2 Jul 2026 10:30
How to Turn Free Talks Into Paid Speaking Gigs with Dr. David Chastain
"I didn't get paid to go to Seattle, but I made a good connection there that I will be paid for."
Welcome back to The Speaker Lab Podcast! In this Alumni Spotlight episode, host Dan Irvin sits down with Dr. David Chastain, a speaker who works at an intersection most people are afraid to even name out loud: grief and addiction, and the way the two are wound together. Grief can delay recovery, and it can trigger relapse years into sobriety — and David speaks on it from both professional expertise and lived experience.
David has been quietly stacking wins, and almost every one of them traces back to the same source: relationships. A paid webinar that came through a former colleague. A talk for an addiction professionals association in North Carolina where one conversation with the executive director — and one leader who happened to be in the room — turned a "our keynotes are full" into a three-hour pre-conference workshop. An unpaid conference in Seattle where he worked the empty expo hall and walked away with three or four potential webinars in the pipeline. He didn't chase the money. He tended the relationships, and the money followed.
Dan also puts on his coaching hat for a candid working session: how to handle the conference that passed on your proposal (spoiler: "apply again next year" is an invitation, not a brush-off), why you should retitle your talk to match a conference theme without rebuilding it, and the insight from a local speakers association that unlocked a whole new pitch — framing grief and addiction as the employee-retention problem businesses are already paying to solve.
Whether you're waiting on your first paid gig or wondering whether the free rooms are worth it, this episode will change how you measure a room!
You'll learn:
- Why grief and addiction intersect — delaying recovery and triggering relapse even years into sobriety
- What landing a paid webinar meant after years of speaking for free ("it's okay for me to ask for money")
- Why your existing network beats cold outreach — and how to actually use it
- David's "tiny book" strategy: 40 portable pages designed to sell at conference tables
- How seeking out one executive director turned a filled keynote slate into a three-hour workshop
- The empty expo hall trick: working vendor rooms while everyone else is in sessions
- How to respond when a conference passes on your proposal — and why you should always reapply
- Retitling your talk to fit a conference theme without changing the talk itself
- The reframe that opened a corporate lane: grief and addiction as a turnover and retention problem
- Why David stopped saying "I'm not good at networking" — and what changed when he did
- And much, much more!
"I've stopped saying I'm not good at networking, because the evidence says I am. It's not only the process of the events happening again — it's the process of believing that I can make this work."
Measuring every room by what it pays you today? The unpaid room might be the seed. Grab a free 15-minute Speaker Business Assessment at thespeakerlab.com/SBA and build a system that turns connections into bookings.
Episode Resources:
