[00:00:15] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Hello and welcome to Lessons from the Leap. I’m your host, Ghazenfer Mansoor. On this show, I get to sit down with entrepreneurs, founders and business leaders who talk about bold decisions, pivotal moments and innovative ideas that shape their journey.

This episode is brought to you by Technology Rivers. At Technology Rivers, we bring innovation through technology and AI to solve real world industry problems. We do this by helping businesses streamline and automate their operations and secondly by partnering with startup founders, entrepreneurs and product owners to create innovative software products from SaaS platform to web and mobile apps.

If you like to learn more about us, head over to technology rivers.com and tell us about your project. Today on Lessons from leap, we have Eric Silverberg, co-founder of Speakers Lab. Eric, great to have you on the show. Tell us more about yourself and how your journey began.

[00:01:05] Eric Silverberg: Thanks for having me Ghazenfer, I’m Eric. I’m one of the two co-founders of Speaker Labs. I founded this business with my co-founder, Eli about 10 years ago now and in a nutshell, what we do is we help leaders and we help teams and we help businesses make their people amazing public speakers and presenters. We uplevel people’s communication skills with a laser focus on one to many communication on public speaking and how did we come to do this? Well, it,  I’ll tell you the shortest version of the story that I can. Okay, so Eli and I, we met when we went to business school together and we went to business school for the same reason I think anyone goes to business school.

We wanted to graduate one day and become really rich bankers or really rich consultants or something but that’s not how it went. Instead, when we were graduating undergrad, we were only 22 years old. We found ourselves in a position where we were hired by our business school to be faculty members, to be professors at the business school directly after graduating and it was such a unique opportunity.

For so many reasons but a few things happened in that experience. Number one is we basically became full-time public speakers at a very early phase in our careers which is something that I think is incredibly rare. Most people in their very first job, they’re not public speaking every single day but given that we were teaching PAC lecture halls every single day, public speaking was exactly what we were doing.

So we became really good at public speaking at a very young age. We also fell in love with teaching. We loved teaching our students but what we didn’t love was working for an academic institution. So we stayed in academia for a little while, but then we had this entrepreneurial itch but we didn’t have a business idea.

So we did the next best thing and after we laughed academia, we worked for a high growth tech company in Toronto and we thought that when we went to go work in tech, we thought that we were leaving our speaking careers behind in the lecture hall. What we found was the speaking skills that we honed in the lecture hall.

They were having a huge impact in business whether it was speaking to our prospects or our customers or our colleagues internally. The public speaking skills that Eli and I had honed, they were having a huge impact and people started coming to us asking us for help. They were like, guys, how can I speak like you? And so there it was finally our entrepreneurial idea. Why don’t we start a public speaking teaching business? And like I said, that was about 10 years ago. Now we teach people how to be amazing speakers.

[00:03:35] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Awesome. So you coach so many people. So tell us like why do so many smart, capable people struggle with speaking clearly and confidently?

[00:03:46] Eric Silverberg: I think the key is. Mostly to the latter part of your question is the confidence piece. What we find is the biggest difference between the world’s best speakers and everyone else, it has absolutely nothing to do with their intelligence. We meet so many people that are infinitely smarter than I am.

That are horrible communicators and we meet so many people are nowhere near the type of IQ that you would expect to, compared to the example that I just said  that are amazing communicators because like I said the biggest difference between the world’s best and everyone else, it actually is more about how you speak to yourself than it is about how you speak to the crowd. So of course we teach strategies in our programs for getting clarity, for storytelling, for what to do with your body and voice, for creating amazing slides, you name it. But where our programs are really focused is on that confidence piece and so you know, if you can develop a new relationship with your fear, with your nervousness, with your imposter syndrome, with your limiting beliefs, with your growth mindset, that’s where the magic happens. 

[00:05:01] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Cool and you teach the idea of being a projector rather than a protector when speaking. Yeah. Is that the same thing or can you unpack that bit more? And why is it a powerful shift?

[00:05:13] Eric Silverberg: Yeah, so I think you’re right that in our programs we do talk about the protector and the projector and it is basically the same thing.

Yes. Is every one of us has two different versions of ourselves. We’ve got what we like to call your protector and what we like to call your projector. Now your protector is trying to keep you safe. It’s obsessed with what could go wrong. It’s complacent. It worries about judgment.It worries about failure, it catastrophizes and so it shies away from opportunities and it the protector, it holds you back for all the reasons I just discussed. It is solely focused on keeping you safe. Don’t put yourself out there. Don’t take that risk. Don’t push yourself. Just stay safe.

