Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker

Why would we do one conversation after the other when we can just stand in front of an audience of

500 people and just move them so powerfully that they come to find us to work with us? It's just

unlike any other method I've found so far. I'm 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.

I'm ready for my close-up. Hi, and welcome back.
I'm so glad you're back here with us this week. Okay, you know it's so rare that I have a guest on multiple times, but today I just had to do it.
One, she's my friend, but two, this girl drops gems and teaches just at a whole other level that I had to expose you to it yet again. Okay, Ashley Stahl, she's the founder of Wise Whisper Agency.
She's literally crafted hundreds of TEDx talks and speeches, stages all over from South by Southwest, MGM, so many venues and events, other level. I mean, her speaker agency is crushing it and she's turning dreams into reality for hundreds of people and she can do it for you too.
Ashley, thank you so much for being here with us today. Thank you for having me.
Okay. So there's so much we want to talk about today, how to craft an ideal talk, how to be a captivating storyteller and blow people away and how to go viral.
But before we get into your wheelhouse and you've done all of those things, and I can't wait to hear from you on it. I was just asking you offline about when you worked at the Pentagon and you took me into this whole story about how, when you were at the Pentagon, you were asked to speak and give your first keynote ever and talk me through how that went.
Cause I know a lot of people that are listening now have never gotten on stage, have always thought about like, how do you do it? So break it down how it all happened and how you were able to pull it off. It's so funny.
I always used to think that when we would see somebody on TV, somebody like went running after them to grab them and put them there. And what I didn't realize is that that person is a publicist, not like somebody else that just wants them to be there.
I don't know why, like everybody who's quote unquote sought after, I just really growing up thought, wow, people must be like TV networks must be racing down to get this expert. They must be good.
I didn't understand the world of PR and publicity and how there is just entire workforces full of people that people are paying to get them on TV, to get them on stages. I had no idea how much personal brand can be a game of pay to play.
Or if you don't want to pay, you need to work and get it done because it's a lot of tedious work. So for me, in my 20s, I worked in national security.
It was during the Obama administration. I know we live in a very politically heated era, so I hope nobody gets spicy about that for better or for worse.
What we can agree, regardless of our politics, is that he was seen as a pretty good speaker. And so I would watch him speak.
And one of the things I noticed that he would do is he would always pause. And in his pauses, I could see people processing his information in such a different way.
Meanwhile, I ended up getting a job working in national security at the Pentagon. And so I wasn't really tied to him.
My team reported to the Secretary of Defense. And I spent my whole life trying to get there.
I learned languages. I got the degrees.
I spoke French, Arabic. I started learning Dari, which is spoken in Afghanistan.
And so there I was at the Pentagon in DC. I was like 23 and I wanted to join the CIA.
I wanted to become a spy. And the reason I wanted to do that was because people always shared things with me.
And I thought, wow, after seeing 9-11 happen, you know, when I was in high school, standing there watching the TV screen, I thought, wow, if this is happening in the world and I can use my language skills and my people skills to fix this in some way, because I always knew it was a gift from a young age, I'm going to use it. And what I didn't realize or calculate was how much I didn't know myself, how much my values didn't really line up with being a spy or working in national security.
But I benefited from a lot of the trainings. They put me in the FBI.
