Welcome to module four, this one is going to be all about confidence and credibility. When it comes to thought leadership confidence, of course is of utmost importance, you need confidence to have a strong voice. And this will also help you counteract imposter syndrome, which I'm going to talk about later on. Now, if you're convinced that you know your stuff, then your confidence and your competence are going to completely shine through. And over time, you're going to gain the ability to step on stage and command an audience's attention. So this module is going to outline three very specific ways you can grow your confidence, education, developing your skills as a writer, and identifying other thought leaders in your space as role models or mentors.

Now I want to dive into hacking education. If you don't feel like you're fully educated in the area to which you're focusing as a thought leader, a great way to gain expertise quickly and at a low cost is to hack your education. We're in an era right now, where technology is disrupting and democratizing education, which access now to top education is no longer reserved to the wealthy or the few top brains. Now, while a doctor or a lawyer needs to, of course still pursue a traditional path in education today, a thought leader doesn't necessarily need those impressive letters from top schools after their names in order to succeed. In fact, except for a few professions, many educational paths leading to careers can now be hacked. While some corporations are slow to adopt them, no traditional MBA needed to advance mentality that we have here in Silicon Valley.

Many companies, don't ask Think an MBA now is an advantage because it can teach in the box thinking. And many big tech giants and other innovative corporations now follow that specific line of thinking. And some are not even requiring four year undergrad degrees anymore. Right? Well, crazy, right? So in night, what was it 2017 IBM's vice president told CNBC about 15% of their companies us hires don't actually have a four year degree.

Google Starbucks, Apple Hilton Whole Foods, Costco, even Bank of America no longer require college degrees to work there. I want to tell you a little bit about my journey in the world of education because my undergrad college days were spent in and out of a hospital. I never knew if I was going to actually be in the operating room the next day or even survive long enough to graduate from college. So Gaining letters after my name in an advanced degree wasn't even on my radar. I was fighting life or death at that point. But fortunately, because I had a really strong foundational education background because I went to New England boarding schools for high school, they're really intense, and they really teach you independence and good study habits.

By the time I got to college and was studying from a hospital bed, I was really independent. And I had such incredible learning habits that I was able to succeed. I knew how to study and I knew how to conquer rigorous course loads without even having to go to class. And being really sick at the time, I knew I had to get creative. And so I did. I completed my undergrad degree and hospitality management from my hospital bed, even without the internet at the time, and I couldn't email my teacher so I had to come up with even more creative ways to communicate with them and get them assignments and many times I had to teach my Self write, that usually meant checking out lots of textbooks and library books to supplement what I was reading.

So by the time I earned my undergrad degree, I decided, Okay, I'm just going to hack the rest of my education. Did you know you can take classes at most of the country's top universities without applying or even paying those astronomical fees that matriculated patient, students actually need to pay to be granted a degree. Because when you're paying Stanford and Harvard, a lot of money, you're not necessarily paying just for the education, you're paying for that degree, write that piece of paper. Now you can take a lot of those classes but for greatly reduced prices. I've actually attended classes at Harvard, Stanford, Wellesley, Dartmouth, Boston University, Golden Gate and even took a remote calculus course at Berkeley. A lot of these either took at night or I audited during the day.

Or I took executive education I actually went to Harvard for a week and and did one of their week long executives classes. Now night classes are hundreds of dollars a class. They're meant for people with full time jobs, not interested in earning a degree, but really just getting smarter or getting learning more knowledge. I actually ended up taking all the graduate level classes in finance that you need to be a certified financial planner or a CFP. But I never got the certification. And I didn't even bother to get the actual degree because I knew I was never going to work in finance.

I wanted those classes for my knowledge, and it's really knowing all that graduate level finance is foundational, actually, to my current success, and it was back then as well. Because I didn't care about the actual degree itself. I could take classes at night at a small local A university that cater to professionals versus full time students. I put, I mean, it costs a few thousand dollars to take all of those finance classes. Do you think there are any difference to take, you know, graduate CFP courses at one university than it is another, the same information. And I never felt that pressure to get an A or any type of a grade in class because I was learning for my benefit, not because of a pre determined rigid path to a degree.

Now living so close to Stanford, it's about a mile away from my apartment. That now is my go to spot for night classes. And it ended up being a $350 Stanford night course that taught me how to write at the sixth grade level. And those skills are what allow me to simplify and explain difficult and technical subjects to non experts. In fact, what I've learned at that Stanford class became a core part of myself. skill set.

