Ashley Stahl
Appearances
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
Why would we do one conversation after the other when we can just stand in front of an audience of 500 people and just move them so powerfully that they come to find us to work with us? It's just unlike any other method I've found so far.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
So it's almost like they have some ups, they have some downs, we don't really know where it's going, and then it has this sort of completion to it. That's the drama stories. The snapshot stories are, that's what I like to call them, it's snapshots of multiple stories from multiple people's perspectives and bringing them into one. So we see this type of storytelling in a lot of movies.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
And as people are listening, especially if they have a pen in hand, They can write this down. They can start to see like, what kind of storyteller are you, right? So the snapshot stories, there's a movie called Life Itself. It's a tearjerker.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
It shows a car accident happening and somebody dies and the whole movie backs up and it's written in a way where you look at the life of every single person that was impacted by that car accident. And then the movie ends with all of those people coming together and meeting each other. A lot of books are like that.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
A chapter might be the name of a character and the chapter is told through the name of the character. This is snapshot storytelling. And that's just, you know, maybe somebody listening right now, they're thinking about reading a book or writing a book. They're thinking about writing a speech. These are all different approaches you could do.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
But I would argue the two that we're using are the most powerful. So I'll get into those. The fourth type is the gap stories. It's comparing what is now with what could be. We see this often in speeches. Like Martin Luther King's, I have a dream speech. That is a traditional gap storytelling method. My dream is that it's over here. We're over here. Very, very common storytelling method.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
It's so funny. I always used to think that when we would see somebody on TV, somebody like went running after them to grab them and put them there. And what I didn't realize is that that person is a publicist, not like somebody else that just wants them to be there. I don't know why, like...
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
You see a lot of politicians doing that. Number the fifth one is the proof in the pudding storytelling. I use this one quite often. Politicians use this a lot. And we've had a lot of politicians come to us and ask us if we can write their campaign trail speech for them. Cause it's like a Ted talk. It's like this inspirational 10 minute thing. That gets people rallying.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
So the proof in the pudding stories, it's about one core concept with different people or situations to prove it, right? So you might see a core argument and then a lawyer is using evidence to prove it, stories to prove it. Or you might see a politician saying, this is what we should do. And here's all these people that are impacted by us not doing this. We're proving that we should do this.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
So that's an educational framework, educational storytelling. We use that quite a bit at Wise Whisper Agency and might get more into that. The sixth one is mosaic stories. It's showing how all these different ideas came to be, all these different fragments came to be. So one thing I think about a lot, and maybe this is just that I worked in counterterrorism, is the Arab Spring.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
So we remember the entire Middle East lit up around 2012, Arab Spring. And there was a lot of little pieces of that movement that became momentum to create the entire movement. So if somebody wanted to tell a story about something like the Arab Spring. They might wanna use the mosaic method.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
They're grabbing little peaks and little moments of different people's lives, different situations that catapulted into one full movement. The seventh is the bait and switch story. It's a story that sounds like it's going one way and then it completely blindsides you and goes a different way. A lot of people think of like TV shows like The Undoing with Nicole Kidman.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
That show on HBO was all about like somebody was found dead And who did it? And then in the end, you get completely blindsided by who did it, right? That's the bait and switch storytelling. And then the one that we use at Wise Whisper, in addition to the proof in the pudding, where we have one argument and we educate people on why that's the way to go, is this one.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
It's called the powerful flashback stories. This approach to storytelling is dropping people right into a moment in time that you don't give them context. You don't talk about how it was a sunny day at 6 a.m. and you made your coffee. No. You get them right into the heat of the moment. So think about a spy movie where you're dropped right into a spy mission in the first scene.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
Like you don't know who to, you don't know what's what, but somebody's running and somebody's being chased and you're in as fuck, right? Like that's a powerful flashback story. So, and then I just say number nine, boring stories, because life is just too short for a boring story or a bad haircut. That's like my motto. I don't know why. It's just too short. So what does Wise Whisper use?
