343-SYB-Solo-Messenger-v2.mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
Carol Cox:
I believe you are the exact messenger for your idea and your audience. Hear why on this episode of the Speaking Your Brand podcast.
Carol Cox:
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 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.
Carol Cox:
Hi and welcome to the Speaking Your Brand podcast. I’m your host, Carol Cox. If you haven’t yet listened to last week’s episode, you’ll definitely want to after today’s. I’ve gotten such great feedback from listeners. I talked about how I almost got stuck in the Expert Trap, but I managed to get myself out of it before the presentation that I delivered at a marketing conference in July. So I talk about what my content and my slides look like, and then I realize, Oh my gosh, I’m stuck in the expert trap and how I got myself out of it and the strategies you can use as well. Today we’re talking about why you are the messenger for your idea and your audience and that your audience is waiting for you. I know that you want to have a unique take on your topic and not sound like everyone else, but maybe you’re worried that you see other speakers or authors or entrepreneurs out there who have similar topics to you.
Carol Cox:
And here’s the thing that will always be the case. There are always going to be lots of people out there who do or say something in the same umbrella, in the same topic area as you. And that’s why this is where having an idea is key and it’s different from my topic. Let me give you an example. Here’s a presentation topic that you could see at a at a conference or on a lunch and learn that you’re going to something like five ways to improve your Social media marketing or how to save for retirement. Those are topics. And yes, you will see those everywhere. If you go to a marketing conference, you’ll see five ways to do your social media marketing. If you’re going to a business or a finance conference or an event, you’ll hear about how to do financial planning or how to save for retirement. Those are topics. And they the problem with just having a topic like that is that you become undifferentiated. You’re what I call a commodity speaker, which means you’re interchangeable with everyone else. So you’re not going to get those higher profile or paid speaking engagements that you want. You’re also less likely to generate leads and clients from your presentations. An idea is so much more. And that’s what makes your talk interesting and memorable. An idea is having a unique angle or twist on your topic, an original way to frame it so that it’s not like what everyone else says about your topic.
Carol Cox:
And this is exactly why your audience is waiting for you. I’ve talked in the past on this podcast about four layers of thought leadership that I’ve identified. The foundational layer is your expertise, what it is you do in your business and your career. The next layer on top of that is your idea, your big idea. So what is your take on your expertise? But you don’t stop there. The third layer is your personal story, your personal experience, why you care about this idea, why this idea came to you, and then that top layer. The fourth layer is the emotional courage to dig deep and to put your idea out there, even when it feels uncertain and scary. So I’m going to share with you in this episode why your ideas are so important. The two different ways that ideas can come to you, what oftentimes stops them from doing so, and how to activate your idea. Because ideas look for a messenger and it’s up to you to activate it. If you’re new to speaking your brand. And welcome. I’m so glad that you’re here. We help women entrepreneurs and leaders create their signature talks and develop their thought leadership platforms. We focus on advocating and champion for women’s visibility, voices and influence because we know it’s through women’s stories and challenging the status quo that we’re going to change existing systems for the better. If you’re interested in working with us.
Carol Cox:
Enrollment in our Thought Leader Academy is open. We have two dates left for all of 2023 August 29th and October 24th. Those are the two start dates we have left August 29th and October 24th. We work with you over eight weeks to identify, validate and activate your idea and turn it into a powerful thought leadership message and signature talk. We work with you over those eight weeks and in group Zoom calls of small groups of women, we have usually 6 to 8 women per group. And then you also get a one on one virtual VIP day with us to create your signature talk. And clients say that that process is magical. You literally say your idea and your talk come to life. If you would like to join us, you can get all of the details, including pricing as speaking your brand.com/academy. Again, that’s speaking your brand.com/academy. You can enroll from there or you can schedule a zoom call with us. We are always happy to talk to you about your goals and to make sure the thought Leader Academy is the best fit for you. Now let’s get on with the show. What do I mean by an idea? Here’s what the dictionary says. An idea is a thought plan or suggestion about what to do or an opinion or belief. It’s also defined as an entity such as a thought concept, sensation or image, actually, or potentially present to consciousness. Now, that’s kind of a weird definition.
