Being an Influential Voice at Home, Work and in Community with Tricia Brouk: An EOFire Classic from 2022

0:02Who's ready to rock today? Fire Nation JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on fire brought to you by High Level, the all-in-one sales and marketing platform. On today's classic episode, we'll be breaking down how to be an influential voice at home, work, and in the community. To drop these value bombs, I brought to Tricia Brooke and the EO Fire Studios, a former dancer and TEDx producer. Tricia is an international award-winning director, author, and founder of The Big Talk Academy. Her book, The Influential Voice, Saying What You Mean for Lasting Legacy, was a number one pre-release on Amazon.

0:32And today we talk about how you have to consciously and constantly think about how you can communicate effectively to create dignity, respect, curiosity, and love, and oh so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Tricia and our sponsors. Are you ready for the ultimate all-in-one platform for entrepreneurs, marketers, coaches, and agencies? Build funnels, automate follow-ups, manage clients, and even white-label your own software. Say hello to our featured partner, High Level, and visit highlevelfire.com to start with your free trial today. Fire Nation, it's time to stop guessing and start winning with a proven playbook.

1:12Inside the Freedom Circle, you'll have access to my step-by-step systems for creating offers, building processes, and driving traffic all in just 90 days. Ready for freedom? Visit freedom-circle.com to learn more. Trisha, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with? What is up, Fire Nation? I'm so excited to be here. And I think that most people disagree that everyone has the personal power to create the abundance in wealth, health, love, and prosperity that they desire. Wow. That's starting the episode with a bang, Fire Nation, which shouldn't surprise you from the intro about being an influential voice at home, work, and community.

2:05And we are speaking with the Empowered Woman of the Year from 2021, the most influential leader in media and production in 2022. And of course, we'll be talking about Trisha's book, The Influential Voice throughout this episode. But I want to start, Trisha, by talking about parameters and examples of being an influential voice. What is that? An influential voice means if you're sitting across the kitchen table from your kids or your partner, you have an opportunity to speak with dignity and curiosity and respect because everything that you say is going to influence them. It means that if you are standing in front of a classroom, you are an influential voice to your students.

2:49And if you are sitting across the boardroom from your team, you are also an influential voice, which means we have to think consciously and constantly about how we're communicating and how we're doing that effectively in order to create dignity, respect, curiosity, and love in our communication styles. So Fire Nation, are you having that kind of intentional conversation with yourself and with others. I mean, I think that's super important. And I kind of want to move into the key elements of being influential, because I think if a lot of people are listening right now, they might be asking themselves, well, what does exactly it mean to be influential?

3:30What are some of those key elements? Let's break those down. When you have clarity on your purpose, your values, and your mission, that is going to be the barometer for you to stay on point as an influential voice. When you understand why you get up in the morning every single day, and for me, it is to make the world a better place by helping amplify and elevate the voices of others. When you're clear on your values, that's your north star. So if you feel like you might be going off point or off course as an influential voice, you can come back to your values to make sure that you are still in alignment and your influential voice is being communicated and heard the way you want to.

4:15And values are different over time. The values that you grew up with may not be the values that you have today. The values that we have here at The Big Talk are inclusion, integrity, excellence, dignity, curiosity, respect, and love. And we come back to those values no matter what we're doing. If we're putting out a new program, if I'm coaching my speakers, we are always in alignment with those values. And then, of course, the mission. That is also important to being an influential voice because if you know what your mission is in life and you're on purpose, every time you show up as an influential voice, you will be in alignment.

4:53And that's why it's so important to get clear on purpose, values, and mission. I want to talk about one of your students. I want to talk about somebody who's learned from you. Like give us kind of an example, a walkthrough. We don't need to use any names or any real specifics, but what was the process you took them through from not being influential when it came to their voice, like not having those key elements. Walk us through what an example would be of how you took somebody from A, not being an influential voice, to Z, they are rocking it, they have their zone, they know what they're talking about, they are being influential.

5:31One of the first speakers who approached me about supporting her work came to me and said, I want to do a talk about rare eye disease. I have three children, two were born blind, And I want to talk about retinal disease. She had started a foundation 16 years prior. And in our process, and this is the process I take all of my speakers through, it's the active listening session. I just ask tons of questions. They're not required to do anything except answer my questions fully, honestly, and vulnerably. And at the end of this active listening session, I said, Kristen, this talk is not about rare eye disease.

