Words are such a powerful thing. I think when you put so much time and energy into the words you use, it becomes scary—thinking about saying those words out loud. A big piece of that is when it comes to communication, there are three parts. There's the words that we say, there's how we say it, and then our body language. Especially for a copywriter in particular, or even just a business owner who is typically working behind the scenes, they're used to putting 100% of their energy into the words.
When you think about that whole picture, the words you say are only 7% of your message. Your tone, your delivery, your pitch, your cadence —all those things, and then your body language —what you're doing when you're not speaking at all—all those things come together with a message. I think what happens is, maybe we're not even aware of that, what's really happening is we're not sure how to communicate fully. I think we get a little afraid of ourselves on camera.
There's something about a video camera knowing that like if I were to look down here, I can see myself. If I wasn't used to seeing myself as most of us aren't, it can be a little jarring because you don't see yourself all day long, but other people do. It's uncomfortable and we have a tendency to shy away from uncomfortable things.
But I will say, in this world where we're online building relationships and building trust with prospects and our audience all the time, video is such an accelerant to trust. It's worth the discomfort because you get through that discomfort pretty quickly if you're willing to push.
Have you ever wondered how some people just seem to have a way with words? They have this spark that lights you up when you're near them, they have the It factor. And while most people think it's something that only a few are born with, I believe that you can find it so it can become your superpower to grow your business. It's about you bringing your brand to life by becoming a magnetic communicator in person and on camera, showing up with confidence, authenticity, and inspiration.
So are you ready to become magnetic? I thought so. I'm Heather Sager and I'd like to welcome you to Finding Your It Factor
Hey, friend, welcome back to another week! I trust that you are doing well and I hope that your journey on becoming even more magnetic is moving along well for you. I hope that these last few weeks you have been stepping up your game a little bit, becoming more aware of how you communicate, not only at planned conversations but just impromptu ones throughout your day. Remember like showing up in a magnetic and charismatic way is a full time job.
You have to be mindful of how you're showing up all the time. The goal of this show is to help equip you with some of the tools and some of the things to be thinking about so that you can show up as the best version of you for your audience, but also for yourself.
I got some really great feedback from you a few weeks ago when I shared with you the audio recording of the virtual summit I participated in last month around being more confident on camera—super important right now in this very virtual world.
I got some follow up questions from that. I got some feedback that they really liked, you really liked hearing my presentation style. I thought, you know, I did another virtual summit back at the beginning of April, all around storytelling. It was a storytelling summit to help you use stories in a powerful way in your business. I gave a presentation around how to become magnetic through strategic storytelling. You know, this buzz phrase, "tell stories," you're most likely hearing it a lot.
You know, you should be telling more stories in your business. I often hear from people like, 'Oh my gosh, I don't have any stories,' or 'I don't remember how to to tell stories.' Storytelling is, it is an art, but also any o ne can do it.
I wanted to share with you today some of my best strategies around strategic storytelling. Not just telling stories, but doing it in a strategic way for your communication, your business, for your marketing. Telling stories isn't enough. You have to understand like the secret to standing out on a stage, but also in your marketing. I'm going to talk about what strategic storytelling is. I talk about this idea that we live in a really not complicated world, but a fast paced world.
How we consume information, you need to understand that so that you know how to cut through the noise and speak to your people. I talk about how to place stories at the right times. I also cover the mistakes that people make when it comes to telling stories and more importantly, how to fix those steps. We talk about a couple other things we even get into beyond just the words that we say.
What are the other facets of communication that we need mindful when it comes to storytelling or just communicating in general in our business. This is a super juicy episode, like I said, it's the recording of a virtual summit presentation just like last time in case you missed that one, by the way, go back. That was a really great episode.
Remember, not only is this audio going to be valuable for you in terms of the content that you hear, but I also want you to pay attention that I am on a quote-unquote stage presenting this. I want you to pay attention to how I deliver the information. Pay attention to how I engage the host. Pay attention to how I speak to you, how the information flows you. This is very meta. You get to not only absorb the information I'm teaching you, but I also want you to consider how I'm delivering it.
I might encourage you to listen to the episode to absorb the info, but then really listen to the episode and take notes on my delivery style because I think you'll pull a lot of good nuggets that will apply to how you communicate. This will help you become even more powerful.
Now, before we dive into the episode, I know you're working on building that email list and trying to get more leads into your business. I want you to think about this. Imagine speaking on more virtual stages this season—not waiting—but this season with confidence and sharing your message with hundreds or thousands of your dream customers.
Imagine walking off that stage with a list of obsessed fans ready to gobble up your content like ravenous teenagers or in my house, like a bunch of toddlers and preschoolers who eat all the food. Speaking on stages, yes, even these virtual ones, we all have the opportunity to speak on right now. It accelerates the know, like, and trust factor that we've been talking about for weeks more than any other form of marketing. You have to start with a strategy, friends .
If you have not yet downloaded my free guide, five step roadmap for speaking on stages to grow your audience and authority, you got to get your hands on it. This isn't one of those freebies that are going to sit in your inbox, never looked at, that it's just full of fluff.