And I still learned what I still use what I learned in that particular class, both writing and speaking everyday. Now, for another subject, I actually got together with three classmates that we had taken out of Stanford, you know, class like that. And we hired the professor. We just went up to where and we said, we want to continue our studies with this and Stanford as an offering more advancement in this particular area. Can we hire you for six months to a year to privately tutor the three of us on Saturday mornings? And she said yes.

And so we got together and we just paid her a few thousand dollars. And we had a private Stanford professor. Hacking your education is easy if you put your mind to it and you care more about the knowledge than the letters after your name, or the embossed piece of paper that says graduated from. With so many online courses available, it's possible to hack your education just with online courses. Now, of course, in person courses have the benefit of networking, which is always a good thing. And I like to get you know as much ROI out of everything as possible.

But with the internet at your fingertips, you have no excuse not to learn. In fact, you can search for other thought leaders in your space and learn directly from them. Later on, we're going to identify how to actually, we're going to dive into how to identify those particular thought leaders. Now, of course, being online, you can also get really specific in your research. If you want to learn everything there is about artificial intelligence in the world of gaming. Just set up a Google Alert for it and subscribe to a handful of newsletters that actually cover that particular subject from other thought leaders or academic institutions or research, even corporations and dedicate one to two hours a day to reading news in that particular vertical.

I personally spend about two hours a day reading the latest tech Science and medical advancements in my particular space, because I like to stay up to date on the cutting edge. And by the way, it's just fun because, of course, you're passionate about the things that you want to talk about. Now, your challenge is to broaden your definition of education. It's not about the specific degrees or the best schools or the highest educational credentials anymore, especially if you're already in the working world. With a media access you have now to top speakers in your field. You can continue learning on YouTube and developing without spending a lot of money.

If you can dream about something you'd like to learn, you absolutely can find a way to learn it without spending a lot of money now. And education is really a life long journey. It's ongoing. Just because you put some work into your education in your 20s doesn't mean you can now hop on stage and speak to your audience. Today or even intended Unnecessarily if you're not keeping up to date, and once you begin your thought leader journey, that's not the day your education ends, you have to continuously educate yourself and stay current. Make it a point to read every day.

And if you look at studying and learning as vital processes in your business, you're going to make time for them. This is this is business work. This isn't just fun and games. And if you do a little bit every day, this becomes a lifelong habit that you actually really enjoy. As I said, it's, it's I love reading about health and biotech news. Now, the importance of writing, let's switch gears and talk about that.

One way to put your learning into practice of course, and to build your confidence and credibility is by developing yourself as a writer and your initial portfolio of content. Now, writing is a skill and mastering any skill takes practice. And even if you get a standard advanced degree, you might not know how to write the way a thought leader should. And the more you write, the better you're going to get as with anything. When I first started writing, it was torture. I have to tell you, it was absolute torture, torture.

I hated writing articles because I'd never practiced that before. In the beginning of my career, my writing was around things like project plans and client reports and simplifying technical or scientific writing, creating instructions. That's a very different type of writing than writing an article as a thought leader, I wasn't used to it, I didn't have a content catalog to pull some information from. Everything had to be an original idea. And as with any skill, the first 10 to 20 hours are the hardest with a really steep learning curve. And once you get past those initial 10 to 20 hours of any skill, the learning curve flattens out significantly and as you gain a solid foundation to build this new skill.

You it's gonna become easier for you to do it. So if you're brand new to writing, here's an easy way to get started. Just do it, start writing. If you aren't getting your content in any out there in any way, no one's going to know you exist. Video is definitely becoming more and more important, but even even video begins from the written concept. And thought leaders in the business world aren't necessarily just YouTube or video celebrities.

What they all do share in common is written content. Still, it's a requirement in business, not an option. And I didn't learn only through writing short articles, I also immersed myself in the process of becoming a better writer. So that course I took at Stanford and I took one on magazine writing, because I knew that really simplifies writing now why It's important to simplify writing to the 12 year old blood level, which is also the sixth grade level. Let me explain this. In the US.

