To become a speaker, start by speaking for free at local venues to build a sizzle reel, create a one-pager listing your topics and bio, claim an active LinkedIn profile, and send 25 personalized cold emails daily to events that fit your message. Sasha Simmons, founder of Witavation, emphasizes that speaking is half art (what you say) and half business (getting booked), and most successful speakers treat both sides with equal effort.

“I just started telling everyone I was a speaker,” Sasha Simmons says. “People at the gas station, in the grocery store, anyone that would listen to little old Sasha.”

This was 2010-something, at a gas station or a grocery store, when she had zero speaking credits and zero business being on any stage. Her only credential was that she had mentored her boyfriend’s younger brother through the college process, gotten asked to create a PowerPoint presentation for a church youth event, stepped on a stage for the first time, and felt something click.

“It was that moment. You know how you have that moment? It was that moment.”

Three months later, after she started telling everyone she was a speaker, word made its way back to the president of the university where she was doing her graduate work. They were looking for a student speaker for 500 of their top donors. Sasha interviewed for the job along with a few other students. She got it.

She stood in front of that audience shaking, talking super fast, making every first-time speaker mistake in the book. When she watches the footage now, she winces. But the room was watching a speaker who showed up unprepared and unafraid, and something about that landed.

That is the paradox she is on Alexa’s Publishing Chat this week to untangle: Speaking is half art and half business. The art is what you say and how you say it. The business is the 25 emails a day, the sizzle reel, the one-sheet, the mirrors in your bedroom, the reading habit, and the absolute refusal to stop when the first 19 events say no.

Today, Sasha runs Witavation, a professional development company that works with organizations like USDA, Nationwide, Chase, and Microsoft to move teams from stuck to strategic and reactive to proactive. Her 13 years in the speaking space have taught her something most motivational speakers never figure out: inspiration without frameworks is just a high that fades. Real transformation requires wit, vulnerability, and tools people can actually use.

If you have written a book, built a message, or fought to get your story told, you are going to want to take notes. If you lead a team and are tired of generic motivational speakers who leave nothing behind, this one is for you too. There is no such thing as an overnight speaking success any more than there is an overnight bestseller. But there is a formula.

The Art and the Business Are Not the Same Thing

When Sasha started coaching speakers, she noticed something that surprised no one who has ever tried to do two things at once: people were treating speaking like it was only one thing.

“There is the talent of speaking, being on the stage or doing a webinar, whatever the case may be. And then there is the business of speaking,” she says. “And if you don’t know the business of speaking, you will never have a successful career as a speaker.”

Alexa nods. She has been building platforms for long enough to know this is the fault line where people split. They can give a great talk and still never get booked. Or they can do all the right outreach and then freeze on stage. The two are not the same skill.

“So it’s really twofold,” Sasha says, “and you have to do two things at the same time, unless you have someone doing one or the other for you.”

For most people starting out, you do not. You do both.

Begin with the End in Mind

Before Sasha lets a client write a single sentence of a speech, she makes them do something that sounds pointless until it is not.

“I have this exercise where we identify the adjectives that we want people to feel when we’re giving a speech,” she says. “We take a whiteboard and we write as many adjectives on the board as we possibly can. It doesn’t matter how ridiculous it seems because we’re going to eliminate, we’re going to fine tune it and figure out what works and what does not work.”

Then she works backward. “What is the message that I want to send to my audience? What do I want them to gain from this talk that I’m giving them? How do I want to challenge them? What type of changes do I want them to make in their life?”

Once she knows the destination, she backfills the road. “Where did I go? What did I go through in my life that answered this question for me? And how did I get through that?”

Alexa brings this back to something authors know in their bones: the difference between telling a story that happened to you and telling a story that matters to someone who is listening.

“People don’t want a sad story,” Alexa says. “They want the butterfly, not the cocoon.”

Sasha agrees. The moment you identify the feeling you want to land, the examples choose themselves. The moments that answer your central question become the moments you tell. Everything else stays on the cutting room floor.

The Cold Call Spreadsheet

Sasha’s speaking coach preached this mantra: 25 sales calls a day. Not 25 emails. 25 calls.

“There are no shortcuts in life,” she says. “You can’t sustain a successful career by looking for shortcuts. You have to just put in the work. It’s a lot, but there’s value in learning that.”

For most people starting out, cold calling means email, because the phone terrifies everyone. Sasha recommends having 3 to 5 email templates drafted and personalized. Research the event, mention something specific about why your message fits, and send it.

Then send it again. And again. Because the first response is almost always no.

“You have to be a lion chasing your dreams, chasing your goal,” she says. “You can’t be passive in anything.”

If the thought of 25 emails a day sounds like too much, Sasha has one more piece of advice: sign up for databases and newsletters so the opportunities come to you. “There are databases and systems that will do these things for you. And so I definitely recommend getting some sort of a system that can send things through for you so you’re not doing all that manually.”

