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.
Ep 463: 3 Copywriting Secrets | Dr. JJ Peterson Episode Recap
RV (00:03):
I want to share with you the three biggest secrets for writing. Great copy. Not just writing great copy, but writing a copy that converts, that performs. So what do I mean by converts and performs? I mean, coming up with the words that go on a page and that when you use these words, they cause the reader to take action to to actually engage in a certain behavior, which would be like where, where they are where they’re buying something or opting in for something or filling out a form and requesting information or downloading something, right? This is persuasive copy. So these are three of the most important secrets of writing. Great copy. Now, I wanna let you know that one of the things that we teach at Brand Builders Group is part of our formal curriculum is something called the 15 Ps of copywriting.
RV (01:01):
The 15 Ps is our proprietary unique methodology for how to write great sales pages specifically full offer sales pages when you’re trying to collect a credit card and all the elements that, that are needed. So I’m gonna cover two of those Ps here, which I think are two of the most important. And but before I do that, so let me just share with you, here’s the first secret of writing. Great copy. It is learning how to sell the destination, not the vehicle. So what do I mean by that? Well, if you think of going on a journey, right? There’s a starting point. You know, wherever you, wherever you leave from, let’s say San F let’s say San Francisco, you, and then you go, where do you end? That’s the destination. It’s New York. So there’s a starting point and an ending point, and then there’s a vehicle, right?
RV (01:49):
There’s some vehicle that transport you, it’s bike a car, and you know, a, a plane or whatever. Well, when you think about copywriting specifically for the purpose of generating sales, specifically for the purpose of creating conversions, inspiring behavior, you know, as if you’ve been following me for any amount of time, right? I explain it roy vaden.com, the four levels of influence, which is what I consider my actual personal expertise to be about is the stu the study of the psychology of influence. How do I define influence? Influence is the ability to move people to action. That’s it. So when we have to move people to action through the written word, that’s copywriting sometimes sometimes we describe this at Brand Builders Group that copywriting is selling through the written word instead of through the spoken word, okay? So whenever you’re doing copywriting, like for the purpose of influence and for selling, you gotta sell the destination, not the vehicle. And I’ll use a great example with my first book, take the Stairs, right? So my first book, take the Stairs is a book that’s all
RV (02:59):
About self-discipline, okay? And it’s basically teaching people how to use self-discipline to overcome procrastination so that they can achieve success in any part of their life. So therein in that phrase that I just said, are the three elements that matter that you have to like consciously be aware of, that you have to consciously bucket when it comes to marketing, right? Or selling through the written word. My book, take the stairs, or selling it as a speech, right? So I, I often do that program as a speech, right? Companies will hire me to come talk about that message, and I go, okay, how do I, how do I market my speech to meeting planners and companies to get them to book me to come speak at their national sales meeting or their leadership meeting, or their kickoff meeting or their customer service, like whatever, and talk about, you know, this, take the stairs methodology.
RV (03:53):
So what are the three parts that I’m talking about? Okay? Again, there is the starting, you know, there’s the, there’s the starting point then there’s the destination, and then there’s the vehicle. So if you just look at, take the stairs, my, my book and content, okay? Procrastination is the starting point. So the problem is the starting point. The destination is the payoff. So what’s the payoff? Success, right? Like, be be having anything you want in life. I mean, the, the subtitle of Take the Stairs is Seven Steps to Achieving True Success. So then we’ve got the starting point of procrastination. We have the destination, which is success, and then we have the vehicle, which is self-discipline. And if you were to read the My Take the Stairs book, or if you were to hire me to come speak to your group and, and you saw me speak at your event, you would see that I teach the psychology of how self-discipline isn’t as hard as we all think.
RV (04:53):
Once we know how to think about it the right way. And I talk about neuroscience and rewiring your brain so that you can make decisions in the way that ultra performers make. It’s all about self-discipline. But one of the biggest mistakes I ever made when I started my personal brain and when I started my company. So when I very first started my company my very first website was discipline dynamic.com, because I knew that my, my personal brand was gonna be all about, like, my early work I knew was gonna be all about helping people develop discipline. And so it was like discipline dynamic. And then there was this huge lightning crash and it said discipline dynamic. And that was a mistake. What was great about it was that I had clarity about what I knew would transform lives self-discipline, right? And as we later proved with the success of, you know, the Take the Stairs book, you know, becoming an international bestseller, is that it works and it does change lives.
RV (05:53):
And it is super duper powerful. The issue is that early on, nobody would book me and nobody would buy my stuff because nobody wants discipline. And this is a problem that mission-driven messengers make all the time. You have some secret, you have some, you know, discovery, you have transformed your own life through some methodology and, and you’re so passionate about it, right? And, and you’re like, oh my gosh, like I figured out how to lose weight just like walking or, or you know, I have this nutrition secret or something, something. And what you do if you’re like me, and if you’re like many, many of the clients that we work with at Brand Builders Group, when they first come to us, you’re so passionate about the vehicle that you’re marketing, the vehicle, you’re trying to sell people, the vehicle, you’re trying to say discipline will change your life.
RV (06:42):
Discipline is the key. Discipline is the secret. Discipline will transform you. And that’s exactly what I did. And that’s what most mission-driven messengers do because we are like these bleeding hearts. We wanna change the world. And so we were just like telling people like, this will change your life. The problem is nobody wants to buy it because people don’t really buy the vehicle, they buy the destination. And this is the, the, the, the first and perhaps the greatest secret of all copywriting is you have to market and sell the destination, not the vehicle. So what you should not write about, if I, if I were writing a sales page to get people to buy, take the stairs, or if I was writing a program, you know, description to get people to come to my, my speech I should not really mention self-discipline. ’cause Nobody wants that.
RV (07:34):
And it’s not exciting, even though it is the truth, right? That’s why the vehicle is the truth. The, the vehicle is what will actually change lives. But it’s not the thing that people, it’s not the thing that you market to promote. ’cause Nobody wants to buy it, right? What they wanna buy is the destination. So what I really would wanna do is I would wanna talk about what happens in your life if you incorporate discipline without even saying incorporate discipline, just going, if you follow the principles in this book, you will make more money, you will lose weight, you’ll have better relationships, you’ll have more free time, like et cetera, et cetera. That is the destination. Whatever success looks like. We’ll talk about this more in a second. That’s what I should be marketing and writing about and talking about. I should be promoting both the, the, the starting point and the ending point, but not the vehicle, right?
RV (08:24):
So I should be talking about the problem that people currently have and in my marketing and in my copywriting, and then where I can take them, what they can end up with. But I shouldn’t spend that much time marketing the vehicle. Part of the reason why is because in order to get, if that’s the case, in order to get someone to buy, they have to not only sign off and agree that they want the destination that you’re promoting, they have to buy off that they, they agree with and that they like the vehicle of your plan of how to get there. And that’s not really necessary, right? What, what changes lives is saying, here’s the transformation I can provide, I can help you with, and I have a way to do that. And I, you know, it’s a seven step process or whatever. They don’t have to know the nitty gritty of what it is in order, in order to buy it, right?
RV (09:09):
Like when I go to a restaurant and I order a meal, I don’t have to know every ingredient that’s in there. I don’t even have to know the recipe for how they make it. I just want the meal, right? Just bring me, just bring me the meal. And that’s kind of what this is. Okay? So that’s copywriting secret number one. Copywriting secret number two, you have to get great at writing what we call pain copy. What is, what is, what is pain copy. Okay? Pain copy is super simple. Again, this is one of our, so this is one of our 15 Ps of copywriting, one of our proprietary you know trade secrets if you will, of one of the, the, the techniques that we teach. But one of the 15 ps is P two, or excuse me, P three in the 15 Ps is called pain.
RV (10:00):
You have to write great pain copy. How do you write great pain? Copy is so simple to write great pain copy. All you have to do is describe a frustrating day in the life of your prospect as they currently have it now related to the thing you’re selling. So basically you just describe a day in their life as they have it now because of the absence of your solution. So let me go back to my trip metaphor. Remember we said, you know, there’s a starting point. There’s a destination and there’s a vehicle. Great pain copy is all about marketing and talking about and describing the starting point. Ironically, what is more likely to make somebody buy is not the vehicle. Even if you gave someone the secrets for free about how to change their life, that that’s not what’s gonna attract them and entice them to buy.
RV (10:58):
What is going to attract them is to describe the frustrations they’re currently experiencing in their life. How do you do this? This is pain copy. You simply have to describe what their life looks like now. So let’s say there’s somebody again, I’m just, I’m sticking with take the stairs ’cause it’s sort of ubiquitous and it’s simple and applies to me, right? So rather, if I wanted someone to buy the take the stairs book, rather than telling ’em how amazing all of these self discipline secrets are, what I want to do is spend time talking about the issue that they have. And so, for example, I do this in the opening of the book because I want people to actually read the whole book. And that’s part of why the book sells really well, is in the opening of the book, I talk about the three different types of procrastination.
RV (11:42):
There’s classic procrastination, which is consciously delaying the things you know you should be doing. Then I invented two new terms. There’s creative avoidance, which is unconsciously creating busy work for yourself to do as a way of avoiding, as a way of, you know, giving yourself an out where you can do that. And then the neuroscience of your, of the brain, right? The brain releases dopamine. And so you feel good because you accomplish something trivial even though it’s not the thing you needed to do. That’s creative avoidance. And then there’s priority dilution, which is the chronic overachievers procrastination, which is procrastinating, not because you’re lazy, but because of you allow interruptions to happen in your life, right? So if I am trying to get someone to hire me to speak, or I’m trying to get someone to buy the book, I don’t talk about how amazing discipline is.
RV (12:29):
I’m gonna talk about that when I’m there. That’s how I’m gonna change their life. Or that’s what you’re gonna read about in the book. None of you’re gonna buy the book now because I’ve told you, I’ve told you the vehicle and you’re not gonna be attracted to it even though you should. ’cause It will change your life. As you can see from Amazon reviews from Take the Stairs. But what I’m gonna market is procrastination. I’m gonna sell procrastination. I’m gonna be an ambassador of procrastination. I’m gonna say, if you struggle with distraction, if you struggle with interruption, if there’s things you know you should be doing that you don’t, but you don’t feel like doing, you can’t get yourself to do them. If you’ve ever set a goal and not followed through, if you’ve ever made a commitment and not been able to, to keep it longer than, you know, a week if, if you, if you know you’re capable of more things in your life, but you haven’t been able to achieve that potential, right?
RV (13:15):
That’s compelling. And what am I doing there? I’m not describing the vehicle, I’m describing the problem. More specifically, the pain, the way to write great pain copy is to describe a day in their life as it currently exists because of the absence of your solution, right? So if I describe that life, and then I say, but you know, if you, if you buy, take the stairs or if you bring me to speak, if I was gonna try to, you know, sell myself to, for a company to book me to speak, right? I just changed the narrative a little bit. I say, do your, do your employees ever struggle with procrastination? Do you think that people are struggling with a lack of productivity? Do they get discouraged? Do they deal with reject rejection? Do they, do they, do you think they waste time online or they waste too much time in meetings or they, they, they, they spend too much of their time on things that are trivial and insignificant.
RV (14:05):
If so, you should bring me in and I’m gonna be able to help them. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, which we’ll talk about in a second. And that’s why you need to book me and my signature program take the stairs, seven Steps to Achieving True Success, right? So I’m not selling discipline, I’m selling the problem, the starting point. And, you know, talking about the great pain copy, which leads me to the third greatest secret of writing all great copy. I can’t, I can’t even believe I’m giving these away for free. But he, here’s what it is. It’s called payoff copy. You have to be able to write great payoff. Copy. payoff is one of the other 15 Ps, right? So there’s 15 Ps. Two, two of them, I’m, I’m giving you here, pay is P three and then payoff is P six out of the 15 Ps.
RV (14:53):
So how do you write great payoff, copy? Well, simple payoff copy is the inverse of pain. Copy. If pain is describing a day in their life currently, as it exists in the absence of your solution, payoff copy is describing a day in their future life as it will exist once they have the presence of your solution, right? So if you struggle with procrastination, create avoidance, distraction, you know, time management, you’re, you’re busy, you’re burnt out, you’re overwhelmed. I have a, if you, if if you buy the take the stairs book or you bring me into your company to talk about, take the stairs methodology, I will help you be more productive, you’ll have more peace, you’ll, you’ll be more efficient, you’ll have more energy, you’ll have better relationships, you’ll make more money. And that is what this system teaches. So notice how the payoff is the in is the inverse of the pain.
RV (15:47):
Pain is the starting point. Payoffs are the destination, and then the vehicle, which is what we call the uniqueness or the message. But the, the, the, the, the message or the uniqueness is what I don’t wanna talk about or, you know, I might reference to it or talk about it quickly or briefly, but I don’t wanna talk about that in marketing or in my copywriting because that is not the thing that people buy. People buy the fact that you understand where I’m at, which is the pain, and you have a methodology or a vehicle or a system to get me to where I want to go, which is the payoff, which is the destination. If you want a great, if you want to write great copy, write more about the problems and pain of where they’re starting, the payoffs, the destinations and transformations of where you’re gonna go in them, take them where you’re going to take them, and stop talking about the vehicle and the thing that which, which you’re passionate about, right?
RV (16:41):
You’re gonna get to talk about what you’re passionate about once they hire you, once they book you to speak, once they buy your book, once they get into your coaching program. But if you don’t do these three things, you cannot have successful copy without these three things. If you do these three things right, even if you get the other 13 Ps wrong, you’re gonna be in a good spot. Now, hopefully, you’ll, you’ll request a free call with our team. We do free calls with everybody. You can request a free call at some point. We’ll do a free call with everybody, request a call, and hopefully we’ll be able to teach you how to do all 15 Ps. If you do ’em well, you’re gonna see increased conversions. But if you at least get these two right, that’s gonna get you started.
Ep 462: StoryBrand 7 Step Method with Dr. JJ Peterson
RV (00:02):
I am so excited to interview my, my good friend Dr. JJ Peterson. We’re gonna be talking about StoryBrand and the StoryBrand framework. I take credit for the success of the StoryBrand book because we did the book launch party at our house. Donald Miller, who was the original author, wasn’t gonna do a book launch. And we’re like, Don, are you crazy? We gotta launch this book. We launched it at our house, and I think it’s gone on to sell a million copies, or, you know, close to, if I think it, I think it sold a million copies. So that’s all because of where Don hosted his book, launch party. And that night I got to meet Dr. JJ Peterson, who now is the head of StoryBrand. He’s also the host of the Chart topping Marketing Made Simple podcast. And JJ is an amazing guy.