This is an actual guide that has actionable worksheets for you to work through, taking your business ideas, your speaking ideas, helping you shape your signature topic and start looking at the right kinds of stages for you to bring your message. Go get that freaking guide for yourself and stop dreaming about stages and start putting yourself in play and getting on them. You can grab that before we jump in @heathersager.com/5steps, and as always, the link is down in the show notes.
All right , let's jump to it. Here is my presentation from the storytelling virtual summit.
[inaudible]
Hi everyone. This is Adrienne Dyer. You've tuned into The Power of Story show where we're talking about how to use storytelling techniques to make your copy both easy to create and engage with your audience—human to human—which of course ultimately drives the growth of your business.
Today, I'm super excited to talk to Heather Sager. She is a speaker and an online business coach. I'm really excited to talk to you today, Heather, because we haven't had any speakers yet talk about specifically about telling our stories live and on the stage. Welcome to the show, Heather, and thank you so much for participating.
Thank you. I'm so excited to be here and Ooh , I didn't know there were no other speakers here. So how fun is this?
It's really exciting. Yes. Because of course a lot of people who are tuning in are either entrepreneurs or copywriters and marketing professionals. But of course, you know, we all need to learn how to tell our stories in whatever life format we're using, whether it's a workshop, or on the stage, or even just on a live video on Facebook or something like that. I'm very excited to have you help us figure out how to tell our stories in that way.
I wonder if we could just get started with you telling you have an interesting story as everyone does, but I love how your career progressed and how your speaking career came about. I wonder if you could just tell us that story.
Sure. Well, when I was a kid, you would never have guessed that I would've become a speaker. I was a horrendously shy child where I would just turn red and hide behind my mom all the time. I was really, really shy and then I learned how to speak and be very loud. They couldn't get me to be quiet.
Growing up, speaking became a very interesting pathway for me. In high school and beyond, I wasn't really a shy kid. I never had issues speaking up when something was important to me, but I also never really had this urge to be the one talking all the time. I wasn't one of those people that just wanted to talk to hear themselves. An interesting thing happened to me when I was in high school, my mom was diagnosed with cancer. It was happened twice.
My family started a non-profit organization in her honor with this whole sole message of educating people in our local community about a specific type of cancer and how to deal with it. I found myself in a really interesting position at 17 years old where I had the opportunity to step up and be a voice for a really important cause. It helped for sure. I'm the youngest of six children.
It helped that my brothers and sisters just kind of shoved me out and said, 'you can be the spokesperson for the organization.' I did that. I ended up being a spokesperson for that organization and went on to do the same for other non-profits and charities. I ended up competing in the Miss America program for seven years, learning how to get on a stage, and speak, and use that as an advocacy and a platform to get more out in the world about the things that were most important to me.
Through that, I learned that when you have something really important to say, you push through the fear and discomfort for yourself because someone's waiting to hear your message. For me, that's how I got started.
It got more formalized when in my old job, I worked in corporate for I don't know , a decade, decade and a half. I worked actually with entrepreneurs, but I was in a corporate setting where I taught medical professionals, specifically doctors how to better lead their teams and work with their patients. In that position, I had the opportunity to speak on stages all around the world teaching and working with entrepreneurs.
I learned that storytelling was an incredible strategy for helping people see how different best practices and different content can actually play out in their daily lives when maybe on face value, they didn't see how that curriculum would really apply to them. I found that storytelling was effective not only for getting attention, but it also was a really powerful tool for persuasion to gain buy in with the people that I was teaching.
I did that job specifically for 10 years, and my favorite part of it was that speaking and connecting piece. I branched off and I started my own business that now I do speaking full time and then teach others to do the same from the stage. Wow. That's an incredible story. I think it's really hard, especially for writers, any type of entrepreneur who sort of, well, we all work from home of course, but I mean, copywriters are famous for being really shy, introverted.
We just want to sit at home in our own little bubble. When somebody suggests that we go live, even if it's just on Facebook or something, it can be very scary.
How do we just get started in a small way and break out of our shells a little bit and just be seen?
Yeah. I think it's so interesting that you bring this up because it's a very similar thing for a lot of industries. The beautiful thing, specifically using copywriters as an example, is words are such a powerful thing. I think when you put so much time and energy into the words you use, it becomes scary, thinking about saying those words out loud. A big piece of that is when it comes to communication, there are three parts.
There's the words that we say, there's how we say it, and then our body language, and especially for a copywriter in particular, or even just a business owner who's typically working behind the scenes, they're used to putting 100% of their energy into the words.
When you think about that whole picture, the words you say are only 7% of your message. Your tone, your delivery, your pitch, your cadence, all those things, and then your body language, what you're doing when you're not speaking at all. All those things come together with a message.
I think what happens is maybe we're not even aware of that, but that's what's really happening is we're not sure how to communicate fully. I think we get a little afraid of ourselves on camera. There's something about a video camera knowing that like if I were to look down here, I can see myself and if I wasn't used to seeing myself as most of us aren't. It can be a little jarring because you don't see yourself all day long, but other people do.
