291-SYB-Income-and-Impact-Webinar (1).mp3: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

291-SYB-Income-and-Impact-Webinar (1).mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Carol Cox:
How can you make the shift from a commodity speaker to a thought leader? Listen to this audio from a recent webinar we did on this episode of the Speaking Your Brand podcast. More and more women are making an impact by starting businesses running for office and speaking up for what matters. With my background as a TV political analyst, entrepreneur and speaker, I interview and coach purpose driven women to shape their brands, grow their companies, and become recognized as influencers in their field. This is Speaking Your Brand, your place to learn how to persuasively communicate your message to your audience. Hi there and welcome to our training today on how you can speak for both income and impact, specifically the three elements to know so that you can go from a commodity speaker to a thought leader, so that you can get the types of speaking engagements you want and get better results from the speaking that you’re doing. I’m Carol Cox, founder and CEO Speaking Your Brand. Thank you so much for being with me today. While we’re kind of getting warmed up, let me know in the chat where you’re watching from. So what city and then also what it is that you do. I always like to see who is joining our training, so let us know they’re in the chat. I want to say hi to Nicole for Marilyn. She’s a physician turn health equity consultant and patient advocate. So important.

Carol Cox:
Hi, Paula. Nice to have you joining us from Orlando. Brooks also works in health care. And hi, Katie. So nice to see you. Calling in or calling in? I feel like I’m on the radio watching today live from Saint Petersburg, Florida. So nice to see you here as well. All right. So we have an action packed hour planned here. Hopefully we’ll keep the chat active. So the first thing I would love to know in the chat is a guesstimate how much time per week do you spend on social media postings? So for your business, for the work that you do as a speaker, as an entrepreneur, for something that you’re promoting, how much time per week? So add up the days do you spend on social media posting, you know, engaging with other people’s comments, things like that. You know, if I’m on, it’s if I add it up, it’s probably more time than I think that it is. All right. Is saying 5 to 6 hours per week. Yeah. So about maybe about an hour per day. That sounds about right. Katie says 8 to 10 hours. Yeah, right. Maybe even 2 hours per day on the weekdays. If you think about, you know, 15, 20 minute chunks of time, Diane says far too much time, about 5 hours per week. Shannon. Hi, Shannon. Nice to see you. 4 to 6 hours per week. Let’s see. Linda King says 15 hours, right? A lot.

Carol Cox:
Okay. So we’re spending a lot of time now. Next question is how much time per week are you spending on activities related to public speaking? So that would be searching for speaking engagements, submitting, applying for speaking engagements, reaching out to event organizers. It could even include posting about speaking that you’re doing or about speaking that you could be doing. So those types of kind of like business development, visibility activities related to public speaking, how much time per week are you spending on that? Okay. Heather says not enough time per week. Katie says zero, but she’s super committed to making that 2 to 5 hours per week. Yeah, like maybe start with 30 minutes a day to an hour a day, Joye says, posting once a week. Yeah. For social media. Let’s see, Linda says, yikes. 2 to 3 hours. All right. So how much time per week are you spending on activities related to public speaking? Shannon says zero. Okay. Heather says she just hired a VA to help. Yeah, right. So if we think about how much time we’re spending on social media posting again like to advance our businesses, to advance where we’re doing speaking wise, but we think about how much time we’re actually spending on activities directly related to what we want to do. As speakers, we can see there’s a big disparity. And here’s why I wanted to bring this to your attention today. If we look at the picture on the left hand side of the screen with the phone, your followers, your audience on their phones, on their laptops, on social media, they’re distracted.

Carol Cox:
They’re inundated with content, with post advertisements, posts from people. They follow posts from people they don’t follow. And also it’s algorithm reliant. I mean, I have seen that the algorithms are just making it harder and harder to get our post seen by the people who have chosen to follow us. And as I like to say, I am not going to be dancing on Instagram reels in order to get my post to be found. That’s just not my personality. But if we think about as speakers, whether in person or virtual, we have a captive and engaged audience sitting right in front of us. They’re probably not on their phones, or at least they’re not as distracted on their phones. They’re listening to us, they’re seeing us, they’re absorbing our content. We have built in credibility and authority as a speaker standing in front of an audience. Yet we’re not spending the same amount of time on that channel of marketing and visibility as we are on social media. So I invite you, as you listen today, to think about how can you shift some of the time that maybe could be better spent on activities related to public speaking? Because if you’re here today, that means that you want to do more speaking, you enjoy public speaking, and you probably want to get better.

Carol Cox:
At it. And so that’s what we’re going to cover today. And here’s the thing, though, about having that captive and engaged audience is speaking without key elements that we’re going to talk about today won’t necessarily get you the results you want so you can stand in front of an audience and they can listen to you. And you may or may not get the leads or the clients or the additional speaking invitations that you want. So that’s why I want to make sure that we cover it today. So let me talk to you about a tale of two speaking engagements, kind of like a tale of two cities. So this was a speaking engagement that I did back in 2013. So I did a lot of speaking. When I had my technology business from around 2010 to 2014, I was definitely on the speaking circuit in the central Florida, kind of Orlando, Tampa area. There was this event coming to Tampa called Spark and Hustle, and I really wanted to speak there, but I found out about it a little bit late. They had already selected their speakers and there were only maybe about six or eight speakers for the entire day’s event. But I really wanted to speak there. So I emailed the event organizers and I basically pitched myself and persuaded them to bring me in as a speaker and they said yes.