RV (00:49):
So he has a PhD in communication. He spent the last 20 years studying and teaching communication theory. He’s also an adjunct professor at the Owen School of Business at Vanderbilt University. And I mean, he’s, they, they, they’re, these guys are involved in so much with, you know, helping politicians and filmmakers and business owners and, and academia. I mean, StoryBrand has become mainstream. And it was like, I can’t believe we haven’t actually had you back on the show in such a long time. Never. J’s never been on this show. So we have to do this. Dr. JJ Peterson, welcome to the show, brother.
JP (01:29):
Oh my goodness. Well, thank you so much for having me. And yes, we still to this day absolutely give you 100% credit for that book, selling a Million
RV (01:38):
Yeah, we we’re gonna start charging a package. Like, if you just wanna sell a million copies host, you can host your book party at the Vaden Villa.
JP (01:46):
I will give you a testimony right now,
RV (01:52):
I mean, obviously I, I feel like StoryBrand has become mainstream pervasive. It, it, it’s, it’s become a verb that people use. Like you got a story brand it, but if, if someone’s listening and they’ve, they’ve never heard of the book story building a StoryBrand, what is, what is StoryBrand exactly? Like, give us, you know, take us there.
JP (02:12):
Well, the, it kind of all goes back to when Donna Miller, who was a, you know, he was an author and had written a bunch of, you know, bestselling books, and most of them were memoirs. And he ended up putting on this conference where he was inviting people to come and kind of become the hero of their own stories to like, basically create these life plans, find purpose in their life. And, you know, he’d sold millions of books at that point. And so they were like, yeah, the conference is a no brainer. He rented out an auditorium for about 1500 people and sold 700 seats for the first event, and which was great, profitable, wonderful. And got great reviews. And then all of a sudden, the next time the conference came around, they’re like, well, we’ll sell out this time. And sold about 700 seats again,
RV (03:38):
Does
JP (03:38):
He, as he does, as
RV (03:39):
He just disappears to the cabin and comes out with another bestseller. Me off, like,
JP (03:43):
I’m, so, I know it’s a bit annoying. His genius is a bit annoying in that way. But he goes off and he kind of begins to, he gets distracted and starts watching movies and he, he tells the story, you know, and he really, he had been studying story for a while, been he had written a screenplay, and he began to realize that, you know, there really was formula to all movies, formula to all stories. Hmm. And in the moment, what he started realizing is, what if we could apply story frameworks, which really were, you know, the, the, like, they’re powerful mediums. You know, movies are making millions of dollars. Story has been studied for centuries, and there are rules to story. And he thought, well, what if we could take these rules and move it out of the screenwriting space and actually put it into marketing?
JP (04:34):
And through that position, the customer as the hero of the story, instead of what most businesses do is position themselves as the hero. And so he began to change his marketing for the conference and position the customer as the hero was able clearly to articulate how it worked clearly articulate how the conference was gonna benefit them, help them survive and thrive, all these things that you do in marketing. And the next conference did not spend any money on marketing. The very next conference sold out, then went to a bigger venue, sold out, went to a bigger venue, sold out. And he began to realize that when companies or thought leaders or authors were able to actually articulate the value of what they bring to the table in a way that through their marketing positions, their customers, the hero that both people win out.
JP (05:31):
Mm-Hmm. Because if a thought leader actually has something that’s gonna change people’s lives, or a business has something that’s gonna change people’s lives, then it actually, it does not serve the world
RV (06:14):
I know you guys do. And, and it’s, it’s funny because it’s like one of the toughest questions for people to answer. And, and I’ll say for mission-driven messengers, like for personal brands, right? Like, the people that we serve are these, like, oftentimes they’re almost like these bleeding heart. I, I wanna change the world, I want to help people. And then someone asks them, what do you do,
RV (07:02):
And, you know, I remember the first time I read you know, I still have the, one of the galleys, one of the advanced reader copies of StoryBrand and Mark the whole thing up. And I, I, I called Don and I was like, dude, this is gonna be a game changer. Because it’s, I mean, why do you think we have such a hard time JJ communicating? Like when someone asks you, what do you do when you’re on a airplane, or, you know, you’re at you at a dinner party or whatever, a networking event, it was like, what do you do? Like, why do we fumble that up so much?
JP (07:34):
I think some of it, if, if I’m, if I’m really digging in, some of it is trying to be, it’s insecurity and also trying to be humble. Like, there’s two things in that. Like, there’s some insecurity about what you do, so you start fumbling through that, or there’s, you’re trying to be, you don’t wanna come across as cocky. Yeah. And so you’re trying to be humble in that. And what we’ve just found with all of that, and what I would say is that when you try to shrink in what you have to offer the world by not coming, you don’t wanna come across too cocky. You don’t like, you’re insecure about the fact that you can make a difference when you actually shrink in that moment, not only are you not serving yourself, but you’re not serving the world, you’re not serving your potential customers.
JP (08:17):
Because if you actually have experience, if you have things that you figured out along the way that can help pe make people’s lives better and easier, and you don’t know how to, and you lack confidence in your way of communicating that what you’re doing is by shrinking, you’re actually not serving people. And so we teach people how to explain that through through the whole StoryBrand framework really is there are seven talking points really that are essential to every good story. And these, like I said, have been studied for centuries. They go all the way back to Aristotle and Plato who argued that the best way to move people to action, the best way to change culture was through story. If you go back, you know, all the way to poetics it. Like,
RV (09:04):
No, you guys better be careful. I’m just afraid that Aristotle is going to bring a plagiarism lawsuit against Don here. And I, I don’t know if we should be sharing that. Well,
JP (09:13):
We, we cite him. We cite him. So we c him.
RV (09:15):
Him. Okay.
JP (09:15):
We cite him. Okay. So we definitely cite our sources. You
RV (09:18):
Tag him. Do you tag him on Instagram?
JP (09:19):
A hundred percent hash hashtag Aristotle Poetics hashtag Aristotle.
RV (09:22):
Okay.
JP (09:23):
And
RV (09:53):
I, I, we are gonna, I do want to go into those, but before we do that, you know, you’ve touched on this idea that I think one of the big mantras of StoryBrand, and one of the thing that works really well, and one of the reasons why we believe in it and like we become such emphatic fans about it, is the idea that you as the business owner, as the mission-driven messenger, you as the marketer, you are not the hero. The customer is the hero. And I just wanna connect this back to what you were talking about shrinking. When people shrink themselves, or they wanna be humble, the reason they’re doing that is because they think the conversation is about them, or they’re making the conversation about themselves. And I think a huge, like the big central thing is to go, if, if the conversation’s not about you, if, if the goal of the conversation is not to impress the other person, but to simply help the other person to serve the other person, now all of a sudden there’s no reason to shrink. ’cause It’s like you’re showing up as like, the best helper in the world versus like the most important person in the world. And, and, and so I just wanted you to talk on that part a little bit. ’cause I think, you know, the tactics of StoryBrand are super practical and actionable. I wanna talk about the seven points, but to me, the real heartbeat is this idea that customer’s the hero.
JP (11:20):
Yes. And you know, you would never see, well, let, let me just say this. We all wake up pretty much every day as the main character of our own story, right? That just really is how it is. Like you’re the main character of your movie. I’m the main character of my movie. And so we’re all kind of walking through life that
RV (11:39):
Way. And in my head, I have abs that are more defined than what I actually see. But like, yes, I, I wake up, you know, I think of myself as like Brad Pitt, but you know, it’s not
JP (11:49):
Way Oh, you
RV (11:49):
Are, you’re, but I’m, but I’m, I I, I get what you’re saying. Keep kick your
JP (11:52):
JP (12:48):
So in Star Wars, Luke Skywalker is the hero, but he comes in contact with Obi one Kenobi and Yoda wi in Lord of the Rings. There’s Frodo, but then there’s Gandalf in Hunger Games. There’s Katniss. But then there’s Hamid. There’s always this older, wiser guide who comes along to help the hero win the day. And when thought leaders position themselves as the hero, and what I mean by that is when you start talking, quote unquote about just yourself making the conversation about you, what you’re actually doing is positioning yourself as weak. ’cause You’re positioning yourself as a hero in the story. The best people who are equipped to help other people win are always the guides and guides are confident. They are s strong, they’re actually the strongest character in any movie, right? Obi one, Kenobi, Yoda, Gandalf, strongest characters in the movie who are helping other people win.
JP (13:50):
Now, they’re not out there bragging about themselves. They’re not even talking a lot about their history. In fact, we usually don’t know a ton of their history in a movie. All we know about them is that they are equipped to help the hero win because they’ve been where the hero has been, and they’ve overcome the same obstacles. So when you’re a thought leader, or you’re in business, when you talk about yourself and just make it all about kind of your insecurities, or kind of shrink a little bit, you’re making yourself the hero of the story. And you’re actually positioning yourself as weak, which means you’re actually not able to help other people. But when you talk about yourself in a way that talks about how you’ve overcome the similar problems that the people in your audience or your customers have experienced, right? So if you say, look, say you’re a thought leader on finance, and you stand up in front of an audience, and you don’t have to say, look, I’m really good at finance all this stuff.
JP (14:46):
But if you get up in front of an audience and you say, Hey, I used to be overwhelmed by finances as well, I get it. I was actually depressed, I was really struggling. What you’re doing in that moment is you’re positioning yourself beginning to position yourself as a guide to your audience with empathy. So when you say, I get it, I was like, you, and then you say, but actually, I was able to figure out a system where I was able to budget and invest in a way that actually has made me a millionaire in the past 10 years. And I wanna share that with you. Mm-Hmm.
RV (15:33):
Is one of our, one of our flagship, you know, probably most repeated quotes at Brand Builders Group is your most powerfully positioned to serve the person you once were.
JP (15:45):
Yes. I love that.
RV (15:46):
It, it anchors to what you’re, it anchors exactly to what you’re saying here is to go. You, you can be the guide if you actually are teaching people and selling people something that you know something about because you’ve been there, it automatically, like the default is you are the guide, and it it sets, it sets you up, like in that position perfectly.
JP (16:09):
And because everybody’s the hero in their own story, they’re looking for a way to overcome their problems. They’re looking for a way to win the day. They’re looking a way to move forward. And so, again, going back to your initial question when somebody says, what do you do? And you start fumbling and you start kind of trying to shrink a little bit and going, well, it’s really complicated. Immediately in their brain, what they’re doing is, oh, I’m not sure this person has really anything to help me move forward. Not in a, like, not, not in a,
RV (16:39):
In a subconscious
JP (16:39):
Way. Yeah. But it’s very subconscious. They’re going, this person, it is not gonna help me move ahead. And quite frankly, they’re not interesting
JP (17:28):
All right? In order to position your customer or your audience as the hero, what you wanna do is the very first thing you wanna do. And somebody says, so what do you do? You don’t answer that question. You start with a problem that they or your customers are experiencing. So if you asked me, just like, jj, what do you do? I would start, I wouldn’t say I work at StoryBrand. I would start by saying, so many businesses and thought leaders have a hard time explaining what it is that they do in a way that can actually make them a ton of money. So I just start that like, people have a hard time explaining what they do to grow their business,
RV (18:06):
Articulate the problem,
JP (18:07):
Articulate the problem. What you’re doing in that moment is you’re actually making the story about the person you’re talking to, not about yourself. So you start with the problem, then you come in as the guide and position yourself as a solution. So I’ve said, you know, a lot of thought leaders and businesses have a hard time explaining what they do. So they’re actually missing out on a, on a lot of money. What we do at StoryBrand is come in and help people create a clear message using the elements of story. So now I’ve just positioned myself as a guide to, to you the hero. And then I finish out the story with my customer success. So then I say, when people go through this, they’re able to not only articulate what they do in a really powerful way, but they’re able to actually help more people and grow their business. So it’s what the, the three elements are problem, solution, success. That’s a short story. So I’ll just put it all together. I would say so many thought leaders and businesses out there have a hard time explaining what they do to people in a way that makes them money. We help people clarify their marketing and their message by using a story framework so that then they ultimately have a clear way of explaining their value proposition can help more people and grow their business. Mm-Hmm.
RV (19:26):
Got it. So yeah, give us the seven points. I wanna make sure that we at least hit, hit high level on ’em. I know you, they go deep in the book and in the course. Yeah, yeah. And the training that you guys do. But like, walk us through the seven parts. ’cause, And I want for you listening, these are the seven parts of a story. But then this is also like a checklist for like how you would write out the copy of describing whatever it is that you do. So all right. Hit us, jj.
JP (19:53):
All right. So the seven elements of any good story are that in the first bit of the story, right at the very beginning, there is a hero. And that hero wants something in a movie within the first nine minutes of a movie for the story to be good. We have to know what that hero wants. And we could probably all think of movies where we just could say, oh yeah, the hero wants this. It should be very clear, it should be very obvious, and it should be really one thing. Jason Bourne wants to know his identity, but he can’t also open a cupcake shop and want to run a marathon. And all these other things has to be one thing, right? How that
RV (20:32):
Someone wants to get married, couple wants to have kids, somebody wants to be rich. Well, someone wants to find their dad. You know, finding Nemo wants to find their parents like Uhhuh.
JP (20:41):
Yep. Very, very clear. How that then applies to marketing is the principle is that companies need to, if you’re positioning your customer as the hero, companies need to be able to clearly articulate what they offer. And it actually has to be one thing. It can’t be 50 things. And that is what enters your customer into the story. So you have to be able to say, not just say like, I help people achieve a great life. No, no, no. What do you actually offer? And it needs to be clear. So you need to create talking points that articulate what you offer. ’cause That is really what your customer’s looking for. The second element of any good story is that once the hero, we know what the hero wants. A problem has to get in the way. The only way a story gets interesting is if the hero encounters a problem, right?
JP (21:32):
It’s like, if Liam Neeson’s daughter gets kidnapped for the eighth time, and he gets that phone call that says, you know, I have your daughter. And then all of a sudden she hops on and goes, just kidding. It’s a joke. Do you want to come over to Europe and we’ll just go shopping and look at colleges? And then the rest of the movie is about that
JP (22:25):
These two pieces are the two biggest pieces when it comes to writing a good story and creating good marketing. If you don’t articulate what you offer and you don’t constantly talk about the problems your customers experience, then people won’t pay attention to you. And if you can get those two things right in a movie and in marketing, you’re gonna do great. But the story keeps going and gets even more interesting. So then the element comes in that we’ve already talked about. The third principle of the StoryBrand framework is that the hero meets a guide. Mm-Hmm. They meet somebody who comes along and helps them win the day. Mr.
RV (23:02):
Miyagi, here you come. Yes, here he comes. Daniel son, Mr.
JP (23:05):
Mgi. Yes, exactly.
JP (24:01):
And what that does in a movie is show the audience that there is a clear path forward, easy and clear path forward for the hero to win, right? Even in Oceans 11, they’re gonna rob the Bellagio, it’s never been done before, it’s impossible. And then they go, but here’s the plan, right?
