Speaking and Communicating Podcast

Welcome back to the Speaking and Communicating Podcast.

I am Roberta, and today I have Robert Kennedy III, who is a keynote speaker, a workshop communications trainer, and he's here to share with us how to get started on speaking, and more than anything, how to overcome imposter syndrome, which is one thing that I've struggled with myself.

So before I go any further, help me welcome Robert.

Hi, Robert.

Hi.

How are you doing?

Hold on, let me do something.

I always do this when I go on shows.

You ready?

Here we go.

Yeah.

All right.

Excellent.

I like that.

Keep it going.

How are you doing, Robert?

I'm doing good.

Welcome.

Thanks for being here.

Thanks for having me.

So tell us more about yourself.

That is a big question about myself.

I'm moving up in life.

I'm about to enter my third quarter in just a few months right here.

You look much younger than that.

I know we're in August.

Yeah.

Well, no.

Listen, life is good.

I've had a really good life.

I can't complain.

So I'm married.

My wife and I have had the pleasure.

She's been able to stand me for almost 22 years.

So 22 years in August.

We love stories like that.

People don't stay married that long anymore.

Yeah.

I've got three kids.

My first child is in college, her freshman year of college this year.

And then I've got two boys behind her that are high school.

One is in high school and one is graduating from middle school this year, eighth grade.

That alone keeps me busy because they're busy.

They, you know, they're involved in sports.

They're involved in school clubs, all sorts of things.

And so I'm always hopping.

The other side of things is my business.

And so I've been in the speaking industry officially, I would say for the last six years.

Before that, I was in the e-learning industry.

And so I was building online courses for organizations.

And what started to happen was after a while, people said, can you not just build the course?

Can you teach us how to do it?

And so I ended up starting to do training on how to build online courses.

And what I ultimately discovered was that I wasn't just telling them, hey, click this button.

What I was sharing with them was how to communicate information in a palatable way to their teams, to their employees, to their organization, so that it wasn't just assets that's sitting on a shelf somewhere, right?

That's inside their Google Drive or wherever.

We did what we discussed on this show.

That's right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So that's kind of how I began to make the transition into the speaking industry through starting to train people about how to develop courses.

Do you still run your courses?

Because the online space, especially since the pandemic, there's been a lot more of these online courses because a lot of things moved online.

Do you still make those?

Well, I do them for myself at this point.

I haven't been in the space anymore where we develop courses for other organizations.

I actually closed that company several years ago.

We know that the online course space is we have on one side of our business, online courses that we offer to small business owners because we believe that if you've got a business, if you've got a service, if you've got something to offer the world, one of the ways to share that information is through speaking.

How do you solve problems in a way that really connects with people and allows them to know that you understand the experience they're having and the journey that they're going through?

This is how somebody explained it to me.

You can be the brand you speak, but the expertise that you deliver to people is the actual service sometimes.

Yes.

You can turn speaking into a career all by itself.

Absolutely.

I think there are a lot of examples of that.

Warren Buffett, several years ago, he was about the second or third richest man in the world.

He was doing a talk at Stanford University, and one of the things that he said was, if you want to uplevel your career, the best skill that you can take on is the skill of public speaking.

That's going to increase the value of what you bring to the world by 150%.

If you're willing to take that on right now, I'll pay you to do it.

Because when he was in college, he was offered the opportunity to take a Dale Carnegie public speaking course.

He turned it down.

It came up again, and he paid the $100 fee to take the course.

But then he got nervous, and he thought that he couldn't do it.

He didn't do it.

But then he started to notice, like in college, all of the people that got opportunities, all of the people that were listened to, all of the people that were in certain positions were people who decided that they were going to speak.

The people who were withdrawn and quiet, nobody ever came and said, Hey, Robert, would you mind doing this?

Or can you share with us?

Can you speak?

No, because they were withdrawn and quiet, and people didn't typically ask their opinions.

They were not chosen to move this in a certain way as leaders.

And so he said, Listen, if you want to have a career where you you have upward mobility, communication, public speaking is the best skill that you can learn.

