Coaching

Robert Plank: Alysa Rushton us the women's voice igniter and six figure coaching mentor. She's a master certified public speaking instructor and sales coach, who teaches heart-centered entrepreneurs how to craft, package and promote their authentic message and shine their light so they can magnetically attract their ideal clients. She's the founder and CEO of Magnetic Messengers Academy and the creator of popular programs like Get Clients with Speaking and Profitable Workshops that Rock.

Alysa's clients and students go on to do great things like publish books, speak on TED stages, become featured experts on the news and more. I can't to hear about how we can all jump on that train. How are things today Alysa?

Alysa Rushton: They're great, thank you Robert for that great introduction. I'm super happy to be here today.

Robert Plank: Cool. I'm glad that you made it. Can you tell us about this public speaking thing and what it is compared to the other ways of getting yourself out there, and what makes you special to talk about this kind of thing?

Alysa Rushton: Okay. Well, let me address the public speaking thing first. I think you sort of talked about makes me special, but I'll address that in a second. The first thing is is that public speaking's really fascinating in that today we live in this really online world and it's very fast paced and we're all in this online business game and we want to get clients. What's really amazing is that public speaking is such a brilliant way to help you get clients because no other way can you actually connect with people and really let them feel your energy and experience you and what it's like to not necessarily work with you, but what it's like to be with you. What I see happen a lot in today's online business world is that many people are putting out free gifts and this content and that content but when you show up either on a webinar or in a live event, it's really something remarkable and people are with you for a longer time. They really can get a sense of you and what makes you special, and therefore you can start to really attract in your ideal clients which believe is what makes a brilliant business.

Robert Plank: Awesome. When we're talking about public speaking, did I hear you right in that when you talk about public speaking, you're counting not just live events but also online webinars and things like that in that whole mix?

Alysa Rushton: Indeed I am, yeah.

Robert Plank: Cool. I'm glad that that's part of the topic here. I was just thinking as you were explaining that to... I don't know, maybe like seven, eight years ago when, I'm a computer programmer and I like to keep to myself and not talk to anyone, things like that. Then when good webinar is picking up and having all these online launches and these kind of things are picking up, I realized that I had to step it up and if I remained hiding in my little cubby hole, then I was going to get past over again and again. I would just have competitors outdo me over and over again unless I put myself out there and upped my confidence.

If you have anything to say along those lines? If someone's listening to this today and we're going to be talking about public speaking. If someone's listening and they're trying to just write themselves off and they're trying to say, "I can't do that, I can't be a public speaker." What do you have to say to someone like that?

Alysa Rushton: I love this question. Two things. The first thing is that some people, if you're an introvert and you're listening, you might feel like you could never get up on stage. That's one of the reasons why I actually love webinars for my clients who tend to be a little more introvert-y. They do great with online webinars because it takes away some of the scariness factor of being up in front of people in the public eye. Yet, you still get to connect with people on a really deep level, share your message and share an offer or share a way to work with you. For people who are maybe more introverted, that seems to be a really great way to get out there. Does that answer your question?

Robert Plank: Yeah. It does but it opens up some more questions which is always a good thing. Are you a people person, Alysa? Are you the kind of person who can socialize with anyone or are you that introverted type we talked about?

Alysa Rushton: Yeah, I'm a quintessential people person and I'm also a quintessential person who is totally fine to be on their own. I do well in both environments, and quite frankly, I need both environments in my life.

Robert Plank: Perfect, you can adapt to whatever situation comes in front of you. When you were just explaining that whole process, you were explaining a little bit about you run a webinar and you share some of your knowledge and you share some of your personality and you get people excited and you share an offer at the end. Can you walk us through a recent webinar or a case study, sort of like that, where you went through that process?

Alysa Rushton: Yeah. Let me say that this process is very similar for both speaking in a live environment and a webinar. The webinar is just a little bit different but basically it's a very similar formula. But the way, I have a formula for speaking in person if you go to getclientswithspeaking.com you can download my 7 Step Signature Talk Formula. I'm going to give you those seven steps here in just a second. What I want to tell you is it's not a lot different from actually doing a webinar, there's just a couple things you would do a little bit differently in a webinar.

Okay. You want to take them through the seven steps, does that sound good?

Robert Plank: Yeah, let's do it. Sounds great.

