Meet Ashley: CEO, speech writer, author, and viral TEDx speaker.
Today, we’re learning about her inspiring journey going from crickets to crowds! Get out a pen and notebook and get ready to learn 🤓
Ashley’s Links:
- ashley stahl.com/tedx (Mention Chris and get $1000 Off)
- https://www.instagram.com/ashleystahl/
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashleystahl/
You can listen here or watch on YouTube!
TRANSCRIPTS:
I don’t know. The thing that I think about most having come from politics is when you think about people that
Really, there’s that big distinction between marketing and branding,
Right?
And also just feeling like the message in the book I wrote was this, it’s
Chris Miles was able to retire twice by the time he was 39 years old. But he’s not content to just enjoy his own financial freedom and peace of mind. Chris wants you to have your own ripple effect so you can live free today. He’s not the financial advisor you expected. He’s the anti financianal advisor you deserve. He’s jumping behind the mic right now, ready to make waves. Here’s Chris Miles.
Hello my fellow Ripples. This is Chris Miles. You are cashflow expert and anti financianal advisor. Well dare show. It’s for you. Those that work so freaking hard for your money and you’re now ready for your money to start working harder for you today. You want to be work optional where you work because you want to not because you have to be able to have enough money coming in passive income so you can live that life that you love being with those that you love. But most importantly guys, I know it’s not just about getting rich, it’s about living a rich life because as you’re blessed financially, you have a greater capacity to bless and create a ripple effect in the lives around you. Thank you for tuning in today, guys. I appreciate you binging and sharing and allowing me to create a ripple effect through you.
If you haven’t done so already, if you want to go deeper down that rabbit hole, always go to our website, money ripples.com. Plenty more information you can get there, whether it’s about infinite banking, whether it’s about trying to create passive income. Now there’s even a calculator you could take to figure out how much you can even create right now. So check that out. Hey guys. So I brought on a guest today that this is going to change it up for you guys a little bit. I know you guys are used to the same old boring topics, and I know you don’t think they’re boring, obviously, but we always fall in the same line of alternative investments and different money strategies and whatnot, but occasionally we get somebody on that’s either mindset based or personal development or even on the business side. Well, for those of you that are business owners or even aspiring to be a business owner, or maybe you haven’t considered being a business owner yet, but this could be the impetus there.
This is something you should be listening to right now because if you’ve ever wondered how you can increase your credibility dramatically to be seen and not have to work so dang hard to do it. If you wanted to see how you can create potentially millions of dollars by getting yourself out there teaching over and over without you having to teach over and over again, or if you’ve even considered doing something like TEDx, then Ashley Stall is the person you need to be listening to right now. Now, is she an international bestselling author? She’s had her own TEDx success, but she’s also helped many, many other clients create the success in their lives as well be able to make that work through that TEDx platform and other ways to get your branding on point and at a place where you can be able to portray your message and be able to create that ripple effect that we talk about so often. So Ashley, welcome to our show.
Thanks so much for having me, Chris. I’m impressed by your intro skills. I don’t know if that was written down or you just flexed and flowed with that, but you’re a good communicator.
I appreciate that. No, I don’t write down anything unfortunately. Yeah, same. I probably should though. I’d probably be better off sometimes.
No, that was epic. Thank you so much for the introduction.
Yeah, absolutely. So let’s give us the backstory. What even led you down this path? Most people don’t just wake up one day and say, you know what? I think I’m going to go speak and get paid millions of dollars from it.
Yeah, it’s actually funny, my book U-Turn, it’s spelled YOU, and I opened up the book talking about how it was my preschool graduation, and the principal said, what do you want to be when you grow up? And we had to little kids get on stage and say who we wanted to be. And I said that I wanted to be a poet and a mother, and I kind of expected this huge applause, but it was deafening silence.