So he ultimately after that, somebody held him accountable.

And he took the Dale Carnegie course.

And he said that was the best $100 that he'd spent in his entire career more than anything else.

And he gets this guy's a billionaire.

If Warren Govind says it, who are we to argue?

My first job in 1995 was a huge eye opener because I worked for an engineering company.

Society deems as, oh, they're socially awkward, they're quiet, all their brilliance lies on their hard drives.

It was huge for me to discover that the most brilliant person is not necessarily the one that's promoted.

Leadership positions are taken by those who speak up because that's less of the actual day-to-day task.

You manage people and managing people means speaking, having interpersonal skills and being able to manage conflict.

Right.

Yeah.

I was having a conversation with my wife several months ago.

I guess she was having a conversation with a friend of hers, and we're talking about how to move up the ladder and why they were struggling.

And my response was, listen, based on what I've seen or what I've observed, part of what happens is there's a language of leadership.

There's a way that leaders speak that is different than most other people.

Leaders tend to speak strategically.

Leaders tend to speak big picture.

They look at the idea on the front of the puzzle box.

They're not so much focused on how many puzzle pieces, which is a corner piece or which is a side piece.

They're looking at the picture on the front of the box.

And that's how they speak.

If you find yourself stuck at the lower levels of a corporate ladder, start looking at your language.

Because if you're speaking about task, if your language is task oriented, the day-to-day things, then you want to start thinking about, okay, let me start looking at the overall picture.

Let me start speaking about what's happening quarterly and yearly and over a five-year period, rather than what is the list of 10 tasks that we need to do today.

That's more the long-term vision.

Right.

And vision is a critical word because people follow vision.

If you execute a vision, people say, oh my gosh, yes, I see that within myself.

I see that as a possibility, right?

We think about people in the United States.

We think about Martin Luther King.

What is Martin Luther King known for?

He's made many speeches, but the speech that people associate...

Exactly.

People follow behind a vision.

A vision is inspirational and aspirational for people.

So as a leader or somebody who wants to be in a leadership position, start thinking about how you can speak in vision language, in dream language, in aspirational and inspirational language.

Push people to go higher even with the words that you speak.

When you lead, you actually chart new territory for people to follow.

Right.

What can you say to people who feel like they have imposter syndrome?

Yeah, I remember reading a story several years back about Michael Jackson.

Michael Jackson is known to many of us as the greatest performer, the king of pop.

I mean, known internationally as the greatest performer, the greatest entertainer of all time.

Right.

And the thing that I found interesting in the story was that Michael Jackson suffered terribly from what we think of as imposter syndrome.

As a matter of fact, there were times where he didn't go out on stage and he threw up backstage.

It's kind of like when he got on stage, it was the new world.

Once he got the courage to get out there, it was like a totally different space for him.

And he just entered this new realm, right?

But the journey to get out on stage was a frightening one for him.

And several other performers, a lot of other people say that.

Barbra Streisand.

Yeah, suffered terribly from stage fright.

Beyonce says that when she gets out on stage, she actually has created another persona for herself.

Sasha Fierce.

Yes, because she doesn't believe Beyonce is worthy or she's scared, nervous about being out there.

So the way that she coped was by creating this alter ego that didn't have to buy into imposter syndrome and the fears that Beyonce had to deal with.

That amazed me.

So this is not something that the lowest of us experience.

This is something that so many people in leadership positions, one of the great things about humanity is when we see that our experiences are shared, when we see that the thing that I'm feeling is not so much different than other people, then for some reason it gives us just a little bit more courage, right?

So if you're experiencing imposter syndrome, I want to encourage you to go check out books and biographies and find out the stories and the intimate feelings and the experiences that people who were world leaders or great performers, go find out how they were feeling because they weren't feeling that much different than you.

I find that, yes, biographies, they are huge eye-opener because that's not the stuff you hear in the news.

You only hear about the successes and the great things they've done.

