World of Speakers E.45: Cathey Armillas | Learning to drive your talk

CA: I am amazing. Thank you so much, Ryan, for having me.

RF: Excellent. Amazing is a nice single-truss word. It's always fun when you ask people how they're doing. It's either "Good", "Great", "Grand", "Fantastic". I haven't had an "Amazing" in a while.

Why is life so amazing for you right now?

Why do we come up with that word?

CA: Oh, what is amazing? It's one of my words, it's funny that you would point that out.

I love awesome. Those are adjectives that I like to use. Life is amazing.

I don't know, life is what you make of it and it's been amazing for me lately.

I love what I do. I love the people I work with, so it's amazing.

RF: Awesome.

Now, one of my favorite words is rad.

People that are coming from my old-school surfing and skateboarding days, I still surf and skateboard, but I'll be like, "That's rad," and people are just like, "Who uses rad?"

CA: I still use rad, I like it. I totally love that.

RF: Good.

Well, I'm excited to have a rad conversation with you.

To help everybody get an idea of who you are, I'm not the type of person that just reads off accolades and bios, I like to hear stories, and I think we all do.

My challenge to you is to tell me a single story from some time in your life and imagine that that is the only piece of information that I get if I'm going to introduce you to somebody else.

What would that story look like?

CA: Okay, I have this really funny story of how I learned to drive.

I have this uncle who, at the time I didn't realize, but he was drunk all the time. He was an alcoholic.

RF: The classic drunk uncle.

CA: The classic drunk uncle Phil, he was drunk all the time.

He decided when I was 12 years old that he wanted me to learn how to drive. He wanted to teach me how to drive. He was like, "I'm going to teach you how to drive." It became his thing.

And so he takes me out to his car—do you remember those old-school cars? He had a 1979 Mercury Cougar. This huge car. They're really, really long in the front end. The hood is really long.

RF: Yeah, they've got to fit all that engine in there.

CA: Yeah, exactly. All the steel.

He was drunk at the time, and he's trying to take me around, but I had a problem—there were two things: I could either reach the pedal if I leaned down, because it was so far away, or I could see over the top of the hood because I had to lift up to see over the top of the hood, but I couldn't do both.

He didn't have much advice for me other than, "Don't run through the red light, don't hit the cement thing over here." It was kind of crazy.

I had to learn to adjust on the fly.

Sometimes I had to reach for the break and not see what I was actually seeing in front of me, and sometimes I had to look over to see where I was going.

I think it was a really funny story because I actually learned how to navigate that. I learned how to switch between the two, and that's how I learned to drive.

We started off in the parking lot of Vaughn's, down in the Valley in California, and then we ended up on the roads, and that's how I learned how to drive in a 1979 red Mercury Cougar with my drunk uncle.

RF: Okay, I'm going to imagine that when you're teaching people to proverbially drive on stage, there are elements that are involved where you're helping them to understand where the brake is, where the gas pedal is, to look over that dashboard...

There are a lot of moving parts. Speaking is almost like a stick shift, right? Because sometimes you've got to switch in the different gears and things like that.

Your ability to just take the challenge, not cry, run away, and not take it on: I would assume that you're very much a person who is okay with on-the-fly situations.

You almost have to be a coach because you can't be anything less than just reactive and perceptive, and attacking one end and then the other.

I think this is an interesting story that we're going to definitely work off of here today.

CA: Yeah, I think when you're teaching other people how to be themselves and how to speak their best way—you can’t. You have to teach them that they have to figure out that formula.

They have to figure out, "Do I need to hit the brakes or the gas right now," or, "Do I really need to see over the hood right now."

"Is it really imperative that I need to see over the hood at this moment?"

RF: Right, and still it's nice to have somebody in the passenger seat to guide you and put in some parameters, like, "Let's get some basic guidelines," but then let them sort of stumble and run over a few trash cans in the process of learning how to drive.

CA: Exactly. And you just hope that the person sitting next to you isn't drunk.

RF: Well actually, that could help in certain situations, right?

There are actually studies around creativity and being under the influence, and at limiting some of the inhibitions that might come with a very stagnant sober mind.

Who knows, maybe throw a couple glasses of wine in your coaching and you might up your coaching game.

That actually might be an interesting coaching experience, when at lesson 3 or 4 you have a bottle of wine and you're talking and you're like,

"Look, let's loosen things up a little bit. Let's see what happens when you're drunk talking."

Speaking of which, it reminds me of Drunk History. Are you a fan of Drunk History?

CA: No, I don't know what it is.

RF: You do not? Oh my gosh. Comedy Central Drunk History is probably the most entertaining way to learn history possible.

