EP 67 - Victor Ahipene - Learn How to Become a Powerful Public Speaker

LEARN HOW TO BECOME A POWERFUL PUBLIC SPEAKER

Learn how to pitch, present and persuade by using interesting, compelling stories in your public speeches.

On today’s podcast, Steve Simonson introduces us to Victor Ahipene, Leader of the Public Speaking Blueprint. Victor is also an entrepreneur, author, speaker and podcast host. Here are more key points on today’s episode:

• How Victor became a speaker.

• The power of communication and storytelling in business.

• The Public Speaking Blueprint and how listeners can also get a copy.

So, listen and learn how important it is to communicate with customers using the power of stories.

01:30 (Steve introduces today’s guest Victor Ahipene.)

03:35 (Victor talks about his origin story.)

04:30 (Victor talks about his experience about being a speaker.)

15:29 (Victor talks about the Public Speaking Blueprint.)

1:00:53 (Victor tells us how to get his blueprint.)

1:03:10 (Victor’s final words of wisdom.)

Welcome to the Awesomers.com podcast. If you love to learn and if you're motivated to expand your mind and heck if you desire to break through those traditional paradigms and find your own version of success, you are in the right place. Awesomers around the world are on a journey to improve their lives and the lives of those around them. We believe in paying it forward and we fundamentally try to live up to the great Zig Ziglar quote where he said, "You can have everything in your life you want if you help enough other people get what they want." It doesn't matter where you came from. It only matters where you're going. My name is Steve Simonson and I hope that you will join me on this Awesomer journey.

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01:30 (Steve introduces today’s guest, Victor Ahipene.)

Steve: You are listening to Episode Number 67 of the Awesomers podcast series. And that's Awesomers.com/67 to find today's show notes and relevant details, etc. Now today, I am joined by Victor Ahipene. Now, Victor's a very interesting young man and somebody who I find to be fascinating, because he's been speaking from the stage since he was literally 13 years old. And we talked about that kind of in-depth in today's episode. This went on to lead him to do more speaking and he has won national accolades at competitions becoming one of the youngest ever to qualify as a public speaking teacher at only age 17. And this passion for public speaking got filed away for a bit while he was at university, and became a physiotherapist. And it wasn't until he jumped into the entrepreneurial world that this love for speech and speech making was reignited. And today being able to help other people get their message out to the world, and leveraging that message using public speaking as part of what he loves to spend his time doing. And since all of that kind of was put together he's really been on a mission and a sense created three top ranking, top rated and ranked podcast. He's been a keynote speaker around the world and he's helped hundreds of others share their message and make an impact in their various industries and sessions. So, it's something very inspiring and I know we're going to learn a lot from today. I am thrilled that you're here and I hope that you're thrilled to be here as well. Everybody, it's me Steve Simonson and we're back again with another Awesomers.com podcast and today I'm joined by my very special guest, Victor Ahipene.

Victor: Hey, how’s it going?

Steve:Oh, it's great to have you here. And for the Awesomers out there, I did receive a little coaching on the pronunciation. My custom is to mispronounce names and that was just my first run at it there will be other opportunities I'm sure that I’ll mess it up. But Victor, I love what you're doing and I've already read in the bio to the audience so they kind of know where you came from, from the high level and all the cool and amazing things you've accomplished. But tell us in your own words kind of where you live today and what takes up your day to day time.

03:35 (Victor talks about his origin story.)

Victor: So, I live in Brisbane Australia, I'm originally from New Zealand. I help people share their message to the world in a more confident manner to have more of an impact to the people that they can impact. And I guess that had -- that's changed shape and kind of gone full circle over the last 20 years of the extended way, but for me the last three or four years it's kind of gone quite a cool full circle.

Steve: That's interesting I can't wait to kind of get into that a little bit more. And, one of the things that I found intriguing is that you started speaking at a very young age. So this idea of making an impact and positively moving organization or its objectives started early even before you had an organization. Tell us about that when you’re at just a young age of like 13, wasn't it?

0:04:30 (Victor talks about his experience about being a speaker.)

Victor: Yes, so I mean there's the interesting thing. So, I mean today it's through the Public Speaking Blueprint, but back then it was -- so I'm a New Zealand Mouldy which is like the indigenous people of New Zealand. So I mean a lot of people around the world might have seen the All Blacks and the hacker that they do, the dodge before the rugby. That's originally from the native people of New Zealand. I was at private school, a relatively effluent school, effluent -- the one that's not the thing you do and I went there and I was one of literally a handful of indigenous native kids with a background from being New Zealand Mouldy and there's a speech competition that I more or less got pushed into judo, no one else being able to enter it from our school so it was kind of like “Hey, we think this would be really great if you could do we've entered you into it” and there was more like a force thing that in hindsight that I'm super grateful for. But, at the time it was very much outside my comfort zone, like I've always been a really confident person, and I think a lot of people probably resonate with being confident and then being absolutely terrified when you're on stage, or when you're speaking in front of groups that you see. I've got tons of friends and family and things like that who've been exactly the same. They're really outgoing in social circumstances and then freeze or avoid speaking like it's the play. I wasn't too much different and I kind of go back to when I went onstage, it was, alright what do I know that I can already do and it seems like an English class or whatever class you do your first talk. And it's write an essay, put it onto cue cards, tilt your head down, and just read and do tremble read and occasionally look up to give eye contact because apparently that's the goal for speakers. So that's what I did, and it's not hard to imagine that the speech didn't go that well. There was a whole raft of other things, you mean to sing a song as you have like a support group. It's like culturally kind of a thing that after you speak, you'll do either a hacker or a song or whiter and our school not having too many people we could do that. There just happened to be a class that the speech teacher had scenes along, and they walked up on stage and we had to kind of try and do the one that the All Blacks did. And it was pretty horrible.