Alysa Rushton: Okay. The first thing is that you want to connect with your audience. Whether it's online or in person, you want to make connecting with your audience the very most important thing that you do. If you're not connected with your audience everything else is going to feel yucky. Robert, you asked me at the top of the show, what makes me different to teach this stuff? What makes me special and unique? Well, I'll tell you, I work in energy and the energy of the room, the energy of the audience is the utmost important to me. I think we've all been in that webinar or even that live talk where we could tell that the speaker really wasn't interested at all that we were there and we had a dollar sign above our head. We left and we felt like we needed to take a shower afterwards. Have you ever felt like that?

Robert Plank: Oh yeah. All the time.

Alysa Rushton: "Oh yeah. All the time." That is tough. We don't want people to feel like that and we don't want our audience to feel like that. Quite frankly, when your audience feels like that, they won't buy from you. They get turned off, they tune out. In a live audience it looks like people scratching their face and not looking down and they don't engage with you. In a webinar that looks like people hopping off the webinar. People can sense our intentions. The first thing is that we really do want to intend to connect with our audience and intend to give them some real quality information. That's the first step. Once you do that, then it's a very simple process.

Now, the next step in the process, and this is where people start to get tripped up by the way. Connecting with our audience, okay, we can do that. Then they start to get really tripped up in that we want to do that powerful opening. I recommend that people begin by engaging with their audience right away. What happens is, I see a lot of speakers will do this, they'll make it all about them instead of all about their audience. You just want to connect with your audience in a way that's all about your audience and not about you. You can do that by opening with a question or a quote. Or you can do some sort of story if you have more time, but you want to involve the audience right off the bat. Don't start talking about you and how fantastic you are and about all the education you've had and all the names and numbers behind your name. That just will bore and audience to tears and they'll check out right from the beginning.

Robert Plank: I've seen that. We've all seen that, right? Webinars or stage presentations where they take twenty, thirty minutes just to get to the meat of it as opposed to these webinars where they open with a question. It might even just be something simple that gets me to start thinking and as they're getting ramped up in that first five minutes, my brain is reacting in a way that's different that the usual webinars I'm used to when they have a question that makes me think as opposed to thirty minutes of them.

Alysa Rushton: Exactly. Then the next step is to tell your story and this is where I see people really go down in flames. They either fall into one of two camps. The first camp being they don't want to tell their story at all so they just don't, or they overtell their story. Both things are troublesome. The audience needs to understand and connect with who you are as a speaker whether it's online or whether it's in person. If you don't share with them who you are and why you're the person to be telling them this stuff, then it can be really tough.

If you over share and like you said, you drone on and one for thirty minutes, it's equally awful. People hate that I think even more than the under sharing. You want to share your story in a really good way, really juicy way, and I break this down in that 7 Step Signature Talk Formula handout that you can get by going to getclientswithspeaking.com.

The next step is sharing content. The content is really interesting. This is where I believe it's important to teach people something. They came to your webinar or they came to your talk because they had a problem and they felt like you could help them solve it. It's not realistic for the person or for you to think you can solve all of the audience's problems in a sixty or ninety minute talk, but you can help them solve a top of mind problem. Or you can help them solve a little piece of their problem. You want to deliver your content in a really valuable way. Again, I break this down for you in the 7 Step Signature Talk Formula because when we break our content down for our audience, they can start to digest it and it feels really good to them. I show you how to do it in a way that actually instead of getting them over full, gets them hungry for what you're going to give them.

Sometimes what I see happen with speakers is most speakers are over-teachers. They want to teach and teach and teach that audience. There are some speakers that are under-teachers and they actually don't give any real content. For the most part the people I tend to attract are over-teachers, they want to give a lot of value, but what happens it's like you want to sell your audience a Thanksgiving dinner and you bring them in and you feed them a Thanksgiving dinner. Then you say, "Can I sell you Thanksgiving dinner now?" They're like, "Oh my god, I'm so full, there's no way I can eat another bite." That's what you want to avoid in your talk. You want to give them a little bit of the dinner and get them hungry for the rest. Does that make sense?

Robert Plank: Yes. Sort of, I'm trying to think, how does someone know if I'm planning out my talk or I'm planning out how much meat to have in there. How do I know if I'm out of whack, if I'm over-teaching or under-teaching?

Alysa Rushton: Brilliant question, Robert. I love this question. What I teach is a system that you can always know if you're over-teaching or under-teaching. Normally what people do is they try to teach everything they know about the given topic in a ninety minute talk. What I teach you to do is pull out one thing, one content point, and go really deep with it. Let me give you an example of this from my own business and I think this will make a lot of sense when I share this example, okay?