They take these people that are either well-known or they have niche expertise and they find people with the ability to tell a story of say George Washington or these other famous figures.

And then they basically just get them drunk and have them tell the story and then they reenact it with other famous people.

CA: It's legit drunk talking. That's great.

RF: It's legit drunk history.

Well, not speaking of drunk and drinking, I don't want to get sidetracked with that, what you're doing now is you're essentially helping people to drive their own car, which is themselves.

Tell me more about the marketing strategy and the TED coaching.

At first, I wouldn't think those are paired together, but tell me how those have formulated?

CA: I was totally in line with you on that. I did not think that they paired together.

Like many things that happen in life, things come together and you realize, "Oh, wow, these things are a perfect pair, but I didn't realize it."

I started off as a marketing director a long time ago. This was like right before YouTube launched in 2005.

I worked at this unique company. We manufactured and sold industrial shredders. Large shredders that would shred cars, and mattresses, and anything big that needed to be little.

I had this crazy idea. I went to the CEO and I was like,

"You know what we should do? We should pay somebody to create one of those little flash players and we should put our videos up online. Because it's the coolest thing. I loved watching us shred stuff."

He was like, "Cathey, that's so ridiculous. How many people on the internet do you think can afford a half a million dollar shredder?"

I'm like, "Yeah, but it's cool. People would want to see it."

I kind of went back and forth with them and then finally he was like, "Okay, cool. Whatever."

So we paid a local company—it was like $10,000-$15,000 to create—remember those old flash players where it had to load? It was like loading, loading, the whole thing had to load.

RF: Yeah, the circle of death just to get it going.

CA: Yeah, exactly.

We launched a site called “Watch It Shred” and it went viral instantly.

I don't know if you remember the old site Boing Boing, but somebody at Boing Boing found out about our site and they wrote about it and then it went super viral and the David Letterman Show called us and asked us to be a part of the show.

Anyway, long story short, it kind of launched my marketing career to this thing of like crazy ideas.

What is cool and interesting about industrial shredders?

Well, it just depends on how you look at it.

So that happened, and when YouTube launched finally in 2005, it was one of the first viral videos on YouTube. My marketing career kicked off. I ended up leaving that company and I started my own marketing company.

Pretty soon, one of my clients was actually a videographer and he was amazing. And what I loved about this guy, John, is he was like this outdoorsman like no other. He would do caving, which is actually called bloodgreen, or whatever it's called.

He's just always doing class 4 rapids and everything that was extreme and outdoor. And yet, his clients were like, Bob's Books, and I just could never make the connection.

I'm like, "Why do you have such a passionate job, yet what you're doing isn't that passionate?"

He ended up creating this video called "Finding Oregon." He took an entire summer and went to the coolest places in Oregon—places that people who had lived there their entire lives had never seen. And he put together this video and it went viral.

Then the executive producer at TEDx Portland, which is the largest TEDx event in the United States, saw his video and called him up and said, "Hey, we want you to give a TED Talk."

Pretty soon, my world of marketing and TED kind of coexisted at that moment because my client was like, "Hey, I just got asked to give a TED Talk and I need help."

RF: Nice.

CA: Yeah, so he gave this TED talk and got an 8-minute standing ovation because what he ended up doing was, he created a new video called "Finding Portland," and they viewed it during his talk and his entire talk was about how you have to be curious in life. So that was kind of his idea.

He actually did it with a partner. That was kind of interesting, teaching. Not only preparing somebody to talk on stage, but preparing two people, and they demoed some equipment.

My first one out of the gate was kind of an interesting, rough, fun, and challenging thing.

Since TED is all about spreading ideas, I quickly learned that all a TED Talk was, was a mini marketing campaign for an idea.

That was really what brought my two worlds together of being a marketing strategist and being at TED coach.

RF: I like this idea of a TED Talk being a mini marketing platform. What did you say?

CA: A mini marketing campaign for an idea.

RF: Yeah. Would you argue that a keynote, or another type of talk is also a mini marketing campaign for an idea? Is it past the TEDx stage in a general sense?

CA: It should, but here's the thing: I think some people that keynote don't get that concept, and don't understand why TED has been so popular, and that's why. And so I think that it should and can translate, yes, outside of TED.

RF: Interesting. Is that one of your gigs now? As you help people market, that may be as a lead gen for these amazing people that have stories to share on the TED stage?

You have those two sides of the coin and that's your main focus right now, right?

CA: Yeah, that's kind of my main focus. It’s helping people market and it's really been more in the TED coaching.

But for me, I actually ended up coming up with a category that went beyond the scope of both of those.

I believe that I teach people, kind of the power of persuasion, and both marketing and speaking are in that realm.

