As a kid, my family literally paid me to be quiet. For years, I thought my value came from silence. Today, I stand on global stages for organizations like SHRM, Michelin and Vonage. I get asked all the time about my public speaking story, so today I’m sharing how I became a paid public speaker and why it was never part of my original plan.
Speaking is now the most joyful part of my business. It lights me up and makes up 75% of my revenue. But my journey didn’t begin with confidence – it started with trauma, motherhood and imposter syndrome.
The First Step Toward Becoming a Paid Speaker
I never dreamed of becoming a professional speaker. After leaving my corporate role as an SVP, I wanted flexibility as a single mom. My coach at the time suggested I apply for TEDx based on my story of resilience. At first, I thought she was insane.
Still, I started small. I gave my first talk to an almost empty room. Then, I volunteered to speak at Rotary Clubs and Lions Clubs. Twenty free talks later – I had tested my message and started to refine what became my signature framework, The Overwhelm Culprits™.
How I Became a Paid Public Speaker After TEDx
Landing my TEDx talk (the first one I applied for!) felt surreal. Within six months of starting, I stood on the red dot. Then the pandemic hit, pausing momentum. During that season, I became a mom of four and put speaking aside.
In 2021, I joined Mic Drop Academy, which gave me the tools to grow a speaking business. But I still struggled with confidence. By 2023, I finally gave myself permission to try again. That’s when I landed my first paid keynote. It was nerve-wracking, but also transformative. The audience connection reminded me why my story mattered.
Since then, opportunities snowballed. Speaking has become the main driver of my business. My coaching now makes up only a quarter of my work, while speaking delivers most of my impact and revenue.
Lessons on Becoming a Paid Public Speaker
The biggest lesson? Self-validation is everything. You don’t need to wait until you feel “ready.” Your voice matters today. Becoming a paid public speaker requires believing your story has value before the world reflects it back to you.
If you’re curious about starting, I recommend:
- Joining Mic Drop Club, like I host in Long Island, for practice and confidence.
- Taking Mic Drop Workshop, the same course that launched me. For more info on this competitive program please email me at team@corrielo.com
- Scaling with Mic Drop Academy if you’re ready for bigger stages. For more info on this competitive program please email me at team@corrielo.com
For those ready to dive deeper, I also offer private coaching and consulting to help you grow your speaking career.
Final Thoughts on How I Became a Paid Public Speaker
My journey shows that you don’t need to be fearless to begin. You just need to believe your message can serve others. The sooner you believe in your story, the sooner the world will too.
CLICK FOR TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:00] As a kid, I talked so much that my family literally paid me to be quiet. So for years I believe my value came from silence. Today I’m a paid keynote speaker for global brands such as SHRM, Michelin and Vonage, and I wanna tell you exactly how I got here.
In this video, I’m gonna share the real story of how I went from being afraid to speak in front of an empty room to confidently getting paid to take the stage.
Whether you’re dreaming of speaking one day or already dabbling and wanna go all in, this is your sign to stop playing small.
If you’re ready to be the kind of woman who owns the room and her message, hit subscribe so that you never miss a new episode.
I am Corrie LoGiudice. I’m a TEDx speaker, high performance coach, forthcoming author and host of the Long Island chapter of Mic Drop Club.
And truth is my speaking journey didn’t start with confidence at all. It was the exact opposite. It [00:01:00] actually started with trauma, motherhood, and a whole lot of imposter syndrome.
Nowadays, speaking is not only the most joyful part of my business, it totally lights me up, but it’s also the most profitable for me.
And my story isn’t unique because I’m special. It’s unique because I didn’t wait until I felt ready. So let me show you how I got started, so that if you wanna be a speaker, you can do. so here’s the truth. Being a professional speaker was never ever on my life Bingo card. I did not grow up thinking I was gonna be a speaker. It was the furthest thing from my mind. But I loved speaking. I just loved talking to the point where I talked so much as a kid and I got so worked up over things that I had relatives in my family.