Robert Plank: Okay.

Alysa Rushton: In Get Clients with Speaking, I have an online course, it's called Get Clients with Speaking and I literally teach how to create a profitable business with speaking. I teach you how to come up with your topic, how to create a signature offer, how to create a signature talk, how to be powerful on stage, how to get actually booked for speaking gigs both online and off, and if you are speaking offline how to fill the room. I teach a process about how to keep the money flowing with a follow up.

What most people would do is they would try to teach a little bit about their entire system in a sixty or ninety minute talk. That's where the mistakes start to happen. What you want to do is you first want to understand what your system is, what you're offering to people, and then you want to pull out one piece of that offer or one piece of your system, and just teach pretty deeply on that. For example, I have a talk that I give and it's all about creating your irresistible signature talk. I break it down and I show people exactly how easy it is to do. I give them a ton of tips and content, and I teach them that. I go deep but then there's still room for the other steps in my system. After that talk, they're like, "Oh my gosh, that was so yummy that I now want to buy your program because I know you're going to teach me so much more."

Robert Plank: What you're saying is to go deep instead of going wide.

Alysa Rushton: Go deep, not wide. Exactly.

Robert Plank: Heck yeah. Just to make sure I understand you. Let's say that you were presenting on a weight loss course or something. The wrong way to do it, the way that I guess a lot of people naturally want to make their talk is to say, "I teach weight loss and here's how you eat breakfast, lunch and dinner, and here's how you exercise and how you do your water, and you measure all your stuff." If someone was giving a talk they could just talk about here's how I lose weight with just the breakfast area, then they can unpack all that stuff. Is that right?

Alysa Rushton: Yeah. Or they could even just address a tiny portion of the food piece. "Here's what you would eat for breakfast, and lunch, and dinner," and pick three content points within that one heading. You're right, most people lost it when they start to teach on all of it. The eating and the exercise, the water, the weight training. It's just too much for people. They literally have to check out. If you go deep on one thing, people can see the value that you bring and it gets them hungry for the other stuff you have.

Robert Plank: That's awesome because it sounds like if they try to shallowly cover every part of their offer it's almost like I'm getting the Cliff Notes, then I feel like why should I then by from you if you kind of already explained the jist of it to me.

Alysa Rushton: Exactly and what I want to also tell you is that that is not being of service to your audience. If you give people just the Cliff Notes, what's missing typically is more information and also help and support to get to their goal. When people feel like they've been filled up and they know what they need to know, then they're off and running to the next thing without the help and support of you, your program. Most coaches and entrepreneurs that I work with are trying to sell a coaching program, or a master mind program or some sort of online course. When people feel that over filled feeling, then they actually don't get the transformation that they were looking for and their search continues. Whereas if you go deep with something and they end up purchasing with you, typically they'll get the transformation that they want. This process actually helps you be in absolute service of your audience.

Robert Plank: Awesome.

Alysa Rushton: Indeed.

Robert Plank: Those were the first four steps. We have three more to go is that right?

Alysa Rushton: We sure do.

Robert Plank: Heck yeah!

Alysa Rushton: Heck yeah! Step five and six go together in a talk and I like to do these in the body of the talk, not at the end if it's a live training. If it is a webinar I actually do these at the end. That's the difference here. What you then do, after you've given your content, you want to give the audience a really amazing free gift. The free gift serves a purpose so that you're solving another problem for them. Or maybe going a little bit deeper on helping them solve that problem.

As an example, when someone attends my talk and I teach them the 7 Step Signature Talk Formula, I actually give them a free gift which is this form that I use in a live environment that they can customize to get people on their list. It's a really juicy piece of content. You want to pick something as a free gift that is awesome. Not something that sucks. You want to pick something that you actually would charge for or something that you actually do charge for. It will have a lot of value. You want to set it up and you don't want it to say, "I'm giving you this free gift because it takes all the value out of what you're going to give them. You want to say, "I want to give you something that I normally charge $97 for. Go ahead and scratch off that $97 dollars." If you were in a live environment you would say that.

On the internet you wouldn't, you say, "I'm giving this to you today instead of $97 because you're here, I'm giving it to you for free." You want to build the value of your gift. Once you give them that gift, then you can give your offer. It depends on what your offer is. A beginning place to start would be to offer some sort of a strategy session if you're a coach, a more advanced offer would be to actually sell something from the stage. When you're giving your offer you just want to think of it as another tip. Again, there's a whole teaching that would take me about ninety minutes to teach you how to actually make an offer. It's an art. You want to combine a gift and an offer together so that people feel like your giving first and then once you make your offer, it feels really good to them because they feel like they've gotten a lot. They can see the value that you're bringing and they just know that they're going to get so much more when they take the next step with you.