Carol Cox:
I was so excited, prepared my content. I was talking about mobile marketing and mobile websites because again, I had a software and web development company at the time and I got there and I well, first I’m sitting down there on that chair the entire time. I don’t know why I think I sat on the chair because I had seen other speakers do that or they had had a panel beforehand. And so I didn’t I wasn’t standing up using the stage. The content that I chose for that audience was not aligned. It was way too technical for who was in that room. And then the offer that I was making, because this was for lead generation, was not aligned at all with the audience totally. Just did had no just no relation to what the women in that audience would need from a Web development company. So I didn’t get the results that I wanted. And I left there feeling like, really like, oh, that was just not a successful speaking engagement. Now, if you’ve had this experience before, let us know in the chat. Most of us, if we’ve done enough speaking or will be doing enough speaking, we’re going to have those speaking engagements that just don’t go the way that we want. And that’s okay because I learned so much from that. So let me know in the chat if you can relate to that. So let me contrast this with this other speaking engagement.

Carol Cox:
So this was in 2017. So it’s about four years later. I had started Speaking Your Brand, the company in 2015 and kind of went full time with it in early 2017. At this speaking engagement, I completely shifted my understanding of the kind of content I was going to present to this audience. Still, women entrepreneurs and professionals, so very similar audience to that 2013 one. But the response and the results were night and day. From this speaking engagement, I got probably ten clients, some clients who are still with us today who still come back to us as Speaking Your Brand. I got more speaking invitations from this event and I created a deep connection with that audience. And there were three things that I did differently, which I’m going to show you here today. So if you can relate to this, where you’ve had a speaking engagement that you just like, yes, I nailed that one and that one was great. Let me know in the chat if you’ve had one of those as well. So here’s what happened with that first speaking engagement in 2013, the one that did not get me the results that I wanted. I was stuck in what I call the expert trap. I was so close to my content, so close that kind of like the nitty gritty nuts and bolts of what I did in my very technical business that I thought that was what’s going to show me.

Carol Cox:
I was smart, that I was competent, that I was capable, that I was authoritative on the subject, and then the audience would naturally want to buy from me, but that’s not the case. Instead, we need to think about escaping the export trap and shifting from this idea of being an expert presenter or a commodity speaker into a thought leader and making sure that your presentation content aligns with that. And so if you are new to Speaking Your Brand, welcome. I’m so glad that you’re here. I’m Carol Cox, the founder and CEO. And Speaking Your Brand. We run coaching and training programs. We also have a podcast that is over five years old, 290 episodes and counting that come out every Monday. And we also run events like our speaking intensive in person events, which we’re planning already for next spring. Let me quickly introduce you to our team. Our lead speaking coach is Diane Diaz. You see her in the picture there on the bottom right hand side. She’s also in the chat. You can see Joy Spencer in the upper left hand side. She’s in the chat. She’s also one of our speaking coaches and storytelling coaches. And then Selita Roberts, who you see in the lower left hand side. She is our executive assistant and client concierge. She’s also an image stylist and very good about about helping us make sure that we look our best when we show up for speaking engagements.

Carol Cox:
So this is the team that you interact with and that you work with when you work with us here at Speaking Your Brand. And I couldn’t be more excited and just grateful. For the excellent work that they do for all of our clients and for our community and our mission of speaking. Your brand is empower women to find and use their voice in the world to tell the stories that need to be told and to activate ideas for change. Because we have seen that it’s through women’s stories, voices and visibility, particularly progressive, diverse women’s voices, visibility and presence that we can change existing systems to make them better for more people. And as we know, with the recent Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v Wade, our voices are more important than ever so that we are not treated as second class citizens, that we make sure that we have a public voice and a public presence and that our stories are being told. And you all the speaking that you’re doing, whether whatever your industry is, whatever your message is, it all matters. And I have a long background as a Democratic political analyst on TV news since 2005. So I had a voice public presence for a long time, and we certainly need more women to do it. And I continue to do this to go on TV because as you can see from these screenshots, I’m oftentimes the only woman with a panel of men.

Carol Cox:
So I want to make sure that there is a woman’s voice out there, your message and your story matter. And so often as women, we’ve been socialized and told in our culture and our media to believe that our stories don’t matter or our messages don’t matter or ideas or not as innovative or as important as men’s. But they are because we see time and time again that companies that elevate women into leadership positions, that they have better performance. Governments that elevate women into leadership positions have better performance. And it all starts with you having a public presence and a public voice. So what we’ll be covering today is three elements that you can use to shift in this idea from being a commodity speaker to a thought leader. What can get in your way? Some examples to inspire you, and I’ll talk to you about our bonus action guide that you get for attending here live today. And I’ll also talk to you about our Thought Leader Academy. Towards the end we have enrollment is open for our next start date, which is August 30th, just two weeks from today. So I’ll let you know about that program. Here’s a thing about public speaking. A lot of times we get questions from women in our community or clients who start working with us and they say, How can I get on the speaking circuit? How can I get better speaking engagements? How can I get paid more to speak? Speaking is the best way to get more speaking, better speaking engagements and paid speaking engagements.

