Turning Fear into Fuel on Your Speaking Path with Melanie Curtis

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

🗓️ 23 December 2025

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

“I’m a big believer in consuming what you sell and practicing what you preach…it’s a useful step on the path to understanding what’s possible and for growing in the skill set of standing on stage in front of any number of people that makes your body react and become nervous.”

In this episode of The Speaker Lab Podcast, host Grant Baldwin sits down with Melanie Curtis, a world record-holding professional skydiver, seasoned coach, and sought-after keynote speaker. Their conversation explores Melanie’s unconventional career path, which began in the finance industry before she took the extraordinary leap into professional skydiving, amassing over twelve thousand jumps, and then eventually public speaking.

Melanie opens up about the challenges she faced along the way, including imposter syndrome, persistent anxiety, and the internal doubts that can hold back even the most driven professionals. She reflects on why each stage of her journey was essential and shares the turning points that nudged her toward treating public speaking as a serious business, rather than a side endeavor.

Throughout their discussion, you’ll hear advice on finding your target audience, building meaningful connections in both women-centric organizations and male-dominated industries, and leveraging storytelling to transform your message. Grant and Melanie also dig into the emotional side of entrepreneurship, the highs of big wins, the lows of self-doubt, and the importance of having a strong support network.

Whether you’re contemplating your first speech or looking to scale your speaking business, Melanie’s story will inspire you to trust your intuition, stay persistent, and redefine what’s possible for your own speaking journey!

You’ll learn:

Using speaking for marketing a business
Overcoming resistance, anxiety, and limiting beliefs
The importance of high-level coaching and support systems
How to practice speaking via Facebook/Instagram lives
Gradual desensitization to rejection, visibility, and performance pressure
To rely on support networks during discouraging times
Designing personal boundaries for travel and gigs
Distinguishing between type one and type two fun
And much, much more!

“If I didn’t learn how to manage my fears, how to work with my fears and anxieties, my insecurities, I imagine I would have lived a really small life.”

Episode Resources

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, Fran, Graham Baldwin here.
0:01.4	Hey, what if I told you that there was a single marketing asset that you could use to book tens of thousands of dollars in paid speaking gigs before you even have a website?
0:10.2	Well, that tool exists.
0:11.4	And Dan Irvin, one of the speakers on our team, used it to book over $36,000 in speaking gigs without a fancy website or any social media presence.
0:19.6	Even better, we're going to teach you exactly how
0:22.1	to create that tool for your speaking business in under an hour. For a limited time, we're going to
0:26.9	be offering a free live training on how to build and use this marketing asset to start booking
0:31.9	paid gigs in just a few weeks. If you want to hear more, go to thespeakalab.com slash marketing.
0:38.4	That's what you got to do is go to the speakelab.com slash marketing and we'll see you there. What I went through was the path.
1:00.7	You know what I mean?
1:01.6	I don't think that I could have gotten here any quicker than I did.
1:06.4	And I don't mean that in a bad way.
1:09.8	I mean that in a way of sort of allowing people who are at those earlier stages that it's okay to be in whatever stage of the process that you are in.
1:37.2	Yeah. Hey, what's our friends, Welcome back to the speaker lab podcast, excited for today's conversation.
1:41.2	We're going to be talking with one of our successful students.
1:43.3	Melanie Curtis, and she's been killing it. And so excited to talk with her, hear her story, her journey, lessons she's learned along the way and what she can teach you. So, Melanie, thanks for joining us. I'm so stoked. Let's do this. All right. All right. So first of all, let's kind of paint the picture here of who you speak to, what do you speak about, of all the different
2:02.3	things you've got going on, how does speaking fit into your world? Yeah, I, so speaking now is my
2:08.1	main focus in my entrepreneurial life. So I speak to the driven professionals of the world
2:14.6	who want to access their untapped potential. So that's sort of my EPS.
2:19.1	Like I dare driven professionals to access their untap potential. So like for me, that's a
2:24.8	really core thread in my entire life experience. A lot of people know me as a pro skydiver,
2:30.5	world record holder, all that stuff, which underpins how I serve as a speaker, of course.
	...

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