Ep 473: How to Know When You Are Ready to Launch | Melanie Ann Layer Episode Recap
AJV (00:02):
So the question of today is this. How do you know when you’re ready to launch? And here’s the answer, you know you’re ready to launch when you know that your product or service has the ability to help someone else, the end. You see, so often in life and in business, we complicate things because we think they should be more complicated. We think it should mean more and be more complex and have more steps. And the truth is
AJV (00:54):
And at some point it makes sense, but you don’t need it to launch. You don’t need funnels or webinars or a podcast or a big email list. You can have those things and at some point I encourage you that you should, but you don’t need it to launch you. See, you also, you don’t need lots of social media followers or fancy graphics or brand guidelines or fonts and email marketing. You can have those things and one day you should, but you do not have to have them to launch. The only thing that you need to launch is a product or a service that has the ability to help someone else. The end
AJV (01:49):
It is your obligation. It’s your responsibility to launch because you know that someone is out there who needs what you have, they need you and the way that only you can do it and the way that only you can serve them because you’re you and all those other things come with a price and with time and energy and resources and there’s a time and a place for everything. All I’m saying is that those aren’t requirements to launch. They are supplemental, they are ancillary. And at some point they do feel like in order to scale to grow, they become more necessary. They’re just not necessary or essential to launch. The only thing that you need to launch is knowing and believing that your product has the ability to get someone else results in whatever it is that you do. Now, that believing part is really critical.
AJV (02:42):
‘Cause That means you believe it. You believe it enough to talk about it. You believe it enough to tell people about it. You believe it enough to have sales calls and ask for their business. You believe it enough to go speak on stages. And those are stages of one 100 or 1000. It’s to go to the networking meetings. It’s to show up and go, I know this can help you. And that comes with that inner conviction that you know, you can get someone else results ’cause you’ve done it before. You’ve done it for yourself, you’ve done it for someone else, and you know how to help somebody else experience those level those levels of results. That is what is required to launch. If you know that you can help people, then you are ready right now today. Even if you don’t have a way to collect money, even if you don’t have a way to process it, even if you don’t have a fancy course or PDFs, if you know you can help someone, then you are ready right now.
AJV (03:42):
Now that’s not to disvalue or undervalue. The importance of all those other things, systems and processes and technology and having ways to collect money are important. So don’t hear what I’m not saying. What I am saying is that you’re ready today. You don’t need to be perfect. It never will be perfect. And you don’t need fancy websites and lots of followers. All you need is knowing that you have the ability to help someone else. And when you know that you are ready. And you see, here’s the thing. I actually heard this quote and on a conversation I had on the influential personal brand podcast just a couple of weeks ago with Melanie Laer. And I loved what she said and she said, and I don’t know if she came up with this or she heard it somewhere else, but man, it has stuck with me.
AJV (04:27):
And she said, here’s the thing, is you’re gonna wonder how to do it until you wonder how you did it. And that is the beauty of moving forward in conviction and in belief of just knowing like, I don’t have to have all of that stuff. No, you can, but it’s not necessary in order to launch. And sometimes you’re gonna wonder like, how is this ever gonna work? How am I going to do this? Until one day you wake up and you’re like, how did this ever work? How did this happen? Like, how am I here? Like how is it that I am looking at the answered prayers and the hopes and dreams and the goals that were of my past and I’m living them today? ’cause You will ask the question, I wonder how it’s gonna happen. I wonder how I’m gonna figure this out.
AJV (05:09):
I wonder how I’m gonna do it until one day it just changes to I wonder how I did it. I wonder how this all happened. And it’s because you move forward in faith, you move forward in action. You don’t procrastinate, you don’t wait because you know that you are ready. When you know you have the ability to help someone else and you’re not afraid to talk about it, you’re not embarrassed to talk about it. Now, I’m not saying to be prideful and ego ridden and talk about everywhere you go that and be self-promotional. That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is though you have a deep unwavering conviction that what you do helps other people and you have proof. And when you feel that you are ready, let’s go. That’s how you know you’re ready. So when
AJV (05:56):
Are you ready to launch? You know you’re ready to launch when you know that your products and service can help other people. So are you ready?
Ep 472: Building a Huge Business without Having a Huge Audience with Melanie Ann Layer
AJV (00:02):
Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Influential Personal Brand podcast. This is AJ Vaden, one of your co-hosts, and super excited today to talk about how to build a multimillion dollar business without having to build a huge, multimillion follower brand. So I think for everyone who is listening of going, man, how, how do I continue to grow my business without feeling the pressure of having to grow podcasts and email lists and paid media? And if you fit in that bucket, then this is a conversation that you wanna stick around for, because today we’re gonna talk about how you can explosively grow and build your business without having to do what a lot of people talk about in digital marketing today, which is you know, you gotta have all the things on all the platforms, you gotta have a podcast, gotta have an email list. And it’s like those things aren’t bad, and you can have ’em, but they’re not a necessity to having an amazingly successful business.
AJV (01:01):
So if you fit in that boat where you wanna grow your business without the pressure of having to grow everything else underneath the sun, then this is probably one that you wanna stick around to. Now, let me formally introduce you to my guest today, which is Melanie, Melanie Ann Layer. Sorry, I’ve got tongue tied there. I mean, she’s the founder of Alpha F Brand, which I’ve spent a bunch of time stalking on social media, and I love all the visuals and glamor that is associated with what you see online, but also just really love the concept and the heart around a lot of the conversation that’s gonna happen today. But just so you know, alpha Femme is a global coaching and mentoring company. It launched in the online space in 2017. So to talk about growing a super successful business and not a ton of time that’s one of the things we’re gonna talk about because that was not that long ago. And so one of the reasons I invited Melanie Ann on today is to really talk about how do you do these things in a way that works for you, and how do you weave your story into all the things that you do. And so we’re gonna talk about growing businesses. We’re gonna talk about using your story. We’re gonna talk about how you do it with staying true to yourself and so much more. So welcome to the show,
MAL (02:18):
AJV (02:21):
MAL (02:44):
Well, I would probably start by saying I’ve always been a little bit different. And my, my experience of myself is always, I’ve been a little bit different, even, you know, my brother and my sister were really good with the traditional education model, and I just could not get myself to do it. It just, I’d study for a test a minute. The exam would go in front of my face. I’d forget absolutely everything, but I knew every lyric to every song I cared about by heart. It’s like I, my brain just was wired differently. And I came to realize later in life that I have an emotional brain. I have an artist brain. If I care about it, I remember it forever. If I don’t care about it, doesn’t matter how much I repeat it, the minute you add pressure, stress to my life, I forget.
MAL (03:22):
And so, it’s been such an interesting journey for me to not discredit what anybody else is doing, actually, to take a stand and say, let’s not ever discredit what anybody’s doing ever again. Let’s instead look for other ways. What are all the ways we can become successful? What are all the ways that we can highlight our intellect and our creativity and our uniqueness? Because I, I think that a lot of times success is put in a box where if you don’t fit the guidelines, it’s predictable that you won’t get it, or that you’re not deserving of it, or it, it’s just kind of a weird thing where even, even after I achieved a lot of the success that I achieved, I was constantly questioned about my education and why I felt I had the right. And so I think what I love about the conversation we’re gonna have today is the fact that I decided I had the right, and then I built something extraordinary after that.
MAL (04:09):
Nobody told me that I was special or that I deserved it. Nobody gave me a leg up, a hand up, a whatever up to help me do it. I didn’t receive any funding. I didn’t like, there was no help. There was just, I wanted to do it, and then I did it. And I feel like we need more stories like this. Yeah. Now, the other thing I wanna say is, I’m gonna talk about how I built this without any of the traditional stuff, but I’ve helped so many of my clients, whether they have the traditional stuff or not, I think the key is not to say, oh, I, I, you know, I stand against the traditional stuff. It’s more I wanna find my, my perfect recipe that makes it, that I’m not fighting against any part of myself in order to be successful. It’s the opposite.
MAL (04:47):
I’m leaning into every best part of me and finding what are the things that are actually my effortless, we’ll call it a strategy, it’s an energetic strategy. Like, when I do this, I feel good empowered, I feel limitless, I feel magnetic. Like those are the things that are usually the gateway. And so I just followed my own magnetism. Whenever I felt stifled, stuck questioning myself, I was like, is there another way? I just questioned what everybody ever told me was the only way. And I found many alternative ways. And what I wanna say, we’re celebrating now since, you know, I opened my brand in 2017. We’re se we’re celebrating $78 million since 2017 in Alpha Femme. And I can tell you, I have found 78 different ways to make a million dollars. I did not make any of those the same way. They’re all different. And so that’s why I feel like I can help so many different people because not one of those millions was the same. And so it’s just to open your mind, open your heart, start getting curious, ditch whatever you’ve been told that would have felt like limiting. And let’s get into the expansive mindset of what could be. And that’s, that’s who I am. That’s why I’m here.
AJV (05:55):
I love that. You know, and one of the reasons I thought that you would be so great for this particular, you know, time for our audience, is that we get asked all the time, do I have to have this? Do I have to do this? Right? And a lot of that circulates around, do I have to do social media? Do I have to do video content? Do I have to have a podcast? And we’re always like, no, you don’t have to do anything. So I thought this was just really good. So this is where I’d like to start, is how did you build what you’ve built in a relatively short amount of time without any websites, any podcast, no paid ads? So walk us through like, what was the strategy and how did this happen?
MAL (06:41):
So the first thing I wanna say is I was actually good at what I did. So when I first started my business, I started this brand. I had gone bankrupt. My whole life had fallen apart. And I started, I, I took a phone call from a friend that was going through a hard time and she fell in love with my life coaching. And my life coaching was literally just everything I was studying to try to get myself back on track. But my focus at that time was helping people fall in love with their lives, regardless of their circumstances. So I was not selling a dream here. I was, I was like, I felt sitting in the front seat of a car, low on food, gas, heat, everything you could think of in the winter snow storm. If I can find gratitude, I can help anyone find gratitude in their life right now.
MAL (07:26):
And I built this life coaching brand from the front seat of my car. And I hit six figures from the front seat of that Honda Civic, the fir the first year we, I hit six figures. And so what all I cared about at that point was helping people and becoming better at really saying the thing the person had. Like, what was the thing that the person wasn’t seeing? What was the blind spot? How could we create more joy now, more happiness now, more power now? How could we, how could we build on that? So I was not trying to be famous, I was not trying to be successful. All I cared about was being excellent and giving transformation to my clients. And because I was sleeping in the front seat of a car, and I did not feel that any of that was very appealing, I called my brand the Invisible Coach.
MAL (08:09):
And so no social media, no email, no Facebook, no nothing. Everything was word of mouth referral. So if a client loved what I did, they referred a friend, they got 20%, and that’s it. I built my whole business that way. Now, eventually things kind of got bigger because someone asked me if I could come and do this kind of work at their office, and could I help on a bigger scale? Could I coach a team for this kind of mindset stuff? Then some of my past life where I was, I was good in sales, came in and I was, I helped teach high ticket sales to people who felt kind of stressed, especially the dental field when they had to sell big cases like, you know, $60,000 veneer case. And they’re making, you know, 30, $40,000 a year. Like, there’s a gap there. It feels very stressful to sell high ticket when you’re not making a lot of money.
MAL (08:55):
Money. So I started bringing sales training into what I was doing. My business organically expanded. So the first thing that’s so important is I did not start trying to get rich, trying to get famous. I started wanting to be excellent and wanting to be good at my work. That, that’s the first thing I think is very important. The second thing is, I didn’t even use social media when I first started on social media thinking I would become social media famous either. So the first time I ever put my stuff out on, on Facebook, it was like 2015 or 2016, I started posting. 2016 was my first ever live stream. The reason I did this was because I never actually went anywhere. I didn’t buy a house or get an apartment after I went bankrupt and ended up sleeping in the front seat of my car, I actually just became a digital nomad.
MAL (09:38):
So I would drive my car all over the country, all over the, you know, all over the us, wherever, and I would just live wherever I I was. And so as my financial situation got better, the hotels got better, but I just never got another place to live. So I would connect with people everywhere, whether it was by the pool, at the coffee shop, at the grocery store. And in order to stay connected, I had the social media presence. It never crossed my mind that I could meet a person on the internet that would become client. That felt impossible. What did feel possible is someone who I’d had a conversation with, who stayed connected over time could eventually, maybe especially if I went back to that town, become a potential client or a connection, but never ever did I think I would create something on the internet.
MAL (10:26):
So what I think made me very different there as well is I wasn’t doing any kind of strategy. The all I was doing was being the most real version of me because it was like, you’ve met me in person, you know who I am. I’m gonna be the same person online as I am offline. ’cause That’s what it’s gotta be. And by doing that, an audience started to build. And it was the weirdest feeling of my life when someone messaged me that I did not know and said, I’ve been watching your live streams and I’m wondering if you, you do private coaching? And I was like, how did you meet me? And they’re like, I, I saw your live stream. And I was like, what
MAL (11:06):
It all came from a very real place. I think that’s another important thing to to know. My first brand that I ever made, my first company name was my name Melanie Layer, incorporated. That was it, MLI. But then people started asking me what it meant and I felt a little weird, but that’s what it meant,
MAL (11:52):
I didn’t look for it. It, I didn’t work hard to find it. I didn’t hire someone to tell me what I should call my company. I didn’t wait until I had a good name before I made money. I didn’t wait until I had a good name in order to become successful. I called it whatever I wanted to call it until one day Alpha Femme came outta my mouth and I was like, oh my God, that’s it. And I, I could not believe it when I was looking for it on the internet and no one had it. I was like, how does this not already exist meant to be, meant to be? So when I claimed Alpha Femme, the next thing that happened is I realized this is a really good brand. I’ve gotta raise the bar. There was a moment where I realized this is not just about me making money. Mm-Hmm.
AJV (12:58):
One thing, I wanna pause there and talk about this just for a second. So one of the things that you said earlier, which I, I jotted down because I think it’s so good, it’s, you know, let your results speak for themselves. Right. And it’s like, kind of like that’s what I heard you say. I don’t know if that’s exactly what you said, but it’s along these lines of just be so good. People can’t not tell other people.
MAL (13:17):
Yeah,
AJV (13:17):
Exactly. It’s like they can’t not, and so I just would love for you to talk about that for a second of like, what was the mentality that you had around? It’s like, if I just focused on the people who I have right in front of me and changing their life, I know that by the nature of doing awesome work, more business is gonna come. ’cause One of the things that I feel like I’m constantly hearing from friends, family, and our Brain Builders group community is like, well, how do I get more clients? How do I get more clients? How what our constant message back to them is just focus on the ones you have.
MAL (13:49):
Yeah.
AJV (13:50):
And so that’s such a mentality shift. It’s such a, a redirecting of abundance versus scarcity. And so I’d love just to hear like what your message would be to anyone who’s out there going, yeah, I’d love to have a word of mouth referral business where everyone is just sending me business. How do I do that?
MAL (14:08):
When your intention is being excellent for your clients, they feel that when your intention is growing your business, they feel that it’s a different energy. And sometimes it is hard to pivot it when you’re like, okay, that sounds great, but I really do wanna build my business. And it’s like, I know, but is there something else inside of you? Is there something bigger inside of you? Can you actually see that your business, if it, if it were to grow the people, it would help that that’s good for the world. Like, can you actually get behind that? Can you see the ripple? Like I remember early on in my career when one of my first clients was telling me, she’s like, my, my marriage was on the rocks when we started. And I, I’ve, my husband is completely different. You know, another client with her daughter, she’d had, she’d been on the rocks with their daughter and things were just turning around.
MAL (14:56):
Another client’s sister reached out from, for, you know, years ago that hadn’t talked to her sister in years, you know, promotions. And I’m like, I’m speaking to one person. But the the wor their work is changing their, their, you know, sister, their mother, their partner, their everything’s changing. And I was like, the ripple effect of this is spectacular. I’m making such a difference. Mm-Hmm. And that was the thing that really drove me was like, this is helping. This is working. And I think especially in businesses where people have this profession, obviously it depends what profession you have in your life. I, for me, ha being a, a coach, that meant I have to be good at, at having people change their lives. That’s my job. Yeah. You know, I think a lot of people get caught up in being marketers and then the job is secondary.
MAL (15:45):
But really it’s, you’ve gotta be good at your job and then you’ve gotta market how, you’ve gotta market that you’re good at your job if you are a good marketer, but you’re not good at your job. It’s like, hmm. So the first thing is be good at your job, then the marketing is easy. Is it word of mouth? You know, is it through live streams? Is it through a beautiful brand? Is it through this? Now you’re adding things to support this amazing career that you have. And it, and it’s never do I have to, it’s like what are the channels that are gonna help me expand this? But nothing’s gonna make you good. You know, you, you can’t just market. I mean you can, but eventually your reputation will catch up with you and it won’t work. You know, it is gotta come from I’m excellent at this and then I market my excellence from that. The sky isn’t even the limit.
AJV (16:27):
Yeah. I love that so much. ’cause I think that is, that is just such a heart change of going, the marketing will come, the sales will come. But right now I just have to be the best in the world out of what I’m doing or
MAL (16:39):
The best therapist I can be right now. Because this is another thing is every single industry has nuances. Mm-Hmm.
AJV (17:19):
MAL (17:20):
I really only thought when I first started this work that there was me, Tony Robbins and Esther Hicks. I thought that was it. Like we, we were the only people in the world that knew about this profession. I wasn’t trying to beat anybody. I thought the world was in need of more people like me. That’s another perspective shift. I don’t need to be the best. I wanna be one of the greats.
AJV (17:38):
Yeah. That’s so good. That’s such a good, you know, just even verbiage reminder to me it’s like, it’s not about being the best in the world. It’s about being the best you, which somebody needs that somebody needs the best you. And so, so, okay, so here’s my second question that kind of popped up through all the things that you were ta talking about in my notes, is this whole idea of figuring out what feels most aligned with you. And you said, you know, it’s like made $78 million done at 78, you know, different ways. So what, what advice would you have or any sort of tips around, like, how do you just figure out what that combination is?
MAL (18:20):
So what I love about marketing and also coaching, what I love about the whole thing is it feels to me like a scientific experiment. I think a lot of people do marketing and do business like math. I sucked at math, but I love, like, why is it that when you add milk and vinegar, it, it does this weird thing? Like why? And that’s a lot of times what business is. It’s like, why did that work? How did that work? Why did that work? It’s not one plus one equals two, it’s milk plus vinegar equals like why? And so I love it so much because I always tell my clients, you’re gonna wonder how to do it until you wonder how you did it. Mm-Hmm. It’s not this like recipe that you do it once, then you nail it forever. You’re gonna have to pivot course correct.
MAL (19:08):
You’re gonna have to innovate. It’s gonna work once in the second time. It won’t work again. You’re gonna have to change. Like, you’ve gotta be a mad scientist. It’s gotta be this like, let me explore myself, my clients, the world, the market. Like it’s, everything’s changing. So if you’re trying to find the one ticket to success, the one ticket to fame, the one, it’s like, it’s very rarely gonna be an energetic match for you to succeed long term. But if you’re like, sky isn’t even the limit. Give me everything you’ve got. I’m a mad scientist. I’ll make anything work. I’ll make 1 million, I’ll make it 1,000,078 ways I’ll do it so differently. It doesn’t need to be perfect. It doesn’t need to be the same. I don’t need to do it like her or like him or like them. I do not need to beat anyone.
MAL (19:45):
I wanna be one of the greats. I respect the people I walk with. I walk with giants. I love this moment that we’re in, in this planet. I love that I get to be in business in this modern time. I love that there’s so many different ways I can market what I do. Let me do this this month and if I’m sick of this next year, I’ll find something new. Like I’m in the game evolution and growth over a lifetime. Let’s figure this thing out. That energy is so magnetic, so playful, so fun. And you’ll just end up making money. And it is like, money’s the byproduct of the entrepreneur you become. Yeah.
AJV (20:16):
And I think I, and I love what you said, it’s like don’t be afraid to just try it. Yeah. And if you hand it, stop, pivot, do something else. And I think that’s a lot of people just kind of feel like if I start it, I have to just keep doing it. And that’s not true.
MAL (20:29):
No. You get to say, okay, well look, and, and you can see it through, you know, you can say, okay, so we did this and here, what’s the outcome? Well, the outcome is this. Okay. So now we know we won’t do that again. Like, you track it without meaning. Yeah. Kind of like Einstein, who found 3000 ways not to build a light bulb
AJV (20:45):
MAL (20:46):
You can’t get defeated. It’s like, okay, so this is not the way for me not, and this is not the way for me. And it’ll just make you wiser. Mm-Hmm.
MAL (21:20):
Like get your hands dirty. Go in, leave your ego aside and just go in the sandbox. Be like, let me get my hands dirty. Let me build something fun here. Let me figure out what I’ve got, what my tools are, what my skills are, where I need to get better. What results can I produce with what I’ve got? Because it’s not gonna, it might not be a million, but it could be a few tens of thousands. And that’s celebrate something to celebrate. Like, you’re gonna get good stuff on the way, and then you’ll learn to celebrate those little things and build off of those. And it really is, it’s a scientific experiment. And the people who are able to play like a mad scientist at this, they have fun for way longer.
AJV (21:57):
And that’s a key word in all of this is you wanna have fun. Yes. It should be fun. It shouldn’t be, I think
MAL (22:04):
Before we all decided to be entrepreneurs because we imagined it would be, yeah. We thought, can you imagine not having to wake up at a certain time? Imagine being able to go to lunch at the restaurant in the middle of the afternoon. Imagine not having to work till 5, 6, 7 every night. Imagine not being stuck in traffic. Imagine. Oh my gosh, I could work from wherever in the world. Oh my gosh. Then you get this opportunity and you make it, you, you forget a job. I
AJV (22:28):
Think
MAL (23:22):
Yeah, so there’s a, there was a few pivots. It happened a few times along the way. The first really important pivot was the Alpha Femme brand. When I said, I have a brand, like this is my brand, this is what I, it’s like I, I felt the brand had so much potential that I had to raise the bar of who Melanie was to fit Alpha Femme. Mm. And that was amazing because instead of trying to build the business, instead of having Melanie and Laer try to build a business that would be successful so that I could feel like I had done it, you know, that feeling we sometimes have where it’s like I’m trying to build a business so that I won’t have to worry about money. And so that I will feel like I have done something with my life. I, I I I, mm-Hmm
MAL (24:14):
Who do I need to be? Do, am I even an energetic match for this brand and what it could be? And so that made me raise the bar in even who, who I was. And it was like, I’m the founder of this brand that represents the world. There was like a, an uplevel there, but the real huge uplevel that happened for me that changed everything. And this is quite interesting because the story starts in 2020 or the story starts, pardon me, in 2013 when I went bankrupt and I was sleeping in my car, IWI had, I was working a commission only sales job. So if I made nothing in one day, no money came. There was no minimum wage. It was just whatever money I made. And there were days and days and days that I made absolutely no money whatsoever. I’m sleeping in the front seat of this car.
MAL (24:55):
I sometimes I have money for a night at the hotel. Most nights I’m just sleeping directly in the car. Some days I can eat, some days I can’t. Like it’s, it, there’s just no consistency in my life whatsoever. And I have this like really traumatic experience while I’m sleeping in the front seat of a car and there’s first responders on site and they, one woman comes, psychologist sits in the car with me and starts talking to me and she’s like, I don’t know why, but I keep having this, this feeling to give you this business card of this person. I feel like you need to speak to this person. And it was this super like spiritual, like a person, like a, that could see into the future kind of thing. And I’d never done this stuff before at all. So I’m, I, I’m like, okay, thank you.