Carol Cox:
That last one was from the Merriam-Webster dictionary. I like to think of an identity as something that comes to you and that you then bring to life that you actually activate into the world. That’s why I say that ideas look for a messenger. Ideas are like floating around out there in in the in the in the universe, in the ether and Jung’s collective unconscious wherever they are. And they’re waiting for us to grab on to them and to activate them, to bring them to life. And I have been thinking about this quite a bit from some different movies and experience that I’ve had. And then I read Elizabeth Gilbert’s non-fiction book called Big Magic. This was several years ago. It is a fantastic book. You may recognize the name Elizabeth Gilbert from Eat, Pray, Love, of course, her memoir that became a major film. She has written so many other things since then that I think actually are better than the Eat, Pray, Love. Big Magic being one of them. I highly recommend it. I’m going to quote now from the book about Elizabeth Gilbert’s understanding of ideas, because it very much aligns with the way that I think about them. Here’s what she said, quote, I believe that our planet is inhabited not only by animals and plants and bacteria and viruses, but also by ideas. Ideas are in disembodied, energetic life form. They are completely separate from us, but capable of interacting with us, albeit strangely. Ideas have no material body, but they do have consciousness and they most certainly have will.
Carol Cox:
Ideas are driven by a single impulse to be made manifest, and the only way an idea can be made manifest in our world is through collaboration with a human partner. It is only through a human’s efforts that an idea can be escorted out of the ether and into the realm of the actual end quote. And that is your job to do that, to escort the idea out of the ether and make it actualized. That is why you are the messenger for your idea and for your audience. Now, how do those ideas come to you? This may seem a little vague and amorphous right now, and I understand it. So let me give you some examples. I see two ways that ideas can come to you. The first way is that the idea is thrust upon you so you don’t really have a choice. It comes to you because of a personal experience that has happened to you. Sometimes it can come from a positive experience. Oftentimes, sadly, it comes from a negative experience or a tragedy, something that happens in your life that you then want to share with others to prevent the same pain that you went through. I think about a few of my clients, most recently, Karen Keene. She was on the podcast in July talking about sharing her story as a transformational experience for herself and for her audience, very much coming out of a tragedy that she experienced three years ago.
Carol Cox:
If you haven’t listened to that episode, definitely go back. It is incredibly inspiring. Another client that comes to mind is Tammy Lally, who did a Ted Talk in 2017 that I worked with her on and has since had over 2 million views because of a sadly, a family tragedy that occurred to her. But just like with Karen, she knew that she wanted to take the pain that she had experienced and help others with this. So, of course, we don’t want something like this to happen to us. I would not wish a tragedy upon anyone in order to to get an idea out of it, to help others. But if it does, we can decide what we want to do with it. And here’s what I will say. There is no right or wrong answer. You do not have to activate an idea from something that has happened to you, but if you are feeling compelled to do so, then it can be of great benefit to your audience. In this first case, where ideas are thrust upon you, that story, that singular personal experience is what gives form to the idea. Now the second way, which is is more common in and I probably where you’re sitting, is that the way the idea comes to you is that you’re open to the idea and actively looking for it, and the idea comes to you based on your overall life experience, your expertise, your background, your interests.
Carol Cox:
So you’re kind of you’re you’re constantly scanning your environment, what you’re reading, what you’re. Listening to what you’re watching, conversations that you have and we start seeing threads or start or things start to excite you, you start to get curious about a certain topic or a certain thing and you wonder, huh, is this something that I can explore more? So let me give you an example from one of my favorite Broadway musicals. Hamilton Lin-Manuel Miranda is the creator of of Hamilton the Musical, and he got that idea when he was reading a biography about Alexander Hamilton. He says he was on vacation with his wife. He was sitting there under the beach umbrella on the lounger, reading this biography, and all of a sudden it’s like that that proverbial light bulb goes off in his head and he realizes that he could create something based on this material. And then, of course, he took his unique angle on it to make it into a hip hop musical, not just the play, but actually creating a musical, but a hip hop musical that had never been done before on Broadway. So he was open to the idea. He was actively scanning the environment to see. And then when he knew this one struck him, this was the one for him. But like Elizabeth Gilbert talked about, if he decided not to activate that idea, if it came to him and he just said, Oh, this isn’t for me, or I feel a little uncertain about this, or if this has never been done, how is this going to work out? Maybe I’ll fail at it.
Carol Cox:
And he decided not to activate it. Then the idea very likely could have gone and found someone else instead because idea wants to be made manifest and until it is, it will keep looking for someone to do that. If you think about all of the amazing discoveries and art and creativity and innovation that has happened, a lot of times what happens is what’s called multiple or simultaneous discovery, from calculus to the theory of evolution to the discovery of oxygen, to the invention of the telephone, different people independent of each other. There was no communication between them. They had no idea that the other person was working on this in different places at around the same time, came up with the same idea. And I believe this happens because of a confluence of factors where it’s like the right time, it is the right time for that idea to be made manifest. So it’s looking for the person to do that. And sometimes it will find multiple people to do that in Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert shares a story where she talks about how she had an idea for a new novel, and she worked on it for a while, maybe a year. She was writing out the characters and the plot. She she knew what it was going to be, but then it kind of lost.