It’s trying to protect you. That’s why we call it the protector but everyone has another version of themselves as well. There is a version of you called your projector and your projector is obsessed with growth. It’s dying to get better. It is willing to take a risk because failure’s, okay? 

Failure’s a part of life. It’s dying to put yourself out there so that you can learn and you can iterate. It knows that if everything goes wrong, that’s okay. You’ll get another chance. Your projector is your potential and your protector is your fear and what we find is that these two versions of you, your protector and your projector, they coexist over time but they can’t coexist at the same time at any single moment in time only one version of you is going to show up the next time you get up to speak. Either your protector is going to win or your projector is going to win. Now it goes without saying based on my descriptions that I just offered, the projector is going to be a better speaker and the protector is not gonna be a great speaker.

So what we do in our programs is we help people choose their projector. To show up confidently to be willing to fail and willing to take risks so that they’re not holding themselves back like their protector wants them to do. Because trust me, your protector is gonna stay complacent and it’s gonna stay the same but your projector is a new version of you that can reach new heights as a public speaker.

[00:07:30] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Yeah, interestingly, lifestyle people hear those comments were the entrepreneurs for growth but forget even the same entrepreneurs. Forget that about speaking. I had one guest yesterday on my podcast, a business coach and he was talking about the same thing. The mindset is the main thing. If your mindset is not for those aggressive goals,  you’re not ready to get there.

[00:07:57] Eric Silverberg: Yeah, we find that of course is true. It’s a great point. Yeah. It’s the exact same thing in entrepreneurship. It’s probably the same thing in anything that’s scary. Right? And it’s not just about being obsessed with growth it’s also about being willing to fail and being willing to try new things and being okay looking stupid and recognizing that’s a part of the journey.

So, of course. We all want our presentations to go perfectly the same way that every entrepreneur wants their business to take off and succeed. But you need to be okay with those things not happening and that willingness,that’s the secret sauce

[00:08:29] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Cool. So we met at Global Speakers Academy and  obviously,  I had a really great experience, one of the best learning experiences that I ever had in my life and what.What resonated me was like how you remember everybody’s name? I met you the very first time and you knew who I am by just looking at the picture. So your approach made 40 different people feel seen and supported on day one. So how do you and your team prepare to deliver that kind of transformation so fast.It’s not easy.

[00:09:14] Eric Silverberg:  no, you’re right. It’s not easy and Ghazenfer  that’s the reason you were impressed because you know, it’s not easy and you know, the type of effort that must have been required for us to know you before we ever met you and not just you but every single person that was there, right?

 If you thought that was easy, you wouldn’t have been very impressed but you recognized that must have taken a lot of effort and that’s the reason why it made you feel a certain way and I think that we, at Speaker Labs, we have believed from the very beginning that the very best marketing we can do exceed people’s expectations. We are not focused on outbound sales. We are not focused on digital marketing. We are not focused on content marketing. We’re in the business of creating advocates, people who attend our program. Then tell all their friends because they can’t believe how good it was. That’s been our value since the very first day that we started our business and so we try so many different strategies to make that happen and the quality of our curriculum that’s part of it. The design of our workshops and the breakout groups and the feedback that we give people that’s part of it and another part of it is, I mean, we’ve all attended workshops. Where for the first two hours everyone introduces themselves and we go around the room and it’s boring and tell us your favorite food or tell us a fun fact about you. It’s a big waste of time and it shows a lack of care we think and so we do something very different before every single one of our workshops. It wasn’t just your group Ghazenfer, it’s every single group that we work with, we get to know everyone that we’re about to meet.

We get to know their names, we get to know their roles. We get to know their where in the world they’re from. We get to know a little bit about their story and of course we can’t know everything about them before we meet them. There’s still connection that happens live on site but we study our program participants the same way a student studies for an exam.

We study you so that like you said when we meet you for the very first time, you say, Eric, nice to meet you and I say, hi, Ghazenfer super nice to see you and I know everything there is to know about you already. We find that does two things. That number one, makes you feel very comfortable, makes you feel very seen and number two, it shows you how much we care and when you combine those two things together that’s one way that we like to exceed our participants’ expectations. 

[00:11:43] Ghazenfer Mansoor:Absolutely.  