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
Everybody who's quote unquote sought after, I just really growing up thought, wow, people must be like, TV networks must be racing down to get this expert. They must be good. I didn't understand the world of PR and publicity and how there is just entire workforces full of people that people are paying to get them
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
We use the powerful flashback. We use the proof in the pudding. So let's talk a little bit about the flashback since we just left off on that. There's many different things that you wanna think about to make something go viral, to make something do well. The first piece is obviously the title, right? Like when I think about titles, I think about white elephant parties.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
Like you don't really know what you're working with. You just see presents that are wrapped. So why would you pick an ugly present? Like if you're not gonna pick one that has like snot on it and the bow is falling off and like God knows what happened to the present to get to the white elephant party.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
You're going to pick the one that looks exciting, that looks fun, because that's all you have to work off of. That's how titles are. So you want to ask yourself, what is a title that aligns with what my ideal customer is searching? The person who I want to find me.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
If you look at the top 100 most trending TEDx talks, and I say that because we've just helped so many clients write theirs and get booked for those, you're going to see titles like the art of, the skill of, three ways to, the missing ingredient for. You're going to see words that have SEO optimized potential.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
Like if you write the art of confidence and you're working with a platform like YouTube, you have pretty high SEO potential to be found, right? So first thing first is the title. The second piece, which is what I want to get into with your storytelling, is how you open up your story.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
So if you're giving a speech, there's maybe like three different approaches that we see people open up speeches with quite often. And they all line up with the powerful flashback. So the first one is the cheap shot. I don't mean to insult it by calling it a cheap shot, but what it really is is the most crazy story of your life, right?
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
So my second TEDx talk opens up with my dad being in the kitchen. It's not even a story about me, by the way. I think that's interesting to point out that I opened up a speech about my speech about somebody else's story. You can do that. You can open up a speech with a story that's not yours. Permission slip.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
I gave a story about my dad in the kitchen brewing his coffee and getting a phone call from somebody saying that I was kidnapped. It's a crazy story. People were in right away. That's my second TEDx talk in 2019. My first TEDx talk. The first three words of that talk are spying, the Pentagon, counterterrorism. And then I say, this was my career path at age 22. It's all about grabbing people.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
And the cheap shot is about grabbing them with the craziest story you could ever think of. So for example, we had a client at Wise Whisper Agency. We were helping him distill his ideas into a TEDx talk and to a keynote speech. And we went through his life stories. We do this all the time. And one of his life stories was that he got in two, not one, but two fatal car accidents.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
on tv to get them on stages i had no idea how much personal brand can be a game of pay to play or if you don't want to pay you need to work and get it done because it's a lot of tedious work so for me in my 20s i worked in national security it was during the obama administration i know we live in a very politically heated era so i hope nobody gets spicy about that for better or for worse what we can agree regardless of our politics is that he was seen as a pretty good speaker
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
Nobody survived except for him. And he walked away completely unscathed. So, to us, that was a pretty crazy story. Like, how could you step away from something like that? So that's a cheap shot story. Cheap shots always work. And I don't mean to call them cheap shots to insult them. They just are. They're a low lift. They tell themselves. They're so wild. Everybody's going to tune in.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
The second type of powerful flashback is more about the relatable heartfelt story. And I think it's really important I talk about this because a lot of people might think, oh, I don't have any crazy stories. My life has been kind of unremarkable. I totally get that. You have just as much potency as somebody with a cheap shot because everyday life can be so relatable and so heartfelt.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
I think about a client we had who we helped her write her keynote. And we have a very comprehensive intake form that collects people's life stories and And in her intake form, she told the story of her being in high school and she was at a party and it was the popular guy's house. And she always felt kind of insecure, kind of uncomfortable.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
She told me she felt like she was pudgy and just like, you know, whatever those things are in high school that feel really bad is what she was going through. And she heard a girl say, hey, so-and-so wants to talk to you. And it was the popular kid that wanted to talk to her. She ran to the bathroom to get her hair all zhuzhed.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
She heard through the crack of the bathroom door somebody telling him, hey, she wants to talk to you. And he said, ew, that girl, I don't want to talk to her. And that moment really set her on a low self-esteem path, lower than low could get. But as an opening story, that's not a cheap shot. That's not a crazy story. It's just a sad, hard moment in her life.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
And that's why the powerful flashback method, it's not just about bringing people into a whole story. It's about looping people into a moment in time. So if she was opening up her keynote with that moment, she would open up by saying, I was at a party and I'll never forget this moment where this person, you know, And then she can back into the whole story.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
It was early in the morning, but that hook of getting people right into that pain moment. And I think a lot of people think storytelling and speeches are about making people cry. And that's not the case. This is just a sad story. There's a lot of heartfelt stories, right? I think about a client who we wrote a speech for her about burnout.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
And when we really looked at the speech, it actually was a speech about having fun. We opened up her talk about her surfing. And it was like the first time she did something fun after years of being so burnt out and being a workaholic. And I think that's what it's really about is taking a simple story, but looking deeper beneath it and saying, what does this story really represent for me?
