#146: How To Ask For Something The RIGHT Way with Heather!

Come on this journey with me each week when you join me, we are going to chase down our goals, overcome adversity, and set you up for a better tomorrow. Fasten your seat. I'm ready for my close up. Hi, and welcome back. I'm so glad you're back here with me this week. Thank you for being here. Okay, I want to start with an example of the right way to do something and a wrong way that happened to me this week that I think you might appreciate. So I get a lot of DMs on social media, asking if they can come as a guest on my podcast, asking for feedback, asking to mentor them, whatever it may be. Right. And I try to at least respond to things. I'm sure I miss some, but I try to just respond, you know, hey, I've got a podcast up on that. Check out the podcast. Or, you know, I've got a free ebook you can check out or whatever it is. Or sometimes people reach out and, you know, I end up having them on my podcast or, you know, having some exchange. Well, it was really interesting because two polar opposite approaches hit me on the same day, and it got my attention and I wanted to share it with you first. I'll share with you the wrong way. Okay, so someone I don't know sends me a dm. Here's what it says. Hey, Heather, love your podcast, would love to be a guest. Here's why you should have me on your show. Click this link and check out my website and you'll see how great of a guest I I'll be. Here's my availability. So he, number one, I don't know him. He made it all about himself. He led with, go to my website and check me out. And then he says, and here's when I can do it. Flip the script. Okay, that's completely wrong. I did not even respond. It's so ridiculous, right? So the right approach is to lead with value. Offer something. Some people have left reviews of my show, and then they take a screenshot and send it to me and say, hey, I just wanted to show you what a fan I am. My favorite episode was blah, blah, blah. After going through all of your shows, I realize you haven't ever talked about this topic. Here's how I could bring value to you and your audience. If you're ever interested, I'll make myself available. Whenever you have time, make it about the other person, make it about their show, their thing, and you're gonna have a much better chance at response. Okay, so that person gets zero Response. Better luck next time, pal. Horrible approach. Thank you for showing us what not to do in life. Now cut to the same day. Recently I was added to a program on LinkedIn called Content Creator Manager. And I have a person that I work with now that once a month offers feedback to me in regards to the content that I'm creating, what he sees trending. He works with all of the content creators, quote, unquote creators on LinkedIn and he offers his insights when he has these individual meetings with you as well as you get weekly updates from him. For example, he shared that LinkedIn stories is disappearing this month. Wah, wah. Not happy about that. But he did say that they're gonna come out with a new and improved version which will be video focused. I believe that's in October. So anyways, it's a great program. They're just, they're adding value to us to try to encourage us to keep creating content on the regular on LinkedIn, which is a great, great idea, great approach and super appreciate it. Well, he reached out to me. So an individual I know reached out to me and asked me to do something. That sounds like a good approach, right? Someone who adds value to my life asked me to take care of something for him. He reached out to me and said, hey, I know a young man who is a content creator. He's not as far along as you are. However, he wants to create some content for some quote unquote influencers or whatever. And he said, I suggested you. He checked your page out and he said, yeah, I'd love to. He said, would you mind connecting with him? So someone I know that adds value to my life is saying, hey, I need your attention. Here's a great person I want to connect you with that wants to add value to your life for free. Of course I'm going to do it right, because this is someone I know and trust. So I said, yeah, sure, no problem. He connects me with the young man. The young man says, listen, I've checked out all of your stuff. I'm really impressed with your business story with Would you be open to me creating a video, an animated, essentially like a cartoon video of you telling your story and then you could share it on social media. I said, oh my gosh, absolutely. Let me know anything you need from me. And he said, I really don't need anything. I already did my research. If you want to just send me a couple of lines at a high level of your story, I'll make sure to include some of the stuff that you put in there. So it literally took me 60 seconds. I shot him a note back with a couple of lines about my story, my trajectory in business, and off I went. I forgot about it. A week later, I hear back from him. Hey, wanted to let you know your video's done and I've included it here on a private link. Check it out. If you like it or don't like it, let me know. Cause I can always make changes, et cetera. I loved it. It was so good. So creative, super cute. It was great. I was really blown away and so grateful that, you know, this person just reached out to me, you know, through someone who I happen to know to just want to help me and offer value to me. So I write back to him. This is amazing. Thank you so much for creating this. You're so talented. If there's ever anything I do to help you, just let me know. And I'm happy to share this on social media and tag you and promote you. And he said, great. Would you also be willing to give me 30 minutes of your time next week? I want to figure out a business plan to monetize my content creation.

What do you think?