Most kids have a great foundation in the English language by the time they're 12 years old, they can have a perfectly normal conversation with an adult on a range of subjects. But they haven't started specializing in a particular skill set, right? That requires its own vocabulary, whether that's a specific type of sport, football, or hockey, or maybe that's science, or physics or mathematics. All of these different specialties and skills have their own languages and their own vocabulary. So after the age of 12, we really start to diverged significantly in our areas of focus. And that just grows and grows and grows by the time kids hit high school and then college and then go into the workforce.

You now have a very different vocab Larry, then somebody else in a different industry than yours. For instance, an Ivy League trained medical doctor with an extremely high IQ, could be potentially totally lost out of space conference, not because she isn't smart, she definitely is smart, but because she hasn't been exposed to the vocabulary and the basic foundational concepts of that field. And that works both ways the rocket scientist, she might be lost at a medical conference, even though she might be a top rocket scientist for SpaceX or for NASA. As a thought leader, it's important to be able to communicate with a wide audience. Now, you can learn this first through through writing by being forced to make complex ideas simple. Always ask yourself what a 12 year old understand your ideas, boil your ideas down to the basic components so that you can get your point across to the audience.

In a way they can understand. Now, there are ways to hack writing. Don't expect to learn how to write overnight and don't be afraid to hire a company to help you. Companies like influence and company. I use them early on in my career and john Hall, who is also the co founder of calendar calm. He was one of my earliest supporters.

I met him by constantly just asking everyone at conferences who they knew and who could help them with writing. And so I got it through word of mouth. We know people want to create and distribute content, really to build trust with the audiences that matter to them. So companies like influence and company. They're what's called an integrated content marketing company, and they help people and companies accomplish this. They help with everything from strategy to creation to distribution and different media outlets.

Now I hired them at the very beginning and for about six months or so. And what they would what would they would do is they call me and we talked about different content areas, I wanted to get articles out there on and I would email them resources I had, and they would write up an 800 world word article based on my research ideas and point of view, but they would make it into that perfectly packaged article for me. And this was really the easiest way to build up that content catalog especially when I was still learning to write professionally and quickly. Now you can also use companies like scripted or on demand virtual assistants for this task. Now, scripted is by the way, a platform and there are quite a few companies now that have popped up they didn't exist when I started my thought leader journey, but now there are a lot of companies like scripted where it was the platform that connects you to copywriters, and pre round three Lance writers.

So what they do is they look at your previously written work and they help you write more content for most usually a monthly subscription fee plus the per article price. Now, if you use a service like scripted, be specific with your request, don't just say write me an article on the future of work. Instead, really give the writer bullet points or links as references because this is your ideas. Now once you have a catalog in place, you can use it as a foundation for other articles. What you can do is you take copy and paste one or two paragraphs from each article, hack them together, tie them in, write a couple of sentences that really tie the ideas together. And then all of a sudden you have a brand new article.

I call this scaffolding. So copy one, one paragraph, say from three different articles scaffold them together. Now why is it This is also very helpful as because it helps your readers follow along with their main themes, because you're talking about the same things over and over. And every article, if you do it this way is going to support the underlying thesis that you have created. Now, later on, an opportunity could arise to share an article through a big magazine or website. And in that case, you can pull content from the same catalog.

Now, once I had about six articles or five articles in place with influencing company, I was able to write articles using that and then it seemed like it was almost overnight, I ended up started writing articles, like 800 word articles, just with no problem. I mean, it's if you really work your way up to it, it suddenly just clicks one day. And now I can write an 800 word article in under 30 minutes without doing any research without reading any of my previous articles I can just done. I went from a terrified amateur, to being an expert writer and almost completely painlessly. Only those first couple articles were torture. But once I learned the scaffolding technique, you know, the rest is history.

Now, eventually you'll become skilled at at tying your content together, even as you expand upon it, and your content if your ability to fit content together will support you really in other areas like consulting and speaking. At the end of the day, you'll have greater comp, credibility and greater confidence in what you're presenting to the world. Now, let's talk about advisors and mentors, along with education and writing. Well, those were two of the things I said I would talk about in this module. Here's the third advisors and mentors. They can help you build confidence and credibility.

On my website, you can download That free workbook workbook I have, by the way, and you can also download it here, make sure that you are downloading those because you are going to start writing things down and not multitask recording spreadsheet, it has a tab for other thought leaders. Go and find that and start writing some down. You can follow those. And if you don't know any off the top of your head, maybe you know five or six thought leaders in your particular vertical, go ahead and start researching them. And once you put them down in the spreadsheet, follow them on all the different platforms they have. This allows you to interact with them because if you're following someone you've never met, you can then retweet or share their posts or just comment on their posts and your name can start popping up consistently.