You don't hear the journey, the vulnerable stages they went through when they were scared, when things were tough, when they broke down, when they were ready to give up a million times before they got to the parts that we know about them.

So when you read people's biographies and their stories, you'd be amazed.

Is there anything that you never thought you'd be good at and you hadn't passed the syndrome and you thought, no, I'm never going to do this?

And you surprised yourself when you decided to take action and start doing it.

I would say it's probably what I'm doing now.

I have what I call a signature story.

When I'm speaking with organizations or I'm speaking with people, I tell them that when I was young, I was probably about two years old, and my parents left us with nannies or I'm home with the helpers.

And I always heard, you know, they called me Bobby when I was a kid.

Bobby, you asked too many questions.

Bobby, you're so inquisitive.

You asked too many questions.

You should be a lawyer.

You talk too much.

And I kept hearing that and I shut down.

So as a child, after that time, I was known as a shy, withdrawn, would rather be in my room playing with trains than being out at the party type of child.

You know, I had a small group of friends, but I was withdrawn.

I think back on the story, I recognized that my voice was taken from me.

I realized that my voice was suppressed, was squished.

Point number one is, as adults, be very careful about what you pour into children, young, impressionable age, because you do not know how they're perceiving.

I tell you that I'm just about to hit my third quarter.

I'll be 50 in a few months, right?

But I remember clearly, vividly, these moments in my life at the age of two.

Anything that makes us feel a certain way, those impressions never leave.

Even as adults, not just children, the people closest to us, we always stick for their validation and a sense of belonging with them.

And that's why, instead of you fighting back and say, hey, I want to speak up, you actually shut down because you want to be part of this tribe of people that are closest to you.

Yeah.

If we go back to even the imposter syndrome conversation, as human beings, we try to avoid hurt or pain as much as possible.

And so we develop coping mechanisms in our lives to try to eliminate hurt.

Or we try to eliminate more hurt than we're currently having.

So there's some people where you're like, you look at them, you're like, wait, you're in a painful situation.

Why would you stay in that situation?

Because to change for them, they perceive that as hurting more.

I'll choose this pain because I know what this feels like.

I don't want new pain, right?

So, you know, we try to avoid that and one of the biggest tricks and the traps that we run into is feeling like we are the only ones that are experiencing that hurt or that pain.

Which is usually what we tell ourselves.

Right.

When we recognize that other people have experienced it and they live through it and they're successful in spite of it or maybe because of it, we think differently.

And that's the reason why motivation, that's the reason why inspiration works.

Because we see that other people were able to navigate pain as well.

I'm 46.

I'm too much younger than you.

Looking back in my 20s, I used to think when things go wrong, the world is going to end.

Right.

But now, looking back what I've lived through, I thought, oh, well, I know it's going to be okay.

Eventually, I've lived through that.

Oh, yeah, I can push through this.

In the summer, you go to the pool or you go to the beach and you walk towards the beach and the first moment that you put your foot in the water, you're like, oh, it's cold.

But then you get in and you stay there for a little bit and you realize, wait a minute, I can deal with this.

It's not as cold as I thought it was when I first stepped in it, right?

And so we've got to consistently remember that.

And this is why I like storytelling, because if we remind ourselves of the stories of success, we remind ourselves of the moments where we perceived or thought something.

And then when we actually did it or when we got involved in it, what we perceived wasn't actually the truth.

Then we begin to gain a little bit of courage.

And so that's why it's important to remind ourselves of our and celebrate the important moments or even the little moments in our life.

I've begun to laugh at when I heard a horror story thinking something was a certain way and looking back and realizing I was so way off.

Roberta, how ridiculous were you to think that?

Yeah, I forgot who made this statement, but they said worry is an active misuse of imagination.

Yeah, our imaginations were built for creativity, to make amazing things, to think about things that were previously impossible, or things that can just make the world this fantastic fantasy, if you want to call it that.

So when we take our imagination and we create fears or we buy into fears that have not happened.

That probably never will.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Speaking of imagination, I mean, think about it.

I'm sitting here with you on a Zoom call.