You're trying to persuade somebody when you're speaking. You're trying to persuade somebody when you're marketing.

I teach across the board on both, and I do it in various ways. I do pitch training for ad agencies, and I coach a lot of people to give TED Talks. Nike has an internal event called Nike Knows and I'm their speaker coach for that.

So, they're giving a kind of TED-like talk internally, but their focus is more on storytelling.

You just kind of hit a little bit more of the storytelling piece of it.

RF: This is fascinating.

I feel like you are ready to teach me how to drive a 1979 Cougar.

Okay. Let's imagine that you've got somebody, our listeners, we're all in the front seat with you and we're taking turns at the car, and this car is a mini-marketing campaign for our idea.

If you were to have our full, undivided attention, and considering that we're sober at the moment, what are some of the lessons that you'd step us through, from a technical standpoint?

What are the top nuggets that you can cherry-pick from all of these workshops and all these speaker trainings to create a little mini-lesson for us now?

CA: Yeah, sure.

People maybe think this is backwards because many people, when they start to write a speech or a talk or they have to give a keynote, a lot of people go to a slide deck first.

I kind of do things a little bit backwards. I don't let people write, or do anything, until they can actually formulate their idea.

I created this thing called "the idea map" and it's just a simple little thing.

It's just really focusing on the fact that you really have to know your idea first because even if you're giving the keynote, there inherently should be an idea in there that challenges the mind, the thought, the action of the people that you're talking to.

That idea has to be, if it's an old idea, meaning it's been around for a while, you have to give it a new polish. You have to give it a new angle. You have to give it a new something that we haven't heard before, which was really what made TED really popular. They really do focus on that.

It's funny because TED, in a lot of people's minds, is like one of the largest and most popular speaking platforms, yet it's not a speaking platform at all. It's an ideas platform.

I would start people off with, "What's your idea and what do you want people to do with it? How do you want people to consume your idea? What should they do with your idea?"

If you have the most brilliant idea in the world, even if you can articulate it, if you can't make somebody do something with it, then you've really served no purpose.

That's kind of where I start.

I coached somebody last year at TEDx Portland, and he started a thing called "Pitch Black," here in Portland, where he was trying to get funding for black entrepreneurs.

The whole premise of his talk was like, "I want people to buy local," and I'm like, "Wow, that's tough because so many people have done that before." His name's Steven Green.

We probably spent two months just trying to figure out what his angle was going to be and how it was going to be different and how can we say something other than what's already been said before.

We ended up coming up with this really cool, just slightly different angle, and he hashtagged it. It was so funny.

He said, "I just want you to cheat more. I don't want to affect all your habits. I just want you, every once in a while, to cheat on Starbucks or cheat on Amazon."

It's kind of cool. It was just fun. Everybody loved it.

That was the whole premise of not trying to shame anybody, guilt anybody, but he just wanted you to go out and cheat a little bit more on your big box purchases.

RF: Interesting. You have your idea map, I've got this thing called the 3-1-3.

What you're saying here really resonates with me because your idea, however brilliant it is, if you can't communicate it in a way that gets people interested to know more about it or have some inclination to take action, it's all for naught.

I'm curious about your opinion on how the problem that people are solving ties into this idea.

My sort of line in the sand is that people don't care what you do. They don't care about you or your ideas, your business.

They really care about the problem that you're solving, and it's kind of an investigative matter to find out what that is. I can spend probably two months with somebody on that same process.

I'm curious about your thoughts on the relationship between this idea, what is it that you want to do, and what do you want to have the audience take action with, a relationship to there really being a problem that's being solved.

For example, the problem of this gentleman that people aren't shopping locally, and that's affecting these retail companies that are small businesses, they might be minorities and they're going out of business.

I'm curious, selfishly, about the connection between these ideas in this core message and its relationship to the problem that's really being solved.

CA: Well I have to tell you, I watched your TED Talk, both of your TED Talks actually.

RF: I've got three of them actually.

CA: Oh, you've got three? I've watched two out of three.

RF: Maybe another one in the future, too.

I feel like it's an amazing stage to have the ability to mini market an idea, and unfortunately, I've got plenty of them. Which ones are you talking about?

CA: I watched the one that I'm going to refer to as the one where you said, "Nobody cares what you do."

I love that you talked about having a problem, and you talked about having a problem of a paper cut, and the papercut suck, and yeah, they burn and everybody can kind of remember what that feels like. “It's just a little bit of a nuisance.” I think that’s what you said?

A bigger problem would be is if your finger got chopped off.

People would be calling 911, like, "What do we do with this dude? He is on the stage, he is bleeding out, what's going on?"