Now liking or sharing other people's posts. This is what's called social media currency. These simple actions can actually translate later on into real world monetization as people with more followers than you and a larger platform might actually interact back, which allows their audience to see you. Now, that being said, Don't expect a couple of likes on somebody's Instagram to get anyone's attention, especially if they have hundreds of thousands of followers. What's gonna stand out is commenting and frequently with relevant, interesting comments, or direct messaging them and always make it all about them, not about you know, if you've developed some level of engagement with someone through social media, that's when you can ping them and end your note with an action request, see if they'd be willing to jump on a phone with you for half an hour or grab coffee at their lunch break. Because it can be really intimidating to identify these thought leaders and then actually reach out to them to see if they want to meet you at some point.

But if you both talk about similar content, And you're going to likely have a natural starting point for a conversation. Another really easy way to find role models or people that you can follow is to identify conferences you want to attend or Keynote. And when you're identifying those conferences, put them in that tab on the multi-tap recording spreadsheet, because we will be going back to both the thought leaders, the conferences that they have spoken at, and the conferences you are identifying now, because those in the future are what I'm going to teach you how to apply to some of those and get on stage at some of those particular conferences, which is why it's important to start identifying them now for we hit module nine. Now, back when I worked at health tap, this was about 2010. I was their social media director. And I made it a point to get to know each one of the thought leaders in the world of health and technology, which is now called the digital health space.

But back then digital health was basically a brand new word. Now I use things like Twitter and keywords to look people up and see what was trending at the time. I recorded all those people into my spreadsheet and a lot of the different interactions. Now part of my job was to put up and maintain a website for the company. And so I would contact thought leaders I previously identified and asked if I could republish an article of theirs on the health stock website with a link to their stuff. And they almost always said yes, and that's how I ended up starting a relationship with a lot of these people who, eight years, nine years later, I am still friends with some of them, right?

The ones that I promoted, even though I hadn't met them in person for years. Simply by sharing their content, I was able to establish that relationship. Now if you're mentored by other thought leaders, they can help pull you up with them as well. And they can introduce you to other people in that space, because your affiliation with them increases. your credibility, you've heard the expression birds of a feather flock together. Yeah.

So it's credibility through Association. Now, you can also get credibility by being associated with certain companies. This can be a company that you work for now, or that you've worked with previously, advise, invest volunteer for consult, or on the board of directors, any any type of support whatsoever. And these companies you become associated with are significantly more important than your education because they actually signify you do something, you don't just study things. And so this is one of the three major reasons I became a biotech and healthcare and angel investor. Now, I always need three major reasons to do anything substantial, especially when it concerns money like angel investing.

So my first reason for becoming an angel investor is that it'll help me reach my life goal of impacting hundred million Because I work on companies focused on some of the biggest diseases like diabetes and cancer and sleep apnea. Now my second reason is that it ties into my story authentically and provides credibility. I'm dedicated enough to my goal and my particular industry to take my hard earned savings and put it into high risk early stage pharma. I am walking the talk and I'm putting my money where my mouth is. My third reason is that it expands my network strongly. So I can help do business development for the other companies that I'm working with.

Because all of a sudden if I'm investing in a company, I suddenly have that network and probably have access to their investors as well as their partners and and just the brains. Now, there are two massive bonuses to angel investing. I did not expect these to blew me away after my first investment and I put Did that on LinkedIn, to top venture firms? I mean, these are really incredible venture companies approached me to co invest with them. It's like whoa, suddenly, I have access now to highly vetted fund companies that are almost funded, right. So it's they usually come and approach me right before the round is closed to see if I want to join in.

Now, because I'm a well known speaker. Now, I'm not subject to the standard investment minimums. Again, mind blowing, because they don't care about my money as much as they care about the other things that I bring to the table like my network and my expertise. And we're talking some of these minimums might be a quarter million dollar buy in and I get to come in for whatever dollar amount that I would like to do. The second major bonus is that as the first my first year as an angel investor, I got five extra hours on stage hours. That is more time than some speakers.

Get in a lifetime. The reason I got all those hours is because people kept putting me on stage to be a startup investor judge or a moderator for startup pitches. How fun is that? amazing amount of extra time on stage. So the more confidence and credibility you gained through education and writing and relationships, the more you're going to be in a position to give back the knowledge you've gained to others. Now, I call this sending the elevator back down.