MAL (25:36):
But I have no money for this whatsoever. I have no money. And so I keep the card in my car and I keep looking at it and it’s burning the image in my head of this person. Like, I, I need to call, I need to do it, but I don’t have the money to do it. So I chose to not, I slept in the my car for cup for like, nonstop, nonstop, nonstop. Even when I had the money not eat, even if I had the money to save up to buy this one session for a hundred dollars. And I drove up to this person’s condo and she was moving, there were boxes everywhere when I walked in. She said, I’m sorry, the place is a mess. We’re moving. You know, I’ll have to have you sit in my bedroom. I sat on her bed, I was like, I’m gonna die.
MAL (26:13):
This is how the story ends,
MAL (26:58):
We were, we had only rented it for a few days to do content creation. They shut the country down. We couldn’t leave. They had no other Airbnbs, no other hotels. Like we either stayed there, we lived in the street and it was way above our budget. It was the craziest thing. And we were having this like meeting the three of us, what are we going to do? And my sister, obviously, I had told her the story about the this woman in the card and all the things, but she just has this look on her face. Like she just saw a ghost. And I said, what, what? Like, what? And she, she said, just look. Oh, because that’s the craziest thing. Like I was, I was in a town where there is no ocean. Like I don’t, there she says to me, you’re gonna change the world where the mountain meets the ocean. There is no ocean. Like I am in Quebec, Canada. There is no ocean anywhere. And so I said to her, which ocean? And she said, oh, I can’t tell you that. Of course you can’t. Okay, how do I even get there? And she said, you’ll be there when it happens.
MAL (28:01):
MAL (28:53):
It stopped being about alpha femme and it started being about changing the world where the mountain meets the ocean. Hmm. It started being about helping people through a pandemic. It started being about having a mission, feeling like there was a reason that I was alive to serve the planet. Like I, I took it out of my, am I good enough? Am I worthy? Do I have what it takes? Do I, blah, blah, blah. All the little chatter. And I expanded my vision outside into like my impact on the world as it stands. And my entire business changed. And I just kept myself in that mindset. This isn’t about my worthiness and my deserving. Every single thing I touch helps people. Every dollar in my business is a person who’s expanding every Yes. Is a person who’s working on their life, their purpose, their their marriage, their their business is helping people.
MAL (29:43):
It’s like, I’m a funnel now. Mm-Hmm. Everything that goes through me comes to other people. Whoever’s distributing the funds up there is going, okay, pass it through her hands. Money in her hands is good for the world. Power in her hands is good for the world. Influence in her hands is good for the world. And so my message to people is like, get out of the little smallness of your fear that you somehow are inadequate because that, that’s like you are just hoping everything that’s funnels towards you is just gonna come to you and die there.
AJV (30:13):
Yeah. So good. Cut
MAL (30:14):
The floor. Cut the floor and make sure that things go through you, not just to you make sure that you amplify everything you receive and you’ll never have to get blocked about worthiness again. And actually it becomes about the world. And you can stop being all stuck in your ego and we can actually start doing something.
AJV (30:31):
You know what I love most about everything that you just said is that whole thing of like, stop worrying about what comes to you and pay attention of what’s going through you. Because I think that is, it is such a limiting belief of going, like everything I’m doing is just so that money comes into the account or a client comes into the account or followers show up or emails show up. It’s like, that’s really small thinking.
MAL (30:57):
Yeah.
AJV (30:58):
I love that about this. Like, no, don’t think about what comes to you. Think about how it comes through you of just like, whatever comes through you needs to go right back out.
MAL (31:07):
Yeah. And, and it’ll, that’s
AJV (31:09):
An abundant mindset and
MAL (31:11):
It’ll, and it’ll create so much beauty on the way through. But everything is temporary. You know, even the money you think you want, you want it so you can spend it on something
AJV (31:21):
MAL (31:22):
You know, it’s like everything, if it comes through you, if there’s something that passes through, joy is temporary, sadness is temporary. Just let it pass through. Let just let yourself be the biggest conduit you can be and don’t shut yourself off and shut down the channels when you’re afraid of losing. You know, don’t hang on too tight to things ’cause you’re afraid if you lose them, you lose them forever. Just be confident that things through you are good for the world and amplify how much can pass through you.
AJV (31:50):
Yes. I love that. And you said something earlier, I wanna go back to really quick, and I’m, I’m cognizant of the time because I think there’s so much richen richness in the conversation. But one of the things that you said earlier, and again, this is again how I perceived it, is like, don’t wait until it’s perfect to get going. Like, don’t wait to get going. And I think a lot of people wait to get going ’cause it’s like, oh, it has to look a certain way or I have to have this lined up a certain way. So I’d love to just hear like, what would your 2 cents be to the people here out there listening? Well that’s sounds great for you Melanie. I’m so glad you did that, but I don’t have this, this or this or that. And then it’s like, and I love that you come from a Yeah, don’t give me any, I don’t have that. I was making calls from my car, living in my car. So we’re good there. And, and still people really get stuck with like, I just can’t do it yet. Right. I can’t sell it yet. I can’t teach it yet ’cause my website’s not live or whatever limiting belief they’ve come up with. And so for those people listening who going, yeah, but it’s not ready.
MAL (32:56):
Yeah. I think the most important thing is it’s not about what it looks like. It’s about what it is. So if it’s good, it’s ready. The only time I would say, okay, get like, take the time is if you’re like, I don’t know how to do it. You know, I wanna, I wanna do a coaching business, but I’m terrible at coaching. I want, I wanna be an art, I wanna sell my paintings, but I’ve never painted a painting and I’m no good at painting. I wanna be an a singer. But I I, I haven’t taken lessons. I don’t know how to sing. I’ve never s sang a song. Like that’s when I’m like, okay, well then get good at your craft. Mm-Hmm
MAL (33:34):
It’s about what it is. How many hole in the wall spots do people line up at the door outside and it’s like, don’t let this fool you. This is the best pizza. Yeah. This is the best coffee, this is the best. You know what, whatever it is. Like there’s a lineup. You can’t even get in the best tacos. And it’s like this place, this place
AJV (34:17):
And back to what you said earlier, it’s like if you’re so good at your craft that you’re helping your clients get results, everything else will work.
MAL (34:28):
Yes.
AJV (34:28):
And I don’t have to have all the things. Okay. I have one more category, so I’m bouncing around a little bit. ’cause I think there’s so many good nuggets here. You mentioned this earlier, which I think is a really good takeaway for a lot of people who are listening. And so I didn’t wanna just skip over it and not come back to it. It’s incentivize your customers to help you grow your business. It’s the, you know, the difference of like, hey, whether I’m gonna pay you or I’m gonna pay marketing agencies or Facebook ads or whatever. So being selective of like, how am I gonna spend the funds that I have to help grow my business and why not market and create some incentive to my clients to refer me business. So you wanna talk about that for a sec?
MAL (35:07):
Well, the most beautiful frequency I’ve ever found for my business is for me, for you, for us, for me, for you, for us. If I have it be all about me, there is no us. And if there’s no us, there’s no long-term business. If I make it everything about you, there’s also no us
AJV (36:07):
Mm-Hmm.
MAL (37:05):
That’s incredible.
AJV (37:07):
Anyone can do that, right? It’s like, it’s just choosing on where you invest the funds, right? And it’s like, that’s your choice. So make your choice. Don’t be mad about it. But you get to make your choice. And I think that’s a really solid, great way of going, Hey, I win, you win, we win. I love my business and this is a great way for you to spread something that you love and get paid for it. I win. You win. Thus, I think that’s such a good reminder to everyone. And back to, there’s many different ways to build something that you love. Don’t be afraid to try things. Don’t be afraid to pivot. Don’t be afraid to change and adapt through the process. It is a part of finding your niche. It’s a part of finding your groove.
MAL (37:49):
Yes.
AJV (37:51):
I love that. Where should people go if they want to stay in touch with you? Like where would be like the central place that you would wanna say, Hey, if you run a, a real feel of what I talk about and, and here’s what I, I loved this conversation today. I thought, I mean I probably have like 10 bullet points that I wrote down and I usually have like five
MAL (38:29):
And the wild thing is like all the strategies work.
AJV (38:32):
Yeah.
MAL (38:33):
All of them. So it’s just none of them work for a not good product. Yeah. All of them work. When you’re in alignment, it’s just about what do you like? So even if it’s a good strategy, if you hate it, it’s not good for you. If it’s a good strategy and you love it, it’s good for you. And you tell people that’s the best way because it’s good for you. They try. It’s not good for them. So I love, I love strategy, I love trying different strategies, but from the place of if the energetics are aligned to all the strategies work. Yeah.
AJV (38:59):
And I love that too. It’s like anyone who says this is what you have to do and this is how you have to do it, it’s like, well not really. There’s a way
MAL (39:07):
For my scientific mind comes in and is like, really, let me see if I can find another way. Yeah.
AJV (39:13):
MAL (39:33):
So at this stage still, I don’t have a website. So the way is Facebook and Instagram. So you’ll either be my friend on Facebook or you follow, I have two accounts on Instagram, Melanie n Layer and Alpha Fme. And if you follow that, you’ll know when I have free masterclasses, you’ll know what programs are running. You’ll be able to read my posts that are masterclasses within themselves, watch my live streams. Like I’m, that’s where I connect with people and that’s the way to do it.
AJV (39:58):
And I will make sure to put all of the different links in the show notes ’cause she’s got her personal and Alpha F for Facebook and Instagram. So just go to the show notes and you can grab those. Connect with Melanie directly. Melanie, this was awesome. Really, really awesome, rich conversation. I’ll say that probably five more times today.
Ep 471: 4 Techniques to Make Your Content Go Viral
RV (00:04):
So I’m gonna share something awesome with you today. I’m gonna share with you four techniques to make your content go more viral. And the reason I’m sharing this is because I’ve spent a lot of time learning about this in the last several months. And if you’re new to this podcast or if you’re new to following me, you won’t know any different. But if you’ve been here for a while, you know that especially if you’re one of our brand builders group members, you’ll know that we don’t put a lot of stock into things like social media or a lot of time upfront into social media. And the reason why is because we know that building a real business is much more profitable. Focusing on systems, developing people, creating use, useful content, having automation and you know, follow up and, and these kinds of things that aren’t as sexy that you don’t hear about as much in the world today.
RV (01:00):
But you know, generating referrals speaking on stages, those are the things that actually are gonna generate meaningful or significant income in your pocket quickly. But there is this vanity of going viral that everybody is chasing. And you know, then they’re surprised when they don’t actually make much money from it. And so we just don’t focus on social media as much, right? Early on. But if you’ve, if you’re one of our members, you know that in our brand builder journey, we, we talk about doing the, there’s a, there’s a, people sometimes do the right things, but in the wrong order, right? They do the right thing at the wrong time. And the sequence matters a lot, particularly if you wanna scale a really significant multi seven or eight figure business. Now, that all said, we hit eight figures last year as a company, and we have spent five years perfecting our craft and creating our curriculum and building our systems and training our people, and doing all of those things.
RV (02:03):
And so what we have done is we are now set up to scale. We are set up to really rapidly grow. And so now all we have to do is go out and grow our audience. And so we are now turning our focus and our attention to learning some of these things that are more about scaling your audience. Because we’ve scaled our people, we’ve scaled our offerings, we’ve scaled our systems, we’ve scaled our team, we’ve scaled our technology, and so now we’re really ready to go out and scale our audience. And so that’s what I’m gonna share with you a little bit about what I’ve been learning in that front. And, and also to kind of say like, if you’ve been following me for a while watch out. Here we come, right? Watch how, watch how fast we’re gonna start to grow on social media and things.
RV (02:49):
And that’s because we can afford to do things now. We can afford to hire the team. We can afford to, to, to buy traffic if we need to, to, we can afford to produce high quality content. We can afford to invest in education to grow our audience because we have a backend business that can pay for it, right? If you know anything about how we teach paid traffic, which we don’t really talk much about here on the podcast, that’s really for members only. But we talk about how the, the person who wins the click is whoever can afford the most to pay for the click. And so the key is to not actually spend so much time just trying to build the audience or dropping a bunch of money into ads, is to build something on the backend that is very profitable so that you can afford to go buy traffic so that you can afford to go buy awareness.
RV (03:37):
And that’s basically what we spent five years doing. That said, I know that many of you’ll be excited to be learning about, you know, some of the strategies and techniques that we are learning to go viral. And I’m gonna share with you four of them today that are really important. That will make a huge difference for any of you, regardless of, of whether or not you have that backend system, and you have that, that clear personal brand, and you have that uniqueness and, and you really are building things the right way. Or if, you know, you’re just trying to get more views on your videos, and that’s what you, you, you know, or your, or your podcast or whatever your YouTube. And so either way this is, this is gonna be great. All right? So let me walk you through these. So the first one is content selection secrets.
RV (04:22):
Content selection secrets. A huge part of going viral is knowing what type of content is going to go viral. What kind of topics are going viral? What are, in other words, what are people already interested in that they are naturally sharing, that they are likely to share? And you might say, well, okay, but how do I know what the whole world is interested in? How do I know what people are likely to share? And that is the great question. And the answer is actually much simpler than you might realize. It is to watch what other content is going viral and to recreate your version of that same content. When we teach media strategy we referenced, you know, a term that David Meerman Scott created years ago called Newsjacking. And he said, if you wanna get featured in the news, what you do is you watch what is breaking news, and then you produce content on that same story, but with your slant, your expertise, your angle on that topic, because it will get picked up by the media that’s breaking news.
RV (05:32):
Well, this sort of viral drafting as I sometimes I think of it as like drafting is you’re, you are figuring out which topics are already going viral, and then you’re gonna draft off of those. So you’re not gonna copy them. You’re not going to, like, you’re not gonna just take a, a viral video and post it on your feed. That’s actually against many of the, the terms of many of these social media outlets, although people do it all the time. What, what I’m gonna say is watch for, for topics that are going viral in your niche and then create your version of it. So how do you do that? Well, there’s some simple ways. One is look at what’s showing up in your explore page. Look what is showing up in, in the trending section in YouTube, you can simply go look at a video and look at how many views a video has compared to how many subscribers the channel has.
RV (06:30):
If it has way more views than there are subscribers in the channel, you know, that piece of content is performing very well. There’s also lots of other third party tools that you can use to do this research for you. We talk about those in our membership program. But, but, but you can watch on what’s recommended for you. Like all of these platforms recommend content and push content. You know, in YouTube there’s like a whole panel down the side that will say, you know, you know, recommended next or, or watch this next. Those are all videos that are being recommended because they’re holding people’s attention, and that’s what the, the platform wants. And so those videos are performing well, and so they’re recommending those to more people, which, so you have to just pay attention. You have to like open your eyes. You know, when we say the next level of thinking or the next level of results requires the next level of thinking, it’s like your eyes have to be opened to a, a new way of viewing the world.
RV (07:23):
And, and this is happening all around you, and you’re probably just not paying attention to it. You’re not seeing it. So you need to look for that. And then you look for the topics that lend themselves to your expertise, to your niche, to your industry, or that you have something to say and you kind of recreate it in your own style, in your own voice. That is how you create viral content is, is basically recreating your own version of content that has already been proven to go viral by other people, right? So that’s content selection. And then that’s the first technique. Now, each of the next three techniques are all gonna be about hooks, okay? We’re gonna talk about visual hooks, text hooks, and audio hooks. In order to teach you each of those, you need to understand what a hook is. And this has been one of the most frustrating parts of my journey as it relates to kind of organic marketing and social media marketing is so many people say, you gotta have a hook.
RV (08:28):
You gotta start with a hook. You need a great hook. That’s a great hook. But nobody can define what in the freaking heck an actual hook is. Like, what does that mean? What is a hook? Like, I know the concept is that it hooks people attention, it hooks people’s attention, but how, like, what’s the formula for creating a hook? And I now, after studying this, you know, for a couple years, I think I found the answer. And I think it is insanely simple. And I think even the people who teach it, they can’t articulate what it is. They know what it is, and they’re able to replicate it, and that’s why they grow. But they actually can’t articulate it in a way that they could teach it to somebody else. And that’s what’s been so frustrating is, is, is figuring out how, what is, what is a hook?
RV (09:20):
What does that mean? What is a hook? And when I was in Toastmasters, when I started my professional speaking career, Toastmasters used to have this formula for a speech, okay? Not for videos, but for speech. And they said, and its formula’s been around for, you know, probably centuries, but at least decades. And they said, the formula for a great speech is tell ’em what you’re gonna tell ’em, tell them, and then tell ’em what you told ’em. Tell ’em what you’re gonna tell ’em, tell ’em, and then tell ’em what you told them. And that’s, that’s what the formula was for a great speech. What I’m realizing now is that what a hook is, is that first part. Tell ’em what you’re gonna tell them. So many people will start a video by just saying like, you know, here’s something I was thinking about the other day.
RV (10:08):
Well, that’s a random thought. Instead, what you wanna do is make the first words out of your mouth on the video telling the people exactly what you’re about to teach them, right? So you don’t wanna pontificate and flounder and mess around. You wanna say, here’s four ways to make your content go viral. And then it’s like, okay, one, I’m gonna teach you 1, 2, 3, 4. But the opening line should be, here’s four techniques that will help you go viral, right? I’m telling you what I’m about to tell you, or I’m telling you what I’m about to teach you. That’s the hook, right? I had my first con, my first social media content. I mean, my Ted Talk has gone viral and I studied TED Talks, right? So that, that’s gone viral. But in terms of like just creating organic content, I finally had a, a, a a, a social media piece go viral.
RV (11:03):
And it was when you, you know, I told the, the story of how someone stole $40,000 from me and for me and aj, and that was the opening line. I, I said, someone just stole $40,000 from me, and I want to tell you what they did. So it doesn’t happen to you, right? I’m telling them what I’m about to tell them, or I’m telling them what I’m about to teach them. I promise you, if you, if you focus on making the opening three to five seconds of your content and be very clear of just telling them what you’re about to teach them, your content is gonna perform exponentially better, exponentially better. So that’s the big idea. Now, let me teach you, you know, I promise you four techniques to make you go viral. So all three of these next techniques are related to hooks, but there’s three different type of hooks I want you to focus on.
RV (11:55):
Visual hooks, text hooks, and audio hooks. So a visual hook is when you hold something or you show something visual like you could be holding a prop or you could be, you could be doing anything that is different than just a talking head. It could be where you are. The, the where you’re behind. It could be something you’re wearing. It could be something you’re holding, but it is, it is something like visual that the eye can see to go, oh, this piece of content is going to explain this thing. Why am I standing here? Or why am I holding this? Or why am I doing x? That’s a visual hook. The visual hook is a signal that I’m about to tell you something related to that visual element, and that serves as a hook. So that’s visual hooks. Then you wanna use text hooks.
RV (12:53):
Text hooks are actually the easiest is to make sure the onscreen texts, like the, the, the, not what you say, but, but what you, what they see, that text that they see visually says what you’re about to teach them. So if this were a video, it would say four techniques to make you go, make your content go viral. And it would be titled that, and the text would be on the screen. It would also be the first line of your caption. And then the third type of hook is an audio hook. An audio hook is what you actually say, assuming it’s a video or a podcast where there is a spoken word element as you say. You know what I’m gonna share with you four ideas to make your content go more viral. So they’re seeing a visual element, they’re reading a text, a description, and they’re hearing an auditory description, all of which are three different types of hooks, A visual hook, a text hook, and an audio hook, right?
RV (13:55):
Lemme say that again. You’re giving them, they’re, they’re, they’re seeing a visual element, they’re reading a text description, and they’re hearing an auditory explanation. So they’re seeing a visual hook, they’re reading a text hook, and they’re hearing an auditory hook. I promise you, if you start your content with those three elements, and especially if you’ve, you’ve made a content selection, a strategic content selection, your content will go more viral. So there you have it, four techniques that will make your content go viral. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please make sure you leave a review for me on iTunes or wherever you listen to the show, and share this episode with someone who you think will benefit from it. That’s how you can pay us back and really help us. We, it’s what keeps this podcast going. So thanks for being here. We’ll catch you next time on the Influential Personal Brand Podcast.
Ep 470: Passion Struck with John R. Miles
RV (00:02):
Hey, I’m so excited to introduce to you someone that has become a friend over the years just being in this space, John R. Miles. And he is the founder of a movement, I’ll call it, a movement called Passion Struck. So he is an authority on behavioral change, and we’re gonna talk some about really like the science behind behavior change. And that’s a really important thing to him. But basically all things personal growth. And he’s just a really inspiring guy. And his, he has a podcast that is an award-winning podcast. It’s called Passion Struck with John R. Miles. And he, we’re gonna talk about this too, because it’s been really impressive to see what has happened with his show. He’s had amazing, amazing guests on there. I mean, Marshall Goldsmith, Jim Quick, Gretchen Rubin, mark Hyman. You know, like so many of my friends and colleagues, lots of our brand builders, group clients Dan Pink, Dan Dan’s not a a client, but he’s a friend.
RV (00:58):
And then a lot of our brand builders, group clients, you know, Jen Gottlieb, Dr. Gabrielle Lyon it goes on and on and on and just really amazing. And so I want to hear his story, but he’s got the book coming out. Passion Struck is just coming out now. And so he has been recognized by a few different places as like one of the top alternative health podcasts. And he’s got experience in over two decades he spent in corporate and military leadership. And so anyways, he’s just a really fascinating guy and has some remarkable achievements. And I felt like you need to hear and know John Miles. So John, welcome to the show.
JRM (01:42):
Hey, Rory, it is so amazing to be here and I’ve been looking forward to this for like two weeks, so, so thankful to be here. That’s
RV (01:49):
Really great, man. I, you know, I wanna start by talking about the book ’cause I know that you’re really big on behavioral science. So tell us like, what is the idea behind Passion Struck as a movement and sort of a premise. And then I would love to hear a little bit about some of the behavioral science that is, is kind of behind your, your writing in the concept.
JRM (02:13):
Yeah, so I think a good introduction to this, and it’s how I start out the book, is one of my favorite quotes is by Henry David Thoreau. And he says that the mass men lead lives of quiet desperation. And that’s how I was living myself. Part of your teaching is we’re best positioned to serve the person that we once were, and that’s who I was. And when it happened to me, it was at what most people would’ve thought the pinnacle of my career. Here I am Fortune 50 CIO, making seven figures plus, wow, have the house, have the cars, have everything you would want. But I think what ends up happening is in the success driven society, we find ourselves in, we’re, we’re orienting our success around the wrong things in life. And what it brought me was a complete utter burnout, numbness, et cetera. And so when I found myself at that state, I tried to think using your one word problem, like what was it? And it’s, it’s not an easy thing to do. I mean, I struggled with this one word problem, but you,
RV (03:24):
You and every, every brand builders group client is, it’s such a hard, it’s like such a simple question, but so hard to answer, right? Like, what problem do you solve for your audience in one word? And, and that’s my story too, right? That’s where we came up with this. I struggled with it. I had a mentor ask me that, but it, it is hard, it’s hard to answer that. So what did you come up with?