Steve: So, that first of all the pressure of having to deliver speech at 13 that you were kind of volunteered unwittingly at first. And I think we can all identify with that idea of looking down the cue cards, and then you look up with the audience, and occasionally you make your hand motion because you were told that body language counts. But then, to have to go on and do a song or something after that little performers that seems like, double downing on the torture for somebody who's not familiar with it, you must have been terrified?

Victor: Yes. I was terrified, I think that was the big thing was it reflected. But yes, apart from the speech not being probably presented and delivered the best that possibly could of, the others think side that was not having you're looking back as your preparation is key for everything that we do and business and life, the more you prepared the bitter. And knowing that I didn't know if there was a song, or anything happening at the end of it. Because they kind of came up on stage afterwards, when the organizer of the event say. So yes where's your support group.

Steve: Wow.

Victor: Yes, so it was almost a comedy of errors. I'm a relatively competitive person and I really don't like and I mean for me to that day losing was just not winning or not knowing that I'd put out a good effort. Yes, I've never been a bad sports person, I've never been elite-level sports person at the same time. But I always tried to be as fit as I possibly could, as prepared as I possibly could, and you're going into there I knew that there was something left on the table. So my mom enrolled me into some public speaking classes, with the speech teacher at her school and she kind of took me under my wing. She obviously saw something, and she definitely wasn't from that talk.

Steve: But you were also into it, despite you kind of a first experience it was not necessarily positive, because of that competitive spirit like the only way to get better is to kind of double down on my own skills, of my own knowledge.

Victor: Yes, is it. And it's that's why I say it. I was entered against my will and to a degree and then, I look back on it and I'm super grateful because the journey that it's taken me on. I mean, a year later I came second and the same competition and then we entered and by the end of it, we had a full support group that would go along every year. We had four speakers from our school, and so I mean it was the cool thing of me boosting my own confidence and skill levels, but there was also the being the pioneer. I love for Russell Branson, he talks about being a pioneer he said “you don't use you want to be a pioneer and anything for anybody because you're the one with all the arrows in their back lying face down in the dirt” but I can definitely attest to that. But it's that the journey it kind of took me on it's like, I went 0 to 100, I was skipping assembly in the morning and going to other people's speech classes. I was getting out of any kind of class, I could and go in there after scores here my own ones and we'd sit exams, and do different things with the kind of speech qualifications that were going through. And it ended up that myself and another guy who were very kind of, I guess kindred spirits and the sense of how much we really enjoyed it once we found out that they were just like anything there were ways to be effective and good communicators. We pushed through a lot of the grades, and by the time we got to about a year out from finishing high school, we'd both graduated as qualified public speaking teachers and with in teaching our peers. and it kind of gone like yes, a pretty crazy journey from a confident trembling kid on stage at 13 to 17 years old and you're now teaching people. You've now teaching the next generation of thirteen-year-old. So it was pretty cool to have that skill, because I see so many people who don't and it's gone now my passion and my journey to help people change that.

Steve: That's good. Because you know a lot of people and as you kind of talked about this, it's almost like an odd thing because a lot of people with high confidence are terrified of speaking on stage. There's just some sort of break that happens. I'm really good at this or I know what I'm talking about to like “yes, all these people are going to judge me” and I think a lot of entrepreneurs especially E-commerce companies that need to to tell their story are often reluctant to be the face of their company. Whether it's on stage, or in a video, or a webinar. They're just nervous about it and it seems like somebody like yourself could really help get them moving towards the right direction, which is anybody can do it.

Victor: That's the amazing thing when you realize that there is a system like I say to people, yes if you're an accountant, but you are in your first year of studies at University and someone said to you “put together a statement of performance position and write a report” and yes we've got a gun to your head, and you need to do it, you're going to be trembling, you obviously not going to do a good result. But i’ll give you four years of study and then it's probably going to be easy. I'll give you four years of work experience after that, and it's going to be something that you do ten times a day. But a lot of people don't realize that there's systems and processes that you can do exactly the same in public speaking, they think some people really got the gift of the gab, and we've already talked about it, like those people who command a conversation or the confident person or the cheeky person may be in class aren't necessarily the great speakers. And I look at some of the people that I follow quite intently, and I'm sure some of you listens to like Tim Ferriss and he said he was an introvert, who's really doesn't enjoy public speaking and he obviously applies his own systems and things to be able to speak. But a lot of people would deem him as an extrovert if they were to judge him from the speech, as he gives the books he writes, the podcasts he gives, and I think, are you a good speaker because you're an extrovert or introvert everyone's going to have their own style. It's more have you got a repeatable system that you can kind of plug what you want to deliver into, and put something out to the world and it doesn't matter if it's the boardroom, if it's your staff room with your staff, or if it's the tiered stage, and in Vancouver and you're speaking to potentially millions on or just even on camera for know E-commerce business. This kind of 8020 overall where you can apply a certain framework and then for each talk, there might be certain tweaks that you can do to then optimize. But if the overall framework you're going to give a good presentation regardless of you have the smaller tweaks.

Steven: So Victor, one of the things that you kind of alluded to earlier is this concept of having a framework. And I think that's probably some of what you deal with the Public Speaking Blueprint or what you talked about earlier. Is that true? Is that how you work it?

15:29 (Victor talks about the Public Speaking Blueprint.)