JP (24:50):
We just have three steps to show them this is how you win the day. Then the fifth element in a good story is that after the hero gets the plan, there’s a moment where they have to be called to action. They have to be either in or out. And so the, in a lot of movies, there is a ticking time bomb that is gonna force the hero to act, right? Like, it’s gonna go off in five minutes and they’ve gotta be in or out, they’ve gotta run towards it. Or runaway a tsunami’s coming to de destroy Los Angeles, and they’ve gotta get their daughter out of the city. You know, there’s all of these kind of this countdown that says you need to act or there may be consequences. The principle for that in the marketing is we actually need to have clear calls to action in our marketing, our heroes.
JP (25:40):
Our customers need to know exactly what they need to do in order to buy our product and service. There is a study that was done recently that said 70% of small businesses in America do not have a clear call to action on their website that people are losing money if they don’t know if, if your customers or your audience doesn’t know what they’re supposed to do next. If you’re a thought leader and you’re up on a stage, you better at the end of your talk have something that they’re supposed to do that will connect them to your products and services. What’s the next step they’re supposed to take in order to work with you?
RV (26:16):
Yeah. And I, you know, it’s interesting. It’s never really dawned on me the, the, the, the, the dynamic of the ticking bomb part of it, right? So there’s a clear action, but then, you know, obviously, like you know, we do a lot of copywriting, like sales copywriting, like to, you know, how do you create page that gets someone to pull out their credit card? And you know, urgency is like a really big part, is people, people always procrastinate. And I’ve never thought about that with the relation, like the connection to StoryBrand in movies, how it’s like, you know, he, he’s about to get on an airplane and leave your life forever, or you know, you better ask her out on a date before she like gets on the train That there, like that kind of a thing. So do you guys advocate kind of like deadlines and countdowns and that kind of stuff?
JP (27:07):
Absolutely. Absolutely. Because if you allow people to delay action, it often becomes inaction. So I, I say that a lot. Delayed action usually is inaction. And so when you, it’s always in a movie, like you said, it’s very clear, there’s a moment, right? It’s, it’s not kind of wishy-washy of what the hero is supposed to do. They have to go get the girl, they have to disarm the bomb, they have to hop in the helicopter. There’s something that they have to do. And all the sports very,
RV (27:35):
Very clear. Every i’ll I have the built in clock, like
JP (27:37):
Exactly. And if, if you’re saying, okay, so let’s say Tom Cruise is running through the airport to disarm a bomb, and all of a sudden he finds out it’s going off in a month, well, there’s no urgency for that action
JP (28:21):
What you’re doing again, in that moment is you’re shrinking. And again, I’ll remind everybody, you shrinking does not serve your customers or the world
RV (28:53):
Clear. And I think of it, you know, so like, as a parent of two toddlers, I go, if my son is about to pick up a marble and put it in his mouth, I don’t kind of politely say, Hey, you should maybe not do that. Or like, I reach over and I smack it out of his hand like now. Right? And so, mm-hmm,
JP (29:54):
Absolutely. Clarity is kindness and showing people where they’re supposed to go, what they’re supposed to do is actually an act of service. So if, if
JP (30:42):
They’re gonna get the girl they’re gonna hit the home run, or that actually they’re gonna strike out and everybody loses. They’re gonna miss out on the girl and she’s gonna marry his brother. You know, like we know what the tragedy, what we’re pain we’re trying to avoid, and what success we’re cheering for. And it’s the same thing in marketing. You need to create talking points and value proposition around what their, your customer’s life will look like once they do business with you. That’s called success. So what, what are they gonna save time, save money? Are they gonna be more confident? Are they gonna be able to get ahead? What are the things they’re actually gonna be able to benefit from, from your product or service? And we need to write those out and articulate those, but we also need to articulate what they’re going to miss out on, or what pain they’re going to continue to experience if they don’t work with us, that they’re gonna continue to be tired, they’re gonna continue to be overwhelmed.
JP (31:38):
And that might get a little bit worse where they actually struggle with burnout, right? You can kind of forecast what can happen to them if they don’t work with you. And mainly it’s that their problems either are solved if they work with you or are not solved. If they don’t, and they either can get then a little bit better or a little bit worse. And those really are the seven elements of a good story. And a seven, the seven elements of good marketing. So what we actually do is then teach people how to create talking points for all seven of those elements so that you can make sure that on your website emails, when you’re giving keynote addresses, when you’re doing webinars, that everything you’re talking about is very clear. It’s positioning your customers the hero, you as the guide, and showing how you can make their life better if you work with them by giving them a clear call to action. Mm-Hmm,
RV (32:30):
JP (32:44):
Yeah, we actually have a little a little gif for everybody who’s listening is that you can actually go to storybrand.com/brand script. And when you go to storybrand.com/brand script, you’re actually gonna see what we call an online brand script where it has these different elements that I’ve just been talking about. And there are boxes to be able to create, start working on your own story, your company story, your entrepreneurial story, to try to create talking points around those pieces. So it’s actually like an online version of everything that I just talked about. So you can go there and practice creating your marketing and your messaging, and that’s storybrand.com/brandscript.
RV (33:27):
So Cool. Yeah, so we’ll link up in the show notes. And you know, I guess this last thing, jj, like, if, if someone is starting out, you know, right now and they’re hearing this and they’re going, oh my gosh. Like, you know, I, I I’m, I I I struggle with articulating what I’m doing and y you know, like, I don’t know, you know, I’m not a great writer, et cetera. I mean, you’ve given ’em some really great tools and, and stuff, but just kind of more like on the emotional side, you know, what, what’s kind of the encouragement or the reminder that you would want that person to hear?
JP (34:05):
Yeah, I think, you know, I, for me, for a long time, ’cause I’ve been in marketing and public relations and things for a very long time, and the thing that I struggled most with was I, I never wanted to brag about myself. I never wanted to elevate myself. And it, it meant much of that came from kind of a false humility. Truthfully,
JP (34:54):
And it actually lifted a huge weight off of my shoulders and allowed me to talk about myself and the things that I do in a way that really serves others versus serving myself. And so if you’re in that spot where you’re like, I don’t know how to do this. I’m, I, I feel weird talking about myself getting on podcasts or going, getting up and giving speeches ’cause it feels like, what do I have to say? Well, the first thing I would say is you have amazing things to say, everybody. A lot of times people think they don’t have anything new to offer the world. And I’m telling you, you may not have a new idea, but you have a new way of telling it because you’re the only person who’s ever experienced what you’ve experienced. So stand in that authority that you have that there is only one you.
JP (35:39):
And then the second thing is, stop thinking about what you do and start thinking about the problems that you solve for other people. What pain are people experiencing? What problems are they experiencing? And what wisdom do you have, or tools or tips or tricks do you have in your arsenal that can help them solve their problem? If you start just thinking in that way, the weight will come off your shoulders. You’re gonna get so much more excited about talking about what you do and selling your services because you are going to make the world a better place. People need you. They need your wisdom, they need your experience, and they need what you have in order to make their lives better and the lives of the people they serve. So,
RV (36:25):
Amen.
JP (36:25):
Think about that and solve problems. Don’t talk about yourself. Solve problems.
RV (36:31):
Yeah. Amen, brother. Don’t, don’t be the hero. Be the guide. Dr. JJ Peterson, thank you for coming and for sharing your wisdom, brother. We love you guys. And we, we, you know, we always want the best for you guys, so keep kicking butt.
JP (36:45):
Oh, thanks. It’s such an honor to be here. Love you guys too.
Ep 461: What You Need To Start Building Your Speaking Business | Joe Heaps Episode Recap
AJV (00:02):
So speaker, you want to get booked on more stages. So I’m talking to you today that aspiring speaker, that early beginner speaker or even that moderately booked speaker who’s going, I want to make this part-time thing or this dream, my full-time gig. I wanna become a highly paid professional speaker. I wanna speak on stages. This is what I wanna do. This is my dream. How do I do that? All right. And so recently on the influential personal brand podcast, I interviewed Joe Heaps, who is the CMO, and he’s in charge of marketing and sales strategies for e speakers, which is an online speaker matching service with meeting planners. And so we had a conversation around some industry trends of like, what’s working to help get speakers booked in today’s market and today, I mean, 2024, and what do we need to know as speakers that will help us grow our speaking business?
AJV (01:00):
So I wanted to share some of those highlights from that interview and a more condensed recap version for you. So there’s just a few things I thought were really helpful that I wanna share with you to help you build that speaking business this year. So the first thing I thought this was really fascinating Joe mentioned, he goes the number one misstep that I see early beginner speakers make is they make all of their speaker press kits, even their demo videos all about their credentials versus what am I gonna do for you? Right? And I see this all the time too. In fact, I’ve made this mistake before where I start with the very first page of my speaker press Kitt is my bio, and it’s like, Hey, AJ Vaden is a entrepreneur, speaker, author, and it’s all about me.
AJV (01:48):
And it’s like, well, we can get to that, but what this meeting planner needs to know is right up front and that very first line, what are you gonna do for me? Right? So it’s what he calls the audience benefit statements. What are the payoffs? What are the takeaways that my audience is going to leave from your session, right? So you’ve gotta start with the audience in mind as well as the buyer in mind. In this case, the buyer is the meeting planner or the committee or whoever’s gonna book that speaker. But they need to know, it’s like, what are you gonna do for my audience? What are you gonna do for me? Not what are all of your credentials? And then I love what he said, he said. Then the, the second biggest mistake that I see that speakers make is that if they start with that, then there’s no transition.
AJV (02:32):
And they immediately go into, and I’m a, you know, New York Times bestselling author, podcast host, da da da, and there’s a complete disconnect between what were the benefit statements that we were just talking about and who I am as a speaker and as a person. He said, so as that transition happens from the audience benefit statements such as, you know, Hey, I am a engaging speaker who’s going to bring humor to the audience. So if you’re looking for entertainment value, dah, dah, dah, dah dah, then we need that transition statement to go, Hey, as a, you know, 20 year standup comedian, and use your bio as an actual part of the proof process to the benefit statements. Make sure that there is a natural transition of whatever you just said in the benefit statements about what they can expect from you as a speaker.
AJV (03:25):
What are the benefits that they’re gonna get from hiring you as a speaker, right? The takeaways, the what the audience is gonna leave with, make sure that’s the first thing that you talk about when you get to your bio. It’s not, hey and AJ is a, it’s like, no, we need to make sure that the very first things in our bio are giving the proof and the evidence from whatever we just said in the benefit statements of how our experience and our expertise gives us the right to talk about these things. And it’s the proof that I actually know what I’m talking about. Then you can add in all of those other credentializing things. And so the way to do that is just a very, very articulate way of going. We have to start with the audience in mind, the buyer in mind, IE the meeting planner, what do they wanna hear first?
AJV (04:16):
And then use our bio as a way to give proof to every statement that you just set. And that’s what they’re looking for on that very first page of a speaker press kit or the very first thing they see on the, about us on your website. But it’s like, Hey, it’s like, what are you gonna do for me? What’s the very first thing I wanna know? Is what kind of speaker are you and what are the benefits of your, your speech? Not the features. The features are all about you. The benefits are what are you gonna do for my audience? And I thought that was just a very good, simple way of thinking about it. Second thing and we talk about this all the time in different formats, but I loved his little take on demo videos. He said, honestly some, some meeting planners are gonna wanna see 30 minutes of stage footage, some 15 minute, you know, sizzle reel.
AJV (05:04):
You see those popular? He said, but I’ll tell you most often what most people are looking for is some sort of 32nd to two minutes that is so short, y’all 30 seconds, 30 seconds to two minute clips of you on stage. He goes, they’re not looking for testimonials in that two minutes. They’re not looking for where you’ve spoken, what media you’ve been on, there’s no voiceovers. It’s like, Nope, I need you right up front on stage doing the best thing that you do, right? So, and it needs to be on the content. And it’s like when you think about two minutes is not a lot of time, you can’t be fitting in all that other stuff in there. And there are so many different opinions on what makes a great demo video. Other people say it’s like, Hey, five minutes. And we do want that production value.
AJV (05:45):
We do want the credibility and the testimonials that Joe’s take on it. He goes, the very first thing they need to see is you on stage. And he goes, if you wanna add all that stuff after the fact, make sure it’s after the two minutes. But that first 30 seconds to two minutes needs to be you doing your thing with the best content you have. We need to see audience engagement, we need to see audience reactions, and we need to see you doing your craft. And that’s what we want those first two minutes. And then if you wanna extend it past that with testimonials and all the other stuff, that’s fine or make separate videos for that. But just give us two minutes of the best you’ve got on stage. And that’s what meeting planners wanna see. Thought that was super helpful and insightful.
AJV (06:29):
Last thing wanna share is just something about fees. ’cause That’s always coming up. And so I asked him, it’s like, what, what do you, what do you see as the best way to set fees? And there’s a couple of different things that he shared that I thought was really great. And he said, just remember if you’re a beginner, if you’re just starting out, just speak. If you get paid it’s bonus but speak because you wanna speak and you maybe get paid $50, $200, $500, he goes, just say yes. The more you speak, the more you speak, right? We say that all the time at Brand Builders Group, but if you wanna speak and you’re just starting out, you just say yes, you take the gig and then you take it again and then you take it again and you follow basic laws of supply and demand, and the lower the supply, the higher the demand, your fees go up.
AJV (07:16):
So as we’re talking about someone who is getting booked for speed getting booked for fees, and you are doing this, what are those early beginner set fees that you’re seeing most often on e speakers? And he said, what I would consider a beginner speaker who maybe doesn’t even have a demo video yet, but they have just some clips on stage. He said, maybe they’ve been doing this for a year or so. They’re not booked, but they’re getting booked. Sometimes he goes somewhere between $2,500 and $3,000 is where we see most people at a beginner level, regardless of what you set your fees at, I think that’s a, a probably an accurate picture of what it looks like as a beginner. He said, then we start seeing that supply and demand factor. The more you get booked, you know, the more demand you have, then those fees start rising up.
AJV (08:01):
He said, but I would say the average speaker on our site, which they’ve got more than 20,000 speakers, is between 70 $510,000. And those are people who’ve got systems in place. They’re doing this pretty frequently. This has become their full-time thing and those are their average fees. And he goes, and then what we’re seeing for us anyway is anyone above 10,000 is someone who is booked out, right? So they are rather booked out. They have had some sort of a content event. So their content has gone viral. They had a TED Talk, they had a bestselling book, they had some sort of what I would call life event. So they climbed Mount Everest or you know, they survived a plane crash where they have some unique life event, which is rare, or they’ve had some sort of content that has made them available to increase their fees to a certain level. And I just think following
AJV (08:54):
That as the basic guidelines, as you’re, as you’re setting out to build your speaking career and specifically over the next 12 months of just like, where am I at today and where do I wanna be of going? You just start speaking until you can get paid. And then the more you get paid, just know those beginner level fees. It’s very normal to start around $2,500. Even if you know you’re worth more than that you’ll get paid worth more than that. But the more you speak, the more you speak. So just a couple of insights around press Kids demo videos and fees as we set out into the year to help you build your speaking career. Hope that helps. If you wanna check out the full episode, it’s with Joe Heaps from e Speakers on the Influential Personal Brand podcast, and I’ll see you soon.
