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Join the Nerds!
Welcome to the funtastic world of the Fabulous Learning Nerds! Scott Schuette and Daniel Coonrod and Zeta Gardner are Learning Executives with over 50 yearsā experience between them. Together they share new ideas, learning tools, approaches and technology that increase learner engagement and impact. All while having FUN! To participate in the show and community please contact them at learningnerdscast@gmail.comĀ
The nerds are all about creating a community of learning, innovation and growth amongst educational professionals: Instructors, facilitators, instructional designers, learning and development professionals, trainers, leadership development professionals, learning metric gurus, sales enablement wizards and more. So, if you want to learn, connect, grow and have a good time doing it, The Fabulous Learning Nerds Podcast is for YOU!Ā Ā
Scott (00:01.724)
Hey everybody, welcome to another fantastic episode of our Fabulous Learning Nerds. I'm Scott Schuette, I'm your host, and with me, he's Farid Abed -Mitland, everybody, Dan Coonrod.
Scott (00:14.268)
Dan!
daniel (00:15.85)
Scott! What's up man, how you doing?
Scott (00:18.428)
Me?
daniel (00:22.57)
It's a good state of being, isn't it? It's nice. It's like being like right in the middle. It's easy. No pressure, no stress. Boom. Boom. Love it. Love it.
Scott (00:29.276)
I'm in the club. I'm in the club. I'm telling you right now I'm in the club. Yep. Yep. Going to be in the fair to Midland club on my quest to have as much joy in my life as I possibly can, which is not an easy quest. the late great George Carlin put it best when he said, stop wishing people to have a good day. Start.
daniel (00:44.138)
I'm super excited to have her with us tonight and we're going to learn all about her in a little segment that we call What's Your Deal?
Scott (04:23.932)
Sabrina!
Kabrina Ashley (04:25.742)
Hey, so excited to be here and all of this space talk reminds me of xenon of the 21st century. It's like going back to the early 2000s.
Scott (04:33.436)
I know, right? Hey, so what's your deal, my friend?
Kabrina Ashley (04:37.262)
Yeah, absolutely. I'm really excited to talk about all the ideas behind how do we tell better stories and how do we actually convert when we are talking to people, whether that's converting a relationship that you meet somebody at a bar and you're wanting them to be your friend or you want to go on a first date with them, or if we're trying to do more of a business conversion of somebody in the office, getting them to do what we need them to do as a leader.
or converting somebody for sales. And what does that look like from a storytelling perspective so that we can really connect with people on a human to human level instead of this more bro marketing kind of yucky salesman piece that we've seen from like the car salesman idea.
Scott (05:20.156)
I love that term, bro marketing. I think I'm going to start using it today. Hey, do me a favor. How did you get from where you were to where you are today? Tell us a little bit abbreviated TikTok version, so to speak, of that journey for yourself.
Kabrina Ashley (05:38.414)
Yeah, absolutely. So for me, I started out wanting to be the first female and youngest CEO of Disney. So from the time I was four, I watched a documentary and was like, okay, people can color in the lines and that's the job that I wanna do. I wanna be an Imagineer. And then as I got older, I realized that going to art school and what that was gonna look like, I got my hopes dashed my senior year of high school when they told me how much money I would make being in the arts.
and how much money it costs to get a degree in the arts. It did not, the math was not math -ing. And so I decided to go into business and communications and get a double major and then minor in leadership studies. So my thought process was I'll go into corporate and how else can I work at Disney? So I started to look for different ways and ended up being in the college program and then got promoted into corporate training for their teams on
in their services for guests with disabilities sector. So started working with people specifically with autism and writing the pamphlets for families as they came into the parks of what rides have loud music, which ones have water, which ones have flashing lights. So that way, if you had a child or you were somebody who was sensitive to those things, you knew ahead of time before getting on the ride and then having to bring yourself back down from that overstimulation of whatever sort that it was.
And in that process, I learned a lot about what does corporate training look like because I was in charge of creating it from the ground up. And then being so young in the space at that time, how do I get people to listen to me without them just being like, well, that's the cute little kid who just happened to be in this space because we didn't have anybody else to fill it. And so how did I get across to people the message that I had for them and still get the results that I wanted to get in order to hit the.
that I had to knock down for my authorities over me.
