On this episode of Monetize the Mic, Jess gets the chance to talk with Interview Connections client Spencer Snakard about confronting visibility blocks!

Spencer Snakard is an executive transformation coach, trainer, and speaker. She works with visionary entrepreneurs and transformational leaders who are on a mission to make a major impact, helping them to break through barriers to their next level of success while loving life every step of the way, and without giving up what matters most to them.

She has trained and coached in personal and professional development for nearly 25 years. Her transformative programs cause profound and lasting shifts in participants' lives by getting to the heart of what drives us, what holds us back, and what it takes to be truly fulfilled as spiritual beings having a human experience. 

Jess asks Spencer, “What are people confronted with when they get visible consistently?” “Sheer terror, my friend.”

Spencer explains that a lot of fear is at play when you become visible. We’ve all witnessed people getting torn down when they put themselves out there. Spencer knows that it’s a practice. You have to start getting comfortable with being uncomfortable. Every time we put ourselves out there we’re stepping into this bigger audience, a bigger platform, and a bigger way of being seen. You will be facing and confronting fear when you grow and that’s just part of the process.

Jess wants to know, what is the fear that people are confronting?

That fear is unique for everyone. Spencer talks about the fears of looking bad, saying something wrong, and the feeling of being out of control. When we become visible, we’re giving up a perceived sense of control. Once we put ourselves outside of our bubble, we’re exposing ourselves to a lack of control. 

As you get visible you start to think, “What do people think of me?"

A difficult block that people run into when they’re becoming visible is comparison. “Comparisonitis” is an extremely human thing that we all fall victim to from time to time. Asking ourselves, do we measure up? And having that feeling of not being enough. 

Spencer recommends being vigilant about your mental state and what kind of energy is coming into your space. If someone is disempowering you, let it go. Stop filling your mind, heart, and soul with it. It’s so important to pull away from comparisonitis and feeling like a fraud. When you’re visible, you can feel someone’s energy if they’re standing in their power, or if they’re not.

Jess asks Spencer for some tips on how to show up powerfully for your podcast interviews?

Spencer recommends first having some clarity around how you want to be showing up. You don’t want to be showing up in a fake way, by putting on a show and wearing a mask. Ask yourself, “Do I want to be showing up real, vulnerable, and authentically? What is my message and how am I bringing it?”

Spencer loves being able to interview on podcasts because they are long-form and she can really have that space to go deep. Interviewing on podcasts can help you find some clarity around the question: what is the gist of what I want to say here?

Both Spencer and Jess remind listeners that you know so much more than the people you’re sharing with and you really should own that. Spencer argues that you are everything you need to be. You are perfect for all that you are and for all that you are not. You are everything you need to be right now. Stand in that and own that. All those fears and doubts wither away when you own that. It’s a very different way of looking at being visible. Everything you need you already have, so own that!

Spencer helps her clients to get to the root and the heart of their identity and who they think they are. Then, Spencer, has her clients ask, “Is it true?” Your thoughts are not facts. People tend to fall into these doom spirals of everything that could go wrong. Spencer asks, “What if we start going up spirals and think about what could go right?” Start looking at all the great things that could happen, the potential and possibilities. 

We are so quick to look at negatives, what if we start celebrating successes and wins and what we’ve done great?

Jess then asks Spencer about some breakthroughs she’s had in her business since becoming visible.

Spencer realized that she needed to start tapping into her strengths. She was able to recognize that the execution of tasks is not one of her strengths. Spencer is all about vision and potential and possibility and relationship building, not about the carry-through of the nitty-gritty. 

That’s part of why Spencer hired the team at Interview Connections to book her on podcasts. She knew that she needed to get on podcasts but she also knew that her strength is not in the carry through of that task. Spencer wanted to let someone else who is masterful at that task do it for her and she’ll just show up powerfully on podcasts.

If you want to learn more about Spencer and how she helps entrepreneurs and leaders overcome mental blocks, you can head to transformingmillions.com for a free one-hour Masterclass!

Jess and Margy are the co-owners of Interview Connections, the first and leading podcast booking agency. This is the podcast to teach you how to transform your business and life with the power of visibility and strategy!

On this episode of Monetize the Mic, Jess sits down with Lee Caraher to discuss women’s visibility!

Lee Caraher is the CEO of Double Forte, a national independent PR/Communications agency. An acclaimed communication strategist, Lee is known for her practical solutions to big problems. 

Lee has a reputation for building cohesive, high producing teams who have fun together at the same time and has authored two top-selling books about positive and profitable work culture. She is a straight talker who doesn't hold too many punches, although she does her best to be pleasant about it. Her big laugh and sense of humor have gotten her out of a lot of trouble. 

Her company works with some of the top consumer lifestyle, digital life, technology and wine brands in the country. Double Forte’s “Get on The Map” service is a foundation-building program that helps small businesses and individuals build authority and visibility to drive business success. Working with Lee and her senior team, small businesses and entrepreneurs learn how to “Show Up” and “Level Up” their footprints and influence to compete and grow their businesses. 

Jess wants to see more women investing in their visibility. 

