Melva Tate’s Top 10 Tips for Building Your Speaker Platform

Put in the work. That’s the rule that award-winning coach, speaker, and human resources consultant Melva Tate lives by. And that’s the rule that motivated me to attend one of her talks Tuesday evening, despite the fact that I was exhausted and wanted to sit on the sofa and watch Netflix. And I am SO glad I did!

Melva spoke at an event hosted by the I Am Woman Network and in her presentation offered advice on how to build your platform as a speaker. If you want to be a speaker, Melva is definitely someone you should listen to. She does several speaking engagements a week, most of which she gets paid thousands of dollars to do!

Here are Melva’s top 10 tips for building your speaker platform.

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3 Things to Do Before 2018

image via Instagram

Be a woman to watch. I’ve already decided this will be my mantra for 2018. But there’s no need to wait until January 1 to start crushing my goals. In fact, I believe that to make 2018 the year I want it to be, I need to get to work on next year’s goals right now and I want to help you do the same.

If you want to slay 2018, here are three things I believe you should do before the end of this year.

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21 Affirmations for Women Who Write

I regularly post inspirational and motivational quotes on Instagram. One day I posted a quote that simply said: “Let’s see what will happen if you decide not to give up.” A short while later I got a text from a friend who told me that when she saw this quote she burst into tears because all day she had been considering giving up on her dream of being an entrepreneur.

As a writer, I obviously believe in the power of words. I believe we can read books, blog posts, short stories, essays, and poems that can completely change our lives. And as this story shows, even a quote on Instagram seen at the right time can have a huge impact.

But there’s no need to wait around for the right quote to pop up in your social media feed. You can start writing personalized affirmations and speaking them over yourself every day.

Here are 21 affirmations to get you started.

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How I Plan My Week

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I call it the Sunday Slay.

That’s my name for the hour that I spend each Sunday meticulously planning the week ahead and it’s one of the ways I manage to juggle a full-time teaching schedule with writing for several publications, running See Jane Write, exercising, and trying to have a social life.

Here’s how you too can use Sunday to can set yourself up to slay the week ahead.  (more…)

7 Ways to Beat Writer’s Block

Writing is a practice. Just as athletes have to practice to get better at their sport, we writers must practice to get better at our craft.

It was in Natalie Goldberg’s book Writing Down the Bones that I first saw this comparison made and the analogy has moved me ever since, especially because I’m a runner. I’m a very slow runner, but a runner, nonetheless, and whenever I’m running a race or training for one I’m also always thinking about writing. Lately, I’ve decided to dig a little deeper with this analogy between writing and running.

Runners train not just to get faster, but also to get stronger. Runners train to prevent injury. So, I started thinking, how can we writer’s train to prevent the injury of writer’s block?

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