Scott (07:36.38)
That's fantastic. Like I'm super excited to dive into what you're going to talk about. I know that it's going to add a lot of value for everybody. And let's just be honest, like Disney U is no joke. Like that's some serious stuff. So the fact that you had time there and learn some stuff there and then learn to speak up and have your own voice and create better stories there is super exciting to folks like us. And with that, everybody, let's go ahead and dive into our topic of the week.
Scott (08:11.132)
This week we're talking, hey, telling stories to be seen and heard for your brilliance to grow. Awesome, awesome stuff. So, Cabrinha, like, let's piggyback off on your story and kind of how you started off. And I'm just going to ask you a real basic question. So like, how do we do that? How do we begin to create that content that talks about, about you, yourself, your authenticity and all of that stuff?
Kabrina Ashley (08:39.15)
Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things that I do with all of my clients is we sit down and we go, what am I interested in? What are the quirky things that make me me? What are the things that I call home about? I always tell my clients, if you have a story that happens to you, like somebody cuts you off in traffic and you want to call your best friend, you want to call your mom, you're going to tell your spouse about it, I want you to write it down. Because there's all these amazing little moments that happen to us on a daily basis that we forget about.
For example, my kids just had their birthday party because they're both summer babies. And we all know that summer babies kind of get forgotten during the school year shenanigans that happen with birthdays. So they were like, mom, we have to have our birthday before the school year ends because we want people to show up. And being the cool mom that I am, I was like, what art project can we do? And I ended up with several bottles of sparkles that were, you know, the chunky glitter, not like the super fine stuff. I was like, it'll be fine, no big deal.
And then we had a couple of kids that came and this glitter was everywhere. Not just in my kitchen where it was supposed to stay, but they had tracked it all over my house. They had rolled in it like it was a fun thing. And I'm still finding glitter and it's been a week and a half later. And so I had to think to myself as I'm sitting here vacuuming this up, complaining to my best friend on the phone, I was like, this is a story because what are we tracking around with?
What kind of things do we track to other people and what kind of things are we leaving? And I'm in the process of writing a speech for a talk that I'm doing next week at a conference and was like, this is perfect because now I can say, do you want to just be the person who has annoying glitter? Are you going to be the fairy who actually is purposefully using the glitter? And so taking stories like that and then finding ways to talk about this to your audience so that people go,
I know what glitter is. I've had that experience. Everybody's had that moment where they've had glitter stuck in their car or their kid has brought something home and it's spilled everywhere. And so knowing that these shared experiences are something that we can all come around. This is why things like COVID and being sick or having kids or these shared things that so many people go through changed the way that we're doing business now post -COVID because everybody in the world had this experience at the same time.
Kabrina Ashley (11:04.942)
And so people can relate to this is what it was like for me. This is what isolation was like. This is what working from home was like. And we've come together in a different way that we haven't seen in marketing and in business and in corporate culture. And there's so many people who are just trying to get back to normal instead of taking these kinds of stories that we share and finding ways to work them into their everyday conversations, but also into content.
because the content piece is important because we want to have evidence on the internet for people to know that we are who we say that we are.
Zeta (11:43.32)
I love that. Yeah, like just saying glitter is a fifth element. It is its own kind of state of matter. I can totally relate with that. So you want to create content that not only just talks to other people, but makes it relevant for them. I love that. How would you go about then starting that structure? Say you're trying to translate something to your client. How would you start that?
Scott (11:43.676)
That's fantastic.
daniel (11:50.826)
Hahaha!
Zeta (12:13.048)
process.
Kabrina Ashley (12:14.766)
Yes, so the process starts out with how am I hooking people? You'll see a lot of people in the space talk about you need a good hook. And so you'll see some of them, if you follow me on LinkedIn, one of the ones that I just did that did really well was five things that I learned about posting on LinkedIn from cicadas. It's weird. It's something that people are like, how could you possibly learn anything from these little disgusting things that are everywhere and super duper loud? And if you're in the South, I'm sorry, they're almost gone.