I responded, yes, of course, no problem. I will make the time because I can see you are a talented person who does business correctly. You offer value to people. You're respectful, kind, smart, talented. Yes. Happy to help you. Someone helped me one day. I want to help you. So do you see that seismic difference between that person that I didn't know, who only talked about how great he was, wanting me to go to his site to check out his stuff, wanting me to schedule around his calendar, so versus someone who connected to me through a mutual connection, who asked me for a favor. When I finally connected with him, he only added value to me, did not ask anything of me. He'd already done his homework, right? He didn't need me to do anything. And when he gave me the end product, it was amazing. He did a great job and I offered to do anything I could to help him. And he just asked for a 30 minute call to talk about his business. So it's just to me, that was such a great example of the wrong way to do business versus the right way. And I wanted to share that with you no matter what it is you're looking to do, right? I'm always looking to land that next great guest or find someone to help me promote my new book in the largest way possible. But it all starts with who is in your network, who can you tap? And even if that person isn't in your network, is there a mutual connection you can access that maybe they would be willing to connect you to that person? You will be so much more likely to, to be well received if you go through a mutual connection. So definitely tap your network when you're looking to make that next strategic move. There's probably someone in there that can help you and wants to help you, right? This guy that, the content manager, he was so happy to help this young guy. And everybody's relationship improved as a result of this exchange, right? So you put more good out there, you help more people, and good comes of it. Okay, so then I have another example for you. I oftentimes, and I don't know if this happens for you, but to the podcast, right? I'll get messages from people that I know, friends or, you know, acquaintances who will reach out to me and say, oh, hey Heather, you should totally have Oprah on your show. Great, that's great. I would love to have Oprah. Do you know her? That's always my response, right? And I'm using Oprah as an example. But you know, hey Heather, you should have the CEO of IBM on your show. Great. Do you have a contact, like, it's very frustrating to me how often people, people will send me a note saying something like that, here's what I wanna share with you is that even though people think, hey, Heather's top of mind, you know, and I'm thinking about our show, which is cool, and I'm reaching out, giving her an idea, the chances are when you're giving huge names like that, I've probably thought about that person before, but I don't have the in, right? I don't have the contact. So I finally lost it on my old boss, actually the other day, he did this again. He's done this a number of times where he just reaches out, throwing big names at me and, and I said, listen, here's the thing, thank you for thinking of me, thank you for thinking of the show. However, if you wanna help, help would be you reaching out, you finding a contact, you pitching the show, you landing the guest and then coming back to me and saying, hey, I just landed Oprah for you for your show. Here's her availability, what works, and let's get this thing going right? That's helping. It's not helpful necessarily to just spout out big names. What's helpful is doing the behind the scenes work. That's the hard part, right? The hard part is sending the DMs, finding out who you know in common asking for a favor to access somebody, that's the stuff that's really time consuming and it can be frustrating. You know, that's the grind, right? So he actually, he was funny. He said, okay, well I will, so we'll see if maybe you never know what big next guest I'm gonna get, if maybe that's gonna come through somebody who actually threw big names at me and then I asked them to actually do the work. And you never know, maybe they will. That would be a massive help. But just keep that in mind the next time that you think you're offering advice or help to somebody else. Sometimes it's the stuff behind the scenes that's a lot harder. Coming up with the idea isn't really hard, it's actually executing on the idea, which can be very time consuming and challenging.

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Okay, to that end, a few different things I wanted to share that have happened in the last week. One was really cool, you know, and here's what I'm gonna remind you of. It's shocking how little all of us know, right? We all know just our own little world, what we're exposed to. And what I mean by that is everyone travels in different circles, everyone has different access to information that we just might not have. And you could literally be six degrees of separation away from that one thing that could change your business, change your life, and not even be aware of it yet. Here's a little example of how something like that happened in my life. The podcast you're listening to right now is powered by Acast. And we have a team on ACAST that I work with for my show. And I actually was on a call two weeks ago with one of my team members on Acast, and we're rolling through a bunch of different ideas, you know, strategies, what's working, what's not working, what he's seeing across the podcasting world. And I had, oh, he had said to me, hey, Heather, I listened to your show and I heard about your new book, Overcome youe Villains. Tell me a little bit more about it. And so I'm telling him about the book and he says, I think you could be a really good fit for a promotion Amazon's doing. I said, Amazon, hello. Game changing. Yes, tell me about it. So he explains that Amazon, because he has contacts at Amazon, is working on a strategy for the fall where they're gonna highlight and showcase podcasters that have