I loved that. I cracked up when I saw that because I was like, "Yeah, as a speaking coach and as a marketer, I'm always creating chopped fingers." I loved that.

RF: Yeah, and what's fun about that, the concept is that people get caught up on the severity. It's more severe, but I really find that the difference is, if you have a paper cut, there's nothing to do about it.

I mean, if you get your finger chopped off, there are steps that have to be taken. You know that there's action to be taken.

CA: I totally loved that, and I do believe that that is a huge piece when somebody's trying to communicate what they want to be done with your idea.

Sometimes the severity is just a thought, it's just like a radical thought of the way you think.

I remember my sister, I have a stepsister and she's an architect, and she sent me this link to a TED Talk "Why We Should Build Wooden Skyscrapers," and I remember thinking to myself when she sent it to me, "I don't really care".

And then I watched it and I'm like, "We should build wooden skyscrapers!" I was like, "How did this dude change my mind?"

And then, coincidentally, two weeks ago, the very same guy that got me into the TED coaching, this John Waller guy, he did a video job for a guy here in Portland who built the tallest building in the United States, right now, that's made completely out of wood.

I was like, "That's crazy how that came full circle."

When I was watching the talk, he actually made me think of it more like a chopped finger than a paper cut. It was just in my mind.

I mean, there was really nothing that I could professionally do to help him, but sometimes that's just what it is.

I think when you were talking about it, what made a lot of sense to me is that you should make people think that your finger is chopped off, not that you have a paper cut. I love that.

RF: Cool. I'm glad you dig that.

Let's assume that starting the engine is, and we're in neutral at this point, I like this analogy here. You actually can't drive your talk unless you have this actual core idea.

What is it? Is it a finger that's chopped off?

How are you going to make that pain resonate, and what are the consumers going to do with it?

Here we are, the engine is turned on but we're in neutral, and it might take us two months of being in neutral.

Maybe that idea is like the gas, although you can't be idle without gas, but it's a stretch here.

So we're in idle and we're in neutral. What do we do now?

CA: Once you come up with the idea, and you have a really good angle because some of that I think is filtering. A lot of trying to come up with an idea is going, "Huh, this idea that I was going to talk about..."

Let's say you're going to talk about bullying. There are a lot of ways you could talk about bullying. There are a lot of different angles, so you cover a bunch of different angles.

When you finally resonate on one angle, I go right to the end, I go, "how would you close it?"

Because that dictates everything else that you're going to put in the middle.

What is it that you want somebody to walk away with and do?

Again, what do you want to change in their thought, their actions? What do you want them to do with your idea?

Then that gives me everything I need to kind of go, "Okay, well then, this is how we open,” and this is where I think TED Talks and keynotes deviate, and they don't have to, they really don't.

There's a lot of what I call “supporting evidence” in TED Talks, meaning somebody's not standing on a stage and saying, "Hey there's this amazing idea and it's so amazing because I say it's amazing."

They usually will say, "Hey, here's social proof, here's some kind of scientific evidence or there's data."

I love psychology, my favorite TED Talks in the world are from psychologists like Dan Gilbert, for instance.

Every talk that he gives is amazing. His entire talk is supported by evidence. He's always talking about why people do what they do.

I think that it's really finding a cool way to highlight how to support the idea. Why is this idea really good?

I mean, it can't just be a great idea because you think it is. You have to give me more than that. I think that's where a lot of the work comes in.

Now, people who tend to give keynotes will tend to kind of scatter all over the place and have all these points, and they just veer, many times too much, away from the core idea.

I think if you can stick to that core idea and that angle, but you can find a great way to continue to support that, then that's kind of where I lead people.

RF: Okay.

So let's assume here, back to this car, when you were driving with your drunk uncle, where was the final destination?

Did you guys have a destination in mind? Was it like, "Let's drive to Macy's?"

CA: Yeah, get back home safe.

RF: Okay. So you're in neutral, and you've got this big idea and then before you actually start driving, you have to know where you want the car to end up?

I know there wasn't GPS back in the day, but now I'm envisioning like, "Okay, we've typed this into Google Maps, but you have a variety of ways to get there."

You can take side streets, you can take the highway, you can literally use ways and—

CA: Go up on the sidewalk.

RF: Yeah, like grab their attention a little bit, take out a couple of poles.

I'm liking this, the fact that these are simple but powerful, starting with the engine first to turn it on, knowing where you're going to go but this idea of the roadmap, whether it's kerbs or streets or freeways, you have these abilities to pick up the different pieces of research and support the context along the way.

How do you structure navigating that?

Do you have people do a bunch of research, or is it all based on stories and things to back up with research?