But it's one of those things that's really interesting for people of how did you pull this back around? So I tend to like hooks that are very out of the box things that people wouldn't expect. But then there's other things that I've seen. Another example that I saw on LinkedIn from somebody that I follow was four things hiccups taught me about sales. And then the person didn't even tell us about sales. He went in to be like, just kidding. I'm going to tell you how to solve the hiccups though.
daniel (12:44.746)
Hehehe
Kabrina Ashley (13:11.022)
which seems like a really weird thing to put onto LinkedIn, but we're building know, like, and trust from a different area of not just trying to shove sales down people's throat all the time. And that's what so many businesses do. They're like, we're having this webinar, we're selling this thing, or you'll get on somebody's email list, and the only thing you'll ever see from them content -wise is when they want to sell you something. And that's like that best friend that calls you, who you just say is your best friend, but they're really that person who's always asking for money or.
Can you buy this thing from this new MLM that I'm a part of? Or can you go and watch my kids because I don't have anybody else? They're the person who's always asking for something. And you're like, they're my friend, but... And we don't want people in our ecosystem of LinkedIn, our email list, people that we work with in the office to feel that way about us. Because then when we really do have an ask, we've cried wolf too many times for them to buy into whatever it is that we want them to buy into.
And most of us, I know Scott and I have talked about this previously, is we want more than just the money behind whatever it is that we're doing or the next promotion. Behind this, we're looking for purpose and more to life from the content. And when we create better content, it puts us in a position to where I can get promoted into that position. Whether that's at the company that you're with or not is beside the point. But if I'm looking for a new job,
waiting until I've lost my job or I'm ready to hurry up and jump ship is not the time to start creating that evidence. We wanna start creating that evidence now while things are good so that if the vice president position opens and you're a manager and you're ready to jump into that, you can hop right in. I see this with executives all the time. They're like, well, eventually I wanna be president of this department, but they're so busy doing the things in the department that nobody even knows really what they do.
And if they disappeared, everything would fall apart. It's like when you go home and your mom has done the dishes, done the laundry, put everything away, everything looks good, nobody really notices what they're doing until they're not there. And this is what happens in the corporate setting a lot is that managers and people who are doing their job and just quietly doing what they have to do to get things done, they get forgotten in the mix and that they don't get promoted because they're not shining that light and that evidence of.
Kabrina Ashley (15:33.134)
Who they are, what are they doing, what thoughts do they bring to the table?
daniel (15:38.186)
I love that. And I totally agree. It's for so long in my career, I was, you know, the quiet guy like, what did you do? you know, I did some stuff and I might've spent like 60 hours that we pull in together different resources and different teams to get a project across the finish line. But I always felt like, like, you know, I don't want to be a braggart and I don't want to be like, I don't want to, I don't want to toot my own horn, so to speak. Like my work will, will show for itself. And,
a friend of mine, we've actually had him on the show, Brandon Gore, was just like, hey man, like, no, like you've got to be loud with your accomplishments. Like you have to tell these stories. I know you like telling stories. So why aren't you telling stories about these? And you know, I think like I got off the phone, I was like, and then like, of course, you know, it twisted my brain for a week. I was like, man, like that's so right. And again, like I think so many people are just like hoping to get noticed and they don't want to like,
They don't want to like feed into this idea of like, I'm just toot my own horn. Like, no, tell this, tell your story. You don't have to toot your own horn to tell your story. I love that. Totally agree.
Kabrina Ashley (16:47.662)
Absolutely, and one of the things that I've talked with several executives about, especially in females in male -dominated spaces, is that there's something, they call it the hot girl walk, but the idea behind it is I'm gonna walk the office every single morning. So if you're in an office setting and you're not working from home or you're there a couple days a week, going ahead and every morning for five minutes while you drink your coffee, walk around the office and go, hey Bob, how's it going? Tell me about that project that you're working on.
Hey Susan, it's really good to see you this morning. How are the kids? Because now all of a sudden people are seeing my name over and over again. We know statistically on the marketing side that when people see an ad a certain number of times or they've connected with a company a certain amount of times, they're more likely to buy. The same is true when you're trying to get promoted. The more I see your name, the more I know what you're doing, the more I hear those stories, even if you don't want to post content at all. You're like, Sabrina, LinkedIn's not my thing. I don't have an email list. I don't want to do any of those things.
At least if you get nothing else out of this, walk around the office and just connect with people and go, hey, yeah, I was working on this thing and this is how I pulled together this project. I see this a lot with my tech professionals because they're quiet and they are smart. They're some of the smartest people I've ever come across. And they're doing these amazing things and you'll sit down at a meeting, a meetup with them and they'll tell you all of it. And they're like, yeah, and I just feel like nobody sees my value. And like, have you told anybody besides me in the last 10 days about what you're doing?