Ep 460: Helping Speakers Get Booked On More Stages with Joe Heaps
AJV (00:02):
Hey everybody. AJ Vaden here. Welcome to the Influential Personal Brand. I am super excited for today’s interview because I love when I get to do interviews around very niche topics like we’re gonna do today. And today we’re gonna be talking about the world of speaking and most specifically how to get booked as a speaker. And I have invited a newer friend of mine, but a good friend of my husband and a lot of the team at Brain Builders Group, Joe Heaps. And I’ll tell you a little bit more about Joe in a second, but I wanted to let you guys know what this interview is about and why you should stick around. And just before I hit record, Joe and I were talking about how, you know, there’s so much stuff
AJV (00:53):
And the truth is, I think there’s a lot of value in some stuff that’s out there, and there’s no value in other stuff that’s out there. And so we’ve been on this kind of mission to help get some industry leaders in the speaking industry on this podcast to help create some clarity and expectations around if you have a dream, if you have a passion of becoming a highly paid professional speaker who is booked on stages because you have a message that you just feel called to share, right? There are some things you need to know that will prepare you and equip you to do that successfully, where you can take this dream and turn it into a very lucrative business. But if you think it’s gonna happen overnight, and you think it’s gonna happen by, you know, just posting some social media content, well, that may be where you’re a little off schedule, right?
AJV (01:45):
And so today we’re gonna have just an honest conversation of helping you build that dream of building your speaking business. So if you’re an aspiring speaker or even a speaker who’s getting booked, that just goes, man, I wanna get booked more. I do want this to be my full thing full-time thing, then this is the interview for you. So stick around get your pen and paper, take notes, because this is gonna be jam packed with tons of industry insights that’s gonna help you succeed in that endeavor. Now let me introduce you to the gentleman who’s going to help share some of these industry secrets. ’cause It’s not gonna be me today. I’m just going to be asking some questions. And quite honestly, I have my pen and paper too. ’cause I’m super excited to learn what’s new, what’s changing, what’s evolving. Because as a speaker myself, I have no doubt that Joe’s gonna share some tips today that I can put into practice in my business.
AJV (02:39):
So Joe Heaps is the managing partner and also the CMO at E Speakers, which you’re gonna learn all about. He is and why I think this is so helpful. He’s the one who’s responsible for all the sales and marketing strategies, which, you know, surprise, right?
JH (03:34):
Thank you. Appreciate the invite.
AJV (03:37):
Yeah. And you know, as we’re kind of getting started and helping everyone learn about you and e speakers and why I got started, I just wanna start with like a little bit of background knowledge of like, what is e speakers and how did that even come about? Like how did you get started with that? Like yeah, tell us what it is and then why, why did it get created?
JH (03:55):
Yeah, you bet. Well first of all, our e speaker’s mission statement is we truly believe that the right speaker in front of the right audience can make a lasting, it kind of creates a magic. And and that right speaker in front of the right audience leads to like long-term improvement in organizations and individuals. And so the, the idea that a speaker can go out and just speak to anybody is false. I mean, you can collect a check, but we really feel like there’s a magic when the right speaker gets in front of the right audience and that change is made. And that’s really what this is all about. And I know any speaker that’s out there has felt that, like, you felt like maybe you just checked the box, you gotta check and you walked away and it really, you, like, you did your job, but you didn’t really connect with anybody.
JH (04:42):
And I know that people have been in the audience and done the same, but that, that change is really what’s important. And it’s what keeps a speaker getting booked, quite honestly, is if people in the audience feel their authentic self and they, they really connect with their content and they feel like they’re making a change in their life. And so our mission is to help speakers get on more stages and to make that change more often. Mm-Hmm. How we started was 24 years ago by a speaker named Art Berg, who Rory is a good friend of, I don’t know, AJ if you met r art before, or not he hasn’t. But art was a speaker he’s a quadriplegic and spoke, you know, over a hundred times a year, traveled the world. And that, and that at the time was a pretty big challenge, kinda like a a unique situation because he was in a wheelchair and traveling the world and on his own without any help.
JH (05:47):
And that, that’s a lot of work for a quadriplegic. And now there’s, there’s several more you know, and, and they do great jobs. But the fact that Art did that was a major thing that he tackled in his life to show that, you know, that wasn’t gonna stop him from making a difference in the world. And so one of the things that art he was really big on technology and how it connected with people. And he had this vision that through technology, his job could get easier and he could make the meeting planners, the buyers, the people that hire speakers, their job easier. And so he created a, a software with my business partner, Dave. And they started off with that technology. And the technology was really an event management tool that he could track all of his events in, in the calendar and everything.
JH (06:45):
And that he kind of gave a backdoor for speaker bureaus, which are kind of the in-between people that that book speakers off also, they’re kind of an agency. And those speakers bureaus kind of had a backdoor into the calendar. And at the time the cloud wasn’t really even a thing. Nobody knew of the cloud, and this was kind of a cloud technology. And so it, it allows people from their offices to be able to connect with speakers and be able to book them. Because at the time, you know, cell phones were just barely coming into the picture. No, internet wasn’t even around in the beginning. And so, you know, it just, it just blossomed from there. And unfortunately a few years into the Endeavor, art passed away. And but, and that’s when I joined the team and, and you know, that’s what Speers that’s where we started.
JH (07:38):
And really art art’s vision really is what we use every day to kind of keep us moving forward is just that idea of making speakers more readily available to book and giving them the tools and, and the things they need to be able to, to get booked. And then making it easy for meeting planners to connect with them and, and their job. And especially in this day and age, it’s you know, you can search the internet for any type of speaker and find something, right? But again, is it the right person and are, is it making it easy on the buyer? So that’s kind of what we have an event management tool that we can talk more about if you’d like. Or we have also have an arm of our business that is all about promotion and marketing of a speaker and specifically to those meeting planners or those buyers. So that’s kind of
AJV (08:34):
What we do. You know, I, I love that. And I know I’ve heard, you know, so many different great things about e speakers through the years and, you know, we’ve known of you guys since we’ve been a part of the National Speakers Association, but I mean, it has to be at least 20 years that I’ve known about you guys. So what did you guys start in the nineties?
JH (08:53):
99. 9 99?
AJV (08:55):
Yeah. ’cause I know it’s like, even in the early years of us being a part of the National Speakers Association, I remember seeing e speakers and, you know, I spent some time on the websites, you know, kind of getting up to date on the all the news speakers that you guys are featuring. And I think that’s and I think talking about both of those would be really interesting in interesting for our conversation today. But one of the things that I would love to start with since you are, you know, a huge part of like the sales and marketing strategy I’d love to start there of just going, like, when you think of a speaker and what assets, what, what tools they need to get booked as a speaker, right? So when you’re thinking of like, what do meeting planners need to make quick decisions, and what does speakers need to have readily available to supply? Like, what would you say are the most important marketing assets that a speaker needs today?
JH (09:46):
Yeah. Well I think probably the thing that we see that peop, that speakers stumble on quite a bit is what we call our audience benefit statement. It is it’s front and center on a speaker’s profile and the audience benefit statement. We tend to see speakers and they don’t really have that defined in, we’ve actually gone through your course Brand Builders course ourselves. And, and and so I know you, you know a lot about this as well, but really talking about the benefits of hiring you rather than in marketing. Marketing 1 0 1 talks about features and benefits of a product. Doesn’t matter what product it is. A good product is marketed with benefits. Like, it’ll help you do this, you’ll feel better doing this. It’ll, you know, and, and we give lots of examples of companies that do that in their advertising.
JH (10:38):
But the benefits of hiring a speaker are way more powerful than the features. So we see speakers lead with things like, I’m a New York Times bestseller, I’ve written these books. I’ve, I’ve talked to these people, I’ve presented to these groups, I have these degrees. I went to this school. You know, and that, that’s, that’s really, really common. In fact, seasoned speakers still tend to kind of slide back into that because speakers are unique in regards to a product because you do talk about yourself a lot, and you’re building your own personal brand as you know, right? And so that’s one of the things that causes some pain for speakers is they’re wondering, why am I not getting booked? And it’s because they’re leading with the features of the product. They’re the product and they’re leading with the features rather than the benefits. And the benefits are things like, why would somebody hire you?
JH (11:31):
What do you, what benefit are you going to bring to that audience? And so you need to lead with things like when I come speak to your group, we’re gonna identify these key things and your audience will walk away knowing how to do this, this, and this. Right? And so that’s really kind of the idea of a benefit statement. Yeah. And, and there’s a lot of different examples. I mean, if, if, if people wanted, they could go to our directory at e speakers marketplace and, and go through and search on a topic. And you can see, in fact, if there are speakers listening, I’d encourage you to do that. Put your topic in and, and see the reco the results that come up. And you’ll see some really good ones. We’ve tried to really work with people on that audience benefit statement, but some of ’em come up and, you know, they’re, they’re just, like I was talking about, in fact, they lead with their name.
JH (12:18):
Like, you know, it would say, Rory Vaden is a New York Times bestseller and speaker and author and trainer. Well, we have like 20,000 speakers in our database. And same thing, most of ’em are trainers, authors, and speakers, right? And, and could be New York Times bestsellers. So you know, that that type of, just getting that outta the way and the process of working through that audience benefit statement really sets the stage for the benefits. And then you take those benefits of hiring you and they become, you know, bullet points in your bio and they can become even programs like your speeches, right? And so that’s really the probably the biggest thing that we see. The other thing in regards to just, I mean, that’s the marketing side. I know that’s what you ask about. But the other thing that we see is speakers tend to struggle with systems.
JH (13:08):
And that’s where our tool really shines, is that, you know, a good system means that you can be away from the system. And, and our, we live in ACI in a world now that everything is connected, everything ties together, whether it’s through I calendar, whatever. And you have all these different ways now, even since the pandemic, zoom is the new thing, and, and everybody, you can zoom from an airport if you needed to, right? And, and on the road. But speakers are super busy. And you know, having a good system that keeps them on track mm-hmm. Is, is really important. And that’s one of the things that Art started in the very beginning is, you know, being, having such a demanding schedule with over like, you know, 200 presentations a year or whatever. One staff member, he found the value of systems and the, the freedom a good system gives you to like chart this course of success.
JH (14:07):
And so really that’s, that’s kind of what he harnessed in our tools and, and we see as a real big value. And it’s still a big struggle for speakers, is is having a good system. Could they be away from their business for a week and everything continued to run? That’s good. And, you know, that’s, that’s really not just, I mean, of course we expect speakers to take a vacation, right? But not just vacation. It’s, it’s being booked three times or four times that week. And just the intricacies of going to Nashville, going to Dallas, going to Chicago, flying to LA and you know, just don’t have time to keep up with things. And so having a good system is super important. So, oh, well I, that I’m not sure if I answered your question, but No,
AJV (14:49):
I think I have some follow ups, but I think that that systems part of the conversation wasn’t even on my radar. And the truth is, is most speakers, at least when they start out, they are the sales department, marketing department, operations department, billing department. Right? Right. It’s like they’re all the departments. And I don’t think if a lot, I don’t think a lot of people realize, it’s like, no, being a speaker is being an entrepreneur. It is a business. Yeah. You gotta do all the same things that you would do as a small business owner. You, and if you don’t have a good system, all of a sudden it’s like, it’s not so fun anymore. Yeah. Now it’s, it’s a lot of work. And you’re working all the time, traveling all the time on stages all the time. And it’s like, oh, all right. This thing I thought I wanted to do, I don’t wanna do it anymore. Yeah.
JH (15:34):
Well, and if people, if speakers only, if all you had to do is say, Hey, you have an event this day, show up at this address and speak on this topic, and that’s all you had to do then I think things will be a lot easier. But the truth of it is, is that it is literally a business. Mm-Hmm.
AJV (16:50):
No, I love that. And, you know, often I refer to speakers as artists, right? And it’s like, the reason most people wanna be a speaker is because they have this message that they wanna share and speaking is a, a craft that they want to get better at. And, and it’s like, but then you get kind of stuck with all you’re doing is sending out emails and proposals and, and contracts and, and all of a sudden all the things that you wanna do, the things that you love to do, you don’t, you don’t really get to do those anymore. And having a good system gives you the freedom to work on the message, hone the craft and do the revenue generating activities, be excellent on stage and do the pre-event calls. So I love that you brought that up. That wasn’t even on my radar for our conversation, but it’s such an important part of where most people get into something and then all of a sudden they’re like, I’m exhausted, right?
AJV (17:42):
I’ve got major burnout, I don’t know if I can keep doing this. And it’s because you didn’t have a good system to start with. So I love that part of it. Right. And I love the, the benefit statements. ’cause You’re right, it’s like most speakers start with, here’s, here I am, right? Like, these are my credentials. So I love that benefit start statements piece. But then you also mentioned a few other things like program descriptions and all of that. And so do you find that it is still necessary that speakers have like a media kit or a press kit, a demo video? Like what’s most important, what’s least important? How long should they be? Like, what are those things look like today?
JH (18:18):
Yeah, no, those are good questions and yes, super relevant. All of that is still needed. I mean, and just to give the listeners a, a kind of a blast from the past, the way this used to happen, I’m answering your question, I promise. The, the way this used to happen was quite literally, if any of you were old enough to remember how you used to order things over the phone instead of online, you’d open the JCPenney catalog and you would find the number and call ’em and say, Hey, I want x, y, z number. Well, the same thing happened with speakers. Specifically bureaus would print this big, like catalog of speakers and they would ship that out to all the buyers, all the meeting planners. And then the same thing happened. They call and they look through and say, Hey, these are the speakers I want.
JH (19:06):
And so it, it changed from that to then speakers had like individual websites and then social media came into it. And then people were still mailing VHS tapes and then CDs and, you know, all of that. And that media kit has graduated into this digital media kit now. And so yes, it’s still valuable, but, but different. And, and one thing that I think speakers need to know is that just because you have a website and everything’s there doesn’t mean that that solves the, the doesn’t make it easy for a buyer to hire you. They have to go find your website, they have to navigate that. And you have to give them things easy at their fingertips. And I mean, I, I haven’t seen the numbers on this lately, but seems like before the pandemic MPI, which is meeting professionals international, they’re a big group of meeting planners.