What's the method for choosing the route after you know where you want to go?

CA: There are two different types. If you were to just broadly categorize the type of evidence that there is, there's anecdotal ,and there is scientific or whatever.

So you've got anecdotal, which could be stories, and then you’ve really got more that fall into the category of kind of scientific evidence.

I think to roadmap out what you're doing, one of the things you always have to know is there always has to be a string. You always have to be going from one context, or one idea, or one concept, to the next within the actual story, your talk, or your speech.

Keeping that main idea up front and present, but being able to string this all the way through is really important. Sometimes, mistakes that we can make are that we don't do that, we'll go off into the wilderness a little bit and go, "Oh shoot, I totally got off track. I've got to get back on the road." Or, "I've made a couple of wrong turns."

RF: You see the ocean, you drive down on the beach for a little bit and maybe you follow an ice-cream truck around or whatever it is, but you're saying, stay on the route once you get it routed.

CA: Yeah, stick to the route.

A funny story. A little deviation here. I ride motorcycles and I have a Ducati that I ride, and I took my niece, my little 10-year-old niece on the motorcycle and she was so excited to be on the back of a motorcycle.

My brother lives in this huge neighborhood that has a lot of streets, and it's really confusing and I was telling her, "Okay, you've got to get me back home now," and she wouldn't tell me the way home.

We got so lost because she wanted to keep riding. I was like, "No Kaley, you need to tell me how to get back home right now."

RF: Oh my gosh. Okay.

There are a couple things I'm seeing here. You are obviously sober in that situation because you've learned from your drunk uncle, but you are now the family member giving back to the younger generation, teaching them how to drive, but teaching them on a motorcycle which is even cooler.

When they're in the driver's seat, this is interesting because there are people who when they are speaking they feel like they're in the driver's seat, and the rest of the world sometimes gets fuzzy, and they're into their talk, and they just keep talking.

And then they keep talking and talking and driving around the cul-de-sac and bringing the audience with them when the audience is like, "Look, take us home!"

CA: Exactly.

"We just want to go home right now. We don't want to be on this ride."

Yeah, and I think that's really important.

Number one, as the audience, we don't have the capacity to go down every loophole with you.

You need to keep us attached to the idea as much as possible and keep throwing unexpected things at us.

Anything expected, we could pick up our phones and do it ourselves.

Any kind of data or any story that it's like, "Oh yeah, I was expecting this dude to say this."

That's another thing, and I don't think people understand that it's not a lot of hard work. and yes, to answer your earlier question, I do make people do research.

When I'm coaching somebody to give a TED Talk, I make them go out and do research.

The research usually leads to research, meaning you start off thinking you're going to research something, and it takes you down a rabbit hole that is cool, and you end up somewhere else.

It's that little bit of work that you're doing that is so great for your audiences because your audience hasn't taken the time to go two, three, four levels deep on what you're talking about.

Any idea that you have and you give to the world, it should be as deep as possible, and as wide as possible, and as wide as possible to me always means,

"How universal is this idea? How many people can you include into this idea?"

Or is it just specifically only to a very small segmented group of people in the world.

Then of course, how deep can you take it? If everybody believes that bullying is no good, that's awesome. That's ground level.

What's going to be the next level below that, and then what's the next level under that, and then what's the next level, take me deeper, and deeper, and deeper.

RF: I think that's great.

The idea that is resonating in the last few comments is that if it's not deep enough, it's something that they can grab their phone and look at and then it just draws the attention away.

You see people when they're in the audience and they might get just a surface level and they might be interested, and if you don't take them down that hole, they're going to go down the hole by themselves, and they're going to stop listening.

CA: They're going to stop listening.

They're going to go down the hole themselves, they are going to find something better than what you're saying.

RF: We're referring to the phone as the hole, the phone hole.

CA: Yeah, the phone could totally be the hole.

When you're a speaker, you know. You can tell by the look on somebody's face if they are actually tweeting something exciting that you said or if they're like, "Dude, skip this guy."

He is trying to look at something else, or he is taking a picture, you can tell.

I think that's one of the things too, as a speaker, presenter, you always have to be aware of how people are digesting what you're saying.

RF: Absolutely.

Before we transition to how you monetize a message, how you get on the TEDx stage, how you increase your stage time, I want to pick your brain quickly on this idea of conversational keynotes or conversational presentations.

Have you heard of that phrase before?

CA: Yeah, of course, because TED Talks are supposed to be conversations. So, yes.

RF: Okay, maybe I'm not using the right verbature, but TED is a very one-way broadcast, right? It's not very conversational.

But this idea, I'm doing more research, I'm interested in these conversational presentations where the Q&A is maybe in the middle and your whole keynote or your whole presentation changes depending on how the audience wants it, like this audience engagement.