6:08This talk is about how you learned to see the world through the eyes of your children. And when that light bulb went off, and this is part of ways of communicating, you have to have context. When that light bulb went off on why it's important, because she wanted to create awareness, why it was important to her, because she had two blind kids, but why it's important to the world is when you create that global impact. And when she opened up the idea to also include people like me who don't have kids and who don't have blind kids, well, I can learn to see the world through the eyes of others and create more compassion and empathy in doing so.

6:49And when she began to talk about her idea in that way and had that global impact, she went from a mom advocating for rare eye disease to a woman who stepped on to the stage at the FDA and got funding for rare eye disease because she knew how important it was for the communities. In addition, she was able to create awareness for everybody who wants to look at the world through the eyes of someone else to have more compassion and empathy. That is the power of being an influential voice. I love that example for a lot of reasons. I think a lot of people in my audience will be thinking along the lines of, well, I watch TED Talks and I watch all these great people present from stage and they're just so knowledgeable.

7:36They have like degrees and PhDs and all these different things. And they just have so much knowledge on these broad topics and they share that. And I can never be that person. Well, the reality is, you know, I love to say, knit your flipping face off because there could be something so unique, so special, so like minute and just really narrowed down into this one specific topic that you can literally be the best influential voice in the world on rare eye disease in this example. But what is something that's your example, Fire Nation? What's something that is special to you? Maybe something with your kids or with your parents or with your loved ones or friends that you've experienced or yourself.

8:17I mean, there's so many people, you know, who become functional medicine doctors because Western medicine can't help them heal their guts or fix other health issues that they're dealing with. and they become the best at this one micro topic within functional medicine that they can build a whole career off of that. You can build a whole talk off of it. You can become incredibly influential all around it. And when you add what Trish is talking about today with communication, things just start to happen. And when we get back from thanking our sponsors, Fire Nation, we got some great things coming your way.

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11:09High level, join the revolution. Trish, we're back and I'm excited for this part because you've devised six ways to effectively communicate for impact. Let's go through one by one and kind of have a little conversation about each. The first thing that's really important is that you trust that your voice matters. And that might seem really, really simple. But the reality is there are 7.8 billion people on the planet, which means you're pretty guaranteed one of them needs to hear from you. And that's why it's so important that you trust your story, your voice, your point of view. There's no other you.

11:49And when you trust that what you have to say matters and that your story matters, and you begin to give yourself permission to share that story, the urgency and the responsibility with which you share it is going to impact others. You will be an influential voice. And this goes back to what we started talking about. You don't have to be a CEO or an author or somebody who has a PhD at the end of your name. You're an influential voice because you speak with dignity, authenticity, respect, curiosity, because you know that every single thing you say has the opportunity to affect another human being.

12:30And that's what being an influential voice is about as well. Before you move on, I really want to talk about trusting the fact that your voice does matter. because this is actually kind of a personal topic for me on this specific one, because my sister at 34 years old came down with breast cancer. She ended up having a double mastectomy. And one of the more devastating things, there's a lot of devastating things, but one of the more devastating things is she just felt like she was alone. I mean, she looked around. She's like, I don't feel like there's any other 34-year-old women who are dealing with this level of breast cancer.

12:58And of course there were, but she just wasn't able to find them. And so when she got through it and was cleared and everything was great, and now she's been cancer-free for a number of years now, she wanted to go back and like help out this community. And she was just kind of hesitating. And I'm like, well, Marcy, like, why are you hesitating? Because you literally said multiple times, like how devastating it was to not be able to find people in your same age bracket that were going through the same thing. And now here you are with the ability to give that to others to say, hey, like I was 34 years old.

13:29I was a mother of two. And like, this is what I dealt with. And like, this is, you know, how I dealt with the best and be that voice and really become influential in that community. And she actually went and launched a podcast called Breast Cancer and the Unknown all around that topic and was able to be a very influential voice around that because of the reasons we just discussed. So you need to trust, Fire Nation, that your voice matters and whatever focus it's going to be. So, Tricia, keep going. For sure. I just want to also highlight, Marcy, I'm glad that you're all right and that you have the courage to start that podcast.