JH (20:06):
And they had listed being a meeting planner was in like the top five most stressful jobs in the US. And I’m still, it’s, I’m sure it’s probably still up in the top. But they have a lot on their plate. And if you just say, yeah, go here and do this, then that’s, that’s not easy. And we’ve become a society where we want things instant. Like we go buy something online and you want to actually see if they have those red shoes in stock. And if they don’t, you’ll go somewhere else where you know, they have it in stock. ’cause You don’t wanna wait. Mm-Hmm.
JH (21:00):
They can narrow it down to one of ’em, hire ’em and and sign the contract and pay ’em all through online. And all of that is generated or has come about because of the, the type of buying that people are doing online. Right. That’s a new, and anyway, so my point is, is that that digital kit is so important and yes, have it all on your website, but that’s one of the reasons that our, our profiles, our online profiles have done so well is something we launched about 10 years ago. And we had, we saw this need where speakers were sending their kits out to all the speakers bureaus and all their meeting planners. And it’s a huge cost number one, ’cause you got to, it’s a big box, you know, then you’re shipping that out and then they have to then go through that and digitize the video or then take the video and put it on the website.
JH (21:56):
And it’s a lot of work for all those people to do that. And we heard from the bureaus that they have rooms to just boxes full of VHS tapes or CDs, right? And, and meeting planners have the same thing. People just send meeting planners random boxes of stuff and just say, Hey, I’m a speaker on leadership, hire me. You know? And so they just had a hard time processing all that. So the, the digital media kit is effective in the, in the sense that it’s one thing that you can send them and it has everything in it, and it’s easy for them to like save in a folder and, and share with people and things like that. And that’s one of the things where the profile, our profiles have really shined is on the profile itself. We have all the different marketing materials that, that are, we’ve found that speakers or the buyers want to know, they don’t have to leave the profile at all.
JH (22:49):
They have their bio, they have all their topics, their fees, they have videos, they have marketing materials, they have all their programs, their calendar, if they do virtual work, all of that thing. All of that is on one profile. And it, what it creates is a an a a better experience for the buyer. And they have everything they need right on that one page to make the purchase decision. And yes, they could go to the speaker’s website, yes. They could be go to the speakers social media, yes, they could look at this PDF, but you know, ultimately, like having one place where all of that is, is together is, is still valuable. So, yes.
AJV (23:28):
Yeah. I love that. And I think one of the things you said that really stands out to me, and which I don’t think a lot of speakers are probably doing when they think about their demo videos or speaker press kits is, am I building this to appeal to the, the buyer, right? Am I building this to attract them, make it easy for them? ’cause I see a lot of Prescott that are like 12, 13, 14 pages and it’s like, takes me forever to go through it. And I’m supposed to be doing that for our clients, right? It’s like, that’s really long. Or demo videos that are 20, 30 minutes. And I’m like, I don’t have time to watch this. So I’m guessing a meeting planner doesn’t either. So for, when you’re thinking about making it easy for this buyer, right? The meeting planner to make decisions, is there like a special recipe of like how short it is this? Yeah. Tell us about that. Yeah,
JH (24:16):
There is, well, specifically with programs, so we, let’s just talk about that audience benefit statement that it’s kind of your lead in, right? It’s what’s your, the benefits of hiring you. And then as you take that, you go into your bio and your bio should always start with an extension of that audience benefit statement. ’cause You don’t want ’em to all, all of a sudden go to your bio and now all of a sudden you’re talking about being a New York Times bestseller and all this stuff. And you said, Hey, I thought you were a leadership expert that could change the culture of my organization. And now all of a sudden you’re talking about this. So it’s kind of the segue paragraph. That first paragraph is the segue paragraph that really ties in your audience benefit statement into, now this is all about me. So you have that, that segue paragraph that talks about the benefits still and explains them in more detail.
JH (25:06):
And then the rest of the bio is all about you as a speaker. Sure. Say all those things that we talked about. These are the things I’ve done, books I’ve written places, degrees I have, or what makes you be able to support that. You, you can change culture in an organization because you’ve done all these things. Right? And then the, the next extension of that is in the programs, your speeches. So when you outline your programs, you always lead with the benefit, right? So this is the benefit of hiring, this is why you want me to speak to your group on this program. And then the format of that is always great to identify who this is good for. This is great for senior leadership, middle management, you know, salespeople, whatever. And so you identify kind of who it’s for and then the last thing you look, make sure you always have in the program description.
JH (26:01):
You have the program description and then the takeaways. Mm-Hmm.
JH (26:50):
And they can send ’em this PDF that’s a one page about how to create culture in an organization and kind of more about what you present. So that’s kind of the general gist of kind of the content that you should have on your profile, you know, really driven by the benefits. And then you asked earlier about the video and we find effectively that somewhere around 30 to 40 minutes of video total is like probably the most valuable. But we, we prefer really small segments. Hmm. So I wouldn’t ever put a raw video up there. It’s like 30 minutes of you speaking. ’cause That’s just boring Right?
JH (27:49):
Wow. And so, and, and really we found more success with short little video clips. So let’s say you know, a AJ or aj your speaker, right? Mm-Hmm.
JH (28:48):
Like, what’s all this stuff? And so if that’s not, if they don’t see you on the stage in the first 30 seconds of the video, they’re out. Right? So I’d always lead, and I don’t have any problem with voiceover videos, but, you know, if you want to take the first couple seconds and say, Hey, this is AJ Vaden leadership expert, and then show you on stage where you’re delivering content, that’s where the value comes. And that’s really what they want to see. They want to see you delivering your content, how you interact with the audience, if they’re engaged with you less about the content itself and more how you’re working with the audience. And then secondly comes the content, right? And so that’s where, if aj, you’re a, a branding expert, they want to see the content. This is, this is AJ speaking on branding, it’s the video name.
JH (29:37):
And the next video might be, you know, AJ speaking on corporate culture or whatever, right? And they expect when they, when they listen or watch that, they’re going to hear a segment of your speech that talks about branding, about corporate culture or whatever, right? It’s not just somewhere in that 30 minute video or 15 minute clip. It’s, it’s in that two minutes. And you can obviously go longer than a two minute clip. But we found that we, in our system, you can have six topics, up to six topics. And so that would give you six individual videos that would show you delivering your content and with those particular topics. And that’s a really great way to do it. And then of course, you can also add other videos that would be like a testimonial video. So if somebody was interested in hearing testimonials, not just reading them, you can, you can go in and add those testimonial videos and, and of, and if you wanted to outta a sizzle reel. But in our system, you can set a primary video that always shows up on your profile and that particular one I, I don’t like making it anything other than something that you’re right up on the stage in the very beginning to catch ’em. So
AJV (30:52):
I love that. That’s what we, I think that’s really insightful about Yeah, it’s great to have a sizzle and it’s great to have testimonials, but that needs to be ancillary to the main thing being the main thing, which is you on stage, which is what this meeting planner needs to see first. Right.
JH (31:07):
And the interesting thing is that we’ve seen speakers do this and they create these little clips and you can be, so if you don’t have stage video and you can be just like, AJ is right here to me in the Zoom window, and and you can just say, Hey, my name’s AJ and I, I’m a, I’m a expert on corporate culture and when I come speak to you, we identify this, this, and this, and you audience will walk away knowing how to do this, this, and this. I mean, it’s just simple as that. Hmm. And it can be a video just like we’re on right now. And you know, it, it works out great. And and it’s something that can be shared on your own social media and on your own website and meeting planner really like that. And it can be even a marketing, we have a couple speakers that just did some marketing emails out about being an expert in whatever it was that they were an expert and that video was part of that email that they put out. So anyway, it just, there’s a lot of value in like, really specifically saying what you do and how you solve problems. You
AJV (32:08):
Know, I love that for the, the brand new speakers who are just starting out where, you know, so much of it as you hear, it’s like, you’re not gonna get booked without a demo video. And it’s like, well, you’re saying yeah, you can. Yeah. So I think that’s a, a really one hope inspiring for everyone who’s just beginning. But for those people who are just starting out going like, Hey, I’ve got my message. I know what I’m doing. I just don’t have any stage footage yet. I haven’t had that opportunity to get it filmed on stage. You really think doing something like this that’s just articulating what you talk about, how you do it, what the benefits are. You think that meeting planners are booking speakers that way?
JH (32:44):
Yeah. Well, a hundred percent. I know they are.
AJV (32:46):
That’s awesome. Yeah. That’s, I think that’s really hope inspiring for everyone out there going eventually you need stage footage, but you don’t have to have it to give back.
JH (32:57):
Yeah. Well, and the crazy thing is, is we all know people that have big names, celebrity figures, Malcolm Gladwell, Simon Sinek, whoever, AJ Baden,
JH (33:55):
And and anyway, but that, so that’s how we got him to get booked. But you know, the, the, the point is, is that that if you’re not a celebrity figure, which the majority of us aren’t then how do you get jobs? And it, it takes, it, it really takes the doing all the time. I think, oh man, I, I don’t remember who it was. It might’ve been I don’t know. I was listening to David Goggins I think one time, and, you know, he said to Grove something, you really have to do it. You have to be in doing it. And it’s all about the doing. And I’ve always remembered that as just like, it, you, you can’t, there, you can’t just like all of a sudden say I’m a speaker one day and not do anything to like build your business.
JH (34:46):
Right. You has, you have to do it. And so when you’re small, it means doing everything. And when you’re larger, it means you know, making sure that other people are doing everything right and that everything’s still happening and all the boxes are checked. So that’s, that’s what we’ve seen as we work with speakers and we’ve actually seen, I have literally seen speakers come and I’ve talked to that haven’t had one speech. They not even call them. Supposed they’re just learning about speaking to now they’re charging $20,000 a speech and they’re booked over a hundred times a year. You know, so it’s, it, it, it, it happens, it does happen, but it just ha you have to, you have to go and get in and do it. And that’s what people, they have to roll up their sleeves and get to work and it just doesn’t happen automatically. So
AJV (35:41):
Yeah. It’s, but it’s back to, it’s treating, speaking like a business, right? It’s like Right. Say you’re a speaker doesn’t mean anything’s gonna happen. Right. But you gotta put yourself out there and do the right things to get yourself booked, so. Right. All right. So I’m watching the time, and I know we have this a little bit longer, so I’ve got a few other questions here. So one of the things that I think we hear all the time at Brand Builder’s Group is how, how do you know how to set your fees? And so any insights around, doesn’t matter if like this is your first engagement, you’re just starting out, or you’ve been doing this a while. Is there any sort of thoughts, insight, or is there some magical strategy of how speakers should be setting fees?
JH (36:23):
Well, I’ve always heard this philosophy, it, it’s whatever people would hire you for is what your fee is. Right? And so it’s a sup, it’s a supply and demand thing. But in general we encourage new speakers to just get out and get experience, speak for free, get low paying jobs. You can start with like, rotary clubs are a great way, chambers of commerce are a great way. Like you can, you can really get out and get paid $50, a hundred dollars a speech just giving speeches. You just, you can’t I don’t know. I had a, I was talking to a guy recently that was a CEO at a company and he was transitioning over into speaking and, you know, he makes a good amount of money as a CEO and then came into speaking and felt like, well, I’m not gonna go earn a thousand dollars.
JH (37:16):
You know, it’s like, well, you have to then build your brand. You have to, you know, like you have to give, there has to be some reason that they would hire you for more than a thousand dollars. And so we kind of helped him recreate his what he was doing in a different approach and, and added more value to it by his experience as a CEO. And, but if you’re just starting out, that is obviously gonna be a lower fee. And so you just keep pitching it. And I’ve, I’ve heard this question a ton is when do I know when I can raise my fee? Hmm. And so that really comes when you’re getting booked enough of that fee that you feel like if I raised it, I’d still get booked and everybody’s different. There’s no secret sauce on fees. Unfortunately in my, in, from my experience start low, like if you wanted to start, like low range is, you know, 500 to a thousand, that’s really low range.
JH (38:17):
In, in our database of our speakers, you know, like a lower range would be like 2,500 to 5,000. That would be a good place to start. So if you, if you’ve spoken a bunch maybe for low fees and you’re trying to set some type of fee, you know, 2,500 is a good fee that p somebody would pay to get you to, to book you. And then like the 2,500 to five is a general good range. If you’re a, you know, if you’re like five to 75 is another good range, but like right around 10 is a, is a fee range that you see most speakers kind of ride around. You know, they’re, they’re booking 80 times a year 80 dates, and they have a pretty good business. And anybody above that, they either have some content or experience, they landed a plane on the Hudson River, they wanna race, they sold this business for whatever.
JH (39:13):
They have some reason that’s taking their fee, you know, to a higher level and or their content is just so valuable, right. You’re a Simon Sinek and you know, people will come just because of your content. Yeah. And that, and that’s a whole different thing, right? You, you know, those, those, those people are 50 to a hundred thousand a speech or not, or more. Right? And so it really depends where you’re at. But that’s, that’s that’s in general I think kind of the fee ranges that we see. And I really would just start with people, things like chambers of commerce and, and rotary clubs and, you know, volunteering free stuff. Just get some experience underneath you. ’cause You don’t want to go get somebody to say, yeah, I’ll pay you for 5,000 and you don’t have the experience delivering that speech and you don’t do a great job. And they’re like, yeah, not so great. You want all of your speaking experience, your, all of your bookings to build upon each other so that you can get references. Because that’s super huge in, in speaking as you want to be able to have testimonials to say, yeah, they delivered a great speech. And those also help in raising your fee.
AJV (40:28):
Yeah, I think that’s really, I think that’s really wise. And it’s, I think it’s interesting to hear, it’s like most speakers are around that $10,000 range. It’s like, if you’ve been doing it for a while, would you say that’s the most crowded fee range where that’s like, where it’s like, man, is there the most competition in that fee range?
JH (40:47):
In which one?
AJV (40:48):
The 10,000?
JH (40:51):
I would probably say five to 10,000 is probably the range, but probably more so there’s probably more people in the 7,500 to 10. They’re the, they’re the speakers that have figured it out. They have system in some place. They have they have a good database of, of contacts. They’re, they’re getting leads off the web. You know, they’re, they’re, they’re kind of well-rounded mm-Hmm.