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
And making that be the thing that you share about in your flashback. So she could get on stage and say, in 2017, I got on a surfboard and I realized it was the first time I'd had fun in 10 years. So it's like really just opening up and painting a picture for people in a heartfelt way. So you don't have to have a cheap shot.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
And so I would watch him speak. And one of the things I noticed that he would do is he would always pause. And in his pauses, I could see people processing his information in such a different way. Meanwhile, I ended up getting a job working in national security at the Pentagon. And so I wasn't really tied to him. My team reported to the Secretary of Defense.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
The third type of storytelling is the conversational approach. This is the kind of story that you see all the time. You see it a lot on the TED or the TEDx stage. People get on stage. They'll tell you a shocking statistic. They'll tell you some sort of piece of data. The problem with this one, we try not to use this very much, but I wanted to include it for people.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
to just contextualize how this can exist in a powerful flashback is people might start to have a discussion with the audience and drop a powerful statistic to get to their intentions or to get their attention. But then they start to converse with the audience. And usually the audience will get bored unless the story in the conversation is powerful enough. and heartfelt enough.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
So it's kind of not as effective as giving a heartfelt story and taking people on a journey. Because if you say, did you know that 90% of the blah, blah, blah, has blah, blah, blah happened in their life? People will get your attention. But then once you start to back up and explain it, you could lose people unless you have powerful storytelling. So
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
Just something to consider if you want to open up a speech with a powerful statistic is make sure you have a story to go with it. That is a flashback moment, something potent that people can go into with you.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
And I spent my whole life trying to get there. I learned languages. I got the degrees. I spoke French, Arabic. I started learning Dari, which is spoken in Afghanistan. And so there I was at the Pentagon in DC. I was like 23 and I wanted to join the CIA. I wanted to become a spy. And the reason I wanted to do that was because people always shared things with me.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
Yeah, I mean, pretty much like you're gonna go viral if you have a cheap shot story and you tell it with enough spirit. So if you have a crazy story and it's the craziest story ever, not only a crazy story, but you can help people feel a range of emotion throughout the crazy story. That's the second piece. Then you're in a position for something to go very viral.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
As long as it's followed by good content. Because if you just have a crazy story, but the rest of your content isn't really helpful for people, it's not going to hit. They're just going to be like, wow, that's a crazy story. I felt so much, but it didn't help me. And they're not going to share it. So you have to pair crazy story with a range of emotion.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
If you look at my second TEDx talk in 2019 about how to figure out what you really want, my dad gets that phone call in the kitchen, I was kidnapped. And I talk about how we had just lost my big sister. We just took her off of life support. And the fear in his body of like his only other daughter left, getting a phone call like this.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
So I made people feel like his fear, his heartbreak, it ended up being a scam. Spoiler alert, the phone call that he got that I was kidnapped was a scam. But I ended up going home that night and it was like, for me, this moment of seeing how fragile he is, like he almost wired his entire life savings to some nobody who scammed him and pretended that they had kidnapped me on the phone.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
Meanwhile, I was like sitting at coffee with somebody down the street. So this phone call was so real for him. But so it's a cheap shot story. It's a crazy story. And I say that again, without judgment towards myself for using it. But I still showed people the range of emotion on my dad's experience, what he had just been through in his life, why that phone call meant so much.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
I made commentary in the speech about that. I brought people into my experience that for me, what came up was realizing my dad's getting older. Like he's too fragile to handle phone calls like this. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
And I thought, wow, after seeing 9-11 happen, you know, when I was in high school, standing there watching the TV screen, I thought, wow, if this is happening in the world and I can use my language skills and my people skills to fix this in some way, because I always knew it was a gift from a young age, I'm going to use it.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
