Carol Cox: Are you providing transformation or
information in your presentations in content
here while you want to increase the
transformation and decrease the information
in 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 the Speaking Your
Brand podcast. I'm your host,
Carol Cox. The past few episodes have
showcased some of our recent graduates from
our Thought Leader Academy.
Last week we had on Christie Rocca,
and Christie and I talked about the hub and
spokes of your thought leadership message.
The week before that was with Nicole Edwards,
and we talked about creating a memorable bit
for a keynote talk.
That's a really fun one.
And then the week before that,
we had Kelly Carlstrom,
who's a pharmacist and our lead speaking
coach, Diane Diaz, and they talked about
working together to create Kelly's lead
generation signature talk.
So those are great episodes to listen to.
If you want to get a sense of what the women
in our Thought Leader Academy work on and how
they're using their thought leadership and
their signature talks.
Today, I want to talk about providing
information versus transformation in your
presentations, your keynotes and your content
in general. So there's a difference between
information and transformation.
I know that whenever I work on a presentation
like a training or even a keynote or the
agenda for the in-person client retreat we're
holding in April, my default,
my instinct is to think,
first of all, the information I want to
convey to the audience,
everything I want to teach,
all the tips, all the techniques,
all the strategies.
And you may be the same way,
but I want to challenge you like I challenge
myself to reduce the information and increase
the transformation.
And I know this may at first seem
counterintuitive because of course we want to
provide value to our audiences,
but I promise you there is more value in
transformation than there is an information.
And why is this? Because you'll have a bigger
impact on your audience when they can see
what's possible for themselves,
and also by providing more transformation
than information.
This is the way you get traction on your
thought leadership message, and this is how
you can increase your prices both for the
speaking fees that you charge and the pricing
for the services and programs that you offer.
So we're going to dive into that today.
I shared on LinkedIn recently that I'm a bit
obsessed with business TV shows like
Succession We Crash and Inventing Anna.
I'll share later in this episode the three
lessons I've taken from watching these real
and fictional characters.
Three positive lessons that we can take.
Because certainly if you've watched any of
these shows, you know that what they do,
what these main characters do is not always
what we would want to role models. So we're
going to take three positive lessons from
that. Now let's get on with the show.
I don't know about you,
but I feel inundated with information all of
the time, whether it's updates from the
people I follow on social media podcasts,
I listen to shows, I watch the news articles
that I read. It's just a lot of information
to consume day in and day out.
And of course, I enjoy it.
I enjoy the podcast, I listen to the TV shows
that I watch the LinkedIn post from people I
follow and so on.
But it's still a lot, and this is why I want
you to start thinking about transformation
and not so much information in your
presentations and content.
In times past, information was harder to get.
You had to go to the library to look up
something. You remember doing that back in
the day? I certainly do.
You had to buy a set of encyclopedias if you
wanted to have quicker access at home.
If you think about it, as a kid, we had a set
of encyclopedias. If we wanted to look up
something like information about a country or
something that had happened in history, and
now literally we can just put a search into
Google. How amazing is that?
Or we had to ask an expert who might know the
answer. Information in the past was at a
premium. If you knew a lot and you could
share a lot, you were highly valued.
Now, however, since information is ubiquitous
and answers to questions can literally be
found with a quick search on our phones,
or by asking Alexa or Siri having and sharing
a lot of information, isn't that valuable?
It's like a commodity where if you have a lot
of a commodity, the price goes down.
Will the same thing with information. There
is so much information that it's not as
valuable anymore.
And we think though that our audiences want a
lot of information.
This is the expert trap that I talked about
last year in episode 241 of this podcast.
And I believe though if you pack your
presentations with a lot of information,
you're doing your audience a disservice.
You think you're providing value to them, but
really you're providing a disservice to them.
What? Your audience needs from you is
curation, discernment and wisdom rather than
a lot of information. So they need curation,
discernment and wisdom.
Let me give you a few examples.
Imagine that you're interviewing some website
developers to create your new website.
You talk to web developer A and she gives you
a lot of specific details,
a lot of information when you talk to her all
about WordPress and the plug ins that she
recommends, how many megabytes of storage
there'll be, how many words and images she'll
put on the pages, how she'll hook up your
calendar and your payment system and so on.
Whew. That is a lot.
Is your brain feeling full just for me
running off that list?
