Closed Mouths Don’t Get Fed

I woke up Saturday morning feeling very confident about the upcoming opportunities to take my message of living authentically, aligning spirit, mind, body, and money, the importance of life planning, and other tertiary topics that connect to the “authentic life” to the stage.

So confident that I thought I’d put every conference, company event organizer, and community manager on notice that I am ready to come inspire their people:

I’ve been vocal in the past about my desire to make public speaking a part of my business, but I stayed passive about finding opportunities because I didn’t have a unique message that I felt would make a difference in the lives of people who heard it and identified with it. My passive approach to speaking wasn’t a failure–I’ve had some great talks, participated in some tremendous events, and delivered important messages, but I haven’t moved the needle on making speaking a significant part of my income.

Because I was frontin’.

My internal belief did not match my external words—I SAID I wanted to speak, and while I believed I was a good speaker, enjoyed being on stage, and did actually want to speak, deep down I doubted that I was “good enough” (whatever that means) to be a keynote speaker, to charge what I believe I’m worth, and to really go after the stage.

Your internal beliefs will ALWAYS override your words–talk is cheap.

But recently, my internal belief has ascended to match my words. And it’s all because I’ve found the path to living my authentic life, and on that path, I found my unique message—that unique message was missing before and that is what brought my lack of confidence to be able to bring an inspiring and noteworthy talk to the stage; I now have a message, which includes personal stories and experiences, that no one can deliver better than me.

The turning point for me was this talk at the EPI Conference earlier this year.

I flew to Arizona with a little bit of regret that I didn’t back out of the talk because the subject I had agreed to speak about no longer aligned with the direction I was going, but I was not going to go back on my word or miss the chance to be on stage. I wrote a talk that I was proud of and covered the topic of personal branding that would have helped the audience; I shifted my mindset about the opportunity as a chance to perfect my presentation skills on stage with one final talk on personal branding.

I could have never imagined what happened next.

A chance encounter at the hotel coffee shop led to an hour-long conversation with two strangers that inspired me to re-write my speech to bring the authentic life to personal branding. With this change in my talk, I was able to get it in alignment with the message I really wanted to share–why we should be pursuing our authentic lives.

I returned to my hotel room, started writing my talk from scratch, and finished it by early evening. As I went to bed, I was a little nervous that I would not know the new talk well enough since I just wrote it that day and only ran through it once before calling it a day.

I didn’t know it then, but the Universe had my back.

That night I experienced lucid dreams for the first (and only) time. Throughout the night, I gave my new talk multiple times on the conference stage, in front of a packed house, and made improvements to the talk in my dreams. By the time I woke up, I knew the talk better than the night before, including improvements I made in my dream rehearsals. I know it sounds crazy, but just watch the video–I went out and nailed my talk. I still think that is my best performance on stage to date and I’m still getting compliments and positive feedback months later.

I walked off that stage and knew I’d found my lane.

Since the EPI Conference, I’ve only continued to refine my message, expand the ideas and thoughts I can work into talks, and build my confidence to make 2024 my breakout year in public speaking. I even created my own series of talks, the Keep Pursuing Series, that I kicked off this fall and have plans to continue in 2024.

For the last few years, I’ve passively tried to become a public speaker and watched others get the opportunities I wanted because I sat back and hoped people would ask. I’m sure there are things you want to be doing, but because you aren’t being your biggest advocate, someone else is stepping into the place you should be.

It’s time to put that to an end–both you and I.

Closed mouths don’t get fed and if we don’t start opening our mouths to make the world aware of how we can provide value, inspire, and bring positive impact we’re just wasting our gifts and cheating the world out of what we can do better than anyone else.

What Does This Have To Do With Personal Finance

You might wonder why I’m writing this on All About Your Benjamins. After all, it has nothing to do with investments, financial planning, the economy, or anything else that ties into personal finance.

Well, this has everything to do with financial planning–the purpose of life is to experience it and do the things you feel called to do. If you are able to do more of what lights a fire inside of you the life you are planning for will most likely need a new plan aligned with the authentic life you’ve discovered.

Worry less about the economy, the markets, and forces you cannot control and spend more energy on the things that you are passionate about and you know you were created to do—money and financial planning touch everything, including the authentic version of your Self and the life aligned with it.

I’ll end this post with another tweet from yesterday.

I came home from Leo’s two basketball games and saw a tweet from Kyle Asay that highlighted his mistake of taking the approach of hoping his great work would be noticed by others; his tweet felt like it was written for me because I had already started this post before heading to the gym. You can click on the image to see the entire post, including Kyle’s.

If you’re interested in having me come talk to your company, organization, conference, or community hit me up at jc at justincastelli.io.

Disclaimer: Nothing on this blog should be considered advice, or recommendations. If you have questions pertaining your individual situation you should consult your financial advisor. For all of the disclaimers, please see my disclaimers page.