Like crickets. Yeah,
Crickets. And it’s interesting. I feel like all of us have these essences when we’re kids, whatever they are, and we kind of go off and become adults and do things. And for me, I remember in where I was standing when nine 11 happened and I was in high school and now I’m 37 years old, but I remember back then thinking, oh wow, I’m a protector and I want to help. And I’ve always had really good language skills. So I kind of went off course from my mom poet plan and I ended up working in national security under the Obama administration. I was at the Pentagon, I was working on Afghanistan and I got invited to give a TEDx. I was like 23, 24 years old and it would officially be my first talk of my life. So can you imagine starting there? That’s no. And do you know what’s wild is that the TEDx stages are all different sizes because it’s a whole licensing thing of how big the TEDx event is.
And I could go on forever about why they’re big or small, but the short of it is I was at TEDx Berkeley, that’s 4,000 people, and this woman that I met in an award ceremony, I got an award working in national security. She had just given a TEDx, and I looked at her and I said, oh, one day that’s a bucket list thing. I would love to do that thinking I’m nowhere near the kind of person that should be giving one of these right now. And sure enough, she referred me the next week and they emailed me back. I was in Istanbul on a work assignment. It was 2012. There were protests in the street. I had tear gas in my face and I get this text message I could barely read because my eyes were stinging from the gas and it said, Hey, I recommended you for a TEDx.
You’ll be hearing from them. Sure enough, they wrote me back and they said, do you have a speaking reel? And I’m like 24, never spoken in my life. 23, I go back to my motel in Turkey, I use the bathroom curtain as a backdrop and I prop my iPhone. I Google what is a speaking reel, and I gave this horrendous speech that I made up on my toes at the end of my workday thinking that’s the end of that. They’re not going to take this thing, but I have nothing better to give. I don’t even know what this means. Sure enough, they took me and I ended up getting on stage and I went on after guy Kawasaki, which was terrifying. And I mean, he was the only person actually there that wasn’t nervous and that was an eyeopener for me to realize, wow, all these successful CEOs are petrified of getting on stage and to kind of see like, okay, there’s just one guy that really doesn’t feel scared.
And I practiced so hard for that and I hired a speaking coach. But what I did that was most important was I ended up going to one of Obama’s speech writers saying, Hey, I’m about to embarrass myself, but do you have any tips? And they gave me the structure. They’re like, oh yeah, here’s how we think about the structure for the president’s speeches. And it was this structure that I could totally work in and that’s what saved me. So I ended up giving a speech. It went viral. I started a coaching business. I left the Pentagon. Coaching wasn’t even cool back then, but I was so good at job hunting during the recession that friends were like, can you help us get a job? You should be a career coach. So that TEDx talk ended up skyrocketing. My career coaching, I had a wait list and I had about a million dollars of revenue and just one-on-one coaching come through that one TEDx talk, which blew my mind.
And I went on to build my brand. I did Forbes columns and blog posts and all the things. And looking back this TEDx was the thing, it was the 80 20. And I just remember thinking like, wow, I’ve written 700 blogs now for my Forbes column, and they have not done anything near what this one 10 minute clip has done for my career. I also felt kind of weird about it. I’d never spoken before that talk. So I told myself I need to redeem myself with myself. I need to give another TEDx and kind of undo the weird feelings I have of this one. Grateful it went viral, but wanted to do better. The second talk ended up going crazy, and it got me in the top 100 TEDxs on the internet. It got me a four year spokesperson deal, tripled my keynote fees, book deals galore. And I just thought, why isn’t everybody doing this? Any hardworking entrepreneur with a message, they need to be doing these. They’re just so valuable when you do them. So that’s kind of like a little opener of my little journey with TEDx.
Wow, that’s awesome. Well, just to be thrown into that, really being thrown into the fire, I mean, that’s just insane, but go from that to where you’re today. And that’s the thing, it’s not about what, who knows you, isn’t it?