Who would gimme $5 to be quiet for five minutes? True story. So when I had made the decision many years later after my professional career, I worked as an SVP for
[00:02:00] over 15 years and decided to start my own business. So that I could have more freedom and flexibility to be with my son. I was a single mom at the time. I just could not make the senior executive schedule work as a single working mom.
So I started working with my very first coach specifically to help me start up my own coaching business. And she herself was also a professional speaker as well as an author. But on the speaking side, she had actually encouraged me to apply for TEDx. Simply based on my story. So my story, especially leading up to that moment.
I had survived a five year timeframe where I went through everything from a miscarriage. I was in an abusive marriage. I left sudden marriage when my son was only five months old. I ended up taking him with me to work one day and never returning. I went through a very high conflict divorce and then when all the dust had settled and I thought my life was on the up and up again,
[00:03:00] I lost my post-divorce partner to suicide.
Like I mentioned, a lot of trauma, but a very engaging story in a way too. So when I met this very first coach, she had told me, she was like, you should apply for a TEDx. You have an interesting story. You have an incredible way that you walk people through challenges. Which this was also something that I was encouraged by my therapist at the time.
She had said, I’ve never seen any of my patients be able to maintain their performance as a high performer. Going through what it is you’re going through. If you could teach people how to do this, you can impact a lot of lives. So between the two of them, right? And my coach telling me to be a TEDx speaker, I still thought she was insane.
So it was the absolute furthest thing from my mind. But along the way, the universe started sending me signs, right? Signs started small, right? It started off as every time I was at a networking event to talk to people about my business, people would ask me,
[00:04:00] oh, you’re so well spoken. You’re so articulate.
You’re a great storyteller. Have you ever thought of speaking? So I was getting that just from random strangers at networking event. I also would go to places like Barnes and Noble to look for books and so cliche, the book on how to start your speaking business would fall on the floor right in front of my face.
Finally, the last straw was, it was the summer of 2019. I was on Facebook and I saw an ad for MicDrop Workshop, right? So I signed up for this online course, white mic drop workshop by Jess Tro and took it in a weekend. And decided, you know what? I’ll give this a try. We’ll see how it goes. No expectations.
Like I said, I was expecting to be a coach and take it from there. So initially, my journey started from nothing. I gave my very first talk. It was to an empty room. So the sad part about this was instead of going out there and pitching myself to other events, I decided, you know what? I’m going to set up my own events.
[00:05:00] I had done event planning and stuff in the past in my former career, so I was like, oh this is no big deal. I’ll set up my own events, I’ll sell tickets to it, and I’ll give my first keynote at this event. And I sold two tickets and yet still no one showed up to the actual event. And I still ended up giving the talk to a more or less empty room because the person that I had booked the space from wanted to see the talk, but she had manage the lobby in case anybody came in.
So the room was empty, but she was listening to me in the lobby, which is quite funny when you think about it in hindsight. But that was my very first event. And from there I volunteered to speak at places like my local rotary clubs and my Lions club. I did no less than probably 20 local events in about a three month timeframe.
And during that time, that’s when I really started to hone in on what my message was gonna be. And it was really surrounding this concept that I speak on now called
[00:06:00] the overwhelm culprits™. And so I started testing it, at these Rotary and Lion clubs. I noticed that a lot of people would be writing notes.
And they’d be like really engaged in paying attention. So I had a really good feeling from there, but I didn’t really know what to do with anything from there, that’s when everything changed. So I decided at that point, you know what, my coach had told me I should apply for a TEDx. Why don’t I apply for a TEDx?
And it’s crazy to say I landed the very first TEDx I applied for. That never happens. So I landed my TEDx. I have only done free speaking engagements to this point, and less than six months after I decided that I was going to try speaking as like a serious thing, I went from never speaking a day in my life to being on the red dot on one of the biggest stages in the world.