We learned different communication tools like elicitation and counter-elicitation. So what that looks like, Heather, is if I'm wanting to get information from you, I want to know how many people, you're in a class and you walk out the door and I want to know how many people are in that classroom.
Is it five? Is it 10? I'll say, hey, that's a pretty big class you have right there. What is that, like 20 people? And then you'll say, no, it's 10.
You make people correct you. That's counter-elicitation.
So there's so many different communication tools I learned. And I like to think that I use my tools for good and not for evil.
But it's been years since I worked in national security, but I'll never forget, I went to an award ceremony. I got this award in DC.
I met this girl. Her name was Sarah and I have so many friends named Sarah.
There's something with me and the Sarah's. They've all been so good to me.
This Sarah, she won this award with me. It was like a top 99 ceremony for women under 33 in national security or something like that.
My dad flew into DC. He was like so proud, you know, of my little award.
And I was like, oh, you look so put together. Who are you? And I'm talking to the Sarah girl.
She goes, oh, I just gave a Ted talk at the UN. It's the TEDx UN Plaza event.
I was like, oh my gosh, that's so cool that you did that. And I said to her, one day, I hope I can do something like that.
And she looked at me and she said, oh, I'm sure it's coming. And she said it like a cartoon, like a sparkle on her tooth, like, you know, like, I'm sure that's going to happen for you.
I'm like, no, it's not. And sure enough, I flew to Istanbul that week.
I was in a protest. It was like a government protest.
It was, you know, if you'd watch the news in 2012, you'd see Istanbul was like not going well. A lot of civil unrest.
There's tear gas in the air flying in my eye. I'm squinting my eyeballs and I get a text and it's this girl from last week from the award ceremony.
And she said, Hey, I recommended you to TEDx Berkeley. And they took my recommendation.
You're going to speak there. By the way, this is Sarah from the thing.
I'm like, oh my God. So I'm like 22, 23.
I don't even know how many years old. I'm like a fetus.
I'm so young. And I've never spoken on a stage in my freaking life.
Like what? And so I ended up getting an email from them going back to my hotel that night. And they asked me for a speaking reel.
I had no idea, Heather, what a speaking reel was. I used my iPhone 2, like what iPhone was in in 2010, 2011.
I used my iPhone whatever on Safari and typed in what is a speaking reel. Didn't have it.
I propped my phone against the bathroom window of my motel in Istanbul. I pulled the curtain behind me.
So I had like a backdrop and I just started talking at the screen and decided that was going to be my speaking reel, like really hot mess express. For some reason, it was like an act of God.
They took me, they accepted me. And you know, it's so great.
It's honestly great. I can't find it.
Like I look at my email and I see, but I sent it via WeTransfer, you know, when WeTransfer was a thing. And the link is obviously dead because it's like 15 years old or whatever it is.
And thank God it is because I don't think I could sit and watch myself in this video, but they accepted me as a speaker. I ended up going on stage after Guy Kawasaki, who is a, I don't even know how to describe him as a speaker, like an epic speaker.
And he's a legend. And everybody, when I got to the TEDx Berkeley event, it was 2013, that event.
Because once you get booked for a talk like this, you still have three to six, even eight months to prepare. It depends.
There's some runway. So I got the yes.
Every night, I thought they were going to take it away from me. They were going to change their mind and be like, never mind.
You're not our speaker. Because I just felt like this imposter.
Because I kind of was. Like, I had never spoken in my whole life.
But that's the thing that makes the TED and TEDx brand so awesome, is that they're really looking for people who have a story. And the thing that I've learned as a writer at my core, that's really who I am, is that you can make stories and art out of everyday life.