They're like, no, you know, they should be able to see it. They can track all that stuff. My employer's tracking me all the time. They're busy too. They're not paying as much attention to you as you think that they are.
daniel (18:25.194)
There's been two times in my life where I've been promoted after I returned from taking a vacation. Like, you know, I come back and somebody's like, where have you been? And I've been like, I was on vacation for a week and I was this, this, that, and this. And they're like, well, we needed this, this, that, and this. I'm like, man, I'm so sorry. Like, you know, I wish you'd reached out to me on the phone. Like wanting to shoulder that blame, like, I goofed up only for them to be like, no. And then like for them to come back a few days, weeks later and be like, hey,
you know, like, why don't we give you some more responsibility? Why don't we see, why don't we talk about your growth, what your role is here? And I never in my brain clicked with like, you said the hot girl walk, which, you know, like just that being present, being visible. And now I love it, love it.
Scott (19:19.1)
Yeah, I think that's important, but if I can go back just a little bit, so you hit on some really, really groovy things, right? So we all have to have some stories to tell. And if you're just doing your job, and by the way, if you're leading a team and the only thing that you do is help the team get the work done, that's a singular story. It was a time in my career where that was our story. We always got everything done on time. Isn't that great? It was awesome until I didn't have a team big enough to meet the needs of the business. And I talked to my mentor and I'm like,
I'm late on stuff. I'm really struggling. Great. You need to find a story that isn't you deliver stuff earlier on in time anymore because it's just not realistic. Right. So my question is what, what are some of those stories that we should begin thinking about? And then once we identify them, how do we cultivate those so that they serve our needs?
Kabrina Ashley (20:09.614)
Yeah, going back to your example, there's so many stories just in that one piece. So as a leader of a team, what are the things, conversations that you're having with subordinates? Maybe somebody just had a baby and had to go on maternity leave and you feel that's one of the reasons that things are late is because you have that person missing. And now you're seeing the importance of everybody on your team, which goes back to what Daniel was talking about. You could tell me, here's some of the ways that we solved that.
or here's some of the mistakes that we made in not having redundancies in our team in X, Y, and Z, and here's how we're fixing it. That becomes another story that I can tell, whether that's to people with inside of the business or that's on something like LinkedIn for content, then we're looking at leadership skills that you're using on a daily basis and being able to step back and go, well, what does this look like? But that's also where your everyday stories come in of,
like we talked about getting pulled over, getting cut off in traffic. And how does that relate back to being a leader? How did you handle that? You could talk about the emotional piece of how did you regulate back from that and then have to lead the team afterwards? And how do people come from hard situations into leadership and still keep that composure? So we find different stories when we start to look for them. So the great thing about our brains is that there's this
spot on the front called your reticular activator. And the second that we ask it an open -ended question, we literally will drive ourselves crazy until we close that loop. So I'm asking myself all the time, what are the stories around me that I'm missing? And all of a sudden I start seeing stuff everywhere. Like when I train teams, they tease me because I'm like, did you see this thing? And we could talk about X, Y, and Z from this skeleton that's in this person's office. We should take a picture with this. And...
I have more pictures on my phone of myself than I do of my children. It has become this thing that I do so often that I'll see a message, like here in Nashville, they have all of these artists who will put different things on sidewalks to promote different songs that they are trying to pitch. And some of them are really interesting. And I go, well, what is this message saying? So I've started collecting different messages from.
Kabrina Ashley (22:30.99)
billboards and church signs and things like that. And then I can pull those back in and go, isn't this interesting? This is what people are saying. And then I can connect them back to either each other and create that kind of connection. Or I can connect them back to something that I'm talking about. And it's something that's completely outside of myself. The other thing about stories is we can use other people's stories. So let's say I'm obsessed with Walt Disney and the Savannah bananas. So I have tons of content.
There's no lack of stories from these two men to talk about some of the things that Jesse Cole has done in growing the Savannah bananas from their team and how that functions and some of the leadership skills that he pulls in, as well as how Walt as a very creative individual and his brother Roy, how did they actually build the business out and what are stories that people might not actually even know, or they haven't really thought about that Aesop's fable kind of feel behind the story.