So absolutely wild. Now, what happened after that? No one ever could have predicted. Literally,
[00:07:00] and I do mean literally the week after my TEDx was when the world shut down because of the pandemic. I gave my TEDx the very first weekend in March. By the following weekend, everything had been shut down.
So at that point, any kind of major spinoff that I could have received off the TEDx, it slowed down because the event industry just wasn’t planning events that way anymore. Yes, I did some virtual events. Which ultimately ended up being my preference too, because during the pandemic part of my story.
Is I went from being a single mom of one to a remarried mom of four during the year of the pandemic, in a single year. So I decided to pause my speaking at that time because I was pregnant, at that point. And then I had a brand new baby, and we had COVID. But still the, I wouldn’t even call it a dream, I was gonna say the dream never left, but truth is, it wasn’t necessarily a dream because again, speaking was not on my life bingo card. It was one of those things that I was like, all right, I’m gonna try it because everybody
[00:08:00] seems to think I should try it. So at this point I was very happy being a, working mom from home with my kids and basically never leaving the house. I was a remote worker working in my own business, and I received a phone call from the team at Mike Drop.
Again, that same online course I had taken back in 2019. This was 2021 at this point, and they invited me to join the very first cohort of a new program they were launching called Mic Drop Academy. Academy was a very high touch, high level program for folks who have seen success in places like TEDx or who were speaking professionally who wanted to scale their speaking business.
And I told my husband, they reached out to me and about the opportunity and he was the one at that time that really encouraged me and said, Corey, you have such an incredible story. You have so much to offer people. You’re of more value to the world, not on our couch with our kids. Like you should be out there on the stage sharing it.
So join the program. The program was
[00:09:00] not cheap at all, we both agreed I was gonna try it. I took the cohort. It’s amazing because while I was on the sessions, there were times I was nursing my baby, but still I did the program and more or less I learned what I needed to learn and I followed through on it, but ultimately I lost momentum, and it wasn’t because of not having the talent.
I did TEDx and whatnot. It was more or less due to confidence because. I didn’t see myself as being that kind of outgoing speaker in my mind. I was still a, work from home remote parent. So there was a big disconnect there.
So maybe I wanna say it was probably two years after, so I did Mic Drop Academy in 2021. In 2023. Was when my husband was basically like, you took this course, you need to actually try something different. You’re doing coaching. But he really wanted me to challenge myself. So I started reaching out to speaking engagements to try to book paid enagements.
[00:10:00] And that’s when I landed my very first paid travel gig. And this was in very early 2023. And that’s when I gave myself permission like, you know what? Let’s just try this. Let’s see what’s gonna happen. And from there, everything snowballed. Like crazy. So at this specific event I vividly remember being so nervous because I had not given my talk at all live since TEDx and my talk had actually changed quite a bit after going through my Drop Academy and having, mentors being able to look at my talk and help me analyze it and figure out ways I can make it better.
So I had never actually given the talk and here I was getting paid to do it somewhere and I had been out of practice. I was still very postpartum. I was feeling really low with myself. And I remember arriving to the event and sharing with some of the other speakers how nervous I had felt because I was so out of practice.
And so out of. But that keynote was one
[00:11:00] of the most transformative keynotes I have ever given. And one of the most memorable, not just for the audience, because I do remember at that time one of the things that made me wanna keep going was there was so many people in the audience that day. One that stands out to me was there was one gentleman that wasn’t going to go to the event.
And had shared that his sister had died by suicide the week before, and he decided to go. And in my keynote, I share very candidly about how I lost a partner to suicide. And he had told me during the meet and greet after how transformative that was for him, that he now had a framework with the overwhelm culprits to, learn how to navigate life without his sister.
And messages like that from my very first event were what ultimately made me wanna keep going and do it again and again. And it also taught me too, it was transformative for me in seeing what an impact my story, my personal story, which seems so simple and so boring to me. The type of
[00:12:00] impact it has on people when I give it.