[00:11:45]  Eric Silverberg: Have you ever sell something like that before, guy? I’m curious. Well, what about that resonated so much with you?

[00:11:51] Ghazenfer Mansoor:  I have not seen, I have read, so one of my favorite books from Dale Carnegie. How to Win Friends Influence Others I think he mentioned about one of the presidents. I forgot the name. That was probably a hundred years ago. But he had such a great memory in that way, why he was so popular. So other than that, no, I do hear that those are recommendations. We should, we try. But human memory is not, I mean, it takes time, repetition and memorization really to remember every person’s name.

[00:12:28] Eric Silverberg: It takes a whole lot of effort. That’s right. Yeah. It’s funny, Eli and I, we also sometimes just for fun off the record even though of course we’re on a podcast,  is sometimes for fun. Eli and I will pull up a group from five years ago and see how many of those people we still remember all these years later and I have to say we do pretty well when we go back and check.

[00:12:49] Ghazenfer Mansoor: And it also gave me idea, like, okay, yes, you do care. Gave me an idea of how we should be caring for our customers. Imagine if we’re meeting somebody first time and we know everything about them or,  like we are at the restaurant and if I even ask the bartender their names and then calling them by name, the care that shows it just. Creates a different kind of confidence ’cause people connect with people.

[00:13:19] Eric Silverberg: Yeah, a hundred percent. You’re a hundred percent right. I’m glad that resonated with you and I’m glad it made you feel something right from the beginning of day one and I think that it’s important. I should say actually too, I have to be honest, I think there’s maybe a third reason that we do that and it’s really just coming to me now in a moment of realization. Eli and I, we started our business when we were only, I think we were 27 years old when we started Speaker Labs and of course, we’re in the business of making people better public speakers who want to be better public speakers leaders.

What that meant was we were usually the youngest people in the room and so how are we going to show up and gain the credibility of people much more experienced, much wiser, and much more successful than us? I think that effort was one of the ways that we could do it, and we wanted that effort to show.

[00:14:12] Ghazenfer Mansoor: That’s a really good point. Cool. So now that we are on this topic, so what is the biggest difference you see between the speakers who present and those who truly connect?

[00:14:25] Eric Silverberg: There’s many differences I would say but let’s go with this main one which is usually the underlying difference: the speakers that just speak, they typically speak with only logic in mind. Here are the facts. Here are the figures. Here is the data. Here is the chart. Here is my point. Goodbye. The world’s best speakers recognize that data and accuracy, all those things matter. It’s not that they’re irrelevant but Maya Angelou had it right. People don’t remember what you say. They remember how you made them feel and so if you connect with your audience on an emotional level that will trump the facts and the figures every time and for very analytical people and for very intelligent people and for very technical people that’s a very uncomfortable perspective because they’ve gone by their whole life succeeding with accuracy, with numbers, with data, but the world’s best speakers, the speakers that you remember the most, the speakers that you connect with the most, ask yourself, is it because of the accuracy of their data or is it because they made you feel something? and the answer is obvious. 

[00:15:47] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Yeah,I think that’s really good insight. So

[00:15:52] Eric Silverberg: I know that you’re definitely a technical and highly intellectual person. So how was that insight when we taught it to you in the program? Were you resistant to it or did it resonate with you right away? 

[00:16:00] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Oh, it resonated right away, for sure.So, I mean I’m a big believer like it’s connecting people that the trust that you get and even when we are hiring people, we, yes. In the past we used to hire just based on a skill, skills can be taught. You need the right people and in order to and there are certain basics that you cannot change in people easily. Everything, everybody can be changed but it’s a tough battle. So looking for those skills,  those basics are important as well. I mean, I so called those basics. 

[00:16:41] Eric Silverberg:Yep.I agree. 

[00:16:43] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Okay. In your process, the one thing that resonated me that really clicked for me was the dinner party method. Can you explain what is that for anybody who doesn’t know? And then how did that concept came to life? At Speaker Labs?