That's what great writers and artists can do.

So I deeply believe that everybody has a story to tell.

And this moment in time was my moment to tell mine.

So I got on stage right after Guy.

I forgot my lines as I was walking up.

And then I just kind of centered myself and remembered everything.

I memorized every word of my nine-minute speech. And the thing went viral, which was just mind-blowing.
And the reason that was possible was because when I got this TEDx talk opportunity, I found somebody in the administration in D.C. who was a speechwriter.
And I said, look, like I'm about to embarrass myself and fall flat on this YouTube red dot thing.

Like, you've got to help me.

And he just sat me down for like 20 minutes.

And he's like, here's how you write a speech. There's the opener.
There's the key points. How many minutes is it? Okay.
Nine minutes. Okay.
That's only three pages typed, Ashley. That's not a long speech.
You should memorize it. If you memorize it, you'll say it better.
I followed his directions in that 20 minutes, and there we were. I gave my thing.
And it changed my whole life. Like that talk, I got around 2 to 3 million views from it.
I got 80% of my leads. I ended up launching a coaching business and leaving Washington, D.C.
because I was so good at job hunting, and that was my thing, and it was the recession. I helped everybody with their job hunt.
So I started a business. 80% of my clients came from that one nine minute talk.

And I always had a wait list and I just couldn't believe it. I'm like, wow, I am watching so many

business people do so many things to get leads, to make money, to survive. And I just needed to go

memorize three pages typed and like go stand on this dot and that's it. It felt like a lot when I was doing it because I held it so heavily, like it was a big deal for my career.
And it was, it was my first speech of my whole life. And it was going to be, you know, memorialized on a YouTube channel with 40 million subscribers.
I didn't want to fall flat on my face. And that fear, there was like the fear of God in me.
It lent itself to me, I don't know, like giving the best talk I could at that time.

And it all started in a spice bazaar with a text message in my pocket during a protest. And yeah, fast forward 10, 12, 15 years, I had a coaching business.
Most of my success came from not one, but two TEDx talks I would go on to give. I got international licensing deals on my e-courses from my TEDx talk.
My courses are all in Chinese and Asia on platforms like Masterclass, but in Asia, it's not Masterclass, but it's like it. I got a speaking agent.
He saw my talk. He contacted me.
He put me on a speaking tour. He booked me on 40 stages.
My keynote fee went from 5K to 30K per speech. It was all from these two little talks.
And I forever wondered in my career, why is anybody doing anything when they could just be doing this? And I don't care how much you like speaking or not, you have a story and you have a voice. So if you don't want to be a speaker, which, you know, spoiler alert, I learned I don't want to.
I actually want to be the woman behind the speaker. I'm the writer.
I got six book deals offered to me from these TEDx talks. I ended up taking one of them, and that book has been translated into multiple languages.
We've done about 60,000 books sold. and just for little old me who identifies as a writer first and foremost, it gave me permission to start offering myself up as a speech writer to people as the 10 or 15 years pressed on.
And I really got my mastery and went on those speaking tours and really learned how to command an audience. And now I have a writing team of 20 people at Wise Whisper.
We do many different things, but the most important ones is we help craft keynote speeches. We help get clients booked on all sorts of stages.
A hundred of our clients we've helped get booked on the TEDx stage with a hundred percent success, but we help clients every single month. We pitch them to up to 40 aligned stages.
So anyone who finds us that wants to establish themselves as a speaker, wants to speak their brand get book sales get clients through speaking we pitch them every single month as part of our offers to get them booked for those um we ghost write books so i've become officially the artist that i was meant to be and it's funny because i opened up my book in preschool and i remember the thing in preschool that happened preschool graduation the principal said what do you want to be when you grow up and that was our graduation ceremony all the kids went up to the microphone and said I want to be a firefighter I want to be a you know whatever I walked up and I think it's like a class of 30 kids and I said I want to be a mom and a poet and And I waited for the audience to clap. And it was like a black void, like deafening silence.
And it's wild because that's just how life is, right? Like, you know who you want to be so early sometimes. And then I went off and worked in national security and counterterrorism.
I went off and had a career coaching business. And then eventually all these things brought me back to who I am, which is I wrote a book.
Now I oversee a speech writing team. We're writing speeches and we're not just a speech writing team.