I'm curious if you've played with that, or your thoughts on that, instead of having a, "I'm going to talk for 45 minutes," really setting them up and making it almost like a "choose your own adventure".

I'm interested in that as a format. I don't know what your thoughts are?

CA: I actually coached one of my friends who speaks in the HR world on that. He gave a big presentation one time and the audience was offended.

I mean, it's a very specific field and they're like, "We expected you to be the expert here, not to show up and be like, hey, where do you want to go with this?"

I think it can backfire on you sometimes, but I think if you're a good presenter and you're energetic. I think it doesn't work as well with some people as it does with others.

Some people naturally have this energy to them, they allow for a lot of conversation.

I always start my presentations off with like, "Hey, I don't want to be here talking at you guys. Let's do this together." I kind of give that hybrid feel.

I have a ton of stuff prepared, don't get me wrong, I have stuff prepared here, but I don't need to like bang it into your head if there's some other direction that we need to go.

I do think it's a really good way to do it, and you have to be able to pull that off, you have to be able to kind of engage with the audience.

And you know how that thing is, sometimes the biggest problem that people have in sessions when it's Q&A is you'll get the audience to either
a) you won't get them to engage at all, and it's like pulling teeth, or
b) you'll get them to engage so much that somebody will be sucking up a bunch of time and then you as the presenter, you've lost control and you don’t know how to gain it back.

There are all these facets to it, but I think in the end, you have to teach people, you have to inspire people. You have to be able to influence them through the inspiration of what you're teaching and your ideas.

And so yeah, I do, I love this. I love that kind of style where it is definitely more conversational and you just get to drop knowledge here and there.

Ultimately, we get paid for our experiences because we're out there.

I always like to tell my clients, "There are two pieces to what you do, no matter what it is that you do. There's the practical and there's the theory."

If you're actually practicing something, for me, it would be working one-on-one with a client, teaching them how to pitch or how to present or how to give a TED Talk.

And if all I do anymore is that, and I'm not actually doing it myself anymore, I am only in theory at this point. You have to ride in both.

You can't just quit your one side and go, "Okay, cool. Now for the rest of my life I'm going to tell people what to do." It doesn't work. You have to practice it as well.

RF: That's like driving without a license. That's like having your drunk uncle be your validation.

He's like, "Hey, I say you can drive, so you can drive," and then you're like teaching people how to drive but you don't have a license, right?

CA: Yeah. There are new types of cars that come out, or I'm trying to teach you how to drive a motorcycle and I've never ridden anything but a moped.

RF: Right. Let's talk about upgrading the vehicles and going from cars to boats, to planes, to trains, to Teslas, to rocket ships when it comes to this analogy.

How do you take it from a 1977 Cougar to 2018 Tesla turbo supercharged whatever?

CA: To Ludicrous Mode

RF: To Ludicrous Mode, exactly. May the Schwartz be with you. How do you tap into the Schwartz and the force out there?

I'm assuming part of your coaching is not only once you have the gig, but do you incorporate how to get the gigs?

Do you help people to get onto the TEDx stages?

Do you help people to get more stage time, to get those paid keynotes? Is that part of your shtick?

CA: Yeah. Yeah, I do. It's kind of funny, that's become a huge part of what I do.

When I first started, it kind of surprised me because at first, I'm like, "Okay, I'm going to coach my client on kind of the art of being able to communicate."

And then I realized quickly that when people are actually taking the time, especially people in the TED stage where many times speaking isn't their big gig, they're doing something else in life that's amazing and they just got asked to give a talk.

They all kind of realize that being on a stage and being able to speak is a big megaphone that they could definitely use. So that became a huge piece, me trying to help people generate places to speak or to get on TED stages and whatnot.

I think too that you find your people, you find who you're great for.

Here's a great example. I live in Portland and Nike found me, and I am a very Nike person, but I also work with Intel and I do this thing with them once a year where I teach them how to present. I have this thing called “How to Rock a Presentation” and I do it like once a year for this big annual thing.

I think that the Intel people are like, "Oh my God, that's amazing, I wish I could present like that," and as soon as I leave they are like, "Oh my God, I'm never going to do that."

But for me, the first time I went to Nike I was like, "Oh my gosh, they're my people."

It really fit well and the kind of jobs that I look forward to are very different from the kind of jobs that one of my clients might look for.

I try to help them find where it is that they're going to be able to find their best platform.

I think the world tries to tell us, "Everybody should give a TED Talk," but maybe that's not right for everybody. It just depends.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, I don't push any one thing with anybody.

You know what I mean?