JRM (03:43):
Well, I started coming up with things, working with my coach that turned out to be symptoms. So I came up with a apathy and, and other things. And what I figured out it was, was anti-matter unmuting the fact that we reached this point where we feel like we don’t matter to others, we don’t matter to the world, we don’t matter to ourselves. And I think it is such a profound thing because it’s literally impacting billions of people across the planet. I mean, you just look at what Gallup is saying, and there are 900 million people in 142 countries who are unfulfilled with what they’re doing day in, day out. Said another way. Tom Gilovich psychologist at Cornell just put out a study in 2018 examining thousands of people about their biggest regret in life. And it wasn’t our biggest mistakes, it was the would haves, the should haves that we could have accomplished. It’s, it’s the lack of pursuing our ideal life. So passion struck is really about that pursuit. How do you become one of the five percenters? How do you 10 x your life so that you live it in the most fulfilled way you possibly can?
RV (04:57):
Mm-Hmm,
RV (05:44):
And the people, the mission-driven messengers who are in our community and, and, and, and not just our clients, but the ones who listen to this show, finding their passion is a huge part of building their personal brand. It’s a huge part of breaking through Sheehan’s Wall, as we call it. It’s, it’s a huge part of m making it as a successful business. Like making your personal brand into a successful business is so closely aligned with nailing and finding and being clear on your passion. So how do we find that passion? I mean, I think if people know when they don’t have it. So how do we, how do we find it?
JRM (06:24):
Well, man, Rory, I I’ve got a great story for you. So I know you and aj are are both religious as, as am I and as I was
RV (06:36):
At this, yeah, we’re not just religious. I mean, we’re hardcore Bible thump and Jesus freaks, right?
JRM (07:09):
So what I found is the biggest barrier to truly understanding what your pap passion and purpose are on this planet is that we don’t listen to that inner voice because we’re so distracted by what’s going on around us that we’re not really in tune to what it’s really calling us to do. And I remember interviewing Andreas Wooder, not sure if you know him, but he Uhuh he started the business school at Catholic University in in dc. But he was just this guy who went in, he was in his late teens, was completely listless. He had no direction and ends up applying to be a Swiss guard, never thought he would get it. And he ends up getting selected and being one of the Swiss guards for Pope John Paul ii. And he told me that Pope John Paul II was just amazing in that when he was with you, you felt like nothing else in the world mattered.
JRM (08:09):
And he became this incredible mentor to him. But he told him that, Andreas, your issue is that you’re not discovering your uniqueness. He said, God’s pursuit for you is he’s put you here to solve a problem that only you can solve with the skill sets that he’s given you. And it is your life’s journey to find this uniqueness and then exploit it in serving others, which is basically the whole message that you and AJ teach. But as I was looking at this for myself, I had been getting this inner voice for a while, but I didn’t understand how to process it because it was telling me, John, I want you to go out and help the lonely, the hopeless, the beaten, the board, the battered, the broken. And here I am sitting as CIO of this company thinking, what the heck am I supposed to do with this?
JRM (09:03):
And I don’t think this finding your purpose is something that you just flip a light switch on. To me, it all started when I really doubled down into my mindfulness practice, got rid of the noise, and really focused on self-awareness and self-compassion. And I started really leaning into what did those words mean? And that’s kind of how I came to this whole conclusion that it’s really about people not feeling like they matter. And that’s why we have that mental health issues. We have so many people feeling lonely, helpless, whatever you have, but then it’s, you can’t use that as your marketing blueprint, of course. So it really took me, once I understood that’s what I was trying to do, it was then how do you approach this with the audience in a way that it resonates with them? And so for me, that became the power of intentionality. How do you create an intentional life?
RV (10:00):
Hmm.
RV (10:01):
So if you, if you walk down that and you go, I love that idea of intentionality, sounds like a uniqueness, what we would call a uniqueness, right? Is to go, okay, the cured insignificance is intentionality. Where do you start with that intentionality? Like what’s, what are the, what are the first things that we should be intentional about that will lead us towards finding that passion? Or like you’re saying, like we believe it’s a divine design of each person. Just like kind of what Pope John Paul, the, the second was saying there is like, we believe that it is a part of how we are divinely designed is to, is is to to serve a purpose. So if if someone’s listening right now and they’re kind of feeling that way insignificant, or they’re burnt out, or they’re realizing like they’re just not loving what they’re doing, what are some of the things they should be intentional about first?
JRM (10:59):
Well, this really goes into the core aspects of my book, and let me just set this up for you. So this thing just didn’t come out of thin air, and I think it’s important for the listener to understand that I have always been passionate about leadership. It’s what led me to ultimately going to the Naval Academy instead of going to other public universities I got into. But as I was going through, I really started to, to look at, you know, what made some of the greatest Naval and Marine Corps leaders of all time. Like, what allows someone like General Stan McChrystal to do what he does and why do some of us fall short? And it really launched me on this, what is now become a nine year journey of examining over 750 remarkable individuals about what allows them to break through so that they are living this ideal life that they always aspire to.
JRM (12:00):
And and some of your clients are, are doing this. Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, who you mentioned Jen Gottlieb, are, are two great examples. Louis Howes is another one. And what I found was initially about 30 core things. And as I looked deeper and deeper, I boiled it down to that there are 12 principles that they all seem to follow. And it just so happens is I went further and further into behavior science that all 12 of these align with principles of behavior science. So the first principle that I talk about is you need to become a mission angler. And in each one of my chapters, I tell the story by examining people who have perfected this. So in this chapter, I cover Jim McKelvy, who founded Square and Gary V. And Life Crafting is something that I talk to a lot with Hal Hirschfield, who’s a behavior scientist at Anderson School of Business at UCLA.
JRM (12:58):
And it’s really about, if you think about the topic of this chapter, mission Angler, anyone who’s ever been a fisherman, and I live here in Tampa Bay, it’s not as if I get into a boat and just arbitrarily go 20 miles into the Gulf and hope that wherever I put the anchor down, I’m gonna catch fish. Typically, you’re looking at tidal patterns and you’re looking at moon phases, and you’re looking at what’s, what fish are in season right now, and where do they typically migrate to during different times of the day and moon phases. But so many of us, we don’t craft our lives the same way. We leave it up to chance instead of being deliberate about the outcomes that we want. And so one of the things that I talk about is that you need to craft the life you want. It’s, it’s that difference between your actual self, your odd self, and this ideal self that we aspire to become.
JRM (13:56):
And it’s how do you close that gap between where you are now to where you want to be and do it as Ben Hardy says, through the gains, by measuring yourself against who you used to be over time. And at the core of this, Rory, is, is aligning the actions that you’re doing with your intentions, with your aspirations. And people get this causality wrong. They think they’re all, they think that they’re standalone things, and they’re absolutely integrated, because if you’re not being intentional in alignment with your core values, your core beliefs, then it’s gonna lead you astray. You’re not gonna find yourself in those critical moments making the right decisions. And to me, that’s at the crux of having intentionality.
RV (14:46):
I love that. So walk me through that again. You said a align the action, align your actions with your intentions and aspirations, like you’re talking about the relationship there. So are they sequential or like, is is it a hierarchy or like, what’s the, what’s the connection point between each of those?
JRM (15:05):
So the way I describe it in the book is that you have passion, perseverance, and intentionality as the foundation for this. And I looked at Angela Duckworth’s work on grit, passion, and perseverance. And those things kind of make up what constitute your actions. But when you couple that with how you’re intentionally undertaking those actions and then doing it through the lens of your dreams or aspirations, it’s then that alignment of A plus B plus C equals six that ends up compounding as these things come together. So another way to look at this is something that I often talk about is oftentimes we become our own visionary arsonist. And I’m not even, I’m not sure if you’ve ever heard me talk about this before. No,
RV (16:00):
I’ve not, I’ve not heard this, but this is, this seems interesting.
JRM (16:04):
Well, what I mean by this is it’s really self-sabotage. We arson the very things that we want to create in our lives. We arson the growth and achievement because we inadvertently undermine our own progress. It’s akin to programming a destination into your GPS, but then repeatedly taking detours that lead you farther away. And yet we find ourselves doing this all the time because of perfectionism or setting unrealistic goals, procrastination, negative self-talk, odent behaviors, you know, you, you name it. But the problem with this is that it’s taking us further and further away from where we want to go. And this is an absolute great way to look at the synergy of action, intention, and aspiration. Because if you disrupt their harmonious interplay, that’s how this visionary arsonist comes into effect. Because what ends up happening is they’re misdirecting their actions. While they may be engaged in an activity, the actions are not in sync with their intentions or aspirations. So the actions, instead of being in the present moment of anchoring yourself intentionally to them, they become erratic and misaligned. So that, I think that’s a way of looking at it, is you’re, you’re ending up ha wanting to have this alignment, but you keep doing things underneath it that sabotage one element or another of it, and all of a sudden you’re halting your own progress. Mm-Hmm,
RV (17:39):
Yeah. It, I think one of the things that, that ha has stuck with me, I’ve been thinking about a lot recently is that it’s just like the reason that most people don’t succeed or have ultra performance is not because of a technical skill. It’s not like a tactical thing they’re missing it’s ’cause of a mental belief system that they have, you know, that’s somehow working against them. And, and it’s like this program, like you’re saying, it’s like a faulty map program that just is, is detouring them, is, is, is pulling them off track. And
JRM (18:59):
Yeah, so I mean, to give this some backdrop to the listener is it’s not as if four years ago I came here and I had this incredible brand, like Mel Robbins has it. I had come out of this prolonged career being an executive where the majority of the companies I worked for, the last thing they wanted me to have was the personal brand they wanted me to represent and be the face of the company. Now, thankfully, a lot of this is changing, and I highly encourage people to start their personal brand as early as they possibly can. But I remember starting to have these ideas for the book, and I started shopping it to different agents, and the agents all came back to me and said, you know, a how do you know any of this is gonna resonate? What audiences have you tested it on?
JRM (19:47):
And three, how are you even gonna sell it because you don’t have a brand that anyone identifies you with? And so it really put me in a place where I was thinking about how do I get the word out there? And so I started to really use your content pyramid, and I started playing around first with getting blog posts out and social media posts, just testing the ideas. And I was getting some traction, but not as much as I needed. And so I started to really examine podcast, and I started to, to really listening, listen to maybe 15 to 20 different podcasts a week. And before I knew it, I’d probably listened to a hundred different podcasts. And from that I figured out people who were doing it really well, who then became the guidepost for me. And I became really intentional about it.
JRM (20:40):
I know a lot of times people who do podcasts after a season or 10 to 20 episodes, they stop. And I knew I didn’t want to do this if it was that type of endeavor. So I really was careful about how I thought about it when I started it. So when I launched it, I knew I was going in, I matter what for a year. And no matter what the results were, I was making this a long-term decision. And I, I have to tell you, when I first ended up launching it, I think, like many people, it wasn’t resonating the way I thought it would. It would, like, not everyone is a Mark Manson who launches their podcast, and all of a sudden it’s in the top 30 of podcasts. That’s not how things happened to me. It started out with me getting 50 or 60 downloads. And the funny thing is, they weren’t even from family, family and friends,
RV (21:38):
Common, thanks everybody for the support. I really appreciate it.
JRM (21:42):
But what I ended up really coming to the conclusion of about five to six months in was that I wasn’t being authentic in the way I was hosting it. I had seen great podcast hosts, whether it’s, you know, ed Millette or Lewis or Jay Shetty, or Dax or Mel or whoever you want to say. And, and I was trying to be, I think too much of them instead of really carving out my own lane. And it was really when I started to do the entire podcast through the lens of how do you create this intentional life? And interviewing people through that lens that I started to see this traction emerge. And then it, it’s like one action, as Lydia FiNet says, it’s like action leads to action. So the more I doubled down on this, the more I kept interviewing people through this lens, it was like word started to spread.
JRM (22:35):
And I remember the first person of notoriety, notoriety, I can’t even the first person of significance. I, to me, every guest is significant. But to me, when I got Susan Kane on the podcast, that was like a defining moment because it kind of established some credibility with what I was doing. And from her, I was able to book Dan Pink, and then it led to Gretchen Rubin and then others. But I’ve been very mindful that just ’cause you have a big name doesn’t mean you have the best wisdom. And so what I try to bring on the show is a combination of these big guests, which I think you have to have. But I also try to bring on a lot of what I call everyday heroes, whose stories people can really relate to because they’re stuck just like we all are. And then they find their way of being unstuck. And I think people can relate to their messages.
RV (23:32):
Uhhuh
JRM (23:41):
It’ll be three years when the book comes out. So Uhhuh,
RV (23:45):
Uhhuh
JRM (24:09):
Yeah. So I started out with doing one interview, one solo per week, and I did that for the first year. And I found out I was having so much interest of people being on the show that I had a backlog. And so I thought, I’ll get out of this backlog by doing an additional episode for a short period of time. Well, that became permanent, and now I find myself in this s backlog again. I mean, we’re booked out right now till till June. So I’m trying to think of what’s the next evolution of this, because I’m not sure I, I want to add additional days to this format. But there are so many great people who are coming to me. I, I, I hate saying no to ’em. So, so right now I do Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Right. The, these next couple weeks, it’s actually gonna be four because if I tell someone they’ve got a book coming out, I have them on the show I’m gonna get it out the week their book launches. So I do a couple bonus episodes here and there.
RV (25:13):
Wow.
JRM (25:14):
So like, yeah.
RV (25:16):
How do you do how have you been doing, it’s interesting that you’ve been doing like the solo episodes from the beginning. How, how do you come up with the content for those and you know, like I, I think they’re all your, yours are like 20 minutes roughly, right? Usually they’re around like a little more than 20 minutes. Like how do you come up with what to talk about for 20 minutes now? And I think this ties in obviously to your passion, right? Is if someone, and that’s why I think it’s so important to personal brands. ’cause It’s like if you nail your passion, then hopefully you can talk, you know, about it in a very deep way. And but I’m just curious, like, have you struggled with the solo episodes or how do you out, how do you outline those or think about ’em?
JRM (25:56):
Yeah, I’ve, I try to do ’em through storytelling as much as I can. So I, I try to do ’em as if I was delivering a keynote speech. So I try to set up the big idea that I want to talk about. I then try to express it in a story either about myself or a person I’m talking about. Then I try to hunker down on, on two or three big ideas, go through ’em, and then kind of give a summary. And a key takeaway is the format that I’ve, I’ve kind of come to. But yeah, I think I’ve done 140 solo episodes now. So putting out that many solo episodes and for them to be unique is, is absolutely, it takes a lot of effort. And each one of these, if you think about it, it’s almost like you’re writing a 3000 to 4,000 word speech a week.
JRM (26:46):
So I read a ton. I read probably a hundred books a year, and a lot of the inspiration for the topics comes from things that I’m reading. I read Scott Berry Coffin’s book transcend, and I think I probably got 20 ideas just out of reading his book. You know, I I, I got a whole bunch out of, you know, let’s say hell Air Rod’s Miracle Morning or Jim Quick’s Limitless. I mean, but the important thing is it’s, you can have the idea. I mean, they’re talking about it through their voice, but I try to passion struck it. So I’m trying to share something that I find interesting for my community, but I put it through the lens of what we talk about on the show. So that’s kind of how I come up with it. But we, we have kind of a, a rolling list of 50 to to 70 different ideas that we’ve thought about for, for content.
JRM (27:44):
And then we kind of just think about what we’ve talked about. Because something that you’ve taught me that I think is in extremely important is I like to teach things randomly. I think I put the information out there in a random way because I want people to keep coming back because they never know what they’re gonna hear. Like this week alone, I’ve got Mark Hyman talking about the future of medicine. I have Dr. Aliza Pressman talking about parenting, and I’ve got Mike Mcic talking about being all in. I mean, there are three completely different topics. And then my last one, my solo this week is on quiet desperation. So I try to just make these things so that people keep coming back because they never know what they’re gonna get. And I don’t like doing things too habitual from a content perspective.
RV (28:37):
Interesting, interesting. Have you done anything to get to try to get people to leave reviews? ’cause I know you also have a ton of podcast reviews and that’s you know, that’s super impressive, like thousands and thousands of reviews. Which do you, do you, is there anything that you’ve done there that gets people to, you know, excited to do that, or not really?
JRM (29:00):
I mean, I just constantly ask for it. I mean, I think sometimes it’s one of those things that you, you’ve gotta be, you can’t be bashful about asking for things. So I ask my guests and I ask, I put it out in every episode, and I ask on social media, and I ask every single opportunity that I can because that social proof is extremely important. I mean, the fact that we have 16,005 star reviews in the US I mean, tells you something. It, it, so to me it’s extremely important to cultivate that. And so it’s something that we’ve just been mindful of since we started the show.
RV (29:40):
Yeah, there’s that intentionality again. And I think that’s an interesting part of it that people don’t just realize is like, Hey, you have to actually ask for them to do it. And it’s a measure of how engaged your community is too. And it’s encouraging. ’cause What’s interesting, the podcast format is you, like, you never hear the other people, right? You have like a conversation with your guests, but there, you know, there could be hundreds of thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people listening, but you don’t get feedback from them other than like the review. Like that’s really the way that you, you, you get to interact with people. So it’s interesting, you’ve been so intentional about that and asking and asking for the reviews. So anyways, I think, I think this is so powerful helping people find their passion and having a plan for it.
RV (30:26):
These 12, these 12 principles that you talk about in the passion struck book, I I think that aligns with personal brands because if you really nail your passion the all of a sudden you’ve got something to dedicate your life to and a and a and a cause to build a personal brand around and build a business out of, and most importantly, a mission to live. And you know, something to, to, to serve. I, I have one other question for you before I do that. Where do you want people to go, John, to like, get a copy of the passion struck book or like stay connected with you and, and, and learn more about what you’re up to?
JRM (31:04):
Yeah, Rory, the best place for them to go is all things passion struck Central, which [email protected]. And if they purchase the book before the end of the publishing week, I have curated over $300 worth of free giveaways specifically for the audience eBooks, I, I did a master course. You, if you do it this, if you do it sooner, you get a free access to the, the first chapter of the book and other things. But passions struck.com is the best place to go.
RV (31:33):
I like it. I like it. So the last thing I wanted to ask you about before we turned on the recording, you talked about, you were telling me, you were about to tell me about the Hockey Stick moment. So you were, I think you were talking about at, I guess maybe there was at some point you had like a tipping point for your personal brand or, or the show. Do you, so do you remember what that was? I’d love to, I’d love to have you finish that story.
JRM (31:57):
Well, I think it was a combination of both. So I was working with Hillary at the time and Hillary Billings, and I was at this point where we were, this
RV (32:08):
Is a brand builders group with one of our strategists. So you got to, so Hillary was your private strategist.
JRM (32:13):
Hillary was my private strategy, and I was at this point where I was thinking about launching other things, but I’m one of these people that, in that, I think when you dilute your focus, you end up basically disintegrating other things that you’re working on. And the podcast hadn’t gotten to the point that I had wanted to, and I knew I was at this crossroads where I was either gonna double down on it and figure out like, what is causing it to stagnate or I was gonna jump to this new thing and I decided to double down on it. And that’s when I really started to examine how I was doing it, not from really the cadence of how I was putting out the content, but in how I was being deliberate about how I was curating it, how I was asking questions to the guest, who I was bringing on, why I wanted them on.
JRM (33:08):
And I really started putting myself in my audience’s shoes. Like, if you are in this life right now where you feel stuck, or maybe you’re a high achiever and you’re feeling burned out, or you don’t know how to make that next leap, like what is advice that we can start giving on this show to help you fundamentally change your game? Because as you know, most people, I mean, I love the way you say this, people don’t pay for information. They pay for the application of it. I didn’t want to just put out information and have no one do anything with it. I wanted to start putting out information that people could live by. And so I really started to intertwine not just people talking about it, but the science behind it, so that if we’re talking about a discipline, bringing on experts who can then lay in the science for why it works, to me became a powerful one-two punch. And when I became more authentic, starting leaning into really serving my audience and making that the focus, so it, the whole thing became about, it’s almost like doing a keynote speech where you’re not up there serving yourself, you’re serving the listeners. That’s what I did. And quickly, over time, everything changed. When I leaned more and more into my uniqueness, it, the hockey stick happened. And, you know, I, we’ve had now 36 months of consistent growth on the show, so.
RV (34:38):
Wow. That’s really, really cool, man. Well, we’re so excited for you. I’m so proud of what you’re doing. I’m, I’m, I’m, I’m, I’m, I admire what you do. I, I love what’s happened with the show. And so we’ll put a link to passion shuck.com where people can go check out the free resources, check out the book, check out the podcast. John, thanks for helping people find their passion. And keep going brother. And we we’re cheering for you. We wish you the best. Well,
JRM (35:07):
Rory, it’s such an honor to be on your show and I just hope the rest of the people who are listening to this, you know, create that ideal life that they want because that’s what we’re all put on here. Earth here to do. So start doing it today.
RV (35:21):
Amen. Me too. Me too brother. Me too.
Ep 469: How To Cultivate Your Community | Lindsey Schwartz Episode Recap
AJV (00:00):
AJV (01:04):
The second one, I want you to think about it in terms of client relationships, right? So these are the people who are paying for your products and services. These are your customers, right? And how do we think about community in that realm? And then the third category is I want you to think about community in terms of your team. And these could be full-time employees. These could be part-time contractors, and anywhere between, but community also happens within your company, within your organization. And I want you to think about it and those three different formats, because it doesn’t matter where you are. One of those fits
AJV (01:56):
So it doesn’t matter. So I just want you to think about this as you head into this conversation of which of those buckets am I gonna filter through with this information, right? And maybe it’s all three but I would encourage you to pick one for this first round lesson of which of these is this most closely apply to me? And where I am right now? Is it my overarching just community in general that would be more personal? Is it my clients, my customers, or is it my team? Right? Whether contractors or employees, doesn’t really matter. So first highlight is knowing the difference between audience and community. And I thought this was so wise. And so right on where Lindsay said that you have to think about your audience is all about connecting with you, but community is about helping your audience members connect with each other. And that really is so powerful because when you, when anyone thinks about how do you grow a scalable business, it’s you have to remove yourself from the center of
AJV (02:58):
It, right? And at some point it’s gotta grow beyond you. And that means that people are now connecting and communing and collaborating with and without you. And that could be, again, personally, professionally, and in terms of your team or your customer base. So that’s the first thing, is just knowing that an audience, you know, in this regard is thinking about your customers, right? This could be online followers, offline customers, doesn’t matter. But an audience is that one-to-one relationship. Whereas a community is how do we take all of our customer or potential customer relationships and start connecting them with each other so it’ll go so much further beyond you. You’re just the conduit of these relationships. You’re the host of the party, right? You’re the person who’s just sending out the invitations. But you’re not expected to entertain or talk to every single person the entire time at a party, right?
AJV (03:53):
You bring people together who are going to talk amongst themselves, who are going to connect and network, interact among themselves. Same thing happens in our personal life. Same thing happens within our team. And the same thing happens in our customer base. That’s the first thing. Second thing, create the culture of people that you actually want to attract. You know, tons of much smarter people than I am talk about culture, but one thing that I believe is that culture should attract or repel people
AJV (04:49):
But you want people to resonate with that. And the best way you can do that is you have a well established and a firm foundation of the culture of people that you want to attract. And so I, in my conversation with Lindsay Short, she said, so how do you do that? There’s two thi two quick things that I would love to share that she shared. Number one is ask yourself, what do you want to unify people around, right? So when you think about rallying the troops, what is that? You know, mor cry, right? That rallying mission that everyone is coming together because they all believe in the same thing. They all want the same thing. That would be the first thing. Second thing is ask yourself, who is the aspirational person that my community wants to become, right? So is it they’re all trying to become better at wealth management. Maybe you’re a financial advisor. Maybe they’re, they’re trying to become better moms. Maybe you you are very much in the business of helping support moms or working moms or parents or dads, whatever, right? Maybe it’s for the aspiring entrepreneur, maybe it’s for the established entrepreneur, whatever.