Victor: Yes. I mean this is something that I love seeing the transformation with people and because some of their lives I trained people kind of through online training programs, through one-to-one stuff at a higher level. But when we run live training event it's amazing seeing a transformation that can happen, I throw people when giving an impromptu talk on a random topic at the start of the day, and then we do it again before lunch, and that the confidence people are just shutting down the street going “yes, I've got this”, “yes, I'm going to nail this” because they've now seen how cool just like learning to drive a car was really hard, yet public speaking is as hard, and then I can make it a lot easier and then fine tune there. And so I would look at from kind of the 8020 of public speaking as this blueprint. And it involves learning well, I guess first introducing and creating a story. I mean so many talks particularly when we're taught from our English teacher at high school is it's kind of who what's the majority doing. I'll just stick with the majority and do that so it's usually like “hey, I'm Victor and today I'm going to be talking about such-and-such and my first point is going to be, and my second point is going to be, and my third point it's going to be” and it’s you've got a world debts attention spans and dopamine levels are getting shorter and shorter. If you're not capturing their attention in those first few seconds, man you're fighting an uphill battle to try and get it back right people will just be doing the obligatory thing. This isn't just your high school speeches, this is conferences that you go to as well, where people would standing on stage and they've got all these people in front of them. And I let you say, they're wasting these people's time, and I think it's important to understand why you need a blueprint not just to become a public speaker. But when you get put in front of somebody on stage, they've usually invited you because you're some sort of an expert, or an authority in some point. More so than everybody else and people need a reframe their thinking on why they are an expert or an authority, and to me, it comes back to can you teach eight out of ten people in that room, or 8 out of 10 people walking down the street, something in a particular topic. Like from high school, I went off and did the university thing I studied physiotherapy, I can teach 8 out of 10 people walking down the road, thinks about their body and rehabilitation and things like that. When I go to a university or a conference, I'm not the expert in the room full of physiotherapists, but I am an expert in a room full of everyday people. And for most people that's the case, and they get invited onto stage so you've got a duty to be able to share your messages effectively as possible, otherwise you're wasting these people's time and when you extrapolate like “Yes, it might be a five minute, but it also might be a 90 minute presentation that you've got” if you've got 500 people in there, you're wasting hundreds of hours of people's time to give them something that they could have could have read, if you're using the cue cards at a lecture, or even worse is death by PowerPoint, where people just write their speech out turn 45 degrees and then they just read it off and you're like “look man I can read faster than you can talk, send me the link, bring the next speaker on” and I might catch up on it later because, this is just painful watching somebody read off those slides and so it doesn't take a huge shift in your speaking ability, to be better than the majority which is cool, because as soon as you see that confidence, that's the brew and we start getting over a lot of there. The fears, and the other things that tend to hold all the stories we tell ourselves that hold us better. And so when it comes to speaking, first we have to go how do we get rid of these cue cards, and thus death by PowerPoint and it's realizing that we are an expert and what we're going to talk about we already know, and once you realize that I know about point one, I can just speak off the cuff with it. Sure you're going to practice and it's not going to be memorized, because you've risk running, and having a blank in your head and you're standing on stage for what could be an eternity out there, trying to figure out where that sentence was that you left off on. But when you actually know the points, then you can speak off them. And again, you don't need to spend anywhere as much time preparing, because you already know your points. You can put that time into rehearsing and so that you've got a more highly polished talk, and then your cue cards can go out the window, your slides can just be used as a cue or something a picture that backs up, everyone loves the funny picture or something in there. It can just be rather than the graph and 58 different points that you put next to it, and a lot. Yes, this is where a lot of people listening, have a bit of a kick back and I'll be going. But, what if I forget something? and the big thing is you're up there is the expert, people don't know what you're about to talk about, well then might know your overall topic. They don't know if you forgot something.

Steve: That's the hidden little gem there. They don't know if you forgot something, only you do, and just keep moving right is that there?

Victor: Yes, yes, absolutely. Because I've gotten offstage and “oh my god I forgot such and such” I might have only been a small point that I thought was massive but then I've come often people that was so impactful, that was so informative, or that was great. But coming back to we've gotten rid of our cue cards, were throwing them out the door, we've gotten rid of our Dean's powerpoints, we need to start our talks with more impact and the best way to do there as you know people don't care about a ton of statistics and facts. They care about, so they believe stories you've got to take them on a journey and you've got to find the position that you can either make yourself a better or worse than the audience. You're already on a pedestal when you're up there, you want to highlight a story about how you were there, and you took them further and let's say, this isn't a company and it's people that all it's slightly different well. You want to maybe take where the company was, and we're going to take them, you want to sell them on a future based proposition, or you want to show them how you were at a certain point and you took them to where they are or further done it with somebody similar, but I mean jumping onto stage. In starting with a story, is it engages people, it allows the people who are going to relate to your story because everyone probably isn't going to, there's still going to be people who are swiping on their phones or whatever, and you can't keep the Scourge by that what you've got to realize is, having a story lets you control the narrative people want to, that's why I say don't start with what I'm going to talk about and then I'm going to talk about this and this. If you can't really like a really weird title to your talk, the kind of clipped Beatty titles. It doesn't get people the idea will roll in management of rehabilitating a shoulder like, people kind of bit their brain is already answering that question they go, I already know how to do that blow-by-blow. Whereas three strategies, on how I revolutionize treating a shoulder, people were like “wow, I really need to listen to that” and so yes if you can start the talk say, let's go with this shoulder case, if I started off like, look I had a client walk in the door, and they hadn't been able to put a shirt, that didn't have batons on for the ten years, because they couldn't move this shoulder enough. Like yes, he take you kind of expand that story out, and you might talk about and that had seen chiropractors, physiotherapists, osteopaths, had seen also Phoenix surgeons who said it was the worst shoulder that ever seen. And now, they're sitting at my doorstep like India, I feel safe speaking to I'm giving physio examples here. But if you've got these physios in front of you, and they're going and that's sitting in front of me expecting me to provide a bloody miracle.