We're like a fucking dynasty. Like the people on my team, I have writers from shows like Succession, New Girl, Lizzie McGuire, That's So Raven, like classics, and like shows right now that we're watching now.
Our executive creative director spent 13 years at Apple. She was Steve Jobs' right hand making decks for him, writing speeches for his executive team.
So where I'm at now in running this agency is really being in an energy of creativity, of artistry, of poetry. And I have learned so much about what it takes to captivate an audience.
And it has been such a joy to help other people craft talks, even if it's a 10 minute talk that actually create results for them. We had a client just last week, we crafted a talk for him.
It was like a 10 minute TEDx speech that he's going to go give, or we booked him on the TEDx stage. And he ended up getting an award at a gala.
And they're like, you can speak up to 10 minutes. And he used his TEDx script that we helped him craft.
And he said at the end, he made an ask for the audience to donate to a cause. He got $2.6 million in donations off that 10 minute script that he just tacked on an ask at the end.
It is just the power of being able to move people and make an ask. That is incredible.
Oh my gosh, he must've been over the moon when he called you. Yeah, I mean, it's funny.
These people that are our clients, we are pretty high in service. Like The talent that we scope is so world-class.
And there's a part of me that kind of hates the fact that we can't be the discount agency that's more affordable because there were so many years in business that I needed and still need more affordable resources. That's not us.
We're pretty high-end because high-end talent has high-end compensation, And I've learned it firsthand over here. So we have clients that are coming in that are really movers and shakers in the world.
So for him, I guess it was just another day, like he pulled 2.6 million, but he shot me a text and said, great script. Like people were in tears and they just donated so much money to my cause.
And I just thought like, isn't that wild that the only thing standing between you and what you want are the words you choose and how they make people feel? Like that ability to have a conversation that moves somebody is the epicenter of getting what you want out of your life. Oh my gosh, you make it all sound so simple.
However, it doesn't feel that simple for the rest of us. So break down for us or share with us what is captivating storytelling and like, how do people use that in day-to-day life? You know, one of the things I've been sitting with recently is that there's a lot of different types of storytellers.
And there's two types that we really lead with at Wise Whisper Agency. And I'll just give everybody the, I say nine types, the ninth one is the boring storyteller.
So there's really just eight. The first one is the hero's journey, right? So that's like from Joseph Campbell.
It's a typical beginning, middle, and end, you know, like in the middle, there's some sort of conflict and the end, it resolves itself. It's a standard story arc.
The second type of story that you hear all the time, we often see on TV dramas, it's a lot of ups and downs, and then it completes in some way, like a finale. So it's almost like they have some ups, they have some downs, we don't really know where it's going, and then it has this sort of completion to it.
That's the drama stories. The snapshot stories are, that's what I like to call them, it's snapshots of multiple stories from multiple people's perspectives and bringing them into one.
So we see this type of storytelling in a lot of movies. And as people are listening, especially if they have a pen in hand, they can write this down.
They can start to see like, what kind of storyteller are you? Right? So the snapshot stories, there's a movie called life itself. It's a tearjerker.
It shows a car accident happening and somebody dies. And the whole movie backs up and it's written in a way where you look at the life of every single person that was impacted by that car accident.
And then the movie ends with all of those people coming together and meeting each other. A lot of books are like that.
A chapter might be the name of a character and the chapter's told through the name of the character. This is snapshot storytelling.
And that's just, you know, maybe somebody listening right now, they're thinking about reading a book or writing a book. They're thinking about writing a speech.
These are all different approaches you could do, but I would argue the two that we're using are the most powerful. So I'll get into those.
The fourth type is the gap stories. It's comparing what is now with what could be.
We see this often in speeches. Like Martin Luther King's, I have a dream speech.
That is a traditional gap storytelling method. My dream is that it's over here.
We're over here. Very, very common storytelling method.
You see a lot of politicians doing that. Number, the fifth one is the proof in the pudding storytelling.
I use this one quite often. Politicians use this a lot.
And we've had a lot of politicians come to us and ask us if we can write their campaign trail speech for them. Cause it's like a Ted talk.
It's like this inspirational 10 minute thing that gets people rallying. So the proof in the pudding stories, it's about one core concept with different people or situations to prove it, right?