If it is, you're also less likely to make a
decision and move forward.
So this is also could be hampering your sales
if you're providing way too much information,
way too many of these types of details in
your sales conversation.
Now, this information is useful.
There are some clients of web developers who
want these specifics, so put it in a proposal
document and send it to them.
Now let's look at a different approach,
Web Developer B and what she does.
When you talk to her about your new website,
she asks you what you want your new website
to do for you and your business,
what your current site is doing as far as
generating leads, how you want to be
perceived, how you want people to feel,
and what you want people to think when they
come to your site.
That's transformation.
It's about goals, it's about identity,
and it's about vision of what's possible.
Let's take a look at another example,
an executive leadership coach.
Now, let's imagine Coach A,
you're talking to her because you want to
hire an executive leadership coach and she
talks about all of the features of working
with her. You get six coaching calls that are
an hour each and you get lots of worksheets
to fill out and then she'll review the
worksheets and she'll give you feedback.
So she's running through all of these
details, which is all information,
but does that really help you to make a
decision about whether to move forward?
Now let's look at Coach B.
When you have a conversation with her,
she asks you questions like,
What do you want to accomplish?
Where are you feeling stuck?
What does success look like to you?
That's transformation again,
goals, identity, vision of what's possible.
And we do this ourselves in our sales and
marketing for our Thought Leader Academy.
We talk about how in our Thought Leader
Academy you evolve from being an expert
presenter to a thought leader so that you
could have a bigger impact with your message
on your audiences.
So you can get bigger opportunities in in
speaking and in the media and so that you can
grow your income.
And again, that's transformation,
your goals, your identity as a thought leader
and a vision of what's possible for you and
your business. So those are examples from
business offerings. So let's take a look at a
presentation example.
Last year we did a training on business
storytelling for a very large multinational
corporation. As I was creating the
presentation content, I could have packed it
full of information like the history of
telling stories, why businesses traditionally
suck at storytelling, why businesses need to
use storytelling, and what a bunch of
different people have taught about
storytelling, their different approaches and
their different frameworks. So I could have
just packed this presentation content full of
all this information and research.
But what's wrong with this approach?
First off, it's a lot for the attendees to
absorb in just an hour.
Even if it was several hours long,
that would still be a lot for them to absorb.
The second thing is that it's not curated
content as the speaker,
as the facilitator.
It's my job to learn about storytelling and
then decide what are the pieces I need to
share that are going to be the most useful to
that particular audience.
I need to curate the content for them.
The third thing that's wrong with this
content approach full of information is that
it doesn't walk the talk.
After all, if you're going to teach about
storytelling, you better tell stories in it.
There's also no vision in it,
no vision for the attendees and what's
possible for them.
And there's no applied learning as well.
So here's what I did when I created the
training. First I opened with a fun story and
use the storytelling elements I was going to
teach them. So I use the what I call our
ideal story ingredients ideal as an acronym.
I talk about this in episode 137 of this
podcast. I used humor,
I use suspense, and I used a prop in the
story that I opened with.
And then at the end I book ended the
presentation where I came back to that story
and gave the ending of the story.
So that was I left them in suspense during
that hour. The second thing that I did is
around empathy.
I understood that the attendees were leaders
in this company and they wanted to learn how
to use storytelling to better pitch their
ideas and get buy in from the leaders above
them. So I acknowledge this in the
presentation, acknowledged that they were
leaders who needed to learn how to pitch,
that they could get their ideas out there.
I also practice curation.
I determine the best storytelling framework
to teach them, one that I created based on
everything I've learned about storytelling.
So I took all these different approaches and
frameworks and all the research I have done
and then created a storytelling framework
that would work for them.
I also painted a picture,
a vision of what's possible with
storytelling. I had an example from President
John F Kennedy. I had an example from Malala
in her Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech.
So I played those video clips of how
important storytelling is to paint a vision.
And then I also included hands on activities
to get them involved so that they could
practice storytelling as well.
So you see the difference there between just
a bunch of information versus transformation,
that vision and that curation.
Here's how to think in terms of
transformation versus information.
Number one, empathy.
Get into your audience's heads as you're
working on your content.
What do they want for themselves?
What are their goals and their dreams?
What's getting in their way?
What's keeping them stuck?
And how do they talk about what they want?
So that's number one, empathy.