Carol Cox:
Event organizers who see you speaking in front of a group of people are more likely than to want to bring you on for their event, for their conference, for their company, for their group. So that’s what our bonus action guide today is going to help you to supercharge your speaking strategy and define those speaking engagements. Let me give you some examples here. This was back in 2010. So 12 years ago, I was invited to speak at a Internet conference in Orlando. And I had this was kind of the start of my speaking circuit at the time. So I went and spoke there and I met two other women who also were speaking at that same conference, and we were at the speakers table together all day. So we got to know each other well. Those two women also ran events for their own organizations. And so just by me speaking there and getting to know them, I probably got a dozen more speaking engagements just from that one day over the next two years, and I’m still friends with those two women. I just saw them in July when I was on vacation. So from that one first speaking engagement in 2010, I did this panel, I did this Orlando Chamber of Commerce event.

Carol Cox:
I did another conference at a whole bunch more in between and then in 2012. So about two years later, I was on the big stage and this is what I see time and time again is this two year period of time. If you’re just starting out on the speaking circuit to start and then you’ll start getting those bigger speaking engagements. Here’s another example of that too, of your time period. So this was me when I was chairperson of my local Democratic Party, where we’re doing a fundraiser for political candidates. Here is the very first time that I was ever on TV in 2005. Again, me, the woman, reporter and a panel of men. Here is again 2006 on TV. Here I am in 2015. And then finally, I was paid as an exclusive political analyst for the NBC affiliate here in Orlando. And that came about because of these relationships that I had built over time. And you can do this to here’s an example of when I started Speaking Your Brand. This was the very first workshop I did in 2015, and then it did more speaking to kind of get the community to know what I was doing with my new company. Here’s me and Diane back. This is probably in 2018 and then another speaking engagement. And then finally at TEDx Orlando in 2018, as one of the speaking coaches introducing one of the speakers there, again, from smaller event to bigger stage, about two years.

Carol Cox:
Here’s Dianne with one of her very first speaking engagements when she started her company, the brand teacher, before she came on with Speaking Your Brand. Here she is, more workshops on TV, bigger stage, and then finally doing a keynote to about 600 women at the Orlando Women’s Conference, again about a two year time period. So it is entirely possible for you to do this. And then finally coming out of the pandemic, I was named one of Orlando’s Women of the Year in 2021, was invited to do a keynote and then another keynote address and then doing another one this coming October. Slowly, as many of us are getting back into the in-person speaking. So along with up leveling your skills, whether it’s your content, your delivery, your strategy, your pitching, there are some things that we have to unlearn before we can start up leveling these skills. The first thing to unlearn is that so many of us believe that we need to teach and train to provide value to our audience. So we are. Identity becomes tied to seeing ourselves as the expert with the answers. That was me back at that 2013 speaking engagements where I thought I had to be super technical to seem competent and authoritative. But here’s the thing. Your audiences are inundated with information all day long. They don’t need a lot more information.

Carol Cox:
They need to understand what’s possible for themselves and how you can help them get there. Myth number two to unlearn is that you may believe that your story is too uncommon or uninteresting, or that no one can relate to your story. Or you may think that you don’t have a story we’re sharing. When women start our Thought Leader Academy, they work on their thought leadership power statement where they talk about their bigger idea, their bigger message, and how their personal story relates to that. And sometimes they have trouble figuring out what personal story do they have? How does how does any of their story or their personal journey relate to their idea? And trust me, 100% of the time, there is a connection between why you care about what you do and that personal story. Whether it is from childhood or adulthood, your story matters. It’s not too uncommon or uninteresting. And trust me, your audience will relate. Myth number three to unlearn is that your audience doesn’t want to be sold to or that you can’t make money from speaking. You absolutely can. We have women who we work with who charge $3,500 for a virtual keynote, $4,500 for a workshop, $10,000 for an in-person keynote. These are numbers that I just heard in the past two weeks from women that we work with. You absolutely can make money from speaking and you can also generate really high quality leads from the speaking that you do.

Carol Cox:
But you have to escape the expert trap in order to do that. All right. So let me share and talk to you a little bit about Jackie Robi. She went through our Thought Leader Academy at the end of 2020, beginning of 2021. And because of the work that she’s been doing around her thought leadership, she’s been invited to Dubai to speak at a conference there last fall. And she’s going back again this fall. Flown business class to Dubai, definitely the way to go. She’s also been recognized with different awards. Dr. Christina Maddison is a public health pharmacist. She has been on TV news over 200 times since the start of pandemic. She recently delivered a TEDx talk in May, and you can see the picture there on the left hand side. And tomorrow she is going to be appearing on Good Morning America. They flew her to New York City to do a Good Morning America segment. That is the power of thought, leadership and putting yourself out there. So here are those three elements you need as a speaker to generate the impact and the income that you want structure, storytelling and selling. And yes, they are three S’s because we love alliteration and acronyms here are Speaking Your Brand. And so when you work with us, when we work with you on your framework, we will probably come up with an acronym or an alliteration or a visual shape to go along with it.