And I love to do this, especially for other women, but I help a lot of men as well. Because many of us have had to crawl up the side of the building using our nails right to get where we are. There's a lot of us now that we want to make it easier for others to reach their goals and achieve the success we've achieved. And I also believe that's the way we're going to get a lot more women in power and in business. The power is by working as a team to empower each other. working individually, it's easier to fail, especially getting things like women into the C suite, or the boardroom or top government positions.

But together, working as a team, we can win. And if you live your life as a giver, empowering others in whatever way you want to empower them. Sometimes help can come from places you never thought it would. And this happened with Monica, when I mentored her and her friends career transition, I never ever thought that she would ever be in a position to help me with things because she was coming from the art industry and she's going into the blockchain industry. There's no overlap in our interest areas. But it turns out, she's also an expert in online courses.

Who knew right and so all of a sudden I had someone who was giving me really good advice on how to do this particular product. You never know when you meet someone and you're really nice to them, and you make a case connection with them, who's going to end up helping you further down the road. As you pay it forward, you're going to see it returned back to you. So Adam grants book give and take. If you haven't read that book or you haven't seen his TED Talk, go ahead and Google him. It is a very impactful TED Talk.

And he talks about the spectrum of people and their personalities from givers, matchers and takers, and basically everyone in between, because personalities are a spectrum there they are not black and white, obviously. Now, I saw him speak at the Nantucket project years ago. And he spoke about how givers are often the ones who fail in business, and I suddenly I freaked I was like, I had this huge conflict because I had new I spent my life helping people and that's just who I've been since I was a little girl. And I've also incredibly ambitious wanting to be successful. Fortunately, this panic only lasted a few minutes because I don't know went on to explain. givers are also the most successful people in business.

The key is, know how and when to give. Some people don't know when to stop giving. And they end up spending so much time on others that they don't end up, you know, helping themselves. And I'm sure you've seen people like this in your industry. And you might even be one of those kinds of people so generous that you don't end up doing your own work. Now, when a giver understands how to give what they actually have to give, and while they're also helping themselves, they can see massive success, which is why givers are both the least successful and the most successful people in business.

You just need to know when to say no. And I will cover that in later modules. Now, action items, take a couple of minutes. brainstorm keywords in your subject area, like the beginning of my carrier, the key words I would use Are things like virtual care, right? Or telemedicine? What are 10 keywords, go ahead only 10 that you would use on social media posts if you were discussing your platform.

Now take those keywords and search for and find 25 thought leaders in your space, and there's room to record them on the spreadsheet. Now, if you know where they're speaking, go ahead and write down that conference because that's a conference that you are identifying, not only for other thought leaders, but for yourself to potentially speak going forward in the future. Now, some of these thought leaders can be advisors or role models, or even in some way work together later on in the future. Some can be CEOs of Fortune 200 companies and you may never know you might not even know if they actually notice you and your platform. So you may as well get in there and follow even the very top people that you would never imagine you would meet in real life. Now one other practical way, by the way to gain credibility is to get on one of those lists like the Forbes 30, under 30, or 40, under 40.

So right now and there's a tab on your multi-tap recording spreadsheet specifically for lists, you can identify a few lists in your industry, and decipher kind of how you get on them. A lot of them, you're going to have to use companies like influence and company to get on them to get in front of the right people, but some are just apply. So see if there's an apply. Now, if you were to hire company like influence and company, what they do is they essentially act as an agent for you. You can also see if you can just get introduced to other people who have been on those lists and go out, go ahead and reach out to them and get some hints from them. These lists like the 30, under 30.

These are not fair contests in any way. It's really Just somebody's opinion of other people and who they know or who's gotten in front of their eyeballs. There's always someone who could be a third party advocate for you. Because this is really just that contest contest between who knows who. Now, once you once you've identified those things, and if you need some hints, you can do things like Amazon search. So search for thought leaders or books in your particular industry, that might be great mentors and role models, general social media search a YouTube search, and make sure you get hopefully 25.

Now, there, you can also subscribe to all of their newsletters as well. And if you do record about 25, make sure you get the URLs for those conferences. I'm telling you, you're going to want it going forward. Alright, so that's it for now. Make sure you identify that Some stuff before the next module and I will see you in module five