Steve: Yes, they're on the edge of their seat. They're like “oh yes, what's going to happen”

Victor: And the other thing is, they're all from really being in a situation where they've had their person who has seen ten different people when it's rocked up on their seat and they're going yes,I hate that because as much as your ego wants to say “I can do it” I've already seen ten other people. And by then, you're controlling the narrative but you're not giving them any answers yet, you're going “here's the story on how I'm going to tell it”. You don't have to give the person's background of how they did this, it's just you decide what you're going to tell and from there, then you can just roll into what your point it, and so they got to me and let's say your points might be a unique way of assessing it to find out what's really wrong, and you can flow straight into that, so this person sitting on my doorstep and I was like “look I really need to find out what's been going wrong” and we'd been experimenting with this different stuff at our clinic and we had found a B and C so we really had to dive in, then of course you already know that you've applied it to a case that you're talking about, you've actually lived it. And so you can be talking to them about this a great way that you assist people shoulders, and then from there the way that we extrapolate that data out or what we find there to create this different rehabilitation program is such and such, and then you're just talking about the rehabilitation process and how you're doing it differently. People are still relating it back to the story like, it's all anchored to the store they're not going there just telling me I need to assess it differently, and they need to treat it differently, because you're going and then John he came in. It was two weeks later and he was in tears, he lifted his hand been able to wash his hair for the first time in 20 years and it was super exciting and then whatever your third point is, you then want at your third. Generally, two to three points is more than enough, regardless of your length of your talk. But you can shorten and extend it as much as you like. Like your story, your interest, or it could be shorter, it can be longer, each point can go into a little bit more dept. But two or three points that help hammer at home, then want to lead and to not a conclusion like not this is what we've spoken about today or here's a cheeky summary, but a really strong for the marketers out there, they love it, it's a call to action, it's what do you want people to do, are you trying to get them to buy a product, buy a training, a trying to get them to use your services, are you just trying to get a message across for them to take action to look at doing things differently or share something with their loved ones, or whatever it may be. You watch TED Talks and they've got a lot of value based call the actions at the end of it. You have to buy but you're trying to get them, you're trying to take them on a journey that they buy into a value at the end. That they're going to take action on because, they give them that clear point of point of action at the end of your talk. So now you know a new way to treat people and assess people and get them to follow up on everything. So I hope you've all learned something really well, like more. So now you've seen the amazing changes that can happen to John my question is, “how are you going to change your approach to complex patience” and it gives them thinking or I challenge you to, now go out and assess in a way that's going to give you clear answers and change the way in the impact you have on people. This is what I need to do, and the next time a person gets a shoulder walking and the physio it's a shoulder walking to their door they're going “oh that message hit me hard” I need to change out and stop being complacent on what I'd previously been doing. Kind of with the overall message that it's generally let your create a story, let your points flow from that story, and then anchor back to one change one call to action that you want. That's the kind of the blueprint simplified from there.

Steve: I love it. So there's a lot to unpack in there one of the things that I want to really emphasize for the Awesomers out there listening, is the point the Victor made along the way which is speaking genuinely and authentically comes much more from telling the story, comes much more from not memorizing. Knowing your main points but you know just talk, and let it flow and be a person like you're having a conversation instead of that rigid the death by PowerPoint. It's so painful to watch somebody on stage in front of a group, and then they're just literally reading off the PowerPoint. It's a waste of everybody's time and one of the things I don't want people to forget is that, when you are delivering some sort of content from stage or on webinar, whatever. It is you have some sort of duty to the audience to pay off for their time, right? so your call to action at the end doesn't matter if it's a course or some value driven thing like “hey change this in your life, do this to make it better” whatever. Existence or better training course or better shoulder some call to action makes sense for the audience that's the payoff for them. And I hope that people will heed that in any context that really that is where the audience get excited about, they get hooked through the story and the speech itself, but to call the actions where the payoff is. Do you agree with that premises?

Victor: Yes. I mean, when a one of my favorite talks sort of that I followed when I was at high school, and I was going through all the speaking stuff and even now, I still go there and watch it as Martin Luther King's I have a dream like he had one call to action here one over. I didn't really touch on it but your talk should have one overarching theme, and then two or three points that relate to that theme. Okay so, you walk away from hers and it's he has a dream for your equality between men, women and children. That was his overall theme, like if you walk away from his talk and you watch it, if you didn't remember every single points people weren't going to remember every single, but we've all been to talks more like they were great. What do they talk about he was trying to make the world more equal, but as long as you realized that if you take on that message they do what obviously things that were important enough for you to take on, and you know so I encourage people to go on YouTube. YouTube has taught because it uses storytelling it oratory and the interesting thing would that talk which I heard more recently was, he had given it just like a stand-up comedian, he'd given it like 50 to 100 times in the previous years, at different local black churches and congregations and things, and he had fine-tuned all that storytelling and seen what the audience was working on. It wasn't perfect, the first time, but he got more fine-tuned and more fine-tuned until he had that massive address that's obviously got on to have a fairly huge impact. So the whole of the US, but he's fairly well know and through you particularly one talk and obviously as actions that followed. So it's interesting when you start looking at TED Talks or Simon Sinek talks, or anything like that. And you have a look at them following a particular blueprint right some of them are doing it unknowingly, some of them are definitely doing it deliberately, because they've had training in there, I've implemented that. And it allowed everyone's got a story that they can tell, if you can impact as most as many people was possible from your story, and from your journey, and from your learnings, then the video can proceed the video get it across.