Even though I'm actually a TED coach, I wouldn't just carte blanche tell somebody, "Oh, you should give a TED talk."

RF: Right, and the TED stage is particular in that it's really for people who have these amazing Ideas, concepts that are worth sharing, and that's a platform for it.

Let's talk real quick about platforms.

If you were to sort of slice the platforms into these different categories and maybe associate a vehicle with it, what are the minimum number of cars or vehicles that would act as platforms for speakers?

Just generalize it, because we could get crazy in all kinds of specifics, but if we were to talk about the different cars that you can drive, and the cars being the stage that you can be on, what would those classifications look like?

And then maybe we can hit each one of them for what it takes to drive it and maybe some advice on how to get into that car.

CA: Well, I kind of think there are these big, really general things. Of course, there's speaking and then there's presenting or training, there's like actual training and then there's more keynoting, which is more in the speaking realm.

I've personally done this hybrid of my marketing world and my speaking world too, and I've created kind of another one that might be in between the two where I have people on a retainer model, so it kind of falls a little bit more under the training.

However, there's a lot of speaking that goes with it. Does that make sense?

Some of what I'll do will actually just be speaking, but some of what I'm doing is training as well, and then I just get somebody on a retainer model.

I would definitely say keynoting and training would be two big areas. I guess that would be like a motorcycle and a car or something like that.

RF: Okay. What I'm thinking here, I just took some notes, so speaking is almost like a Toyota right?

It can be a nice Toyota, it can be a regular Toyota, you could speak at a local Toastmasters, it might be an older model.

You can get some that are nice and fancy and it's up there in a general sense.

And then training, I'm thinking of it like a Land Rover. Something you're going to strap into. It's off-road, you're really in the dirt, you're not on the regular roads, this is more of an off-road vehicle.

And then the keynoting, I think almost as like a Bentley, where it's like big, sexy, expensive high class, a sixty-thousand-pound car that's got the power and nimbleness of whatever.

And then, your hybrid, I like that it's an actual hybrid, like a Prius or something.

CA: Yeah.

RF: Okay, so let's jam through these and maybe you can give your top tips on effective ways to try to get in that car.

For speaking, in probably the most general sense, how do you get into that Toyota or does everybody just start off in a Toyota? I don't know.

CA: Yeah, there's always that motto of kind of going from free to shining fee.

I think you always have to pay your dues in anything that you do, no matter what industry you're in, and speaking is no doubt the same way.

Of course, I had this ex-military, Navy Seal kind of dude that was my first mentor and he used to always tell me, "Whatever you do Cathey, whatever stage you're on, I don't care whatever you do—don't suck."

I was just always terrified. He was like, "I don't care. I don't give a crap." He was always cussing at me, like, "I don't care what stage it is, I don't care if it's Toastmasters, I don't care if it's a girl scout troop, make sure that you don't suck."

He was always pushing me, of course, to speak anywhere that I could.

I think too, as we get further along we realize the benefit of pushing yourself to in a spot where you can feel new again. Meaning we get so used to being on stages now and walking into companies and doing stuff that it's not that you don't care anymore, you just can't get that feeling again where you're like, "Oh my God, I'm about to go on a stage and speak."

I think that if you're not pushing yourself in those areas, you're not growing.

RF: Yeah.

CA: Do new things.

The only Toastmasters Club I go to anymore is a TD one.

It's kind of interesting, you're in this little room and you're having to give a talk or a speech and you're talking only to a camera. It's so much harder.

You have to sit there and go, "Okay, well, I can't see an audience, so I really have to work on how well this is going to be digested and how well am I doing."

RF: Wow, that's cool. I dig that.

CA: Yeah. It's like how do you push yourself and how do you get yourself in there. So yes, I think that's important.

I do think that everybody, and maybe somebody doesn't. I think some people come into it and they might be better than others.

Look at the comedian world, some people work 20 years and then all of a sudden they are an overnight success.

And then other people come along and they do great right away. I do think that that is an important piece to the next too.

The problem that I find with the Bentley or the keynoting is, and I love it, don't get me wrong, keynoting is so much fun and I love to do it.

But if that's your business model, you're having to throw it away and replicate it every single day.

I mean, you have to go find another gig, you have to go find another gig, you have to find another gig.

My MIT smartass brother-in-law told me this one time when I was starting my business, he was like, "Awesome—"

RF: I love your family, by the way.

CA: They're crazy. When I started my business, he was like, "Awesome. How are you going to be anything other than self-employed if you're a speaker?"

And I was like, "God damn, he's right."

He really was somebody that pushed me. My mind was going, "Okay, well, how do I actually make this a business?"