AJV (05:57):
Just decide who it is, right? In order for you to attract these people, you have to know who they are and then where to find them, right? And that, that’s a huge part of just establishing like, this is the culture of the people that we wanna attract. It’s like, you know, at Brand Builders Group, we say that we serve mission driven messengers. We want to attract a culture of people who are unified around this idea of mission over money, and that you make money as a byproduct of serving people well, of living out this mission, of having a message that is worth sharing and having the courage to share it, right? That is what we’re trying to unify people around. And the aspirational person that our community wants to become is they want to become that person who is a conduit of good change in the world.
AJV (06:49):
They believe that their message has the power to change someone’s life, right? That is who we want to attract. And if we do a good job at that, then people will come into our community and go, wow, I’m so happy I found you. Or they’ll go, whoa, y’all are whack. I’m outta here. And that’s okay. And we have to be okay with that because we have well defined bound. We have well-defined boundaries of who we are trying to track attract, because we know the culture of who we are. And I can just speak personally, the same thing goes for the people on our team. The people that we are attracting to work at Brand Builders Group also go, man, I wanna, I wanna be about something that’s not just about money in my banking account. I wanna be about something that is bigger than me.
AJV (07:31):
I wanna be a, a play a small part in something huge. That’s who we’re attracting, right? And I can say that part is working great. Our people are amazing. I feel utterly blessed and ignorant
AJV (08:27):
And, okay, I’ll go do that on LinkedIn later. It’s like, no. Like right now, what are creative ways, and not even just creative ways, what are ways,
AJV (09:11):
So our people have physical locations since we’re virtual to go and connect and brainstorm and ideate. We’re having quarterly social events. And these are just ideas with our team within our client community, right? Brain Builders Group community. Who is the best community in the whole world? Shout out to all of you. It’s, we spent an entire year building an app in an integrated way, a one place, you know, stop for you to ask questions get on live trainings, network, have chats, have a social feed have topic specific forums, all these different things. And it’s like within this one place, they have tons of ways of connecting. They can hop on virtual training calls, they can hop on networking calls. They can be a part of meetups. They can do forum conversations, which are again, like vertical conversations around certain topics.
AJV (10:00):
They can just chat with each other in the social feed, kind of like a Facebook group. They can have one-on-one chat conversations right in the app. And this was a huge undertaking because we said there’s so many different ways for people to connect If we don’t figure out how to consolidate, and that was the word for us, consolidate these ways, we’re gonna lose people, right? They’re gonna be so confused and so overwhelmed. They’re not gonna do anything. And that’s what I mean by tactically sufficient, right? So it’s one thing to go, you can, you know, hop on this zoom call, you can go to the Facebook group, you can go to, it’s like you can, but most don’t
AJV (10:51):
Now that’s all digital. We also do 48 different virtual events. That’s not gonna work for everybody. We do six in person, not gonna work for everyone. So you just have to take some of these ideas and go, how could I implement something that would help my community connect with each other? It could be a free Facebook group, it could be Zoom meetups, it could be client appreciation events. It could be virtual. That could be virtual or in person. You could do a variety of things. You could also just go through your client Rolodex and go, who should meet each other? It could be as free and as manual as that, or have an app, right? So there’s all different things. The point is, is what are you doing to help your community connect with more than just you, but help them to connect with each other? And that’s what turns an audience into a fully alive and engaged community.
Ep 468: 3 Steps To Help Turn Your Audience Into Your Community with Lindsey Schwartz
AJV (00:02):
Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Influential Personal Brand podcast, AJ Vaden here, and I’m so excited to introduce a new friend and I say a new friend because although we have dozens and dozens of mutual friends, somehow Lindsey and I have just now gotten to meet. But I believe it was God’s timing and super serendipitous because it’s super in alignment with what we’ve been hearing from the Brand Builders Group community, and all of our listeners on the influential Personal Brand podcast. So, I’m so excited to introduce you to Lindsey Schwartz. I’m going to give her a formal introduction in just a second. But first and foremost, I wanna tell you why you need to stick around for this podcast and how you know if this episode is for you. Number one, if you are in a season of trying to figure out how to build engaged community around your personal brand and your business.
AJV (00:52):
Well, this is, this is a custom designed episode for you. Number two, if you’re figuring out how to get more engagement from your community online and or offline, this would be an episode for you to episode for you. Number three, if you’ve been thinking to yourself, I wanna create live event experiences, and you’re wondering, should I do that? Why would I wanna do that? How would I do that? And are you crazy enough? Do you do that
AJV (01:45):
And how do we stay in touch with our community when we don’t live nearby and we don’t see you all the time? So that is what we’re gonna talk about today. And if that sounds appealing to you, then don’t miss a second. Stick around to the very end, and you are going to be glad that you did. Now, with all of that said let me introduce you to Lindsey Schwartz. I will read you an official bio, but I know just even by reading this, there are millions of things that she has left off in this because I know, ’cause I’ve heard so many amazing things about her for so long that she is very much downplaying all of her awesomeness in this bio. But I’ll tell you that she is an author, she is an investor, she is a master community builder, and the founder of Powerhouse Women, which is fiercely committed to supporting other women, which I love. But she also invests her time in mentoring women and girls of all ages. And I think that’s amazing. It doesn’t matter if you’re a high school student or a, you know, powerhouse entrepreneur, the power of just mentorship and leadership is ever present and all things that you’re doing. And I’m so excited to learn from you today and to ask you questions, and most importantly, introduce you to our awesome community. So, Lindsey, welcome to the show.
LS (03:01):
I am so thrilled to be here. I’m a longtime listener of the podcast, so this just feels super fun.
AJV (03:07):
I am so excited. And one of the things that I would love to do before we get into the nitty gritty details, since we are newer friends and you’re new to our audience, I would love for you to just kind of give a high level background of where you started and how you got to where you are and what you’re doing today.
LS (03:26):
Mm. I am so grateful that you asked this part of the story because the further removed I get from it, I think people see what powerhouse women is today. And it’s easy to forget that everybody has that day one. Everybody has that season where you’re figuring it out as you go. And powerhouse women really started when I decided to do something that challenged me, probably for the first time in my adult life. And when I tell you that I had lived a very safe life, I had lived a life that didn’t involve much risk, it didn’t involve getting outta my comfort zone. And it was tricky because I am the person that can give 60, 70% of my full potential, and I can create results that look really shiny on the outside. But I think you get to a point where you realize that personal growth is such a fundamental need.
LS (04:20):
Our own evolution is such a fundamental need that that life starts to feel really small if you’re not stepping into things that really challenge you. For me, this season really came to a head about seven years into building a, a little network marketing business that I built. And, and it was really successful. So I shouldn’t really even call it little, but I was in this season of restlessness, just praying for direction, praying for an answer. And, and, you know, I think we, we often pray prayers that we’re not ready for the answer for
LS (05:07):
And I published consistently one article per year because I was just so afraid of putting myself out there. You know, they say publish consistent content. So every year I would put out one blog
LS (06:05):
It really is already within us. It’s within the seeds of these dreams and visions that are put on our heart for a reason. And the book was released, and my, I had some support in, in the publishing process. My editor and publisher now, good friend, said, you should do a book launch event. That’s, that’s what people do to promote their book. And I said, okay. So the very first Powerhouse Women event was really just a day supposed to be about celebrating this book and this message. And I’ll never forget, you know, and we’re gonna dig into what a big production it’s become. Now. I’ll never forget at the end, women said, okay, well, what’s next? And I was just kinda like, goodbye
LS (06:58):
And realizing that there were so many others who were in a similar season. They just knew they were meant for more, but they were stopping themselves because of fear, or self-doubt, or all the things that now we know are so normal. That is actually the price of admission. That’s how, you know you’re pursuing something that’s, that’s worth pursuing. So, fast forward, here we are seven years later. I know we’re gonna get into all of that, but the beginnings of the story are very humble. I had no clue what I was doing. I was really operating on faith and on this, this knowing that I couldn’t keep playing small and hiding my gifts anymore.
AJV (07:37):
Hmm. I love that. One of my favorite quotes that I keep getting fed to by the Instagram algorithm is let this year be a God did a year. And I love stories like yours ’cause it’s like, you can take no credit. And it’s like, it’s like to give him all the glory of, if we just step back and step into faith, it’s amazing what he’ll do without us
LS (08:38):
Well, I think on the heels of what you just shared, I thought I was living my life by faith up until that point, but I, I realized that faith doesn’t actually enter the picture until you step beyond what you know yourself to be capable of. So here I was operating within what I could control and what I, I wanted to control the outcome. I wanted to control people’s perception of me. I wanted to control so many variables of it. And I had this tight grip on my story and my purpose and my life. And it wasn’t until I opened that up and I said, okay, I’m gonna step way out, way beyond what I know myself to be capable of. And now the lesson I learned in that is that that was where all the magic lies. That’s where the miracles lie. You don’t actually start to scratch, scratch the surface of what you’re capable of until you step into that feeling of, can I really do this?
LS (09:34):
So even still now, I know that my next miracle, my next breakthrough is waiting for me. Just beyond, like, if you imagine kinda like looking over the horizon, it’s, it’s just over what we can see. Mm-Hmm. And that’s easy to say, and it sounds really cute, and we’ll probably all be fed a quote like that on Instagram this week. But it’s a whole other thing. Let, let’s just be real. It’s a whole other thing when like, your heart is pounding and your palms are sweating and you’re like, am I really about to do this? Which kind of brings us to, I know we’re gonna get into the just the community element today. I think that’s why community is absolutely essential, because I’m not strong enough to do this on my own. And I, I don’t know many people who are, I just think we’re, we’re really designed to create in community.
AJV (10:18):
I love that. So that’s such a good transition to talk about community. And so I would love to know, it’s like, what would you say is the difference? Because people always talk about my audience, my audience, but an audience and a community are really different. Yeah. And so how would you define like, here’s my audience versus here’s my community.
LS (10:39):
It’s, it’s such a important distinction to make, and I’m sure other people would have their own definitions, but I remember when I started to be asked to teach on this, and I really had to sit step back and go, well, I don’t know, we’re just do, I’m just doing what I’m doing. I couldn’t even tell you what it is. But the moment I sat down, it really kind of just downloaded right there in that moment that I think we, we confuse an audience with a community, and both are necessary. And I have strategies for building both in my business, but building our audience is really step one. It’s really it. When I think about building my audience, I’m, I’m answering the question for myself. How can I get more people to connect with me? Whether that’s me as a personal brand or me as a business brand?
LS (11:23):
And that’s important. We want people to know about you and know about how amazing you are and how you can serve them. But most people are stopping there. They think, okay, I’m just gonna get that attention and convert that into sales. And you can do that. That, that’s beautiful. It’s a, you know, that’s a whole strategy. But what I predict and what I know from my own personal experience is when you take it a level deeper and you start to ask a better question, once you have that attention, you have a way to bring new people into your world. It’s asking a question of not how can I get them to connect with me? Now they’ve done that. How can you get more of those people to connect with each other? And that’s where community really starts to form. And it’s, I mean, it is the most valuable thing that you can build for your brand is a connected, engaged community.
LS (12:13):
And even when people hear engaged community, I think they imagine, oh, when I post something on Instagram, they’re talking back to me. No, no, no. What I talk about when I say engaged community is I’ll use, you know, my own story as a, just a mini example. We will launch, you know, event tickets. And I’m actually not really selling that event. It’s the people in our community saying, Hey, five friends, you have to come with me. Yes, buy your ticket. I’m gonna send you the link. But it’s taken a lot of intentional cultivating to get to that point. So when you have an engaged community, you know, because you have these, it’s just like this natural built in almost affiliate marketing channel. You have these referrals coming in, you have this brand loyalty that actually can’t be taken away and it can’t be matched. It’s so deep. Community is just so much deeper. But it really starts with that question, how do I get more of the people who are following me to connect with each other?
AJV (13:13):
I love that. And it’s so true. But I love that distinction of building an audience is helping people connect with you. Building a community is helping them connect to each other. And that’s awesome. So I would love for you to talk about how do you do both of those
LS (13:48):
Well, it’s interesting having you ask that question in that way, because what I realize is we, we actually focus primarily on building the community element. And that inherently has helped to also grow our audience. I think audience growth, and you have so many amazing resources even on this podcast to really dive deep into that. You know, it’s as simple as really knowing who is the person you’re speaking to, what, what works in terms of getting them to come, you know, and, and wanna engage with your account to listen to your podcast. So we just pay a lot of it. It’s kind of boring. We pay attention to metrics and numbers and we’re like, oh, wow. When we do a podcast about this topic, we tend to have more downloads. Or when we post quotes on our social media, those are actually what get us new eyeballs, new followers.
LS (14:34):
So there’s, I, I think the strategies for how to build an audience are, you know, there’s so many different resources out there, but for us, just really paying attention to numbers, metrics, what works. I’m most excited to talk a little bit about like, the strategy behind the community. ’cause I think this is kind of where it’s, there’s not many people really teaching this. Hmm. But when we, when I really sat down, like I said, to kind of put it into a formula that I could gift people, that I could help them have the success that we’ve had, I realized that there’s, there’s these three crucial elements. But if you skip the first one, the other two don’t matter. Okay. So the first one is, there’s this culture, there’s an energy and a magnetism. And even if you, you know, go to the powerhouse Women page today, or you, you meet someone, I, I always say that the true test of culture is if you meet someone who’s associated with that brand.
LS (15:26):
So if I were at a party and I meet someone who I know has worked with Rory and aj, because I follow their brand, I love their brand, I immediately assume some things about that person. That’s the culture. Whether you’ve intentionally created that. And if you haven’t, then now is the perfect time to start. Or if you haven’t, it’s, it’s really what do people know about your brand, whether or not you’re telling them that, what are your customers, the people who engage with you, what are they saying about your brand? But it starts with the, the easiest place to start. So if this is kind of like, woo, okay, that sounds deep. And where do I even begin to really cultivate that culture? I think the most important question any of us can ask if we’re really serious about building community is the question of, well, what do I want to unify people around?
LS (16:18):
What’s gonna be the connective tissue that brings people together? Because you can unify people around all sorts of things. You can unify them against, we all dislike this thing, this topic, this person, people unify around that you watch it happen all the time, or you can unify people around a common mission, a common cause. But what I found, I’ll just give you the cheat sheet for what I believe is the most, the most powerful thing to unify people around, especially those of you that are building more personal brands, is who do they wanna become? What’s the aspirational identity that they wanna become? And that, that’s essentially what we’ve done within powerhouse women is, you know, there’s this, people would probably use all different words to define it, but there is this mission-driven, heart-centered, collaborative version of ourselves and, you know, kind of like this future higher self that we’re all on this, this journey to step into. And so defining that culture, what you’re unifying people around is number one. Then there’s a whole strategy around,
AJV (17:30):
Before you go on, ’cause I wanna, okay,
LS (17:38):
Agreed.
AJV (17:39):
It’s so focused on where do I get the people? Where do I find the people that they forget? It’s like if you don’t know who you’re trying to attract and why you’re trying to attract them and why they would stay, right? It’s like you’re missing the core element of what really builds community. And so Mm-Hmm,
LS (18:17):
Yes ex, it’s exactly what you guys teach.
AJV (18:20):
And that is so true. It’s like if you met somebody that was associated with brand builders group, like we know, like hopefully they have this, this, this and this, because that would be an extension of the culture that we’re trying to create. And hopefully they wouldn’t have X, Y, and Z and there’s nothing wrong with X, Y, and Z. It’s just not what we represent. It’s, there’s a, there’s a community for that person. It’s just not here. And I think a huge part of that is knowing you gotta know who you are and who you’re trying to attract, so that when you find them, you’re like, that’s you. And they know that too. So I love that. Yeah. And then the second piece is, who is the aspirational pers the aspirational person they want to become. And if you have a whole bunch of people going after the same thing in the right direction, it will multiply.
AJV (19:08):
Because then it’s like they become your sales force, which is kind of what you said earlier. And I love that. And I don’t wanna skip over that. ’cause I think these are the types of things that people skip over and the plight of urgency to get it done. Mm-Hmm.
LS (19:47):
Yes. So from the very beginning, the motto within powerhouse women is we’re not meant to do business or life alone. So what we’re unifying people around is this belief that we are better together and not just as like a platitude of women supporting women, which is beautiful. There’s something wrong with that. But I, and, and this is very much the truth today. I want people to feel that when they walk in the room, I want them to feel it when they engage with someone that they meet from the community. It’s, it’s different and people feel it. So it, you know, what you’re unifying people around is, is so much more than words. It, it’s, it’s something that it takes time to, to really cultivate this, but the depth of it should be felt Mm-Hmm. Before you even have to say the words. So really that connection and true collaboration almost just seems like, not a strong enough word, but the belief that we’re better together.
LS (20:45):
And, and the aspirational identity is, is kind of what I described before of this woman who knows she’s meant for more and wants a space that it’s safe to be just as unapologetic about how big her dreams are and whatever size big really means for her. ’cause We all have different, different callings in life. But she, she feels the sense that she’s meant for more. She wants a place that it’s safe to be unapologetic about the big dreams, but equally safe to be really honest about the parts that are challenging and hard. There can be space for both. ’cause I believe when we’re, when we give ourselves the freedom to be just as honest about both and really open and unapologetic sharing both, that’s where our true power lies and where we really see that connection and multiplication of sharing in each other’s gifts really, really comes to life. So that would be my answer today. And there’s, you know, I think that’s important to know too. I’m constantly getting to know my own community. And my community is constantly evolving. So this isn’t something that you write down day one of starting your business. This, this should be something that evolves as your mission and your purpose evolves. And mine has,
AJV (21:58):
I love that so much. And I think too, just knowing that it does evolve and so whatever you said it as today, it’s like, let it organically change and evolve as things grow and progress. And that’s okay. ’cause It makes different, likely will look different, you know, from where you are today, seven years ahead, which I’m positively sure all of the things we’re gonna talk about have gone through an evolution process. Okay. So that’s number one I love. I just thought that was so powerful. I wanted to stop to make sure everyone got that. Yes. Okay. So that’s number two.
LS (22:29):
Well, and I, and I definitely wasn’t trying to steamroll and, and jump into number two because what I, what I said at the beginning is give yourself time to sit with and marinate in this first piece. And, and I think that’s the other thing I just wanna make sure to mention is I wasn’t clear about those things in the first couple of years, but what I was really dedicated to was constantly gathering feedback. And I would, I mean, I, I would set up one-on-one Zoom calls with, with women who would come to our events and, and just for 15 minutes and like really hear their heart. So the way that this started to form was by getting together, like, just communing with the people who, who were in, in some way or another really resonating with, with the message. So it, it took me some time to even get really clear.
LS (23:21):
I would say I remember so vividly it was, it was our third annual event. So first one was in 2017. In 2019, all of a sudden I felt like something clicked in. And that was after two years of building this community, listening to people not even really monetizing it yet, other than the event which was essentially just, you know, paying for itself barely. It was two years of cultivating this. So I want, I wanna make sure to, to state that piece. The, the second part, the second pillar of, of what it really takes to build not just an engaged community, but a profitable one, is that connection piece. And, and that’s the connection where you intentionally create ways for people to connect with each other. And, and this goes like to such a deep human need this. And, and if you look at the, the hierarchy of needs right above food, shelter, and water, like things that are actually necessary for our survival is a feeling of belonging.
LS (24:19):
Mm-Hmm.
LS (25:17):
Like it’s a direct conversation between us and them. We do this on our social media channels. And my favorite little tip to give is, you know, do you use your Instagram captions to encourage connection between each other? Or do you use your captions to encourage connection with you? Now we use both, right? So a call to action if I want someone to engage with me is, you know, tell me what you think about this. Or we’ll post about a podcast and say, you know, have you ever experienced this? We’re asking them to talk back to us, but take in another step further and instead create captions maybe once a week that in call people to engage with each other. So we’ll do things like, hey, our motto here is, you’re not meant to do business or life alone. And we believe that the answer to anything you need is just one or two, you know, introductions away, or one or two bold asks away.
LS (26:08):
So in the comments, you know, comment below one need that you have in your business right now, and then go through the comments and see if there’s someone else that you could be the answer to their need. And we get people to engage with each other. A even simpler way to do this, this is like one of my favorite things to do it either in Instagram comments, or you can do this on Zoom calls, is we’ll just say, Hey, we’re gonna have everybody drop, you know, an emoji in the comments below. And all I want you to do is go and follow and DM the person who commented right above you. We’re gonna use this thread for you to make two new friends right away. You just send one message, you’re gonna receive one message. Little things like that, all of a sudden start to position you as sort of this, this place where people know they can come to your brand and they’re gonna meet like-minded people.
LS (26:56):
It’s no longer just about you and connecting with you as the brand. That’s gonna happen anyway. If I know that I’m gonna get a core human need met when I am interacting with your brand, I don’t even need to worry about people falling in love with the brand. That’s just gonna happen by default. So that connection piece, those are just two really easy examples for how you can start to build connection. Now, of course once you’ve gotten really clear, like, well, what do you wanna build connection around? ’cause It’s gonna be a different, different conversation. If I’m building co connection around business and entrepreneurship and, you know, supporting one another than it is if I’m building connection around gluten-free living and, and healthy eating or clean, you know, a clean lifestyle. So I think, again, starting with that most important piece, but connection is an action word. So how are you encouraging people and telling them to take the action that you wanna help them take?
AJV (27:55):
That’s so good. Because the truth is, as much as people say, I want community, they truly do need to be told how to build it. Yes. How to involved, what to do. It’s like, just give me some steps. Right? And so the easier you make it, it’s more likely they are to follow through on it. It’s like whoever’s above you, this is what you do. And it’s like, oh, okay, I can do that. Mm-Hmm.
AJV (28:41):
And it’s like, man, this is hard enough to do with other people.
LS (29:23):
Mm. It’s so, it’s, it’s so simple that it’s easy to overlook
AJV (29:29):
LS (30:05):
AJV (31:02):
I love that. I think that’s so good. So another question I have, wait, was there anything else? Were you gonna add anything else? So there
LS (31:09):
The third piece, and we won’t even really dive into this because unless you’re doing the first two, the third one doesn’t matter. But because like I said, there’s, there’s this journey. You’re essentially invi inviting people on. You’re inviting them to grow with you. So the third piece, because I love a good alliteration and I needed a C word, is the climb, which is do people see a clear way for them to continue to grow with you? Mm,
AJV (31:32):
That’s good.
LS (31:32):
And that there’s a whole other strategy to that, but I really want people to not, again, ’cause I think people jump to that and they’re like, oh, great, this is where I sell offers. No, not necessarily this, this is such an important piece, but if you aren’t mastering the first two, the third one is gonna fall flat. So we’ll kind of leave that there. We can always do a part two if we need to in the future at some point. But just asking yourself the question, do people see a clear path to grow with you? And I think the self rele reflection question is how are you modeling that as an aspirational leader? Are you constantly growing? Do your people see you evolving? Because that is, that sets the tone, especially if there’s a personal brand element to your business.