Steve: No question about. All right Awesomers. We've dug a little bit into Victor's background we know where he came from, and we know a little bit about his university, experience, we're going to do more of that origin dig in right after the break and I'm also going to tell you a quick story about a nightmare conference that I attended where the speeches were “oh let's just say they didn't go well” we're going to do that right after this break.

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Steve: Okay, we're back everybody. It's me, Steve Simonson and today I'm joined by Victor Ahipene. Now that a pretty good, alright. I've been pretty good at this. And so Victor just before the break, I teased this conference that I went to not long ago as within seven days of this recording, and that the speeches that were given were largely not following any blueprint. Many of them were just following their PowerPoint it was painful, when they would get to the last slide that would be like “okay that's it” and they would literally walk off the stage, and the MC would be like caught by surprise it would take her 60 seconds the hot bag “alright well wasn't that great” I mean it was a very very poor experience and there were 2500 people in the audience. So every half an hour, we're just racking up waste of time. Now some of the messages, if you really worked hard, you could suss out some takeaway or whatever but it was tough. And it didn't mean these people weren't good, it certainly didn't mean they weren't smart or brilliant in their own right? It just was the execution and thing and you know their preparation perhaps was not quite up to the standard that I think you would have. So that was a weird experience for me to have so many of those in a row on such a big venue, be let down. So I think your blueprint that we're going to talk more about is a really important thing. Have you ever been to a conference like that?

Victor: Unfortunately, it's such a common thing that here you get academic, like if you're at a place where it's full of academics they're used to taking lectures. And if you've been to any kind of tertiary place ever, you remember the one lecture who made things interesting and exciting in the rest you just either don't remember their names or they don't teach it in an effective manner. And then they take that to the stage, they go okay I'm just going to pile you full of information. I am just going to throw graph after graph and statistic and fact. And we don't care it like statistics and research And things like that, is important to drum home different things in really small doses, like use a story to be like... yes and that's what that go back to the shoulder and in his shoulder got above a hit. And that's exactly what we found through our research. We looked at three hundred different people, this was a sum. Rather than we looked at three hundred different blah blah blah and what we found was this. And people were like yes unfortunate... But the cool thing to River and listening is now when they're out there speaking at a conference without speaking. Even just to be a workplace and things like that, they're now going to be so far ahead of the crowd. That everyone's going to go, you were easily the best speaker. And if we came from... one of my students his name's Josh. He does marketing for dental owners, he does like Google AdWords and pay-per-click and that sort of stuff in Australia. And he got invited in the subscriber. So this is really a cool thing. He's very much introverted, he's really good at the analytical side of things. But he got invited to the steam tool owners, business owners conference. It was like 500 people as a paid conference. And he wasn't allowed a pitch from stage that was one of them sees. In the speaking wheel jury they're going to be paid or you're going to be paid, not paid but you can pitch from stage. And then the event organizers going to take a cut of that but it's usually one or the other. It's not usually both. Anyway, so he was being paid, wasn't allowed a pitch and he came to me said, “Look how can we construct a good talk?” He said this is the kind of stuff that I wanted to talk about. And I was like Facebook Ads, Google ads and SEO. And like for those out there who know that, like complex things. And I said what's the overall thing with it? I was like well don't we shape it, here's how you can do them in a simple way. But you're busy business owners, you don't want to do that like that.Underlying tone was like use us without us having to pitch you. And unfortunately for Josh, the event organizer who invited them, he ran all of his things for his different clinics around Australia. And so I said, have you got any awesome testimonials from him? Because he's the guy who's going to be introducing you on stage. He's going to give you a new social proof. So he started the talk with an email screenshot from the event organizer. He'd asked them before obviously and it just said like, “Hey Josh, we've just taken over this new clinic. Do you think this new clinics how... well can we go with the marketing in the local area?” And then it followed the next thing it's like “Yes if we focus mainly on this and then we start rolling out this and this.” And then it was like a follow-up email like a month later, “Hey, can you please turn off such-and-such because we've gone from 50% capacity to 120% capacity. We need to hire more staff this bah bah blah.” And he's like “Yes”, but it was basically who wants to see how I did this.

Steve: Yes we need this turn off advertising. We have too much business like anybody in the audience want too much business attention.

