How many newbies do we have in the room today? How many newbies? All right, let's give it up. Make some noise. Okay, so we have newbies that are starting their brand new speaking brand. Welcome, welcome. We're so happy to have you. Thank you for being here. Who has an established brand, but AI has you a little freaked out and you're kind of thinking about wiki Wiki remixing it up. A scotch, hands nice and high.

Make some noise. Okay, who has a. Who is literally like all in on maybe going an entirely different direction with your position, your platform and what you talk about. Nice and high. Let's see. Ooh, half the room. You are in the right room, my friends. Good job.

You take your right hand, put it on your shoulder and say, good job, me. Okay. All right, here we go. So today we're talking about how you can be booked, busy, and hashtag blessed. And our story starts with a gal from Baltimore, Maryland. People don't know this, but in the 1970s, Oprah Winfrey was actually a nighttime news anchor in my hometown of Baltimore, Maryland, where I met Sarge. Where's Sarge, by the way? Oh, so this is Sarge. She's my right hand gal.

Been bossing me around for 20 years. Look at that walk. She's sargent short for Sarge. Now she gets paid for it. She's psyched. But we worked at a TV station together and we would cold call out of the yellow pages on a landline to show up with a printed out PowerPoint pitching broadcast television. The right of paper, check. None of that's relevant in 2025, but we got rejected a lot and it was really good for us.

And so Oprah was the most famous alum of this TV station, not us, which is sad. But anyway, so she's on the nighttime news, she shows up, and she is smart, she is driven, she is ultra prepared. But the minute that the teleprompter started to roll about her story, something happened. She was too expressive, she was too emotional. She was too much for that format. And so the harder she tried to fit into this mold and read this teleprompter, the more the ratings went down, the more the producers were frustrated, and the more that she wanted to quit. So Oprah Winfrey does the unthinkable. She leaves the power, the pay, the prestige of nighttime television, and she asks to be transformed to a daytime television slot.

Less power, less page, less pay, less prestige. But when she did, when she was in that environment, connecting with people, real people, real questions, real Moments, everything changed. Oprah was not meant to be reporting. Her skill was relating. It was not about reading the teleprompter, but reading people. And the minute that she aligned herself in the right skill space with the right message, it changed the game. So if you are someone who right now isn't a little bit of like a get through, like whoever hears themselves with their speaking schedule saying, I just gotta get through this week. I gotta get through these gigs, get through this thing.

Get through, get through. It's like, where are we trying to get to? Right? We get to do this. We get. And so for me, in 2021, I was in get through mode. I did the main stage here at influence in 2021, which by the way, real quick, one more time. Ty Bennett, main stage to get a little love killed it crushed it. So 2021, do the main stage Influence. I had speakers bureaus tweeting my stuff.

She has this amazing thing. She's a digital persuasion expert. On the outside, everything was profitable, it was cranking. But on the inside, I was literally dying. I was just trying to get through each moment. Fast forward four years later and I'm very happy to report that I now thank the Lord, am in a get to energy with my business. Thank you. Because, you know, it's hard, right? Thank you.

The four o' clock crowd's feeling it. Okay. I like it. All right, so long story long. The point is, I want to share with you today how I went from get through to get to in the last four years. In case you're in a similar space right now, whether you're freaked out by AI, you've lost passion about your topic, you're overwhelmed from the Influence fire hose, wherever you are. I'm going to share with you exactly what I did to help you move from get through to get to. I'm going to go high level with the top 10 things I learned and then deep dive on the five step system that I used.

How's that game plan sound? Good. All right, let's do it. Okay, so here's my story super fast. I ran a social media company for about 12 years and we ran social media for live events. So we were the agency on deck when the Oscars selfie that broke the Internet in 2013 went viral. It wasn't my idea, but we were the ones that were there so we got credit for it. It was sweet. So we're there and I became sort of this social media, live events person.