Planting The Seeds Of Change

Planting The Seeds Of Change


Ep.031 180 Degree Transition

April 23, 2018

How Speaking Your Core Message
Can Build Your Business
My guest Carol Cox works with high-performing women entrepreneurs who want to increase their visibility as they grow their business. She helps them create their signature talk and develop a visibility plan to have more influence in their industry or community. On the side, during election season here in Orlando, Carol also serves as a democratic political analyst. She’s been doing this about 12 years when she can and has loved politics and international relations since high school.
Speaking Builds Business… When Your Message Is Clear
Speaking Your Brand is the third business Carol has built, and she knows that relationships are the bedrock of business. To build relationships, Carol highly recommends speaking as a key skill for entrepreneurs to polish. Face-to-face interactions encourage people to do business with you, she says. Tapping into your community and giving back by speaking is a great way to reach out.
The secret to connecting with your audience is sharing personal stories, which can feel vulnerable or scary even to those who enjoy speaking. Yet it’s one of the best ways to increase that know-like-and-trust factor with listeners. Online today, there’s so much noise, options and content that people don’t truly connect with you there. Speaking at conferences, events, associations, and local networking groups—that’s where you develop deep and beneficial relationships.
I love that Carol helps people to face their speaking fears. I never expected to do public speaking myself, but today I recommend many of my executive clients become speakers. Benefits include trust-building and forcing you to develop a clear message, as well as becoming more comfortable with yourself, sharing your own story, and experiencing vulnerability.
So many leaders, executives and entrepreneurs have an inconsistent message, which unfortunately impacts their credibility level. If your audience, whether your team or the wider world, can’t relate to you consistently and know what you stand for, they won’t see you as an expert or authority. Speaking is a must!
How to Focus Your Message
One of the biggest challenges Carol’s clients have is the volume of content and expertise they want to share. Whether through a long career or specialization, all their knowledge, in 45 mins, cannot be absorbed. Her goal is distilling out the core message into 3 to 5 points that will be understandable to the audience, relevant, and immediately applicable.
Typically, Carol works in “intensives,” about six hours in one day, or three if working virtually. She likes the momentum this approach builds and how ideas stay connected. Asking a ton of questions, she takes her clients through a 3-act structure storyboard, from the opening of the presentation to the closing, and how everything ties in. At the end, the client has a polished signature speech.
To focus your message, Carol says ask yourself this question: “If you can only tell your audience one thing, what would it be?” Then boil down that key point into a short tweet and from there build it up again into your speech. I believe Carol’s process is valuable in the corporate world, too.
Carol finds that most of her service-based provider clients, though they may not have recognized it yet, are doing the same types of things with all their clients. So she also helps them see that and create a framework for their signature system. She says it’s not that they can’t figure this out or do this themselves, but they are too close to see it clearly and do it easily.
I had intended to do this myself but ended up procrastinating—generating draining catabolic energy that can zap productivity. Working with Carol was enjoyable and it was so much easier to have someone else walk me through the process. I encourage anyone putting this off to catch yourself and find someone with the right skills to h...