Jeff Corle Speaks

When you book me for a speaking event, what I call a "Keynote Concert", you can expect to see total audience engagement and total enjoyment. I tell my very inspiring and unique life-story with pictures, stories, and original songs. I was a professional singer-songwriter for many years before getting interested in helping people through telling my life-story so I know how to engage an audience. When I used to play music in clubs it was my mission to make sure that every person in the place - even the drunk guy in the corner - was listening to me and appreciating what I was doing. I have always wanted to engage and entertain (now touch and educate) every person in the room. So now, when I do a speaking event, it's again my mission to engage every single audience member and leave them with an experience like no other.

Fortunately, I have a great secret weapon for accomplishing this goal that most speakers don't have - my guitar.

I include three original songs in my current keynote concert. One very poignant and touching song called, "That Damn Disease" which talks about my stress induced battle with Alopecia Universalis but is applicable to anyone suffering with a disease that changes their appearance. A second upbeat and humorous song at the midway point of my story called, "I Talk to Cows!" which chronicles what I came to call my "therapy sessions" with my beloved bovines which eventually led to my emotional recovery. And a third and final upbeat and uplifting song called, "Don't Settle" in which I encourage the audience to not only listen to the message of not settling for anything less than the life they love but to also sing it with me at the top of their lungs!

So if you're interested in having your audience leave your event with rave reviews of the speaker you hired and the unique experience he provided then I'm your man!

Jeff Corle spent a happy childhood on the small western-Pennsylvania farm where he was the fourth generation of his family to grow up there. His Mom gave him a Sears guitar for Christmas when he was just ten years old and the first thing he did with it was write a song.

“I didn’t know any chords or even how to tune the guitar, so I got the bottom two strings sounding good together and wrote a song with just them.”

He’s been singing and writing songs ever since.
And now he uses his original songs to engage his audiences and deliver powerful messages in what he calls his "keynote concerts".

“I finally figured out that I have a pretty interesting, unique, and inspiring life-story that I know a lot of people would benefit from hearing. That’s why I got interested in motivational speaking."

Corle does have an interesting life story. He’s no stranger to success or adversity.
After moving to Nashville in 1999 to pursue music professionally, he wound up making it big, just not in music. . . in real estate!

“It was those Pennsylvania Dutch genes of mine, they just weren’t satisfied sitting around playing guitar all day!”

Corle’s knack for fixing up old houses to support his music habit landed him at exactly the right place at exactly the right time – the dawn of one of the biggest real estate booms in history.
During his time in Nashville, he would go on to buy and renovate over 40 houses, many of which were historic.
Along the way he had magazine and newspaper articles written about him and was even nominated for a historic preservation award by the Nashville Historic Society. But the good times wouldn’t last.

“I was young and naïve. I thought the party would go on forever. I now know that all great booms are followed by busts and those busts can really bite you in the ass.”

After making a small fortune riding the real estate boom, Corle turned his attention to a new passion, organic dairy-farming.

“I wanted a new challenge, I always knew I would retire at some point to the family farm but with all the success I’d had in real estate, I guess I kind of thought I could do anything, so I figured why not now?”

It was late 2007 when Corle bought his Grandparents’ farm and moved home to Pennsylvania to farm full-time. The timing couldn’t have been worse. The financial crisis and resulting real estate implosion were just around the corner and they would prove to be devastating to Corle’s real estate business and to his health.

“Had I still lived in Nashville when the crisis hit and not been 650 miles away on my fledgling dairy farm, I’m sure I could have weathered the storm. But I was back on the farm milking my cows every day and I just wasn’t there to deal with the collapse.”

Corle would eventually suffer through eight foreclosures and would be forced to sell the rest of his real estate holding at or below cost. And he lived in constant fear of losing the family farm.
Overcome by stress and anxiety and falling deeper and deeper into depression, Corle developed an auto-immune disease that in just 14 moths would take all the hair from his body, leaving him virtually unrecognizable - even to friends - and plunge him deeper into depression.

“Having my finances and what I believed to be my future wiped out and then on top of it losing all my hair put me into a very dark place. Dark enough to seriously consider suicide. I thank God, my family, my friends, (and my cows) for helping me find my way out of that darkness. I have a song about that time called "That Damn Disease" and a line in it that says:

"I don't know how I came back from that dark dark place. But friends and love and prayers and hugs finally helped me find my way."

“I was either gonna die or move forward away from the pain. I chose to move.”

How Jeff Corle began to move forward, away from the train wreck of his recent past and how he eventually recovered emotionally and physically (he now has a full head of hair, and what his Mom calls a rather unruly beard) is as they say, the rest of the story.

If you’d like to hear the rest of this very interesting and uplifting story (hey, any tale that casts cows as trusted friends and therapists has to be interesting, right?) And to see wonderful pictures of the houses he renovated and of course, the cows, then please consider booking Jeff Corle for your next speaking engagement.

I need a PA plug-in for a 1/4 inch guitar cord jack. That's about it other than a microphone, of course. Sometimes I find it better for me to have my own mic and mic stand set up away from the podium with my guitar so I can move to the guitar and start singing a song.

I also like to show pictures so standard audio video as well.