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If you’re a Baby Boomer or at least over 50, here’s why speaking ONLINE might be perfect for you. You can reach people all over the world from anywhere with internet. Maybe you’ve been downsized, or are in career transition? Steve Dotto, is a great example of what’s possible in the online “content creator” space, especially for Boomers.
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Topics Covered:
3:30 – How Steve transitioned from Traditional Media to YouTube
5:40 – A solution for older people who are getting marginalized in the workforce
16:00 – How to take over the marketplace in your niche by answering questions online
24:30 – Success tips for being an online speaker
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LINKS
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Steve Dotto’s Webinar Wednesdays
https://dottotech.com/webinars/
Grey Matters Podcast with Steve Dotto
https://dottotech.com/podcasts/
Join Grey Matters Facebook Group with Steve Dotto
https://www.facebook.com/groups/gogrey
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Connect with Carla Rieger:
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/carlarieger
Twitter – https://twitter.com/carlarieger
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/carlarieger/
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This is episode 33 get started building your business through speaking. Maybe you’re already out there speaking and you want to create a new presentation but just haven’t gotten going on it. Or maybe you want to start speaking to grow your business and you just aren’t your way to get started. Here’s a quick three step process to get you into action. Hey, this is Carla Rieger and you’re listening to the mind story speaker podcast for influencers in business. Hey everyone, it’s Carla Rieger and I’m so happy to be here today with you about how to create a powerful presentation without being salesy. See, getting over any mindsets that get in your way and just how to go start to finish really quickly. So this is really powerful information that has made a massive difference to people’s success and fulfillment and business and just getting into action signed. Super excited that you’re here today.
Listening to this by the way, is for people, Hugh, not only say speak to groups, you might do that or want to speak live in front of groups of people, but it could be when you pull together a small group of people and just have kind of a facilitated discussion about your products or services. Or you might want to do like a webinar, do a video that you put up online. Actually once you create a presentation to a group, you’re much better if you have one to one conversations with people to see if there’s a good match for what you offer. So here’s some questions for you. Do you want to start speaking or speak more to grow your business but aren’t sure how, aren’t sure how to get started or you just want to take it to the next level. Do you have to speak at meetings or online and you’re concerned about what to say or being nervous so it might be part of your job.
Do you have fears of being too salesy or not salesy enough? So where are you putting all this work and energy and it doesn’t turn into any business for you. And of course the typical fears of failure and also fears of success that people often have. So if so, you’re in the right place and giving presentations is the quickest way to grow your influence and income because instead of one to one, which takes a long time, it’s one to many and it’s kind of an exponential factor which will pay off in spades if you learn how to do it in the right way. But many people shy away from it because of mindsets and lack of the right information about how to succeed. So we’re going to talk about that. So we’re about getting clarity on your topic, audience and title or getting deeper clarity.
And this is also going to help you avoid wasting valuable time, money, and effort. Because I’ve had so many people come to me and they go, Oh my gosh, I wish I had known this years ago. I wish I had gone through this process with you years ago because they could see how they were making the wrong introductory offer to the wrong kind of people and so once they switched it, it was just like boom. It just sort of took off and changed everything. It was really huge. So don’t underestimate the power of doing this little like literally 15 minute process and if you look down in the description, you’ll see worksheet and then a link to a PDF and you can look at it on your phone or on your tablet or on your laptop and then just make notes on a notepad or you can print it.
If you’re a printer and you can fill in the blanks. It’s actually really fun and easy to do. It’s, it creates a lot of Epiphanes and again it can really get you reinspired and in your business and attracting rate people to you. As I said, you might be going on the wrong track or you might want to open up a new sort of channel for yourself. And then we’re going to talk about how to go start to finish quickly with a presentation. Like it could be very quick and easy to do if you do it this way. Now this is all from a course, an online course I have called presentation prosperity. And it’s also what I ended up doing with my coaching clients. This process alone, many people have said has been worth the price of admission and you’re getting it for free today.
