“And oftentimes you might have read that silence as an answer. Nobody wants this. I’m not good enough. The market’s too crowded. But listen to me. The silence was not an answer. The silence was just early.”
Welcome back to The Speaker Lab Podcast! In this episode, Dan Irvin is back with another solo session — just you and Dan, one-on-one, notebooks out, working through the sentence he hears more than almost any other in coaching calls: “I have tried speaking before and it did not work.” His thesis is direct: most speakers who say they tried didn’t fail. They quit on email two. And that, Dan says, is actually good news.
Dan shares the story of a student who spent 20 years in nursing — the last several as a nurse manager — with a talk on burnout: why good nurses leave and what leaders can do to keep them. She came in convinced she’d already tried and failed. Her old spreadsheet told a different story: 14 organizations — a women’s luncheon, her church, a local business group, a couple of friends at clinics — and a response column that was mostly empty. Two free talks where the audience was visibly moved — one woman in the second row cried. Then silence, and she put it away. Dan’s team didn’t touch her stage skills or her stories. They changed three things: who she talked to (state nursing associations, hospital leadership retreats, health systems that already bring in speakers), how she described what she does (one sentence: “I help nurse leaders keep their best people from walking out the door”), and the timeline — four months on the calendar before she was allowed to judge anything. Around week five, the inbox was still quiet and she wanted to stop. A couple of weeks later, on her third follow-up to a regional nursing association, she got a reply. They were planning their spring conference. That became her first paid booking: a breakout session, a modest fee, about ten weeks after she started. The director then introduced her to a hospital system in the same region, which became a leadership workshop. Same nurse, same stories, same talent. The only thing that changed was the experiment.
Whether you’re staring at an old spreadsheet of unanswered emails or still telling yourself the story that speaking didn’t work for you, this episode walks you through what actually happened — and what a real attempt looks like when there’s a system behind it.
You’ll learn:
- Why most speakers who say “I tried” didn’t fail — they quit on email two
- What “I tried” usually means when Dan asks people to walk him through it
- Why month one of outreach is supposed to look like nothing — and why silence is not an answer
- The three reasons first attempts stall (and why none of them have anything to do with talent)
- How pitching people you already know tests whether your neighbors have a budget — not whether speaking works
- Why “I speak on leadership, resilience, and personal growth” gets you ignored — and what to say instead
- The difference between hearing silence and hearing a real “no”
- How one nurse went from a stalled first attempt to a paid booking by changing three things
- The five steps to designing a real experiment: one target, one sentence, a set window, real tracking, and one adjustment at a time
- Why “I tried and it didn’t work” might feel safer than trying again — and why Dan wants that door open
And much, much more!
“You did not fail at speaking. You ran an experiment too short to read, too short to make real determinations, too short to make career-altering, life-changing decisions.”
Still telling yourself that speaking didn’t work the first time? Book a free Speaker Business Assessment — a 15-minute session where the team looks at what you tried last time, who you targeted, how you described your talk, and what a real system would look like this time around. Dan takes some of the calls himself.