In Jess’s experience, she finds that a lot of women feel like they’re not ready to increase their visibility. However, a lot of men have confidence at the start. Jess is passionate about seeing more women invest in their visibility, become featured in the media, and really become leaders of their industry. 

Jess asks, what is Lee’s perspective of women being featured in the media?

Lee explains that 70% of people quoted in the media as experts are men. 90% of people quoted in the first page or first 15 minutes of the media are men. Those statistics are even worse for BIPOC women. These numbers don’t reflect the number of actual business experts either. There are much more women running businesses than you’d think based on the number of women business experts quoted in the media.

Lee argues that you have to put yourself out there as an expert, and you have to be found. You have to make it so easy to find you, so that a reporter who has 2 seconds to find an expert can find you really fast. In Lee's experience, companies tend to invest more in men. Business owners who are men invest more time, money, and effort in putting themselves forward as experts. Because of this, the media can find men much easier than they can find women.

Reporters need to find people fast, and so if you're not able to be found quickly online you will not be found. This tends to diminish women in general, women’s authority in their categories, and women’s ability to implement their agenda. 

Lee introduces us to a concept called the Say Gap. The Say Gap is the difference between how many times men are quoted versus the amount of times women are quoted in the media. 70% of quotes are from men, and only 30% of quotes are from women. That is a gap of 40%!

There are things you can do to be known as an expert. There is time you can invest. But the most important thing is to change your mindset over who is an expert!

Lee was deciding whether she wanted to continue writing her second book. One night she was on the couch thinking about it, and watching the 2016 presidential debate. This debate was the one when the former president called the former secretary of state a “nasty woman.” After that moment, Lee immediately knew she was finishing this book. 

Lee knows that one thing she can do is make sure there is another book written by a woman CEO on an important topic. At that moment in time, Lee thought “I have something I can do to change this, to at least be another option in the world.” 

In Lee’s experience, she finds that women owned businesses typically underinvest in themselves. Her company helps put small businesses, with a particular focus on women owned businesses, on the map. She helps businesses achieve their goals through communication, messaging, and confidence.

Jess asks Lee, why is it so important that more women are leading and being visible?

Lee reminds us of the assumption that you can’t be a wife, mom, and run a successful business. That assumption is completely false. We should be declaring ourselves as women business owners! 

By declaring you’re a woman owned business, you’re not making the assumption that people don’t know it, you’re declaring the value of it. That declaration helps you in terms of authority and quotability. The more normal we make it to be women experts, the more normal we make it to be heard, the more normal we make it to be featured and visible in the media. It is not the norm to take our authority and declare our expertise. And that is doing ourselves and our industries a disservice! As women, we need to make sure the value that we have created is attributed to us.

Lee also discusses how podcasting can help anyone increase their visibility. By being a guest on podcasts, you’ll start appearing all over the internet. This increased findability drives authority through the roof. Lee recommends that you guest on as many podcasts as possible with several but specific topics. If you search Lee’s name, you will find hundreds of podcasts that she’s been on!

These podcasts are easy to find and easy to reference. By increasing your visibility online, you’ll start being known as an expert in your industry!

You can find Lee at double-forte.com!

On this episode of Monetize the Mic, Jess and Margy discuss the power of masterminds.

As a listener of Monetize the Mic, you probably know that Interview Connections helps their clients increase their visibility as a guest on podcasts. Every time a business experiences growth, there are new challenges to overcome. Clients of Interview Connections grow their business rapidly with their new visibility and find that they need more support in other aspects of business, like sales, marketing, pricing, etc.  

That’s where Monetize the Mic Mastermind comes in! 

This program is a group coaching and mastermind exclusively for Interview Connections clients. Jess and Margy have grown a successful, multi 7 figure business and they have a lot of experience with overcoming challenges in growing your business. They also have a great arsenal of coaches and mentors in their network that they’ve been bringing in as guest speakers for this mastermind!

Jess and Margy realized that they wanted to offer up-leveled support for their clients long-term on their journey of growing and scaling their business. They know from experience that a mentor and a mastermind can help you avoid so many mistakes that Jess and Margy themselves made. 

Having those mastermind mentors saves you so much time in the long run. A mastermind can also offer you a sense of community with people who are going through exactly what you are going through. You can connect and network with people who have goals that are as big as your goals! The masterminds that Jess and Margy have been a part of completely transformed their businesses and their lives.

An important thing that both Jess and Margy have realized is that you have to change yourself to reach goals. Business is a vehicle to transformation. They find that it’s so invigorating to help their entrepreneur clients whose businesses they really believe in. Interview Connections clients embody authenticity, integrity, leadership, and kindness. Jess and Margy put their voices and their stories on podcasts to give them a stage, a spotlight, and visibility. Now, Jess and Margy are offering their clients support with their infrastructure so their business can scale and grow from all that visibility!

How does this mastermind work with the consistent visibility and networking that clients get from podcast guesting?

People tend to not realize just how important visibility is. Jess was recently talking to an entrepreneur who said that she had spent thousands of dollars on coaches and systems but she wasn’t getting any sales calls. Jess knew immediately it was because she wasn’t visible.