So yay, because what it does is it helps me find the overlap of your uniqueness, your what you’ve learned, your experience. Cause those are sort of three different things. And when you get all of those three together, you can see who’s your best audience. Like who’s gonna relate the most to, you know, I know many of you have many possible audiences you can go to, but there might be somebody that you’re not thinking of, a type of community that you could be reaching out to. And where you find out what’s hurting them or what’s changing for them. And again, it might be something new or different that you hadn’t thought about with an existing target market that you focus on. So that it’s just really interesting to do a brainstorm on it and then how people can benefit from all your uniqueness, what you’ve learned, your experience, your offerings.
And then of course it’s the overlap of what the marketplace will impair because you know, you can go out with things in the world that people love, but they won’t pay for anything. So it’s good if you can sort of find the overlap of all those things. And that’s what this process helps you do. So if you’ve ever struggled to get clarity on how to introduce people to your offerings, this process will blow your rind. So some of you might be familiar with me, know me, but some of you might not. And I also want to share with you some examples of what I’m talking about in action. So you really kind of get it. So you know, I’ve been a professional speaker for a few decades. I’ve been a coach to people who have to communicate in what’s called high pressure situations such as public speaking, negotiations, sales conversations, pitching to investors, trying to motivate a team.
And I’ve spoken all over the world at many events, thousands and I’ve done all kinds of training programs, live and online and ran all kinds of coaching programs. Now here’s what I noticed in all my years of working with people, what really drives a voiding of getting out there and being your best are fears of failure, rejection, pushback, and also strangely enough, fear of success. Of course, many of those fears are happening at a subconscious level and all you know is that you just keep avoiding doing it or you’re doing it, but your fears are somehow getting the way of being your best self. And I’ll give you an example of how that happened to me and how I did a turnaround on it. So one of the biggest things you can do is make sure you put yourself out there in the world more often is if you change your agreement with yourself about what happens if you fail, get rejected, get pushed back or have the success that you were afraid of.
The first and most important thing is to have your own back no matter what. What does that mean? Well, you may think that your biggest fear is what other people think or do, but that’s not really true. Your biggest fear is what you will say to yourself and how you will maybe give up on yourself and there’s that old quote. Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent. It’s like if someone says, I don’t like your purple hair and you don’t have purple hair, then you would just think they might have a perception problem. It wouldn’t bother you. If it’s feedback that you get, you can look and see if it’s useful for you and if not, you can just let it go and be curious and willing to learn. Like what part of that would be useful. But the biggest, the most important thing is to really make a strong agreement with yourself, to have your own back, to believe in yourself, to care about yourself, to be accepting, forgiving of yourself.
No matter what happens. That alone, I’ve seen this made a complete turnaround in people just getting into action, getting out in the world, sharing their ideas and offerings and getting the success. Literally, it’s a one stop shop for a lot of good things. So if you leave and nothing else, but that it can entirely change your life. So here’s the other one, and maybe you do this too, which is how is this situation a gift? How can I learn, especially if it’s a so called negative situation. So I’ll give you a couple of examples. I had this coaching client who had been a successful speaker, but he’s, he was very dry and academic and in most of his presentations he noticed people mostly scrolling on their phones and not really paying attention. And he wanted to monetize his message more, but he wasn’t. So I suggested cleaning stories, especially a personal mission story.
And he completely rejected the idea. He had all kinds of fears about people knowing things about him personally. He was a wellness practitioner and he’d been very sick and almost died. And the products and services he represented made all the difference. It meant he had to be honest about having been addicted to alcohol, cigarettes, a few recreational drugs, junk food. And he was terrified. They judge him. But that’s because he was judging himself for the past behavior. So I did a process with him to forgive himself for that past behavior and told him like, how could you possibly help other people get over addictions if you hadn’t gone through them yourself and managed deliver much more healthy life. Now people need to know that about you. They need to know you’ve made the journey. You don’t have to be perfect at it. And I’m saying this to all of you listening is you don’t have to be perfect at what you offer, but you’re a few steps ahead of people and that’ll help you get over the impostor syndrome that many people have getting out there with their ideas.
