Event Professionals have plenty to fear. More than ever.

My 16 year old son recently learned to drive with Yours Truly as his teacher.

In related news I have developed a twitch in my left eye.

While he is now an excellent driver (no doubt because of his teacher), during the process the temptation to yank the wheel from his grip was often overwhelming.

Not because he was doing anything wrong, or dangerous, or otherwise teenagery.

It was because I had to trust his novice experience to not kill us all in a head-on fiery collision with a tanker truck full of explosives, innocent preschoolers and rescue animals en route to their fur-ever homes.

He didn't really ever think he knew better, but he was the one with the wheel. [twitch]

And I, the driving expert, was trapped in the passenger seat forced to watch his novice skills clumsily get us from here to there.

I was required to sit silently - as the more I intervened the less confidently he drove, and the more puppies would meet their untimely end.

Over the past handful of years I have observed a growing trend of speaker experts - Speakers Bureaus and Speaker Manager buddies - relegated to passenger seats in speaker recommendation and selection.

In the decision-making process of Yesteryear, we could take the wheel with the skill of a seasoned driver, and navigate our planner passengers through the dangerous highways and byways of choosing a professional speaker.

But somewhere along the way, the wheel was yanked from our hands.

We pulled over and found ourselves in the death seat of our expertise, left wondering "How the [twitch] did we get here??"

In a word: FEAR

Career Cast ranks Event Professionals in the TOP 5 of Most Stressful Jobs year on year, resting (un)comfortably on the list among 4 others who are, at their core, life-threatening.

While we are Speaker Experts, Meeting Pros are Risk Mitigation Experts.

And Event Professionals have plenty to fear. More than ever.

• Safety continues to be the number one issue for event planners. 55% cited safety concerns as the biggest obstacle to hosting live events.
• the biggest challenge for corporate planners is staying on budget (44%), and budgets into 2020 and beyond are going to be severely impacted.
• 66% also believe that a low barrier to entry and competition in the virtual event space has become a significant concern. - (EventMB, 2020)

Said 'barrier to entry' for speakers hit rock-bottom this year, with everyone jumping on the virtual train and maximizing super-accessible technology.

In the speaker world, anyone with a ring light and a half-decent microphone knocked out a virtual demo video.

VOILA! Insta-speaker, credentials and pedigree be darned. Ok. Damned. There I said it.

Who can blame our Event Professional friends for yanking the wheel for fear of head-on collision with attendee satisfaction disaster?

My BP is elevated just reading these stats and thinking about what's on the line for Event Profs.

When fear is high, trust is low.

And when trust is low, our circle shrinks. We trust our own experience and that of the of people we trust: close peers and colleagues.

And that's exactly where they turn for help when looking for speakers.

So how do the experts get back in the driver's seat?

Many would say that it will take a fiery crash and a revoked license to get the wheel back.

But I have to believethere is a less puppy-threatening way to re-enter Event Professionals' Circle of Trust.

The responsibility lies on our collective shoulders to help Event Profs clearly understand not only our value, but how we can be a co-mitigators of risk.

The way out of the passenger seat in the speaker booking process begins with an unshakable core belief about ourselves as Speaker Experts.

It's time to put the TRUST back in TRUSTED AUTHORITY.

I'll go first... Hello, my name is Christa and I fight fear with facts.

Event Professionals love my talent because they know they:

• Are stage-ready, obsessively vetted and 100% free of any closet skeletons.
• Deliver customized presentations (because they know better than to cheapen it by delivering a canned one).
• Agree enthusiastically to value-add at every event.
• Develop materials that create confidence, mitigate risk and lower fear.
• Keep on-hand videos, references, and testimonials that are relevant, current and born of up-to-date and time-tested audience satisfaction data.

Event Professionals love working with me because:

• I have tallied up an unparalleled 23 consecutive years as a top-performing bureau agent AND speaker manager = no monkey business or rookie mistakes.
• Having booked and run logistics on thousands of events for speakers over two decades, I’ve hit nearly every possible scenario and worked out every imaginable hiccup in the event booking and management process. 
• My commitment to the profession of speaker expertise has been steadfast through 9/11, 2008 and whatever TH just happened to us all in 2020.
• My company, See Agency, has won multiple awards for growth, including two from the Inc. 5000. If there were Gone To Hell and Back Again awards for the opposite of growth, we would have won those, too.
• I've personally won a handful of peer recognition awards including one for exceptional willingness to assist others. I've appeared on TV, radio and countless podcasts presenting about the speaking industry. I have spoken to audiences across the US and Canada and work on a one-to-one basis with professional speakers and entertainment from around the world. My brain has been picked clean. A lot.
• One of the best compliments I ever received was in the book acknowledgements that was written by a speaker I represented. She thanked me for being the bearer of 'unvarnished truth' in her career. In the great words of Regina King in Jerry Maguire, "I'm pregnant and I'm incapable of bullsh*t."

I'm the second part, not the first (thankfully).

If 2020 didn't kill me, teaching another kid to drive just might.