There's that piece, the idea that it's recorded and you capture it back. It's uncomfortable and we have a tendency to shy away from uncomfortable things. But I will say, in this world where we're online building relationships and building trust with prospects and our audience all the time, video is such an accelerant to trust. It's worth the discomfort because you get through that discomfort pretty quickly if you're willing to push. It's okay if we make mistakes and we stumble over our words.
I think t hat the biggest c hallenges that I have faced myself, you know, a couple of months ago I got asked to go speak at a local high school and just talk about my career and talk about career opportunities available for writers. I love to doing it, but it's really hard when you're a writer and how you have all the time in the world perfectly craft the w ords.
Before they're seen by anybody, you can make sure that you're absolutely happy with the words, but when you're speaking live, you've got to think off the top of your head, so you worry about, saying something stupid, or stumbling, or just completely losing your train of thought. I guess that's sort of a matter of just practice.
Well, it is. It's two things. One, there's a myth thinking that you have to be really good on your feet. I think that is one of the things that I get asked most often is, 'Heather, how do you think on your feet all the time?' Here's the funny thing. Yes, I'm really good at thinking on my feet, but it's because of 15 years of training. For me, I practice so much. Here's what you have to practice.
You have to realize that the things that are in your head, everyone's like, 'Oh, it's so clear in your head.' Have you ever thought about trying to articulate the thing that's in your head? It's all these thoughts, but they're not necessarily these coherent sentences or words. Our brains work in a way where it seems so clear, but yet when we try to get it out, we're like, that doesn't even make sense. You have to learn how to train that connection between your mind and your mouth.
As a writer, typically we do this. There's that common phrase called the crappy first draft where you just allow your thoughts to come out and you just expect it's going to be terrible on paper, but of course nobody ever sees that. Well, we don't give ourselves the gift of doing that between our thoughts and our words, the verbal. What I do and what I encourage all of my clients and students to do—this is a very sexy title, so forgive me—the word vomit activity.
It is something that I encourage everyone to be doing. That's just say a thought out loud until it makes sense to you. You maybe ask yourself a question or you say, Hey, I'm going to practice my pitch or my value proposition, or I'm going to practice my opt-in, whatever it is that you want to do, right?
Just try to say it out loud and then laugh and be like, O'h my gosh, that was terrible.' Or if you're gutsy, record it and then be like, 'Oh my gosh, that wasn't as bad as I thought it was,' or whatever that is for you. The idea is get it out, but then don't stop there. Do it again, and again, and again, and again.
This idea that the more that you word vomit, the more confident you get that the next time somebody asks you a question similarly, or you have to pitch or do something, it's not the first time you're doing it. It's just in that moment it feels impromptu. But trust me, any professional speaker, they feel so off the cuff but it's because of years and years of practice.
Getting their vocabulary down, getting their stream between their thoughts and their words, how they practice those things so in the moment comes, they know how to string words together that sound really well put together. They're strategic. There is an element of spontaneity to it, but it's because of the training we've done. Right. And so, which leads me into the first question that I wanted to ask you, which is about strategic storying.
Because of course, as you say, you talk about how storytelling isn't enough. There has to be some strategy behind it. I wonder if you could explain that process. Yes, okay, a couple of things for some context. We have to remember that as people, experts have said that we all have thoughts happening all the time. There's like 70,000 thoughts a day going through our minds. It's like almost 50 thoughts a minute. We're always thinking about things.
The other thing that we have to recognize with how our brains work is our brains are working in overdrive all the time to take inputs of information, categorize them, and make them make sense. What does this have to do with speaking? I think a lot of times, people when they're speaking, they think that how they describe things and the way that things are so logical to them must be logical to other people. This just is not true.
The way that you see the world a nd the way you see your information and the things you teach are unique because you think differently than other people. When it comes to storytelling, what storytelling allows us to do is to convert a lot of our thoughts into something that's familiar to other people. You have to think about how can you make things more familiar? A story has a plot and we're all used to standard storylines and plots.
There's a character, there's some kind of struggle or event, and then at the end they will prevail like that's usually how every story goes. That's why the Hallmark Channel at Christmas time is so popular because we all are hungry for that familiarity that comes with those movies. Here's what happens is most people make the mistake of, they go, okay, I get it. I need to tell a stories to drive connection. They miss an important piece. And that's when you tell stories at the right times.
A lot of people go, 'okay, so I should always start with a story.' That's true. But then the question comes, 'wait, so when else should I use stories and how many of them do I need? Am I trying to be funny? Am I trying to make people cry? Like what am I doing with stories?' Here's what I like to think about when it comes to, this is for like verbal delivery, but I think this would absolutely translate in your written content too.
We have to consider, let's get geeky for a moment and pretend that you have like a chart with a Y and an X axis where on the vertical is attention span of people and then across would be time, like the time spent watching you or reading an article. Logically speaking, as a content creator or a speaker, we know that we don't have people's attention like high for the whole time we speak. We kind of think we do or we kind of assume that people hang onto our every word That's just not true.