So that really helped him. And once he did that forgiveness process with him, he decided, okay, I’ll try that story on a penny. He chose this small low stakes group of 10 people to see how it landed. And he was entirely shocked to see that half the group wanted to talk to them afterwards. They felt closer to him. They totally appreciated his vulnerability, they felt safe to talk to him about their own struggles with addictive behaviors. And three of them ended up being clients and that was out of a group of just 10 and that gave him the courage to them speak to hundreds of people live and online, which has led to a huge upswing in his business. Because at that point it’s a numbers game, right? If three out of 10 are interested and you speak to a hundred you know, now we’re talking 30 right?
So there’s always a certain percentage of people listening in any presentation that want a deeper dive solution. And that’s the power of sharing your solutions and your stories. One on many instead of one to one. So let me give you another example of myself, little embarrassing, but I’m going to tell it to you. It’s a time when I was asked to speak to a group of people at a meeting and they paid me. I was professional speaker at the time. They paid me better and I ever been paid before and that was making me a bit nervous right there then and because the event happened in my city, I decided to attend all the morning events before I spoke and I noticed that the audience members were hung over in jet lag and I sat at the back table and listened as people criticized every speaker that came up to the front of the room with mean spirited comments and most of them talked amongst themselves and didn’t pay much attention to the speaker except to say something nasty.
And some of them were literally asleep on their table, like hands folded, lying there. And like the more I watched the other speakers bomb in front of this audience, the more terrified I became because I never seen an audience respond that way to every speaker who came out to the front of the room. So finally it’s my turn. And sure enough, I see them making side comments, staying on their phones, falling asleep, and I let that totally affect my performance. I, I went through my material, but the feedback afterwards from the organizer was I looked like a deer in the headlights. I looked and sounded insecure. It was really hard to hear, but I said, I understand, I appreciate her feedback. I wasn’t going to argue with her. I was going to say, Oh, you have a bad audience, which is tenting right? Cause she said all these speakers bombed and I’m going to have to get a new speaker agent.
You know, I kind of said that, but I just said, you know what? I’m just going to take the feedback and learn from it. Take full responsibility. Now I always record myself when I give a presentation. So I listened back and I was like, Oh cool. I can see what you mean so I could see how my voice sounds. And so I thought, you know what? I did this. How is this situation a gift? What can I learn? So after about a week of self-judgment, now it’s like usually a few hours, but it was a week of soul judgment. At that time I decided to forgive myself and make a big long list of what I could learn from the situation. So I researched how to deal with unresponsive audiences cause I really never seen an audience like that. I worked with a coach to help me reframe the situation and develop the skills I needed for doing it better next time.
And I went through my recording and notice how my voice sounded and then I listened to other presentations doing the same material where he sounded confident. And that alone, that’s a huge takeaway. And you can remember what you were thinking at the time you said it and change your thoughts so that you come across as more confident, authentically confident. So fast forward about a year later, I found myself in a very similar situation. The audience didn’t seem to want to be there. They’re hung over from the events and last from the night before. They’re making critical side comments of the speaker who was on stage before me. I thought, interesting. This is my opportunity to see if I can stay confident, grounded and effective in the face of that response. So as soon as I came on stage, I decided to address the elephant in the room. If you’ve done this, you’ll know what I’m talking about.
It was really effective. I said, it may be that some of you don’t really want to be here, you have to be here and you’re feeling the effects of last night’s social event and maybe you’re skeptical about this topic. To begin with that I’m going to share with you. I just want you to know that’s totally okay with me, but since you’re here I invite you to make the best of it to see if there’s one small thing here that would make a difference to your life in terms of your resilience and ability to better handle change, which was my topic so that you can take that one idea and give it to somebody who needs it on your team. Now that alone made them pay attention. It’s like I was giving them permission to be the audience they were being and that made them actually be better. And even so, some people still fell asleep or looked at their phones. I just smiled, you know, and then I use every trick in the book I had learned at that point to grab attention such as
pausing [inaudible]
showing a funny slide that made the people who are awake laugh, which made the other people look up. And what was funny, I told stories directly related to their industry cautionary Chails, which tend to like I’m telling you now, a cautionary tale which tend to make people pay attention. And the organizer ended up telling me that mine was the best presentation at the event because the other speakers had left the district suspectful nature of the audience get to them, which is common, right? It was such a huge learning experience. If I’ve never taken the time to list everything that I could learn from that first event, I would have failed again at the second event. So instead I ended up making a difference for people in a challenging situation. They appreciated it, the organizer appreciated it, and therefore I got more work from it and it was a win win all around.
