead of trying to talk to everyone about everything, he challenges speakers to focus on what they’re great at (credibility), what fires them up (excitability), and where the real opportunities are (profitability). The biggest thing that holds most people back? Imposter syndrome. Clinton’s quick to remind us that even the best feel uncertain sometimes, but the key is taking action anyway—and shifting the focus from your own nerves to the people you’re there to serve.

Success in speaking isn’t about waiting for gigs to magically appear—you’ve got to have a clear system, a focused message, and the drive to keep showing up. Clinton’s story is proof that when you ditch the “someday” mindset and get serious about building the right framework, you can turn speaking into a real, thriving career—no matter where you’re starting from.

You’ll learn:

The importance of systems in speaking
Overcoming limiting beliefs and imposter syndrome
Managing nerves and the psychological side of speaking
How to identify audiences and topics
A framework for finding your niche
Understanding and establishing credibility
Building relationships with event organizers
How to stand out among other speakers
And much, much more!

“And by far, in my opinion, the biggest thing that stops people is ourselves. It’s our own limiting beliefs around, “Can we get paid?”

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Systems are powerful. They're the number one thing that separates out your hobbyist from your professional paid speaker or any industry
0:23.6	for that matter. Systems provide leverage, right? How do I go from trading time for dollars,
0:28.7	one bit of input, one bit of output to go from what to go to one bit of input to three bits of
0:34.0	output, right? That's leverage. How do we do more with less? Well, it's through systems, right?
0:38.0	And the acronym is, save yourself time, energy, money,
0:42.5	and I like to say sanity.
0:43.7	Because sanity is the most important one.
0:49.7	Hey, as our friends, Graham Baldwin here. Welcome back to the Speaker Lab podcast. Excited for today's conversation. You are in for a treat, my friends. Today we're going to be chatting with Clinton Young, who has been a very successful speaker and then also works a ton with our students inside the Speakelab. And so he's's been part of the team for a couple years now.
1:11.1	So excited to chat with him. Clinton, welcome to the show, man. How you doing today? Thank you, Grant. I'm doing outstanding. Great to be here. Yeah, let's get into it. So first of all, one of the things I always like to start with, we're going to be talking a lot about, you know, you are in the trenches, in the weeds with speakers on a day and day out basis, helping them build and grow their speaking business.
1:28.6	And so we're going to talk about that, things that you've noticed, things that you've learned, things that we can share with the audience today about how they can continue to build and grow their speaking business, regardless of where they're at on the journey. But for some context here, I always like to start with, like, tell us about your own speaking journey because you've been very successful as a speaker. You've been a lot of paid gigs.
1:44.2	And so maybe give us some context of how you got
1:49.6	into speaking in the first place. Oh, Grant, you're going to love this. So it actually starts
1:55.0	with one of your podcasts. And I'm not placating here. It starts with literally episode 25. I'm going to get to that
2:02.5	in one minute though, but just picture this. It's 2008. Okay, we all know what happened in 2008
2:09.6	globally, right? There's this financial collapse. And I literally like had a really, really challenging time during that time. I lost my business within the span of six months. I literally, like, had a really, really challenging time during that time.
2:18.9	I lost my business.
2:20.4	Within the span of six months, I lost my business.
2:22.7	I lost my property.
2:24.2	I lost my credit score.
2:26.0	Six months after getting engaged.
2:29.2	Welcome to the team, honey, right?
2:30.5	Yeah.
	...

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