Number two is vision paint,
a vision of what's possible for them as
individuals and as a whole.
So whether it's a team that you're talking
to, a company, an organization or society or
a community as a whole paint a vision of
what's possible for them,
both as individuals and as a whole.
And number three stories do this through
stories, your own stories and your client
stories and other people's stories. And even
have the attendees themselves share stories.
That's how you're going to get to
transformation. So that's empathy,
vision and stories.
Now, as I mentioned in the intro,
I'm a bit obsessed with shows like Succession
We Crash and Inventing Anna Succession is a
show, a fictional show on HBO that is modeled
after the Murdoch family.
They are in the the news media business.
So it's a patriarch of the family and then
his children who are fighting over control of
the company as he gets older.
And so that succession we crashed is a new
show on Apple Tv+, which is about the
founding of We Work the CO Working Company.
And then Inventing Anna is a show on Netflix
about a real woman named Anna Dalvi.
And basically she's a con artist and she
pretended to be this German heiress and ended
up getting money from bankers and all sorts
of high society people in New York City.
Fascinating shows.
Here's what I see that these main characters,
whether they're real or fictional, have in
common. They have a big vision and they share
it with others.
Confidence sells.
They are uber confident about their vision
and who they are and how they can make it
happen. And then the other lesson that I took
from this is that people want to believe in
something, in someone.
So even though there are red flags,
even though a lot of these characters are
frankly just not that nice,
and we definitely don't want to model the
that behavior.
But really, people want to believe in
something, in someone.
So what I take from watching these shows is
that belief in our vision and the confidence
to put it out into the world in a big way can
make a huge difference.
Your audience wants to believe in the vision
you paint for them. They want something
better. And as a speaker and a thought
leader, that's your role.
Your audience can get the information.
They can get it somewhere out there.
They can even get it from you in your course,
your book, your podcast,
your video series, other documents that you
provide to them.
But in your talks, whether it's a keynote or
a lead generation signature talk,
you're helping them see what the information
can do for them by showing the transformation
that's possible.
Speaking of vision and of course,
we have to walk our talk to you as Speaking
Your Brand. Our vision is to have more women,
thought leaders and more prominent women
speakers. When I do a Google search right now
for thought leaders, what comes up is a bunch
of men, a bunch of white men.
And I am here to change that.
Our entire team is speaking.
Your brand is here to change that because we
know that women's stories,
women's voices, women's experiences,
women talking about the issues that matter is
what's going to challenge the status quo and
change our world for the better.
But we need more prominent women speakers,
women with more prominent voices,
and women as thought leaders to make that
happen. That's why we provide the coaching,
the support and the community in our Thought
Leader Academy and in our Catalyst Collective
program, so that you as a woman have that
support to build the confidence,
to put yourself out there in a bigger way.
And this is what we help you to do in our
Thought Leader Academy as you work on your
thought, leadership idea and platform,
your. Signature talks and your visibility and
revenue plan. We have our next start date
coming up in May.
I encourage you to apply today.
Go to Speaking Your Brand, IMG Academy to get
all of the details and to submit your
application again. That's Speaking Your Brand
academy. In our Thought Leader Academy,
we work together in both the group calls and
one on one coaching calls and our five step
process to help you get clear on your
compelling idea and your thought leadership
message and uncover and connect your core
story, your personal journey to your thought
leadership idea that is so important.
We help you craft your signature talk one for
lead generation in another one that's a story
driven keynote style talk.
You create your visibility plan.
You identify the best monetization methods
for your speaking, including setting your
speaking fees and usually higher than what
you probably would think.
And we also work on delivery for impact and
income while we hear from women who've gone
through the academy is that I gave them not
only these tangible outcomes but confidence
in themselves and a community women who share
the same desires.
The first step is to submit an application.
We then have a zoom call with you so we can
talk through your goals and make sure that
the Thought Leader Academy is the best fit
for you. Again, get all the details,
including pricing and submit your application
by going to Speaking Your Brand academy.
The next episode of this podcast,
I'm going to be talking about the business
case for thought leadership and if your
business is not run around volume.
So in other words, you're not looking for
thousands of clients, which most likely
you're not. You definitely need to listen to
this next episode about the business case for
thought leadership. Then the episode after
that will be the takeaways from our in-person
client retreat. Cannot wait to share those
with you until next time.
Thanks for listening.