So think about that for yourself. A past situation that maybe is keeping you from the success that you really want. Because that is true in a lot of situations. We want success to be Australian online, but it never is, right? It’s a zig-zaggy line and all those failures are huge learning experiences. But you’re going to get stuck if you don’t forgive yourself and learn from it. So that’s just something to think about. What is a situation where you were giving a presentation and things didn’t go right and it could be just be a one to one or it could be to group, Oh it’d go in there if you haven’t already done this and make a list of everything and what could you learn? That alone has broken people free in a really huge way. So as the great Ursula Gwyn Wentz said, it’s good to have an end to journey towards, but it is the journey that matters in the end.
It’s really who you’re becoming on the journey. And so going out there with your business and giving presentations and helping people in that way is like a real mythic journey cause it will bring up anything in the way of your personal growth and your professional growth. And so that’s a good thing because in the end I think that’s why we’re all here. It’s the journey. If you can keep reminding yourself that, that can make a huge difference. So let’s just quickly go through what happens when you go through create an attractive offer on an existing or new offering your life. What you’re going to do is you’re going to get to this expertise mission statement where you’re figuring out your passion and how you want to help them, what you’re going to help them deal with, and how you’re gonna do it and the ultimate benefit.
And I’ll give you some examples in a moment so you can see what it looks like. And then we’re going to look at presentation titles, which are very attractive because that can really help people get interested in what you have to offer. Now, here’s the big thing that people get very confused about, is you have your vehicle for getting people where you want them to go, and then your destination. So say you have a rocket ship and your destination is the moon. A lot of people make the mistake of talking about the vehicle instead of the destination. So an example is I do coaching and training and speaking, but the destination is I help people create their business using presentations, but helping go one-on-many. It’s helping build their business quickly and doing it in this confident way so that they make more money, they feel more fulfilled and it builds your reputation and referrals go a lot more quickly that way.
So that’s like the destination. And so if you’re ever in a networking event and you just tell people, Oh, you know, I represent a certain company and you know we have certain products, it’s not, that’s like your vehicle. So you want to talk about the destination. So that’s like the healthy life that people can have on the other end of it. Now you may know that intellectually, but I find people who know that distinction still make the mistake. So we’re going to talk about it in terms of your presentation title. So let me give you an example of Rob who was communication consultant that I worked with. So once he did the worksheet, he realized he will down his passion. You said you use my conflict resolution training and 20 years in the high tech industry, those were the two that he decided on after the brainstorm to help work teams resolve differences.
So that’s what he’s going to do with them and deal with conflict in a more productive way. So you can be filling in the blanks of these for yourself. And I will do this by, and here’s your vehicle, right? You’re your rocket ship holding interactive workshops, offering coaching, public speaking, that teach self-awareness, collaboration, and creative problem solving. So you don’t want to talk about your business to prospects. I will do this by, but it’s for you to know this is more what you want to talk to people with is the, so that line so that they can have more fulfilling and productive teams. So let me give you an another example. Tanya is a company rep for health and wellness products company. So my passion is to use my health and wellness expertise to help wellness practitioners. So that was the specific audience, the community she wanted to focus in on augment their business with our products.