I love that quote because it feels like such a reframe and so true. I think too many people are making intros to people that they don’t have influence on, and I’m not interested in manipulating it. Honestly. That’s kind of why I started my agency right now. We’ve written a hundred TEDx talks, we’ve booked more than 1200 for people. And the impetus for me was not only what text did for me, but also this very cringey feeling that I got when I looked at the personal branding arena. We’re all so fatigued. We get so many pitches to pay to play and pay for your shout outs and dah, dah, dah. And so I thought, well, how do I be an agency that is writing and booking TEDx talks for people without being this weird Tinder swindler, Anna Delvy feeling for everybody? And the way that I’ve done that is just use my own self as a case study for the success and keep the bar high as far as really holding the standard of how can we become a place that has the best speech writing come out of it in the world. And we’ve been approached now by senatorial candidates, presidential candidates to write their stump speeches, kind of like a TEDx talk, which is our bread and butter. I’ve tried to stay away from it because after enough years in politics, I’m permanently hung over by it. But sometimes we get sucked in and we write politicians talks.
Right, that’s true. I mean, they’re always trying to sell something too, even if it’s selling an idea or selling themselves.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean a lot of people are coming in, they have different motives. Some people just want more lead gen and they have a business perspective on why they want a TEDx. Other people just want legacy. And I think that’s really cool is to realize that the TEDx platform is a democracy of ideas. You don’t need to be famous. You don’t need to have a brand to get on there. You just need to have a powerful, powerful speech and the right pitch to get noticed. And like we were saying before we started recording, sometimes we see speeches that were like, how did this get on stage? Probably if I didn’t get that advice from those speech writers, I probably would’ve been one of those duds what happened to her. But I think that just like anything else, creating your personal brand is just as much of an art as it is a science. And we have that down for TEDx. But I’ve done so many things with personal branding and I have a lot of unusual thoughts about how to create a good personal brand that pays you and you’re not just paying for
Sure. Yeah. What do you feel are some of the common mistakes you see in branding like this?
Such a good question. It’s like, how have we not met Chris? You’re asking me a really good question. I would say there’s too many people that think PR gets you sales, PR gets you credibility, and there’s a tipping point. I literally can quantify it for anybody listening. If you have more than five to 10 TV interviews and you have more than 10 different blog platforms, you’ve submitted one or two blog posts to, you’re kind of done with that side of personal branding. The only reason you should keep going on TV is the kind of press that does get you sales is like National Press. Good Morning America today. Any publicist isn’t going to throw you on GMA or Today show unless you’ve got experience that’s worked you up to that. So if that’s worth it for you, you’re trying to get an QVC for your product, whatever have you, it might make sense for you to continue doing pr.
I found that the only reason I’ve gotten a publicist to get on TV and do branding is to create my speaking reel. And the things that I needed for my speaking reel was a 92nd bite of a TEDx talk of audio, and it just flashes back and forth. Your TV and your TEDx talk and puts copy on your speaking reel letting people know. And it doesn’t have to be a speaking reel, people listening, maybe it’s a media reel, maybe it’s a thing that gets you a book deal. It’s just a little video clip exposing people to who you are in a soundbite format and it’s really effective. Agents love to see it for book deals, for speaking, whatever have you. And so for me, I only got a publicist for can I just get six TV interviews so I could throw these on my speaking reel?
It was a complete brand move. And I think that’s the thing about personal brand is that at its best, it’s an inspirational self-honoring thing you can do. At its worst, it’s totally delusional and there’s something kind of dark about the delusion that we can project through it. And I don’t know. The thing that I think about most having come from politics is when you think about people that had a scandal like President Senators, whatever, we’ve seen it all. Usually the politician bounces back pretty quick, they’re back at their stuff, but it’s the victim that’s totally down for decades. And that’s because of the universal truth. If you don’t create your brand, people will create it for you. And so if you have a business right now, you need to have that illusion be correct and be self-honoring. And the internet is a bunch of islands, right?