And what I didn't realize or calculate was how much I didn't know myself, how much my values didn't really line up with being a spy or working in national security. But I benefited from a lot of the trainings. They put me in the FBI. We learned different communication tools like elicitation and counter elicitation.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
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Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
So what that looks like, Heather, is if I'm wanting to get information from you, I want to know how many people, you're in a class and you walk out the door and I want to know how many people are in that classroom. Is it five? Is it 10? I'll say, hey, that's a pretty big class you have right there. What is that? Like 20 people? And then you'll say, no, it's 10. You make people correct you.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
That's counter elicitation. So there's so many different communication tools I learned. And I like to think that I use my tools for good and not for evil, but you know, it's been years since I worked in national security, but I'll never forget. I went to an award ceremony. I got this award in DC. I met this girl, her name was Sarah and, And I have so many friends named Sarah.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
Another educational tool is obviously data. Really, really powerful. So there's many things you can do with storytelling, but hopefully this gives everybody listening some starting points on how to craft a speech that really can move people.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
There's something with me and the Sarahs. They've all been so good to me. This Sarah, she won this award with me. It was like a top 99 ceremony for women under 33 in national security or something like that. My dad flew into D.C. He was like so proud, you know, of my little award. And I was like, oh, you look so put together. Who are you? And I'm talking to the Sarah girl.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
That's a great question. I mean, every audience is different. And I think it kind of goes back to what I said with like the doctor and the leg being broken. There are some service providers where they really are fixing a broken leg and their speech rights itself. You don't have to put the frills on. It just makes it for a better school bus ride if you put the magical storytelling on it.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
But your tips alone, you're in a desert and they need water and water is going to taste better than it's ever tasted if they need it that bad. So I would say some audiences, they just need your information and you're the subject matter expert and you don't have to put the pressure on yourself. And I tell clients this all the time because in our offer, it's called the Speaker Skyrocket Program.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
We have pitched so many clients on stages. Some of them, it's a panel and they'll be like, how do I prepare? And I'm like, honestly, this is like a scratch and itch panel. Like you are such an expert. This is a panel about the topic you know. You don't need to zhuzh it up with stories. Just know what they need to know, and you already know what that is. You don't even need to have it written down.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
You don't need to put more work in. Then there's other audiences where maybe it's a more general audience, and they're there to inspire. That's when the storytelling becomes pretty crucial.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
You know what? I do find that a lot of panels have been super boring. I personally think I'm better on a panel than I am as a keynote because I'm somebody that has a lot to say. I have a lot of content. And when people can meet me where they are, I can hit that exact need so much more than I would if I did a keynote speech in front of everybody. And it's more of a blanket topic, right?
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
But I do think that panels are a really good place because they are so boring for people to shine. So one thing that a lot of speakers have is called bits and bobs. Like, I don't know if you've ever used that language in your speaking, Heather, but like I hear a lot of high paid speakers on the circuit use it.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
There's this exercise I like to give clients at Wise Whisper Agency where I tell them to make a lifetime line, write down every significant event of your life, inflection points, decisions, impasses from when you were a little kid to now. And there's probably like 15 events that you're like, oh, like
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
graduating college was a big moment for me or that girl that like I tripped, fell and broke my arm. I don't know. It's all these bones broken in this episode, but anyway, like big moments. And then write down what you learned from that moment. What was the lesson from that moment? What was significant about that moment?