So ever since that one event the opportunities just keep coming up. And me, I have a full team now that helps me with my speaking business to pitch opportunities and to grow my brands. But the opportunities keep coming and I have not stopped speaking since I’ve been full-time in this, since 2023. My coaching business has gone,
I wanna say at this point, just speaking candidly, my coaching business is like 25% of my business while speaking is 75%. So it’s a very large part of the work that I do. Even my upcoming book which is based on my signature keynote, the Five Overwhelm Culprits, which was started all those years ago at the Rotary Clubs in the Lions Clubs, and before my TEDx.
It was vaguely featured in my TEDx, but it wasn’t called Overwhelm Culprits at that time. Everything started from there, and this has just been years and years of refining and working on it and making it better and taking feedback
[00:13:00] and doing what I need to do to help the message to, deliver it in a way that it’s of service to other people.
So all in all, the lesson from everything I’m sharing today is. If you want to become a paid public speaker, you have to learn how to self validate, right? You have to validate your own story, your voice, your message, and why they matter to other people, right? Because it’s not about the transformation that you want the audience to have necessarily.
It’s the transformation that you are best positioned to help guide the audience through right through your life experience, through your stories, through, what you know. About this world, and the sooner that you believe it, I know for me, it took me years, where I had all the information and everything I needed to do with it, but still I took a three year break that I didn’t do anything with it because I was scared, right?
I didn’t believe that I had the ability to do it. I didn’t believe I had the right
[00:14:00] lifestyle. I didn’t believe that you could be a working mom and travel and speak and. The sooner I was able to believe it, the sooner I was able to have this kind of impact with this world. And I know the sooner that you believe it, the sooner that the world will too.
So I’d love to know, have you ever thought about becoming a paid public speaker? If so, what’s holding you back? Drop it below in the comments or send me a dm. I’m most active on LinkedIn. I would absolutely love to hear from you.
And if this video sparks something inside of you regarding speaking, I have four different ways that I can help you get started or at least take things to the next level if you’re currently a speaker. Option one is if you want to just get better at speaking, just be more confident speaking at, community events or at school or at work.
I invite you to join Mic Drop Club. I host the Long Island chapter. If you’re in the Long Island area of New York. You can get 25% off any chapter by using the code Long Island 25. That’ll credit you to me.
[00:15:00] And also there is a virtual chapter as well, which is super exciting. It’s basically like Toastmasters, but for women.
And you get to join me and lots of other professional public speakers all in my network and learn how to improve your public speaking skills. I’m gonna include the link in the show notes for you. Option two is if you want to become a paid public speaker and you have no experience doing so, I highly recommend starting off with where I started off Mic drop workshop.
That’s the program that’s a high level overview of what you need to get started. I am an affiliate of the program, so I will drop the link below if you’re interested in checking that out. Now, if you’ve already been paid to speak and you’re looking to scale the business side of it. Again, I highly recommend Mic Drop Academy.
I am a graduate. I was in the first cohort that’s where I went all in. I will leave information in the show notes on next steps. I’d be glad to give you a personal introduction to the Mic Drop team ’cause it is a fairly competitive program to get into. So send me a message, let me know and I will link you up.
And then lastly, if you’re an
[00:16:00] established speaker who’s ready to scale, and has done all the business side of it, and you got all that figured out, you got all your marketing stuff figured out I am available to help through my private coaching and consulting programs so I can support you on things like systems strategy, growth, right?
All those details are also in the show notes.
All right? So wherever you are on your speaking journey, you don’t have to go it alone. Click below and let’s take the next step together. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for listening to my story. I hope it provided you with some value today, and I look forward to seeing you on the next episode.
I’ll see you next time.
Thanks for checking out the next step with Corrie Lo. If this episode resonated with you, share it with a friend, subscribe and leave a review. Together we’ll transform overwhelm into action and we’ll keep taking the next step towards competent leadership. See you next time.