AJV (32:13):
Mm. I love this. One of the things that just like registered as you were talking about this is, although we’re talking about, you know, a community centric conversation today, my mind also just went to this is mutually applicable to all things company culture with recruiting, hiring and employee retention. It’s like there’s, that is your community. Yes. So don’t think this is just for, you know, your customers. This is for your so true and so true. This is equally as important for any of you who are maybe I don’t wanna build a huge community per se, but the truth is, is you do have a community, it’s your team, it’s all the people around you. So how are you instilling these things within your community so you have less turnover and better retention and happier employees and because they too are your best, you know, recruiting grounds. So you never have to go out and recruit like they’re doing it for you. So,
LS (33:11):
So well said.
AJV (33:12):
So many of those things are just very much the same. Now, one of the things that I wanna make sure we get to before we do run Outta time is one of the, you know, choices that you have made is to create this experiential component with live events. And I know that is no light undertaking. And so I would love for you to kind of just as much as you’re willing, pull back that dark black curtain and say like, this is what it’s actually like to run big events. And big again, is totally up to you to decide what’s big, but it’s like, I think an any, any size of event can be considered a big event because there is so much planning and orchestration and doesn’t matter if you’re talking about 50 people or 5,000 people. So what would you have to share with us about what it takes to sell out an event? In your case you’re, you know, 500, 600, 700 plus P person events, but what are the mechanics to pull that off?
LS (34:16):
Well, this has again been m many years of, I wouldn’t even say trial and error, it’s more dedication to building the community. Just knowing that, because I have always, and we haven’t even really touched on this, but let me just pull back the curtain all the way. We’ve always had a very small audience. We sold a 600 plus person event last year with an email list of under 10,000 or right around 10,000 and our social media falling now we’re starting to grow and get some traction. So anyone who’s coming to the brand now is like, you don’t have that small of an audience, but, but it, it really started very small. I didn’t even start an email list until mid 2018, almost two years into the business. Really wish I would could go back and change that. But so when I say I have always had a small audience, I think there’s so many of us that use that as an excuse.
LS (35:09):
Mm-Hmm.
LS (35:51):
And just in something in my spirit kind of just said, okay, Lindsey, you’re thinking about this. Like you’re doing it by yourself. You don’t need to know 50 women, you just need to know 10. Who would all be willing to invite five friends? And so I think that was always the way that I look at, I look at my events that way now, is how can we provide such an incredible experience and make it feel like something that you wouldn’t wanna come to this alone, you wanna invite, like even that, that cool girl that you haven’t really talked to in your Pilates class, but you just sense that like she’s got, she’s into the same things and maybe you two could connect and go to this event together. So it’s just built into our culture that you don’t, yes, you can come to this event if you don’t have a community and you can find your community, but once you’re in, it’s kind of like, okay, who are you bringing with you next year?
LS (36:43):
Because you wouldn’t wanna keep this to yourself. So in the early, early days, you know, we’ve we’ve also never run ads. So it’s all completely organic, small audience. So anyone who wants to come at me and say, Lindsey, here’s my excuse for why this won’t work,
LS (37:43):
But it’s not just because I woke up one day and had this huge email list. It’s seven years of creating the connection, listening. There’s no one who’s more in touch with her community maybe than me. And still to this day, individually answering dms and messages and, and really creating the experience that this isn’t my community, it’s theirs, and I’m just the one who’s gonna throw the party for all of us to come together. So I know that that’s a little, I I can just hear the people who are more left brained, like, but give us a strategy,
LS (38:34):
So in the past we would do like an early bird ticket sale, and then we would do, you know, just then from however long you have until the event, you’re just trying to get butts in seats, right? We’ve realized, again, data and numbers, which I have the most brilliant business partner, my COO, who is brilliant at this. And she really helps to bring, bring these numbers together. We noticed everyone buys tickets right before a deadline. So if you notice this trend within your own event promotion, just create more deadlines. So we create deadlines that are ticket price increases. That’s kind of like the mower conventional approach. So we’ll do, when we launch tickets in March, there will be a one week flash sale. You have seven days to get the best possible price. So it’s condensed into a really, really short timeframe. And we typically will sell 30% of our tickets in that one week.
LS (39:25):
Then it goes to our early bird, and that’s kind of like the longest stretch of time. It’s kind of like the Sahara Desert where you see a tumbleweed coming in that’s like one ticket sale every couple of days and you can’t freak out in this period time period. There’s just no urgency for people to buy. So until we have another price increase that we can really push toward, we create other deadlines. So one example of this is we host a speaker contest where two women get chosen to do like a five minute head talk, if you will. We call it my powerhouse moment. And you have to be a ticket holder in order to submit. And we, we realized that that was one of the biggest questions we would get asked from our, from our audience, from our community, was how do I become one of the speakers?
LS (40:10):
I would, my dream would be to speak on stage one day. So we, we gave them the opportunity and we built that into a reason why they, they should have their ticket earlier than maybe they were planning to purchase it. So yes, there are strategies, but it all really comes down to building that community and creating something that people can’t miss. It is, we actually now relate to it as our New Year’s Eve. That’s like the start of our year. And then we come back around and we celebrate the growth we’ve had in the previous year, you know, at the next event. That’s, that’s just kind of how we roll now. But,
AJV (40:42):
You know, part of that is, and I love that because I do think it’s like we’re just trained, our human brains are trained to go like, you know, fomo, right? It’s like, I want this good deal, don’t wanna miss this deadline. It’s like our brain thinks in those types of tranches. And, but what I love is that you’ve also incorporated some of the things that your community wants as incentives. Yeah. And you can only do that if you’re in touch with your community. You’re getting feedback from your community, you’re listening to your community, and you’re going, Hey, like let’s weave this in as an incentive to get people to move to action. ’cause We all need that. We all need some reason to get a, to move to action so that we don’t miss out on the things that we said we wanted. So I love that you’re also using the things that you already know about your community as a way of getting them to take action and in a, in a schedule that works for you, right? Because in the event business
LS (41:42):
Oh my goodness.
AJV (41:43):
You know, I love it.
LS (41:44):
Once you, once you become an event host, you realize, oh, okay, I was the jerk that was always waiting last minute to buy my ticket. And then you’re hosting an event realizing you have to pay all of those deposits months in advance. So if you, if you really wanna get on an event hosts good side, buy your ticket early
AJV (42:04):
LS (42:17):
That is so
AJV (42:18):
Genius. I was like, yeah, that’s true. And it’s like, yeah, you are gonna pay more if you wait till the last minute because it’s stresses everyone else out. So yeah, you’re gonna pay more if you pay. Yeah. You have less stress, it’s easier. But I think there’s a lot of those just nuances of going, like, I gotta get you to move to action so that we can move to action on the backend. And so how do we dually incentivize that? And I love that deadlines and discounts and speak on stage incentives. That’s like probably like a, a favorite that you mentioned of giving something to people that they’re asking for. And, you know, for so many people, what a cool life changing moment for them to like fulfill a dream that, you know, I love that. I think that’s so cool. I, I love all of this.
AJV (43:02):
And I know that you have your big events coming up and it’s in August and tickets are going to go on sale any day. So as this is being released, as, as you were listening to this right now we are timing the release of this also with your tickets going on sale for your 2024 Powerhouse Women event, which is going to be in Scottsdale on August 9th and 10th. What can you tell us about this event? So, I, I just, I’m an advocate of abundance mentality. Everyone who’s listening, if you wanna just go and watch how it’s done, right, like this would be like a great opportunity to do that. But tell us about this event and what, what should people expect?
LS (43:46):
Oh, you’re so kind. I I’m biased. So I always tell people this upfront. I am very biased. So I will tell you it is, it is the best day of my year. And it’s, it’s truly, it’s a culmination of everything we talked about today. If you are someone, if who is listening and you’re like, yeah, I, I wanna be more unapologetic about how big my dreams are and be in a space where that’s celebrated and where people aren’t intimidated or trying to talk me into a smaller vision, but I also wanna have real conversations about the challenges that come along the way. And I wanna meet my people. I wanna meet people who are on that same journey. Then we’ve brought them all together in a room for you. And it is happening August 9th and 10th. The 10th is the full day event. And then the ninth, we have a kickoff party, which is a pajama. It’s a big pajama party. We call it pajamas and Prosecco. And really, that even that’s intentional. It’s, it’s, it can be intimidating to walk into a room of powerful women, but it’s a little less intimidating if you get to meet them Friday night in fuzzy slippers. So, and they’re pajamas.
AJV (44:49):
We do
LS (44:49):
That in pajamas,
AJV (44:51):
In your pajamas. I love
LS (44:52):
It. It’s a little less intimidating. So it’s, it’s just the most beautiful celebration of ambition and authenticity. And we bring in amazing speakers, some who you’ve probably had on the podcast, Amy Porterfield, Jasmine Star has spoken on stage, Lori Harder, Patrice, Washington. We do have, I guess I can share it here. Jamie Kern Lima is coming this year, which I know you guys are helping That’s
AJV (45:16):
Awesome.
LS (45:16):
With her book launch. So we have a lot in store and I’m, I’m just so excited for it. Yeah. And the tickets will go on sale any day now. But like you said, even if you’re just listening to this and you just wanna take like a masterclass in how we are promoting this event, you know, tap into our email list, watch our social, you’ll see actively how we’re doing this. And I’m just so excited to pay it forward.
AJV (45:40):
I’m so excited for you and for this event and for this episode. So much goodness in this. And I love your heart behind everything and I love too, that you can appeal to the right brain and the left brain
AJV (46:30):
Mm-Hmm.
Ep 467: 8 Best Ways to Grow Your Podcast | Hala Taha Episode Recap
RV (00:09):
I wanna share with you my eight favorite techniques for growing your podcast. This is coming off my interview from Hala Taha, my friend talking about some of the technical sides and some of the, the detailed sort of tactical things that you can do to grow your podcast. And if you didn’t listen to the interview that her and I did, you have to go listen to this. Like, the interview blew my mind. There was so much about the world of podcasting that I did not even know. So what I’m gonna share with you are sort of like the eight conceptual things that have grown our podcast, right? And this podcast is the second time that we’ve grown a podcast to over a million downloads. And we only started this one a few years ago. So here we go. Let’s dive in real quick.
RV (00:55):
I’m just gonna give them to you the eight, my eight favorite tips for building a great podcast. So number one is appear on other podcasts as a guest. That is for sure. The fastest way to grow your podcast is to appear as a guest on other people’s shows. I remember interviewing Jordan Harbinger on this podcast. We actually talked about this. He started a show many years ago called The Art of Charm, grew it to millions and millions of downloads left the show or lost the show, and then started his own show, the Jordan Harbinger Show. And he rebuilt the whole thing like in a matter of a year. And the way he did it was by appearing on other people’s shows, like, so that is the fastest way. And part of that, right, is because people want to stay in the platform they’re already in.
RV (01:43):
Like, it’s harder to move somebody who’s like an Instagram follower to follow you on a podcast or a YouTube subscriber to like follow you on Facebook. People like to stay in the format that they are in. Now, you wanna try to move everyone, obviously, to your email list. But anyways, moving people from one podcast to another is much easier than moving somebody from some other platform to your podcast. So guest on other people’s show, which leads to both number two and three in my list, which are strategies for how to achieve, number one, to get book on number on other people’s shows. So number two, strategy is to help book all of your guests from your show onto other people’s shows. Yes, that that’s, I’m, I said that correctly, that one of the best ways for you to grow your podcast is for you to spend time and energy helping all of your guests who come on your show to get booked on other shows. Now, at first you might go, why? Like, how does, how does that work? Like how does that make sense? How does it grow my show? The reason it grows your show is because it causes you to network naturally with other podcasters,
RV (02:59):
And that forces you to build relationships with other podcasters, and you add value and you build relationships with all of your guests. So helping your podcast guests get booked on other shows is one of the fastest ways that you can build a relationship with somebody. And so what happens is they, you become friends, and so they start referring other guests to be on your show. And they start fu referring you to be on other shows, because when they go on shows, the the shows they’re off and on will ask ’em and they’ll say, Hey, who, who, who should have me on? Who, who show should I be on? And who should I have on this show? Which leads me to number three which is asking, asking every time you’re on a podcast as a guest, say, are there any other podcasts that you think I would be a good fit for?
RV (03:51):
That’s what you want to ask every time that you’re a guest. And similarly, when you’re the interviewer and you interview someone on your show, you should always ask them, who else do you know that would be a great fit for this show? Right? You gotta make the ask. You gotta make the ask. So that’s really, really key. Now, number four, here’s the secret to getting big guests. Okay? The secret to getting big guests is to offer them help in their time of need. Okay? So on any given day, a a an invite for a celebrity to come on a podcast is sort of an annoying, disruptive thing that they have to say no to or turn down, or they say yes, and it kind of throws ’em off the rhythm, right? Some, some, for a lot of high profile people, that’s, that’s how it occurs.
RV (04:44):
It’s like, I, I I’m not in podcast mode, so you don’t really wanna ask for that if you don’t already have a relationship or a warm referral or introduction to them. So what you wanna do is wait for their time of need, right? And you go, ah, they just had a book launch come out, or they just had a new TV show come out, or they just, they just, you know, they’re doing something right and you’re keeping an eye on the, the guest that you really want. I call this the Gretchen Rubin story because this is how Gretchen Rubin and I genuinely became friends. Like I for years admired her and thought she was so great and, and, you know, both academic and, you know, and also like in the personal development world and just really sweet and a fantastic writer. And, and so, you know, I waited until she had a book coming out, which is the easiest time to do it, right?
RV (05:29):
Everybody wants to go on shows when they have their book coming out. So I almost always wait until they have a book coming out, and that’s when I’ll ask them, because that’s when they’re most likely to say yes. In fact, here’s a little advanced ninja tip from one of our brand builders, group strategists. This is Matt LaBree. So Matt, this is a shout out to you brother. What he does for his show is he actually looks on Amazon at all the books that are scheduled for publication in like the next three months. And he, that’s how he picks his guest to come on his show. So is so smart. He’s getting them even before their new book comes out, because that’s when they’re doing all of their pre-launch prep. And he’ll make a commitment to say, Hey, let me interview you before your launch and I will help you during your book launch.
RV (06:15):
I’ll publish this episode on your launch. Relatedly, the other thing you wanna do with big guests is, is promise them that you’ll do the full court press on promotion. Tell ’em, you know, I’ll email my whole list. I’ll, I’ll post multiple times on social, like, I’ll tell everybody about you. And that’s a big deal because even if there’s a really big podcast that might not perform as well for someone as a small podcast where the host is super enthusiastic about the guest and willing to like, promote heavily the guest being on their show. So that’s the key to getting big guests, is help them in their time of need and, and promise to do a full court promotional, pro press for them, and then, and then do it. Relatedly number five. So here is another simple step any podcaster can do that we so often overlook.
RV (07:11):
Email your list every time you publish a new podcast. Email your list and tell them you have a new podcast. And if you think that’s emailing them too often, then I would say, well, then your podcast must not be that good, right? Nobody gets annoyed at like having too much like valuable information that’s hyper relevant to them being sent to them. So, and podcasts take a lot of work to, to produce and schedule the time and prepare for the interviews and find the guests and, you know, record and edit and blah, blah, blah. So what I want you to do is make sure that you don’t overlook the step of emailing and telling your people like, Hey, we have a new show, a new episode that just went live. You gotta check it out. And if you’re publishing your podcast on YouTube, it’s especially important that you, you email and you push traffic to your YouTube video the moment it goes live, like the moment it’s published, because part of the YouTube algorithm is a affected by how quickly a video is getting views.
RV (08:17):
You can, you can force that by driving social and you, you know, your, your email and your social list directly to YouTube to sort of spike the algorithm. So make sure you’re doing that. Number six, make it easy for your guests to promote their appearance. Make it easy for your guests to promote their appearance. How do you do that? Basically by giving them beautiful assets that make them look like the star from when they were on your show. So think about this for a second. Everybody has to feed the social media beast, right? Like anyone who is, you know, a con, a mission-driven messenger of any type and is like, very few people love being on social media every day. So it’s a chore that we all have to do, is we have to put out relevant content on social. So if you can create an asset that’s not about you so much, and not about your show, like take a back seat and highlight your guests.
RV (09:22):
Make your guest the star of the post, draw attention to your guest and give them assets that they can promote. Or even if they won’t promote ’em, hopefully you can, you can post it and you can tag them. And a lot of times they’ll share your post from their post post. We also related to this, we email our guests every time the show goes live. That’s an important step here, is just alerting them that, hey, like, we prerecorded this show two weeks ago, or two months ago, it’s going, it just went live. And we let ’em know like, Hey please review first of all the page, make sure that we didn’t spell anything wrong. You know, make sure that it looks the way you want it to. If there’s any changes, let us know. And also, here’s an asset if you, if it’s valuable to you, this is one of the highlights from the interview where we thought you really looked like a star.
RV (10:16):
We, we’ve gone ahead and edited it for you and put it together. But it has to look more like their branding than your branding. No one’s gonna share something that looks like your logo and your show and all that. You gotta take a backseat if you want them to share it, right? You can share it. You make your own assets that are more about your branding and you’re featuring them to your audience. But if you want your guests to share it, you, the asset needs to look more like them and less like you. So give your, give your guests assets to help them promote, make it easy for them to promote. Number seven, consistency. Consistency, consistency, consistency, right? I, I could not put this list together and not talk about the importance of just being consistent. Almost every single podcast does not have linear growth.
RV (11:07):
It has exponential growth. It’s it’s the hockey stick curve. It starts slow, slow, slow. And I would say you should consider publishing your podcast for a year and not even look at the stats, because that’s how long it takes to even start to begin to get traction. But like, if you’ve been publishing for six months and you look at your stats, you’re probably gonna be depressed and deflated. But if you keep going for like another year and 18 months in, it’s gonna start to catch flight. And by two years it’s gonna be become significant after two and a half or three years. If you’re doing all of these things, your podcast is gonna be a full out asset that produces leads and credibility and trust for you for the rest of your life. It’s gonna be the greatest door opener you have for networking to high profile relationships, to book deals, to speaking engagements to clients to just attracting friends, to just making an impact in the world around the world globally. If you just stick with it, A huge part of the podcast game is just not giving up. I mean, that’s a huge part of the personal brand game in general is just not giving up. So, consistency. Consistency. And then number eight, and this is my favorite. So I, I saved this for last, although I have a bonus tip for you. Number eight is move the audience emotionally.
RV (12:41):
Move the audience emotionally. A podcast is intimate, you’re talking right in people’s ears, right there. Your voice is in their head. And so you wanna become a master of emotions. You wanna become a master at using your voice, telling stories, delivering frameworks, pillar points, all things that we teach you. For those of you that are members, brand builders group inside of captivating content, right? Where we talk about the advanced storytelling mechanics, we talk about the six pillar point formulas. We talk about the 17 thought leadership frameworks. We talk about the, the, the exercise and engagement list, all all of these things, behavior drivers, all of these techniques for crafting amazing content and delivering it. You, you wanna apply that to your podcast. Your podcast is stage time. And what makes a great presenter is giving the audience an emotional experience. One where they’re inspired, right?
RV (13:39):
They’re moved, they’re proud, they’re, they’re challenged. They’re saddened, they’re they’re scared, they’re frightened you know, they’re provoked. Like move the audience emotionally. The, the use your words and, and your stories and your guest stories. And whenever there is an a chance to have an emotional moment, zoom in on that moment. Don’t skip over the emotional parts. People want to be moved emotionally. That creates a visceral bond, visceral attraction. And one of, one of my, one of my favorite quotes from one of our brand builders group clients, so this is not a Rory Vaden quote I did help them come up with this in one of our strategy sessions, but this is, this is their quote, it’s from the attention ears from Hillary Billings is she says, remember when people get emotional, they get promotional. When people get emotional, they get promotional.
RV (14:32):
That’s from Hillary Billings, from attention ears and Marshall, they that, that’s, you know, one of their pillar points. That is so good and so true. When people get emotional, they get promotional. So you gotta move your audience emotionally. And then number nine, bonus tip for you in terms of how to build a great podcast is interview your top prospects. Interview your top prospects. Even if your podcast never grows, even if it never becomes an amazing networking opportunity, even if it never becomes like a super loyal audience of like lots of listeners, which it will, if you do, it will over time consistently, it’s still the most amazing prospecting tool, I promise you. Take it from someone who went door to door for five years, spent two years calling over the phones to, to enterprises, and spent like five years walking in office parks and cold calling.
RV (15:25):
No cold call. Like if you’re cold calling somebody on the phone in their office knocking on their door, like 99% of the people are gonna slam the door on you. But when you show up in someone’s inbox and you say, Hey, I’m the host of this podcast. I would, I’ve been following your company, I think you’re so brilliant and I’d love to share your insights with the world. Would you be open to an interview with me? Like, who says no to that? Like nobody. So now all of a sudden you get to learn from them and you get to build a relationship by giving to them first, celebrating them, promoting them, adding value to them first. And now after the podcast is over and you’ve built rapport, now you can have an actual conversation as humans and maybe some that can go somewhere. So podcasting is the most magnificent Trojan horse prospecting strategy, I’ll call it the Trojan horse prospecting strategy of all time.
RV (16:22):
So it blows my mind that more business development people are not using this tactic, but it’s also, it’s also what I can use to prospect other podcasts to be on, right? Like, if there’s a podcast I want to be on, I don’t reach out to them and say, Hey, will you have me on the show? I reach out to them and say, Hey, can I have you on my show? Can I promote you? Can I highlight you? Can I celebrate you? Can I tell the whole world how brilliant you are? And let me do that first, and then maybe there’s a chance that we’ll develop a relationship from there. So there you have it. Nine of my, my favorite tips on how to build a great podcast. I promise if you do those, it will work over time. I promise it can’t not work. So I want you to share this episode with someone you know, who either should start a podcast or who has a podcast, share this with them so that they have this checklist to make sure that they’re doing it for themselves. And in the meantime, keep coming back. We’re always looking to give you the best of the best that we can to help you build and monetize your personal brand. And I hope that we get a chance to work with you as one of our mission driven, mission-driven messengers, who will one time become one of the members of our community. But until then, keep coming back. Stay tuned. We’re so grateful for you. See you next time.
Ep 466: Secrets of Growing Your Podcast with Hala Taha
RV (00:02):
I have to tell you that whenever I meet someone who is crushing social media, I’m always like, how do you do that? What is working? Dah, dah, dah, duh. Like, I’ve never, it’s one of the things, ironically of building a personal brand that like I’ve never been that good at naturally. We’re probably more well known for, for making a lot of money from a few, from having very few followers than we are from having lots of followers and reaching lots of people. And I was introduced to the guest, you’re about to meet Hala Taha from a couple really good friends that I I really admire. And I’ve heard several people say so many great things about her. I’ve gotten to know her. And she is amazing. She is super duper sharp, so she is known. Some, some people call her the podcast princess.
RV (00:48):
She’s the host of a huge podcast called The Young and Profiting, or the Yap Podcast, young and Profiting podcast, which is very regularly the number one business and entrepreneurship podcast across all different apps. So you’ll see her podcast charting. And then she’s also the, the founder and the CEO of Yap Media, which is both a podcast network with some of the biggest podcasters in the world are on her network. And then she also has, and this, you know, they’re like an award-winning social media, full service podcast, social media marketing agency for top podcasters, celebrities, CEOs. She’s had so many celebrities on her show as a guest. And she’s probably known. I mean, she’s also known for being a top top influencer on LinkedIn. So anyways, I was like, gotta have her on the show. Gotta learn from her. Gotta get free coaching for me at the same time for all of you. So, Hala, welcome to the show.