13:59And I made a short documentary about a young girl who was being bullied in high school. And this documentary premiered in LA and a stranger after the documentary came up to me, an adult man, and said, I'm so glad that you were able to put voice to this story because I was bullied in school and I recently got divorced and I was contemplating suicide. and because you gave this girl a voice, I am going to get help and I am not going to take my life. That is the impact that you can have on sharing your story. So I just want to go back to that for a second. Moving on, it's so important to coexist with fear.

14:43When you take a stage, you're going to have fear. Your body is going to physiologically betray you but the reality is if you know it's not about you and you make it about the audience, you can coexist with that fear. The second that you put the attention on the audience and you forget about how you feel, how you're being perceived, what if I do this? What if I fail? What if I fall? What if I faint? None of that is going to happen because you're prepared and the audience wants you to succeed. So it's super important that you learn how to coexist with that fear when you get on stage or when you do a podcast episode or when you do a Facebook Live, any kind of communication or have a hard conversation with your partner.

15:27That is all about being an influential voice and being able to coexist with that fear. And remember, it's not about you will help you do that. The third way to communicate effectively, and I talked about it just now about Kristen is understanding context. These are the three questions I want you to ask yourself, Fire Nation, when you're talking about an idea. Why does it matter in general? Why does it matter to you personally? And why does it matter to the world? And this is going to help you dial in your idea, but also create a global impact by sharing it. So if we think about it in relationship to Kristen, why did the idea matter?

16:05She wanted to create awareness around this rare eye disease. Why did it matter to her? She's got three kids, two are blind. Why does it matter to the world? because when you look through the eyes of others, you can create compassion and empathy for yourself. And then if we move into credibility, vulnerability, and relatability, these are vital components to being an effective communicator. And the reason why is because as a speaker, as a communicator, it's important to be credible. And this does not mean that you have to be fancy. It means that you have lived experience. And what I mean by fancy is PhD, book, all the things.

16:49It's important that you recognize your credibility is because you have lived the experience. And then of course, relatability. You want to be a human being who's authentic, that people can relate to and connect with. And then vulnerability is so important and everybody's talking about vulnerability, Well, it doesn't mean sharing your trauma before you're healed from it. It means that you are making a decision to share a very personal experience or story in service of the audience. And I'm not the first person who said this, but it's important that you share your story from the scar, not the wound.

17:28And I'll give you an example. One of my speakers applied to TEDx Lincoln Square when I was the producer there with a talk about forgiveness. and her written application was about how she wanted to share with the audience how to forgive. Everybody teaches you it's important to heal with forgiveness, but nobody tells you how. And her story was about how her mother and brother were murdered on Christmas Eve. And JLD, I thought to myself, how am I going to put her on my stage? I'm going to feel bad. The audience is going to feel bad. It's going to just be a sad situation. And that's when I gave myself the challenge of asking her to move forward to the video submission because I couldn't imagine how she was going to do this.

18:13And to this day, it's one of the most powerful submissions I've ever received. She sat across from her laptop, lit by the computer screen, and shared the story from the scar. She was not upset. She was not hurting. She was sharing it in service of the audience. and that is how you share vulnerably as an effective communicator. You are sharing your story in service of the audience and you are not getting upset. Here's something that's really, really important. If you are upset on stage or if you're communicating and you become emotional, you rob us from having emotion as an audience. If you are having the experience, we feel the need to take care of you and it is not our job to take care of you as a communicator from a stage.

19:00So it's really important that you're healed. Any questions? No questions. That's powerful. Amazing. Okay. Objective in action is the fifth way to become an effective communicator and an influential voice. This is something that actors use all the time. It is what you want from your scene partner and how you're going to go after it. And that's what keeps scenes very vibrant and rich. And I teach this exact thing to my speakers. Now, we as human beings do this all the time. It's an unconscious thing that we do. You want your kids to go to bed? That's your objective. That's what you want. How are you going to get them to do it?

19:36That's the action that you play. You want your partner, your spouse to take out the trash? That's your objective. That's what you want. How do you get them to do it? You play an action. If we go back to the kids, you want them to go to bed? How do you get them to do it? You could take them. That's an action. You could storytell them. You could bribe them. How do you get your spouse or your partner to take out the trash? You could seduce them. You could nag them. You could pay them. Same thing when you're on stage and you want to effectively communicate to the audience. What do you want from the audience?