Victor: Yes and so then he's like, “Okay, well this is what we did. We did SEO and here's some really simple tips that you can go and do it yourself.” But if you start getting serious you might want to look into this software and this software. And it takes a little while or you can go and Edwards or go. And we kind of just overviewed on like setting up an ad on Facebook for him. It showed the deal that he was offering but it's video. A lot of it comes down to the targeting and the retargeting and setting up your… you've got to set up. And it was just like a step by step. Create your ad copy, create your picture or video. You create your targeting and set up what your retargeting is going to be. And like if you know how to do it that's pretty good. For majority of people they're like, what's retargeting crap? But it showed them the step by step on what they needed. We gave them like the general overview because here like an hour on stage and then kind of his cool day. He'd set it up at the start as well but his call to action was what you should be looking for if you're going to run marketing for your business. And so he basically had said, “Yes, you can get somebody, you can do it yourself.” But would’ve worked out what the average dentist makes per hour. And we said, “So you're making 500 bucks an hour or your average…” and he basically put his prices in there without words. I said, “Yes. Your average social media managers is going to charge you $2,000 a month and they'll generally... They should be able to run all of these.” But here's some key questions that you want to ask. And so the end of thing was his call to action was as business owners and dental owners. You want to be using your time as effectively as possible. If they're treating people or growing your business thing, cool if it's marketing. Then now you know exactly the next dips that you need to do. And yes he closed mid six figures from that talk. And he couldn't even take everybody because of restraint of trade. He wouldn't take two people per postcode and things like that. So that was recurring revenue wasn't for somebody. People rushing to him at the end because he'd showed them value. He hadn't over taught. Initially he was going to be like and this is how you sit up a pixel, and this is how you do retargeting, and this is how you test different copy and all that kind of stuff. He’s like we got rid of all of that. We didn't try and overwhelm people because you want to show people the why not the hell. And a lot of but particularly if you're trying to sell from stage. But as soon as people start getting into the how is for training courses, how is for two-day weekend conferences. The why is for sixty to ninety, thirty minute whatever short of presentations. And so you have been able to take people on that journey at the start of going. He's somebody that you've all paid a thousand dollars to come and listen to his conference. Here's the results that I already got him. It was a perfect thing be going back to Josh being an introvert. He'd never spoken from stage before. He was always sick on school speech days. And whatnot yes he was very reluctant, he never spoken before he got voted best speaker. Three of the other speakers at the event were professional speakers and asked them what other events has he been speaking at. He said this is the first one I've ever done. And off the back of it he's got another three gigs where he's going to pretty much roll out that same talk. It's a slightly different industries as their business expands. And he's going to likely... and this is the power of being able to get a message across and get in front of your ideal audiences. He'll probably close a million dollars worth of business from three or four talks. For current and future business. Just from being able to spend their time crafting a good message that's going to impact. Versus he could have gone in there, over taught, had really dense slides, bored the people and maybe picked up one or two people who were just looking for the right solution at the right time. So I think it's important and kind of highlights for somebody who's not me, get out there giving a speech for everybody else. I'm just nervous speaker.

Steve: Yes. It really is a great example. Josh embodies kind of the introvert in us all that says, I don't know if I could do it or how or why. But fundamentally if you go on stage, you deliver value in a compelling way, that's like here's the story, that in this case it was a conference organizer. They needed business, they were opening here and mission accomplished. Here's what we did, who's interested? It's an organic way because most people do the math in their head. Even us entrepreneurs, we have a tendency to try to do a lot of things ourselves. We don't have the time to do it all. I was just talking to some brilliant Bart guys the other day, it's like I have no interest in setting up my own bot flows. I want to hire somebody to do my bot flows and that goes for me. Just about every task possible, I want to bring in the experts. So I like this idea of the blueprint or the system for speech making. And I'm a big systems guy. Now for the Awesomers listening, we will have in the show notes, appropriate links and so forth, to the things that Victor a dozen. I also recall that you have a podcast go on Victor and pretty well rated and highly influencing.

Victor: Yes, so it's kind of when I see it, I've gone full circle from the public speaking. I kind of got put on the back burner but back it after high school yet. But I was literally sitting there going, do I want to become a speech teacher? It seems like a really difficult niche to kind of create a career out of like you were always chasing the next bunch of kids. And yes I was in a small town. I just didn't have a big-picture outlook. So when I became a physiotherapist and worked in there and have done different things there and are in a couple of clinics. But from there I got... before I kind of got the clinics and I obviously loved the business side of of most things. I was working for someone, like a lot of people during that nine to five you start looking for something else. And I stumbled across podcasts and was like wow never heard of this. The sky like a kind of spin in the world. It's like he's got like a huge huge following, it's making a really cool impact. And I was like, I've done public speaking, maybe one will go hand in hand”. And yet to a degree it does, another degree, yes it's just another skill you learn and the systems you learn for a cool podcast. And at the time I was doing some property like trying to learn property investing and had a young property investors group that we ran in Brisbane. And I was like, I want to learn more about young entrepreneurs. Like I was somewhere in my twenties at the stage, I'm just going to interview and it's successful under 35 year old entrepreneurs. And I'm like okay. So I started, I got some friends to get going and yes the podcast kicked off pretty well. It's pretty well-received and I think we had about a hundred and eighty-five episodes that started up tonight. It created different opportunities. People came to me and they wanted help setting up their podcast. Some of my guests they were successful and again they were like I don't want to learn all of this and can you do it? And then one of them said you should turn it into a course and then it kind of took me down. The rabbit hole of online marketing and all these different things. But then I kind of found that I loved podcasting. I didn’t overly love podcast like training people to set up podcast so I could set up a course and things like there. I closed it all down one day and I was like I'd run a couple of live training events for public speaking. And yes literally the first time I think I had six people in it and at the end of it I had no further up. So no further working with me and four out of the six people literally came to me. And were like after the directly after the via night. So what are we sign up to now? I'm right... let me get back to you on that one. So yes things kind of evolved from there. And I was splitting my time too much between something I wasn't passionate about, helping people get podcast. Now I teach it within my training. if podcasting is a way that you want to share your message which is awesome and it was just the transformation for me. And this was ego driven I guess. The transformation wasn't as rewarding as seeing someone who's trembling in almost in tears. When they're all sometimes are on tears when they're giving their first talk. So your confidently controlling the stage hours later. So I shut down that podcast recently, I put all my efforts into the Public Speaking Blueprint and I've released a public speaking secrets podcast. Which is about... probably when this will go over to be about ten episodes in. And we've had some... thankfully I've been able to leverage off my previous podcasts. It's often difficult. I interview Grant Cardone, interviewed so and so and so. Some people were like this isn't my first rodeo. With have some really really cool speaker trainers, how to use humor, how to run events. How to go from $0.00 events, the high ticket items. How effective storytelling. So I don't try necessarily. I try and just capture people from all around the world who have got subsets of expertise. And it sharpens my teaching tools and it helps a lot of people out there. So it's been really cool. And now there's going to be a book that will come out off the back of that, probably in the coming weeks. Look out for The Public Speaking Secrets coming out.

