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For people who play golf for their profession, there is no greater honor than to wear the Green Jacket. For professional baseball players, there is no greater honor than to wear a World Series Ring. Boxers can gain no greater honor than to wear the Championship belt for their division. For business leaders who make their mark by leading and managing people, there is no greater honor than to be called a Professional Speaker.

The business world is not quite as organized as professional sports with established leagues and championship protocols. There are a few paths to gain the Professional Speaker designation. The National Speakers Association has prerequisites for becoming a member, so that a speaker must have gained acceptance as a Professional Speaker before even being accepted into the organization. Before gaining recognition from the National Speakers Association one must gain recognition from two other groups who do not give out their endorsements lightly: association meeting planners and corporate meeting planners.

If you have an interesting topic, and are active in a trade association, you can often get yourself on a conference schedule as a member of a panel or as a session presenter. Every association event has a “call for presenters”. Associations are always looking for great content for seminars and sessions. However, if your message is not well received nor well delivered, attendees will not remember you and not praise your session in the event review surveys. You might get on the schedule once or twice, but not a third time.

If you can move the audience, fill the room and help create anticipation for the next event this association hosts, the planners will put you on the list of those they consider a Professional Speaker and you will be called on again to help them. This is truly an earned honor. Many people wish to present at conferences and conventions to help promote their businesses. But the list of people who can truly deliver for the meeting planner is not so long. When association meeting planners place the Professional Speaker mantel on your shoulders, you know you have exceeded their expectations. This mantel must be worn with respect. It can be taken away as easy as it was given. So a professional speaker who knows this will be careful to make sure that the meeting planners’ expectations are understood and are considered first and foremost, when creating and giving presentations.

Make sure to check with the meeting planners to be sure you understand the broader and more specific goals of each event. Ask for feedback to help make your presentations more valuable to the planners.

Association meeting planners are in a tough situation. They are expected to deliver top notch quality sessions that are delivered in the most captivating and entertaining manner, while coming in under budget.

Corporate meeting planners are also in a tough situation. Their superiors have big expectations of a presenter or a facilitator. The end result has to be measurable. The end result has to lead to an increase in whatever metrics the department tracks. Ultimately the end result has to lead to increased profit. This is not the easiest goal to deliver. When going in to lead a session or facilitate a seminar, you may not yet know all the inner workings of that department or that company. There can be many reasons a company will not be able to gain a measurable bump from a professional speaker. Going in to talk for a day or two will usually not cause a fundamental shift in that company’s culture, politics or standard procedures. Or will it?

When a person from the outside can inspire, motivate, excite, frighten or otherwise move an audience at a corporate event, a shift in focus or direction can happen. When you are driving a car, a tiny shift in steering can take you in a whole new direction. This is why professional drivers take the wheel of race cars. When target shooting with a pistol, a fraction of a degree can make you either hit or miss the target. This is why you seek the help of a professional marksman if you want your aim to be right on every time. Sometimes a very small shift in the attitudes and understandings of an audience can cause a real shift in direction.

A professional speaker can make that small shift happen in a short period of time. This is what really separates the pros from the rest of the crowd.

Many businesses will have a solution vendor come in to present best practices in using the solution. Other times businesses will bring in a business leader or manager who has had success in a similar field. Either way, the corporate event planner, whether the planner is a full time event planner or the unit manager looking for a boost in the unit’s performance, is looking for a set of expected results. There needs to be a better understanding, a better approach or even a better phrase left behind for the attendees to use to shift the business in a more profitable direction.

When a corporate meeting planner invites a presenter back for a second time or recommends a presenter to other event planners, this presenter has been handed a great honor. When a corporate event planner places the mantle of “Professional Speaker” upon the shoulders of a presenter, the honor cannot be taken lightly.

The professional speaker who has been award this mantle needs to wear it with great respect: respect for the power of the spoken word and respect for the power of the imagination.

A professional speaker respects the power of the spoken word, because it is words that move the audience. The professional speaker is like a weaver who finds the threads of ideas and the colors of phrases and weaves them together into stories, examples and metaphors that reach the listener on both an intellectual and emotional level. When you view a beautifully woven rug, you can see the different textures of the threads, the different colors and color combinations. You can feel the cushion of the carpet under your feet and it all somehow means more than the color, the texture and the comfort of your feet. In the same way that color and shape please your eyes and move through your nervous system to touch your subconscious when you see a woven fabric piece of artwork on the wall, the messages that a professional speaker’s words create will please your ears and move through your nervous system and touch you somewhere in your emotional self.

A professional speaker also respects the power of imagination. When the spoken word is touching the listeners on an emotional level, the words stimulate the imagination. Once the imagination is working, there is no limit to what can happen. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. There have been people in history who have used the spoken word and the way in which it moves the imagination to cause great pain, suffering and destruction. When a speaker has good intentions and crafts his or her message carefully and deliberately with regards to unintended consequences, people’s imaginations can be moved to ignore barriers and limitations and create all sorts of positive and valuable courses of action.

This is why one must be careful and respectful of the “Professional Speaker” mantel. Perhaps there should be disclaimers when speakers are working to touch their audiences’ imaginations. Perhaps there should be a scrolling warning under the big screen at a presentation that reads, “Caution. Do not attempt at home unsupervised. This is a professional speaker giving a professional course.”

Why would it be any different than attempting to drive a race car? If handled incorrectly or recklessly, there could be a big wreck.

For now there are few ways to be sure that a speaker, coach or facilitator can be trusted with the imaginations of your audiences. If your speaker is a member of the National Speakers Association or has one of the professional speaking designations from the association, chances are this speaker can be trusted with your audiences’ imaginations.

If you are seeing a speaker for the third or fourth time on the agenda of a conference or convention, the chances are that former audiences have given great reviews and that the meeting planners are comfortable trusting the success of their event to this speaker.

If a business has invited a speaker back for a second or third time, you know that the results have been good. These professional speakers were able leave behind ideas, concepts, phrases and courses of action that made a positive difference to the metrics and to the profit potential of that business unit.

When a corporate meeting planner recommends a speaker or presenter to you that is a very large endorsement. When a corporate meeting planner is confident enough to tell you that a professional speaker was a big contributor to the success of an event, then you know your event can be very successful as well.

Of course you need to tell your professional speaker the challenges you face, the results you’d like to see and how you plan to measure the success of the content. Make sure you are clear about describing the audience, the problem that needs to be solved, the new direction that is sought or the metrics you hope to move. This will allow your professional speaker to craft the delivery of the words and to craft the way in which he or she plans to move the imagination of your audience.

Don’t attempt to drive your next event without a professional handling the words and presentations.