Heroic Public Speaking

10/29/2021

We Need a Full-Time Assistant to the Director of Sales & Programming

Heroic Public Speaking is searching for someone who can answer students* immediately and effectively. You pay attention in a way that looks effortless (we know it’s a lot of effort, though). You’ll contribute to student success because you ensure that the student feels heard, seen, and appreciated. You will help the students navigate through their training programs by trusting the process and staying fully engaged in the training.

*Our “students” are adults who lead companies, go to the moon, win Olympic medals, write bestselling books, fly fighter jets, and change the world, one speech at a time.

About The Kind of Person We Think is Right for This Position
You love being a support person; you know how to balance putting your head down and doing the work with feeling comfortable taking initiative to improve a process or lead a project to completion. A full inbox excites you, especially when you set a goal to get it down to zero by the end of the day (and most days, you do just that during business hours, because you can’t go to sleep imagining all of the unanswered questions). The only thing that thrills you more than responding via email is tracking details; you live for it (well, at least when it comes to work, you love tracking details. We hope you live for other things outside of the office). Your overall goal is to ensure that students receive first-class attention, and accumulate world-class experiences throughout their tenure at HPS while helping the Director of Sales and Programming achieve her objectives.

Some of Your Specific Contributions:

Serve our students’ needs by managing all questions coming in through our help desk.

Update customer records in the company database and tracking systems.

Process sales by taking credit card information and processing it in our system.

Schedule sales meetings for the Director of Sales & Programming, as well as maintain and organize her inbox and calendar as requested.

Prepare briefs on potential clients before sales conversations, ensuring that the Director has a complete understanding of who they’re speaking with and what’s important to that client.
Draft and send emails on behalf of the Director at different points in the sales process.

Create scheduling links and templates for sales calls as needed.
Maintain weekly and monthly touchpoints with alumni, affiliates, and trusted partners on behalf of the Director.

Contact customers to answer basic procedural questions or to gauge their level of satisfaction with the company.
Maintain client and affiliate relationships for the Director via LinkedIn.

EDUCATION & QUALIFICATIONS
We don’t really care where you went to school or what level of education you’ve achieved. We care about who you are now and how you show up in the world now. We have an intelligent and sophisticated group of people working together with shared values. However, how someone did in school, where they went to school, or what they studied isn’t the first thing we consider when making our hiring decisions.

WE DO, HOWEVER, EXPECT THE FOLLOWING
Strong verbal and written communication skills; you enjoy engaging with and influencing others.
Excitement over the idea of communicating with our students on a daily basis.

Accountability and fast turnaround.
Willingness to take well-informed risks: not shy away from them.
Ability to manage multiple priorities and meet a deadline while maintaining an emphasis on detail and excellent follow through.

Desire to work in a fast-moving and agile environment. (If you’re looking for a job where everything is the same all the time and people just mark their time, then HPS is not the place for you. We’re ambitious, energetic, playful, purposeful, and do the right thing—even when it’s inconvenient.)

Comfort with taking direction and responding to feedback well while also having the confidence to improve company processes.

Can collaborate and work in support of other teammates, as well as work independently and be a self-starter.

Enjoy drama on the stage or TV but aren’t interested in it on a day-to-day basis. A high degree of emotional intelligence and presence of mind is an absolute.

09/02/2021

This is, frankly, the kind of post that no business owner ever wants to write. It will be challenging, but please, read it all the way through.

Last night, Lambertville, NJ received historic levels of flooding.

If you’re local to the tri-state area, you’ve probably seen the news, or maybe dealt with unprecedented flooding yourself. Lambertville was hit particularly hard, with some places getting five feet—not five inches, five feet—of flooding.

HPS HQ was one of such places. When we visited this morning, we were stunned and heartbroken by the level of damage. After a year and a half of life under pandemic conditions, we were so thrilled to once again welcome speakers back in HPS HQ on a regular basis. There’s nothing quite like the magic of an in-person event at HPS HQ. The reality is that our space will be unusable for the foreseeable future.

But HPS HQ has never been just a building. HPS HQ is our community and our students. It’s the thousands of speakers who’ve passed through our doors over the years and built something wonderful together. It’s all of us.

We currently have a number of in-person sessions of HPS CORE and Done-for-You filmings on the books. We are now discussing how to best proceed to make sure we deliver on those events as best we can. So if you are currently enrolled in HPS GRAD or are slated to come to HPS HQ for DFY, HPS CORE, or any other reason, just hold tight for a while. Over the coming days and weeks, we will be making decisions about the future and will be in touch with more details about what this may or may not mean for you.

Until then, stay safe, care for those you love, and please continue to cherish this beautiful and inspiring community we have built together. We need it now more than ever.

07/12/2021

And…WE’RE BACK. 👏

FOR THOUGHT LEADERS: KEYNOTES, BREAKOUTS, WORKSHOPS, BOOKS, AND MORE

Heroic is a place of intense energy and creativity, built on a foundation of creative and intellectual excellence. With its longstanding commitments to community and integrity, Heroic is the ideal laboratory in which to build your signature intellectual property, prepare to give the greatest speeches of your life, and write books that are revered and dog-eared.

01/22/2021

Here's a clip from my episode with John Lee Dumas on Entrepreneurs on Fire. If you want to listen to the entire episode check out: https://buff.ly/3iDWzwW

06/03/2020

Black Lives Matter

Imagine it’s you up on stage at HPS HQ.