What I want you to think about is how do you adjust what you're saying to the ebbs and flows of people's attention spans as they naturally happen through talks. Distractions, 'I'm thinking, what's for dinner tonight', or 'Oh, there was a text message from my kid's daycare,' whatever happens. There's a noise happening in the back of the room. Somebody is on their laptop. I'm distracted again.
Those absent flows are going to happen and you recognize they're going to be different for each person in the room. As a speaker you're constantly trying to figure out when are people paying attention. Here's where a story comes in. You tell a story right before an important piece of content to capture and peak their attention, so that way you have the room in the palm of your hands to then deliver a really important piece of information.
There's a common marketing term where you say like 'hook, 'then you deliver your content. I want you to think story in a presentation to capture their attention like a hook, but I think it's a story. Then what you can do is connect the story to your content and you'll hold people's attention for even longer.
That's brilliant. As a participant in speaking events, I can think back and think of how, you know when , when I'm listening to a video or a podcast or something like that, my mind will sometimes wander the cats counter and knock something over, but then I can go back and rewind it, but you can't do that in a live event. If you miss something important, you just missed it.
I love that using the story that like key moment to bring people's attention back and then deliver your message. Now what about an overarching story? Do you sort of try to have a story that's like a story arc that's flowing throughout the entire presentation or is it okay to just have little stories that are related but it doesn't have to be one grandeur?
Yeah, good question. You know what ? I don't think there's a right answer. I think you can approach it a couple of different ways. Sometimes, you have different kinds of speakers, right?
You have some speakers where their personal story is their talk.There are speakers that come to mind. I can't remember her name. There's the gal who, Elizabeth Smart, I think is her name, where she was abducted as a little girl and held in captivity for years.When she was I think a teenager or a young woman, she was rescued or she got, I don't remember the whole story, but I remember she was really big and still is. She's now an author and really big on the professional speaking circuit.
For her, her keynote talk is her story. Clearly, there are so many lessons of perseverance and I mean there's so many crazy things that have happened to her that she now uses to teach and empower other people too , to get more intentional with how they live their lives and tell their stories. Her whole talk is her story. Conversely, other speakers like say me for example, my business and speaking, I don't speak full time for a fee. For me, my goal is not to be a professional full time speaker.
My revenue is about, I don't know, 30% of my revenue comes from speaking and speaking fees.
But the majority of my businesses , I run an online coaching and training business with digital courses, so I'm looking to use speaking as a platform to get more people into my business, which means my storytelling strategies are more about how do I leverage story to paint the picture on my credibility, but you stories to get my audience engaged so they can see themselves in my content and want to continue to learn from me.
When you think story arc, one strategy for using a full story, you can absolutely do that. Keep circling back around to the same story, or you start with the story. You tell your presentation, maybe have some other analogies and other vignettes of stories in it, and then you have resolution at the end. You can do that. You could have three different stories throughout your presentation. I don't think there's a right or wrong way to do it.
I think what you have to focus on is are you using your story for the benefit of your audience or are you just telling it because you think it sounds good and it was a crazy life event that happened to you.
Right. That does make total sense. I love that too. What would you say then would be the biggest mistakes that people make when it comes to telling your stories?
Yeah, I think this 100% is it. It's this topic here where what happens is people are like, 'Oh my gosh, I have a really, really good story that I need to share,' or 'I have this really big message in my heart that it needs to be shared because they've experienced crazy things in their lives.' They know that there's a story in there that other can learn from it. They focus on their own story.
I think it's important, but I think it kind of misses the point where when you are presenting specifically, but I e ven think this happens with copywriting and writing. You have to be telling a story that's co-creative, where you are creating t he story for people to buy into, but they're not picturing you in the story, or Sally, or John, whoever it is you're talking about. They're actually picturing themselves in e xperiences similar.
For example, if I tell you a story about me presenting my senior project when I was in high school. If I tell you a story around that, which was the time when I was doing a lot of community service work for my mom and those kinds of things. If I make the story really specific to me and my mom fighting cancer and all those other things, which is by the way, is a really incredible story.
What happens is, I allow you to think about maybe where you were in high school, maybe be thinking about man, like the craziest thing I had to deal with my senior year was who was my date to prom, or maybe something happened to you. If I make the story too much about this crazy thing that happened to me and I don't build in relatable moments around homecoming, or around break time between classes, or whatever else, you won't be able to picture the story from a way you participate in.
It's more of a passive, 'Oh that's nice that you have that,' or 'I feel bad for you that that happened.' You don't want to tell stories for people to feel sorry for you, or for people to be like good for you, or that's great for them. You want people to see themselves in the story, especially when the story is one that ends with triumph, or success, or an evolved version of that person. That's the goal of the story.
I think the mistake people make is they just tell stories cause they think they're good stories. You have to think about what emotions, what shared connections do you have with your audience, what kind of details could you share that are not too detailed, where you paint the picture so much for them. You have to stem visualization in their mind. A technique that I learned from my good friend Kindra Hall who is an expert on storytelling.
She has the book that just came out last year, Stories that Stick. She's incredible. She's a great keynote speaker. She taught me how to fix a mistake I had been making in my presentations and that's I used to use a lot of pictures in my presentations when I told stories. She told me to cut it out. She's like, 'Heather, when you show people that photo of you in high school, or that photo of you at the prom, or the photo of you wherever, you rob people of that co-creative process.