Then finally, it's the wrap up. It's the delivering the rest of your content if there's any. It's getting to the Q and A, and it's calling them into action. We're in such an information society, we're in such an information overload, and what we tend to forget as human beings is that information alone does not cause transformation. If that were the case, everyone with access to YouTube would be a brilliant business marketer. Or they would be a brilliant multi-millionaire. That's not the case because information alone doesn't cause that transformation. We need accountability. We need support. We need information broken down for us in a really systematized way. That is where you and your services come in is that you can help people by calling them into action and taking that next step with you so that they can get that kind of transformation that they came to that talk. Either online or in person that they were looking for.

Robert Plank: Awesome. A lot of steps here. Let me make sure I have this right. Step one, connect with your audience. Step two, engage with them right away. Step three, tell your story. Step four, share some content. Step five, share an amazing free gift. Step six, give the offer. Then step seven wrap up any loose ends.

Alysa Rushton: Boom, you nailed it!

Robert Plank: One thing that has me a little bit concerned with running webinars and seeing the way a lot of other ones are done is that I've seen that sometimes the freebie or the Q and A gets in the way of the offer or the close. Have you ever seen something like this with webinar presenters?

Alysa Rushton: I certainly have. Definitely it needs to be done in a skillful way because if it's not skillful it definitely will interfere with people taking action. On a webinar, you want to do a couple things for yourself as a webinar host. I know we're kind of bouncing back and forth here between speaking live and webinars, but if you are running a webinar, one thing to remember is always on your screen you want to have, as you're making your offer, what your offer and a link to your checkout page. You want to keep that top of mind for people. You want to begin and end on that.

That's really where the intention is and try not to get sidetracked too much. It's okay to take Q and A and it's okay to do a free gift, but you don't want it to take the main stage. Does that answer your question?

Robert Plank: Yeah. Did you say that you have the link to the check out page at the beginning as well as at the end?

Alysa Rushton: I do it right away. Yeah, I do. I do it right away. By the way, the webinar system that I teach, for myself most of the students that I take through this end up having a really high webinar closing rate, about 18, some of them as high as 20%. Which are wonderful numbers. The first thing you want to do is share with people where to go and get them thinking about it. Start getting them tantalized. Then obviously end on that link as well. I put that link on every single page as I'm going through my offer so that it's always top of mind. You don't want to get into the place where people are on a particular slide with you and they don't know where to go. You need them always knowing that link.

Robert Plank: That makes sense. Is this a case of you begin and you share your offer and you teach all this different stuff and then you have the free gift. Then when it comes time to have the offer you're repeatedly mentioning that you're also that way I guess the free gift is something that you mentioned a few minutes in there, but the main attraction, there's no confusion, there's no mistake, is go to my checkout page and buy this thing. Is that right?

Alysa Rushton: Exactly. Indeed.

Robert Plank: Cool. As we're winding this down, do you have any advice for not necessarily the shyness that we're talking in the beginning that some people might have. As we were around maybe step two or three, I guess there's the pushiness of it. If you're too pushy, then it alienates people and it's too much about it. It's like the whole dollar sign floating over the head thing earlier. I guess if people aren't pushy enough, then there's not enough of a directness. Do you have any thoughts about that? How can someone get calibrated to not be too pushy but also not be too timid about it?

Alysa Rushton: I love this question. First off, I would take the word pushy out of their language altogether. Any time someone feels pushed against, they're going to resist. That's push. We can't bring pushy or not pushy energy to our talk at all. We have to remove that from our vocabulary and the energy we have to get into is being of service to our audience. When you are in service to your audience you align with sharing your message, sharing your story, sharing your content and your free gift and your offer, and all of that, in a way that feels really good to you and to your audience. You're going to align with the feeling of being in service. When people can genuinely tell that you want to be in service, there's not going to be any of that pushy energy around you. They're going to actually feel on a very energetic high level, that you want to be in service and that it doesn't really matter to you whether they sign up or whether they don't. That's always the energy that I bring to every talk that I give and I teach my clients to do it as well.

