There's an often-quoted statistic that the fear of public speaking is right up there with the fear of death as the two events people most fear in their lives. However, as a business owner, I can guarantee you that public speaking is a phenomenal way to grow your business, so if it's an activity that scares you, you need to take the bull by the horns and start working past that fear. As an introvert, public speaking isn't something that comes naturally to me, although I'm told I'm good at it. It's been quite a learning process, and I've had as many failures as successes. My best learning experiences have come through the process of finding the courage to just do it and learn along the way.

If you're a self-employed service professional, you work in a time-based economy. You have only so many hours in the day to work directly with your clients. Speaking to groups gives you the opportunity to reach out and touch and impact others who might otherwise never cross your path and for you to get them into your marketing funnel so that they can begin to get to know, like and respect you. Once they're in your marketing funnel, and if you provide a solution that solves a problem that they have, they'll ultimately hire you.

Here are ten steps I recommend to get you into action to use public speaking to fill your professional practice:

1. Pick 3 topics on which you can present a 20 minute - 60 minute speech. These should be topics on which you love to speak and will readily showcase your expertise to your audience. The topics also need to be ones that speak to your target market's pain and provides a solution for a problem that they're having. If you want to purchase some ready-made presentations, or have some you'd like to sell, check out http://www.turnkeyworkshopsforcoaches.com.

2. For each presentation, write a 2 - 3 sentence description of that provides a brief overview of your content. To add some meat to the description, create a benefits statement for each presentation and what they'll learn or get out of your talk. Remember, your audience will always be asking the same question, "WIIFM", or "What's In It For Me?", so make your description so compelling that they think, "Hey, I've got to hear that!"

3. Have a professional photo made, and create a 3-6 sentence introductory bio of yourself. Many bios sound the same and are pretty boring, so on my website, I decided to tell something of a story about myself to make my bio a bit different, http://www.onlinebizcoachingcompany.com/aboutdonna.htm. Let your personality shine in your bio.

4. With your topics, bio, and photo in hand, you can now put together in MS Word a simple speaker one-sheet that tells a prospective association program chair everything s/he would need to know about you. If you have a list of audiences to whom you've spoken previously, you will want to list some of those under the heading "Satisfied Clients", and spread 2 - 3 testimonials from other speaking gigs throughout the sheet. In order to get ideas for layouts of the one sheet, visit the National Speakers Association, www.nsapseaker.org, and view the speaker one sheets of other speakers to jumpstart your creativity.

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