Somebody imagined that back in the 90s, it didn't exist.

Somebody imagined it earlier than the 50s, because if you remember, so as a kid, there was this show, there was this cartoon, Jetsons.

And this is like the 80s, right?

But by the time I watching it in the 80s, it had been a cartoon that was created maybe like in the early 70s at this point.

In this cartoon, they had this future family.

They had flying cars, sidewalks that moved automatically.

You just kind of stand on it and it moves.

They had instead of phones, video screens in the wall.

That's how you would talk to people.

They had robots that cleaned the house.

They had all of these different things.

And here we are in 2022.

Wait a minute, I can talk to Roberta over Zoom.

Wait a minute, I can speak to my mom over FaceTime.

There's room by cleaning our homes.

There's room by cleaning our house.

Yeah, wait a minute.

If I go to the airport, I don't have to walk all the way to my concourse.

There's the sidewalk that just kind of moves me along if I choose.

And the only thing in there that isn't really commercial yet is the flying cars, although we do have flying cars.

We have self-driving ones as it is.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

So somebody close to half a century ago was imagining this stuff.

We're living half of it already.

Yeah, it was a long time.

So people are imagining things.

Everything that we do in our day is the result of somebody's active imagination.

So what can we do instead of wasting it on worry?

How do we switch and make it a habit to actually imagine creative things?

Well, James Altucher has this great book called Choose Yourself.

Inside of that book, he talks about how he developed this habit of writing down 10 ideas daily, because the brain and the creative part of your brain, it's like a muscle.

The more that you use it, the stronger it becomes, the deeper it can dig.

I write down 10 ideas daily, and he said, you know what?

The majority of them are probably silly, crazy, stupid ideas that I will never come back to and use.

But every so often, there is one or two that I'm like, I can probably do something with that, right?

And I can share it with somebody, or I can ask somebody to help me do it or help me build it.

Practicing the art of ideating, just coming up with ideas.

I have Evernote as one of the tools that I use to write down a lot of different things.

And I've got a folder in it that just says ideas.

And I just sometimes I think of stuff and I just write it down in there.

And sometimes I'll go back to it and I'll see, oh my gosh, I wrote this thing down six years ago and now I'm doing it.

Like you call yourself an ideator.

Usually people think I'm a creator.

So those are two different things, right?

So the creators are the ones who you're actually executing.

You're actually doing it.

You're bringing idea to life.

Ideation is just the process of sitting in your awareness and creating ideas.

You may or may not do anything with those ideas, but it's just allowing those ideas to come to life and giving your ideas permission to be.

All of us have had this experience.

You're a kid, you're in elementary school in South Africa and Jamaica.

You call it primary school, right?

The lower grades, one of the first activities that they teach you how to do is to color.

You've got coloring book and here's where they start to suppress our creativity.

You start to color and they say, wait a minute, no, you have to color inside the line.

No, no, you can't color outside.

Oh, hold on.

That's a tree.

No, you have to color it green.

And the bottom part of the tree is brown, so you have to color it green and brown.

And before you know it, you got a whole class of green and brown trees.

Everybody's thing looks the same.

What about the child who's just like, listen, I want to use purple on my tree.

We try to mold.

I'll use a controversial word.

We try to brainwash kids from a very early age and condition them to do certain things.

And then they get grown up and we wonder why they're not creative.

And we wonder why adults are sheep who just want to be like everybody else instead of standing out and being different.

We crush them.

We tell them it's got to be this way.

And then when they get into corporate, we tell them, you got to think outside of the box.

What?

You told me not to.

That's a new idea.

Yeah.

We've got to rethink our education in some ways.

And when I say education, I'm not just talking about the school or the school building.

I'm talking about how we train our children, how we train ourselves from a very early age and really get back to embracing, allowing and empowering creativity.

Because if we do that, that really allows for a better world, I think.

Because there's so much creative juice running through everybody's DNA.

We need to create an environment where we bring that out.

So when it comes to leadership, do you think that it's something that people can cultivate or some people are just born with it?