What you want to do is say, you're telling a story about the time you learned to drive and you talk about the rusty Nissan Sentra that you used to drive, that you buy as a hand-me-down, but you got it for 800 bucks from your uncle. People are picturing their first car, even if it wasn't a Nissan Sentra. They're picturing like that clunky old cars we had when we were 16. You're picturing that in your mind. If I show you a picture of that Nissan Sentra, I robbed you from that co-creative process.
I'm now forcing you to be an audience versus a participant. That was a really good tip she taught me. I pay it forward to audiences that I speak with. Figure out how can you make the story co-creative even if it's a story that is really specific and unique to you. That's an interesting twist on the sort of copywriters mantra, which is to show and not tell because you are trying to show and not tell but not show too much. So specific, that like you said, that you rob the audience.
Well, you want to be specific, right? Your story has to have a level of specificity to it. If I were describing that car, I would talk about, okay, so for me, my car, it was a 1990 Ford Ascot . On the ceiling, there was hair gel in it because evidently the guy who had it before me was so tall his head must have hit the ceiling. I would use a specific detail peppered here and there in the story.
What you don't want to do is describe every single thing in detail for the whole story because you're missing those opportunities for them to fill it in. Detail is important, but you don't want to overly detail . Right. Don't give them the visual representation. Don't show them a picture of the car. Yeah. That was a powerful shift for me. I'd always been like, 'Oh, it makes it a better imagery.' I now rarely ever do slides. I only do slides if it's something that I want people to write d own.
Gotcha. Okay. All right . Beyond crafting the story, as you say through the lens of the audience, do you have any other secrets that you can share?
Yeah, so I hit on this a little bit talking about how communication is far more dynamic than words. I think a thing that would be really powerful for people to think about is how do you tell stories? A thing that makes this story so good isn't just the words you use, but there's an experience you create. There's feelings that you evoke with your audience.
It's almost like you have to step in the role of a character and you have to live out the emotion on stage, which can feel a little uncomfortable if you haven't done it before. One of my favorite storytellers that I have seen speak on live stages. There's two, Brendon Burchard. He's an incredible storyteller because he uses his entire body. You can just see, he's like all the time. Every height level you can imagine it happens. He goes wide with his arms and his hands, his facial expressions.
He is an artist when it comes to speaking on stages. Another person who does this really well, which will be probably no surprise, is Rachel Hollis. She uses her space really, really well. I think the tip that I would recommend for the audience listening today is, well , you might not be Brenon Burchard or Rachel Hollis. They work their butts off to get where they are. What I want you to think about is as you're crafting your story, think about your performance.
Think about the speed in which you tell your story. When can you speed up to build some excitement and some tension and get people really excited and then have a pause to really jerk things around to get people to stay with you.
Think about your, your pace, your pitch, your tone, your inflection, those things all add character to your story. They evoke emotion from your audience.That's one part.Then the other part is thinking about how do you add more through your body language?
I think a lot of people think of the standards, am I standing up straight, am I using my hands, am I walking, or am I pacing, or am I rocking back and forth? All those things are important. But I want you to think about taking up space. People don't think about going vertical, like hunching down when you need to or expanding your body taller. People don't think about coming forward and back onstage. Also, people don't think about any of these things coming to live on video.
I mean just in the last 45 seconds alone, I've done a lot of expressive and crazy things. Just think about if you were distracted in a moment and I did something that captured your attention on the video, your eyes going to come back to this specific window. Sometimes, using body language is just literally to get people's attention. Thinking about practicing is more than just the story. The story is one part of it. You have to have a good story down.
But I would say the storyline, the words you use, it's far more forgiving if you can become an artist with your storytelling. Those, the speakers who make the big bucks and they're the ones asked back and they're the ones that have audiences that are enthralled by them talking about them and wanting to work with them for time and time to come. It does feel weird, doesn't it? I know because I'm a stage performer.
When you're singing or acting on stage, of course I've seen myself on video, and I've gone through that process. When you're on stage and you make a movement like this, it feels huge and when you're in the audience, it looks this big. You have to have , go like this, and then it looks like this from the audience. Funny how you have to, like you said, take up more space than what a ctually natural a nd c omfortable.
You do. One of the activities I do with my students in my programs is that I'm like, okay, so imagine this. I want you to imagine that I have a beach ball in my hand right here, like a blow up beach ball you'd get for free as a prize . I don't know at some event. You bring it home. You go to the beach. You're playing with it with your kids.
That beach ball, if you hold it right in front of you, it would be like right around here. What you'll do is when you're speaking, your hands would typically stay within this, what I call the beach ball zone. Your hands are just going to stay here for the majority of your talk. When you want to get attention and you want to make an impact, and there's a dramatic moment, you move outside of the beach ball, you raise your hand to get the audience to do the same.