AJV (41:49):
Yeah. And I think that’s really helpful of just going like, Hey, starter fees, you know, it could be as low as $500, but somewhere between 520 500 if you don’t have like, a lot of name recognition or credibility or, you know, books or content that’s gonna set a higher precedent. I think even having that idea for everyone who’s listening of going like, okay, like I thought my fee was gonna be 10,000
JH (42:48):
Some of it’s exposure too. I’ll give you an example. A local speaker here in Utah I had a youth group activity in my backyard and I had him come speak and it was, I don’t even remember what the topic was. It was just probably about achieving your very best or something to that effect. And he came and did it for free. ’cause He was looking for experience. Right. He was just transitioning into it. And that was probably eight years ago, and I just ran into him the other day and his fee is 50 grand. That’s awesome. And it’s all because of exposure. He got, he, I, I always thought he was great. He’s the same great guy now that he was then he has the same content, he’s better at it. Yeah. But he literally has the more exposure, he got more people like, wow, where’s this guy come from? And he just, it just, it just ballooned from there and got bigger and bigger and bigger. And now, you know, he’s 50 grand of speech and that’s amazing. Right. And that’s about eight years ago. Eight, eight years of work, and now he’s going from zero per speech to 50, and he’s still booked, you know, 80 to a hundred times a year. So
AJV (43:59):
That’s amazing. You know, but, but my favorite sayings is the more you speak, the more you speak. Yeah. Right. And it’s like, you just gotta get out there and as you’re, as you’re in, you know, a beginner mode doesn’t mean you’re a beginner in business, but a beginner in the speaking world, it’s like you just say yes. Right? You take the gig. It doesn’t matter if it’s at the Chamber of Commerce or, you know, the, you know, networking group in the back of Applebee’s. Like whatever. Right. You just say yes because you never know who’s in the audience. Right. And that’s always been our take. It’s like you just never know who might be there that can lead to the next event and who’s gonna be there that lead can lead to the next event. All right. So I’ve got two last questions for you.
AJV (44:40):
That was I think super insightful, especially for those in that beginner range and aspiring of going, like, what is a moderate price to start with? All right. So two last things. Who would you say is booking most speakers today? Or what topics are getting booked the most? Like, are there any industry trends of going like, Hey, like education is just like booking everything or ced, or are, or are there any topical trends that you’re seeing of going, Hey, doesn’t matter what, you know, year we’re in culture’s always gonna be top. Because I know for a long time there was like this huge rise in social media speakers but I’ve also seen that really go down. And then there was like, you know, diversity and inclusion speakers was really high, and then it’s kind of dropped off. So are you seeing any trends with like, industry bookings or topical bookings that we should know about? Yeah.
JH (45:36):
Yeah. Well, let me ask you this first. This is a roundabout answer. What percentage do you think a speaker hiring a speaker is in all the things that a buyer does a meeting planner does? What percentage do you think, where did that rank?
AJV (45:55):
Oh, maybe 5%.
JH (45:58):
What, okay. What, what priority do you think? Yeah. Oh no, 5%. Five percent’s good. I mean, that’s a good guess. The truth is, is that we did a recent poll with our database of meeting planners, and it’s 81% of event organizers said it’s in the top three things that they do. Wow. Is hiring a speaker. 81. 81% said that. And so the, the thing I want to bring up is that you know, speakers always, it’s, it’s a small thing. I mean, like booking an event or scheduling an event, you book the space. Mm-Hmm.
AJV (47:10):
Just like, as meeting planners or, and I think that’s fascinating. ’cause It’s like, I would’ve thought it probably would’ve been further down because it’s like, my gosh, there’s so many logistics to do these big events. Yeah, yeah. But it’s like, are there any trending topics?
JH (47:24):
Oh, right. That’s right. Yeah. So knowing that, that they’re, they are hiring speakers. I’m going right to our live statistics right now on e speakers. And the top topic that’s being searched right now in our database is inspirational. Hmm. Inspirational healthcare humor health and nutrition customer service, leadership. Those are some of the big ones. Women in business. Those are some kind of trending right now. I do know that corporate culture is huge. I mean, we, we get a lot of re inquiries about that changing the culture of, and it, and it has been since the pandemic because it’s unique environment, right. Culture is a big deal. And, and diversity, even though it has dropped off a little bit in regards to our focus of it, it’s still one of the top things that people get booked for.
JH (48:24):
Diversity and inclusion, equity inclusion, it’s all, it’s all super important. And, and anyway, so I, I actually was at a conference for speakers in Canada for the Canadian Speakers Association, like NSA in December. And there was a speaker that spoke about how we need to do better jobs as speakers of being diverse in our presentations. And this is, this is one of those things that you don’t really think about as a speaker. It’s like, I don’t speak on diversity, equity, and inclusion. I speak on these other things, but really you do, because we live in a world where there’s so much diversity in the audience that the things you say matter make a difference. Right. They do matter the way you address people. And I’ve even, I I, I took this to heart and because I say you guys and hey, you guys, and hope you guys are doing well and all of that.
JH (49:26):
And I, I know that’s changing now, right? But you can’t just say guys, and you can’t even even say men or women or ladies and gentlemen even. And it’s, it’s very specific. And so it, you wanna make a difference. As a speaker, I’d really dive into that and, and address how you actually present to your audience and what you can say and what you can’t say and, and make a difference that way. Even if you don’t speak on Mm-Hmm.
AJV (50:28):
Yeah. I think that’s wise. ’cause They’re like, you know, I thought that was interesting and I had jotted this on when you said it, it’s like inspirational as a top trending topic. But it’s like the truth is any speaker could make their topic inspirational. Right? Right. And it’s like, same thing with, you know, diversity, equity, inclusion. It’s like you could integrate some component of that into pretty much anything that you talk about. Right? Same thing with culture, right? And it’s like, same thing with customer service or experience. It’s like if you just focus on like, Hey, these are things that are important out in the business world today. These are what people are looking for, and learn how to integrate that into your message without changing your topic, then it really does make it a more well diverse option right. Across the board.
JH (51:12):
Yeah. And, and one of the things that we’ve seen where speakers are more successful is where they actually have an outcome that comes from their, their topic, right? So you’re solving a problem, there’s an outcome to your topic. And if you don’t already have that, if you don’t know what your outcomes are, then I would highly recommend that you look at that because you’ve gotta know what, what is the outcome that this buyer wants me to deliver on? What problem do they have and what outcome am I delivering? What am I solving? What problem am I solving? And if you don’t know that, and just say, I’m a speaker on this and, you know, hire me to speak, you’ve gotta talk about, you know, solutions and problems and you know, outcomes. And we’ve seen a, the speakers that focus on an outcome driven content Mm-Hmm.
AJV (52:08):
I love that outcome because
JH (52:09):
They’re actually solving the real problem. Right? What’s that?
AJV (52:12):
That outcome driven content. Yeah.
JH (52:15):
Yeah. They’re really solving problems.
AJV (52:16):
Yeah. And that is the hard work of making sure you know, the problem that you’re solving and are you speaking to that. And I, that’s all back to honing that craft of practicing that. And it’s like, sometimes you only figure that out because you’ve done this speech a hundred times, right? And sometimes it’s a hundred times for free, right. But the point is, is you’re getting out there, like you said earlier, and it’s like you’re doing the work whether you’re paid or not, you’re out there doing the work. Joe, if people wanna learn more about e speakers, where’s the best place for them to go?
JH (52:49):
Well it’s pretty easy. E speakers.com and there’s some dropdowns there for speakers on how you can learn more. You know, we you know, if you, if you contact us and tell us that you listen to this podcast, we can give you a free base account because we’re partners with brand builders and, and love these guys and they do great work and and we’ve gone through it Ourself has been amazing and, and they’ve changed some of the things and the ways we do things even so. But anyway, yeah, east speakers.com is where they can go and get a free profile and get started. And if you’re brand new, that’s a great way to kind of put a stake in the sand and say, Hey, I’m in the speaking industry. And if you don’t have a system in place and you are a successful speaker and if seasoned and you don’t have systems in place, we have great solutions for that and tie into a lot of the CRMs and financial software. And so we have, we have 24 years of business behind us, under our belt and most of the new features and system, the features that we work with and the benefits that we’ve come from or we’ve I guess that we, the benefits that we provide are driven by our customers, our speaker customers. They say, Hey, look, this is what I need to run my business better. And so we provide solutions and and tools for them to be able to run their business with them. So
AJV (54:17):
I love that. And that’s so super generous. So if y’all didn’t hear that, go to e speakers.com, mention that you heard about e speakers from this influential personal brand podcast with Brand Builders Group, and they will let you set up with a free account. So cool. So generous. Joe, thank you so much for being on here. And for everyone else, stick around, listen to the recap episode and then join us again on another episode of the Influential Personal Brand. We’ll see you next time.
Ep 459: 5 Steps for Coaches to Help Other People Create Breakthroughs | Michael Bungay Stanier Episode Recap
RV (00:00):
RV (00:43):
What does it take to be a great coach? How do you coach somebody else to create peak performance? How do you actually help another person have a major breakthrough in their life? That’s what we’re gonna talk about today. I’m gonna share with you my little five step formula for helping somebody else have a massive breakthrough in their life. And this comes from the fact that I have coached hundreds of top producers, top performers, ultra performers, some of the most influential people in the world, right? If you look at some of my one-on-one clients, I have coached people who are like the number one realtor out of 76,000 agents. I’ve coached people to the world championship of public speaking. I’ve coached New York Times bestselling authors, I’ve coached billionaires and, you know, multiple billionaires and several hundred millionaires. I have coached some of, of the elite kind of performers and business professionals on the planet.
RV (01:45):
And one of the things that I’ve learned, and I think a part of why I often get hired by these, you know, elite business performers or people who want to become elite, is because I have really over the years, learned a lot about the psyche of what it takes to create a breakthrough for someone else. And that’s just what I wanna share with you. So it’s really simple. The first thing before I get into the five steps, what you first must know is that the reason why most people don’t have major breakthroughs in their life is not because of logical or technical limitations. It’s because of emotional and mental limitations. Let me say that again. Make sure you get it right. The reason that most people don’t have big breakthroughs in their life is not because of logical or technical limitations. It’s because of emotional and mental limitations.
RV (02:47):
Meaning, if, if somebody is going to become an, an ultra performer, right? That’s my term that we use and take the stairs or a multiplier to use a term from my second book, there is somebody who has an exponential change in their results, an exponential change in their outcome. It usually doesn’t happen from learning a tactic. It’s not that they go, oh, oh, there’s some hack that I just needed to learn, and now all of a sudden my, you know, my results are gonna explode. It’s because of an emotional or a mental breakthrough that must happen. And so I’m gonna walk you through this five step process. I’ve never created a piece of content like this before, so I’m so excited to be sharing this with you because as I, as I, you know, listened to the, the interview with Michael Bungay Stanier, and you know, such a great interview.
RV (03:39):
And he, he’s such a, such a successful guy in the book. His book sells really, really well. And I was thinking going, wow, I’ve never actually talked about what are some of the things that I try to do to help my coaching clients create breakthroughs. And of course, this is something I try to do with myself as I coach myself as well. So, how do you have, how do you help somebody have a huge mental or emotional breakthrough or pivot or change that allows them to have the big breakthrough in their life? So here’s this little five step process. So number one, the first step is you have to listen for their limiting beliefs. Listen for their limiting beliefs. So you know, part of what I loved about this conversation with, with MBS, Michael Bunge Stanier that we had, and part of what I love about coaching in general, right?
RV (04:32):
The premise of coaching is interesting in true coaching. The true coaching model is to believe that not the coach doesn’t have the answer that the, you know, the student has the answer. And it’s sort of like Socratic ma method based on Socrates, which is that a great coach is supposed to ask questions, and that the, the answer is revealed to the student by the student as you sort of ask questions. And part of me really loves that and agrees with that. Part of me also goes, my coaching style’s not that way. You know, I ask a lot of questions and I try to help people get to the answer quickly. And if they’re not getting it, I, I wanna like tell ’em what it is. You know, if, if we can, if we can see it, and if, if we are, if something is revealed through the conversation that points to the answer, not that we have all the answers or that I have all the answers, but that we can see what their answer is.
RV (05:25):
And this is what is so key about coaching, which I don’t think people understand. It’s not that we have a one size fits all answer that we can just go, oh, tell me your problems. I’ll give you the answer. It’s not out of our expertise necessarily. Although in our particular area of personal branding and personal brand strategy, we have a very, very, you know, robust set of curriculum and content. But even inside of that, it’s not that we have the right answer. It’s, it’s all about finding the right answer for the client at that specific moment. And the best way to do that is to listen for their limiting beliefs. So how do you listen for somebody’s limiting beliefs? It’s very simple. First of all, you gotta understand what a limiting belief is. And then I’ll, I’ll share with you some triggers for this, right?
RV (06:15):
So what a limiting belief is, is their quote unquote true story. I’ll call this a true story. It’s not actually true, but in their mind it’s true. You’re listening for their, their true story about why they can’t do something or why they aren’t succeeding, right? Like, somebody, somebody. And, and so now let’s, let’s talk about that, right? So if, if somebody is talking, let’s say you’re coaching them and they say, yeah, you know, gosh, I would, I would love, I’d love to get in better shape this year, but it’s just like, it’s just not possible with a toddler. There’s just no way that can happen. So right there is, is I go, I can, I have this like, mental trigger that goes, ah, that’s their limiting belief. They just spoke it out loud. And people do this all the time. If you listen, you’ll hear when someone you’re talking to says out loud, they won’t hear it.
RV (07:13):
But if you have a keen ear, you have to train your ear for this is, you’ll go, ah, they just spoke their limiting belief. How do I know that? Because they just spoke out something that they believe is true about why they can’t do something else, right? They’ll say, oh, well, I couldn’t do what that person did because blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Oh, that’s a limiting belief. Or, you know, I’ve always been taught that you can never, you know, you can, you, you know, I’ll never be rich because I don’t believe in having debt. And, and everybody knows you need to, you need to take on debt to become rich. And it’s like, oh, so you’re listening for it, for you’re listening for their true story. It’s their rationalization, their justification, their explanation for why they can’t have something else. And that’s really key.
RV (08:04):
So you just gotta train your ear to listen for it, right? It’s their story. It’s something they believe to be true about why they can’t achieve something else. So that’s a huge, that’s like half of the battle right there is just being able to train your ear for it. Now, step two, in step two, I want you to call it out without singling them out. So what I mean by that is you want to, once you hear them say it, you wanna draw attention to it, but you don’t wanna make them feel stupid. You don’t wanna make them feel weak. You don’t wanna make them even feel wrong. So the the analogy that I think of for myself as a coach is I don’t wanna be a judge. I wanna be a mirror. I simply wanna hold up a mirror like a a, you know, a judge is determining right or wrong.
RV (09:03):
A judge isn’t a place of power. A judge is telling you you’re out of bounds. You know, you’re inbounds, you’re out of bounds. But a coach shouldn’t be a judge as much as they should just be a mirror to go, ah, let’s pause the conversation. Let me hold up, Amir, and I wanna reflect something back to you that I just heard. I just noticed that you said the reason you can’t do blank is because of blank. And so you just wanna reflect it back to them. And I want you as the coach to also encourage your client and for both of you to suspend whether or not that limiting belief is actually right. It might be true, right? It might be true that, you know, they, they literally go, oh my gosh, I’m involved in so many things. I just, I couldn’t, I couldn’t, you know, I can’t lose weight this year because I’m so busy.
