Meet David Swihart

We recently connected with David Swihart and have shared our conversation below.

David, thank you so much for making time for us today. We can’t wait to dive into your story and the lessons you’ve learned along the way, but maybe we can start with something foundational to your success. How have you gone about developing your ability to communicate effectively?

When I went to college, I wanted to work with teenagers in formal youth ministry. I had a rough teenage experience caused by bullying and peer rejection. As a result I had low self-esteem and no confidence in myself. I hated speaking and dreaded any time I had to get in front of a crowd. After being rejected for half a dozen youth ministry positions, I tried preaching and quickly found a small church in rural Illinois where I spoke every week. Looking back at those early speeches and sermons, they were rough to say the least! I was nervous, underprepared, and did not have a lot of life experience to share.

Fast forward through making a lot of mistakes, several flops, and a few absolute failures, I decided to get better, so I studied formally and informally things like rhetoric, humor, storytelling, argumentation, narrative flow, and logic. I read books on ethical influence, psychology, emotional engagement, and personalities. I worked with speaking coaches and trainers, I worked with peers on strategies, I worked with mentors who helped me develop content as well as techniques.

After all of my study, I practiced. I spoke to groups, to churches, to individuals, I tested my material with people of all ages, and I kept learning and refining my ability. I learned to break things down and explain things so people can understand and then I put practical applications in for people to take away with them.

Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?

My name is David Swihart and I am a speaker, coach, trainer, facilitator, and pastor. I own my own business Next Steps Coaching, LLC where I provide a variety of services to help organizations (both for profit and nonprofit) thrive through leadership and team development.

Right now I am most excited about my new speaking course that I am working on, Unleash Your Voice. My passion is helping people to find their unique voice and share their story and message with their audience. My clients have a variety of ambitions from speaking to small groups and churches all the way to speaking to auditoriums full of people. I love helping them craft and design their speech so that they can communicate it clearly to their audience. I help them through the entire speech development process and the presentation including slide decks, staging, and speaking strategies.

My course is set to launch in mid-August after a live event we are hosting in Dallas called Kingdom Communicators. The event is focused on helping faith-based authors and speakers get their message out their through books and stages. You can find out more at kingdomcommunicators.com

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

For me, the most important qualities, skills, and area of knowledge I developed were gratitude, contentment, and listening. Each of these has been critical to my mental health and relationships, both personal and business.

Gratitude is a choice and is critical to success. I would challenge anyone early in their journey to keep a gratitude journal or list daily of all the things for which they are grateful. Include the big things like family, life, friends, but also the little things like an unexpected blessing, a treat, a thoughtful word of encouragement, focus to finish something, etc.

Contentment is an undervalued virtue in today’s world. We are always striving for more and are never satisfied with what we have. I encourage people early in their journey to decide what they truly need not what they want and to learn to be content with that. I made the mistake of chasing things that were not important to me and nearly lost everything as a result. I neglected my most important values (family, faith, and generosity) in the pursuit of personal fame, wealth, and more.

Listening is a skill that will always serve you. I have had to learn how to listen with my eyes, my ears, my spirit in prayer, to listen with empathy, to listen without judgment, and to pay attention to what the other person is communicating. This skill is critical in every relationship, and the more time you invest in learning to listen, the better you will be at understanding people, relating to them, and helping serve them and add value to them.

Tell us what your ideal client would be like?

My ideal client is someone who is looking to share their story with others and desires to speak to groups. My ideal client is has usually been through a difficult circumstance or set of circumstances and has learned a series of lessons as a result. They know that they need to share their story, but are unsure how to best communicate it to their audience. Often my ideal clients are believers in Jesus and desire to make an impact for the kingdom.

Contact Info:

Image Credits

Photography by Christian del Rosario (all but multiple bow ties shot)

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