Barbara Corcoran

SPEAKING.COM: What do you want people to learn and take away from your presentations?

CORCORAN: One thing: I want them to feel motivated and empowered because I think everybody deserves it and because I generally believe that just about everybody in that audience is in a rut. Maybe it’s not the right way to look at the audience, but even the people who do an exceptional job can get very comfortable doing an exceptional job. Nobody is ever totally happy with what’s going on in their life. I’m really just out to move people forward. I want to get them juiced-up so they feel like they can reach into themselves and get the power to move themselves ahead.

Then I hope it sticks with them because it’s kind of nice to be in the entertainment business and get people juiced-up for an hour or two, but it’s really useless and almost disappointing if they go home and do nothing. I like to think people really go home and act on it.

I do believe I touch a lot of people. I don’t know what percentage, but I get so much feedback about how I’ve made a direct change in people’s lives, and they’re very specific in their compliments. I definitely never leave an event thinking I haven’t changed people for the better. Public speaking wouldn’t be worth the effort if I felt like I weren’t able to do that. It takes too much out of you and I don’t need the money, but I really need to feel like I’m effective in making change.

SPEAKING.COM: What are some of the topics and themes you address in your speeches? What do you want to convey to your audiences?

CORCORAN: As of now, I probably have between 40 and 45 main points. When I do the pre-conference call with the client and the speaking bureau, I try to figure out which are the best ones that fit their audience. I like doing pre-conference calls, because I feel like I really understand who’s in the audience not just by way of age, gender, income level, or what they do for a living, but what’s the problem in the industry.

I would say with 85% of all these industry speeches, the problem is dealing with change because technology has rewritten all of these businesses and a lot of people are having a hard time getting their old dogs to do a new trick. So often I talk about welcoming change and seeing change as the opportunity that it clearly is – and it always is, if you look on the bright side of it and dig for the gold.

I like to tell stories on my best successes. I don’t lecture – I don’t say “You should do this or this”, because I hate it when somebody tells me this. I tune them out, with this attitude of “Don’t tell me what to do.” There’s great power in a story because it doesn’t directly come out and state the moral. People get to conclude it on their own without you shoving it down their throat.

Another reason I like to tell stories is I find that after many, many years, I will run into people who say, “I remember you told me the story about the such and such” and they’ll tell me about an action they took because of the story. So I think people remember stories, but they don’t remember lectures.

Overall that’s my methodology: I just pick out what stories I want to tell to prove the point that I think will be helpful to the audience in their particular business at that particular time.

SPEAKING.COM: Are there particular audiences you think resonate more with your message than others, or do you think that you kind of have the universal message that applies to everybody?

CORCORAN: The poorer the crowd and the less hopeful the crowd, the more impact I feel I have. If I’m speaking to a room of underprivileged women who are all starting their own businesses or trying to, or trying to at least dream about it or women who can’t financially afford to change their life because they have two kids, they’re a single mom – the more duress that someone in my audience has, the more they need hope. They’re most in need of thinking they can take circumstances into their hands, grab the power, and change their life.

With that audience, I try especially hard. I resonate well with those ladies and men, because I am them – I was a rags to riches story. I had more advantages than a lot of the people in the audience often have in that I had parents that loved me, which I have learned in life isn’t always the case. That is such a major card, but otherwise I had all the struggles they had coming up the pike. I’m a walking, talking example of who they could be, and so I’m best able to give them hope.

That being said, the reason I feel like I resonate best with that audience more than everyone else, is because when I come off the stage, rather than asking for selfies, which is the norm today with everybody no matter how sophisticated they are, this particular group of men and women – who haven’t had the breaks in life, really want them, think they can do it and are trying – they’re hugging and kissing me. They’re squeezing me to death so much that sometimes I feel like I’m going to suffocate and maybe die, but what a happy way to go!