So I don't always have to even be using my stories. I can go, you know, this is a lot like fill in the blank.
Scott (23:40.604)
really good stuff and not necessarily intuitive for a lot of us, right? So as a seasoned facilitator, I kind of learned the skill. Like I feel like storytelling is a skill and it's an important skill that we all need to have. And I believe firmly that seasoned facilitators speak in, well, we speak in analogies all the time. I do it all the time.
It's like this, it's like an eighties rock star and people go, huh? And then you kind of tie in whatever the heck I was talking about into the analogy that I just kind of made up. Right. but at the end of the day, people are better understanding that. So without 10 to 20 years sitting in front of people trying to explain really complex things into something that they might understand or have it be relevant. What are some.
techniques or skills per se that I can start using today to enhance that skill of storytelling, just, you know, helping people around me understand things better so that I can even grow that skill, be able to tell stories that fit me and what I'm trying to do so I can get where I need to go.
Kabrina Ashley (24:57.614)
Yes, so the first thing that I tell everybody is if you have a smaller human in your life, ideally seven and below, they are great people to tell stories to. If I have something really complex that I'm trying to explain in a TikTok video or in YouTube or in my newsletter, I go to my seven and my six year old who are obnoxiously honest and I go, hey, I'm gonna explain this to you and I want you to tell me what you got out of it because that's gonna tell me how much actually got retained.
because they're gonna tell me, well, I don't know what this word means. Your audience, like most of the time, my kids don't know what the word algorithm means. They're like, that character from that second basketball movie that you said was really good in the 90s. And so I go back and I go, okay, well, how do I explain what this is? Because if my kids have that same question, I'm finding that adults have those questions too, but we're too prideful to say, what does that mean? We go on Google and we're like, okay, well,
Let's see what it means, but then we've got more adults who are trying to explain this complex thing and they're not breaking it down small enough either. So if we can be the bigger person and go, what's the smallest viable product that I can create from this idea so that my people understand it 100 % even if I feel like I've dumbed it down a little bit, it's not because my people are stupid. It's not because they've got a low IQ. It's just because we buy and we make decisions at a fourth grade reading level.
So if I know that that statistic, no matter how high the IQ is, if I'm gonna buy and make decisions at a fourth grade reading level and I know that I'm gonna make those decisions from a feelings place and an emotional place first, how do I break that down to where people don't get upset before they have that information? Because we know that thoughts create emotions and emotions create behaviors. And so if we can work backwards and know that we can tame that emotion,
we say, here's the thought, here's the emotion that people are having, then we can create a different behavior afterwards. And so if we use that kind of brain science backing in our favor, now we're breaking things down a lot smaller. That means that things aren't taking as long for people to get because we don't need all of the fluff. A lot of times we add the fluff pieces because we want to feel smarter. We want it to sound really good. In the course creation world, for example, there was a lot of
Kabrina Ashley (27:23.278)
debate five or six years ago of if your course is longer than a certain hour amount, then it's more valuable and you can charge more. And now we're at this point of actually if it's a lower hour amount, you can charge more because the goal of learning, adult learning especially, is how fast can I do it and how well do I actually retain the knowledge long term? So asking a child, what does that look like?
ask somebody who has no idea about the industry. I love going to my people who are not entrepreneurs and not in this space and saying, here's what I'm working on, what do you think about that? And just seeing their wheels turn, especially if after they've had a beer or something, because then you get really, really great answers. It makes it really fun. And so I've turned it into a game. The other thing that I would highly suggest people do is create a story library. This is the simplest thing that you can do.
It's a Google Sheet that says, story is just like, and then a space for that you just leave open. So as stories happen, I write them in the story library. It already says is just like, and then I walk away because now I've opened it up in my brain to go, well, what is that like? I love sparkles and I've talked about them for years and this situation that happened in my own house, I had no idea how I was going to use it. I was like, I know that this is a story.
but I have no idea how I'm gonna create this into something that makes sense for my audience that I'm trying to teach. And then as I started to noodle on it and kept vacuuming up sparkles every single day, I was like, that's what it is. And it finally came to me, it's those shower moments. But how often do people actually write down the shower moments when you have that epiphany of, this is why, or this is what I wanna do with my life. Most people don't write those down and they're like, well, I had a really good idea.