So you might see a court argument and then a lawyer is using evidence to prove it, stories to prove it.

Or you might see a politician saying, this is what we should do and here's all these people that are impacted by us not doing this.

We're proving that we should do this.

So that's an educational framework, educational storytelling. We use that quite a bit at Wise Whisper Agency and might get more into that.
The sixth one is mosaic stories. It's showing how all these different ideas came to be, all these different fragments came to be.
So one thing I think about a lot, and maybe this is just that I worked in counterterrorism, is the Arab Spring. So we remember the entire Middle East lit up around 2012 Arab Spring.
And there was a lot of little

pieces of that movement that became momentum to create the entire movement. So if somebody wanted

to tell a story about something like the Arab Spring, they might want to use the mosaic method.

They're grabbing little peaks and little moments of different people's lives, different situations

Thank you. story about something like the Arab Spring, they might want to use the mosaic method.
They're grabbing little peaks and little moments of different people's lives, different situations that catapulted into one full movement. The seventh is the bait and switch story.
It's a story that sounds like it's going one way and then it completely blindsides you and goes a different way. A lot of people think of TV shows like The Undoing with Nicole Kidman.
That show on HBO was all about somebody was found dead and who did it. And then in the end, you get completely blindsided by who did it, right? That's the bait and switch storytelling.
And then the one that we use at Wise Whisper, in addition to the proof in the pudding, where we have one argument and we educate people on why that's the way to go is this one. It's called the powerful flashback stories.
This approach to storytelling is dropping people right into a moment in time that you don't give them context. You don't talk about how it was a sunny day at 6 a.m.
and you made your coffee. No, you get them right into the heat of the moment.
So think about a spy movie where you're dropped right into a spy mission in the first scene. Like you don't know who to, you don't know what's what, but somebody's running and somebody's being chased and you're in as fuck, right? Like that's a powerful flashback story.
So, and then I just say number nine, boring stories, because life is just too short for a boring story or a bad haircut. That's like my motto.
It's just too short. So what does Wise Whisper use? We use the powerful flashback.
We use the proof in the pudding. So let's talk a little bit about the flashback since we just left off on that.
There's many different things that you want to think about to make something go viral, to make something do well. The first piece is obviously the title, right? Like when I think about titles, I think about white elephant parties.
Like you don't really know what you're working with. You just see presents that are wrapped.
So why would you pick an ugly present? Like if you're not gonna pick them on, it has like snot on it and the bow is falling off and like God knows what happened to the present to get to the white elephant party. You're gonna pick the one that looks exciting, that looks fun, because that's all you have to work off of.
That's how titles are. So you want to ask yourself, what is a title that aligns with what my ideal customer is searching, the person who I want to find me? If you look at the top 100 most trending TEDx talks, and I say that because we've just helped so many clients write theirs and get booked for those, you're going to see titles like the art of, the skill of, three ways to, the missing ingredient for.
You're going to see words that have SEO optimized potential. Like if you write the art of confidence and you're working with a platform like YouTube, you have pretty high SEO potential to be found, right?

So first thing first is the title.

The second piece, which is what I wanna get into with your storytelling, is how you open up your story.

So if you're giving a speech,

there's maybe like three different approaches

that we see people open up speeches with quite often,

and they all line up with the powerful flashback.

So the first one is the cheap shot. I don't mean to insult it by calling it a cheap shot, but what it really is is the most crazy story of your life, right? So my second TEDx talk opens up with my dad being in the kitchen.
It's not even a story about me, by the way. I think that's interesting to point out that I opened up a speech about my speech about somebody else's story.
You can do that. You can open up a speech with a story that's not yours.
Permission slip. I gave a story about my dad in the kitchen brewing his coffee and getting a phone call from somebody saying that I was kidnapped.
It's a crazy story. People were in right away.
That's my second TEDx talk in 2019. My first TEDx talk.
The first three words of that talk are spying,

