Speaking for a living is something that many people dream of, but few people actually achieve. There’s something incredibly exhilarating and rewarding to know that your voice and thoughts can impact people in a positive way and solve some of their day-to-day problems.

Nevertheless, the road to accomplishing that is narrow and filled with obstacles and only the truly determined ones reach the exit line.

Because we know how challenging this endeavor can be, we’ve outlined a few key steps to help you achieve your goal of becoming a motivational speaker.

How to Launch a Career as a Motivational Speaker

Step 1. Discover Your Unique Style

So you’ve found your area of expertise and now you’ve decided you want to share some of that wisdom with those around you? That’s wonderful. What you first need to do is discover your unique style.

You can do that by conducting a personal analysis of yourself and identifying the elements to which you respond best. For example, are you the type of person who responds better to images than audio?

That means you should include motivational visual presentations as part of your speaking process, to give more resonance to your words and help the audience fully understand what you are saying.

This analysis should ideally integrate every aspect of your persona, from the tone of voice, to hand gestures, to facial expressions to your overall personality. For accurate results, try to conduct a little focus group interview, with the help of your family and close friends and ask them to give you a truthful description of your personality, character traits and presentation skills.

This will tell you what your strengths are and what you should be focusing on during your presentation. It will also give you an idea about your weaknesses when it comes to communicating with people.

Another good method is to record yourself while making a presentation and then analyzing it with a few people, in order to discover which areas you excel at that you can focus on adding to your unique style.

Step 2. Gain Insight

Let’s say you are an expert at time management or increasing productivity or helping people find jobs. Whatever the case may be, you still need to understand the exact issues that people are having trouble with. So start talking to as many different people as possible, identify the main problem that most of them are struggling with and then devise a strategy to get them back on track.

This will help you create a speaking topic that really meets the needs of your audience and allows you to relate to them. You know the issues and frustrations they face and you can really help them.

Step 3. Promote Yourself

After you’ve found your own personal style, identified the main problem you want to help solve and devised a proper strategy for it, it’s time to put yourself on the market. People may already recognize you as an industry expert, but unless you start promoting and branding yourself as an actual motivational speaker, those gigs are not going to start coming.

Therefore, you need to advertise yourself through all the social means possible and let everyone know that you are open to the idea of public speaking. You can also consider promoting your name in meeting planners and speakers’ bureaus and investing in a professional service to get your website in the top 10 pages of Google’s results listings.

[RELATED: The Beginner’s Guide to Getting Booked at Speaking Events]

Step 4. Find Speaking Engagements

After you’ve done all of this, it’s time to find the right speaking engagements for your profile.  Keep in mind that even a small event is a good opportunity for you to get your name across, but pay extra attention to the company responsible for organizing the event and to the type of audience that it will attract.

You need to do your homework and find out everything there is to know about the venue, the lighting, the sound system and the time allocated for your motivational presentation, so you can be fully prepared before the event.

5. Have Fun.

Last but not least, don’t take yourself too seriously as a motivational speaker. Remember, laughter is the best way to connect with people, so if you feel you’ve made a mistake or something went wrong during the presentation (your screen went blank, you stumbled over a chair etc.), it’s OK to poke fun at yourself and crack a small joke. This way you will relax the atmosphere and get everyone in a positive state of mind.

Sharing your wisdom with others is a wonderful way to make a living, so just remember to enjoy the experience and others will too.