Podcasting is an island, whether you own a podcast or you’re on a bunch of shows, blogging is an island. TEDx is a total island for me. It’s been the one that I deeply believe has the most actual ROI for people, TVs and islands. So the list really goes on. And the book that I wrote years ago when I was in career coaching is really about using your zone of genius. Pick your island. You want to build your brand on based on your skillset, right? If you hate speaking, you probably don’t want to give a TEDx. Maybe you do if it’s worth it for your business, you have a big company. There’s so much research behind what happens when A CEO brings their story to the table and how that elevates a brand and a company that they’ve been maybe hiding behind. But you want to honor your skillset and really build islands for your brand that you can keep moving along. It’s hard to sustain something you don’t enjoy or want to be doing.
That’s for sure. I know you and I were talking on before we went on the air, and I mentioned how I went to apply for a TEDx talk and I didn’t even get a callback. It was nothing. Now I think about it, I think I did send ’em a speaking reel, but the speaking was actually at a high school club conference sort of thing. I was speaking to a couple hundred high schoolers and my daughter had just gone into the hospital that day, so I was completely a DHD flighty. I mean, they enjoyed it. It was entertaining, but it definitely was, in my opinion, it was definitely not my best speech. But I remember after that I was like, you know what? Who cares? I’ll just keep doing my podcast and just focus on that. And that became my island, right?
Yeah, exactly. And you have a really powerful, but once you have an island that’s kind of running for you, and the way I have a podcast, I have a book, two islands as well, but once you have an island that’s working, it’s kind of folded into your life in a way that’s not pulling on your cognitive load more than needs to, that’s the perfect time to add another thing to your brand island. Because things move, things change, and omnipresence is the thing that makes you have the influence that you want to have. And I say that in the least manipulative most, I don’t know, spiritually fulfilling way. You can’t get out there and stay a secret. Different platforms change. We saw different countries thinking about banning TikTok.
Remember when Facebook likes were a thing, people were paying for them, and it’s like Zuckerberg must have woke up with a sniffle and changed his whole algorithm and decided no more likes. And it was like, I think I had a hundred thousand likes and I didn’t even pay for them. We just did a lot of ads for a course that I had launched years ago. And I just remember thinking, wow, this 110,000 likes or whatever gets through to three people now. And so it’s like, good thing. That’s not my only island. We’re building islands on other people’s platforms. Apple just had an adjustment. We all saw our downloads go down. You need to be mindful of how you diversify and what you’re saying about that speech you gave to the high school students. I do think everybody needs to have a good 60 seconds of audio where they can show that imagery.
It needs to be aligned with where you’re headed. So what is the topic of your career, the speaking, the offer that you have? How can you make sure you get 60 to 90 seconds of clean audio? And so anybody listening, even if you’re speaking for free, ask if it’s okay for you to bring your own recording person so that you can get that audio clip. Obviously I think a TEDx talk is the most credible powerful way to do that. But in the short term, if you need a speaking reel to elevate yourself for a book deal or whatever, you’re seeking tv. If you want a talent agent brand deals, these are all things that I think are really useful with that little reel that you can do.
You said an audio reel, so they only want the audio or do you do the video?
I do the video up against it, but it’s kind of like if you look at any speaking reel, you hear cohesive audio for 90 seconds or 60 seconds, flat even 45 seconds. But you’ll see that talk panning through the imagery and it’s alternating with TV interviews that are silenced with the audio of you and your talk above it. It’s
Kind of like B roll going along with it then
B roll. Exactly. And if you look at my speaking reel on YouTube, I think it’s a good speaking reel as far as it makes me look like, oh, this girl is doing things. The problem with my speaking reel in retrospect, which I haven’t worked on it, is that it doesn’t have a clear enough message on this is what I’m an expert at. So sometimes people when they’re making speaking reels, they’re like, Ashley Stall, I’m amazing. Here’s the testimonial. But they don’t do enough of like, this is what I’m known for, this is what you hire me for, this is what I’m offering. And a lot of that message comes across through the testimonials that are on your speaking reel as well. And I think a speaking reel itself is a brand island of its own.
Absolutely. Well, let me ask you this before I get to a bigger question with this as well. But if people want to learn more about what you do and how they can maybe even engage your services or even just learn more from you, what’s the best way they can follow you to do that?