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
The amount of clients who come in and fill out our intake form and say, oh my God, that pulled so many stories out of me I didn't even know existed. And now those stories are in their repertoire of stories that they can tell. We call those bits and bobs. It's like you can pull a bit or a bob off the shelf and throw it in to a panel, right? So maybe somebody asked you a question from the audience.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
It's like they're grabbing on a bit or a bob that you have from your life stories. And because you've taken the time to excavate those you are able to share those in a powerful way.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
She goes, oh, I just gave a TED Talk at the UN. It's the TEDx UN Plaza event. I was like, oh, my gosh, that's so cool that you did that. And I said to her, one day I hope I can do something like that. And she looked at me and she said, oh, I'm sure it's coming. And she said it like a cartoon, like a sparkle on her tooth, like, you know, like, I'm sure that's going to happen for you.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
I love that you're saying that. I didn't even realize how mystical this agency could be for me because... I'm such a results person. Take me out of the Pentagon and national security. Take me out of the military, but I still was in it long enough. Even if I have good intentions in life, I really look at the net outcomes of things. That's how I think in business.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
I'm like, if somebody pays you, even if your intention was to give them the service, they didn't get the service, they better get the damn service, right? That's how I think. So I wasn't thinking enough when I started this company about the journey the clients were actually going through emotionally. I was so caught up in how do we write the best talk ever and they have it in their hand?
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
How do we get them on the TEDx stage? How do we get them at South by Southwest? How do we get them their spots? But you are correct that so many people have said, wow, this has been like therapy for me. And I think this comes from a quote that I love by Martin Scorsese. He says, what's most personal is most creative.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
And what we are really doing in our intake form is we are taking a look at what is most personal so that we can be creative. And our intake form has questions. There's a couple of questions. One question is, you know, name 10 of the most significant life events that In your entire lifetime, why were they significant? What did you learn from it? How are you different because of it?
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
Another question we have in there is, what do you want the world to really know? Something that you intimately understand that the world just doesn't get yet. And how would the world be different if they got it? So yeah, we are excavating into people's psyches, into people's souls, and people are coming out.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
And it's really fun to hear that you've sent us all these clients that are telling you that, that they've gotten like a therapeutic experience through going through this with us.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
Yeah, exactly. And that's my hope for everybody listening. I'm hoping that because of this episode, they become better storytellers and they make conversations that turn into results for them all because they could bring people on the magic school bus with them.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
Okay, well, first of all, I am not me if I don't give this audience a promo because I just love you and your audience. So anyone who contacts us within 90 days of this episode coming out, please let us know you came from Heather and we'll give you $1,000 off whatever you do with us. But we have pretty... formal offerings. Number one is crafting your signature talk.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
I'm like, no, it's not. And sure enough, I flew to Istanbul that week. I was in a protest. It was like a government protest. It was, you know, if you watch the news in 2012, you'd see Istanbul was like not going well. A lot of civil unrest. There was tear gas in the air flying in my eye. I'm squinting my eyeballs. And I get a text and it's this girl from last week from the award ceremony.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
A lot of clients like that to be a TEDx talk and getting you booked on a big stage. A lot of clients like that to be the TEDx stage. We also craft all sorts of keynotes. We ghostwrite books and we have an offer, the Speaker Skyrocket program on our website.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
That's all about just getting you booked on stages so that you can give the best talk of your life over and over and get all the business, more business than what you know what to do with. And that's all at wisewhisperagency.com.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
And she said, hey, I recommended you to TEDx Berkeley. And they took my recommendation. You're going to speak there. By the way, this is Sarah from the thing. I'm like, oh, my God. So I'm like 22, 23. I don't even know how many years old. I'm like a fetus. I'm so young. And I've never spoken on a stage in my freaking life. Like what?
