My Real Experience with Thought-Leader

If you have been in the public speaking space and trying to get your public speaking career off the ground, you’ve probably seen the flashy ads with Taylor Conroy talking about how you can get on a TEDx stage. If you google Thought-Leader you won’t find much beyond a single Better Business Bureau listing with a reasonable complaint and a reasonable reply. If you’re thinking about joining their program, here are my thoughts.

Cost and Time

The first thing you should know is that joining the Thought-Leader program is not cheap. I paid $6,800 to join the program and the price has gone up since 2022 when I joined. This is not something to be taken lightly. It is probably the most expensive program I’ve ever joined that didn’t have a degree attached to it.

The other thing is the matter of time. This is a huge commitment. There are 4 trainings that start you off in the program. There are two sessions to develop your TEDx application and two sessions to develop your talk and your one minute pitch video. For me, these sessions were incredibly inconvenient because I was living on the West Coast at the time and with the time zones, it mean that the sessions started at 7:30 or 8:30 in the morning. Can I get a cup of coffee first?

After that you’ll have to do your 3 minute talk practice and a full keynote talk practice. You’ll do these until you have both down, especially during the process of writing your talk. This is no easy thing. Be prepared to put in the time and energy to make this a reality. I’m a firm believer that life gives stuff to those who show up and so I did my level best to show up to every appointment and do all the tasks. I took the time to write my talk as well. You should know going in that its a commitment of both time and money.

The Good

The program is run by people who have successfully landed TEDx talks, some of them have landed multiple talks. In the informational sessions you’ll primarily hear from those folks. It is all very exciting. They do seem to know what they are talking about and there are people who have successfully landed talks but I don’t know it is as many as they claim.

I was encouraged a great deal by my first account manager, Bradley. He hadn’t landed a talk when we started working together but eventually did land a talk about his work with trees and horticulture. He was very generous with his time and encouragement. I would have given up long before-hand if he hadn’t encouraged me to keep going.

There is plenty of support which is fantastic but that is cold comfort when deadline after deadline passes and you barely get a rejection from the organizers or hear nothing at all.

The Bad

I’m not totally unhappy with the program. I would have had no idea how to craft my application so perfectly or how to write my talk. The first draft of my talk was universally panned for not following their specific format of telling your story through a cycle of what went wrong (down story) and how you recovered from the crisis (upstory) along with a call-to-action for the crowd. Given that my topic is about my new political theory and not some whinging about a private crisis, it was hard to adapt what I wanted to say to the format. However, with a little work and much complaining by me, I managed to adapt my talk to the format and ended up talking about myself far too much (in my opinion). The feedback I got was not very pleasantly. I was treated rather like some kind of pariah for wanting to do something different or not sharing a ton of personal detail. I erroneously thought that TEDx was supposed to be about the best ideas, not the most heart wretching story. I was dead wrong.

The bad part is that after several dozen applications and nearly a year and a half of work, I have still not landed a TEDx talk. I realized that landing a talk is not in the control of Thought-Leader but the sales pitch could use some refinement. They made it seem like working with them was a kind of fast-track because of their connections and because of their expertise in crafting applications. That isn’t quite the case. Everyone has to use the same application to the same organizers like everyone else. There is no inside track. Could you develop this yourself? Probably, but that is the only place where they really give value.

They do tell you how to do the application and what a successful application looks like. However, not every event asks for all the application parts and applying to each event is very tedious. They do have a complete list of all the events with application links which is helpful but some of the events are far-flung. They expect you to apply to any event on offer but you have to balance that with the travel costs to get there. I limited my application to events within the United States. Many events prioritize local people over anyone from elsewhere which discourages applications. In their social network you’ll see people talk about the problems around the events and the difficulty of dealing with the applications.

Is Thought-Leader For You?

If I’m honest, I would not do this program again at this price point. I’m not happy that my talk hasn’t been picked up as of this writing (November 2023). I’ve worked a full year and put out applications. I did all the sessions and I diligently took the feedback (even when I didn’t like it) and followed the formula anyway. The time and energy that is put in to get to the application stage is not necessarily worth the high price tag. I definitely wish I had deployed that capital in a different way. I’ve found other programs that I would have rather spent the money on. But as Nana always says, “You pays your money and takes your chances.” Overall, the support offered is first-rate but if you think that you can land a TEDx talk and super charge your public speaking career (which is what they advertise) then I would advise you look elsewhere. The juice just isn’t worth the squeeze on this one.