[00:17:04] Eric Silverberg: It was the toughest thing that we’ve ever had to build at Speaker Labs because when we set out to start a public speaking training business, we knew that there was a lot of things that people want to learn to become better public speakers.They wanna learn what to do with their body and voice. They wanna learn how to overcome fear and build confidence. They wanna learn how to create an amazing slide deck. But we also knew people want to learn how to build a presentation. But the reason why it was such a hard nut for us to crack was every presentation is different. How can we create a system, a process for building presentations when an emotional keynote presentation is different than a sales presentation, which is different than a wedding speech, which is different than a eulogy, which is different than an investor pitch. Every presentation is different, right? So. It was so hard for us to figure out the lowest common denominator process for what goes into any good presentation. Guys, it took us years. It took us years to crack that nut and finally what we realized was the world’s best presentations, they actually do follow a similar structure and the structure is basically in essence, I don’t have time to speak to it right now, as you know from attending our program, it takes five days to teach that process.

But in a nutshell, what we realized was. The world’s best presentations, they follow a three ACT model, okay? In the first act, you need to intrigue people because people weren’t born wanting to hear you speak. You need to give them a reason to want to hear you speak. Act one is all about intriguing people.

Act two is all about giving those people value. Value in the form of ideas or lessons or perspectives or strategies or philosophies. Give them value. That’s act two. So you have to intrigue them, then you need to give them value and then finally you need to move them at the end of the presentation either towards a goal or just emotionally.

You need to send shivers down their spine. That’s the three ACT models that we realize that’s the lowest common denominator of any world class presentation. They start by intriguing. Then they give value and then people are moved either towards an action or they’re just moved emotionally. Okay and the reason that we called it the dinner party method is because we know as teachers, it’s a very good teaching strategy to make our strategies very sticky, very memorable.

And so, you know, protector and projector, that’s an example of us branding a strategy. So then it’s sticky so that guys, you don’t just remember it for a week. You remember it for the rest of your life and so when we realized that three ACT models was the key to building a good presentation, our next step was how do we make this sticky?

How do we make it so that people remember this 10 years from now after attending our program? And what we found was there’s actually a really neat parallel between a dinner party and a presentation. We’re in a dinner party. There are three acts as well. A great dinner party has three parts. First, you need to send an invitation to your guests.

That’s act one send an invitation because if you don’t have any guests, you don’t have a party. The same thing is true with a presentation, right? Your first act, it’s all about intriguing people. To attend the rest of your presentation with a dinner party, you need to invite them and intrigue them to attend your party.

So there’s the parallel for the first act. The parallel for the second act is in a presentation. You need to feed your audience value until they feel satiated, until they feel full. In a dinner party, it’s very similar. You need to feed your audience value but instead of ideas, you’re feeding them actual food, right?

Until they feel satiated, until they feel full. And then in that third act, any great dinner party has to come to an end and you can either do a real sendoff, a real memorable ending for your dinner party or you can just sort of say, okay, bye. Get outta here and the same thing is true with the presentation.

You can end your presentation with a simple and um. Yeah, thanks for coming to my talk. Or you can build something really meaningful, really moving. And so we found that that parallel was really nice and really sticky. Where a dinner party has an invitation, a meal and a sendoff and a presentation has an invitation, a meal, and a sendoff.

Obviously the meal is ideas instead of food but we found that was a pretty nice parallel and so that’s our process for teaching presentations.

[00:21:28] Ghazenfer Mansoor: And is that mostly for the keynotes or is that same matter applicable for other types of talks as well? Like for example, in a panel discussions or fireside chats or 

[00:21:42] Eric Silverberg: Yeah, I would say that it’s a little bit different. So,  how do I wanna say this? Any presentation can follow the dinner party method, but conversations don’t follow the dinner party method. So for example, today speaking to you Ghazenfer on this podcast, I am not following the dinner party method right now.

A conversation is different than a presentation. A presentation is one directional. I speak the whole time, you listen whereas a conversation is bidirectional, it’s dialogical. Right. So no, I would say a fireside chat, a panel discussion, a podcast, not exactly the same, but any presentation, whether it’s in your personal life or in business, whether it’s at a conference or whether it’s speaking to a prospect in sales, those presentations can definitely follow the dinner party method.

[00:22:30] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Cool. Yeah and every talk have contents,  the presentation,what do you call it?  the delivery. Do you give any different weight to each? Which one is better? I have a great presentation. I have super good content. Oh, big PDF, all that documents and or, I’m a great talker. So how do you balance that?Where do you focus more? 

[00:23:03] Eric Silverberg: The answer is yes. The answer is you need both. If I’m being real with you, if you have great content but horrible delivery, then it doesn’t matter how good your content was because I can guarantee you this. No one’s listening and if you have great delivery but horrible content, well then maybe people are listening, but you’re a fraud.

