Welcome to Episode 76 of our podcast, Courageous Conversations, hosted by Leanne Pilkington.
In this episode, our guest is Julie Masters, CEO of Influence Nation. She talks about how to tell compelling stories, the difference between influence and popularity, the framework of a good story, her personal challenges with gender imbalance in her work, and her tips for taking the next step and embracing what we are truly capable of.
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00:30 – Standing out and communicating in a compelling way
02:00 – The halo effect; the deeper you delve into your community, the more engaged they are and the more they recommend you
02:50 – An example compelling story: No. 1 croissant as voted by the New York Times comes from Melbourne at Lune Croissanterie; how the croissant’s creator used her astrophysics knowledge to the process of cooking the perfect croissant
04:40 – Asking ‘why’ before writing content – not why you do something, but why people should care (think of this before thinking about being ‘Insta-famous’)
05:50 – Influence and popularity have come together; people seem to think influence equals popularity when that’s not the case.
06:45 – Popularity is a vanity or a feel-good metric. Business women shouldn’t fall for this.
07:30 – Becoming a translator for our audience; become a student of the world of your target market; be fluent in their questions and language
08:00 – Using a shared spreadsheet to collate frequently asked questions; using this to come up with compelling answers
09:00 – Questions fall into 4 main categories; what’s the process, what are the challenges, what are the opportunities, what are the trends
09:30 – Learn to step away from speaking your own language; stopping to listen and be speaking the language of your target market
10:00 – Julie’s experience with a mortgage broker; using a library of questions and answering a question via video – one video each day for 100 days. It’s a great tactic for influence and resonating with your audience.
12:00 – Epic storytelling; what it means and what are ways we can use it in the industry
13:00 – The vanilla ice cream problem; We find the crazy flavours exciting in the same way we find exciting content more appealing. But when it comes to producing our own, we remain plain and vanilla.
15:00 – Emails from humans are more likely to be opened than ones from a brand
15:15 – In the first 15 seconds, you must make an impact. One way is to ask a question that will make an audience that will make them answer ‘yes’.
16:55 – A great question; ‘why is this a story that only you can tell?’ Julie told this to an agent and he now uses this question to his vendors. ‘Tell me a story about your home that only you can tell.’
18:00 – Moving into an empathy space from making an impact; a trusting, engaged space.
19:20 – Closing powerfully; a purposeful close. It involves repetition of what was covered, it’s charged with emotion and paints a new bliss, and finally end with a request or invitation that encourages the next step forwards
21:30 – Word for word perfect is distracting. Structure gives you a roadmap without necessarily putting your hands on the steering wheel and press the clutch, etc
22:15 – Consistency in a storytelling standpoint is maintained through structure.
23:00 – 90-day cornerstone; for Julie this is her recording the podcast. Once a quarter she records as many as possible and then they are made into smaller portions and redistributed and becomes content for the next 90 days
24:45 – Top of the tree is live video; it can be transformed to podcasts, blogs, bite-sized content, etc.
25:15 – Do less and obsess. Do one incredible piece of work and then work on redistributing it
26:00 – Imposter syndrome and the extra layer of it for women; women tend to hold back until they’re absolutely certain it’s perfect. Men tend to not have this layer.
27:00 – Who do you think you are? The trick with this question is to answer this question for yourself. If you avoid the question, you stop stepping forward or growing.
28:30 – If you don’t like your answer, change your answer until you find one you like.
29:00 – Spanish word ‘duende’ which comes from flamenco; the duende is a moment of gravity, or owning the ground you walk on
30:30 – The duende will only arrive if we allow something in us to die; this can be story; something that holds us back from standing on our own; the shackles.
31:40 – Early in her career, Julie had to manage powerful career men. For her to get forceful, passionate, etc towards men was perceived as being emotional, stressful, etc.
33:00 – In response to anyone who says ‘it must be that time of the month’, something Julie comes back with is ‘well, everyone is hormonal, everyone has hormones!’ Like a man having road rage
33:50 – Failing at consultation and management of males; what Julie learned
34:50 – No one looks at Oprah and thinks she’s hormonal, angry, agresssive, etc. Developing a sense of stillness and gravity is something we choose to have, and what Oprah has.
36:30 – “I am listening, I have a sense of compassion and I won’t talk over you. But there is a line and we will talk about it.” Using this way of thinking to get across the gender imbalance
37:40 – Recommended listen: Tim Ferriss and Hugh Jackman interview
38:00 – “Breathe in as you would breathe out”.
38:50 – You can tell who the most powerful person in the room is usually by how little they say versus how much they say. They aren’t afraid of the space in between.
40:30 – You can’t be what you can’t see. You can’t make change unless you see the issue in front of you.
41:00 – We always make our choices unconsciously before we make them consciously. To get around unconscious bias is by conscious choice
42:00 – A quote Julie heard during the BLM movement: “I have realised that I didn’t make good choices. I had good choices.”
43:30 – The invitation – quotas are a rigorous form of invitation to contribute to important decisions
45:30 – Julie’s tips for others to take the next brave step: say yes, don’t question it. Have a panic later! Recognise the voice in your head.
49:45 – Julie’s strategy for her own speaking on stage – it all comes down to structure, knowing her first 5 mins and last 5 mins.
51:45 – If you had one minute only to tell her story, how would you go about it? The elevator pitch
53:30 – Julie’s closing advice; sit really quietly, write down on a pad of paper, what you know you need to do, what you know you need to get better at, where you know you need to show up more, what’s stopping you, and get curious