Carol Cox:
She lost interest in it, that her curiosity wasn’t going any further. So she set it aside and she didn’t look at it for a while. And then she happened to meet the other novelist Ann Patchett at a book event that they were both at. They had never met in person before, and she describes in the book how they kind of, you know, when they when they met and then when they said goodbye, they kind of gave each other a kiss on the cheek. And then they continued to correspond with each other, actually through handwritten letters. That’s how they corresponded. And it wasn’t too long after that that Elizabeth Gilbert decided that the original novel that she had been working on with the plot, the characters, everything she had mapped out, she was just it was not for her. Instead, she had an idea for a completely different novel. She decided to work on that new one instead. And what happened, unbeknownst to Elizabeth Gilbert, is that Ann Patchett all of a sudden came up with an idea for a new novel of her own that was almost the same plot location, characters, even character names, as an original novel that Elizabeth Gilbert had had plotted out, but then had set aside and eventually had abandoned. And Elizabeth Gilbert says in the book that she believes that that kiss that they shared on the cheek literally passed the idea of that novel from Elizabeth Gilbert to Ann Patchett, because that idea wanted to be made manifest and a realized with Elizabeth Gilbert’s permission that it wasn’t going to be her anymore that was going to make that idea manifest.
Carol Cox:
Oh, I actually get goosebumps every time that I think about that story. And then when I read that story in Big Magic. Let me give you a third example of how ideas can come to you. I recently saw the new Barbie movie. Perhaps you have, too. I loved it. I had a feeling that I was going to like it, but it was. It was funny, It was witty, it was creative. All the set design, the musical numbers, the costumes, and of course, the message that is embedded in it. Greta Gerwig is the screenwriter and the director, and she did an incredible job with that movie. And the idea for the Barbie movie, the way the Barbie movie would have to be done in the year 2023. Greta Gerwig was the messenger for that idea. Mattel, the toy company, had decided. Back in the past decade or so that they wanted to do more with their intellectual property, with their IP, like Barbie. Margot Robbie, the actor who plays Barbie in the movie, had been talking to Mattel about licensing it to create a movie. So that had been going. The conversations had been going on for a little while. In the meantime, Greta Gerwig had made the movie’s Lady Bird and the Little Women and had gotten wide acclaim for them, including Oscar nominations.
Carol Cox:
So now here is Greta Gerwig, who was in the right place in her career where she had done some, quote unquote, smaller movies. And what something like a Barbie summer blockbuster would be. She had done smaller movies. She had learned her craft. She had honed her craft as a screenwriter and director. She was now ready to be the perfect messenger for the idea of the present day Barbie movie. And when Greta Gerwig met with Margot Robbie to talk about it, originally Greta Gerwig was going to write the screenplay with her partner, Noah Baumbach, but then she wasn’t sure she was going to direct it. But once they wrote the screenplay, she realized that this was an idea that she had to make manifest by also being the director of it. Again, it’s an incredible movie. You haven’t seen it yet. I highly recommend going to see it, but that’s another example. Sometimes ideas come to you because someone comes to you and says, I’ve seen this other this other work you’ve done, and I think you’d be the perfect person to do this. And you may have some self-doubt or some uncertainty, but really think about and sit with whether you are indeed the perfect messenger for that idea, for that audience at this time. And that’s why when an idea comes to you, when you have an experience, when you see something that’s going on in your industry and the area that you work in and you think things could be better, things could be different, things could be there could be a change here to make things better for people.
Carol Cox:
Once you start having that inclination, then it’s up to you to activate it because you are the messenger for that idea and you are the one that your audience is waiting for. Now, sometimes this can be challenging. What gets in the way of activating ideas that come to us are fear and perfectionism. The fear often times shows up as What if other people don’t like it? What if I try it and it doesn’t resonate? What if I try it and it fails? It doesn’t get the reception that I want. The other side of fear. Is you do it. And then what if it’s not as good as you imagine? What if the fantasy of acting, the idea doesn’t turn out to be the reality? So that is one thing that gets in the way of activating the ideas fear. The other thing that gets in the way is perfectionism. And I’m going to quote again from Elizabeth Gilbert and Big Magic, because I think she says this so well. And of course, she’s a beautiful writer, so I’m going to go with her words. Here’s what she says. Quote, Perfectionism is a particularly evil lure for women who I believe hold themselves to an even higher standard of performance than do men. There are many reasons why women’s voices and visions are not more widely represented today in creative fields.