You have no value to offer and so for that reason, it really is important that you’re both. Now I think that if you have really good delivery, you can probably convince people for a very short term that you’re a capable human being. You can trick people into thinking that you’re an amazing person with great delivery, but if you develop a long-term relationship with those people, eventually people are gonna find out that there’s really no substance here.

So that’s why content is so important too. I think that, you know, Eli and I, Eli’s my co-founder, we used to have this debate all the time. What’s more important? Content and delivery and it took us years until we settled the debate finally and realized one is not more important than the other. It really is so vital that you have both.

[00:24:12] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Good point.

[00:24:13] Eric Silverberg:I think it’s like asking you guys what’s more

 important for your survival, your heart or your brain.

[00:24:18] Ghazenfer Mansoor: A good analogy.

[00:24:19] Eric Silverberg: You need both. 

[00:24:22] Ghazenfer Mansoor: You’re not gonna live.Yeah, true and those are all critical components of any presentation and as you said, if the sendoff is not good, if your delivery is not good, or  if there’s no story, it gets boring quickly and people will start on their phone.

[00:24:37] Eric Silverberg:Yeah, that’s right. 

[00:24:40] Ghazenfer Mansoor: So in the meal section, you say questions are the answers.What does that mean when preparing a talk. I am getting as the meal section specific? 

[00:24:47] Eric Silverberg: It’s the entirety of building content. Questions are the answer and you know, it’s a perspective that, again, took us years to build what’s the lowest common denominator because we’re in the business of making things as simple as possible, as simple as possible, because simplicity is accessibility. If our process was super complex, zen for no one would’ve gotten anywhere in our program. So, we realized that the lowest common denominator to creating good content is ask yourself questions and answer those questions in the invitation, in the meal and the sendoff.

No matter what piece of your content you’re delivering, you need to ask yourself questions and then answer those questions. So the very first question you need to ask is, what are you talking about when you’re building a presentation? You need to ask yourself, what are you talking about?

What’s your big idea? And then it turns out, once you establish your big idea, how do you build the rest of your presentation? You just ask yourself questions about that idea and the presentation sort of starts to build itself, which is what we hope you experienced is once you have your big idea, you can start investigating that idea. Why is that true? How can you get good at that? How do you define that? What does that mean? And that becomes the value that becomes the meal of your presentation. The answers to all of those questions that you can pose based on your big idea.

[00:26:13] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Well, good points. Thanks. One other question I have is like many founders speak in terms of topics and titles. Instead of ideas or themes. Can you explain the shift from topic thinking to thesis thinking? 

[00:26:32] Eric Silverberg:Yeah!

[00:26:33] Ghazenfer Mansoor: And I personally struggled that I know when I first there I went into that. My thesis as well as my topic.

[00:26:39] Eric Silverberg: Yeah. Listen, you’re not alone. We noticed a pattern over the past 10 years, which is that every public speaker, and of course I’m speaking in a universal language where, what I really mean is most public speakers. Okay. But most public speakers and I mean the vast majority. They fall into a trap when they go to build content. They think in topics and you’ve seen presentations like this before. I guarantee where, let’s say someone gets on stage and they’re talking about marketing and their presentation feels like this.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    Marketing with a couple bullet points. Digital marketing with a couple bullet points, advertising with a couple bullet points,  content marketing with a couple bullet points. We call that thinking in topic and that is going to always result in poor content. Thinking in topic doesn’t work. It may be useful directionally to know your topic, but there is a very big difference between thinking in a topic and thinking in a thesis. Now, this is something that you learn in grade school when you learn essay writing, but it’s something that many of us forget as we get more mature and as we start getting into our careers and as we get a little bit older, that thinking in thesis really is where the magic happens. So instead of just saying, today I’m talking about marketing, that’s just a topic, but feel this, okay? Feel how different this sounds. Today I’m going to be talking about how digital marketing is by far the most important type of marketing in 2025 and beyond. There’s an enormous difference there, and the difference is a topic is just a word or a phrase, whereas a thesis is a simple idea with a stance and that’s the key. You need to take a stance. It’s not enough to say, I’m gonna be talking about finance, today. No. What’s your stance about finance? It’s not enough to say, today I’m gonna be talking about public speaking. No. What’s your simple idea? With a stance that acts as the center of gravity for everything else you’re gonna say throughout your talk. Thinking and thesis is one of the most important things you can learn when you’re building content.

