the finances, managing staff and stepping up to take decision-making responsibility. I was also overseeing people in my church. On top of all that, by then I was married and Kate and I had had our first child.
I was 23 and already on my leadership journey.
My first major leadership role came when I was working on a big theatre production. I had been asked to come along and do some dancing and singing in the show, but soon after rehearsals started the director bailed out after an argument with one of the other senior people in the crew. That meant the troupe of performers and stage crew were on their own, with no one to run the show. I was more than a little surprised when they voted for me to become the director, producer and choreographer.
There I was, at the ripe old age of 25, managing 30 people, most of whom were older than me, and running an entire theatre production. I was responsible for everything from negotiating with the venue to selling tickets and filling the concert hall, to overseeing the whole team. The production opened on cue and we had five sell-out performances.
At the start, shouldering that level of responsibility was overwhelming. Yet I was excited and really challenged by it too, and the fact that the project was a great success gave me the confidence to progress to other challenges.
Kate and I and our baby girl moved to Launceston, in the north of Tasmania. We went there mainly for my work, and also because I'd been given the opportunity to become second in charge in a church there, leading young people as a youth pastor. I was also working for Xerox selling photocopiers, though I have to say I wasn't too successful at that.
Then I got my job in job seeking — as a youth futurist.
At the time I was also teaching a number of adult education classes in singing and dancing. I had a strong singing and dancing career back in my twenties and I absolutely loved it. For a couple of years, I taught a 10-week course to classes of 20 to 30 people. It was great fun and offered a nice bit of extra cash on the side.
And that's when it happened. That almost fatal car crash would be a total life changer.
The turning point
I suppose I'd always known deep down that there was more for me to do in my life, and that I could make a real difference in many people's lives. As a result of the accident, I found something I never could have predicted. Through the experience I discovered a more fulfilling career through which I would ultimately touch many thousands of people.
At 26 years old, I was in the prime of my life, married, with two kids and a full-time job with the Australian federal government. A big part of my job was travelling around the state so I had to drive a lot, which could be pretty tiring. That day, at around three in the afternoon, on the highway outside Devonport, I actually fell asleep at the wheel and veered over to the other side of the road. I later learned I was travelling at 104 km/h when I struck a semi-trailer going at 102 km/h head on, with a combined impact of 206 km/h. My car spun around into the path of another car behind the truck, which ploughed straight into my door.
The result can be imagined. A big part of my right arm was ripped off and the entire right side of my body was crushed, part of the car forced into the right side of my body. After about 18 minutes I lost consciousness. I was told later that by this time I had stopped breathing and my heart stopped beating for a couple of minutes. When the ambulance arrived the two paramedics managed to resuscitate me.
I was saved by the jaws of life. The paramedics cut me out of the car, stretchered me into the ambulance and raced for the hospital. I was on life support for a week. When I woke up and the doctors told me I'd lost my right arm above the elbow and I'd never be able to walk again, I first retreated into denial.
This couldn't have happened to me. It was a nightmare I convinced myself I'd soon wake up from. It was three days before I could accept this was actually my life and my reality. Then I went through a flood of emotions, always overshadowed by the thought of my kids growing up with a disabled father.
When I was out of hospital, a local youth group asked me to share my story, then I was approached by a school. I went on to share my story at school after school. Through my traumatic experience, it seemed like I had crashed into a new career path. I realised that this could be the beginnings of a new profession. I eventually decided to take the plunge, leave my job and learn how to market myself and my story.
This was the start of my journey towards building my profile and gaining recognition as a professional speaker.
Some years later, having travelled the world and presented in 40 countries, I met a couple of people who had great stories to share but didn't know how to communicate them. They came to me and said, ‘Sam, it looks like you've made it. You've built your profile and you're making a living as a speaker. Can you teach us how to do it?’ So I decided to share what I'd learned from my own experience with them, and within the next year or two they in turn became highly paid professional speakers.
It was then I realised that I had a formula I could teach to other people, showing them how to build their profile and become influencers in their space.
For the first four or five years of running the business, I was the only speaker and I had just one or two support staff. One day, during the period when I was completely focused on building the business and travelling the world as a professional speaker, Kate said to me, ‘Enough is enough.’
I had just come through my busiest month ever, which included 56 flights, both domestic and international. By then we had three young kids and I wasn't at home much at all. I had to make a decision. Should I continue as a solopreneur on the professional speaking circuit, or should I look at actually running a business and teaching other people what I did in order for them to grow their profiles and influence in their industry?
Around this time, Google asked me to put on a workshop at their headquarters in Sydney. They wanted me to teach some of their leaders how to present and share stories. I asked them, ‘Can we use your largest room and invite some of the public along to the seminar?’ They said, ‘Yeah, that would be fine.’
So they booked their biggest room, which sat 300 people, and I advertised it out there in the marketplace and more than 300 people signed up, including just a handful from Google. It was a sold-out event. I realised then that there was a huge demand out there for training in how to build a business profile, how to commercialise your voice and how to be an influencer.
That was the motivation I needed to set up Speakers Institute to teach others the skills behind becoming a successful speaker and a thought leader. Since then I've drawn on the wisdom of the best influencer trainers in the world, including body-language experts, publishers, media personalities, PR consultants, speaker bureaus and agents, as well as some of the best professional speaker trainers on the planet. I soaked up their knowledge in their areas of expertise, and in this way we built the Speakers Institute curriculum from the ground up.
As we developed, we became a premier training organisation, teaching our clients how to build their profiles in the new profile economy. Over the past five years, we've seen a really interesting transition as people previously influenced for the most part by governments, organisations, brands, products and logos have increasingly come to be influenced by people, individual human beings.
Learning to lead through life
Thinking about my life from my early childhood years on, I can see that I learned about leadership from many different sources and situations. It's probably the same for everyone. Think about the people who have been your mentors. Equally, there were probably people whose actions and conduct showed you how not
