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FROM THE WINGS

Me? A Professional Speaker?

PJ Kleffner, DTM

Immediate Past District Director

Many Toastmasters who win the World classes over and over again, which was no longer
Championship of Public Speaking go on to sell challenging. Looking for some new excitement
DVDs and training courses. For example, Darren in my life, I applied for a field sales engineer

LaCroix’s “Get Paid to Speak by Next Week.” position, and soon found myself in Santa Clara
I always assumed that to be a “professional with a little more excitement than I needed. I
speaker” meant you had your own company, and never knew what was coming next each time I
people booked you to train or entertain them, picked up the phone or walked into a customer’s

and they paid you huge piles of money to do office. Each customer had a new application, new
that. One day it occurred to me that my job was questions, and new objections to handle before he
to speak, and I got paid to do it. Boom! I was a would buy my scopes. With experience, I learned
professional speaker. to handle that part of the job. However, other

I began my speaking career in a corporate circumstances beyond my control continued to
training environment. My job was to teach sales make my life interesting. I have had presentations
engineers how to operate oscilloscopes so they interrupted by earthquakes, fire drills, a war,
could demonstrate them and sell them to our power failures, and what do you say when the

customers. I was a college dropout teaching oscilloscope you are demonstrating catches fire
engineers with Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees. and goes up in flames?
Did that intimidate me? Yes. Did it stop me? No. After a total of six years in Santa Clara and
I quickly discovered that I knew more about Seattle, I returned to Beaverton to manage

oscilloscopes than they did. Ibecame pretty good the training department. I trained a couple of
at sharing that information in a way they could hundred more sales engineers, and then took a
learn and remember. job supporting our international distributors.
One day, I discovered that the sales engineers This added some challenges to my life, like jet

got paid twice as much as me for doing what I lag, language barriers, lost luggage, and diseases
was teaching them to do! I was teaching the same with unpronounceable names. Have you ever

20 ONE COMMUNITY