So you’ll see that there’s two worksheets. There’s one where you just explore your passion, your credibility, your experience, what you’ve learned. And then there’s another brainstorm where you look at all the different kinds of communities you could serve and the more narrow you can get, the easier it is to launch or to take off to the next level. And then this is how you’re going to do it, right? I will do this by teaching them how to use the products to enhance the results for their clients. So you’re thinking about that, your particular expertise with that particular type of person. That’s really useful. And then this is the ultimate benefit so that they, the wellness practitioners can have a secondary income and serve their clients in better ways. Right? So here’s mine, Carta, coach and speaker. My passion is to use my 20 years in professional speaking to help business owners build their business through giving presentations, live and online.
And I will do this by teaching them how to choose a topic, how to market themselves, create and deliver so that they can have the right mindset for success, a clear strategy to succeed and the accountability to get it done. So that’s all you’re doing with your expertise mission statement. And what you ended up doing is put that somewhere where you can see it every day it cause sometimes you know you get over wrong. Like what am I doing, who am I serving? And I just read that and I go, okay now you might have a few of these if you serve different markets, but it’s good to get very clear on how you serve particular niche before you start creating presentation. So once you do that, right, you want to look at presentation titles. So here’s an example of how you take what you did and turn it into a title.
So what Rob did, who his communications consultant is what hurt for his particular team, which are high tech teams. Cause that’s where he has a background is conflict on teams. Right? And what is changing for them is there’s lots of mergers amongst many of his perspective clients and that’s creating more conflict. So he looked at it from two angles, which helped him create the title, turning conflict into a tool for team effectiveness, especially during a merger. So that helped him. He did a live stream on that and he spoke at some networking events and then he actually got invited to speak at a conference on that topic because it was very clear what he offered and who it was for. It’s not what you want to do. So Tanya, the company rep, she found that the wellness practitioners that she worked with often felt they didn’t have enough income and it was a lot of time for money.
They had no passive income. So the other thing was that was changing was aging clientele, not only the wellness practitioners she worked with that Chris, we’re all aging all the time, but a lot of them were kind of midlife and noticing the wrinkles and the saggy skin, but also the people they worked with, right. And a lot of her products and services helped with anti aging. So her title was how to double your business as a wellness practitioner and offer even more value. Again, she did it as like a Facebook live like this. She did it also at networking events and often just put it out as like an email to have a one-to-one conversation. So that gives you a few examples. So then how do you get started with something like that? So you get your title, you’re really clear on who you’re serving, how you’re serving them, what’s going to be the best use of expertise.
I’m a big fan of this thing called google.us. Or maybe it’s pronounced bubble, depending on where you’re from, but it’s mind mapping software. Now you can do this on paper, like just one piece of paper with tiny little stickies or big flip chart paper and bigger post-its. So whatever works for you, but you want to just do a brainstorm, just anything and everything that you could possibly talk about. Just get it all up there because it’s just a stream of consciousness, no editing. That’s hugely important because what people do instead is they, they start writing something and then they go high. That’s not good. And then they edit it and then they put it in a, another idea to themselves and ah, that’s not very good. And then they get stuck. Right? So what you want to do is just like any visuals, any stories, any facts, any examples, any concepts, any quotes, anything you want to make sure you say.
You can watch somebody else’s presentation on a similar topic and take notes about things that you might add. And then you just structure it. So again, you can use mind mapping. So you’re going to do your opening and your overview and your 0.1 and your 0.2 in your 0.3 and your finish. You know, you’re obviously not going to choose all the stuff you chose in your brainstorming, but you’ll start to see what’s the right stuff and you’ll put it in and then boom, you have it right there. I always help people do this and they’re like amazed. Oh my God, that was so quick. And then what you do is you go to your phone and you go to voice memo and you hit record and you just start talking about, you look at your outline that saw the stickies or the the mind map and you just start talking and it’s okay if you’re long winded, it’s Oh Carrie.
If you go off track, it’s okay. If you pause and start again and you do this, download it and then what do is you go to rev.com rev.com which is an online transcription service and you upload your little MP3, your little recording and send it back to you literally in one day and boom, you have this word document with everything that you said and then you just go in there and you edit it and you create sections and you take stuff out that you don’t want and that’s like about a dollar a minute because presentations can pay off so much in the future. It’s totally worth it to have a whole transcript. Now, would you read a whole transcript? Well, you can if you want. A lot of people, they don’t know how to sound like they’re not reading though when they’re giving a presentation.