Carol Cox:
So let’s talk about structure. When you are presenting content to your audience, you don’t want to be all over the map. You need to pick a spot and you need to stay there. As someone who’s an expert in your business, you know a lot of information. You’ve been doing it for ten, 20 or more years. And even though you want to, because of your generosity, to have your audience understand everything you understand about your topic, they can’t in 30 or 45 minutes or an hour, there’s just no way you have to give them the right level of content for where they’re at. And again, invite them to think differently, to think bigger about your topic. I liken all of your ideas to these long winding branches of an oak tree. And if you can relate to this oak tree as where you feel like all of your ideas are, let me know in the chat put in. Yes. Where you think of these ideas and you’re like, Yes, I have this one and I can talk about this and I have this one over here and I have this one over here. And oak trees are beautiful, but they’re not helpful for your presentation content because it’s just too overwhelming. I like to say you can always write a book after you work on your speech for all the things that you couldn’t fit in your talk.

Carol Cox:
So instead of the oak tree, what I want you to think about for your presentations is a palm tree. Palm trees have that one solid trunk, and then they have branches at the top that hang off of it. But there’s not a gazillion branches. There’s just the right number of them. And that’s what I want you to think about for your presentation. Think of that trunk as your throughline. Everything you talk about has to hang off of that through lime, and if it doesn’t fit tightly to that. Line, put it in the parking lot. You can come back to it later or you can put it in your book. Here’s an example of a client that I worked with the years ago. This was her original slide deck. Now you can see lots of text on the slide deck. Kind of difficult for the audience to go through this. As you can imagine, she was standing in front of the audience delivering this speech. The audience is trying to read this very small font, so not a great use of slides. We need more images. But in addition to just the slide design, lacking is that there was too much content, there was no structure, no beginning, middle and end. And she kind of got lost in the weeds because there was no flow to what she was talking about. There was no logical progression. So instead we worked on the structure of her speech and then she hired a graphic designer to do the slides.

Carol Cox:
But in addition to the slides looking much better, her content was much more focused and relevant. It was thought leadership. She asked the audience question and she had a clear call to action at the end because she was doing this for lead generation. And here’s the thing no matter how long you’ve been speaking, whether you’re just starting out, you’ve been doing it for a few years, or you’re a seasoned pro, all speakers need structure. If you’ve seen the TV series Hacks, let me know in the chat. I started watching it just a few weeks ago. I’m a little bit behind from when it came out on HBO, Max, and I love it. It is so fun. The main actress there, Jean Smart, she plays a comedian. And so in the show, she’s kind of like getting older. And so they don’t want to kind of continue to have her have her showcase in Vegas. So, you know, she goes through all of these things. But in in that, she has a young woman who ends up coming to work with her to help write her jokes, to write her her comedy set. And as you can you can see through the episodes that they’re very intentional about the storytelling and the jokes that they put in. But it’s not just willy nilly. They don’t just drop jokes here one after the other and said they have a structure, they have a beginning, middle and end, and they want to make sure everything ties together.

Carol Cox:
So yeah, let me know if you like hacks because it’s, it’s so fun. I think we’re almost done with season two and I just heard that they’re bringing out season three. So excited for that. So here’s how we help you with the structure of your talk. We have our signature talk canvas framework, which is what I came up with about five years ago after working with about a dozen clients and realizing that I was getting to the same place with them by asking them a series of questions and putting their speeches together in a similar way. So it’s based on three story structure and the hero’s journey with kind of marketing and sales techniques interwoven through it as well. And the thing with the framework is that it gives you a guideline, a place to go, versus staring at a blank slide deck or a blank document and wondering, how am I supposed to start my talk? How am I supposed to end it? What am I supposed to put in the middle? Where am I supposed to put my bio, my information about me? So this is where the framework comes in and it’s so incredibly helpful. And the reason that our clients are so successful in their talks is because they use this framework because they don’t just decide to wing it, which you don’t want to do in your presentations, or just decide to slap a bunch of content together.

Carol Cox:
You need to have a structure, and that’s what our framework provides. Here’s one of our Thought Leader Academy grads, Chantel Wilkinson. She’s a DTI consultant, trainer and speaker. And when she came through the Thought Leader Academy, she really appreciated having this framework to give her this this place to go with her content, with her training. She does a lot of trainings and workshops and to integrate her personal stories into it as well. So as we think about structure, I want you to ask yourself, what’s the through line and the number one takeaway for the audience in your presentation? Do you have a clear beginning, middle and end, and what are you sharing that’s new or different in your content? All right, let’s go on to the second element here, which is storytelling. These are the four essential ingredients that I see for thought leadership. Your foundation is your expertise is what you know really well regarding your topic. The next level up from that is your big idea. What is it that you want to see change in your industry or a society as a whole? What do you want to see that’s different? Then the third level is your story, your personal story, your personal journey. And then that fourth level is the emotional courage to share it.

