“You can’t get through it if it’s not real.”
Welcome back to The Speaker Lab Podcast! In this alumni speaker connection episode, Dan sits down with Robin Blair — an ordained minister, award-winning speaker, singer, and media producer who spent decades inside network television and radio before walking away from it all to pursue ministry and professional speaking.
Robin’s career arc reads like a Hollywood pitch: TV shopping host on network television, then a key player in the first children’s radio network to go national, then co-founder of a children’s television production company. She and her team created a live-action, puppet, and music children’s show, made four pilots, and sold the show to Animal Planet. But at the New York City Toy Fair in the 1990s, she watched an executive preview a show being imported from the UK and announce to the room that one-year-olds were now advertising targets. That moment gutted her. Shortly after, discouraged with the direction of the industry, she answered a call to ministry and headed to seminary — all the way through to a doctorate.
After a couple of decades preaching from the pulpit, Robin has stepped back from congregational ministry to build a professional speaking business. Her body of work, Digital Discipleship Matters, takes a faith orientation to the digital culture we all live in — helping families discern media rather than making an enemy of it. And she’s working through a mindset shift that will sound familiar to a lot of speakers: moving from speaking for little or nothing to truly valuing the expertise she brings.
Whether you’re pivoting out of a previous career, figuring out how to get paid for a message you’ve been sharing for free, or trying to reach the smaller audience that genuinely needs what you have, this conversation is full of practical takeaways.
You’ll learn:
- How Robin’s decades inside network TV, radio, and children’s media became her strongest speaking credential
- Why your past career detours are qualifications, not wasted time
- What “digital discipleship” means and how Robin carved out a speaking niche from it
- The mindset shift from speaking for free (or nearly free) to getting paid what your message is worth
- Why Robin created a family discernment tool as the key to unlocking hesitant audiences
- Dan’s advice on finding the smaller group who desperately need your message instead of trying to reach everyone
- Why slow, relational trust-building beats aggressive outreach — especially when you’re just starting
- How to handle silence after a pitch (hint: it’s normal, even when it stings)
- Robin’s approach to treating the internet as a mission field for her message
- The difference between having something important to say and assuming everyone wants to hear it
And much, much more!
“What I’m bringing has value to people for their lives and for generations of their lives. And it’s perfectly okay to receive compensation for that.”
Are you sitting on years of hard-won expertise — but still struggling to turn it into a speaking business that actually pays? Take the free Speaker Business Assessment and find out exactly where you stand.