the Pentagon, counterterrorism. And then I say, this was my career path at age 22.
It's all about grabbing people. And the cheap shot is about grabbing them with the craziest story you could ever think of.
So for example, we had a client at Wise Whisper Agency. We were helping him distill his ideas into a TEDx talk and to a keynote speech.
And we went through his life stories. We do this all the time.
And one of his life stories was that he got in two, not one, but two fatal car accidents. Nobody survived except for him.
And he walked away completely unscathed. So to us, that was a pretty crazy story.
Like how could you step away from something like that? So that's a cheap shot story. Cheap shots always work.
And I don't mean to call them cheap shots to insult them. They just are, they're a low lift.
They tell themselves, they're so wild. Everybody's going to tune in.
The second type of powerful flashback is more about the relatable heartfelt story. And I think it's really important I talk about this because a lot of people might think, oh, I don't have any crazy stories.
My life has been kind of unremarkable. I totally get that.
You have just as much potency as somebody with a cheap shot because everyday life can be so relatable and so heartfelt. I think about a client we had who we helped her write her keynote.
And we have a very comprehensive intake form that collects people's life stories. And in her intake form, she told this story of her being in high school and she was at a party and it was the popular guy's house.
And she always felt kind of insecure, kind of uncomfortable. She told me she felt like she was pudgy and just like, you know, whatever those things are in high school that feel really bad is what she was going through.
And she heard a girl say, hey, so-and-so wants to talk to you. And it was the popular kid that wanted to talk to her.
She ran to the bathroom to get her hair all zhuzh. She heard through the crack of the bathroom door, somebody telling him, hey, she wants to talk to you.
And he said, ew, that girl, I don't want to talk to her. And that moment really set her on a low self-esteem path, lower than low could get.
But as an opening story, that's not a cheap shot. That's not a crazy story.
It's just a sad, hard moment in her life. And that's why the powerful flashback method, it's not just about bringing people into a whole story.
It's about looping people into a moment in time. So if she was opening up her keynote with that moment, she would open up by saying, I was at a party and I'll never forget this moment where this person, you know, and then she can back into the whole story.
It was early in the morning, but that hook of getting people right into that pain moment. And I think a lot of people think storytelling and speeches are about making people cry.
And that's not the case. This is just a sad story.
There's a lot of heartfelt stories, right? I think about a client who we wrote a speech for her about burnout. And when we really looked at the speech, it actually was a speech about having fun.
We opened up her talk about her surfing. And it was like the first time she did something fun after years of being so burnt out and being a workaholic.
And I think that's what it's really about is taking a simple story but looking deeper beneath it and saying, what does this story really represent for me? And making that be the thing that you share about in your flashback. So she could get on stage and say, in 2017, I got on a surfboard and I realized it was the first time I'd had fun in 10 years.
So it's like really just opening up and painting a picture for people in a heartfelt way. So you don't have to have a cheap shot.
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That's netsuite.com slash monahan. The third type of storytelling is the conversational approach.
This is the kind of story that you see all the time. You see it a lot on the TED or the TEDx stage.
People get on stage, they'll tell you a shocking statistic. They'll tell you some sort of piece of data.
The problem with this one, we try not to use this very much, but I wanted to include it for people to just contextualize how this can exist in a powerful flashback, is people might start to have a discussion with the audience and drop a powerful statistic to get to their intentions or to get their attention. But then they start to converse with the audience, and usually the audience will get bored unless the story in the conversation is powerful enough and heartfelt enough.
So it's kind of not as effective as giving a heartfelt story and taking people on a journey. Because if you say, did you know that 90% of the blah, blah, blah, blah has blah, blah, blah happened in their life? People will get your attention.
But then once you start to back up and explain it, you could lose people unless you have powerful storytelling. So just something to consider if you want to open up a speech with like a powerful statistic is make sure you have a story to go with it.
That is a flashback moment, something potent that people can go into with you. Wow.
Oh my gosh. This is like a deeper dive than I've ever done into the art storytelling.
So

thank you for explaining all that. When you look at the data and the most successful TEDx talks, TED talks, is there a trend that one opener is the right opener? What does it tell you? Yeah.
I mean, pretty much like you're going to go viral if you have a cheap shot story and you tell it with enough spirit. So if you have a crazy story and it's the craziest story ever, not only a crazy story, but you can help people feel a range of emotion throughout the crazy story.
That's the second piece. Then you're in a position for something to go very viral as long as it's followed by good content.
Because if you just have a crazy story, but the rest of your content isn't really helpful for people, it's not going to hit. They're just going to be like, wow, that's a crazy story.
I felt so much, but it didn't help me. And they're not going to share it.
So you have to pair crazy story with a range of emotion. If you look at my second TEDx talk in 2019 about how to figure out what you really want, my dad gets that phone call in the kitchen.
I was kidnapped. And I talk about how we had just lost my big sister.
We just took her off of life support and the fear in his body of like his only other daughter left getting a phone call like this. So I made people feel like his fear, his heartbreak, it ended up being a scam.
Spoiler alert, the phone call that he got that I was kidnapped was a scam. But I ended up going home that night.
And it was like, for me, this moment of seeing how fragile he is, like he almost wired his entire life savings to some nobody who scammed him and pretended that they had kidnapped me on the phone. Meanwhile, I was like sitting at coffee with somebody down the street.
So this phone call was so real for him. But so it's a cheap shot story.
It's a crazy story. And I say that again, without judgment towards myself for using it.
But I still showed people the range of emotion on my dad's experience, what he had just been through in his life, why that phone call meant so much. I made commentary in the speech about that.
I brought people into my experience that for me, what came up was realizing my dad dad's getting older like he's too fragile to handle phone calls like this and then I also started talking about the compassion I had for the kidnappers in the TED talk I talked about how why would anybody make a living this way scaring the life out of people and taking their life savings and the only thing I could come up with was like they didn't think of another option. Maybe they didn't have another option.
Maybe they live somewhere

that this was like the only real way to make money. There's a lot of third world countries

where people are making money through scams because of survival reasons. And so I just

remember looking at these kidnappers in this speech and saying like, wow, and that's the story

I'm going to tell myself about them, that they must've thought there was no other option.