20:07The simple thing is their attention. How do you get their attention? Well, you could shout. You could inspire, motivate, educate, teach. And if they're still not looking up and giving you their attention, you can wait. Trust me, silence, stillness, and waiting will get their attention. And that is a really powerful way and technique for you to be in command as a communicator at all times. And then finally, you know, I'm a dancer. I'm a former dancer, moved to New York City to pursue my career. And now I am the founder of The Big Talk. And choreography and blocking is still very much a part of my life.

20:49and when I'm working with speakers, I make it clear to them that the blocking and choreography inside of their scripts happens during a beat change. If you know what you're saying and you know when you're moving, you are an effective communicator and you become more influential voice from a stage. If you know when to pause and when to move when you have a new thought inside of your script and you're not wandering around, meandering, pacing, shifting, you will gain the respect and trust of your audience immediately. And that is the importance and power of being an influential voice and an effective communicator.

21:29Fire Nation, I hope you were taking as many notes as I was. I mean, I love going through that process of trusting that your voice matters, as I talked about with my sister's story, and then coexisting with fear. I mean, I wrote this down, I thought this was pretty powerful. The audience wants you to succeed. Like that's a really interesting thought. And it's so true. I I mean, have you ever been in the audience and a speaker like stumbles on their words and now you feel uncomfortable? You're like, oh, I'm uncomfortable because I know they're uncomfortable. Or like when a comedian is just bombing, the whole place feels uncomfortable.

21:58We don't want that. We want you to succeed. You need to understand the context. You need credibility, relatability, vulnerability. And I love that phrase of sharing a personal story from the scar, not the wounds. Now, Trisha, you shared a lot of great things today. Give us one key takeaway that you really want to make sure Fire Nation walks away with. I want everyone who's listening to this podcast to say out loud right now that my voice matters. My voice matters. Yes, JLD. Your voice matters. And it is your responsibility. Hear me. It's your responsibility to share your story because there is one person out there who is meant to hear it.

22:39And by doing that, you can change and even save a life. Now let's talk about your book. Let's talk about your call to action. Let's break it down. The Influential Voice, Saying What You Mean for Lasting Legacy, is a book about being an effective communicator and a good human being. It is my mission in the world to teach people how to have opposing opinions and viewpoints and be able to communicate them to one another so that there is a shared collective of union. We don't have to have the same opinions, everybody. We can have differing opinions. We can have differing beliefs. What we need to learn how to do is communicate with dignity to one another so that everybody's opinion can coexist in one place.

23:31And that's what the Influential Voice book is all about. And that is also why I created the Art of the Big Talk Masterclass in order to teach people how to craft these talks and to be able to put into reality and into fruition. their desire to be able to effectively communicate from big stages. And that's why I've created both of these programs. Lovely. And I know you have something special for Fire Nation. For sure. I want to give Fire Nation chapter one of the Influential Voice book, complimentary. And if you go to the influentialvoicebook.com forward slash chapter, you can grab your free chapter one of the book.

24:12And I also have a very special masterclass called The Art of the Big Talk. It is a two-day masterclass that I run twice a year where you learn everything you need to know to step into the red circle and get that credibility, visibility that you need to have greater impact. And that is theartofthebigtalk.com. Fire Nation, step into the red circle because you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with TB and JLD today. So keep up the heat. Head over to eofire.com. Just type Tricia in the search bar and her show notes page will pop up with everything we've talked about here today.

24:52You'll also get to check out our last episode back in August of 2017 if you want a little blast from the past. And Tricia, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Hey, Fire Nation. Today's value bomb content was brought to you by Tricia and Fire Nation. Over the last decade, I've interviewed more than 3 ,000 of the world's most successful entrepreneurs, and I've created a revolutionary 17-step roadmap to your financial freedom and fulfillment. I put it all into my first traditionally published book, The Common Path to Uncommon Success, personally endorsed by Seth Godin and Gary Vaynerchuk.

25:33The Common path to uncommon success is the step-by-step guidance that you need to achieve the lifestyle of your dreams. Visit UncommonSuccessBook.com to order your copy today and I'll catch you there or I'll catch you on the flip side. Are you ready for the ultimate all-in-one platform for entrepreneurs, marketers, coaches, and agencies? Build funnels, automate follow-ups, manage clients, and even white label your own software, say hello to our featured partner, High Level, and visit highlevelfire.com to start your free trial today. Fire Nation, it's time to stop guessing and start winning with a proven playbook.