Page 150 - Talane Miedaner - Coach Yourself to a New Career_ 7 Steps to Reinventing Your Professional Life (2010)

138 COACH YOURSELF TO A NEW CAREER

come and speak at their meetings. To my complete amazement,
the National Speakers Association in Kansas City invited me to
come and speak for its group of eighty members and paid for my
airfare and hotel. I was thrilled! Not only was I speaking, but also I
was speaking to professional speakers!
After doing free talks for a while, I started getting invitations
from corporations and was flown about to exotic locations to
speak at corporate retreats. In addition to those perks, I’d com-
mand a decent speaking fee. It felt like getting a paid vacation!
This is what I mean about how things start to snowball into a
whole new career direction.
Most people don’t just wake up one day and find themselves
speaking in front of large audiences or doing that dream job. Tony
Robbins started out speaking for free to anyone he could get to
listen. Now he commands a significant fee for a keynote presen-
tation. Most people start at the very bottom; it is a fine place to
start, so don’t let that discourage you. It would have been easy for
me to say that my first paid seminar was a complete failure, but it
wasn’t at all. It became the basis for my first product and the start
of a successful and lucrative speaking career.
When we lack passion in one area of life, it tends to suck the
passion out of every other area. The way to break this vicious circle
is to start adding the passion back in. Then the passionless areas
are suddenly blatantly obvious, and we naturally start to change
those as well. It doesn’t matter where you start; just start, however
seemingly small or insignificant the change may appear.

How to Orient Your Career Around

Your Core Values

The key to ongoing happiness is to orient your career and life
around your top core values. Ideally, you want to structure your
entire life so that you are living your values all the time, every day.
It may take a bit of time to do this (I had to quit my job and start