A Note from Your President

It’s always interesting to reflect back on a year that has just become your past and imagine what the new year will bring. 2020! Not only a new year, but a new decade. Your future is always ahead of you which means you have choices as to how you will move forward with your speaking business.
We’ve had Chapter meeting speakers and Labs featuring a wide array of information, ideas and imagination to provoke our thinking. Whether you agreed, disagreed or found some of that information to be mildly entertaining, you can use all of those experiences to shape how you choose to approach the next decade. To get us started in the new year, January brings us Damian Mason as our Chapter meeting speaker, we have a special event with Karen McCullough on the 21st, and Labs to help you continue to grow professionally and connect with colleagues.

Tim Marvel, your President-Elect, will be sharing information about the results of the Chapter survey that was completed in November. For those who responded to that survey, it was another opportunity for you to help shape the Chapter’s future. We are an association of many walks of life, a variety of preferences, and a myriad of approaches in defining our speaking businesses. So, feedback matters, and we appreciate it when you take the time to do that. We will also have some of our members taking a look at the Chapter’s policies and procedures to ensure we are operating effectively and to see if any updates need to be made. We last did that in 2015, so the timing is right to do that during this Chapter year.

And don’t forget, there is still time to register for the NSA Winter Conference, Building Your Speaker Sales Playbook, where you’ll learn proven strategies to sell your services. It’s in Houston this year which makes it very accessible to us.

I look forward to seeing you at our events in January and appreciate the time you take to participate as a member of our Chapter. Wishing each of you a highly successful 2020!

Imagine your potential,

Nancy Bartlett, CSP
NSA North Texas Chapter President 2019-2020

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NSA-NT January Chapter Meeting with
Damian Mason, CSP

Saturday, January 11, 2020 / 9:00am-noon

Reinventing Yourself for Success and Longevity in the Speaking Business

By Dave Lieber, CSP

Bill Clinton is coming to our chapter.
OK, not exactly.

Our January 11th speaker at the National Speakers Association/North Texas Chapter is Damian Mason, CSP, and his Clinton imitation is so wonderfully funny.
Imagine how popular Damian was in the 1990s. At his peak, he delivered almost 100 presentations a year and picked up a few spots in movies and television. He was riding high.
Now imagine how few groups want to hire a Bill Clinton impersonator today.

So what did Damian do?
He flipped the script, reinvented himself and, as they say, picked a lane.
Since Damian is an Indiana dairy farmer, he became a speaker who specialized in farming topics. He was good at that, one of the very best in the nation.
But these days it’s not a good time for farmers. Giant conglomerates are buying up family farms. Tariffs hurt farmers, and It’s hard to make a living.
Damian revamped again.

His new book – Do Business Better: Traits, Habits and Actions to Help You Succeed is the pivot where he expanded his farming wisdom into overall business acumen.

Here are five cool facts about our January speaker:

1- Damian, a member of the Screen Actors Guild, had a good role in a movie, 2001: A Space Travesty starring Leslie Nielsen.
“Damian, do you want to be a successful actor,” Nielsen asked him.
“Yes, sir.”
Nielsen: “Then I’ve got two words of advice for you: Get better.”
The crew had a big laugh, but Damian understood that “get better” applies to everything.

2- Damian is impressed by Lady Gaga. He likes her music, but more importantly, he likes her life story, her drive, her unwillingness to quit.

3- Real world chops. At 18, he got his first factory job. He worked the midnight shift in a dusty mill making ceiling tiles. He worked alongside ex-cons and other unskilled laborers. His boss inherited the job through marriage, not merit. He saw the way the world works at a young age.

4- Damian studied acting at Second City in Chicago, which has produced some of North America’s finest comic actors.

5- During his toughest times after Sept. 11 he questioned whether he had a future in the speaking business. At a scary moment, he accepted a job selling medical devices.
His wife Lori said, “Damian, don’t take that job. If you take that job, you’ll be good at it. You’re a good salesperson and the hardest worker I know. But if you take that job, your spirit will be crushed. Your creativity, your excitement for running your own business, will be gone. I don’t want to live with a Damian Mason whose spirit is crushed. Don’t take that job!”
He didn’t.

Damian is one of NSA’s most interesting speakers. You don’t want to miss him.

LEARN MORE & REGISTER TODAY! 

 

 

If you are a guest, let us know!

Join us before the meeting from 8:15a-8:30a for a quick NSA-NT welcome.

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January Lab

Masterminds Instead of Disasterminds – Tim Durkin, Julie Alexander, Betsy Allen-Manning and Susan Gatton

Wednesday, January 15 / 6:30pm-9:30pm

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Special Event with Karen McCullough, CSP

Tuesday, January 21st / 6:30pm-9:30pm

Creating and Writing a Killer Keynote/Presentation

If you are interested in developing and writing an amazing presentation that consistently get booked, this session is for you. Karen has created a repeatable framework that you can use over and over for every keynote and future presentations. She will walk you through a repeatable process you can use to write an amazing presentation that gets booked! Together, you will take a deep dive into the creative process that is necessary to write, deliver, and book a “Killer Keynote”.

YOU WILL:

• Leave with a STRUCTURE that will guide you when writing your keynotes and presentations.
• Gain insights into what the audiences wants and demands.
• Receive Karen’s framework on how to market, promote, and consistently book your keynote.
• Discover the very short stories every presentation must have to better connect with today’s audiences

Members $39
Non-Members are $49

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SAVE THE DATE!

Saturday, February 8 Chapter Meeting: Anna Liotta, CSP will wow you with her insights to talking to decision makers from any era in her talk

What’s Stopping Millennials, Gen Xers or Boomers from Hiring You and What to Do About It.

Wednesday, February 12 Lab: Working with a Speaking Broker with Shari Barth from Optimal Training Solutions.

February 28-March 1 NSA National: Winter Conference

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