You say this versus that. I don't know, go big 'cause there's something in t he story. For the most part, you keep it tight in your beach ball. Then you use the dramatic moments when they matter. You don't want to do like a little boy who cried wolf
You don't want to be doing big dramatic movements all the time because then they don't make an impact. They're just spastic and a little like distracting. You want to be strategic with them, but it requires you to practice it. It also most likely requires you to put a camera on yourself so you can see what you do naturally. Because so many people tell me, they're like, 'Oh my gosh, this is not a problem.
I talk with my hands all the time.' It's either they're talking with one hand and it's really spastic or they think they're talking their hands, but they're staying like right here. You have to think about like what you said, a stage and I think a camera adds on this like really heavy filter that you have to consciously work to break through because like I said, a story is amazing, but a well-placed story that is performed, that is what makes people stand out and connect with you.
That's so fascinating. It's funny too because I was thinking about doing live video. I talk with my hands all the time. I'm always just trying to make sure I just keep my hands folded neatly on my lap because I'm so afraid it's going to be, like you said, be spastic. I like what you're saying that it's okay to just sort of free ourselves up as long as we're..
It's okay to move yourself. There was a really incredible study done by the Science of People. It's a company run by Vanessa Van Edwards. She's really famous. She's got a great Ted Talk online.
The study with her team around the use of hand gestures in Ted Talks and the highest performing re-watch Ted Talks of all times. I don't remember what the number was, but the Ted talks that had more hand gestures, had higher watch rates. People were far more interesting and far more engaged when they have hand gestures. She also talks about a study that shows that when people can see your hands they are more trusting.
It's very fascinating, that would be a really great Ted talk for people to watch. What I've noticed is a lot of times on video people try to crop out their hands or they awkwardly show too much. When you do video, I would be cognizant of your cropping. For example, for me, probably the furthest I would go back if I were doing a live would be about here where you can see the top of my hands, but they're not like you're not seeing my elbows where that becomes overly distracting.
When I go live, I mean this is my home office, this is where I would go live from. I would be about right here where I use my hands so you can see them, but when I'm not using my hands they'll drop down from the frames. They won't be distract. Showing your hands is a great thing. You don't want to be super distracting on a Facebook live or Instagram story
Right. Okay. That's fascinating. It's funny you were talking about doing Ted Talks too because another speaker on the show is Adam Creek . He's an ex Olympic athlete. He is a professional speaker but he didn't talk about that in his interview.
I have seen him speak live. You can actually watch the talk on YouTube. It's called ' I seek Failure.' He is talking about when he and his small team tried to row across the Atlantic ocean. He gets right down on the stage and sits down. He's talking and it's quite hilarious. When he does that, everybody was just like, you know. It's a complete lean forward moment. Yeah, just complete wrapped attention. You couldn't pay attention to anything else.
I loved how he used his body on the stage in that way.
What's so fascinating is a lot of times we see people like that perform on stage. We go, 'Oh my gosh, I could never do something like that. I'd be so uncomfortable.' There's something that happens when you're speaking on stages, whether you're doing a bit or you're performing like that or something, or you're telling a joke. It's one of those things, it's really repetitious over and over again.
There comes a point where when you do it, you have to fully commit to it. Or if you just dabble with it a little bit, like if he would've just done the rowing action, it would have been fine, but it wouldn't have landed. It wouldn't have had that lean forward moment. When you think about your signature story, for those of you watching, like when you think about it, you have to think about where in my story am I holding myself back, both in the what I'm telling, but also how I tell it.
Where am I holding it back, where I'm keeping it kind of more monotone instead of just like ripping into it and just really illustrating that moment.
Where am I holding back a bit? That if I were just to crank up the dial in that one area or add some kind of visual element, it would have a very different effect. Practice that to see what it would feel like. It's going to be a little uncomfortable, but if you commit to it, it's those moments that you get the lean in from your audience.
You don't get the lean in from just the general pretty moments . Pretty moments don't create lean in. It's the power moments, which are the mostly uncomfortable the first time you do them. Right. This whole thing about body language, because being a writer, I talk so much about words, words, words and stories. I love that we're talking about all the other components that have to do with how we communicate as humans. I think writers often forget that because we're so much on the page.
Could you tell us how you became so attuned to body language and facial expressions and things like that? Yeah, so two big things for me made a huge different, one of the noticing and then to the study of it. The noticing, so I was born with a rare genetic condition called Osteogenesis Imperfecta. Sounds super fancy and clinical. It's essentially means I have brittle bones, kind of like Samuel L. Jackson in a movie 'Unbreakable' and then Mr. Glass where you touch him and he breaks.
I don't have that dramatize version of it from Hollywood, but I was born with it. It was static and my mom had it, half of my siblings have it, aunts and uncles, grandparents have it. It just means that growing up I had to be a little bit more careful because if I fell I most likely would break a bone.
I've broken so many bones in my life. I have no idea how many. If I have a bone, I've probably broken it. It's just part of my childhood, which is funny cause it's so normal to me, but it freaks other people out. Anytime I see a new doctor, they're like freaked out by it cause they've only seen those conditions in their medical books back in medical school.