new books coming out. Ding, ding, ding. That's me. And so because he, he had heard one of my episodes talking about Overcome your Villains, and he had the right information from Amazon, which I don't have any contacts right on that side of the business, inside Amazon, he was able to put these two pieces together. So I jumped on the phone with Harper Collins. They got a press release over to him in time because the pitch was last week. And so he had all the necessary information pulled together and he connected the dots because he had the contact at all Amazon, he had the knowledge of what they were looking for. Harper Collins didn't know that. I didn't know that. So, so often it's important that we're sharing what is going on in our lives with other people in different circles. I never thought to reach out to pitch my book to my team at Acast. I just didn't think about the possibility. And luckily my friend was listening to the show, picked up on it and said, hey, hang on a second, there's something here. Amazon's looking for this. This could be a game changer, not only for the podcast, but also for the book. And so then I connected Acast with Harper Collins and now they're working together behind the scenes. So the more that we can connect those dots and the more information we can share and the different types of people we have in our corner, the more opportunity we create that we didn't even know existed previously. And he's also a number of times reached out to me saying, hey, keep me updated on guests, keep me updated on big things happening with your speaking, because you never know when Apple will be featuring, blah, blah, blah, right? So he's in these conversations and these talks with Apple and Amazon and these other big companies. So he has knowledge and he's privy to things before they hit the ground. I find out about these things when they show up on your computer and you see, oh, so and so podcaster featured with their new book on the COVID of Amazon. Amazing. But that's too late, right? It's too late at that point to go back and pitch you. They've made their choices. It's so important to find someone that's in the know ahead of time, that's looking out for you and then to work together to connect those dots. So that was just another crazy out of left field. I mean, and we don't know if we've got it. He made the pitch. We're included in the pitch. They're going to pick some people. We don't know who they'll pick, but putting it out there to the universe that it is. The Creating confidence podcast with Overcome your villains. Oh, gosh, please. To be featured on Amazon. Okay, so next. All right, this was interesting. As you know, I've been stuck in my apartment doing virtual speaking now, Gosh, for over a year, Right? Which is which can be really isolating and frustrating. Cause I'm a people person. I love to be with people. However, like anything, practice builds competence. Competence builds confidence. So for me, up until this past week, I'd only done one in person event in a year. Everything else I do is virtual. I'm so conditioned and practiced and competent now at speaking in front of a computer, whether it be on Microsoft Teams or on Zoom or on some proprietary platform. This is sort of my wheelhouse now. And what's super funny is I'll never forget this, is that when the pandemic first hit and I had to do my first virtual speech, I thought, wait a minute, some people can convert to digital. And let me give you this example. It's like going to SoulCycle in person and there's one amazing instructor and the energy's off the charts. But then when you try to take that class virtually through peloton with the same instructor, it doesn't connect. This, the energy's off. It's not the same. So there's some people that come through loud and clear on a digital platform, and then there's some that don't. And again, they might be great in person, but they just don't connect on that virtual platform. So that was my fear when this whole thing happened, is that, okay, I'm really good in person, but maybe I'm not really good virtually. And so I remember the first few months I offered 100% money back guarantee on every virtual speech I gave because I was just nervous and I didn't want to let anyone down over time. Right? Over a couple of months, I started to say, wait a minute, I am good on here. Like, I'm asking for reviews, I'm getting the feedback, and it's really strong. And then of course, you just get better and better, right? The more you do something, the more competent you become, the more confident you become, the better you are, and the more I would lean into the feedback I'd get from people. Here's what works virtually, which is different than in person, okay? But now it's been almost a year and a half of exclusively doing virtual. So it's the flip, right? I had my second in person speaking engagement after a year and a half. So now it's almost like you feel a little fish out of water now when you're in person because you haven't been doing that. Now I feel uber confident when I know I have a virtual speech. I'm not nervous at all. I'm cranking it, I'm owning it. I know what works. I know, hey, hit me up down the chat feed and I know how to play that. But now how do you do that in person? There's no chat feed anymore. I have to start relying on, okay, what used to work in person. And I don't necessarily remember because it's been a year and a half. So I had my second in person speaking event this week. And of course there's that strangeness around mask wearing or no mask wearing and people coming up to you and wanting to shake your hands and not really wanting to shake people people's hands. And some people are super cautious and some people don't care. Right? There's just so much disparity, I guess around everyone being very different in this time. And then at the last minute, my speaking engagement, it was at Lynn University Business School. They decide at the last minute to max the event out, make it smaller, put it in events elated because of COVID and because of Delta.