Carol Cox:
The hardest part is your story and really digging deep to find the emotional heart of your story and being willing to share it. And when I talk about your story, I don’t mean kind of like the superficial rags to riches kind of glossing over the hard parts, which a lot of us tend to do instead, really digging deep, because that’s where you’re going to find the real connection with your audience. So if you’re for those of you in the chat, let me know if you feel like you have a story, like you know what your story is that you would share, or if you feel like you’re not sure which one it could be that maybe you have a few of them, or you’re not sure if you really have a compelling story at all. Let me know in the chat. So here’s my question to you. And if you’re maybe shying away from this idea of sharing your story is my question to you is, do you want to offer a transformative experience for your clients and your audience? Because in order to provide that transformative experience, that deep storytelling is what is necessary. Our client, Tammy Lally, she spoke at TEDx Orlando in 2017 and she talked about money, shame, and she stood on that stage for eight and a half minutes and shared a very raw and vulnerable personal story about a family tragedy. She dug deep. It wasn’t easy, and she did it because she knew that she wanted to be able to help other people because she did this.

Carol Cox:
Her TED talk now has over 2 million views, which is very unusual. Most TED talks get maybe a few thousand views. There are 25,000 TED talks that happen every year. And so, for one, like Tammy’s, to have over 2 million views is extraordinary. And it’s because not only does she put the work in, but we used our framework. So again, it wasn’t willy nilly. She didn’t just tell a story. We use the framework to make sure that she was taking the audience on a journey so that they could understand and relate to her story and understand what money shame is and maybe how it impacts them. And I know that for so many of us, especially as high achieving women and high achieving women in a patriarchal society is hard for us to not want to present as perfect. And I’m not really talking about perfectionism. That’s kind of its own thing, but it’s related. But even still, as women, when we’re standing on a stage, we don’t want to seem incompetent or like impostors, like maybe we shouldn’t be there. And so we may shy away from wanting to share stories that make us seem imperfect or that we had things that happened to us in the past that maybe are not going to look good on us, the characters.

Carol Cox:
And as a storyteller, you’re presenting a character in a sense with flaws are so much more interesting. Perfect is boring. This is why I love the musical. Hamilton If you’re a Hamill fan, let me know in the chat. And I like Aaron Burr’s character the most out of all of them because he is so flawed. And not only is he so flawed, but he’s so willing to share his flaws as he goes through the different the different numbers that he does. This screenshot here is from the song In the Room Where It Happens, and in the beginning of the song he’s very sedate. Like he’s got it together. He’s going to like just like stay calm. He wants to be in the room where it happens, but he’s going to just kind of like find a way by the end of the song, he is just so frustrated. He is like dancing, like crazy, like on the table. He’s just letting it all loose because he he’s like basically showing his emotions on his sleeve. And that’s what I want you to do with your storytelling. I want you to show your emotions on your sleeve. And of course, I can’t do a man from Hamilton without doing a woman. Here’s Eliza Hamilton, Alexander Hamilton’s wife. And she’s really the emotional heart of the musical because she very much shows her emotions and her heartache, and she provides that deep connection with the audience as well as speakers.

Carol Cox:
You can do the same thing when I delivered a keynote last September, this is my first in person after the pandemic has started and I stood in front of that. That was a luncheon for a fundraiser, and I stood there in front of the room and I decided to share a story about a very heartbreaking professional event that had happened to me about 15 years ago. This professional event was so hard for me at the time that I lost my voice and my confidence and my purpose for years afterwards. And I didn’t realize until later because I didn’t really have that supportive community that I needed at the time to kind of bounce back from that. But I shared that story and when I did, you literally could hear a pin drop in that room. Everyone kind of stopped eating. They stop, you know, that little kind of chatter that goes on when people are eating lunch and kind of listening to a luncheon speaker. And there was silent. And they were paying attention because even though none of them had been in local politics before, none of them had had that same experience I had had. They could relate to this idea of feeling like that backlash and feeling like they lost their confidence and maybe lost their purpose for a period of time. And that’s how the more detailed you are in your storytelling, the more relatable it actually is.

Carol Cox:
So I want you to ask yourself, what’s a personal story that you can share? How can you go even deeper into that story, into that emotional heart of it? And then how can you frame that story to align with your overall message that you want to share in your presentation? And so when you work with us in our Thought Leader Academy, we help you to define and develop your best idea and your story. That is the core of what we’re helping you to do, in addition to helping you create your entire signature talk as well as your visibility strategy. Let’s get to the third element of speaking. So we covered structure, we covered storytelling. The third one is around selling. So now I want to know, how do you feel about selling? Are you like cat number one? Like, Yay, can’t wait to do it, I love it. Or are you like cat number two? Or you’re like, Nope, don’t want to do it. Feel super awkward, feel super uncomfortable, don’t want to make it offer in my presentations. Don’t want to feel like I’m being salesy. Let me know in the chat. Are you number one or are you number two? And I love these memes so much because cat number two is obviously a real cat that they just did that to make his head shake back and forth. But you can see a cat doing that, whereas you will never see a cat super excited, which is why they had to make it a cartoon character.