[00:28:54] Ghazenfer Mansoor: A really good point, like having a right test. That’s when the conversation also happens because now you are challenging others.

[00:29:01] Eric Silverberg: And I actually, I wanna correct you there if you don’t mind, Ghazenfer, for it’s actually, it’s not having the right stance. It’s having a stance because by the very definition of stance, you’re living in the world of subjectivity, right? So there is no right and wrong. There’s your belief, there’s your stance, and then it’s on you to unpack that stance. To prove it to be right when you get to the rest of your presentation but I wanted to make that little tweak because I think it might be valuable for your listeners. There’s no such thing as the right thesis. There’s just your thesis. What’s your stance, what’s your belief? That’s really the money maker.

[00:29:36] Ghazenfer Mansoor:  Thanks for the clarification. 

[00:29:37] Eric Silverberg: Yeah. 

[00:29:38] Ghazenfer Mansoor:And what’s one client transformation story that really surprised you?

[00:29:45] Eric Silverberg: You know, it’s funny, there are so many, and quite frankly, Ghazenfer, you’re one of them that stands out in my mind and we’re very lucky to say and very grateful to say,  I should say grateful, not lucky because we put a lot of effort into this so it’s not luck, but we’re grateful that we’ve had so many thousands of transformations over the decade that we’ve been in business. There’s one that always stands out to me. There was a woman that we were training. Many years ago, I think we were only in business for about a year and a half at the time, and we were facilitating a two day program at a Canadian company called Wealth Simple and they’re a huge billion dollar organization. They basically make investing easy. That’s, and they have an app and they have robo-advising for all of that and this woman, on day one of our program, we got to doing exercises and we asked her to get up to speak and she could not say a word. She started crying and hyperventilating and having a panic attack in front of all of her colleagues. I mean, really tears streaming down her face and she couldn’t breathe because she was so afraid of public speaking and as you can imagine, the facilitators of the program, that’s a very difficult thing for us to watch but we coached her. We gave her a lot of advice and a lot of feedback, and then we did the kind thing and we let her grab a seat. We didn’t make her speak that day. The very next day we went in and I guess what we said to her resonated and we taught her things like the protector and the projector that we were discussing earlier and the next day she got up there and she spoke and she didn’t run outta breath and she didn’t cry and she absolutely crushed it just 24 hours later and she, someone who was absolutely petrified of speaking that. Now today, she speaks on panels, she delivers keynote presentations, she leads a team and so we’ve had many transformations, but for some reason. That one’s always stood out to me. Someone who was just completely a shell of a human being that in just 24 hours got up there and owned it. It was really special.

[00:31:40] Ghazenfer Mansoor: That’s amazing. 

[00:31:42] Eric Silverberg: Yeah. 

[00:31:43] Ghazenfer Mansoor: And if someone only have five minutes to prepare for a talk, what should they focus on?

[00:31:51] Eric Silverberg: I think the main thing you need to focus on if you only have five minutes, is clarity. Is, what’s your thesis? What’s your big idea, and what are the questions that people might have about that thesis? Because of course, storytelling is awesome. Analogies are awesome, metaphors are amazing, data is great. But if you only have five minutes to prepare, it’s very unlikely that you’re gonna have enough time to prepare all those analogies and those data and there’s examples and the exercises. What you can do is you can have clarity and if you have clarity and you present that clarity with passion, with engagement with emotion, I think, you’ll always get by.

[00:32:27] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Yep. Cool. 

[00:32:30] Eric Silverberg: Yeah. 

[00:32:31] Ghazenfer Mansoor: So,  can you share a moment that made you realize this is exactly why I took this leap? Obviously you came from teaching at the school too, you’re still teaching, but just teaching speakers. It’s a different journey that you took.

[00:32:52] Eric Silverberg: So,

[00:32:53] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Was there any moment?

[00:32:54] Eric Silverberg: Any moment that made me realize that I wanted to do this, or any moment that I realized, This might be successful, or what,

[00:32:59] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Looking back, was there any moment when you saw some success stories? And it could be the lady that you mentioned just now, like, oh, this is exactly why I took this step.

[00:33:11] Eric Silverberg: Yeah, I think,  it’s a great question. I don’t really have, you know, I heard a great analogy once by a guy named Joe Walsh, who was the lead guitarist for the band. The Eagles. You know The Eagles?