Without actually getting on the court and putting the spotlight on you, you’re just not going to grow. If you don’t have the visibility, all of the marketing strategies and the coaching are pointless. Jess and Margy realized that when growing from 6 to 7 figures, the name of the game was lead generation. Where does lead gen come from? Visibility. 

Visibility is the first and most important thing, but joining a mastermind can help amplify your visibility as well. After Jess joined a mastermind, she had a network. The people in that mastermind would offer support, they would share Jess’s podcast episodes, increasing Jess’s visibility. 

The biggest gap that Jess has seen with entrepreneurs is between their true gift and vision for what they’re doing and why they’ve started this business, and then what they’re talking about on podcasts.

When entrepreneurs have space on mastermind calls to go deep, they tend to find that the tactical topics that they talk about on podcasts are a lot different than what their vision is. Their vision is more about why they’re running this business and what their gift really is. Masterminds allow people space to infuse this vision into their podcast interviews. Once that vision becomes part of your podcast interview, that’s when there’s magic created. Listeners are so attracted to you and that energy.

Why is it so hard for people to go deep and tap into their inner vision? 

When you go deep, that’s where you see the good, the bad, and the ugly. The surface level is all about looking good: “I’m an expert and I have a successful business.” When you go deep, that’s when you see the insecurities come out. Often there will be some doubts about worthiness, and that’s uncomfortable to face. We don’t want to admit that. You have to go through that muck and clean it up for you to be authentic.

When there is inauthenticity, that will come through in your energy and people will not be attracted to that. It will come through in your messaging, in your body language, and even in your pricing.

What is the structure of the mastermind?

Every Wednesday, there is a group coaching call. Jess and Margy alternate between trainings and implementation. They strongly believe in focusing on both vision and implementation. Some masterminds are all about the vision but there’s no space for implementation. 

Every other Wednesday, you’re held accountable to implementing what you’ve learned the week before. Every other Thursday, they host a mastermind call where you can have a hot seat coaching session and share what’s going on in your business. Plus, there’s a private Facebook community for you to connect and network with other amazing entrepreneurs who are reaching for big goals.

If you’re interested in joining the Monetize the Mic Mastermind, send Jessica an email at jessica@interviewconnections.com and she’ll hop on a call and talk to you about the mastermind!

This Mastermind is for Interview Connections clients only. If you’re not a client, apply for a consult call at interviewconnections.com/apply so you can get in!

On this episode of Monetize the Mic, Jess and Margy talk about the why behind setting high goals.

At Interview Connections, Jess and Margy love to set crazy high goals and go for them. Something they like to acknowledge is that their goals a few years ago seemed incredibly high, and now those same goals seem so small! Compare your goals now to your goals two years ago and you’ll see how much your business has grown.

When talking about setting high goals, Jess remembers a specific moment after attending a Landmark course. She was walking back from the hotel to the seminar and had an amazing lightbulb moment. Jess started opening herself up to new possibilities and increased her goal of what was possible.  Margy has always been the one to set the really, really high goals. Jess tends to set lower goals, and they usually end in the middle of those two goalposts.

Sometimes when business owners and entrepreneurs set high goals for their team, they’ll see that their team feels triggered by these expectations. It’s important to remember that your team is a mirror of you. Look at what exactly gets triggered with your team when you set high goals.

Triggers are necessary. They are what you come up against with high goals. The day after Interview Connections launched, Jess was working on closing spillover sales. Margy asked Jess “How many sales are you closing?” Jess responded that she was going to close three sales. Margy said, “How about six?”

That moment was so triggering for Jess. Margy was telling Jess that she can do more than that. But, what Jess heard was, “You didn't do enough.” Jess sees this trigger in her team as well as in herself. 

Jess and Margy have experienced a drive to hold people accountable but also a fear of triggering them. What it takes to get your business to 2.5 million, versus what it takes to get to 10 million is huge. Margy’s unwillingness to be direct with people and holding them accountable was holding her back. Jess and Margy couldn’t get to 10 million if either of them were holding back on their gifts and who they really are.

Margy felt like she was holding back on her aggressive vision casting for high goals. Those high goals seemed like they were a lot to ask, but they would never happen if they didn’t set those goals.

Jess feels like she wants someone to be accountable to as she reaches for these big goals. Margy helps Jess stay accountable to those goals! 

For Jess and Margy, it’s been interesting to see when they’re being their most powerful selves, and being their possibility versus reverting back to their small selves with triggers. The reason Margy loves giant goals is that they require so much transformation. As their goals got bigger, they required new teams and new systems. Every new level you hit, you have these new opportunities. 

When someone holds us accountable to the person they know we can be, it can feel like they’re being mean, or like they’re withholding love and connection. That’s when triggers happen - tantrums, shutting down - you feel that child start to kick up. Whatever those sirens are that your inner child sets off when you feel like you need that love and connection, that’s what comes up when you go for these high goals.

It’s not all being badass when you level up in business. There’s triggers, there’s crying. You’re going to confront things that are dormant that you haven’t dealt with before that could go really far back. If you are going for a high goal and it’s a shitshow, that’s good news! That means you’re on track. Going super deep is where the breakthroughs are. When you work through your own triggers, you can help others work through them as well!