I don't believe that leaders are just born.

And I'm going to caveat that in a couple of ways.

Number one, my family leadership is something that I heard since I was a child.

My dad is one of ten children.

My mom is one of eight children.

You know, I guess being one of ten, each child is jostling for position.

And they kind of have to find their way inside of that.

All of them, all ten of them, just strong minded, highly opinionated people, right?

Maybe somewhere in my genetics, there is the predisposition to speak out in some way, to let my opinion be heard.

But at some point in our lives, there is the opportunity for us to lead in some way.

Parents have the opportunity to lead, right?

Whether they take that on or not, that's a different story.

We have the ability to lead in our friendship relationships.

We got to make a decision about which restaurant to go to eat for lunch.

There is the ability to lead when their friends may be making a wrong decision.

We've got the ability to lead.

We've got the ability to lead in work and in church.

There's so many different leadership opportunities in our lives.

And so it's not about being born.

It's about being willing to embrace what it is.

And we start that by leading ourselves and giving ourselves permission to say yes, permission to see that the ideas that we've come up with or the things that we want to do are okay.

And then when we begin to give ourselves permission, then we can begin to choose to lead others as well.

And it's not about position as well.

Yeah, sometimes leadership is not about being in front.

It just may be being courageous enough to choose to do something before anybody else, whether or not people follow you.

I hear some people say, well, if you want to know if you're a leader, turn around and see if there are people following.

And sometimes people don't follow, at least not immediately, right?

But if you're courageous enough to do something first, sometimes it's years later.

Sometimes it's decades later.

But if you do something and you're courageous enough to do it first, people look and they're saying, OK, yeah, Roberto was the first person to do that.

Let me see if I can do it as well.

If you believe in it so much, they first buy into the belief.

They may not fully understand, but just seeing your belief in it and your convictions about it.

Exactly.

Do you think that public speaking as a career has not sold so much?

You know, when I was a kid, being a doctor was acceptable.

Being a teacher, a pastor, because my dad was a pastor, why don't more of us think about public speaking as a career path?

Because a lot of us don't think that we can.

We don't think that we can.

The heroes that we know of as minorities that spoke up are usually no longer alive, right?

Martin Luther King was a speaker.

Malcolm X was a speaker.

Marcus Garvey was a speaker, right?

And so we think about, you know, Webb Du Bois, James Ball, we think about these people that spoke up and they spoke, not because they were trying to make a career, but they spoke because they were fighters, because they were fighting for Asian people.

Yeah, and a lot of us don't think that we have the strength to do that.

Because again, we've blocked speaking into this small space.

But there's so much that can be done.

There are so many different areas of speaking.

You can be a motivational speaker, a technical speaker.

You can be a trainer, like you said, you used to do training as well.

And I still do training.

If I were to give you the percentage of my business, training and workshops are the bulk of what I do more than keynote speaking.

Because companies don't want just somebody to amp them up.

They want real, practical, transformational principles that they can implement and see change.

They would rather me spend a day with them, them saying, hey, here's the five-step framework that you can implement today in order to make this change, than going there for 45 minutes to say, you know what, I see you doing this and you can do it too.

You can do better.

If you adopt certain things, you can make this change.

And in five years, you'll be amazing.

All you got to do is just believe, right?

I mean, and that's good and that has its place.

But they also want to be able to ask me some questions sometimes to say, hey, Robert, you just said this.

How can we do that?

Okay.

So that they internalize the information and actually apply it in practical life.

Absolutely.

So, yeah, I mean, the majority of what I do is more workshops and training than keynotes.

Robert, this has been such a pleasure.

Thank you so much for being with us today.

Before we go, we'd like to know where can we find you after this podcast?

I'm easy to find.

I'm Robert Kennedy III on all social media platforms.

My website is robertkennedy3.com, the number three.

And you can find me also on Facebook in the Storytellers Growth Lab.

You can just go to storytellersgrowthlab.com and click join the community.

Thank you so much for being here.

I appreciate your time.

Fantastic.

Thank you, Roberta.