[00:33:28] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Yeah, I know. 

[00:33:30] Eric Silverberg: So, and I watched a documentary about the Eagles and what he said was, as the Eagles, as he and his band mates, as they were going about their life, there was never any plan. There was just chaos. One thing just seemed to lead for another, for no apparent reason. But when they look back on their life. It feels like it was written as a perfectly executed novel, and I kind of feel the same way. There was no grand plan when I took that job to become a professor, or when I went to work in tech or when we started Speaker Labs, we had no idea whether we would be successful. Well, it’s only in retrospect that it seems like it all makes sense that it seems like it’s a perfectly crafted novel. So, I don’t really have a moment except I can tell you. The day we realized this is going to work and we’re probably doing the right thing with our lives here is the day after we wrapped up our very first program with our very first client. We got an email later that day that client introducing us to her husband, recommending that her husband’s company bring us in to train his team and we realized at that moment. If we can get advocacy like this, if a wife is willing to tell her husband, you need to do this with your team at your company, then this must be pretty good. We must be pretty good at what we do. Because no one would tell someone to waste their time and waste their money on a program like this if it wasn’t awesome and so I think when we received that very first advocate, when that very first person recommended us to someone else, we realized, we’re probably doing something right here.

[00:35:02] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Finally, what’s next for you and Speaker Labs? Any new frontiers or projects you’re probably, you are excited about?

[00:35:11] Eric Silverberg: Yeah, I mean, you know, as an entrepreneur that,  entrepreneurs are never quite satisfied, right? They’re always looking for more, they’re always looking for growth. The goalposts are always shifting. So we’re really proud of where we’re at and we’re really proud of the impact that we’ve had and we’re really proud of all the advocates that we have and the thousands of people that we’ve helped. But our goalposts keep shifting. Right? What’s it, what would it be like to triple our business and triple our impact to quadruple to 10x? So, you know, we’re playing around with some ideas, like what if we created a self-paced course that was equally as impactful and valuable as when we’re live in a room with someone because, you know, at the end of the day, as teachers,  currently our business only has impact and only offers value and only makes money when we are in the room. But I don’t have infinite hours in my life. We’ve got a cap on our capacity as teachers and as coaches. So that’s the next piece for us, is what can we develop in terms of an online course or an app or a curriculum that could live on its own and could scale that way without compromising the impact and the value that, for example, you received at the Global Speakers Academy. So that’s what we’re working on and we don’t have the answers yet, but hopefully one day we’ll get there. We’re working on it.

[00:36:25] Ghazenfer Mansoor: All right. It’s been great having you on this show. Thank you for joining us on Lessons from the Leap. Before we wrap up, I have two questions.  Where can listeners connect with you and learn more about your work at Speaker Lab?

[00:36:38] Eric Silverberg: Great question. Thank you for asking. So if you wanna become an amazing speaker, we are mostly at Speaker Labs focused on group coaching. So we don’t offer one-on-one private coaching at Speaker Labs. We only offer that on the heels of a group program. So if you have a team or you have an organization and you’re looking for help www.speakerlabs.ca is where you can reach us. We’re a Canadian company, so not.com, .ca  and careful, if you Google US Speaker Labs, there is another company called the Speaker Lab so careful that you don’t confuse us. They’re awesome too and we know the founders of that company as well. Nothing but great things to say about them. But if you’re looking for us specifically, it is Speaker Labs, www.speakerlabs.ca.

[00:37:25] Ghazenfer Mansoor: And we will add that in our resources as well and lastly, for our visual listeners, people who are looking at YouTube tell us, what is this cap? That you’re wearing today? What is the significance of that?

[00:37:43] Eric Silverberg: Well, I’m Toronto, born and raised, and I’m very proud of my city and I’m very big into our Toronto sports teams, the Blue Jays. The Raptors and the maple leaf and it turns out that my Toronto Blue Jays, they’re in the World Series one game away from winning the World Series for the first time in 32 years. So that’s why I,  instead of wearing a blazer and making my hair all nice for today’s program, I’m wearing my Blue Jays baseball cap and hopefully they win the World Series tomorrow night. 

[00:38:15]Ghazenfer Mansoor: Congratulations. Keeping fingers crossed. Good luck. 

[00:38:16] Eric Silverberg: Thank you.

[00:38:17]Ghazenfer Mansoor: Thanks, Eric.