Carol Cox:
Okay, Nicole says number one, but she was number two for years. Katie says one most days. Okay. Yeah, two says Sarah. Michelle says. And she’s in between the cast. And it depends on the day, which sounds kind of like what a cat would say. All right. So I used to be like, number two, I’m with you there, but really I am number one now. And the reason that I actually enjoy selling is I feel like I’m providing a service to the person at the other end. Now, if they choose not to buy, that’s okay. But at least I’m helping them be aware of what is possible for them, how they can get that help, that support, that accountability that they that they desire to achieve their goals. So that’s maybe it will help you to reframe this idea of selling if you are in the number two camp, to think about it as a service that you’re doing to the person on the other side and then includes to your audience who you’re in front of. So here’s how I think about the business of speaking and how you can make revenue from speaking, from generating leads and clients, from your presentations, from charging for the workshops and trainings that you’re doing and from charging for keynote speaking. Here’s what I see a lot is that the leads and clients from your presentations, because your content is a little bit too technical and tactical, you’re missing out on potential leads that you can get from your presentations.

Carol Cox:
This week’s episode of The Speaking Your Brand Podcast Episode 290 is an on air coaching call, and we talk about specifically how my guest and Thought Leader Academy client Monica Young can get more leads from the presentations that she’s doing. So that’s a great podcast episode to listen to. What I also see is that so many of you are not charging enough for workshops and trainings. Maybe you’re you’re basically doing legion presentations, but you’re doing them as workshops, so you’re giving away way too much content for free or you’re under charging for workshops and trainings. And the same thing for keynote speaking. You’re under charging for it a lot. That’s why when we work with our clients, we are very open and transparent about what we charge for our speaking and workshops and we encourage and to share that with each other. So you have a baseline, you have an understanding of what going rates are for these different types of speaking engagements. Here is one of our alumni, Angela Hosking. She worked with us a couple of years ago in 2019 and then in 2020, even in the midst of the pandemic, she got eight paid speaking engagements and she five xed her speaking fee based on what she learned by working with us, but also by building the confidence to be able to charge more.

Carol Cox:
And here’s what I want you to do, is when you think about putting together your presentations for lead generation, is plant sales seeds along the way. Now, you may notice that I’ve been doing that in this webinar today, and this is why I like for you all to come and watch what we do in our webinars because it’s very meta. Like you’ll see us use the structure, you’ll see us use the storytelling, you’ll see us using the selling techniques like planting these sale seeds, talking about our past clients, mentioning the work that we do in the Thought Leader Academy, mentioning why clients come to us and how we help them. So you can do the same thing in your presentations and your content plant those sales seeds along the way. You know, here’s the example for Monica Young. That’s the on air coaching call that’s out this week. And so after we recorded the call, I gave her actually the the audio recording even before it came out because we recorded a few weeks ago. So she wouldn’t listen to that and listen to also the coaching calls that she had done with Diane Diaz, our lead speaking coach. And after doing that, she reworked her talk and she got and she did it several days later. And she got three high quality leads just from doing a 15 minute lead generation presentation.

Carol Cox:
That’s what a difference it made by taking what she had learned from us. So I want you to ask yourself, as you look at your presentations, are you planting sales seeds along the way? Also, do you know what you’re speaking? Fee is if someone came to you right now and asked, I would love for you to do a workshop for us or for you to do a keynote talk for us. Do you know what you would charge and would you be charging enough? And then are you prepared for a conversation with an event organizer about your fee to stand in your in confidence in the amount that you would charge? Here’s the thing. The time is now to get prepared and to get on the speaking circuit. We’re coming out of the pandemic. Events and conferences are eager to get back into in-person. Some are still doing hybrid. They’ll still be virtual opportunities as well. But so many want to get back to in-person. And because also there are so many companies that still have work from home policies where a lot of their employees are working remotely, but they want to bring them together in person. And that’s where companies are going to be doing events. These conferences, associations and groups are going to be doing events. And guess what? They need speakers and that’s where you come in. So work on these three things to make sure that you’re getting the results that you want from your speaking, the structure, the storytelling and the selling.

Carol Cox:
And ultimately doing these things will help you to escape that export trap of being a commodity speaker. The problem with being a commodity speaker is that you’re interchangeable and you’re undifferentiated. And this is why commodity speakers tend not to get paid or not to get paid very well from their speaking because as from the event organizers perspective, whether they hire you or someone else who talks on your topic, they’re pretty much interchangeable because they feel like their audience is going to learn X, Y, Z from either speaker. So maybe they’re going to go with whoever is a little bit lower priced. Once you position yourself as a premium speaker and as a thought leader, you can charge more. You’ll start getting inbound speaking invitations from event organizers because they see that you’re different from the other speakers, you’re different in your content and you’re different in your storytelling and your delivery. And this is the shift that you make in our thought. Leader Academy is shifting from expert presenter to a story speaker and a thought leader. As I mentioned at the top, enrollment is open now for our next start date of August 30th, which is two weeks from the live recording of today. And I would love for you to submit an application if you would like to have a conversation about your goals.