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So at the last minute, it got dialed back, which I was bummed out about. But here's the thing. In the end, I was kind of nervous going out there and it went great. It was amazing. And the energy that is produced at a live event is like nothing ever in the world. And it was so fun for me because I remember now getting to get feedback from people's eyes, right? When you do things virtually, usually I only see my face. I can't see the audience. That's how most of these events are set up. But now being back live, I can see their faces, I can call people out, I can ask questions of them and really engage with them in totally different ways. And that made it really fun, right? It made it sort of exciting for me versus just looking at my own face on zoom, which can get a little bizarre and boring. So I felt a little bit like a rookie going out there. And in the end, it went really well and I was so pleased with it and it was a lot of fun and it just reminded me, gosh, I used to, at the end of my events, do this text in to get on my email list and I was clunky around that. I wasn't as smooth as I used to be. I didn't make the call to action as clear, clear and clean as I used to. So there's opportunity for me to continue to refine the in person now, just like at first there was opportunity for me to refine my virtual. It's funny, we just constantly feel like in some ways we're starting over as a beginner again as things begin to change and evolve and they'll constantly be changing and evolving. So we're constantly gonna be growing with these different and new environments. So it was a win. I'm super pleased with it. The client was really happy and I got great feedback, which made it great. Okay. But then there was another really big story I wanted to share with you that made me so happy. I was tagged in a post on LinkedIn by a woman and it said something like this. I can't believe I'm posting this. And I want to thank Heather Monahan for giving me the inspiration to do this. I saw Heather speak at the ASA Thrive virtual event this year and she told her story about posting that she had been fired. And. And that gave me the inspiration to go ahead and do the same. So she went on to kind of tell her story about what had happened, how she had been fired. It was unexpected and she was flipping out. And then just like I had done basically put a post up explaining that you've been fired and then ask for help. And I get it. People say, that's not for me. And why would you share that you were fired. And don't you feel shame? But your shame will either claim you or you will claim your shame, right? So I claimed my shame. When I did that, I owned getting fired. I decided to reframe getting fired as in good company, because Steve Jobs has been fired and Oprah and J.K. rowling and so many other successful people. And then I asked for help in that post. That post went viral and that's what landed me on the Elvis Duran show. So this woman did the same thing. Her post explained, exploded, and the comments that she got in that post made me cry. They were beautiful. So many people offering her job, so many people offering her connections. And then of course, I jumped on there and said, hey, I would love to support you. I've got a playbook on how to bounce back from getting fired fast. I wanna share it with you. I wanna share with you the blueprint so that you can follow and take pieces from what I've done to see what works for. But I just want you to know you're not alone. And I also had her join my I do a Friday team meeting and I had her come to my Friday team meeting and then I invited her to my book launch team. So she's gonna be at my next book launch meeting. So anyways, we hit it off. She was great. And she told me, she said, Heather, in 24 hours, my entire life changed. And here's what she meant by that. Before she put that post up, she was so down, so depressed, feeling like she didn't know what she was gonna do for work, feeling so crushed. She put that post up and within 24 hours, she had countless opportunities. She felt so incredibly hopeful, so excited about the possibilities and in a position to be able to choose what she wanted to do. And that shift, that can happen in 24 hours when you, number one, debunk your beliefs, Right? She had to debunk this idea that sharing that she got fired is shameful. No, it's not. That's not true. And. And she debunked that. And then she took massive action. She put that post up and then she surrounded herself with the knowledge that she needed to move forward. So that's the back process that's laid out in Overcome youe Villains, that three step process. It works every time, anytime and all the time. Debunk and take and Break down that belief, take massive action, and then curate and choose the right knowledge to surround yourself with to support you. And she did this process put, and even though she was super scared, she pulled the trigger and did it. And so I'm so proud of her and I was so happy to see that. I remember what it feels like that day when you feel like you lost everything and you feel alone and you just feel destroyed and scared for the future. To hear that she was able to put some of these plays from my playbook into motion and have them pay off for her and and create a situation where she's now hopeful and excited about moving forward. She also mentioned to me that as she sat back and was reading some of the content that I've created, she realized she had a villain in that company and she had never seen it before or she had been looking away and not dealing with it. So definitely for the better for her, definitely. It's always gonna be for the best that we overcome our villains, fire our villains and set ourself up to take off. That will always be the right answer for sure. So I hope that that inspires you to debunk the beliefs that you're currently holding. If they're not helping to empower you, you take massive action and then you choose what knowledge you're going to surround yourself with to move forward as that powerful version of you, that most powerful version of you. And to that I also wanted to share this Monday 7:30pm EST one hour Zoom training with me. We do live Q and A. I do a talk, but we're getting into all of the behind the scenes on the book and all the things that are important to you that you want to talk about. Go to overcome your villains.com when you pre order my book for $24, you immediately get to download my $500 bonus bundle for free. Click join VIP book launch team and I will see you Monday 7:30pm EST and we will break this all down. I can't thank you enough for all of your support. If you could please share the podcast tag me. I will always repost anything that you do. I'm so grateful for all of your reviews. If you haven't had a chance to leave one yet, please do until next week. I'll be creating my confidence and I know you will be too. I decided to change that dynamic. I couldn't be more excited for what you're going to hear. Start learning and growing. Inevitably something will happen. No one succeeds alone. You don't stop and look around once in a while. You could miss it. I'm on this journey with me.