RV (09:55):
‘Cause I have so many things. You know, that might be true, but it might not be true. It might be that they still watch 20, you know, three hours a night of Netflix, and that actually if they carved out 15 minutes from their Netflix routine, they actually could get in better shape. But you’re not in step two, your job isn’t to judge them. Your your job isn’t to render an opinion on whether or not this is right. Your job is to reflect it to them to call it out, but don’t s them out, right? Like singling them out is when you, you know, you, you kind of like embarrass somebody publicly. That’s not what you wanna do. You just wanna call it out to say, Hey, I just heard something interesting about what you said. The reason why you can’t blank is because of blank.
RV (10:39):
That’s a huge, huge important step. Now, number three, step three, step three is I want you to give them a new belief. Give them a new belief. So here again, you don’t necessarily need to tell them that what they believe is wrong, but I would use language like th this, I would say, Hey, I wanna invite you to consider a new way of thinking about this. And I just want you to try on, I love that language. I just want you to try on this idea for a second, try on for a second that it actually is possible to get wealthy without taking on debt. I just want you to try that on. It may or may not be true, but I just want you to try on that thought. I just want you to try on that mindset, I just want you to try on that belief, right?
RV (11:43):
That’s kind of like how you have to think about it is going, I notice you’re wearing an old outfit, and I just want you to try this on. You don’t have to buy it. You don’t have to own it. It doesn’t have to become your favorite thing. You don’t have to commit to wearing this, you know, out in public, but like right now, I just want you to try this on. And I want them to try on the idea to try on the, the the thought. So you want to give them a new belief. It’s basically like install a new operating system, give them a new way of thinking about a, a possibly a new way of thinking about, or just an alternate explanation of, or an alternate perspective for thinking about the thing that they currently think is true and set and defined in some other way, right?
RV (12:31):
So you’re gonna give them a new belief to try on. Then step number four, step number four is to fill them with encouragement. Fill them with encouragement. Here’s how you fill somebody with encouragement. And I’m gonna, I’m gonna take this to a biblical term. Now, you, you may not be a Christian, you may not be in the bli. The you may not believe in the Bible. By the way, if you don’t, I would really encourage you to check out my other, I have a podcast that I created called Eternal Life, seven steps, or excuse me. It’s called Eternal Life. Seven Questions. Every Intelligent Skeptic Should Ask About Jesus of Nazareth, where we look at the historical logical and academic accuracy and scrutiny of the Bible and the story of Jesus. You could check that out, but you know, you don’t have to be a Christian to, to appreciate, I think this concept, which is that the word inspire is actually a biblical term.
RV (13:32):
It means to breathe life into, and the, at least in the, the, the biblical account for the creation of, of humanity, of, of men and women, is that God s spoke the world into existence, and then he breathed life into, into man. So there’s this connection between word and life and breath, right? And so that’s where the, the word inspire comes from. It’s to use your words to breathe life into other beings or into things or into creation. That’s really a huge part of coaching. Again, even if you don’t believe in, you know, the Bible or whatever, hopefully you can, you know, grasp the power of that concept, that your words give life to people. They can give life to people. So how do you fill somebody with encouragement? What does it mean to actually encourage somebody? How do you use your words in a way that makes somebody feel inspired, that makes someone feel alive, that makes someone feel encouraged?
RV (14:36):
Well, it’s super simple. Tell them, like articulate to the person what it is about them that most impresses you. That’s how you inspire someone, articulate, you know, tell them what it is about them that most impresses you. You say, oh, I’m so impressed at how smart you are, or how sharp you are, or how fast, or how good you are at this, or, or how savvy you are at this, or your skills at doing this, or why I, the reason I love being around you is because of your energy, or because you’re funny, or, you know, because you always make me think differently. Or because you are you know, such a challenging you, you, you, you, you’re a critical thinker or whatever. That’s how you breathe life into people. And one of my favorite quotes is that Mark Twain said, each man is my superior in some way, or each woman is my superior in some way.
RV (15:34):
I really believe that. I really believe that all of us have something to learn from every other person. And so those are the things that I’m constantly looking for people. And when you want to breathe life into them, when you wanna fill them with encouragement, all you’re going to do is articulate what it is about that person that most impresses you, or what it is that you have learned from that person, or what it is about that person that inspires you. You inspire me to be a better parent. You inspire me to be, to read more. You inspire me to be a better leader. You inspire me to be better in excel. You inspire me to, to, you know, keep better track of my money. You inspire me to write more handwritten notes. You inspire me to be more spontaneous. You remind me to be more grateful.
RV (16:19):
Like whatever it is about the person, that’s what you articulate, and that’s how you fill somebody with encouragement. The reason that this step four is so important in helping somebody break through their limiting beliefs is that when you establish, when, when you’re helping somebody break a limiting belief, when, when you’re helping somebody break through this limiting belief, the neuroscience of this is that you’re forming a new neural pathway in their brain. Remember what I said about their, their limiting belief in step one? It’s their true story about why they can’t do something or why they aren’t succeeding. Why makes it true? What makes it true is not that it’s actually true. What makes it true is that they have told themselves that again and again, and again and again, and the human brain does not delineate between true and false, right or wrong. The, the human brain does not know right or wrong just by itself.
RV (17:18):
You have to teach it what’s right and wrong through programming. You have to teach it what is true and false through programming. So when somebody has a limiting belief, that’s an operating system that is running. Another metaphor that I sort of use for this is that imagine you’re going on a hike through the woods. Your neural pathways are like the path that’s been formed. The reason that path has been formed is ’cause you have walked that path several times. You have decided that that is true. You’ve reinforced it over and over again. So in your brain, literally there is a physical neural pathway that has been performed. And so it’s easier for your brain to think things that it has always thought, or it is easier for your brain to think things that it has already been thinking because the neural pathway has already formed.
RV (18:06):
When you get to step three in this, where you give them a new belief and you, you know, after you listen for the limiting belief, and then you call it out, and then you give them a new belief to try on. What you’re doing there is, is you’re trying to go off the path that they’re currently on, and you’re trying to form a new path. Literally, that’s what’s happening in the brain. A new neural pathway, a new set of synapses firing, you know, between like these neurons in your brain. And, you know, the illustration here is, think of it as you’re hacking through the forest and you’re, you know, you have like a machete and you’re like having to chop down trees. It’s harder to walk down a new path because the new path isn’t clear yet. The new path isn’t established yet, the new path, it’s also slower to walk down the new path.
RV (18:52):
It’s not as familiar and it’s not as cleared, right? So anytime you’re trying to create a new belief, a new mindset, a new pattern of thinking, it’s slower and it takes more time. That’s why you have to fill them with encouragement. You have to fill them with encouragement. And that gives them the encouragement is what keeps them going down the new pathway. And it’s, it’s saying, I, I believe in you. I know you’re smart enough to figure this out because you’ve inspired me to do blankety blank, right? I, you know, I, I, I know that you’re capable of doing this. And I, I know that you have, you are, you have all the characteristics of other people who have been successful in this journey. I know you have what it takes to do this. There’s evidence in your life that you have it because you impress me and you inspire me, and you want me, make me wanna be better, right?
RV (19:45):
So I’m filling them with that encouragement. And then step five, step five, and this will seem a little bit, counter to what I said earlier, give them what I call the 10% tactical. The 10% tactical. Now remember what I, I said at, at the very start of this, which I will hold true to, which is the reason most people don’t experience breakthroughs is not because of logical or technical issues. It’s because of emotional or mental, you know, limitations. But technical tips give people confidence. Technical tips, give people encouragement. Technical things make people feel like they have a new tool to try. And so that gives them sort of the you know, the, the willpower or the strength or the discipline or the motivation to actually take action and walk down the new neural pathway. So the 10% tactical is just saying, rather than giving them a whole bunch of things to focus on, give them the one thing, right?
RV (20:53):
So this is kinda like a 2080 rule, like the Pareto principle of, you know, focus on the 20% that creates 80% of the results, except it’s even more narrow than that, is I want you to give them the one tactical thing that they should focus on between now and, you know, your next encounter, your next meeting with them to go. If you just do this one thing, I believe that you will, this will create a 90% change in your results. One of the things that I think coaches do is they give people too many action items, too many things to do all at once, right? Give them the 10%, the 10% technical meaning, what’s the one technical thing that is a small, you know, tweak of their current behavior, only a 10% tweak of their current behavior that is likely to be responsible for a 90% change in their behavior.
RV (21:46):
You know, when, when I’m evaluating speakers, one of the things that you know we’re doing is, is I, I coach some of the best speakers, you know, in the world. And when I’m coaching very high profile speakers, it’s like, I don’t give them a hundred things to do. I try to give them like, you know, even in an hour long speech, I’m trying to give them two or three things. And really one big thing to go the next time you go out, I want you to focus on this one thing, because that’s the 10% tactical, the, the, the, the tiny little bit that they can focus on. But if they do that one thing, they’ll have a 90% change in their outcome or their results. So there you go. There you have it. This is my secret, never before shared formula on how to be a great coach and how to create breakthroughs in other people.
RV (22:32):
So step one is listen for limiting beliefs, right? Listen for their story about why they can’t do something. Step two, call them out without singling them out. Be a mirror, not a judge, but reflect back to them, Hey, I just heard you say the reason you can’t X is because of y. You’re reflecting it back to them. Step three, give them a new belief. Give them a new belief system. I just want you to try on for a second. What if you actually could do blank in order to get blank, right? And, and now open their mind up to actually, maybe there is a way to pull it off. Step four, fill them with encouragement. Tell them what it is about them that impresses you most. And then step five, focus on the 10% technical. Give them the one technical tip, the one technique change, the one skill thing, the one pragmatic or practical behavior change that you want them to focus on that will reinforce this new mindset.
RV (23:31):
If you do those five steps again and again and again, you will create breakthroughs in your clients like they’ve never experienced. And as your clients have breakthroughs, that’s gonna build your reputation. And as we know, reputation precedes revenue. That’s why we’re here at Brand Builders Group to help you turn your reputation into revenue. So if you haven’t yet requested a call with our team, I hope you consider doing that. So we could talk about helping you do that and generate more reput or generate more revenue from your reputation. You could do [email protected] slash podcast. That’s all we got for this time around. We’ll catch you next time on the influential Personal Brand podcast.
Ep 458: The Coaching Habit with Michael Bungay Stanier
RV (00:02):
I’m so honored to introduce you to someone who I have found to be a delightful human
RV (01:02):
Yeah. And this book has not done that for years. It has been. It’s just like super consistent every week in and week out. Michael also founded a Box of Crayons, which is a learning and development organization and company that’s trained thousands of managers to be more coach-like in organizations. So this is companies like Microsoft Te Gucci teaching their leaders how to become better coaches. And when I met him, I was just like, oh my gosh. We have to introduce you to our audience, both to hear the story of how you built your personal brand, but literally, like all of us are coaches in some form or fashion. So anyways, Michael, welcome to the show, buddy. Oh,
MBS (01:42):
Look, I’m super excited. That was an amazing gathering in Nashville, wasn’t it? There was so many impressive people there,
RV (02:07):
Yeah. Yeah. I, I feel the same way. And I, you know, whenever I’m in a room like that with colleagues, I am you know, proud to be there, humbled to be there and, and, and then really blown away by a lot of the people because I’m, I’m a reader first. I’m a student first. I’m a fan first. Right. And so I’m, I’m fangirling over a lot of the, a lot of the people
MBS (02:57):
Yeah. You know, I I was really sure I was gonna be a coach early on. You know, it felt like one of those, the saying inspiration is when your past suddenly makes sense. When I discovered coaching, I was like, oh, look, my whole past aligns around that. When I was 17, I did crisis telephone counseling and helping kind of youth anxiety and youth suicide and stuff like that. And so I’ve been learning how to ask questions and stay curious and, you know, sink deeper into what was going on since I was 17. And I heard about coaching when I was working and living in London. And of course part of me is like, it’s a weird Californian thing. ’cause This is like in the 1990s before it really blew up
MBS (03:44):
And then when I moved to the States and lived in Boston, I hired a coach and I started telling my clients, my consulting clients, I was coaching them, whether I didn’t know what that meant. And then when I moved to Toronto in 2001, I’m like, I’m gonna start a coaching practice. And I did my training and, and I found I didn’t love being a coach. Hmm. It was very confusing. I grew a practice, I had lots of people, I’m like, this isn’t quite right for me yet. But I’d been invited by a, a big multinational to help design a coaching training for them. And I designed other training on other topics before, and suddenly something clicked around this, which is, oh, I want to un weird coaching for busy managers and leaders, because coaching has this, it comes with baggage and there’s a lot of kinda woowoo ness around coaching.
MBS (04:38):
You know, it’s kind of like, oh, it’s mysterious, it’s touchy feely. Everybody’s wearing caf, dans and lighting incenses,
RV (05:57):
And I remember being in college, you know, when I heard the word coaching, I used to think of, you know, for me it was, it was athletic coaches. I did martial arts and I had basketball coach. Right. And I, I, I thought I thought of it very much as like instruction and teaching. And, you know, then I was in the world championship of public speaking and I had coaches that, you know, they were giving me feedback and they were critiquing. But then when I was, when I was in college, I took a class on coaching and I very vividly remember them saying, coaching is not teaching. It’s only listening. It’s only asking questions. And like, the foundational premise was that the, the client has all the answers. Yeah. And so it was like a very Socratic method of like, your job is to only ask questions. And so even to this day, I’m still a little unclear on like what the proper definition of coaching is. ’cause A lot of my clients call me a coach, but I teach them what to do.
New Speaker (07:02):
Like I tell them, you know, so I don’t know if that counts. I,
MBS (07:06):
I, well, I get, I think you can get really hung up on these kind of technical definitions of coaching. Sure. So I have a behaviorally based definition, which is simply this. Can you stay curious a little bit longer? Hmm. Can you rush to action and advice giving a little bit more slowly? Because I think coaching involves teaching. I think it is partly a, like I, look, I’ve got scars, I’ve got wisdom
MBS (07:56):
Mm-Hmm.
RV (08:35):
Yeah. And you know, in inside that definition, and it’s like, I don’t, you know, like brand Mild’s group, I actually don’t define it as a coaching company, right? We are really a training company. We have curriculum, right? We’re putting people through processes exercises. Right. We’re certainly getting input, like to tailor it to what we’re doing doing, but it’s like, it’s not, and and to me that is very different from coaching of the idea of going ask questions to sort of help someone discover what Yeah. You know, their like I love the way that you said, I think the word that you, you said was it’s technical training. Yeah. Technical training is different from sort of a find the answer within type of a Yeah.