Steve: Boy,l I love it. So you don't let anything grow under your feet man. You are always on the move. I like that. So we're going to take a quick break and when we come back, I want to talk to you about the future a little bit. So get your crystal ball, I know that you're ready for this but we're talking a little bit about that future. We're going to do it right after this.

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Steve: Okay everybody, Steve Simonson back again with Victor Ahipene which is now just really easy for me to say.

Victor: Probably off the front.

Steve: That’s natural. And Victor and I have been talking about kind of how to get better at telling stories and become embrace the authority that you already are on your particular subject matter. And it doesn't matter if you're going to take the stage or do a webinar to help your audience or just do videos to explain to your customers what your product is about. It's about having the confidence to get behind the camera or in front of the camera however, whatever the situation is get on stage and share your message. Because we all have something to share. And I love this idea of anchoring it to a story in that overarching point, that's a really important point that Victor made. Victor before we dive into kind of the future, I wonder if there was a particular time that you ever looked at kind of running your own business. And being your own entrepreneur speech making, etc. And you're like “What? This is too much for me. I want to give up. I'm just going to go back to physical therapy or whatever it is.” Have you ever want to give up?

Victor: Do you mean today? Or... yes absolutely. I think the biggest one, I'm pretty positive and sometimes overly optimistic with things. But when I was setting up my podcast training and I'd had some coaching and it hadn't gone that well. And yes basically the premise was get a webinar out there and you drive traffic to it or blah blah blah. And I'd lift my job and I'd kind of gone all into it. And this was my last gasp edit. It was literally there's going to be no money in the count. And I've hired somebody to run my ads and done this and I see were all the limitations were now. And I ran it. Three people turned up, two of them I knew like really well and they weren't get it. So it was literally like one person that I was hoping would buy this this training that I'd put out and nobody did. And I was just sitting there on the couch, my partner came home from work and she's like oh yes how's that? I was just like in this short state of depression. What am I going to do. I've thrown everything at this and I definitely hadn't thrown everything at it. I think it was just that kick when you're... another point of desperation which is never a good place to be. It's a good place to drive and motivate you. It's funny when you're trying to negotiate, when you're in it and this is probably what I've learned from it. When you're at a point of desperation and you're trying to negotiate, you will negotiate yourself down.

Steve: Right.

Victor: Yes. When you're not, it's the complete flipside. A friend of mine selling a medical clinic at the moment and he had all these different offers. And initially he had a price set and then he realized that I was probably under selling myself. And then they were trying to offer him X amount of hundreds of thousands of dollars plus listen, listen, listen, listen. Now he's at a point with I might not even sell because financially it's all right, I could keep it going and say he's just come back to me said, “Now you just either give me all of that or I don't sell.” And now they're like, “Yes, okay.”

Steve: Yes. In the business we call that the takeaway close for everybody. So there's nothing better... so first of all thank you for sharing that time where we all have those times of rejection or desperation or just like it didn't work. But I think one of the points that you talked about in there is this idea that at that moment we feel like we put it all in there. We laid it all out and that means there's nothing else we can do. And so “Uh”, right? And we're just going to hit the wall and we're going to fall over but the reality is there's always something else that can be done, right? We might need to take a little bit of a 24-hour break or some sort of reflection time but there's always more that can be done. And you know whether or not that particular program was part of your future or not, you realized even well at least not long after that time that there was more that you could do. Yes?

Victor: Yes. And I think the biggest thing is if you can take your ego out of it. When you're analyzing it. It's not a failure on you per se at that stage. It's like okay what could have been done better? What were other people who had save renting webinars or doing courses or whatever, what are they doing that I didn't do? That might have... yet for me it was my indoctrination series, like I didn't have emails warming them up properly. I didn't have emails following them up. I didn't have ads retargeting them after the facts for those who didn't come. And like once I realized I was like, man I'm surprised I got three people there little own anything more. So it's really going yet and it's hard. It's hard to be like okay this failure isn't on me, it's on what I can learn from it and then keep moving. So yes, it's part of the roller coaster unfortunately but it's about bouncing back. Because a lot of people don't, they just throw it in and say yes enough is enough.

Steve: Yes, I think it's a valuable lesson. And for everybody listening at home or wherever you are, you can't feel the high highs if you don't feel the low lows. At the end of the day anybody who says yes everything's always good, it's like yes. A it's not and B even if it was, you wouldn't really be able to feel. That would just be like a normal feeling, you'd feel quite mediocre. So we've all been there, we've all dealt with that kind of stuff. But Victor with the kind of the change of the technology, not that changes speech giving that much in person stage but, do you see any any big changes or opportunities for entrepreneurs and just people in general who need to improve their communications coming in the next five years? So think of five years out maybe what might be different?

Victor: Well it's a funny thing like it's probably why I've doubled down on public speaking. It's because I see a threat to the majority of us from the advancements of technology. It's not a bad threat but a lot more things are going to be automated. Like I look at a lot of AI tech in things like that. That is going to automate processes and a lot of jobs will be retrenched lost changed because of software that can do a lot of your marketing straightaway. It can do a lot of your call ups and your follow-ups near like. There's going to be more and more automation and AI tech that's going to come in. I think one of the things that's going to be the hardest there's person-to-person communication. Whether that be video conferences, boardrooms, pitching, whatever it may be. And that's why I think it's not necessarily technology that's going to improve the gap between public speaking. What it is, public speaking is going to make you... are being effective public speaker it's going to give you an asset. That's going to be you. It's going to make you... and yes whether it's a job or your business, it's going to give you an unfair advantage on the majority of other people who are trying to compete with a robot. You're not going to win with a robot and automated, mundane, manual, repeatable learning tasks. Whereas no at the moment. Nobody really wants to sit there and listen to a robot give a presentation. They don't feel empathy or connection with the robot. So that's where I think technology is going. Speakings going to benefit technology and vice versa.