Carol Cox:
You’re speaking goals, what you’ve been doing so far with speaking what areas you would like to get help on, and then how the Thought Leader Academy could be a good fit for you. These are the things that we work on together. So your big idea and your story, your signature talk. So we have our framework and you work on your signature talk using the poster board and all the post-it notes, and you literally map it out from the very beginning to the very end with everything in between your visibility strategy, how to monetize your speaking and your delivery and your preparation as well. We have weekly group Zoom calls that happen with an incredible group of women. And as you see from the chat and if you’ve been around Speaking Your Brand for a while, you’ve listened to the guests and our clients on our podcast. You know what amazing women that they are. So you get to have these weekly group Zoom calls with them and with us, our coaches. So me, Diane and Joy, you also get a VIP day, a virtual VIP day to create your signature talk so that imagine having your signature talk done in 3 hours. It is possible we’ve done it hundreds of times. It’s magical and it’s extremely effective. No more like waiting weeks and weeks and weeks and wondering how to put your talk together. We get it done.

Carol Cox:
You also have on demand video lessons that you have access to, lifetime access to and think ific on everything from speaking proposals to speaking fees, speaking contracts, your thought, leadership, message, preparation and delivery, everything that we cover a lot in the live group Zoom calls, but you also have on demand trainings, video trainings you can watch along with the slides and PDFs. As we hear time and time again from the women who’ve gone through the Thought Leader Academy, they say, is the best investment they’ve made as a speaker and as an entrepreneur, we put our heart and soul into this program. We’ve run it now continuously since October of 2020, and we just love the women who come through it and seeing the progress that they make and the confidence that they build. So we have three different tiers for the Thought Leader Academy, and you can get all this information on the page of Speaking Your Brand academy as well. So with Tier one, you get the full academy. So all those weekly group Zoom calls for 16 weeks. So it’s four months. You’re with us on demand, video trainings, the templates, the scripts, the PDFs and so on. Plus you get a small group VIP day to create your signature talk using our framework. So that’s your coach. And then you and two other women in the academy come together on that three hour zoom call to work on your talk.

Carol Cox:
It is so effective. Tier two is if you want to do a one on one VIP day with Diane, you can do that at the tier two level. The Tier three level is if you want to do a one on one VIP day with me. So there are limited spots as of right now, as of the time live right now, I only have one spot available for tier three with me. Diane has two spots available for Tier two with her. So if you want to do that, definitely get your application in today so that we can schedule that Zoom call with you to talk through your application. So you may be thinking, well, this sounds great, but maybe I’ll do it later in the fall or I’ll do it next year. And sure, you can certainly do that. There’s no pressure. You can do this when you feel the time is right. But I will say this events are booking their speakers for the fall and definitely already for next spring, so you want to make sure you’re getting on their roster. The other thing is that we see time and again women are leaving money on the table by not charging enough for their keynotes, for their workshops, for their trainings and so on. So making sure that you’re charging enough for your speaking and really differentiating yourself and your business with your thought leadership message is going to help you not just with your speaking, but for everything that you do in your business.

Carol Cox:
It is such a powerful foundation for all of the content that you put out there. So I invite you to apply for the Thought Leader Academy. That’s a Speaking Your Brand academy. You can get all the details. There’s a button there to apply, submit your application. After you do that, you’ll get a scheduling link where you can book the 30 minute Zoom call with either myself or with Diane, and we’ll go through your application, answer all the questions you have, make sure that your academy is the best fit for you and get you signed up for August 30th. Start Date. I’d love to know if there’s any questions in the chat. I know I’ve been kind of busy going through the slide, so I haven’t been looking through the chat here. So let me see if let me go back here. Michelle says she struggles with planting the sales seeds. I want to say hi, Selita. Hi, Kayla. They’re also Speaking Your Brand team members. Let me go. Let’s see. Nicole Rochester says she has a story. Yes, Nicole, you definitely have a story. I know that Michelle has stories, but one wonders if they’re good enough. Michelle, I know your stories and I know they’re good. Paul, I know you definitely have a story because I we chatted a few weeks ago and you have an incredible story to share and such a powerful message that will help so many people.

Carol Cox:
Katie asked How much support is there for finding opportunities to submit and apply to? So Katie So we give you our kind of guidelines and what we do to find and to search for and to submit for speaking opportunities. So you’re still doing the legwork on your end. You can either have a VA assistant do it or you can do it yourself. But we’re going to give you kind of are what we do. So our approach to finding speaking engagements and then what what happens in the weekly group Zoom calls is that some of them are mini trainings, some of them are open coaching Q&A, and some of them are mastermind hot seats. So you can bring what you’re working on to those calls and get feedback from us as your coaches, but also feedback from the other women as. Well, on your speaking proposals, on speaking fees, your pitches, there are certain groups or organizations that you’re leaning for. Here’s the kind of thing. And in addition to speaking getting you more speaking speakers get gigs from other speakers because speakers are already on the speaking circuit. When someone, an event organizer, asked them, Who do you recommend as our next speaker? They’re more likely to recommend someone who they know and who that they’ve seen on the speaking circuit. So that’s another thing to keep in mind as far as making sure that you’re getting on there.