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
And so I ended up getting an email from them going back to my hotel that night and they asked me for a speaking reel. I had no idea, Heather, what a speaking reel was. I used my iPhone like two, like what iPhone was in, in 2010, 2011. I used my iPhone whatever on Safari and typed in what is a speaking reel, didn't have it. So I propped my phone against the bathroom window of my motel in Istanbul.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
I pulled the curtain behind me so I had like a backdrop. And I just started talking at the screen and decided that was going to be my speaking reel, like forever. really hot mess express. For some reason, it was like an act of God. They took me, they accepted me and you know, it's so great. It's honestly great. I can't find it.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
Like I look at my email and I see, but I sent it via WeTransfer, you know, when WeTransfer was a thing and the link is obviously dead because it's like 15 years old or whatever it is. And thank God it is because I don't think I could sit and watch myself in this video, but they accepted me as a speaker. I ended up going on stage after Guy Kawasaki.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
who is a, I don't even know how to describe him as a speaker, like an epic speaker. And he's a legend. And everybody, when I got to the TEDx Berkeley event, it was 2013, that event. Because once you get booked for a talk like this, you still have three to six, even eight months to prepare. It depends. There's some runway. So I got the yes.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
Every night, I thought they were going to take it away from me. They were going to change their mind and be like, nevermind, you're not our speaker. Because I just felt like this imposter because I kind of was, like I'd never spoken in my whole life. But that's the thing that makes the TED and TEDx brand so awesome is that they're really looking for people who have a story.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
And the thing that I've learned as a writer at my core, that's really who I am, is that you can make stories and art out of everyday life. That's what great writers and artists can do. So I deeply believe that everybody has a story to tell. And this moment in time was my moment to tell mine. So I got on stage right after Guy. I forgot my lines as I was walking up.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
And then I just kind of centered myself and remembered everything. I memorized every word of my nine-minute speech. And the thing went viral, which was like just mind-blowing. And the reason that was possible was because when I got this TEDx Talk opportunity, I found somebody in the administration in D.C., who was a speechwriter.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
And I said, look, like I'm about to embarrass myself and fall flat on this YouTube red dot thing. Like you've got to help me. And he just sat me down for like 20 minutes. And he's like, here's how you write a speech. There's the opener. There's the key points. How many minutes is it? Okay. Nine minutes. Okay. That's only three pages typed, Ashley. That's not a long speech. You should memorize it.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
If you memorize it, you'll say it better. I followed his directions in that 20 minutes. And there we were, I gave my thing. And It changed my whole life. Like that talk, I got around two to 3 million views from it. I got 80% of my leads. I ended up launching a coaching business and leaving Washington DC because I was so good at job hunting. And that was my thing. And it was the recession.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
I helped everybody with their job hunt. So I started a business. 80% of my clients came from that one nine minute talk. And I always had a wait list and I just couldn't believe it. I'm like, wow, I am watching so many business people do so many things to get leads, to make money, to survive. And I just needed to go memorize three pages typed and like go stand on this dot and that's it.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
It felt like a lot when I was doing it because I held it so heavily, like it was a big deal for my career. And it was, it was my first speech of my whole life. And it was going to be, you know, memorialized on a YouTube channel with 40 million subscribers. I didn't want to fall flat on my face. And that fear, there was like the fear of God in me.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
It lent itself to me, I don't know, like giving the best talk I could at that time. And it all started in a spice bazaar with a text message in my pocket during a protest. And yeah, fast forward 10, 12, 15 years, I had a coaching business. Most of my success came from not one, but two TEDx talks I would go on to give. I got international licensing deals on my e-courses from my TEDx talk.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
My courses are all in Chinese and Asia on platforms like Masterclass, but in Asia, it's not Masterclass, but it's like it. I got a speaking agent. He saw my talk. He contacted me. He put me on a speaking tour. He booked me on 40 stages. My keynote fee went from 5K to 30K per speech. It was all from these two little talks.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
And I forever wondered in my career, why is anybody doing anything when they could just be doing this? And I don't care how much you like speaking or not. You have a story and you have a voice. So if you don't want to be a speaker, which, you know, spoiler alert, I learned I don't want to. I actually want to be the woman behind the speaker. I'm the writer.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