So it’s good if you can then kind of put it into note four slides so that you remember what you want to say next. But having it all down in detail would be really important because say it’s three months later after you’ve given the presentation and you don’t remember what a slide means, what you were going to say or what your notes mean. So then you’ll have all the detail and you can multipurpose this as a blog post or any number of things, right? A podcast episode or whatever. So if you have the whole script, that’s really cool. So again, you can do it like with all your stickies and you can also then reorder it and people appreciate that kind of moving around and writing things down and getting into their body. And as they created, it’s very, very quick. So I work with people, clients to do that, but you can do it on your own.
Now I will say that some people are like, yes, I could do this on my own. I’m ready to go. If you think that you would like some help, I do offer private VIP coaching. I’ve taken hundreds of people through this process and it pays back 1000%. Uh, if you feel like having someone hold your hand through it and helping you get, go start to finish helping you deal with any of the self sabotage that might get in your way, keeping you accountable, vetting what you have to say, helping you with all the slides or everything that you might want to make sure you put into that. I do have a deal on now that you’ll see in the description coaching and you can click on the link and you’ll get more details. It’s basically about how to launch the next level as a powerful expert who speaks.
So a business owner who speaks live or online. The purpose is to attract greater income and the sense of fulfillment as an expert in your field or to grow your influence in business through giving presentations. What you get is clarity on who best to serve and how a marketing strategy that’s designed for you and your personality. So I know this field inside out, I have a million contacts, I’ve seen everything, I can kind of match you to what would work best and some people really appreciate that. A presentation that does convert, that does turn into monetization if that’s what the presentation is about or you’re motivating your team, getting them into action. If you want a video reel, I can help you with that, like a little preview of you as a presenter because sometimes that helps you get invited to speak at like networking events or associations.
And I also do a professionally done interview with you that you can put online where I really pull out the best of who you are and what we’ve done together and lots of processes to transform any self sabotage and just the accountability to get into action regularly. So check that out if you want. Now everything I’m talking about today is an excerpt from the book, the heart of presenting. So that’s the essential presenters tool kit, which you can also get. So there’s lots of great ways to improve as a presenter. In addition to listening to yourself on audio is if you do like a live stream, you can watch it back and see how you do. And so some people, they don’t like to do that because of course we have a negativity bias when we look at ourselves. And so we’ll nitpick on ourselves.
But most people, unless you’re doing a lot of really big mistakes, they don’t notice that stuff. But you might notice, I always tell people, when I first looked at myself on video, I put my hair behind my ears, you know, once, twice, fine, but 35 times shows nervous, tick. And so if you watch yourself either like this on a live stream or if you’re speaking live, you can get somebody to videotape you. You can go, what am I say? What was I thinking when I did that? You know, usually you have a thought like this is going to go badly, very badly. And so your survival brain gets triggered, the primitive brain. And that affects your nervous system and then you get the shakes and the flop sweat or it affects your, some people, their jaw gets really tight or they get really nasally and they speak, or they get dry mouth, cotton mouth or their brain stops.
You know, Dave often tells us story of just so many times when he first started speaking completely forgetting, what do you want it to say? Like complete block because the survival brain will suck all the energy in your brain away from the neocortex where you’ve memorized your presentation and what you want to say. So a quick tip to get out of that, if you do find yourself being nervous is, look, I just want to help these people. I just want to make a difference for them. I care about them. And that which forces your neocortex to fire. You can always tell someone where they’re like in the back of their head. You’ve seen people like that, right? They’re not with you. They’re not like looking and with you, they’re off somewhere else, right? And that’s where they’re worrying about themselves or they’re trying to remember something. That’s the kiss of death in a presentation. So if you can as much bring your energy forward, even if something that she goes through on, which it always does, is to just kind of make a joke out of it and that will make a big difference. And check out those links below. Cause there might be something that would be useful to you or someone you know.
Bye.