Because even if you're keynoting, you're getting a lot of money. The minute you stop speaking, you don't have money anymore.

So yeah, it's a Bentley. It's great and you can lose it really quick or you have to replicate it all the time.

I like to keep that as only a piece of my portfolio and what I do.

And then, of course, the training, you have a lot more. It's not as sexy. It is kind of off-road. You do get a little dirty. You have to kind of get your hands in the dirt a little bit, but it's probably the one that takes you the deepest, and you can make the most money overall because you can replicate that business, over and over.

You can stay with one client and they can hire you for training consistently.

You can come up with programs that they can utilize. You can create workbooks, you can create audio that will go along with what you do in addition to what you teach live, and there's a lot of areas that you can work in there and make a lot of money.

It's maybe not as sexy, but there's also a lot more to do, but you still have that problem that it's you and it's your IP and you're always having to create.

Then I think another area that you have to fall into is your products. You have to constantly be creating products and what I call "memorable models".

You should always have a system for anything that you teach because people won't remember anything unless it's via some kind of system.

And that's really a whole other discussion. But that's how I would cover each one of those areas.

RF: I dig it and I feel like I am going to apply for my series C license and then whatever else to just up my game.

I don't have my motorcycle's license yet, I'm trying to think of like what in the speaking world could create that crazy excitement but not kill me.

My parents basically said, "You cannot smoke cigarettes, you cannot ride a motorcycle. Anything else, good to go." So those have been my goal posts.

CA: And it wasn't the first thing that you did when you turned 18 was smoked a cigarette on a motorcycle?

RF: No, no, believe it or not. No, they did a good job. They've psychologically wounded me to follow their directions. They're educators, they are very smart.

CA: They are very smart. They had a plan.

RF: Yeah. I never got grounded. I would just have to write essays on what I did wrong and how I could improve and the impact that it would have. Psychological warfare, but I loved it. It was good.

CA: Yeah, that is great. That's fantastic. I wish I had your parents.

RF: I wish I had your family. Drunk uncle sounds like fun, a smartass from MIT sounds pretty cool.

I mean, somebody who you're teaching and they get you lost specifically in the cul de sac just so they can selfishly get more riding time.

It sounds like a good match, we could all do Thanksgiving together sometime and have a hoot.

CA: Yeah, that would be fun. That would be great.

RF: Hey, this has been a lot of fun.

I really don't think I'm ever going to start my car without some sort of recollection of the connection between speaking and driving.

I think it's a fun analogy to run with, maybe it'll be your next book or something like that.

Really, the more I think about it, the more I think we could dive into it and speaking is like driving in many senses, and there are so many ways to have a nicer, fancier car.

But at the end of the day, regardless of what your car looks like, it's who's in your car, your audience in the passengers’ seats that you're bringing from point A to point B, safely.

CA: Yep, that's great. It's really good, Ryan.

RF: If somebody wants you to teach them how to drive, drunk or not, where's the best place for them to find you, and contact you?

CA: Definitely, my website it's catheyarmillas.com, I'm Cathey with an "E", C-A-T-H-E-Y.

RF: And Armillas like tortillas.

We'll get all that in the show notes and everything.

Well, very cool.

Well, I might even hit you up because I always think that having other people help you to drive is going to help you get further and faster and safer and quicker.

Well, maybe not safer if it's on a motorcycle, but that's okay, it's more exciting and quicker.

Hey, this was fantastic. I hope that we keep connected online and maybe we'll share the stage some time, who knows.

CA: Yeah, it sounds great. Thanks so much, Ryan, for having me on.

RF: For sure.

Now all of you listeners, if you enjoyed this, which I'm sure you did, there's plenty more to enjoy out there.

There are lots of other cars to jump into and they come in the form of other World of Speakers podcasts.

Again, make sure to leave a review and reach out to Cathey and even connect with her because this information is just like a car in idle, you've got to jump in and take what you've learned for a ride to get your audience to the destination that you want.

Leave us a review, share this with your friends, hit us up on social, all that good stuff, because together we are larger World of Speakers, and as we support each other, we can make more of an impact around the world, safely.

Don't drink and drive, no matter what you do, don't drink and drive. Drinking and speaking— maybe that's a whole nother topic.

Alright everybody, stay safe.

Thanks again, Cathey, fun times and we'll talk to you soon.

CA: All right, thank you, Ryan.

A bit about World of Speakers

World of Speakers is a bi-weekly podcast that helps people find their own voice, and teaches them how to use their voice to develop a speaking business.

We cover topics like: what works versus what doesn't, ideas on how to give memorable presentations, speaking tips, and ideas on how to build a speaking business.

Connect with Cathey Armillas:

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