Fast forward, something that happens when you have brittle bones is you learn that you have three little tiny bones inside your ears. Those bones started deteriorating typically in your mid thirties and you start losing your hearing. For me, that started happening when I was about 19 years old. I started losing my hearing but not really noticing that it was happening. By the time I turned 27, I was heavily struggling with keeping up with conversations.
At that point in time, I had started distancing myself from friendships, taking myself out of different social situations, had this persona that I was just a really strong willed independent person who was kind of not so nice word to other women. I just didn't like to have friends. I started identifying as a completely different person than I thought I was socially.
At that point in time, I worked for the former company I told you about before where I worked with doctors. Those doctors were audiologists, which are doctors of hearing. I just had started working in that company and started learning more and more about how hearing works and how all those things come together. I ended up teaching doctors how to talk to patients about hearing technology. Along the way, I learned that I significantly needed hearing technology.
I started wearing hearing aids when I was 27 years old. It's now been almost a decade and it made a tremendous difference in my life 'cause now I can actually understand what people say to me. Up until that point between 19 and 27, I struggled to understand people and I had no idea what was happening. I didn't even know what was happening.
Here's the difference between sight and hearing. With sight, we can tell when things are blurry. We can tell when we can't see things. Imagine that you're sitting in a room right now and I started dimming the lights. You would notice. You would notice when you start straining to see things because the lights are getting so dark. In hearing, it's so gradual and you have no comparison on whether or not you can hear something. It's just muffled or you don't hear it at all, or you can.
You don't have that understanding. There's not a sophisticated way of being able to discern whether or not you hear sounds . For me, I was doing all of this work that I was talking about, speaking on stages, doing mentoring and coaching and work for nonprofits, all well having a debilitating hearing loss, but being unaware of it. I learned how to read people without even knowing that I was reading people. I was reading their energy from their body language, their facial expressions.
I could tell by their tone whether they were mad, or excited, or they believe something, or they were really not behind what they were talking about. I started understanding that communication was far more than just the words I was missing . When I got hearing aids, Holy cow, like that was a whole other piece of the equation that solved things for me.
I started noticing that there was far more to persuasion, and connection, and communication than just words. After going through that experience, I had an incredible opportunity to hire a keynote speaker. Her name is Tanya Ryman . She's a body language expert. She's on news networks all the time, analyzing the different politicians around what they're doing and their speeches and are they honest, are they dishonest?
I got to study for a bit of time under Tanya by her working with the organization I was with. I became fascinated by the science of body language and then started point a connection between my experiences having a hearing loss and the science and studies behind it to now be able to help entrepreneurs leverage bull so that they can show up more authentic in their brand and reach their audiences in a more strategic way. That's so fascinating.
You've tapped into two things that are for most people just going on very subconsciously. It affects us, but we don't know it. We're not aware of it. We can't be conscious of that ourselves because we're simply just not even thinking about that. It's interesting that my daughter had an experience when she was five years old. She had repeated ear infections. She had actually lost her hearing significantly. We didn't know until the teacher started complaining that she wasn't.
Of course things escalated and we knew that she had some hearing issues and we took her in. Anyway, she ended up going to the hearing clinic. They did the test and they said that her hearing capacity was the same as somebody who is wearing , ear protection muffs, like on a construction site. That's only how well she could hear. We put some of those on just to see.
It was like, 'Oh my gosh, this is what it's like for her.' She's like gone into this little bubble and she doesn't even know everything is so muffled. I do remember just how profoundly, even though it was only temporary , how profoundly that affected her. I remember her teacher writing on a report card, you know, it's been two weeks since she had her ear hearing infection diagnosed. She should be able to hear by now. She's just not listening.
When we went to the hearing clinic they said , this is how what her hearing capacity is and it's g oing t o take months and months for that to resolve, six months to a year. When she ha d s urgery and had ear tubes put in, when she woke up the first thing she just started to sob, She said, 'I can hear, I can hear.' Just thinking about, I never forgot that.
I think this brings me back to, my point is sort of how when we're aware of body language and all these other components, I think we can make our communication actually more accessible to people because now we're communicating to people in a way that more people can understand in a more clear and a better way. I think that's something that we really need to think more about when when we're doing marketing and any type of communication is making our art information accessible to a wider audience.
I think so much. I was just tearing up when you were telling that story of your daughter. It brings up a lot of emotions for me. We talk about power of story. I mean that story right there. I'm sure. Just thinking about as a parent what that's like for you, not knowing something's going on and then I can just, so many different pieces of that.
Something that really struck me there in that moment is, even talking about something so specific as this. I can't imagine that many people who are watching this have experienced hearing loss, maybe they know somebody with it. I think the thing about this is understanding that at the end of the day, all of us want to be heard. All of us want to feel connected.
And your daughter, someone like me, going through periods of time where you have felt extremely disconnected, felt extremely alone feeling, not like yourself, feeling like nobody gets you. All of us have experienced those things at some point and another. If you think about your role as a content creator, as a speaker, as a writer, whatever it is that you do, the best way for you to connect with other people is to figure out how to help them feel heard.