HT (01:48):
Wow, what an incredible introduction, Rory. I’m so excited for this conversation.
RV (01:53):
I, I seriously am so impressed by you. And you know, it’s one thing, there’s plenty of people with lots of followers, but when, you know, like Jenna Kucher or Julie Solomon or like the, like the Marshall Goldsmith, these people that you have worked with that, you know, and I know a lot of them, they don’t lightly throw around a, like, compliment behind the scenes. And so I was super impressed before I met you. The more I’ve gotten to know you, I’m just like, man, you are just so sharp. And I feel like we, we have very complimentary superpowers. So I wanna start with podcasting. Mm-Hmm.
HT (03:13):
Yeah, what a great question. So, first of all, you, it’s never too late to start a podcast. When I started a podcast six years ago, people told me it was too late. Now I’m literally at the top of Apple charts every single day, right? When it comes to growing your podcast, really what, what you need to think about is how do I create the least friction possible for people to subscribe to my show? Hmm. And when you think about that simple question, it’s really, I need to reach podcasters where listeners where they are, I need to reach these podcast listeners where they already are. I don’t need to try to convert them from some other platform to decide to listen to podcasts, to decide to listen to my podcast. That’s a really friction, full experience, but experience. Instead, I can guest on other podcasts like we’re doing right now, where people are already listening to a podcast app that they like, they’re already bought into the idea of podcasts, right?
HT (04:05):
I can do commercials on other podcasts and I can actually track and see based on the commercials that played another podcasts who went and then downloaded my show and started listening to my show. I can look at all the different podcast players out there and see what advertising opportunities are on all the different podcast players. There’s about 70 different apps. Apple and, and Spotify make up about 60% of the market share, but 40% of the market share is made up of 70 other apps that you can advertise on Android apps, castbox Google Play, you know, there’s a, a number of them you can think about. What are the ways that you can proactively influence the algorithms of the ranking charts so that you can rank and get discovered through ranking on Apple and Spotify. So you just have to keep thinking about how can I actually reach podcast listeners in the podcast apps? And a lot of it has to do with actually collaborating with other podcasters, which is why this podcast space is very collaborative and you hear a lot about like, swaps and trades, because the number of audience members who actually are active podcast listeners, they’re sort of finite and they listen to seven or so shows. So you wanna be one of those seven shows and you wanna get into that person’s ecosystem.
RV (05:16):
A amazing, so that, I think like you just gave, I think what’ll be an outline for the whole, like our whole interview together. ’cause I wanna dive deep on those, on those specific things, right? So, so first of all, part of what I want to know is how do you know if a podcast is legit? Hmm. Like what, what tool, what metric do you use? Like, you know, you can kind of go on Instagram and see how many views someone has on their reels, how many comments do they have? Like, you get a sense of like how real the whole thing is. Podcasting feels a little bit tougher to me. Mm-Hmm.
HT (06:05):
Oh yeah. So first of all, I just wanna call it out. There’s like a lot of fraud going on within the podcast industry. There’s a lot of people bloating their downloads using virtual machines to load their downloads. Something called coin marketing to blow their downloads. So a lot of fraud going on in the industry. One of the first things that I look to, ’cause I have to basically accept podcasters into my network. So I can just give you the process that I vet my own podcasters before I totally sign them. Basically what I do is I look at their, first of all, they’re Apple reviews. It is a huge red flag for a podcast to be like ranking or saying that they have, let’s say even over a hundred thousand downloads a month. Which, if you’re getting a hundred thousand downloads a month as a, as a podcaster, you’re really in the top 0.05% of podcasts, like four real.
HT (06:52):
It’s very rare for even like the biggest shows in the world to get like 700,000 downloads a month or a million downloads a month. So it’s not this thing where podcasters are getting a billion downloads per month or a couple million. And that’s a normal thing. That’s not normal in the podcast world. Actually, a real show with organic following a big show will have anywhere from a hundred thousand to maybe a million million five downloads a month. And that’s sort of the cap on the audio side, right? Like right now. So it’s like just knowing that what the realistic numbers actually are. Sure. looking to see on their reviews. If you are somebody who says that you get over a hundred thousand downloads a month and you don’t at least have two or so new reviews from the month, that is a huge red flag for me.
HT (07:33):
I go on people’s reviews and I see that the last review they had was last year. There’s no way you have active listeners in the last review you had as last year, right? So it’s like, if you go look at a podcast like mine, you’ll see that I have like dozens of reviews every month. Now if you have hundreds of reviews, that’s you prob somebody probably did a contest or it’s maybe not legit. But if you have dozens of like dozen or so real reviews every month, that shows me that you have an active audience, it’s really hard for every like 10,000 listeners you get a review or even more, right? So it’s really rare to get a review, but if you have none, that’s a huge red flag. Okay. So that’s number one. Number two is there’s different rankings. So there’s Chartable podcast rankings, there’s Apple, there’s Spotify, those are the main three.
HT (08:16):
Apple and Spotify are trending charts that are gonna show you who’s getting new downloads every day and new subscribers every day. And the chartable charts are actually download and reach charts. So if you wanna understand somebody’s actual reach, you wanna see their chartable rankings and see what is their reach on a global level, on their category level. And then you’ll get an understanding of how big that podcast is out of all the podcasts in the world. So like, if you go on Chartable, I’m in the top 1000 of podcasts and most of the podcasts in my network are in the top 1000 of podcasts. The bigger you are, you might be the top 500, and that’s actually a direct relationship to your IAB certified downloads across all the different apps. Not just Apple, not Spotify, all the different apps. So at one point when I was not huge on Apple, I would rank really high on Chartable ’cause I’m the biggest podcaster on castbox, but I had a very little following on Apple, so I wasn’t even ranking on Apple.
HT (09:08):
So Chartable gives you an idea of actually how many downloads you have, no matter what app it is, and is directly correlated to your reach as a podcaster. So I look at Chartable downloads, then I look at Apple and Spotify to see like if they’re trending, if they’re growing, if they’re hot, or if they’re sort of like outdated. And then the other thing is to look at the timing in which the person started the podcast. If you are a podcaster like Louis Howes or Jordan Harbinger, or somebody who started Amy Porterfield, Jenna Kutcher, some of the people in my network, they started a long time ago, they’re likely to have more organic downloads than a podcaster that started even three years ago. That’s ranking at the same level because they’ve got all these like, legacy subscribers from when there was no competition. So just like so many different factors to look at.
HT (09:51):
The other thing I I look at is to see like, how are their reels performing? Do they get real comments on their reels and social media? Because all of that is correlated. It’s, it’s pretty unusual for somebody to have like a huge podcast but then have very little engagement on other channels. That usually signifies to me that either they got really lucky, they’ve got an awesome podcast topic that everybody’s searching for. In that case, it is legitimate that they could have no so social following, but if it’s not it, that seems very suspicious to me that they would suddenly have a podcast following, but no other following on other platforms. Mm-Hmm.
RV (10:22):
HT (10:25):
Like, there
RV (10:25):
Are like, like there are, there are a few of those. So that’s interesting. Okay. So charitable is where you’re looking. And just for those of you that are listening,
HT (10:59):
So IAB is basically this bureau that determines what is the standard download, and then all the platforms sort of align to the standard to count what a real download is. Mm-Hmm.
RV (11:13):
Yeah. Okay. So, so I wanna talk about advertising. So it’s interesting you said to grow your podcast. You run, I forget what you called it. I don’t think if you said commercials, but you, but you know, more or less you’re, you’re running ads on other people’s shows. Yes. so how do you go about doing that? So let’s say you find someone in your niche, right? Like, let’s say you’re a, you know, whatever, like a, a lifestyle influencer who does like home decor or something. Do you go, you basically go on chartable or listen notes, you figure out, here’s the podcast I want to be on, and then you just like DM the person and say, what are your rates? Or like, is there a more formal way of going about that?
HT (11:57):
There’s lots of different ways to go about it. So now there’s a new platform called Swap fm. There’s also called a pla a, a platform called pod, which was like a legacy platform doing similar things where you can basically solicit that you’re, you, you want to buy commercials on other podcasts and set up trades on pod, you buy the commercials on swap fm, you set up trades if you want to just reach out to somebody cold what I would do is look up somebody in your category or just anybody who you know has a podcast that you feel like has a relevant audience for you, reach out to them on Instagram. You can, you know, get their email from LinkedIn, like scrape their email if you want, reach out to them on LinkedIn. And then you basically have to plan what the swap is.
HT (12:40):
So usually it’s an equal impression swap. You figure out how many downloads do you get a month, how many downloads do I get a month? Again, you wanna make sure it’s a legitimate podcast so that you’re not trading with somebody who has like a fraudulent audience or doesn’t really have an audience and that it’s a fair trade. So you might say like, Hey, I’m gonna trade 50,000 impressions with you this month. Now Jordan Harbinger is one of my mentors, and we do trades all the time. His show is like five times bigger than mine. He’s one of these legacy podcasters. Even though we both rank at the top of the charts, again, those are trending not based on reach. So, hi, even though we’re ranking the same, he gets five times more downloads than I do. So when I do one commercial for every five commercials I do for him, he does just one commercial for me.
HT (13:24):
And we do something called an impression based swap. So even if you are a smaller podcaster, you can actually trade up with bigger podcasters by doing more commercials for them. So the impression amount doesn’t have to be only what you can achieve. You basically figure out how many commercials do I need to run in order to hit the impressions that I wanna trade. And so you, you do those types of commercials. Then on Chartable you can set up something called a smart promo campaign where basically you just set up a pixel on your hosting provider, same with the other podcaster. And you can basically see who went and listened to the podcaster’s commercial and then came to your podcast and downloaded your podcast. And you can see how many downloads you got from that trade. It’s not directly correlated with subscribers, but it’s a good indicator of who came and subscribed to your show as a result of the trade. And then the shows that do well, you wanna lean in and keep doing trades with them until you don’t see that return anymore.
RV (14:21):
Fascinating. Okay. So that’s what I was gonna ask you. So you basically, there’s a, you said on the smart pro promo campaign inside of Chartable, there’s some type of a pixel that you set up that like an auto, like an auditory pixel somehow?
HT (14:34):
Yeah, basically it’s like on the, the episode itself I, I don’t recall if it’s like actually setting up a chartable pixel across like all your hosting or the episode itself. I’m not, I don’t remember. ’cause I don’t haven’t done this in a while, like myself, I have a big team now. But yeah, you set up a pixel and it basically just tracks the episode and then you have all the conversion data.
RV (14:54):
Okay. So, but when you were starting, you would do this and then you would see, oh, this podcast that I either was on or like that I bought, I either did a swap or I bought a commercial on their show. We could, you could track that with somehow this pixel and then go, oh, I wanna buy more ads there until that, just, until that starts to dwindle
HT (15:13):
Basically. Totally. And now Swap FM allows you to do this in a way less technical way. So that’s why I was saying like you could also just use swap fm now to do it, which is like, I’m getting my whole network up on swap fm. So we could just do this internally really seamlessly.
RV (15:27):
Uhhuh. Yeah, that’s so, that’s so good. The so now when you, once you, once you, once you start to grow, like how much do you charge for podcasts? So this is another thing that really comes up is like, when, when is your podcast big enough to charge advertisers? How much do you charge? Where do you find the advertisers? Like do you know that, that, that whole thing and like, you know, kind of give a maybe if, if you’re able to give like a small, like a smaller show just starting out, like here’s when you’re first ready and then over time they become, they, they probably join like a network like yours. Right? And that’s part of what you, you handle. So give us like the small and the large short term, long term.
HT (16:16):
Yeah. So as like a individual podcaster, you can start at any point to try and get direct sponsorships. There’s no limitation, right? Especially if you have a really niche audience. Like let’s say you’re a, you’re a lawyer and you’ve got an audience, and even if it’s a hundred lawyers are listening to every episode, you can proactively reach out to LegalZoom and try to get a sponsorship because even though you’ve got a small audience, it’s exactly who they’re targeting. So they may wanna work with you and then advertise on your podcast or socials and whatever else as like a micro influencer of that specific niche. So the more niche you are, the more that you can get started on monetizing, I believe, right away. Okay. Got it. Now if you have a broad audience, typically if you, if you wanna get advertisers, you’ve gotta really wait to getting about 20,000 downloads per week or about 80,000 downloads a month.
HT (17:08):
That is typically the first step of you getting sponsorships would be to apply to a podcast platform like advertise, cast or gumball to try to do your sponsorships direct. And the limitations of that platform is 20 to 25,000 downloads a week for you to be accepted to start getting direct deals from a podcast. They call themselves a network where they just basically accept any show that gets that amount of downloads and they’ve got like hundreds of shows and they’re just this like middle man between agencies and brands. And if you do well for them, they’ll get you a lot of deals. So like the first step is to get that many downloads and then plug in if you have an internal team to, to like an advertised cast or gumball and start doing direct outreach that is monetizing on your own. Now, the next level would be to join a network like mine, whose job is to not only get you sponsorships, but also to host your show on their hosting provider to flight your ads and to actually grow your show through growth tactics and swaps and, and whatever it is.
HT (18:12):
So a network has other incentives. They’re, they’re exclusively driving your brand deals negotiating on your behalf, soliciting directly and through agencies on your behalf. But then you’re also hosting their show, growing their show flighting their ads and doing other services for them. So a network is a more like exclusive thing. And typically, you know, for my network, for example, we’re looking for people with 150,000 downloads per month or more, maybe a hundred thousand downloads. Podcasts is actually getting there’s been a big Apple update. So a lot of people’s downloads on Apple have actually shrunk 30 to 40%. So our tier to let you in the network has significantly lowered because in November, most of the legacy podcasters out there on Apple lost 30 to 40% of their downloads. So now in general, standards are a little lower in terms of download counts.
RV (19:04):
So there was just like an Apple update, just like a Google SEO update and it just crushed everybody
HT (19:08):
Down. There was an Apple update in November where basically there’s no more auto downloading if somebody has not listened to your show in like six months. So a lot of these older podcasters that had these legacy audiences, it turns out there was just a lot of auto downloads happening. Mm-Hmm. And now it’s better for advertisers because it’s actually real listeners who are active listeners of the show, but these legacy podcasters thought they were getting a million downloads a month, turns out they might be getting 500,000 or 600,000. And so there was a big, big impact in the industry and caused a lot of like back and forth with advertisers because of the, the download discrepancies.
RV (19:41):
Mm-Hmm.
HT (20:26):
Pod yeah, pod you could also use advertise, cast gumball, the other platforms that I was mentioning as
RV (20:33):
A, as a, as a buyer. Yes. And then roughly like, is there a, is there like a rough budget that you would apply or, you know, is there kinda like a minimum that you have to spend? Or like how do you even come up with
HT (20:46):
That number? It’s just based on the size of the podcast. So all advertising and costs is very standard on the audio side of the podcast industry. So it’s all CPM based, it’s cost per 1000 downloads. So, you know, if you’ve got a show that gets a hundred thousand downloads, you wanna buy Midroll on that show, it costs $25 per 1000. You’re spending $250 per commercial on that show. And typically these shows will have like a three flight minimum just so that they aren’t only getting paid two 50 to do a commercial. Podcasters are hesitant to just do like one off deal. So it’s like there might be a three flight minimum. So you might have to pay $750 for three commercials on that show.
RV (21:27):
Uhhuh I think that,
HT (21:30):
I think I did the math wrong. I think it’s $2,500. The commercial, not two 50.
RV (21:34):
You’re saying $25 per thousand?
HT (21:38):
Yeah, 25 times a hundred. So that would be 2,500 per commercial.
RV (21:42):
Yeah. So se so you’re saying, so then it would be 7,500 bucks is what you would pay to have, like,
HT (21:49):
And you’d get 300,000 impressions total.
RV (21:52):
Okay. Yeah, the math, there’s the zeros, it’s like the zeros, it’s
HT (21:56):
RV (21:59):
Okay. They can, we can go, we can go back and rewind. I, I’m okay. I, I’m, I’m following you. So what is dynamic insertion and explain to us what, what is dynamic insertion? How do you do it? Why does it matter? And if you don’t use dynamic insertion, then what, what, what, what happens then?
HT (22:23):
Sure. So when podcasting first came out and there was advertisers, people would bake in their ads. What does that mean? You would actually record an ad and it would be embedded in your podcast episode. Now, as all these podcasts came out and they put out episode after episode, what they found out is that a lot of people will go back and listen to older episodes. And so there’s all of these downloads that people are listening to, but they’re listening to old commercials from sponsors that are no longer actually paying the podcaster, right? So these baked in spots caused a problem because you were unable to monetize your podcast fully based on the new people that were listening. So dynamic ad insertion fixes that problem. So basically if I get a hundred thousand downloads per month and I get an advertiser to sponsor my show, that means that the ad will play across every single episode. No matter if it’s a new episode or an old episode, it will play across the podcaster’s entire catalog. So every week I have sponsors and I record my commercials, and the commercials that I record get played across every single episode, no matter if it’s episode one or episode 400 on my podcast they hear the same commercial. So that’s basically what it is. It’s just infl the commercial across the entire catalog.
RV (23:40):
How do you set it? So like, what does it take to set that up? Because like when you first start, you go, oh, I’m just recording on my microphone, I’m uploading, you know, I’m uploading a file and we’re off and running. But then in order to get dynamic insertion going, what, is there like a tool that you use for that?
HT (23:54):
Yeah, so there’s two hosting platforms that allow you to do this. Primarily it’s megaphone and art. 19, if you’re on those platforms, you’re like basically getting ready for monetization. You’re a podcaster who’s getting like 80,000 plus downloads a month, like, and you’re basically ready for this step. So moving to a hosting provider that allows you to do dynamic ad insertion and allows you to plug into a programmatic advertiser like Spotify ad network where you basically can have prerecorded commercials play on your podcast. Okay. So the way that you set it up is you basically have to decide where you’re going to be inserting all of these dynamic ad commercials. So for example, a typical podcast might have like two pre-rolls, maybe two mid roll breaks with two ads each, and two post rolls. So all those insertion markers need to be added in your hosting provider.
HT (24:42):
Then once you get hosted ads, you have to record those commercials, and then you basically flight them in the insertion markers that you’ve set up in your hosting provider. And then for any open inventory you can basically put that up for programmatic ads to say Spotify ad network. If anything’s open and it’s not filled with hosted ads, they’ll play a prerecorded commercial in that spot if they find a brand that matches. So that’s what podcasters are doing. They’re basically setting up insertion markers. They’re getting their hosted ads either from their network or directly, they’re placing the ads in the proper insertion markers, and then anything open they’re leaving for programmatic ads if they’ve turned that on.
RV (25:23):
Yeah. So I’m gonna officially call this that you who are listening have had your mind blown many times,
RV (26:18):
And I, I’m gonna, I’m gonna tell people what to do at some point if they want to get in touch with you. In fact I’ll go ahead and share that now. So what I want you all to do, if, if you wanna get in touch with Holla, you know, you can reach out to us in [email protected] and I just want you to put Yap in the subject line, YAP for Young and Profiting. And then it’s possible that you would go, Hey, I want, you know, maybe you wanna apply to be a part of her network. But the other thing that she does is that she does high-end, sort of white glove, full service social media management. Mm-Hmm,
HT (26:59):
Sure. So like Rory said, I’m the podcast princess, but I’m also the LinkedIn queen, so I know everything about that platform. I’m running the number one LinkedIn marketing agency. I run most of the influencers on LinkedIn right now and has have been responsible for growing dozens of influencers on that platform. So essentially I have a white glove, social media and podcast agency. We stand up a dedicated team for all of our clients, which includes an account manager, a ghost writer, a graphic designer, a video editor, a community engagement specialist. We do sales funnels on Instagram and LinkedIn, and that is definitely our secret sauce. So we’re doing dms all day to try to drive growth and conversions for our clients. Most of my clients are in this space of being like an author, a speaker, a big entrepreneur, a coach.
HT (27:47):
They’ve got courses. This type of a person does really well with us. Anybody who basically has a converting offer all 10 x anything that they’re doing, especially on a platform like LinkedIn. And then we also are experts in creating podcasts, growing podcasts, and then eventually monetizing podcasts including YouTube and simulcast. So those are our, like, main areas is that we’re the number one LinkedIn marketing agency, also crushing it for people on Instagram podcasts and YouTube. And we do everything end to end where we basically have like a very intensive onboarding process. We’re managing your brand, your voice, your graphics. I have an amazing video team, creative team, and essentially everything that you guys see, like on my platforms, it’s like basically my team doing it and we do it for other people. So it’s, it’s incredible. I love my team. We’ve got a huge team, 50 people plus around the world. And we’d love to speak
RV (28:42):
To you. And I think, and, and what I would say there is, is going, it’s also like, you know, you’re, it’s an investment in a team and, but rather than having to hire and manage a team yourself, you can just hire Holla and her team, and then you, they go build the team. And so if you’re in that, if, if you’re in that mode of like, someone make my pain, go away, like, just deal with all of this, and you go, I’m, I’m serious, you know, I’m ready to invest. So email, email us info at bramble, just group.com, put, put YAP app in the subject line. Or you can reach out to Holla, holla and tell her that you found our found, found us here, whatever. But that is something I wanna make you aware of. ’cause That’s not what we do at Brand Builders Group, right?
RV (29:24):
Like we are a strategy firm and we get asked a lot about execution and social media is a real big pain point. So that was part of why I wanted to have her on the show. And I wanted to just give you a taste of like, you know, the, the way, the way that, the way that I talk about like book launches and speaking, as you can clearly see, it’s the way that this woman talks about podcasting and social media. I mean, it’s, it’s deep, deep, deep expertise. So holla, thanks for the time. I mean, you blew my mind. I, I’ve
HT (29:52):
Podcasting thanks
RV (29:53):
For a long, long time. So I just am really, you know, grateful to know you and grateful for your wisdom and you’ll look forward to staying connected.
HT (30:01):
Likewise. I really enjoyed my time with you. Thanks Rory.
Ep 465: Turning Your Most Embarrassing Moments Into Your Most Relatable Moments | Henna Pryor Episode Recap
AJV (00:02):
So I just did a podcast interview with a new friend of mine, Henna Pryor, and she’s the author of a new book called Good Awkward, which is ultimately how to be good at Being Awkward. And I was kind of inspired to do this post after this conversation when I sat back and just realized for a moment that most people that I know in my life avoid awkward moments like the plague, right? Like embarrassing. Like even people go, that’s your most embarrassing moment. It’s like even recalling your most embarrassing moment can make you blush or, you know, give you goosebumps. It’s like, oh my gosh, I cannot believe that happened. And this whole conversation is about how to embrace awkwardness in order to give you an upper hand, an advantage on connecting with your audience becoming more relatable enh enhancing vulnerability, increasing authenticity. There’s all these different things, but at the end of the day, what it really comes down to in my perception is learning how to be comfortable with yourself and yourself is gonna make mistakes yourself is awkward, right?
AJV (01:12):
Like we do awkward things. We say awkward things, we are awkward different stages of life and some, some of us longer than others. And if you really think about it, those are the moments that make you the most different, the most unique. But yet we’re we’re also, those are also the ones that we try to like hide under the covers the most. Like, lock in a closet and go, let’s just forget like that three year period of my life where I had a perm and wore Snoopy shirts every day. Like, let’s just, let’s just close that door and pretend that never happened and or that that stage of business where I can’t believe I was doing this. And I have to tell you guys this story, I have a few stories I wanna share actually, about, you know, the things that make you vulnerable are the things that people fall in love with.