When you can do that, when you can let go of who buys what from you, and instead you can be energy of just being in service of your audience and know that you've done the work of designing your talk right, so that it does all the heavy lifting for you. You don't have to be pushy. you don't have to even think about what you're doing because you know that your talk is structured in such a way that it's going to naturally get the audience hungry to work with you and you can just show up and be in service.

Robert Plank: I like it. That's cool in that it works in two ways. You have the structure and you have the slides already set up, like you said you can rely on that a little bit and that helps with the confidence, and that helps with the am I on the right track, saying the right thing. Near the beginning of our talk here, you were talking about how you have a room in front of you and you take the temperature of the room. If you have people who are nodding off or on their laptop then that means things are on the wrong track. Or people are leaving a webinar, things are on the wrong track. It's like there's these two pieces to it. There's what you already had set up, the structure and your training is up, then there's the thinking on your feet component. Those people who are either bored or interested or excited are a good barometer of am I serving? Am I on the right track? Or am I boring them? As opposed to, am I energetic? Am in getting them where they need to go? Or is it a misalignment?

Alysa Rushton: Mm-hmm (affirmative). What I find consistently is that if your talk is structured well, you won't have that funky disconnect of your audience. You won't have that people checking out. If your talk's aligned really well, and you're on track with yourself, your audience will be totally tuned in. Your audience will be hanging on your every word. Your audience will be so excited about what you're sharing, that that's why I share this structure of these seven steps because once you get the structure down, there's so much less for you as a speaker to worry about. You can just show up, be yourself, be authentic and get people helped and get people signing up to work with you.

Robert Plank: Have some fun and make some money and have your audience have fun making money too, right?

Alysa Rushton: Indeed, yeah!

Robert Plank: As we're getting wound down here, in your travels and experiences and seeing good presenters, and bad presenters, is there a number one mistake? Is the mistake that people aren't aligned with their audience right or is there something even bigger where you just see this common problem over and over again?

Alysa Rushton: I'm sorry, I don't think I understood the question. Is there the biggest mistake that speakers make?

Robert Plank: Yeah. Is there a number one mistake, universal, throughout speakers?

Alysa Rushton: No, but if I could give you one mistake as a theme of today, the number one mistake when it comes to making an offer and being of service of your audience is over-teaching. It's that classic going wide instead of going deep. I call it show up and throw up. People hate that. You want to just avoid that mistake and really spend time on your content. Spend time making sure that you do teach somebody something, but that you don't overwhelm them so that they don't have to check out.

Robert Plank: All that makes perfect sense. This is making a lot of sense to me because that's usually my problem. My problem is I'll teach seven steps or I'll teach all these little bits and pieces and all these that I try to fit in. My thing years ago at the time was, "I'm going to take five hours worth of stuff and fit it into an hour," and then wonder why I'm running out of time, why I'm having to rush through things, wonder why people aren't buying. That's such a simple idea but I think that's one of those things that it creeps up again and again with live presentations and with webinars. Now that you've put it into words and put it into a concept, that's the thing that I'm going to be watching out for with my own presentations, is "Am in overwhelming them by going wide when I should have gone deep?"

Alysa Rushton: Yeah. Honestly, it's the number one reason why people don't buy from you. It's because they're totally overwhelmed and they can't even see themselves taking action on what you just taught them. Let alone benefiting from the next step with you. If you just teach them one little piece they can see that much more clearly. They can go, "Oh, okay, he's going to break this content down in a way that I can really digest this." Super important.

Robert Plank: It makes a lot of sense so if people are either new speakers or existing speakers and they're looking for you to provide that kind of insight to tweak what they have or what they have coming up so they don't alienate their audience. Where can they go to find out about that freebie we mentioned earlier as well as your websites and blogs and where they can buy from you and all that good stuff. Where are your websites at?

Alysa Rushton: Well, I encourage everyone to go to getclientswithspeaking.com and download the 7 Step Signature Talk Formula. This is for the live environment, it's not for a webinar, but you can make a couple of quick tweaks and easily have an amazing webinar with this. If you want to connect with me further, my website is Magnetic Messengers Academy. I'm sure you can put a link some place for people, Magnetic Messengers Academy is my website. That'll get you connected with.

Robert Plank: Awesome. We'll put that in the show notes, and people are listening in their cars and things, then they can just write down magneticmessengersacademy.com and getclientswithspeaking.com.

Lots of good stuff today and thanks for stopping by the show and talking to us about public speaking, Alysa.

Alysa Rushton: Hey, you're welcome. It's a pleasure to be here Robert. Thank you so much.