I got six book deals offered to me from these TEDx talks. I ended up taking one of them. And that book has been translated into multiple languages. We've done about 60,000 books sold. And just for little old me who identifies as a writer first and foremost, it gave me permission to start offering myself up as a speech writer to people as the 10 or 15 years pressed on.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
And I really got my mastery and went on those speaking tours and really learned how to command an audience. And now I have a writing team of 20 people at Wise Whisper. We do many different things, but the most important ones is we help craft keynote speeches. We help get clients booked on all sorts of stages. A hundred of our clients we've helped get booked on the TEDx stage with 100% success.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
But we help clients every single month. We pitch them to up to 40 aligned stages. So anyone who finds us that wants to establish themselves as a speaker, wants to speak for their brand, get book sales, get clients through speaking, we pitch them every single month as part of our offers to get them booked for those. We ghostwrite books. So I've become officially the artist that I was meant to be.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
And it's funny because I opened up my book in preschool. And I remember the thing in preschool that happened, preschool graduation, the principal said, what do you want to be when you grow up? And that was our graduation ceremony. All the kids went up to the microphone and said, I want to be a firefighter. I want to be a, you know, whatever. I walked up and I think it was like a class of 30 kids.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
And I said, I want to be a mom. and a poet. And I waited for the audience to clap. And it was like a black void, like deafening silence. And it's wild because that's just how life is, right? Like, you know who you want to be so early sometimes. And then I went off and worked in national security and counterterrorism. I went off and had a career coaching business.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
And then eventually all these things brought me back to who I am, which is I wrote a book and Now I oversee a speech writing team. We're writing speeches and we're not just a speech writing team. We're like a fucking dynasty. Like the people on my team, I have writers from shows like Succession, New Girl, Lizzie McGuire, That's So Raven, like classics.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
And like shows right now that we're watching now, our executive creative director spent 13 years at Apple. She was Steve Jobs' right hand making decks for him, writing speeches for his executive team. So where I'm at now in running this agency is really being in an energy of creativity, of artistry, of poetry. And I have learned so much about what it takes to captivate an audience today.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
And it has been such a joy to help other people craft talks, even if it's a 10-minute talk, that actually create results for them. We had a client just last week. We crafted a talk for him. It was like a 10-minute TEDx speech that he's going to go give. We booked him on the TEDx stage. And he ended up getting an award at a gala. And they're like, you can speak up to 10 minutes.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
And he used his TEDx script that we helped him craft. And he said at the end, he made an ask for the audience to donate to a cause. He got $2.6 million in donations off that 10-minute script that he just tacked on an ask at the end. It is just the power of being able to move people and make an ask.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it's funny. These people that are our clients, we are pretty high-end service. Like the talent that we scope is so world-class. And there's a part of me that kind of hates the fact that we can't be like the discount agency that's more affordable because there were so many years in business that I needed and still need like more affordable resources. That's not us.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
We're pretty high end because high end talent has high end compensation. And I've learned it firsthand over here. So we have clients that are coming in that are really movers and shakers in the world. So for him, I guess it was just another day, like he pulled 2.6 million, but he shot me a text and said, great script. Like people were in tears and they just donated so much money to my cause.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
And I just thought like, isn't that wild that the only thing standing between you and what you want are the words you choose. and how they make people feel. Like that ability to have a conversation that moves somebody is the epicenter of getting what you want out of your life.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
You know, one of the things I've been sitting with recently is that there's a lot of different types of storytellers. And there's two types that we really lead with at Wise Whisper Agency. And I'll just give everybody the – I say nine types. The ninth one is the boring storytellers. There's really just eight. The first one is the hero's journey, right? So that's like from Joseph Campbell.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Captivate Any Audience with These Expert Secrets of Storytelling with Ashley Stahl Top 100 TEDx Speaker
It's a typical beginning, middle and end, you know, like in the middle, there's some sort of conflict and the end it resolves itself. It's a standard story arc. The second type of story that you hear all the time, we often see on TV dramas is It's a lot of ups and downs, and then it completes in some way, like a finale.