But learn to do it manually first. That grunt work teaches you something: what actually moves the needle and what is just noise.

You Need Three Things Before You Book Anything

1. A sizzle reel. This is video footage of you speaking. If you have not spoken in public before, you can volunteer to speak for free at local organizations, record it, and use it to market yourself. Or you can rent a space, hire a videographer, and give your speech to an empty room as if 500 people were there. Whatever gets you footage.
2. A one-sheet. This is a one-pager that lists your speaking topics, a headshot, a short bio, how to contact you, and any past clients or organizations you have worked with. Think of it as a speaker resume, but prettier, with graphics and colors. Event organizers and corporate decision-makers use these to determine whether you fit their needs.
3. An online presence. A website is non-negotiable. So is a LinkedIn page. “A lot of people sleep on LinkedIn, but LinkedIn is really, really important for speakers in particular to get your information out there,” Sasha says. Facebook and Instagram matter too, and anything you write should link back to your website and social profiles.

She emphasizes one more thing: pay a designer if you can afford it. The one-sheet is your first impression and it needs to look like a professional put it together.

The Mirror Technique

This one is weird. Sasha brings full-length mirrors to her workshops and asks people to do the full version of their speech in front of them, watching themselves.

“It allows you to see your facial expressions,” she says. “It allows you to see if you’re doing anything that you shouldn’t be doing.”

When Sasha first started speaking, she noticed she was fighting the right side of her lip. A nervous tic, a habit. She would never have caught it without the mirror. A real audience would have been distracted by it the whole time.

What the mirror also does is catch the moments where you stumble. Where you lose the thread. You practice until you find a keyword or an image that helps you get from point A to point B to point C, and then you own it.

“You don’t want to remember your speech word for word because it becomes mundane,” she says. “You want to remember your key points and your examples and the transition that’s going to help you get from that first point to the next point.”

Alexa mentions something that happened to her. She was invited to keynote a memorial ceremony for babies who have died, and she had worked on the speech but had never said it aloud in front of anyone. When she stood up to speak, she cried the entire way through.

“I wish so hard now that I had stood up in front of a group—my kids, my husband, my neighbors—and given that speech a couple of times,” she says. “Because I balled the entire way through. And I’m trying to tell you guys to be happy, and I can’t even control myself.”

Sasha nods. “You have to work those things out,” she says. “Because too often I find that people think they’ve written it down. I have all my points. But you have to say those words aloud to work through the flow of your speech.”

For emotional topics, Alexa’s addendum is this: practice until you can deliver the message even if tears come. Not cold. But present. The butterfly, not the cocoon.

Read 10 Articles Every Day About Your Topic

Sasha’s philosophy is called Google University. College of Google. YouTube University. The degree is in staying current with your subject matter.

“If you want to be a real competitor and if you want to be an expert, you have to be on the cutting edge of your industry,” she says. “You can’t afford to not do that.”

She reads 10 articles a day minimum. At first, this sounds like too much. Then she mentions that Warren Buffett reads 4 to 6 hours a day, and suddenly 10 articles does not seem unreasonable for someone who wants to be good.

The workaround is to subscribe to newsletters and industry publications so the articles land in your inbox. You are not hunting every day, just reading what shows up. But you have to be reading something every day, about your topic, about your industry, about the specific angle you are claiming.

Because that is what separates the people who get booked from the people who stay home: the speakers who know what is new, what is trending, where the conversation is going.

“If you’re not reading, not studying, not doing your research on your subject matter, you are failing and you are falling behind every day.”

Vulnerability and Wit Move Organizations to Real Change

The thing Sasha keeps coming back to is that the stage is not a place to pretend.

“There’s a phenomenon that we sometimes think that vulnerability is a sign of weakness, and when you are speaking, one way to captivate your audience is by giving and showing a bit of vulnerability,” she says. “So that you can get that trust, right? It’s all about trust and belief in all these things when you’re speaking to an audience. And establishing some level of vulnerability in your speech makes you relatable.”

When you share a moment where you failed, or fell, or did not know what to do, the audience does not pity you. They recognize themselves.

This is why Sasha’s work through Witavation has moved into organizational transformation. She has learned that when you combine sharp wit with raw honesty and pair it with actual frameworks people can use, teams do not just feel inspired. They change their behavior. They implement. They move from stuck to strategic.

Alexa asks her the question that stops everyone before they start. “I have like 10 ideas and this is where I get caught up.”

Sasha’s answer is worth keeping. “You could narrow it down to two, even tell her, well, you know, I speak about these two topics here. And do you feel like there’s a need for one more over the other? Don’t feel like you have to just give her one thing because then maybe she can pick and say, okay, you know, don’t I wouldn’t give her more than three, but like maybe give her two or three and they can choose from there and see if there’s a need for that.”

You do not have to choose today. You test it. You narrow it. You let the response from event organizers tell you which of your 10 ideas resonates most. Then you lean into that one until it is so good that people start calling you to come speak it.