Yeah, we write and book a TEDx talk for people, and their commitment is just an hour intake form they need to fill out. And for Zoom calls with us, we do all the rest. We have nearly a hundred percent success. Anyone who comes from here, as long as you reach out within two months of this episode airing, we can give them a thousand dollars off. All they need to do is let us know you come from Chris in order to get that thousand off and our application’s at ashley stahl.com/tedx.
Awesome. And we’ll put that in the show notes as well. So in case somebody’s driving, we do have still have quite a few people that listen to this audibly only notice. I just did the little phone signal. Now those of you listen audibly had no clue. I just did the old school phone that had a receiver. But yes, we’ll put that in the show notes so that people can actually get that information. But that’s very generous. A thousand bucks off. That’s huge. So I really appreciate that.
Yeah, I really believe that this is the thing, and I feel like the better I can do to get more people on stage. I think the thing is so many people burn themselves out over working. And when you do your personal brand, instead of you being in this pursuit energy all the time, it puts you in attracting energy. Every single day, 10,000 people are watching my talk and for 19 minutes or whatever it is, they’re thinking about me. They’re thinking about opportunities for me that I have never thought about. And it creates this mysticism and it invites it into your career.
And that led into my next question, which is why do you do it? What really drives you? What kind of thing really motivates you to want to do this day in and day out?
I mean, I feel like I used to have a ghost writing house for 15 years, and if there’s anything I learned through that that good writers are hard to find, well, good writers may be easy, incredible writers are hard. Our speech writing team is small, and we don’t take on more than five TEDx clients a month because it’s really hard for me to find talent like them. I went through 1500 resumes with my team and interviewed all these people, and that was just for us to find one more speech writer. So now we have three. And so we’re always running about, anytime a client signs up, I’m like, alright, your start date’s going to be in six weeks because we are finishing projects, we are keeping it lean. So I think for me, kind of going back to my preschool graduation, the little girl in me that wanted to be a poet, I was telling you before we started recording, I told my therapist, I wish I could just write these talks and not give them that’s who I am creatively.
And like Martin Scorsese says, the most personal is the most creative. And so the personal relationships that I get to have with people really gets me out of my bed every morning. The depth and intimacy that I have with these high achieving people doing big things in the world. A third of our clients are doctors, medical professionals, New York Times bestselling mental health psychiatrists, sorts of people. Another third are CEOs, corporate executives, and then another third are activists. So it’s like people really making an influence on the world, being able to hear about their lives in such a different way, and also just feeling like the message in the book I wrote was this, it’s don’t do what you love, do what you are and what you comes down to your gift. It comes to your core skillset. And so when I think about these TEDx talks, this is my gift.
I deeply believe that if they come in and we help them write and book their TEDx, they’re getting the best writing they can get on the market. And it’s because even though I’m not a perfectionist, my identity is as a writer. And so there’s something more neurotic about me making sure that the best writing comes out of here. And so pretty much every time we have a client that sees our first stab at writing their story, because usually we’ll write a quarter of the talk for our second meeting, and it’s like seeing their tears in their eyes, seeing them moved by what we can do. I feel like I am just ringing myself out like a wet towel and giving the world what I’m supposed to give.
I love that. Well, you’re really getting people a voice to tell their story and a story that could bless other people too. It can motivate their lives and help move them along, and it might be the very thing that motivates them to change their lives for something better. You are literally creating a ripple effect and changing and blessings lives.
Exactly. Exactly. And I think that people underestimate the power of their story. I just got off a call with a client who’s brand new, we’re writing his TEDx. He was telling me he does a lot of ai. He goes on speaking towards talks about ai, and then one day he just wasn’t in the mood. When you get kind of bored of your own stuff, you change it up for yourself. So he got on stage and he just told a personal story and he said he got 10 x the business. And so I think people are hiding behind what they do. And it’s not that you need to be trite and unload on an audience, a bunch of unprocessed emotional baggage. But I think real vulnerability and really being able to get into your heart not only feels good for us because I start to feel insane if I have to be fake or somebody else.