Steve: I think that's very good insight and I don't remember if it was Bill Gates or Warren Buffett or Allama somebody like that. But they said, “hey in the future as AI and machine learning and an actual robotics art to kind of change the way the business is done. Do stuff that robots can't do and clearly making human to human connections. Having a communication style and a speech ability, all of these things are things that a robot will never be able to do. And if they can that you know god help us. But you know for the foreseeable future, humans really do care about what other humans have to say. And they want to see somebody on stage or on a webinar. And whatever mechanism it is, they want to see somebody who has something interesting to say. And I think it was very kind of Victor to kind of lay out the broad strokes of this framework. This blueprint concept to say let's bind it to a story. Let's have that overarching message that we want to get across. And I'm sure there's so much more in that blueprint. Now Victor we're going to make sure we get all the links on the site for everybody. But are people able to go get your blueprint? Is that something they can buy a day to day or do they have to wait for some release date? How does that work?

1:00:53 (Victor tells us how to get his blueprint.)

Victor: So if they jump over to PublicSpeakingBlueprint.com, it's got some more... it's kind of goes a bit more in-depth and some of the training. So we've got a webinar and there's some worksheets and things that they can work through to kind of be able to craft their message. And of course they can listen to the podcast and jump into there. So at the end of the webinar, it goes for about 90 minutes I think. It's got an opportunity to jump into the Public Speaking Blueprint to the training. But this is probably ten maybe fifteen percent of what we've covered. We dive even deeper into it then. So you're going to get value regardless if you jump in and watch it, I guarantee it's going to give you some more actionable takeaways. So I encourage you jump over to PublicSpeakingBlueprint.com or Speaker Nations, our private Facebook community where you can jump in. And there's other like-minded people all on the same journey to make these speeches more exciting to give and more exciting to receive.

Steve: I love it. Well for my standpoint even if you're not planning on getting on stage and speaking, I want people to jump over to that website, take a look. Because the communication even in somebody's office there's so many times interoffice communications breakdown because of misunderstandings or just the driest exchange as possible. I've stood with people and had him talked to me in like a presentation mode. I'm the CEO and they're coming in to do presentations and at the end of the 30 or 60 minutes whatever the case is, I'm like what's the point? I don't see what we're doing here, right? And that's not a great takeaway. So anybody can benefit from this and I'm encouraged by the fact that there's such a great resource out there. So Victor it's been great having you on. I want to thank you again for coming out here today especially. You probably got up pretty early in Australia huh.

Victor: Yes. The sun's already out but you have it. I think it was 6am we kicked off, it’s Friday here.

Steve: That's great well. We sure appreciate it. Any final words of wisdom you care to leave with the Awesomers out there?

1:03:10 (Victor’s final words of wisdom.)

Victor: Yes, I just want to say that your past experiences don't dictate your future whether that's in public speaking or anything else. It's kind of a mantra I try and take with me because a lot of us will say oh I've given up for speech or we tell ourselves these stories. I've given a poor speech in the past or it wasn't well-received it doesn't mean that you can't get up there and be the next Josh. Who comes out of nowhere, hasn't spoken before in Wales crowds and he had. I can guarantee you like amazing guy but he had no superpower. He didn't have a cape underneath. He wasn't the gift of the gab guy out there. And everybody has the ability to do that. So wherever you are, realize that there's a way forward. And what you've done in the past doesn't necessarily mean that that's what you're going to do in the future. You've just got to change. It can be one thing.

Steve: Very very wise wisdom right there. Thank you again Victor. Awesomers listening out there, we will be right back after this.

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Steve: Well that was very helpful for Victor to share just a kind of a glimpse into that concept of the blueprint and sharing some of the framework with us. And of course it's even better that he was able to share the websites where we can go and check out the Public Speaking Blueprint. And we'll have again those links and so forth in the show notes at Awesomers.com/67 because this is Episode Number 67. But I want to just reiterate that Victor is really smart about making even speeches a systemic process. And he gave such a nice overview of that process where you anchor it to a story and you have an overarching theme. And then you have a couple of points that support theme and probably sub stories, but it all is tied together with a single thread. That's really smart. It's a very professional concept of storytelling and it's also a really important for sales. So if you aren't doing speeches and you're trying to learn how to pitch from stage, believe me you will get far better results if you're making pitches with stories versus here's the six points on why you should buy something from me. So a really important episode and I hope that people dig into this and find some great takeaways to help you in your business. Whether it's regarding making speeches, making webinars or just making videos for your own customers. Communication and storytelling is extraordinarily important.

Well we've done it again everybody. We have another episode of the awesomest podcast. Ready for the world thank you for joining us and we hope that you've enjoyed our program today. Now is a good time to take a moment to subscribe like and share this podcast. Heck you can even leave a review if you wanted Awesomers round you will appreciate your help it's only with your participation and sharing that we'll be able to achieve our goals. Our success is literally in your hands. Thank you again for joining us. We are at your service find out more about me Steve Simonson, our guest team and all the other Awesomers involved at Awesomers.com.Thank you again.