And I know that it was there somewhere, but it's in the junk drawer of our memories. And unless we're constantly writing them down, we're not cultivating that. So for example, I was, when I was speaking last week, we went down to Broadway, which is sounds cooler than it is. It's not like the shows Broadway. It's like the bars Broadway. And everybody who doesn't live here wants to go do all the fun, let's go bar hopping. And I'm sitting there having this conversation with somebody.
Kabrina Ashley (29:49.774)
and ended up asking a guy for his number and he told me no. And I was like, excuse me, sir. And I was like, my goodness, I have the perfect LinkedIn post for this. Because all the feelings of rejection, I was like, what is the feeling that I'm having and what does this relate back to? Because I was like, this is familiar. This feeling is very familiar to me. And so instead of talking about it from the story standpoint, I was now talking about it from the feeling standpoint. Because I was in tune enough having done this for so many years to go,
This feeling of rejection over here is the same feeling of rejection that I get when I get on a call with somebody and I know that they're the perfect fit for a program and they still say no. And how many people feel that way when they're in the middle of a sale and that people are on the fence and you're like, you're so close to just saying yes, and then they still say no. And what does that look like? And was able to storytell from that perspective versus dating on LinkedIn doesn't necessarily correlate. But when I pull in that feeling that I'm getting from being rejected,
Now we've got a totally different kind of piece of content.
Scott (30:54.748)
That's amazing. That's great. And I'm just going to say this. What a dummy. He should have totally, you know, right? I mean, yeah. And, you know, I'm in Nashville a lot and so I get Broadway so that it doesn't surprise me. But at any rate, let's get back. We've been talking a little bit about LinkedIn. You and I met on LinkedIn, which is great, which is fantastic. It's my happy place, the place I like to go.
daniel (31:00.81)
No.
Kabrina Ashley (31:01.102)
Are you alright?
Zeta (31:02.52)
For real, yeah.
Scott (31:21.948)
Talk a little bit about some strategies that our audience can use on LinkedIn telling stories that can get to the ultimate goal that we're talking about, create value for ourselves. Because I think that we've all learned at LinkedIn is not the, hey, this is my kid's birthday party, but I still see that. Or this is what I'm having for dinner. Occasionally, I see that too. But yeah, talk a little bit about the stories we can tell on LinkedIn, some strategies to help.
us better connect and create better impact with the people that we meet on LinkedIn.
Kabrina Ashley (31:57.326)
The beauty of LinkedIn is that you don't have to be there all the time. That's what makes it my happy place. And it makes me want to be there more often than places like Instagram and Facebook because I don't have to basically baby it along to make it do what I want it to do. So there's a couple of different things, especially if you're just getting into content creation or you're like, I'm not sure, I'm not sure my boss is going to be okay with this. What if I create a personal brand and become a thought leader on what I do and somebody gets mad at me?
That's a huge topic that I get all the time. The easiest thing that you can do on LinkedIn is start commenting on other people's stuff. I get more people that follow me and connect with me in my DMs from comments that I've put on other people's content than I do from people who follow me and comment on my own content. The reason is is because people who are unsure, they're not gonna be the people who are commenting.
The people who are in the outsourced, who are just the lurkers, and we know this in the business side, is that the lurkers are usually more valuable than the likers. They're the people who are just watching you from a distance. They just kind of stalk you and they're like, I saw your post. here's this thing. And then all of a sudden they're the people who buy a $20 ,000 thing from you. Or they come into the business and they're like, I want this person to be my salesperson. It's not because they've been engaging with your content the whole entire time.
It's because they've gotten to know you from watching you. Just like we all feel like we know Ryan Reynolds and half the population wants to marry him. It's not because we know Ryan Reynolds, it's because we know of his content and how authentic and personable he is in that content. So commenting on other people's content, I like to do it two or three times a day. I just scroll the first five or 10 pieces of content that I see and I go, that's something really interesting. I can add a valuable piece of content here.
And it doesn't have to be super long. It can be one or two sentences. I was just looking at one today that was about women in the workforce and what it's like when you've gone on maternity leave and then lost your job after coming back. Plenty of times I've had that happen from a business standpoint where people haven't wanted to work with me because I'm a mom. And so being able to say, hey, I see you, I understand this is very valuable content that you're sharing, those kinds of comments, and then leaving some of your own story there of how you connect.