It’s crazy making to feel like when people talk to you about the weather in the elevator and you’re just like, oh, can this elevator end? It’s, I think we’re all looking for real connection. And I think that being able to help somebody in this TEDx, we help them with their story that they go on to give in many different ways. And a lot of clients have come back and we don’t really advertise it, but they’ve asked us, can you upgrade this into a 45 minute keynote because it feels so good to have something so real that you can get behind to really share with the world.
So true. So true. Well, I’m hearing really there’s that big distinction between marketing and branding because so many people just lump ’em together. But the truth is marketing is kind of what you’re putting out to the world, but the branding is what people view you, how they see you, right? Yeah. I kind of witnessed that for this last week, and maybe it’s just fresh in my mind, but I traveled to Boston last week for a marathon. Then I came back and I saw two clients out there, and then another client flew to Utah. I got to see him when they came out here, and I heard a couple times, in fact, one of them even said, they’re like, yeah, I asked around about you. And a person that knew you said, yeah, however he is on the podcast is exactly what he’s like off the air.
He’s exactly what you see. You would not think that’s the case, but he’s exactly that. He good or bad, depending on how you interpret, I guess. And I was kind of like, oh, that’s cool. That’s what I expect. I shouldn’t have to fake or hide and just be who I am. But to hear that come back, that’s like hearing my brand come back in my ears where the marketing I’m putting out, I could say all day long, oh yeah, I’m a real guy. This is true. But for them to actually say, no, this is what we are seeing. This is what we’re witnessing. That I think is what you’re talking about right there, that branding and be able to craft it and communicate it in a way that the real you comes out. There’s power behind that.
So much power. And people feel it, right? People feel in congruence. And for me, working in counter-terrorism way back in my twenties, they teach you my plan was to be in the CIA and I never entered it. I stayed in the Pentagon. But they train you to see incongruence and to smell out. Our brains are already wired for that, and we can feel it. And that’s why so many times we leave conversations we can’t put our finger on. Why do we feel so sticky after that conversation? Why do we feel so cringey after it? And I love the compliment got, I got that compliment once I invited a friend from middle school to a birthday that was hosted by one of my entrepreneur friends, so it’s like a friend from age 10 at an event with all my entrepreneur business friends that are kind of doing the things I’m doing now.
Very separate from my friend I grew up with who’s on her own path. And she said the same thing, you’re the same person now that you were then. And it’s like that really, I think ultimately we go to bed alone at night with ourselves, even if there’s somebody next to us, we’re sitting there with our thoughts when they’re falling asleep and it’s like, do you feel good about what you think? And not enough people talk about marketing and how a lot of the times, especially if you’re an influencer or some sort of personality, the process of marketing yourself is kind of embarrassing sometimes. The amount of weird dms we send and dah, dah, dah, and we’re just trying to get it right. So the more I can help somebody feel proud, we just finished a speaker’s project out where they just got booked on stage. They have their date next week to speak at TEDx, and he shared his speech with five people right when we finished it. And he just sent me this voice note in tears like, wow, I’m so proud of this. It’s like, what are we all working for? We spend 90,000 hours of our life awake at work. That’s two thirds of our time awake on the planet. How can we get closer to being who we are so that it feels good to be who we are?
So true. Yeah. Ashley, you were just about convince me I need to talk to you for myself. My goodness.
I would love to have you, and thanks so much for having me, and hopefully everybody finds me through the thousand dollars off with you. I really appreciate you offering that to the audience,
And we appreciate the offer as well. That’s very generous. So everybody, obviously check out Ashley’s stuff. If this is something that resonate and really kind of have that heart ping with you, Hey, take action. That’s the whole purpose of this podcast, right? It’s one to listen and learn, but it’s another to actually take action and do something when your life actually changes. So you felt something there that you said, this is what I need next. Take action on it right away. Ashley’s contact information in this show notes. Check that out. But guys, your life is up to you. Make it for yourself a wonderful and prosperous week, and we’ll see you later.