MBS (09:16):
Conversation. But there’s a, there’s a way that these two dance together. It’s not one or the other. I mean, if I was training you on, on your world championship speaking, you know, I, you could, you could give a talk and I could immediately jump in and go, right, Rory, let me, let me make some adjustments here. But it’s actually a more powerful lesson for me to go. So Rory, tell me before, I’ve got some ideas, but what do you think went well? What do you think your strength is? Where did you feel the weakness in, in the talk? What bit do you feel like you really need to focus on to kind of lift the level? And you figuring that stuff out is helpful for you. And it’s also then helpful for me to then go, right, let me take, I, I can figure out the advice that’s most useful for you.
MBS (09:59):
Like, even at the highest level of sport now, like the rugby world championships on rugby union. And if you, if you know it, you know, it’s a big thing. And if you know rugby union, you know that the New Zealand, all blacks are the team. They are the, they’re the most winningest team in sport. They have this unparalleled success record. They dominate this sport in a way that is incredible for coming from a tiny country. And the way these elite sports people are taught are part directed through questions. What are you noticing? What are you learning? What do you guys think we need to solve around here? And part technical intervention, which is like, here’s what we need to do differently around that. It’s both. And the bias that I’m looking to shift for people is start with curiosity and then know that teaching might be the thing that follows curiosity. ’cause That might be the most appropriate thing to do.
RV (10:55):
Mm-Hmm,
MBS (11:30):
That’s great.
RV (11:31):
So if you, if you can ask the questions, if you can, if you can orchestrate the questions and engineer the questions in a way that the light bulb comes on for themselves as they’re talking, there’s, that’s like a, that’s a revelation that will be more influential than you just telling them what to, you know what to think. That’s
MBS (11:49):
Right. Because if you come in, if you lead with advice, and that’s what so many of us have kind of built in as our default, our default response. You know, somebody starts talking to you and after about 10 seconds, your advice monster comes up outta the dark and goes, oh, I’m gonna add some value to this conversation. Or just wait till they stop talking. ’cause I know what I wanna tell them. But if you, if you default to advice, the first thing you need to know is that the power in the relationship shifts. It’s like you go one up, they go one down. And when they’re one down, ’cause you’ve got the status, and they don’t, I know this answer. You don’t know the answer. People inherently resist advice sometimes even when they ask for it, they’re like, can you gimme some advice on that?
MBS (12:29):
Yeah. And yeah,
RV (13:02):
MBS (13:43):
I think that’s true. But I’ll tell you this, Rory. You know, I, I’m, I am a teacher. Like I, you know, through my books and through my courses and the like, and something that, and knowing that there are coaches and teachers and, and people doing similar stuff who are building their own brand by building their own content one of my key design elements is what’s the least I can teach that would be the most useful. So part of that design philosophy is for me to not think that me just adding more value, more content, more information, more advice is actually helpful. Part of the discipline of being a great teacher is going, how do I strip it down to what’s essential? How do I give them the least of what I can do? And how do I create the most space for them to then interact with it, to play with it, to understand it, to deepen it? And one of the things that I see in less experienced teachers by teachers, you can be a facilitator or a coach or any other thing, is the sense of, I’ll just keep adding more content as a way of proving my worth. And the courage, the courageous act is to keep taking content out so that you shift you shift away to the audience’s interaction with your content. And it means you give up control, but you increase engagement and you increase learning.
RV (15:09):
Yeah. That reminds me of I’m pretty sure it’s Mark Twain who said that brevity is the essence of wisdom,
MBS (15:16):
Right? That’s right.
RV (15:19):
And it also takes, except
MBS (15:21):
He said it a little snappier than that. I’m kidding. As a
RV (15:28):
But the, it, it also, it also, it takes more work to be able to say something concisely, but not to get away from your real point, which is to lead with, you know, to be curious, not necessarily to is So is being curious the same as just leading with questions?
MBS (15:46):
Well, I think, I think so. I mean, I think questions are the great, the great force of, of cur curiosity. So you know, it’s useful to understand that most of us have an advice monster, a driver to go look, the way I add value is I tell people stuff. And we have different things that, that advice monster feeds in us. Sometimes. It’s like, I like to just be the smart person, show my status, show that I have, prove that I’m adding value by the content I have. Sometimes it’s like, I like to be the person who rescues people. I like to save people. I like to be seen as a person who will protect everybody from everything and know everything. So nobody has to stress or worry. And sometimes it’s like, I just like being in control
MBS (16:33):
But if you can understand that you’ve got a, a, a wiring and a bias to jumping in with advice, it’s deeply wired in your brain. Your brain loves certainty. And when you’re giving advice, even if it’s the wrong advice to solving the wrong problem, your brain is still going. But this feels quite good,
RV (17:20):
And so is the, is the primary, you know, benefit of that, you’re saying to just that they’re more, they’re more likely to make a change in their life if they come to the realization themself? Is that the premise?
MBS (17:33):
Well, there’s a couple of premise behind it. The first is, if you leap in with advice too soon, quite often you’re not solving the real problem. You know, the one of the powerful questions in the coaching habit book is what’s the real challenge here for you? And the inside is the first challenge that shows up is not the real challenge. And when your advice monster is loose, you’re like, oh, that was the first challenge, and I’ve given you some advice that my work here is done. But your work here isn’t done because you’ve just offered up not very good advice to solve the wrong problem. So there’s, if you can become a, if you’re in a, in a leadership role, if you can become the leader who is known for figuring out what the real problem is, rather than having the fast answer, you become a much more revered, much more valuable person to the people around you.
MBS (18:23):
Because everybody’s got answers. Very few people have the discipline to say, what’s the real challenge here? What’s the hard thing? What’s the most important thing for us to solve? So part of it is like, can you figure out what the real problem is that that alone is, is gold dust? Secondly, it is absolutely true that if people figure out their own answers, they’re more likely to act on their own answers. So if you’d like people to do something differently, the more they can figure this stuff out themselves, the more they can make their own neural connections, you help them grow in competence and confidence and autonomy and self-sufficiency and all of that is good for them. But most of that can be really good for you as well, because you become more effective as a coach or as a manager or as a leader, because your people are like, I’m smarter. I’m more confident,
RV (19:26):
So connecting this back to like, so I like, I I love this I love the application of this too, being a leader and a manager in Yeah. An organization. It, it, there’s also an element of this that to me feels like the more fam the the more familiar someone is with you, like the more, the closer you are in proximity, the more this feels important. Yeah. where it’s, it’s like your kids, right? Like they won’t, they don’t listen to you when you tell ’em to do stuff. They listen to somebody else. Yeah. Because you’re in such close proximity and, and the people you see every day that you’re leading on your team, it’s like eventually they just get tired of hearing you say the same thing over and over again. You know, when you look at it as, as being a coach that people hire, right? Mm-Hmm. And you go, they, they hire you. I think you, you, when you, you get into like the dance you’re talking about, about being curious, asking questions, but also typ, you know, I guess sometimes it’s like if, like for life coaching, I process this very much as like life, like a life coaching conversation. Yeah. If somebody is struggling, they don’t know why they feel blocked. They, they have low confidence. You know, a lot, lot of those are sort of these deep rooted issues.
RV (20:51):
If you look at like a different type of, you know, I’m a health coach or you know, something like that. Or like, I’m, I’m, I’m a, I’m an accountant who coaches people on their, on their, on their finances. Right?
MBS (21:07):
Certainly
RV (21:07):
There’s always that part of it. Like, what’s the real driving? How do you get them to change their behavior? Yeah. Like you’re saying it’s a behavioral model. This, this is like the, the getting them to modify the behavior is the part of it. Teaching them the what to do is a, is also part of it. So anyways, just any any tips on finding that balance, finding that dance, if you’re a hired coach Yeah. In, in those different kind of types of roles.
MBS (21:35):
So the starting point for me is when you are a coach in that role and you’re hiring your clients and you’re trying to figure out who your ideal clients are. Yeah. ’cause That’s part of the quest for success, is who do I best serve? Sure. you have a conversation with them at the start going, what does good coaching look like or sound like to you?
MBS (22:20):
I’ve got stuff about blood pressure. My, my head is filled with amazing content. And you’re like, I, and I’m so keen to prove my worth to you and add value because I’m, I want, I want you as a client and I’m driven by purpose around helping the world be healthier. So you’ve got all this motivation to get into the work, but the thing to do is, before you get into that work, ’cause it’s, it’s calling you, but it can wait a moment. If you look at your client in the eye and go, look, when you’ve worked with people before around your health and it’s been really helpful for you, what happened? What did they do? What did you do? And what can we learn from that? And now let me tell you my, when I’ve worked with people and I’ve coached them around health and it’s been really successful, let me tell you what happened, what they did, and what I did.
MBS (23:07):
And you actually have a conversation where you actually figure out what’s the best expression of our working relationship together. And a couple of things are gonna happen. One is you get to start educating your client around, this is how I work. Secondly is you’re like, you get to fire your client. ’cause You’re like, it seems like we don’t have a good fit here, even though it looked like we did on content because you got this health issue. And I know stuff about that health issue, the way we work is not compatible. And secondly, you go, right. So I think I understand what the balance is between how much curiosity and how much advice that that is best to strike in, in this circumstance. So there’s no generic answer to this, Rory, other than to say there’s a place for curiosity, there’s a place for advice on balance lead with curiosity. Because that will mean that when your advice shows up, it’s better directed, it’s more specific and it’s more likely to be solving the right, the, the real issue. But primarily it’s like whenever you are working with anybody, sit down and go, how will we work together?
RV (24:16):
Mm-Hmm.
MBS (25:04):
What,
RV (25:04):
What is that switch there? What’s, what’s the thing, what’s the thing that they’re thinking now that gives them the stigma about coaching and what’s, what’s the way that they start thinking about it once they understand the coaching habit? Yeah.
MBS (25:17):
You know, in general there are five reasons why people resist coaching, certainly in organizations. So let me walk through the five points of resistance and offer a a counterpoint to those points. So the, the first is people go, I just don’t have time for this stuff.
MBS (26:06):
In fact, at its best it’s five minutes or it’s 10 minutes. Hmm. And then the second point of resistance people go is, Michael still don’t have time to coach. Even if I could coach in five minutes or less
MBS (26:54):
It’s not adding it. You are not going, I need to now add coaching to everything I’m already doing. It’s like, be more coach-like in your current interactions. Then the third point of resistance people go is like, look, I don’t, look, I don’t wanna be a coach
MBS (27:41):
We’re not, we’re not making you put on an uncomfortable suit, which is like, this is just an essential way to lead, be coach, like, love that. And then people go, this is, this is number four. Which is like, but I honestly, I’m not even sure what coaching is because like you, it’s like, is it sport? Is it executive? Is it life? Is it health? Is it a DHD? Is it, you know, there’s a thousand variations of coaching and I’m not sure what any of them are. And that’s that definition we’ve talked about. Really behavioral, can you just stay curious a little bit longer? Can you rush to action and advice giving a little bit more slowly so it’s got no woo woo or kind of outcome thing. It’s just a process, staying curious longer. And then the fifth and final point of resistance, Rory, is people going, okay, but what’s in it for me?
MBS (28:32):
Like, I can see why Rory wants me to be a coach, because that’s gonna help the people in, in the organization thrive and do their best and keep up with the, the growth we’re having as a business. And I can understand why the people who I’m leading would love me to be a coach because it’s a great leadership skill and I feel seen and I feel heard and I feel encouraged and I’d be become more competent and confident and capable and self-sufficient. But, you know, you’re asking me to shift my behavior. I’m pretty good at giving advice.
RV (29:45):
That, that one’s the one that, that jumps out to me. ’cause A lot of ways this is basically like, not ba but part of what this feels like to me is it’s the difference between fishing for a man and teaching a man to fish.
MBS (30:00):
Right?
RV (30:00):
Right. Like, if, if, if, if I train my team that I have the answers, I tell them what to do, I solve the problems, then they constantly come to me for every one of those things. The,
MBS (30:12):
The more you give them the answers, the more they come to you for the answers. The more they come to you for the answers, the more you give them the answers. And like before you know it. And this is coming from good intentions, like it’s exhausting. And you’ve built a team of vampires who are just draining your life. Like what? You guys are smart and capable and talented. That’s why I hired you. What has happened? And you’ve just built this system where they’re like, they’re like, I don’t feel I can come up with my own stuff. ’cause You wanna gimme the answer the whole time. So it’s a real shift in identity sometimes.
RV (30:44):
Yeah. I mean, one of the other things that you, I don’t think has come up in this conversation, but one of the other benefits of doing it this way is you actually learn a ton. Like you actually, I I’m shocked sometimes at the creative stuff that like a team or a client will come up with where I’m like, I never would’ve thought of that. Right. And by not launching into just like giving them the recipe, you, you have a chance to be like, there’s this beautiful discoveries that, that come out of it.
MBS (31:17):
Well, you haven’t hired the people you’ve hired to just come up with ideas as good as you can come up with. ’cause You’re like, I can already do that. I’m hiring you to have ideas better than I can do and take this business further than I can think of. You want their full brilliance. And this, this commitment to curiosity allows people to say, oh, I’m going to bring my best. You’ve given me the insight and the courage and the commitment to kind of like, try and be braver, be bolder, have better ideas.
RV (31:48):
Mm-Hmm.
MBS (32:06):
The main website is mbs.works and that’s a hub for all the books, the coaching habit, the advice trap, the new one is called How to Work With Almost Anyone. And all of those books have, you know, free resources and stuff. So whether you want to download the questions from the coaching Habit book or see me hold a Keystone conversation from how to work with almost anyone, all of that’s accessible and available for people. Mm-Hmm.
RV (32:27):
MBS (32:59):
There’s a couple of places you might wanna start. One, one really interesting place to start is just start noticing how much advice you give during the day.
MBS (33:56):
And if you could ask, pick just one question to ask that person might be, what’s the real challenge here for you? It might be, and what else, you know, the best coaching question in the world. There’s always a place for, and what else it might be. What was most useful or valuable for you at the end of the meeting? You could just pick one question. What question would it be? You know, people abandon, have a building ’cause they try and take on too much at once. The smaller you can make it, the more likely it is that you’re gonna get that first rep, rep in. And once you get the first rep in, the second rep’s easier. So pick something specific, pick one question, one person, one context, and then commit to actually following through on that.
RV (34:39):
That’s great, man. Well, I I, I love it. I mean there, I, there’s no doubt that this can, if nothing else, this can improve our relationships with one another dramatically. It’s like God gave you two ears and one mouth for a reason.
MBS (35:09):
Yeah. Thank you Rory. It’s been great.