Carol Cox:
Some of that exclusion is due to regular old misogyny. But it’s also true that all too often women are the ones holding themselves back from participating in the first place, holding back their ideas, holding back their contributions, holding back their leadership and their talents. Too many women still seem to believe that they’re not allowed to put themselves forward at all until both they and their work are perfect and beyond criticism. And I know for for so many of us, we have this feeling like it’s never going to be good enough. And guess what? You’re right. It’s never going to feel good enough. It’s never going to feel 100% perfect. It’s never going to feel 100% ready. The people don’t want perfection. Your audience doesn’t want perfection from you. They want creativity and authenticity and effort. I’ve been thinking a lot about this idea of effort. I recently took a trip to New York City to celebrate my birthday, and we went to a Broadway musical, which I always like to see a performance when I’m there because I love performing. I love watching performances and and watching people do the best that they can in their craft. And I believe as humans, we like to see other humans doing things that we know take effort. And of course, when you have someone as high caliber as a performance on Broadway, what they’re doing takes extraordinary effort, but they make it look easy. It’s kind of like an Olympic gymnast, you know that It’s so what they do is so hard, but they make it seem so easy.
Carol Cox:
And we like to see humans doing other things that we know take effort. And it’s okay if it’s not 100% perfect because we like the authenticity and the creativity that comes with it. It’s the effort that captivates us and inspires us. And this is why I believe that I created content. And art will have its limits. Yes, we will probably get to the point where they will be. I created TV shows where it’s all digital actors and all of the scripts were written by AI, and all of the visuals were created by AI and the music was created by AI, and there will definitely be a time where that will be that will seem exciting and novel. But then I think we’re really going to want to get back to watching humans make the effort to be great actors and singers and dancers and performers and athletes as well as great speakers, because activating ideas does take effort. If you think about having a unique angle or twist on your material, that original way to frame it so that it’s not like what everyone else says about your topic, that definitely does take thinking about what what is it that you want to say? You want to bring in your particular background and experiences. What unique set of circumstances led you to this topic? You don’t want to just regurgitate what others have said.
Carol Cox:
You want to bring something new to the conversation. Let me give you an example of a talk that I gave back in October of 2016. I was invited to a local TEDx women’s event as about 50 women who were going to be in the audience. And I was asked to to give a talk at that event. So I wanted to talk about, since I’m a political analyst on TV news during election seasons, and I’ve been doing that since 2005. So this was 2016. Obviously a big year for politics at the time. And, you know, we could see how much sexism and misogyny was going on in that election cycle. So I wanted to talk about it in this talk. And I remember it was an evening in August 2016, and I know sitting down working on the talk that I knew I needed to deliver in about six weeks from them. And I sat staring at my computer and I was working on that talk. And it was about women in leadership in politics, and I knew it was missing something. My first draft was good. It was about the benefits of having more women in elected office, the gender stereotypes that female candidates face, and some statistics thrown in for good measure. It was informative, but it wasn’t really all that interesting. I can imagine the women in the audience nodding their heads along with what I was saying. But I wasn’t sharing anything they didn’t already know.
Carol Cox:
I needed a hook, a twist, something that sparked curiosity. I needed to get to the core of my topic to find that aha moment. So as I sat at my computer, I stopped researching and typing, and instead I let my mind wander. Sifting through all the years I spent studying women’s history and gender theory and undergrad and graduate school, the years I’ve spent working in politics and business. So I was just open. I was open to the ideas that were floating out into the ether and wondering, was there one that in particular was going to be resonant to me? And then I saw it. And I not just saw it, but I felt it. And it became so clear that my hands could barely keep up with my thoughts as I hurriedly wrote it all down, scribbled it down and then started typing it out. Now, if you want to hear what that idea was, you can listen to that talk in episode 92 of this podcast. That was back. Oh gosh, Episode 92 must have been in 2018 that I did that. So you can there’s a link in the show notes, but you can also just go back and find episode 92. That is what it means to be open to ideas, but not only being open to ideas, but also be willing to activate them. Now, I had some trepidation, some uncertainty, some self-doubt about this talk that I was putting together, the content of it and the delivery of it, and you’ll hear more about that.
Carol Cox:
Also an episode 92. But I also realized that I was the chosen messenger for that idea and for that audience because there was no one else that had the unique set of circumstances that I had with history, politics, business, technology that could bring all of that together in a unique and interesting way. So it was up to me to activate it because my audience was waiting for it and your audience is waiting for you. And this is exactly what we do when we work with our clients. And the Thought Leader Academy is we provide them that coaching and that feedback and that guidance on the development of their ideas and their signature talks. But along with the coaching and feedback, it really is also validation of their ideas, letting them know, yes, you’re on the right path, keep going, keep digging in there, providing that encouragement and that support. Because like I said in the beginning, those four layers of thought leadership, your expertise, your big idea, your personal story and experience and that emotional courage, all of those are necessary to put yourself out there to become the thought leader that you want to be and to make an impact on your audience. Again, if you would like to join us in the Thought Leader Academy, you can get all the details at speaking your brand.com/academy. Until next time, thanks for listening. And don’t forget, your audience is waiting for you.
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