AJV (01:59):
They are the things that make you relatable. Because the truth is, regardless of how much, you know, there are things you don’t know. And regardless of how good you are at some things, there are some things you’re not good at. And when we see is what you’re good at, it makes us feel like, man, I, I just can’t be myself around that person. Like, they’re too smart or they’re too rich, or they’re, they’re too this or they’re too that. And all it does is create a level of discomfort for those around you. And the truth is, you’re not like that at all, right? It’s like you’re goofy when no one’s around and you make all kinds of silly mistakes, but no one knows about ’em. But if they did, they would love you even more. And I feel so, so overly confident in that. So I’ve gotta tell you two quick things. One is a story about me and Rory. And one is a story just about me, of just a little bit of a example, proof of how the awkwardness of your day, of your life, of your business, of your journey is often what will be
AJV (02:58):
The number one thing that helps expedite your connection with your audience. And so about two years ago Rory and I were going through all of the early footage from Brand Builders Group, you know, brand Builders Group started in the middle of a crisis, I would say. And, you know, I was fired very publicly, which was, you know, pretty awkward in and of itself. From our fire, our, our prior company. And then Rory resigned two weeks later. And so Brain Builders Group kind of happened in the middle of this crisis. It was very much a God thing, but in those early days, it’s like we didn’t have a lot of money to do high production quality. And I ended up getting pregnant with our second son only like three months after we started the company, which, you know, was great timing.
AJV (03:44):
And so we had to turn Rory’s office into a nursery, which mean for a short amount of time we had to share my office and doing podcasts
AJV (04:32):
We had no one reviewing content. And this content stayed live in our portal for, I don’t know, almost four years. And we were doing this content archive, cleanout refreshing a bunch of old videos, and I’m, we’re going through all this content and I’m watching these videos and I’m like, can you see the sheet in that video? And so we started watching all these other videos, y’all, there was like an entire series of content videos that you could see the top of the shower rod in my office dividing our two offices. So you could see my shadow behind this white sheet and the shower rod in all of our public facing course videos. I was like, are you kidding me right now? I can’t believe anyone comes back to this portal. I can’t believe anyone is watching this video. And I remember being so embarrassed, and me and Roy
AJV (05:24):
Those are the first things that are coming down Monday morning. And so we emailed our team and like, okay, as we’re archiving videos, start with all the ones that you can see the sheet and the, and the curtain rod that are dividing our offices. And then we were at one of our events very shortly after, a few weeks after, and we were telling this story about we all come from humble beginnings in some way. And we were telling this story, and afterwards, I probably had two if not three people come up to me and they go, I know exactly what videos you’re talking about. That’s
AJV (05:56):
When, when I fell in love with you guys. And I was like, what? And they were like, when I saw that you guys were just doing this because you love it and you had passion for it, and you were using a bedsheet and you were sharing an office, I said, these are my people. These are people that I care to learn about. These are people I care to know because they’re not trying to be something or not. They’re not trying to do this with lots of production value. They’re this, this is not just about entertainment. This is not about a performance. You were just like, here, I think I can help you with something. I don’t care if there was a bed sheet. No, we didn’t know they could see that. But it’s like the whole point is that thing that we felt so awkward about, so kind of embarrassed about like, I can’t believe this happened.
AJV (06:38):
Don’t, they were like, no, that’s when I fell in love with you. That’s when I said, these are my people. I, I wanna, I wanna learn from these people because I felt like you got it. You knew what it was like to be in a startup. You knew what it was like to hustle and you were doing the thing, and I was watching you as you were learning and you were growing. And that’s when I fell in love with you. And I was like, what? Out of all the things, the Bedsheet videos, and I think that was like this whole interview with Henna Pryor was those moments of awkwardness when people go, man, that that’s when people, right, what we find most embarrassing other people find the most endearing. And that’s when you create this unbelievable connection of, man, I I know who you are, right?
AJV (07:23):
Because you don’t hold it back and you don’t pretend, right? And so I think there’s, there’s some element of that, of going what what we think is embarrassing other people find endearing. And so it’s not that you wanna find moments to embarrass yourself, but also don’t, don’t be embarrassed by the moments. Go. That’s just a part of where we were, that was a part of our journey. Like that was hustle mode. That was startup mode. And yeah, there was a shower curtain and a sheet. And now the way that I look back on it was like, yeah, that was, that’s how we started this, and that’s okay. And it’s okay for other people to do that. And by sharing that, it allows other people to settle into their newness, to their beginners, to their whatever stage that they’re in of going, okay, that that’s okay to be that way.
AJV (08:12):
I don’t have to have this, this, or this to make this work or to succeed or excel, because that’s the truth. You don’t. And so allowing people to see those missteps, those awkward moments, will not only allow them to get to know you better, but it also creates a, a new level of comfort in what they’re going through themselves, right? So, second quick story I’ll share is one of my biggest consulting clients of all time in my former life was Bridgestone retail operations. And I had an amazing opportunity to train more than 2,700 retail stores at Bridgestone. And as a part of this, you know, two year engagement we
AJV (08:54):
Were also the host, the training host at their annual conference in Vegas where I don’t know how many people there, I’ll try to be conservative, 10,000 of their retail operators were there. And I was in this ballroom and they were rotating classes, you know, and we were talking about sales and customer service and customer experience and, you know, all the things. And this ballroom probably held 2000, maybe 3000 people. And it was the first session of the day. And I had been doing so much prep work for this because, you know, I may not be like the, you know, avatar to relate to the average Bridgestone retail operations team. And I’m like, all right, I gotta, I’m, I need to find some car humor and I, you know, I need to make this relatable so it’s not some, you know, rando chick up on stage talking about what they need to do in their stores.
AJV (09:47):
And so I found these hilarious videos that I thought were hilarious on Seinfeld about this conversation that Seinfeld was having, about how he didn’t know anything about cars. And, you know, it’s like he was saying, you know, I could take my car to the shop and they could tell me it needed a Johnson rod and I wouldn’t know the difference. And, you know, it just kind of like went on and on and on. Well, you know, I didn’t, I didn’t know what a Johnson rod was. ’cause I don’t know much about cars either, so I just thought it was funny. And so I add all of these videos to my presentation, and as I’m playing these, you know, videos as examples of customer awareness, they all start dying laughing. And so I’m like, I roll with it, and then I’m, I’m saying Johnson Rod, and I’m using that in the examples, and I’m telling stories about it now, and I’m now calling back to the video.
AJV (10:37):
And every single time I do, the laughter gets bigger and bigger and I’m like, wow, I really got this going. Like, I’m really relating to this. So I just roll with it. And the mc of the day was introducing everyone, and that at the end of every session, he would wrap it up with going, can you believe? Right? And it’s like, can you believe that we achieved da da da da dah, and can you believe this da da da? Well, heaps my presentation, and this is how he recapped it. And you believe that AJ said Johnson rod five times on stage. And everyone just dies laughing. And I’m sitting there going, okay, I think I’ve missed something here. And I look back in the back of the room and I can see three of my team members waving their hands in the air frantically like this, like, stop, stop.
AJV (11:20):
And I’m like, what is going on? So I get off stage and one of them rums up to me and she goes, agent, do you know what a Johnson rod is? And I was like, clearly, I do not. And she goes, are you kidding me right now? And I’m like, what, what is it? And she goes, it is the male private area. And I’m like, what? And she was like, this whole video was, you know, this sexual innuendo about, you know, the male private parts. And I’m like, oh my gosh. And this is in front of like
AJV (11:52):
2,500 men, me on stage talking about Johnson rods. And so for the rest of this two day conference, everywhere I went, they were like, Hey Johnson, hey Johnson. And I’m like, I’m never gonna recover from this. This is the most embarrassing thing of my life. I’m not gonna be able to finish this consulting project. I’m gonna get fired. All these horrible things. So a week goes by, I get on the phone with my direct contact, who was the COO of this operation. He goes, stop, heard you were quite the hit at the conference. And I’m like, Uhhuh, did you hear about it? And he goes, yeah. He said, honestly, it was the highway. He goes, the rest of these sessions were so boring. He goes, yeah, I’d appreciate if you didn’t say that anymore. But, and it was like, this rolled right off the shoulders was hilarious, just
AJV (12:47):
And it created this level of I’m not just a consultant coming in here changing stuff. It’s like, I’m this moron who came on
AJV (13:38):
So I would just encourage you as you kind of settle in and highly encourage you to listen to this full episode with Henna Pryor or pick up a book. Good, awkward. It’s, how do I embrace awkward, right? It’s, how do I use my missteps to give me an opportunity to showcase who I really am, not who I think people want me to be, but who I really am. So how do we good? How do we get good at being awkward is one, we realize it’s gonna happen. We be prepared for it, and we don’t hide it, but we embrace it. And even sometimes maybe put a spotlight on it to go, Hey, not everything is worth sharing. But there’s a few things that would really humanize me, make me relatable and help other people have a, a greater sense of comfort and peace and ease about their situation if I just shared a little bit of mine. So here’s a little bit of inspiration to embrace those awkward moments, embrace those missteps and use them to your advantage this year.
Ep 464: How To Get Good At Being Awkward with Henna Pryor
AJV (00:02):
Hey, everybody, AJ Vaden here on the Influential Personal Brand Podcast. So happy to be here today, and I love when I get to interview new friends. And Henna Pryor and I got introduced and just found out that we have lots and lots of mutual friends, but she was introduced to me from our Chief Experience Officer, Matt Lyles. She’s also good friends with one of my closest friends. And, you know, as we were just talking I wanted to make a quick note for everyone about why you need to stick around for this particular episode. And I didn’t even have this on my radar, didn’t even have this on my agenda And as Henna and I were talking right before I hit record, she said something. And I’m like, that’s gonna be the most inspiring thing of all for everyone who is listening. Mm-Hmm.
AJV (00:47):
And so here is, here’s my number one recommendation. For anyone who is tuning in going, is this an episode that I should listen to? Would this be helpful for me today? Here’s what I want you to know before we get into this interview. Henna started her speaking and now authoring career two years ago. I’m just gonna pause for a second and let that sink in. I didn’t say 10, I said two, two years ago, right? And then just last year, she was named as Success Magazines Woman of Influence. Her book was her, her new book, good Awkward, was listed as one of the top books of 2023. She is on a rocket ship to the Moon with her speaking bookings. And this was two years ago. And so we’re gonna talk a lot about how to use awkwardness as a superpower.
AJV (01:36):
We’re gonna talk about her book. We’re gonna talk about all kinds of things. But most importantly of all, if you are someone who is going like, man, I just feel like this has taken forever, and I feel like, you know, I just, I’m gearing up for like this 10 year journey. I would just encourage you as I was just encouraged of, like, it might take that long, but it might not. And you may wanna tune in today to just get a a spike of inspiration and rejuvenation of going like, Hey, the work you’re doing can pay extraordinary dividends. Don’t give up. And so that would be my encouragement as you’re listening and tuning in today. Stick around and learn how somebody like Henna started just two years ago and is way further ahead than she ever thought possible just two years later.
AJV (02:21):
So that would be my encouragement to you. Now, before we get going, let me formally introduce you to Ms. Henna Pryor, who is a sought to after workplace performance export. She is an award-winning two-time TEDx speaker. She is a global keynote speaker. She’s an author, she’s an executive coach. I love this. She says her clients call her the Secret Weapon for Impossible Change. I think we all could use a little secret weapon of that and our lives. But she’s also known, which I appreciate this for her Science-based approach in a fun, no nonsense, no jargon way. And you, I know if you guys listen to the podcast, you know that she’s speaking my love language. And as I mentioned earlier, she was recently recognized as a Success Magazine Woman of Influence. What an awesome honor. And she has a bestselling book, good Awkward, that was named as one of the best books of 2023. So Henna, welcome to the show.
HP (03:15):
Thank you so much. Do you ever have that experience when someone is talking about you and describing you and you’re like, wait, seriously, that’s me,
AJV (03:31):
Love it. And I’m so excited to connect, and I’m so excited that there was like this, like, you know, behind the scenes inner webbing of mutual connections that led to this interview. And that’s what I love about when you’re just great at what you do, your, your name just kind of starts popping up everywhere. And the fact that we were able to pull this off and get this interview recorded today is just so exciting to me because anyone referred to me by, you know, Matt, who’s our chief experience officer, already comes in high regard. And I’m just so excited to to delve into this. And I wanna start this interview by this comment that you made before we hit record, because I think this was not, I, I love it when things, I’m like, whoa, that wasn’t even on my radar for this conversation. So I’m so glad you mentioned it. And so I want the audience to get to know you a little bit. But also I wanna know, like, what were you doing before two years ago? And then what led to this pivotal change where you’re like, Hey, I’m gonna head down this, you know, professional speaking path and then writing a book, and then how long God’s skirting Earth have you done what you’ve been able to do in two years time? So I know that’s a lot, but this is what I wanna start with.
HP (04:44):
I love the question. Is coffee a fair answer? Is that allowed lots of it coffee and a lot of laughter? No, the, the short answer is I spent 14 years in the staffing industry. So direct hire, executive search, where I was working with both candidates and clients. But in that space, I got to work with leaders across industries and get a firsthand view as to what made employees happy, what made experience strong, what made people stay, leave, what made brands successful. Kinda got to watch it from a a 20,000 foot view for 14 years. When I left there in late 2019, I actually went and got my executive coach certification. So for about a year or so, I focused on the one-on-one space and executive coaching. But slowly that morphed into, Hey, can you come do this with my team? Can you come do this thing that you do with me at our conference?
HP (05:33):
Can you start to, to talk to more of us? Which naturally and organically shifted into speaking. Now, my first paid speaking gig was late 2021. So two years in, let’s say two months. At this point, I got paid $250 to go to Vegas. They did not pay for my flight. I live on the East coast, so I went in the hole, right? I think I was in the hole about $200. But that was my first time speaking to a group. And immediately I was like, oh, doing this in front of a bigger group feels electrifying. I love this. I would do this for free. And I think immediately, once I had that experience, I knew not only was that something that I loved, but frankly that was a calling I had had for a long time and was too afraid to step into because, you know, at the time of I’m, I’m 42, just about to be 42, I’m like, I, I’m gonna tell other people how to run their businesses, how to build their brands, how to be successful and have peak performance. I’m only halfway through my life, but I finally got out of my own way long enough to say, you know, you can, you can try this, you can take a stab at it, place some betts. And I’ve been placing Betts ever since, and it’s been great.
AJV (06:44):
So if you don’t mind me asking Yeah. You first paid engagement $250, roughly two, two and a half years ago. Yeah. Do you mind telling people how often you’re speaking now and what you’re charging now?
HP (06:58):
AJV (07:22):
Yeah. That, you know what, and I think that’s really important to know because I think one, it’s really important for everyone to just pay attention. Like, her first paid engagement was $250, not $2,500, not $5,000. It was $250
HP (07:37):
In a paper check that they handed me in the lobby when I got there. Yeah.
AJV (07:40):
And didn’t cover her travel. So it’s like, if this is really a calling on your life, it’s like, and I love what you said, it’s like when I did it, I was like, I would do this for free. Right. It’s an honor to get paid. I love this so much, I would do it for free. But it’s, I think it’s important for us all to know you’re gonna start in some humble beginnings. Yeah. But that can quickly expedite 10 XA hundred x if you’re phenomenally good at what you do. Right. And I, that’s what I just, I really want people to latch on. It’s like, don’t be embarrassed to go, I’ll come for free a hundred dollars. Sure. I’m coming. Knowing that in a short one or two years later, it could be so much more than that. But you gotta be willing to go, I don’t care. I wanna do this so much, I’ll be there.
HP (08:28):
Yeah. And I, I appreciate what you said about being phenomenally good at what you do. I think there was some of that where I was naturally good at some of what I did. You know, I think there’s a degree to which some people have something in them that activates this, but there was also a lot I was not good at. There was a whole bunch that, you know, as it relates to the craft of public speaking and, and sort of thought leadership, which I do believe is a craft, I had a lot to learn. So once I decided I was gonna plant my stake in this, I invested a lot in coaches, in programs, in partners, because I don’t think that the people who want to play at the highest levels get there quickly without support. And I was impatient. I wanted to get there quickly. I wasn’t willing to wait 10 years, 15 years. And I do think that for me has been a big difference in the speed in which this has happened. You asked, how did it happen in two years? I found who I perceived to be the best. And I called them and I said, how do we work together? And that has played a huge role in the fact that things have happened as quickly as they did.
AJV (09:31):
I love that. You know, we say this all the time. It’s like, you don’t have to recreate the will. So don’t, right. It’s like there have been others that have gone before you get a mentor, hire coach, attend a conference, but my goodness, get out there and do something to help expedite that learning curve. You know, I was just thinking about this my, I have a 4-year-old and a 6-year-old, both boys who are oddly obsessed with football. And we were just watching a game, and I’m, I’m drawing a blank and striving me nuts right now of like what the team was. But they were talking about this quarterback, and he is not, he is not a well known quarterback at all. And in fact the statistics that they were sharing about him were in the last two years, two, two years, he has been sold or traded, or you switched positions or team 23 times.
HP (10:28):
Oh my god.
AJV (10:29):
But in two years. And I’m like, what is that even possible? Like, how did that happen? And he was having the game of his life. They ended up winning the game. And the only reason I know is ’cause our team was the other team. And, and they were like, just talking about like this amazing story of perseverance. And then they shared with this kid, he’s not a kid, he’s in his late twenties. Yeah. But this kid was doing, and he said he has hired every coach, he has gone to every off season training. And they were, all these announcers were just sitting there going like, look at this success story of someone who no one thought would even be in the NFL two years later. And here he is living out his dream playing quarterback in the NFL, but he took a risk on himself. He invested all the money he was making to hone his craft. And now look at him. Mm.
HP (11:20):
Yeah. What I love about what you just said, I think that that the line that just grabbed me, you said at the end is he took a risk on himself. And I, I, I resonate with that so much because when you take a risk on yourself, it can feel really embarrassing and really awkward to get traded 23 times. Most people wouldn’t wave that flag proudly. No, they wouldn’t say like, good for me, I got traded or make it.
HP (11:43):
That’s embarrassing as an athlete that you couldn’t, you know, stay in demand enough with where you were, that people didn’t wanna trade you off like a playing card. I mean, that’s, that can be embarrassing and it can derail people from trying something new in the future. But I love that that didn’t stop him. He continued to take the risks on himself because he had a goal. Yeah. And that, that to me is so, so much my ethos too.
AJV (12:05):
Yeah. And I, and I love, I think that’s, and that’s really what it is. It’s like when you are truly following your calling, it’s like, I can’t not do this. Mm-Hmm.
HP (12:14):
I have to Mm-Hmm.
AJV (12:14):
HP (13:05):
Ah, the book. Okay. The book, I’ve always wanted to write a book since the fifth grade. I think I always had this, this desire to write a book one day. But similar to the speaking thing, I think I was nervous to do it because there’s a lot of books,
HP (13:49):
And there wasn’t a day that went by that I didn’t feel impossibly awkward about it. So fast forward, you know, college, I sort of found my people. Then I entered the professional spheres. Every transition point professionally, every inflection point. I feel like all those feelings came back again. Mm-Hmm. Like, they’re looking at me, they’re wondering what I’m doing. Am I being an idiot right now? This is embarrassing. I don’t, I’m not saying the right thing. And our queen, Brene Brown started saying this thing at the end of her podcast, she would say, stay awkward, brave and kind. Mm-Hmm. That became her tagline. And I had a very visceral reaction to it. I remember thinking, brave. Yep. Yep. I know that one kind. Yes. My parents taught me that one. Stay awkward. No, thank you. I’ve been trying to get rid of this my whole life. What are you talking about lady? Everything else you say is brilliant. This one, I don’t know. And I got very curious about this particular emotion and how it relates to the way we show up at work in life in our personal brands. And the deep dive began. So TEDx and then book on that very topic.
AJV (14:52):
I love that so much. And the fact that you just like embraced it so wholeheartedly and wrote the book, launched the book, and all of this too is in like the last two and a half years and some change. Yeah. I would love to know just really quickly, and then I actually wanna get in and talk about how do we use awkward as a superpower? And like what is good awkward, right? Because I think most people associate awkward with like well, awkward is just awkward. It’s not good. Yeah. But Right. There’s these amazing things that can come about that. But I’d love to hear about like, you’re just the, the authoring process. ’cause First time author, right? Yep. And we have so many people who are first time authors or aspiring authors in our audience. So I would love just for you to share what was your experience of writing your book?
HP (15:40):
Yeah. Oh gosh. So I was listening to your recent episode with I think his Alison Trobridge that she was talking about a little bit of the authoring. And so a lot of what she said, I was nodding my head, but for me, you know, I mentioned I’ve wanted to write a book since the fifth grade. I’ve always liked writing in, let’s call it dabbling context. So there was a period there where I had a Tumblr blog and then, you know, social media posts and all that. But a book felt like a big ask, right? It was a big reach and not a small project. I’m a little squirrely in that I don’t like doing the same thing for too long. So I thought, do I even wanna do this? But what it really ended up becoming about was I started to seed the idea on social media.
HP (16:20):
So on LinkedIn, I started to kind of test this idea of awkwardness as a superpower. Where are my fellow people who feel awkward all the time, not necessarily who identify as awkward? And we can talk about that, the sort of state versus trait, but that feel this a lot. They feel awkward raising their hand in a negotiation or for a promotion, or for a project. And so I started to test some of this content that was in my mind on social, and it was very quick that I realized other people are resonating with this. And so I didn’t just start writing a book sight unseen, right? You have to sort of know, is there a reader for this thing that feels important to you? And to the answer on social media was yes, people are like, ah, I feel like you’re in my head, I feel like you’re putting words in my mouth.
HP (17:03):
And it became very clear that there was a community of people who also had strong feelings about that word. And once that became evident, then it sort of felt like this natural morphing from, you know, TEDx was a 15 minute test of the idea that resonated. And then there was a lot more to talk about than landed in 15 minutes. So it became perfect fodder for a longer form book. And I wrote and wrote, and wrote, and wrote, and half of it got thrown out
AJV (17:36):
Yeah. I think what’s so important for everyone to hear is that the book was not the testing ground.
HP (17:42):
No. Gosh, no.
AJV (17:43):
I, and I think so often it’s like, people are like, I’m, I’m, I wanna write a book. And then it’s like, we get busy with like writing the outline and we start writing, and it’s like, that’s not really where it starts. And no, you know, back to what you said, it’s like I had a Tumblr blog, I was doing LinkedIn posts, and then that graduated into a TEDx. And it’s like, the more that I did, the more I figured out what was resonating and what was clicking. And it’s like, we always say this at Brain Builders Group, it’s like, you know, writing a book is not the hypothesis, it’s the conclusion. Right? But we, we gotta know what that is. And the only way to really know what that is, is to start testing it, right? Yeah. And that’s the power of a blog and social media and, and speaking even, right? It’s testing out the content of going, okay, now I know the words that need to be on the pages.
HP (18:29):
Yeah. I think not only testing the content, but also it was opportunities to test my voice. So I, I’ve written a book in the nonfiction, personal and professional development space alongside lots of wonderful serious types. And I quote Tupac in the book,
AJV (19:27):
I love that. And, and I love too. It’s like, I love that quote. It’s like, take the work seriously, but not yourself. And if you’re not, and I think it’s too, it’s like if you haven’t figured out your voice yet, that’s not time yet. Yeah. Right. I love that. Testing your voice as well as testing the content. So let’s talk about the content. So let’s talk about this this new book of yours called Good Awkward. So what is good, awkward?