Carol Cox:
Also, the bonus action guide that you’re getting for attending live today. We’re going to send that out to you in an email once we’re done today. So that’s a PDF. It’s action packed, actually some lume screen share videos as well that show you how we go through and search and find speaking engagements. I mentioned that story earlier about that professional setback I had about 15 years ago and how I lost my voice and I lost my confidence and my purpose for several years after that. And it was at that keynote that I was delivering last September where I shared that story that I literally had an aha moment as I was talking, like literally as I was talking to that audience and I said out loud, Oh, this is why I started Speaking Your Brand, because I needed this community, this supportive community of other women who are putting themselves out there and needed that. And I didn’t have it at the time, and I didn’t realize when I was building Speaking Your Brand. When I started in 2015, I thought it was just building a business that I was going to love, which I which I do. But I didn’t realize how deep that thread was back to that earlier experience. And I think you’ll find the same as well. Yeah. How does the Thought Leader Academy help with speaking confidence? So here’s what I hear from the women on our weekly group Zoom Calls is that they see what the other women are doing and inspires them and motivates them to think bigger, to go bigger with their doing.

Carol Cox:
But also it validates so much of what our normal feelings that we have feeling nervous, feeling uncertain about what we’re doing, and feeling like we don’t know if our content is good enough or if our stories are good enough, or should we be charging more? Is it outrageous to charge $4,500 for a workshop? So when they get feedback and they get that support and they get that validation, it builds their confidence so much. In addition to having their talk done, they don’t feel anymore like confused about what content should they put? How should they open it? Should they? How should they ask the audience questions? Where should they put their story? So they have that expert guidance from us as well as that supportive community from the other women. Okay. Michelle wants to ask, is it too late to apply for speaking opportunities for the rest of 2022? I would say no. So we’re in middle of August right now. And if you think about events that are happening in, say, October or early November, they a lot of them may have speakers already lined up. But number two, you may not know if they have speakers. Sometimes they’re speakers back out. Emergencies happen, family things happen.

Carol Cox:
They decide they can’t do it, travel, what have you. So absolutely still build relationships with event organizers. Still do searches for call for speakers for conferences in 2022 because they may still be out there. Start with your local community and kind of go from there. As far as far as finding those speaking opportunities, especially for the rest of this year and Michelle and the rest of you, even if you reach out to some event organizers and they say they already have speakers, guess what? Now they know your name. They know that you’re interested in speaking. So if a slot becomes available or if a speaker has to back out, or if they start planning for 2023, you’re going to come to mind because they’ve already had some interaction with you. Let me put into the chat here the direct link where you can apply for the Thought Leader Academy. Just answering the application questions will probably help you a lot. I always know when I start answering questions that other people opposed to me it gives me a lot of clarity and a lot of insight. So even just doing that, submit that, schedule your 30 minute zoom, call with us so that we can go over it. And we are not high pressure sales. You probably know that if you know us, we really just enjoy getting to know women like you, having a conversation, figuring out is this a good fit for you, when would be a great time for you to do it? What are your goals and is this good? Is this going to work? Well, for what you have in mind? How a Thought Leader Academy helps with wording speaking pitches? Yes, great question.

Carol Cox:
So when you are pitching yourself for a speaking opportunity or putting together a speaking proposal, you have your title and you have your session description and you have your bio that you’re doing as well. And you want to make sure that those are really impactful, that the title is specific and interesting and results oriented, that the description kind of builds upon itself and leads the audience to want to learn more and that your bio connects your credibility to your topic. So we give you our guidance and templates and examples on that, but then you can bring them to the group calls or you can post them in body networks, which is the community that we use, the private community that you get access to. Q When you join the Thought Leader Academy, so you submit what you’re working on, and then myself or Diane or Joi or the other women in the group will give you feedback to make them that much stronger. We also provide you with templates and scripts for doing cold outreach to event organizers, to doing outreach for getting introductions to people, to other event organizers. So we help you by kind of giving you those things that you can then customize for yourself.

Carol Cox:
Connie wants to ask about joining Nssa. So the National Speakers Association, I would say definitely go check it out. I have never been a member of the National Speakers Association, but I know I have colleagues and friends who have and I don’t know if there’s a chapter here in Orlando where I live. That’s probably why I haven’t investigated it very much. I think there may be a chapter over in the Tampa area, but if there’s a local chapter, go to it, see if it’s kind of the vibe in the group is what you like figure out. Is that something that is something that you want to do? I don’t know anything about their membership dues or their benefits, but it’s always worth checking out these different groups and seeing if it’s a good fit for what you want to do. But I will say that it’s not a requirement. I’m not a member. Diane has never been a member. And we get plenty of we’ve gotten plenty of speaking opportunities over the years. Thank you all for participating in the chat. It’s been a lot of fun. If you have any questions that we didn’t get a chance to cover today, the best thing to do is submit your application for the Thought Leader Academy. We can go over your questions in that Zoom call or you can send me an email. Carol Cox as speakingyourbrand.com. Thank you so much for being here. Have a wonderful rest of your day and your week and hope to talk to you soon.

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