And so showing people that range

of emotion was pretty critical, I think, to being able to not just take a cheap shot story,

but to give it texture, to make it memorable. And then from there, you got to give your best

content. You got to give your best talking points.
And any speech you write, my rule of thumb is 115 words per minute. So I'm always thinking, okay, around 25% of any speech I give can be the opener.
And so I just kind of do my word count accordingly. When should people be hiring someone to write a speech for them.
So for example, I, as I'm sitting here, I'm like, I should have hired you to write my first TEDx talk. I didn't know what I was doing, right? I didn't even, oftentimes you just don't even know that's available to you that that's a thing, right? Like you just think that you're not even allowed to do that.
So when is it important enough that somebody should be actually hiring to have something written for them? It's such a chicken or egg thing because on one hand, we are pretty high in service. So I would tell people, work with us when you've already kind of done the lift to get yourself somewhere, but you want to get further.
But then there's the other part of me that's like, no, invest in the best, get the best talk because people can come in and have us write a 10 to 15 minute talk for them. And that's scoped out at a lower price point, right? They don't even need to ask us to book them on stages if they don't want.
And they want to do the tedious work of pitching themselves to get booked on stages. But if you have one 15 minute talk, and here's a mistake that I'm sure you've seen a lot of speakers make is they say yes to every talk.
And then they're constantly creating new content. It's one of the biggest mistakes you can make in your speaking career is constantly diluting what you know and turning it into these new speeches one after the next.
That really turns your speaking career into this graveyard of content that you haven't really mastered. And so I would say to anybody here who has at least maybe six figures in their business, if you want to your business to the next level, at least have a 15-minute talk.
And by the way, if you invest in a team like ours at Wise Whisper, you can take that 15 minutes, you have a spine of your speech and you can expand upon it on your own, right? Like if you don't wanna pay us to make it longer, you can put that time in, but now you've got a base. You've got a base talk.
And so I would say anybody that has a business that they want to get out there. And I was telling you earlier, Heather, there's two types of speaking, in my opinion.
Like the first type is speaking for your brand, just getting brand awareness, right? So speaking in front of ideal audiences to get book sales, to put your influence out there, to practice your speeches, to get consulting clients. That's speaking for your brand.
In that case, it's beneficial for you to be able to promote yourself. So usually you're going to want to do unpaid speaking engagements because as soon as they're paying you a high fee, they're your customer, they're your client, and they are demanding of you what they want for their audience.
It's not about you promoting yourself. The second type of speaking is that.
It's having an established speaking career, going on the speaking circuit, being a full-time speaker. And I know you know, Heather, with all the work you've done in the speaking arena, that that's a very real thing is there's a lot of people who want to be a full-time paid speaker.
Those speakers usually will come to us to help them craft the TEDx talk and get it booked on the TEDx stage or any stage that they want. But I would say any business owner, you really owe it to yourself to have a powerful talk in your back pocket.
If you want our help getting you on stages all over the world, we have an offer where we pitch up to 40 aligned targeted stages per month for you. We have relationships on these stages.
It includes podcasts. The amount of people that we are booking every day for speeches in front of ideal customers who want to hear what they have to offer, it just makes me think like, why would we do one conversation after the other when we can just stand in front of an audience of 500 people and just move them so powerfully that they come to find us to work with us.
It's just unlike any other method I've found so far. And I feel like same with you because you've been speaking for so long.
No, you just really illustrated the example of it doesn't need to be one-to-one selling when it can be one-to-many and instead attracting that business to you. It's the power of the personal brand and the power of taking stages.
You also brought up another really interesting point that I had not thought about previously, which is the importance of storytelling in regards to other arenas, not just on stage, but you just brought it up as a guest on podcasts. How often do you see people you're teaching them through talks that you're giving them, but then they're applying that to podcasts? Right.
And if you take a look at the beginning of this conversation, you were like, Ashley, you worked in national security and I did the flashback approach in this conversation. I was like, oh yeah, I got this award.
And there I was in Istanbul and the tear gas was going off. I brought you right into the moment with me.
So I do this without even knowing I'm doing anymore. I think it's because we've just written so many speeches and I've overseen so many of them.
But the way I see it is good storytelling. And again, there's those eight different ways you can tell stories or write books or make movies.
But these two ways I do where one is about the flashback, the second one, which I can get into, is about proof in the pudding. It's educational storytelling.
There's different tactics you can use to just be valuable. And one thing I want to share with everybody