HP (19:50):
What is good Awkward? So quick definition of awkwardness is helpful here. So lots of definitions from every dictionary, but for the context of today, awkwardness is the emotion that we feel when the person that we believe ourselves to be our true self is momentarily facing a gap between the person other people see on display. In other words, for moments or maybe moments, our internal identity doesn’t quite match their external reality. So I raise my hand in a meeting at work, and I call someone the wrong name. In that moment, the internal identity I hold someone who’s thoughtful about names, who pronounces them correctly, is facing a gap between the version that they see. Sloppy, careless doesn’t care about these things. Hmm. In the personal branding space, I put out a post that, you know, without me realizing it comes across as, you know, a little tone deaf or a little bit off, off the cuff.
HP (20:47):
The person I believe I myself to be is now facing a gap between the person that other people see on display. That middle space where we feel that discomfort, emotion, that specific emotion of discomfort in a social setting is where we experience awkwardness. Good, awkward. It simply means that in order for us to grow as professionals, as people, as brands, as personal brands, every time we put ourselves into that stretch zone where growth is on the table, we are going to face the potential and the possibility of awkwardness. There’s no avoiding it. Because to avoid awkwardness is to avoid uncertainty. So eliminating it is not an option.
AJV (21:28):
Mm. I love that whole concept of just get good at awkward. Mm-Hmm.
HP (21:32):
AJV (21:47):
Yes. I love that. So let’s talk a little bit about how do you become good at awkward?
HP (21:54):
Yeah. So two, two parts here. The first part is awareness. There is a mindset component here. So awkwardness, again, it’s a social emotion. Let’s say you’re practicing a, a social post that you wanna write, you’re kind of drafting it out and you, you know, get a, get a fact or figure wrong. Well, if you didn’t post it yet, nobody saw it, you don’t feel awkward about it. It’s a social emotion. It’s once other people start to create an opinion of it that all of a sudden it kicks up. So it is very closely tied to approval. So part one of this conversation is how do you start to peel back the layers on the stories that you hold around awkwardness. Maybe growing up it was, you know, don’t do that. People are watching, you know, other people are looking at you. If you grow up with those messages, then you probably are going to have lower tolerance for awkward moments.
HP (22:42):
Everyone’s staring, everyone’s looking at you. So a little bit of a, a narrative rewrite on what is awkwardness. It’s natural, it’s universal, it’s normal, and it’s part of the growth journey. Mm-Hmm.
HP (23:32):
We don’t have to have it anymore. And so what’s happened is that we don’t even have practice in the small moments. Yeah. And all of a sudden we need to course correct on something that went sideways in one of our, our speeches, in our posts and in podcast we were on. And we’re even less primed for how to handle those moments because we don’t even have these daily moments of happenstance anymore. So we actually need to now overcorrect and condition for those social moments. And there’s lots of ways that we can do that. But conditioning is a second important component to this.
AJV (24:05):
You know, as you were talking, it just made me think, because you’re right. It’s like I don’t have to have social interactions, unfortunately, but it’s like, even in like social media, it’s like you can custom curate the perfect post of like, I never have to look awkward. I never have to experience awkward if I don’t want to. And I think that there’s a little bit of it because I just turned 40 this year, so we’re Mm-Hmm.
HP (24:43):
People think they’re like, oh, is it the new generation? I’m like, well, it is. You know, my daughter’s 13 and it, it’s for sure in this generation where we went to a friend’s house, I was about to ring the doorbell, and she’s like, no, no, no. We text, we text here from the driveway. And I’m like, oh God. But then I, you know, I thought, okay, maybe it’s just the teens. It’s the youths. Right? Get off my lawn. My husband, who’s in his mid forties, we were trying to order DoorDash the other day and it wasn’t working. And I said, okay, well, can you call the taco place? And he says, no, no, no, we’ll just get pizza instead. And I’m like, babe, I want tacos. Like, just call. Right. He, by the way, he’s in sales for a living. Ah.
HP (25:19):
Not an introvert. Funny. So we’re, we’re all facing this, right? Yeah. And, and where I think it’s important to understand is it’s not changing anytime soon. Mm-Hmm.
AJV (25:36):
Yeah. I think that’s so good. And I think it’s like anything, it’s like if the more you do it, the better you get at it. Right. And it’s like, the more it does just become that. So let’s talk about these in a couple of different ways here, because I, I love what you said, and I’ve kind of have like a few questions that I wanna make sure we get to through this interview. And I, you know, my job is to keep us on time, which I’m not always so good at
HP (26:25):
Yeah. I love that you started to touch on it when you were talking about, you know, the, the way we show up on these social channels. So the thing about social, or let’s just call it like our digital presence in, in brand world, is it’s asynchronous, meaning we don’t get to mess up and then quickly get the response response from a mess. It kind of trickles in right? With like likes and comments. And it’s all this slow different timeline type of experience. But what happens to be universally true is, you know, there is, I think, a greater skepticism towards the performance that happens, especially online. Totally. So in the, in the book, I have a, a line, you know, we’re either awkward or we’re performing Mm-Hmm.
HP (27:16):
Otherwise we’re in that awkward potential of something, you know, going un unexpectedly awry. So where there’s opportunity here is knowing that our audiences generally are holding up a little bit of skepticism about the highlight real world. The perfect, you know, we’re always on, we’re always getting it right. There is enormous opportunity in life’s natural and inherent awkward moments to create a literal espresso boost of loyalty from our, our clients, the people that we serve. So, example, Cheryl Sandberg, when she wrote Lean In, you know, again, hailed by many as a great book, and she’s very quickly been catapulted as a thought leader of our time. But it was very quickly criticized by many because it was out of touch, or really only for the privileged. Now for Sheryl Sandberg that had the potential to be very embarrassing, very awkward. Here she is trying like hell to advocate for women in a wave of people, or telling her she’s out of touch.
HP (28:15):
She doesn’t understand. She could have ignored it. She could have shut down. You know, that there’s a lot of ways she could have gone. But instead she not only heard the criticism, she named it, she named it out loud. And she continued to then incorporate what she was learning and hearing in the areas where she fell short in this conversation, into her future, talks into her future content, into her keynote, which made even those who kind of were, let’s call it early haters of the work, all of a sudden come on board because of the way she handled that awkward situation, it could have been, again, a huge derailment to the message she was trying to create. And instead she used it as a force for good. Mm. There’s hundreds of examples of similar, but when we have those moments, what are we going to do with them? Because it can either become something that shuts you down, or we can look for that gift in the garbage and use it as an opportunity to rise up further and faster than we did before.
AJV (29:09):
Yeah. You know what, and that’s such a mindset, right? Because it’s like Mm-Hmm.
HP (30:08):
Yeah. There, there’s a couple pieces of research that are really helpful here that shaped my thinking around this. One of my favorites is from psychologist Elliot Aaronson. This was decades ago that he noticed something called the Pratfall Effect. So what I am not suggesting is that you currently, you know, in your spaces, step in it on purpose to make yourself feel more relatable. Right? I’m not telling you to go spill coffee all over your lap and you’re next, you know, LinkedIn live. Please don’t do that. But what I am saying is that what the research shakes out is if you are generally someone who appears competent, intelligent, smart, capable, if you generally most of the time come across as someone like that, and you occasionally say the wrong thing, step in it, embarrass yourself, have an awkward moment, it actually does not hurt you. In fact, what the pratfall effect tells us is that people like that, what it actually does is it kind of knocks you down a little bit off the pedestal that we put you on and makes you one of us.
HP (31:08):
Mm-Hmm.
HP (31:52):
But for me, that felt like a misstep that I wanted to address. So it wasn’t terribly difficult to say, you know what, I, I wish I didn’t use that word. Right. And that’s just something I’m being mindful of. No judgment, you know, everybody else is on their own journey. But I got I think, 20 messages in response to my follow up, just saying, Hey, I appreciated watching you do that in real time. I love that. Right. I appreciated just you, you figuring that out real time and sharing it with us. Same thing with book things that went sideways, things that didn’t work out. You know, again, these embarrassments can end up being the thing that create the loyalty that nothing else can create that quickly. How many of those can we lean into? Mm-Hmm.
AJV (32:30):
Mm. I love that. It’s, you know, I just, I jotted this down as a reminder to myself. It’s like your reactions are just as important as your actions. Yeah. You know, know, and it’s like, sometimes it’s the way that you react to the thing. Mm-Hmm.
HP (33:01):
Yeah. And I think just the, the second thing I’d add to this is, you know, we just heard that the word of the year was authenticity. Right? Merriam Webster said the year. And a lot of people are like, yes, I love that. I can’t wait to be more authentic. And yet they are still trying so hard to be perfect in their videos, in their posts. And what I remind them is, you can’t get to authenticity without stumbling through awkwardness first. There isn’t a path there awkwardness. And the messy middle is the journey to authenticity. And what I’m not asking again, is for you to falsify it. But what I am asking is don’t keep the curtain shut during those moments. Just let people in and trust that as long as you are generally, again, doing a good job in your other spaces, you generally show up as prepared in care of the people that you serve. That believe it or not, people will not hold it against you. In fact, it has the inverse effect. Mm-Hmm.
AJV (33:57):
Yeah. You know, I love that. And actually, you know, made me think of something I think my husband does amazing things in lots of areas, but one of the things that Rory does really well is, you know, he learned the art of this at a really young age. You know, he started speaking when he was like 18 to high school groups, but in his early twenties, I remember him teaching other, you know, young speakers these comeback lines. Mm-Hmm.
HP (34:50):
I love that you made this connection. Yeah. ’cause one of the, the last chapter of the book, we talk about using kind of improv skills to tolerate and embrace awkwardness. And it’s exactly what you’re describing. It’s understanding that uncertainty is going to come, are you building the muscle to tolerate it? And again, you don’t have to take an improv class. In fact, let’s start small. The next time you’re at a coffee shop, leave your headphones out. Right. See what happens if you catch someone’s eye the next time you’re in the supermarket line, leave your phone in your pocket. Yeah. See what happens if you catch someone’s eye an elevator, don’t hammer the closed door button shut. See what happens if someone walks in and you make a quick conversation. We have to intentionally now create these little moments to practice being in social uncertainty. Mm-Hmm.
AJV (35:45):
Have to build up disastrous. You know, it’s so funny, as you said, as you mentioned improv. I’m like, oh my gosh. During this exact same time period, Rory was taking standup comedy lessons.
HP (36:13):
Nothing will phase him anymore. Yeah.
AJV (36:15):
And it’s so true. And, but I Mm-hmm. You know, it’s like I totally connect the dots as you were talking about that. And I don’t know why I had a 20 year flashback, but I’m like, oh, that’s what that was.
HP (36:25):
He’s ahead of his time. I
AJV (36:27):
Love that. So, okay, so my next question is how do you monetize this? Right? And it’s like you have this whole idea of like, you can monetize your missteps. Mm-Hmm.
HP (36:46):
Again, I am so just tickled and grateful and thankful and humbled by the last few years. But I will tell you one of the biggest pieces of feedback I get after a keynote is, gosh, Henna you’re so relatable. Hmm. You’re so approachable. You’re one of us. And I’ll tell you, it’s as simple as naming my fops out loud, excuse my language. Right? Like the, the things that I’m teaching, I don’t start with what went well. I start with how I royally screwed it up a million times. Often on a stage, I will say, you know what, I meant to explain this graph differently. Rewind. Let’s try that again. Right. I will, I will have very natural moments of brain fart. I went blank. I meant to explain that differently. Or someone will, you know, respond. If it’s a small group in a way that I didn’t expect, I don’t run away from that.
HP (37:34):
Or I, you know, shy away, I actually run in and say, you know, I didn’t expect you to say that. So let’s talk about this a little more. Tell me more about what you mean by that. But I lean into what in many cases would create a, oh my gosh, I don’t, I don’t appear like an expert anymore. I don’t appear what I’m talking about anymore. And people are so afraid to do that because they’re afraid it’s going to diminish their, you know, perception of expertise. But again, I’m here to tell you that if you generally are well prepared, well rehearsed, well thought out the rest of the time, those couple of instances are actually going to give you feedback of, oh, you’re so human. Mm-Hmm,
AJV (38:23):
You know, and I think that’s a, I think that’s a huge part of it, is that, you know what I said, what you said there that I think it’s really important is relatable. And that doesn’t matter if you’re a speaker, an author, small business owner you know, a startup. It doesn’t matter if you’re a salesperson, a doctor, a physician. It’s like, my gosh, we all want someone who, it’s like, do you get me? Because this conversation, like, I feel like I’m so dumb right now. Like, I don’t even know what words, you know, I, we were at a restaurant here lately, and I’m like, I feel so dumb asking this, but I don’t know anything that you just said,
HP (38:54):
AJV (38:55):
What is that and how is that cooked? And it was like, Rory, Rory on purpose always is like mispronouncing things on purpose to embarrass me. And you know, it’s like, you know, ve he’s always like, verts. Oh,
HP (39:10):
AJV (39:10):
Stop saying that. But it was like, we were at this restaurant and I’m like, I literally dunno what anything is. I’m like, you were talking too fancy right now. And it was like, I was like, in that moment, I felt so out of place in this restaurant Mm-Hmm. And I’m like, this is like too much. I cannot handle this. And he was like, you wanna leave? And I’m like, kind of Mm-Hmm. I’m like, if I can’t tell what is on the menu and the servers having to explain to me what all these things are, I’m like, this’s too much. But I think there’s a lot of that of going, like, it literally did create like a physical reaction of like, I’m, I’m not comfortable here. Like, I’m not enjoying myself anymore. I feel so dumb that I just had the ask all these things.
AJV (39:53):
Like, why couldn’t there just be a little bit more of like, the everyday person who eats food’s gonna come in and wonder what is all this stuff that we’ve put on this menu? And it was like, literally I was like, like we almost got up and left and Roy was like, beg just the food’s gonna be good. Right, right, right. But it’s like one of those things, it’s like a hundred percent of it was like, I felt so out of place because Mm-Hmm.
HP (40:44):
What I love about your story is in those moments, like most of us would think, gosh, everyone must feel read on my face. What I’m feeling like the server must realize that I am just so uncomfortable right now. Everybody around me must realize. But awkwardness is sneakily one of those emotions that you’ll always feel it 10 x mm-Hmm.
AJV (41:49):
I’ll tell you, I’ll not be going back.
HP (41:51):
AJV (41:54):
I need to know what the words on the menu are in fair, fair you know, but it’s like, but it it still come back. It’s like relatability factor. And it’s like, the truth is what we discovered is we were not their audience. Yeah. And that’s okay. They’re it’s okay. You know, and that’s okay. But it’s like, if you know who your audience is, then you gotta speak language. They understand
HP (42:13):
You wanna go where they have green, green beans. Yeah.
AJV (42:16):
I need to know. I don’t need these fancy, fancy French words. But it’s like, I think a lot of that has that relatability factor, right? And it’s like if clients are saying, Hey man, you’re so relatable, but that’s telling you it’s like, these are my people.
HP (42:27):
Yeah. Yeah. And
AJV (42:29):
So that’s identify
HP (42:30):
Yeah. Agree. And I think, you know, the, the best part of all of this is it actually takes less effort. It takes less effort to let some of this fall off some of this armor of perfection and Mm-Hmm.
AJV (43:17):
Yeah. So let’s talk about that for a minute. So how do we do that? ’cause I think that’s a fascinating thing, especially with, you know, the emergence of, you know, technology and social media and my gosh, now AI and all of the things where I’m like, is that, is that you or is that a fake deal? Yeah. Like, I dunno. And it’s, I think a lot of it has to do with, it’s like, I, I want to get the same person at coffee that I see on social media and often it it, they are different, right? Yeah. I’ve got this continual hangup about meeting people that I really admire. I’m like, I just don’t want them to be different. Right? Yeah. So from afar, I think I know who they are. Yeah. And it’s like, but it’s because so often they don’t match.
AJV (43:58):
Yeah. And so what, like, what causes that? And, and I think what can we do to go, man, we can be the same in all the places. ’cause At the end of the day, that’s what we all want. Yeah. We wanna know that the person online is the person on stage, and the person on stage is that’s who they are at home. That’s who they are behind closed doors. We don’t want these, you know, Dr. Jekyll, you know Mr. Hyde Mm-Hmm.
HP (44:36):
Yeah. So what causes that is there’s an interesting piece of research I talk about that it speaks to this idea of catering. So what a lot of speakers, authors, thought leaders, entrepreneurs do is they try very hard to cater to their audience. So their definition of catering, there was a study done by Harvard Francesca Gino and her team catering essentially means presenting or speaking or writing in order to meet other people’s expectations. Hmm. What do you think your audience wants from you? And then you do that, right? And we think that’s going to make us more successful when we cater to other people’s expectations. That’s gonna make us more likable, more successful, more desirable, when in fact the research shakes out that that is not the case and it’s a lot more exhausting to cater. So they did a, a pitch study actually with entrepreneurs.
HP (45:24):
There was entrepreneurs pitching to investors for funding. And the entrepreneurs who catered to the investors essentially presented what they thought the investors wanted to hear. Were one third, I’m sorry, two thirds less likely to get the funding versus the one third who kind of came in passionate, organic, raw, stumbles, fumbles, blunders, and all that. Third was more likely to get the funding. So catering not only does not help your leadership or your persuasiveness or your influence, in fact it hurts it. And you collapse into bed at the end of the night because you’ve been wearing this mask of someone that you’re trying to be for other people. And so what we can do to overindex on that is to just try to be really honest with ourselves. Is this what we actually wanna say? Or are we saying it because it’s what we were told other people wanna hear? And we can also just monitor our energy levels. At the end of the day, if you’re pooped at the end of the day as a content creator, as an influential brand leader, think about why Mm-Hmm.
AJV (46:36):
I think that’s so good. It’s that whole thing. It’s, I it is so much more work. It’s like, okay, I think this is what they wanna hear. So I have to Mm-Hmm.
HP (46:50):
Right. And making adjustments along the way, you know? Yeah. If you say the thing and it’s not for them, guess what? You’re not likely to end your career there. Make adjustments along the way.
AJV (46:59):
And that’s the thing. There’s an audience for anything. And an audience for anyone. You just have to find yours.
HP (47:03):
Exactly.
AJV (47:04):
Exactly. I love that. But it’s, and it’s true. ’cause It’s like when you’re trying to fit the mold of whatever you think it is, it is more work. Yeah. It’s so much more work
HP (47:14):
And the mold changes. Yeah.
AJV (47:16):
Yeah.
HP (47:16):
You know, our audience is shapeshift constantly the mold, all of a sudden the goalpost like, oops, it’s not there anymore. And here we are trying to chase a target that is, is a kind of fool’s errand.
AJV (47:27):
All right. So I have just a couple of last minute things that I’m just curious to get your thoughts on. So what, what would you say for the person who’s listening, who’s going, man, I avoid embarrassing moments, awkward moments at all costs. Because I don’t rebound quickly and it does affect me mentally, emotionally, and maybe even physically. What would you say to that person who is going, I mean, I listened to this, but I’m going, that makes me wanna cringe the thought. Mm-Hmm.
HP (48:15):
Yeah. So awkwardness, embarrassment, cringe. They’re human, universal emotions. So I hope to a degree, everyone listening to this is like, oh boy, she’s having me lean into this. This is gonna be uncomfortable. Yes, it is. And the moment you realize that it is not something avoidable and that it is not something we can run from, is the moment you’ll at least start prioritizing your response to it. So it’s not that you’re never gonna feel it, you are, it’s just are you hooked by it? Are you ruminating? And more importantly, is it freezing you from raising your hand the next time from trying the post the next time? Is it paralyzing you from taking those micro risks you need to take in this current market to stand out, to be a leader, to be provocative, to be someone different if it’s preventing you than it needs reexamination if it’s not preventing you.
HP (49:04):
Some people own their awkwardness. They’re like, I’m awkward. I say awkward stuff. And here we go. Right? They’re, they’re comfortable. Know which one you are. And then the second thing I would tell you is that it is not just an awareness thing, it is a conditioning thing. So I’m not saying your first at bat is put up a really, you know, provocative or potentially controversial post and let that be your first effort. How about start with, you know, calling your dinner in tonight at the restaurant instead of using the app. Right? How do you start small? How do you create opportunities for uncertainty in your social environment so you can start to build up slowly? That tolerance for when something goes sideways, if you don’t create any opportunities in the small moments, every big moment is gonna feel like that much more of a disaster when it doesn’t go the way that you ex expect. Create opportunities in the small moments. Hmm.
AJV (49:55):
I love that. To, you know, and that’s the thing. It’s like with anything, it’s like take the small steps, but I love that it’s like to create opportunities for uncertainty. Mm-Hmm. And I think most people are trying to avoid uncertainty at all costs. Yeah. But you’re saying no, find it. Right. Even if it’s as small as picking up the phone and calling. But find those moments for uncertainty to build that muscle.
HP (50:21):
Yeah. If we don’t, then taking small risks is never going to feel okay. And as people building brands, we have to,
AJV (50:29):
Okay. Last question. You mentioned it’s like you can, em you can embrace this idea of good awkward to expand your brand. Mm-Hmm.
HP (50:41):
Just, you know, every time you have one of those moments where you’re like, this post was a flop, this podcast, I said something dumb. Right? It’s okay to do that. I just wanna ask you don’t run away from it. See what might happen if you actually even put a little bit of a spotlight on it. Right. And so in the case of the, the tribe comment, not only did I not ignore it, I actually raised it to the forefront and made it a conversation. So your missteps, your fumbles, your stumbles, they’re going to happen. Not everything requires a spotlight. Mm-Hmm.
AJV (51:27):
Oh, that’s so good. And I love that it’s not like, Hey, tell everyone every embarrassing thing No. That you said or you did, but it’s like, Hey, don’t ignore these awkwardness that happens in life and don’t ignore your missteps, but, you know, discern with discernment. Decide which one of those would actually help you expand your brand, connect with your audience. And for those, put a spotlight on ’em. Mm-Hmm.
HP (51:57):
Yeah. Yeah.
AJV (51:59):
I love that. And I think that so much of this is about you know, in my filter, this is about relatability, which I think is a key to trust. It’s a key to building strong relationships, which you can build without actually ever meeting anyone in person. But so much of that just comes with like, I know that I’m getting the real person. Yeah. Right. And it’s like
HP (52:21):
When someone says, Henna I feel like I know you and they’ve never met me. That feels like, you know, a tick in the win column, because that means I’m giving enough of all of it to my branding efforts. And the good news is all it requires is me not stopping it. Mm. Just letting it, letting it come out.
AJV (52:40):
I love that Henn.
New Speaker (52:41):
a. If people wanna connect with you, follow you, learn about you, where should they go?
HP (52:46):
Thank you. It’s henna pryor.com. I’m Henna Pryor on LinkedIn and Instagram. I love to make new friends, even if it feels awkward to reach out, do it anyway. And the book is good, awkward and good awkward.com has more details. It’s everywhere books are sold.
AJV (52:59):
I love that. So henna pryor.com. I assume people can get all their social stuff there. And then if you wanna check out the book, which you should check out the book, I think this is one of those, again, universal topics that applies to all of us, all stages of life, all stages of business. And for, for that, go to good awkward.com. Henna, this was awesome. I loved it. I love having conversations like this. I love meeting new friends. And for everyone listening, stay tuned to the recap episode, which will be coming up next. And I will see you next time on the influential personal brand.