Kabrina Ashley (34:20.59)
makes it so much easier for people to connect with you on the backend. When it comes to content creation, the beautiful thing is, is I only have to post two or three times a week to make this start working for me. If you really want to go gung -ho, you can do Monday through Friday, but only post once. It's not like TikTok or Instagram where they want you to post 15 ,000 times a day and like everybody's content and be on the platform for hours and they're trying to get you to stay there. LinkedIn knows that people are on the platform.
for anywhere between 13 to 17 minutes. So they're gonna try and give you a couple pieces of content for people you follow, a couple of ads, and then maybe some people in your thirds that they think that you might be interested in. That's a really quick, down and dirty version of LinkedIn.
Scott (35:07.964)
Yeah, my understanding, the algorithm really does work on that connecting piece of it, right? So if you're just starting out on what kind of stories do you want to write? If you have that shower moment of, I want to talk about leadership and apply to my favorite comic book character, right? Like somebody may have done. That's cool, but what will really get you going, and you're right, is like just connecting. It's a really great community. And...
Kabrina Ashley (35:12.75)
Mm -hmm.
daniel (35:25.802)
Hmph.
Scott (35:35.644)
You know, my experience is the more that I connect with people, the more that I share my thoughts around, Hey, I support you on this or here's something that I learned. You're right. You'll get more people following you and you'll develop really relevant connections. Like people that get you like, who's your tribe guarantee your tribes on LinkedIn somewhere they're on there. Right. So if you're currently not in a place where maybe you're not working for your tribe or people don't see who you are. Right.
There are people, trust me, I know on LinkedIn, that will see you, that are your tribe. So I really, really appreciate that.
Kabrina Ashley (36:13.294)
Well, and I've seen it over and over again. I'm on a board here in Nashville for a conference called Datatune, and I have watched people in the last several months lose their jobs, come onto LinkedIn within our community, and tag a few of us, and people share things again, and they have a job within a couple of weeks because of the fact that the community is so tight. And these people don't necessarily know each other very well, but they're like, my goodness, I've seen this person at a conference,
or we've connected and we've been chatting back and forth. I have one really good friend who I talk about all the time and people cannot believe that I've never met him in human form. But we've been friends for years on the internet because we met in a program digitally and we've got on Zoom like this and had conversations. He's been on my podcast several times and we've been able to help each other through that process of owning a business and teaching.
Adults and what does this look like to create a course and get on podcasts and all of these different aspects? because Sometimes people in your office aren't the people who are your people who understand you? Especially when you've got smaller teams. I see this all the time with marketers It's a one marketing one person marketing team and they're expecting you to do three different jobs in one and they feel so alone like I'm failing at this this is not how it's supposed to be and then they start talking to other people in the same field and
And like, well, maybe you shouldn't be being treated this way, or maybe you should be making more. And it puts a different perspective, whether good or bad, on what's happening. And then you've got support systems for when you do need to move to another job, or you have a position that opens that you're like, hey, I'd love for you, this is my favorite thing on LinkedIn is, I'd love for you to come and work with me. Like, look at all these cool people that I know that could come and work in my office with me and be my buddy.
So I'm always looking at this as how am I cultivating my own friendships and my own network of relationships? Because as corny as it is, that your net worth is connected to your network. And especially with all of this AI pieces, I say this as a speaking coach all the time, is that live events and in -person and knowing people face -to -face like this and doing Zoom calls, getting on podcasts with people is going to be what happens the next 10 years because we don't.
Kabrina Ashley (38:34.35)
there's not a whole lot of authenticity when you can get onto Zoom now and have a totally different face than what you have in real life.
daniel (38:45.578)
Totally agree. I think, yeah.
Zeta (38:46.136)
first.
daniel (38:50.89)
There is no replacement for that human connection. And I think a lot of the social media platforms are built on the idea of stories. You're talking about stories and people flock to them for those human moments, those human stories. And you're talking about people connecting with you on LinkedIn from leaving comments and stuff and just humans connecting with humans, even if it is on a digital platform. No, yeah, 100 % agree.
Zeta (39:20.792)
I do too, the fact that a lot of this AI and how it can be taking over people's work, more than ever, it's the most important time for us to be connecting, becoming characters in stories and not just reading the story.