(Yes, even though it feels like the world is on fire right now, please, for a moment, just imagine you are up on stage. And keep reading.)

You’re practicing new material, and your story is going well. There’s the polite nod from the audience. Some even smile. Or, at least you assume they’re smiling; the lights are in your eyes and you wonder if the audience can see your fingers shaking as you wrap up this story, the one you rehearsed for weeks. You hope they don’t. Is your upper-lip sweating?

Lip-sweat aside, none of this matters because you land a major point in your message: a profound statement. You don’t rush that moment, you don’t quickly move on. You use the power of the pause: the beat. The beat is an intentional choice to stand and let your material sink in with the audience.

For the audience, it’s that moment of: where is this going to go next?

And on this stage, you know exactly where to go next.

But there are moments off stage where you might not know where to go next.

… the beat you take after you tell someone, for the first time, that you love them.

… the beat you take after someone tells you that they don’t love you.

… the beat you take after you realize you say something stupid or thoughtless.

These beats last one, two, maybe three seconds. But they can feel like an eternity.

Beats can be uncomfortable. Painful even.

It’s during the beats that you, either as the person giving voice to the truth, or the one listening, transform.

The beat closes a door to wrong-headed, confused or misaligned thinking, spins you around and surprises you with another open door. And then you’re opening a door to a world of truth and actualization.

George Floyd was murdered.

(beat)

This was not even close to being the first time that black men and women were at the hands of police brutality in the past week.

(beat)

And there’s not a black square social post or inspirational quote that is going to bring these innocent, black human beings back to their families: alive and well.

8 minutes and 46 seconds. That’s how long Derek Chauvin and the three other officers had an opportunity to stop what they were doing, and take a beat. To change course. To make a different choice. But they didn’t take that beat, despite the desperate pleas from witnesses or from George Floyd himself. Instead, they took a life.

We are taking a beat.

And then we’re going to use this beat to close the door on inaction. As poet Claudia Rankine wrote in Citizen: An American Lyric, “because white men can’t / police their imagination / black men are dying.” We’re running—not walking, tip toeing, or stepping—through the door of action.

And, we’re shutting the door on silence. Shutting the door on accepting inequality as just the way it is. Shutting the door on expecting people to protest in the right way or the way that makes us comfortable when they shouldn’t have to protest or worry about how to navigate America safely.

Or … we could just ignore the beat, or rush through it. From a place of white privilege, that is what we and many others have done in the past.

(beat)

It’s what most of us do when we feel uncomfortable: when we don’t know what we’ll uncover or discover over the threshold to the future. Or if we don’t “get it” or see how it impacts our lives. But, if we ignore this moment, all we’ll be left with is a week-long protest turned thought piece of “speaking truth,” instead of embedding action in our mission and practice.

The two of us think a lot. In fact, sometimes we think too much and act too little.

Although we often like to think of ourselves as “behind the scenes” while our students are the voices on stage, we can not stay silent. Too much is at stake: for you, for all of our students, our children, for the future of humanity.

Are we all really in this together or is it every person for themselves?

We are Heroic Public Speaking. We have a voice and we will use it.

You are a heroic public speaker. You have a voice. You can use it.

Just like when we’re working on a speech, it takes a while to find the right words, the right actions to play, the right notes to hit. So, sometimes, we don’t move forward because we don’t know how.

We don’t have a plan, yet; we don’t have the answers to have a well-crafted plan. So we will ask questions, challenge our intellect, expectations, and assumptions, read, listen, and vow not to be passive or silent. We can’t wait for another beat.

Black Lives Matter.

Sincerely,
Michael & Amy

05/26/2020

Hi. :) Wishing you good health and a clear mind today. What's one good thing that happened for you this weekend?

05/21/2020

Any day talking to Phil Jones is a good day. And here, Amy catches up with Phil on his podcast WORDS WITH FRIENDS. Their word = performance.

One of the many things Amy and Phil discuss is how to effectively communicate with your family and employees in these trying times and reign in stress and overwhelm.

🎧 Listen now 👉:

Amy Port: Performance In today’s show of Words with Friends, Phil interviews Amy Port, Co-Founder and President, Heroic Public Speaking. Today we are going to talk about “performance”. And there is no one better suited than Amy to give us some nuanced insights on this topic. Drawing on her yea...

05/12/2020

I’m currently focusing on learning how to work a bunch of AV gear (which feels like it’s a lot more complicated than my adventure gear)!" -Alison Levine

05/08/2020

"When I'm not taking care of the our little one or commandeering her nursery as my makeshift video studio, I'm putting my efforts toward promoting my new book, "The Content Fuel Framework: How to Generate Unlimited Story Ideas" on podcasts and connecting with consulting clients to see how I can help them adjust their content for this weird new world." -Melanie Deziel

05/07/2020

"I'm trying to get ahead on three months of show production." -Jordan Harbinger

05/06/2020

"I am adding as much ‘virtual value’ as possible to bureau partners and corporate clients, drafting the proposal for my second book, booking events for (hopefully) Q3/Q4 2020, building stronger connections with my 3 kiddos, and ensuring I ‘come out of this mess’ as a better version of myself (mentally, emotionally, and physically)." -Alan Stein, Jr.