Читать книгу People Follow People - Sam Cawthorn - Страница 30

I suppose I'd always known deep down that there was more for me to do in my life, and that I could make a real difference in many people's lives. As a result of the accident, I found something I never could have predicted. Through the experience I discovered a more fulfilling career through which I would ultimately touch many thousands of people.

At 26 years old, I was in the prime of my life, married, with two kids and a full-time job with the Australian federal government. A big part of my job was travelling around the state so I had to drive a lot, which could be pretty tiring. That day, at around three in the afternoon, on the highway outside Devonport, I actually fell asleep at the wheel and veered over to the other side of the road. I later learned I was travelling at 104 km/h when I struck a semi-trailer going at 102 km/h head on, with a combined impact of 206 km/h. My car spun around into the path of another car behind the truck, which ploughed straight into my door.

The result can be imagined. A big part of my right arm was ripped off and the entire right side of my body was crushed, part of the car forced into the right side of my body. After about 18 minutes I lost consciousness. I was told later that by this time I had stopped breathing and my heart stopped beating for a couple of minutes. When the ambulance arrived the two paramedics managed to resuscitate me.

I was saved by the jaws of life. The paramedics cut me out of the car, stretchered me into the ambulance and raced for the hospital. I was on life support for a week. When I woke up and the doctors told me I'd lost my right arm above the elbow and I'd never be able to walk again, I first retreated into denial.

This couldn't have happened to me. It was a nightmare I convinced myself I'd soon wake up from. It was three days before I could accept this was actually my life and my reality. Then I went through a flood of emotions, always overshadowed by the thought of my kids growing up with a disabled father.

When I was out of hospital, a local youth group asked me to share my story, then I was approached by a school. I went on to share my story at school after school. Through my traumatic experience, it seemed like I had crashed into a new career path. I realised that this could be the beginnings of a new profession. I eventually decided to take the plunge, leave my job and learn how to market myself and my story.

This was the start of my journey towards building my profile and gaining recognition as a professional speaker.

Some years later, having travelled the world and presented in 40 countries, I met a couple of people who had great stories to share but didn't know how to communicate them. They came to me and said, ‘Sam, it looks like you've made it. You've built your profile and you're making a living as a speaker. Can you teach us how to do it?’ So I decided to share what I'd learned from my own experience with them, and within the next year or two they in turn became highly paid professional speakers.

It was then I realised that I had a formula I could teach to other people, showing them how to build their profile and become influencers in their space.

For the first four or five years of running the business, I was the only speaker and I had just one or two support staff. One day, during the period when I was completely focused on building the business and travelling the world as a professional speaker, Kate said to me, ‘Enough is enough.’

I had just come through my busiest month ever, which included 56 flights, both domestic and international. By then we had three young kids and I wasn't at home much at all. I had to make a decision. Should I continue as a solopreneur on the professional speaking circuit, or should I look at actually running a business and teaching other people what I did in order for them to grow their profiles and influence in their industry?

Around this time, Google asked me to put on a workshop at their headquarters in Sydney. They wanted me to teach some of their leaders how to present and share stories. I asked them, ‘Can we use your largest room and invite some of the public along to the seminar?’ They said, ‘Yeah, that would be fine.’

So they booked their biggest room, which sat 300 people, and I advertised it out there in the marketplace and more than 300 people signed up, including just a handful from Google. It was a sold-out event. I realised then that there was a huge demand out there for training in how to build a business profile, how to commercialise your voice and how to be an influencer.

That was the motivation I needed to set up Speakers Institute to teach others the skills behind becoming a successful speaker and a thought leader. Since then I've drawn on the wisdom of the best influencer trainers in the world, including body-language experts, publishers, media personalities, PR consultants, speaker bureaus and agents, as well as some of the best professional speaker trainers on the planet. I soaked up their knowledge in their areas of expertise, and in this way we built the Speakers Institute curriculum from the ground up.

As we developed, we became a premier training organisation, teaching our clients how to build their profiles in the new profile economy. Over the past five years, we've seen a really interesting transition as people previously influenced for the most part by governments, organisations, brands, products and logos have increasingly come to be influenced by people, individual human beings.