Kabrina Ashley (39:37.39)
I mean, you bring up a good point of being the character in the story and being the main character in your story and then finding a way to be the sage in everybody else's. And it's a delicate balance of being Luke Skywalker and Yoda at the same time. So how do you guide people while also being the hero in your own journey? And so many people, this is where a lot of people go wrong, honestly, is they're like, I'm Luke Skywalker, I'm the coolest person, look at my lightsaber and...
Zeta (39:41.4)
Yeah.
Kabrina Ashley (40:06.734)
You're like, mm, those are the people that were like, they're interesting. I'll follow them for fun, but I'm not gonna work with them. I don't wanna have a relationship with them. It's more of like a comic relief than anything else. But when you become Yoda and you're like, I'm here to help you. I was just on a call with a client who was like, I'm generally just trying to bring value to the world. And I was like, that's really cool. And there's a balance between the two because anybody who's a people pleaser,
daniel (40:14.89)
Ha!
Kabrina Ashley (40:35.79)
and feels like they can be a doormat sometimes is like, yeah, I want to bring value, but I want people to value what the value that I'm bringing is. And like I said, delicate balance of I am the main character in my story. This is what I bring to the table. This is how I'm the worth that I know that I have. And through that worth, I'm able to bring value to you. And here's how I help you in your own story get to where you want to go. And so coming at it from I'm worthy of this piece,
and I serve people through that work.
Scott (41:11.164)
Great stuff. Hey, listen, great conversation. Totally appreciate you being here. We're unfortunately gonna need to start wrapping things up. But before we do, I wanna give you an opportunity, Sabrina, is there something that you were really passionate about that you haven't had the opportunity to share with our audience and or maybe as an opportunity to kind of wrap up some of the main points that you've got here today? I'll give you a couple of minutes to go ahead and do that.
Kabrina Ashley (41:38.926)
Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things, if you're interested in learning how to do this for yourself, whether you're a business owner or you're in corporate, I have a totally free course called Mic Drop Message, and it's just micdropmessage .com. And it'll walk you through each of these steps of how do we create a story about ourselves to become this personal brand thought leader in our space. And then if you're in a corporation and are looking for somebody to come in and teach your people how to...
tell stories better, how to create content, what does that look like if you're in sales, if you're in marketing, if you're in the C -suite, and how do we work together as a business to tell the same story of the business, but then how do we tell our own individual stories in order for people to work with us through that business lens? Then I have several different corporate trainings that I do. Specifically, since we talked about LinkedIn today, I have a corporate training on LinkedIn where...
I come in for a whole entire day and coach your team through all of this process. And then we go on an awesome field trip, which is everybody's favorite part, where we go and we create content together. And I never curate these. I always just go to a city. And we just walk outside and find a place that's walkable. And we start creating content. Because I want you to see how easy it is to do it without having to really plan for it. I'm going out with my kids. I'm...
doing this fun adventure, I'm going swimming over the weekend, especially during the summer when there's so many things to do, and using this as a way to experience life, as well as create content about who you are and what you want, and being who you say that you are and who you wanna be, ultimately, so that you're living in this purpose piece, along with growing your career and the monetary pieces that we're so, we talk about so much.
Scott (43:33.372)
man, fantastic stuff, Sabrina. Thank you so much. We really appreciate it. That's right. Could you do me a solid? Could you go ahead and let our listeners know how they could connect with you?
Kabrina Ashley (43:45.006)
Absolutely. So you can find me at cabrinashley .com and then I hang out on LinkedIn. And so you can find me in Cabrina Ashley. Feel free to drop me a DM or come and connect with me and I'm happy to answer any questions that you have.
Scott (43:59.644)
Yeah, and the name of your podcast, because I'm sure people in Illinois don't want to subscribe to that.
Kabrina Ashley (44:02.542)
Yes, absolutely. So the podcast is called Top Shelf Creator and we have a weekly newsletter that comes out for creators and entrepreneurs. So if you're trying to build a business, you're wanting to start a side hustle, or you're just really interested in the creator economy and what influencers are doing, that's a great place for you. And we talk all things business from legal standpoint, all the way to how to design thumbnails and all of those fun things in between.
Scott (44:27.676)
That's awesome. That's great. Thank you, Cabrinha. Really appreciate your time. Really appreciate what you're doing. Can't wait to hear more stories from you. It'll be great.