is original content cuts through the noise. And what I mean by that is sometimes we look at our

stories and we think in conversations like this, how do we be the most powerful storyteller ever?

But what I want to tell everybody listening is if you are giving content that people really need, if you break your leg, the most important thing you want to know is how to fix your leg, how to make it not be broken, right? You don't need a good storytelling doctor to tell you a whole story about how they're going to fix your leg. You just need the steps you need to take from the doctor.
Okay, first you need to come in. Then we need to get a scan.
Then we need to put you on this plan, and then it's going to be better. When somebody is in deep need of your services, you actually don't need to be that good of a storyteller because at the end of the day, they just need it.
You are the scratch to their itch. And so I also want to point out the power of just being an expert and not just being an expert, but covering a topic that an audience, picture an audience like a desert.
If they're thirsty for water and your content is the water, you don't even have to put that much pressure on yourself to be a good storyteller. And I think that that's really important based on what you're booking, based on what you're talking about.
I think a lot about clients who come into Wise Whisper Agency. We try not to write books because writing speeches, you know, I could probably have one writer on my team and these are coveted resources for us, our writing team.
I could probably have one of them write three speeches or four speeches in a month. It probably takes seven months for them to be stuck in one book.
So I've stayed away from books, but now too many clients have come back and been like, please, please, please. And our writers really love them.
And we're like, no, we love them too much. We want to write their books.
So we've gotten into book writing. The books that we have really found are the best ones to write are the ones that kind of write themselves, right? It's like the broken leg.
It's like, this is very straightforward content and people are going to read it if this is what they need. It really, you really don't have to be that interesting.
I think being a good storyteller is a service to make the ride more beautiful. And a lot of my job as a storyteller is I kind of picture my clients, my listeners, I picture myself like the driver of the magic school bus.
And when I go on a podcast, I'm like, all right, everybody get in and let me show you what happened at that protest that morning and get in and let me show you what happened on the phone. Look at my dad.
He's right there. He's on the phone.
You bring people into your world with you and you cut the noise and the power of that and getting people's attention cannot be underestimated. You know, that being said, that approach that I talked about, the proof in the pudding, educational storytelling, while we do a lot of flashback storytelling for our openers of speeches, we do a lot of educational storytelling.
And what that looks like is etymology. So for example, etymology is the study of words and how they've evolved throughout history.
So you've heard a lot of people talk about the word passion, and it comes from the Latin root patior, which means suffering. Compassion means with suffering, right? People talk about that all the time.
We use that. So we're being educational in our speeches, or we might talk about history.
Like maybe there's an approach on this podcast I could have taken where I could have talked about ancient storytelling and how it kept tribes together since X BC, right? Like I could have gone into the history of storytelling and how it's one of the most important parts of the human experience and how people understand each other. That wasn't the approach I took on this podcast, but having an educational historical approach to how you talk about something.
Let's say that you are a midwife. Can you talk about the history of midwifing babies? Like where does this come from in society? That's very educational.
People love to be stimulated to learn something new and to understand the relevance of what you're doing and to contextualize it in the experience of life that we're all in. When you think about businesses growing their sales beyond forecasts, like like Feables by Mr.
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that follows. Another educational tool is obviously data.
Really, really powerful. So

there's many things you can do with storytelling, but hopefully this gives everybody listening