The backward way as you think the way for them to feel heard is by them talking. A lot of times people just need to see through you that they're not alone. This is an example of even something like me, when I talk about the story of my hearing loss, it brings up a lot of emotions for me. It also brings a lot of emotions up for other people, not because they've had a hearing loss, but they relate with the emotions that happen during it.
I think that's a really big takeaway to sink into, to think about how do you feel with your audience because it will pull you closer and t hem closer to you.
That's beautiful. That is so powerful. I think there's so many different ways that we can lose or use our voices. I've had a vocal injury before where I spent about two or three years. I was like, in social situations, I started to avoid pubs or parties. I didn't even want to go out for coffee with a friend anymore because it just hurt my voice so much and I literally would just, I couldn't talk. It's quite frightening when you lose that ability to communicate. I sort of resorted to my words.
I started texting people more an d, and then almost got in the bad habit of not having one on one conversations with people enough, even about important things just simply because I couldn't read stories to my kids at night and stuff like that. It really impacts your life.
Like you said, it's so powerful to be aware of all these sorts of different things and you never know who in your audience has experienced something like that. It's just one more way that we can just truly, truly tap into that connection that we have with people, human to human. There's so many other things to think about, but maybe if we just kind of focus on that one thing, that connection, it just makes everything else a lot easier. I agree . I totally agree. Yeah. That's beautiful.
Now one thing I wanted to talk about is that you have generously put together a gift for people who are tuning in today. I know that they're going to get a huge value from that. I wonder if you could talk about that.
Sure . Yeah. One of the things that I talk a lot about with my students, with my audience is this idea of speaking isn't just saved for the stage. I think that's a negative perception that a lot of people have as they think, 'Oh, I'm not a speaker. I'm not going to go out and speak on a stage.'.
I think one thing that's really important to consider that is a stage is just a platform to share your message and connect with other people. What about stage like a virtual summit like this, whether it's a Facebook live, whether it's your Instagram stories, you teaching a masterclass, and any of those things where you're connecting with a group of people - that's a stage. I think a lot of times we forget of those stages. We don't think about having to learn the skills of speaking.
It's a big miss because we miss out on the opportunity to better connect with our audiences. One of the resources that I have that has been a tremendous help to my audience is I put together a roadmap to help people get started with speaking from stages. It's the five steps to get started so that you can start thinking about speaking in a more strategic way. It isn't just about talking to people or sharing a story.
If you're a business owner and you're trying to grow your audience and grow your business, you have to approach speaking on any stage with a strategy. I h ad t hat available. If you guys want to download it, there is a guide there. It comes with a free audio training. Again, it works i f y ou're speaking on this physical stage or even if you want to just do podcast interviews and get your message down so you know w hat's going to connect back to your business.
I think that's wonderful because I mean we need it now more than ever because so many businesses of course at the time of this recording, we're smack in the middle of COVID19 things. People are having to get really, really uncomfortable, right? Get on camera.
Get comfortable. The virtual stage is here out of necessity. I know just today I've done three virtual stage presentations . I think it's one of those things that regardless of whether it was a plan for you, the virtual stages are here to stay. You may as well get good at them. Also, I think it opens up a whole another world of possibilities for businesses, ways that they can.
I know a lot of entrepreneurs eventually start getting asked to speak on stages and that can be another revenue stream for them too, to do speaking engagements. It's just another way to grow and expand our business. Thank you so much. That's incredibly useful, and the link of course will be easily accessible right below or beside the video. Somewhere around. You can find it . Thank you very much. If people want to work with you or just listen, because you have a podcast.
That's probably the best place for people to connect. I'm a big fan of, there's a lot of different influencers online, there's a lot of different people that you can learn from. I actually think sometimes it can get really, really overwhelming. Sometimes you just want to test some people out to figure out if their content resonates with you in this phase, in your business. I have a podcast.
I think that's a really great way for you to get to know a little bit more around what I teach and my philosophies around business. It's called Finding Your It Factor. it's a part marketing podcast, helping you define your message and then be able to show up and tell it in an intentional way to connect with the right people.
Finding Your It factor and then the best place for people actually to connect with me directly is over on Instagram, where I hang out daily. I have videos, how to use all the good stuff. I share cute photos of my kids over there @theheathersager.
That's excellent. Thank you so much, Heather. It Has been an absolute pleasure to talk to you and you shared so much incredible information that that's definitely going to help many people. I am sure. Thank you once again for your time. Thank you so much.It was so much fun and hopefully this has been really helpful. It has. Thank you. Bye bye. Bye
[inaudible]
guys, thanks so much for listening to finding your it factor and Hey, if you have a talk coming up, you have to check out my free resource. It's called nail your next talk. 10 must ask questions before taking the stage so you can show up as an authority and turn that talk into future business. These are the questions that I use myself to prepare for my live talks, and they're going to help you ask the right questions of the person who booked you for the event.
So the meeting planner or the client, and it's going to help you serve your audience to the best way possible. It's going to help you anticipate potential tech or AB snags. Turn the Q and a time into a strategic place for content and make this speaking opportunity, a lead generator for your business. So go get it now. What are you waiting for? It's over at Heather's sacred.com forward slash 10 questions
[inaudible]
.