The Idea Climbing Podcast

By: Mark J. Carter
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  • Summary

  • If you’re passionate about bringing your big ideas to life and want actionable strategies for marketing, branding, sales, mentoring, networking and more this show is for you! You’ll learn from interviews with successful B2B thought leaders and entrepreneurs.
    © 2019 Mark J. Carter & ONE80
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Economics Leadership Marketing
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Episodes
  • Beat Your Brain Bully: How to Master Your Mind and Manifest Your Mission with Lynn Smith

    Beat Your Brain Bully: How to Master Your Mind and Manifest Your Mission with Lynn Smith
    Oct 16 2024
    Do you ever run into your Brain Bully? What does that feel like? With the right strategies you can build your self esteem and achieve success in all areas of your life. In this episode I discuss how to do that with my guest, Lynn Smith. Lynn is a national media expert, consultant, keynote speaker, and host of “StrollerCoaster” a parenting podcast brought to you by Munchkin the world most loved baby brand in the world. Previously, she spent 15 years as an anchor on the TODAY Show, NBC News, MSNBC, and CNN Headline News. In 2021, Smith left TV News to launch her company Rylan Media which takes her media insight and expertise to tackle corporate and individuals greatest branding and communications challenges. Meet Your Brain Bully The brain bully is that voice we all have in our mind that’s saying, “What if I screw this up?” or “Does Mark like what I’m saying?” or “What if the audience thinks I’m a total idiot?” Lynn realized after coaching hundreds of executives, after being a news anchor for 15 years, and having her own Brain Bully incidents many times, that almost 100% of us have a Brain Bully. If you don’t, you’re likely a sociopath or a narcissist. Just saying. Her brain bully creeping in was so common that Lynn decided “I have to create something in order to help myself and other people overcome this situation…”, and through self-examination she did just that. As a news anchor she was told many times (to her face) “You’re not good enough, you’ll never make it in TV”. Then she had her own internal audio loop; “Maybe they’re right, maybe I’m not good at this…” She had to create techniques to overcome her Brain Bully to sustain a long term career in television. Now, when she shares her methodology with executives it’s this lightbulb moment for them. “Oh, I shouldn’t ignore this voice, this voice is actually not real, or right, I just have to tame it, I need to know how to manage my Brain Bully”. How do you overcome your Brain Bully? Initially, early on, when Lynn was in her early twenties and started in television, beating her Brain Bully was the result of pure grit and tenacity. It was a case of “just keep going”. Sometimes she didn’t have any reason or logic to believe in her eventual success, she just had to push through it. There was no other option. From seeing what good came from pushing through her Brain Bully dialogues she realized “Now I can have fun with this, and I can talk to my Brain Bully. I can say, ‘Brain Bully’, listen here, you’re through right now”. She parented her Brain Bully out of the situation. If you have kids, what would you say to them if they had a bully? What advice would you have to get rid of that bully? That’s what she did. You must literally name it and then tame it. You tame it by having those conversations with it. The next step? Reframe it. That Brain Bully could be an asset to you by keeping you on your toes. We don’t want to get complacent. It’s when we lose control of the dialogue that we have problems. So, you must name it, tame it and reframe it. We do a deeper dive into that methodology and discuss topics such as: What’s really holding you back in life, and it’s not your professional skillset or lack of one. How to find ways to do whatever it is you were meant to do with your life. Why just pushing your Brain Bully away won’t work. How to control your fight, flight, or freeze responses in your primitive brain. It doesn’t know the difference between you giving a presentation and you being attacked by a tiger. It’s protecting you from what you perceive as a threat. How to create a Brain Buddy and use it to your advantage. How and why you have complete control over which thoughts you focus on. How to show up as your authentic self. …and more golden nuggets of advice! You can get my book here: “Idea Climbing: How to Create a Support System for Your Next Big Idea”
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    24 mins
  • How to Leverage LinkedIn to Build Your Brand with Donna Serdula

    How to Leverage LinkedIn to Build Your Brand with Donna Serdula
    Oct 9 2024
    LinkedIn is only a powerful tool if you know how to use it. My guest Donna Serdula and I discuss LinkedIn branding strategies in this episode. Donna has almost 20 years of experience on LinkedIn. She is the founder and president of Vision Board Media, a professional branding company that helps individuals and companies tell their unique stories on LinkedIn and beyond. Getting Started Donna’s relationship with LinkedIn started in 2005. A colleague of Donna’s asked if she had heard of LinkedIn and said “You should join, you will get a lot of opportunities. Things just drop in your lap; you’ve got to sign up for it!” When she signed up, she saw that her profile looked like a resume. So, she copied and pasted her very dry, dull, out of date resume. She thought “Ok, opportunity, hit me! I can’t wait to see what happens here!”. Then nothing happened. It seemed like a huge waste of time. She continued with her professional life and didn’t think much more of that LinkedIn profile for quite some time. She accepted another job, no thanks to LinkedIn. She found herself in a much more cutthroat sales type of environment. She was dialing for dollars; she was cold calling. Suddenly LinkedIn started to cross her path again. She was using it to enhance her cold calling, she wanted to learn about the people were that she was calling before she spoke with them. One day she had an epiphany; she thought about all these people and every time she looked at their profiles, she was disappointed. She wanted to learn more about their story. Then it hit her, how was she showing up? She Googled herself and her LinkedIn profile was the first thing to pop up. She realized by lack of caring and lack of activity she was doing the same thing all the other people were doing – nothing. That’s when she realized that your LinkedIn profile isn’t your resume. It’s much bigger than that, it’s your online presence, often your first impression, and your brand. A BIG Shift in Thinking and Results… Donna contemplated how she wanted to be perceived and what goals she was striving to achieve. She looked at LinkedIn strategically. She created a new profile that was much more aligned with her desired personal brand. As soon as she did that amazing results started to happen. She became a magnet for opportunities. People were searching for someone like her, and she was popping up in the search results. People were seeing her as someone in their industry that is a thought leader and cares about other people in her industry. That’s when she realized she wanted to help other people do the same thing and get the same branding results. They need help with their resumes, help with their bios, help with strategically using LinkedIn as a networking tool, help with thought leadership assistance and so on. How to Build Your Brand to Get Opportunities to Come to You When it comes to LinkedIn certain things have changed, and certain things haven’t changed. When you think of the LinkedIn feed, that has changed massively. The LinkedIn profile hasn’t really changed, it’s still this huge area to really tell your story, to showcase your career trajectory, and it’s a place to get found. Most people forget that LinkedIn is a search engine. A lot of people think LinkedIn is just a professional social network. Many people on LinkedIn are there looking for someone like you. That’s one place where successful branding strategies begin. What terms do you want to be found for? You need to be peppering those terms throughout your profile, that way you can collide with opportunity. Many times, Donna finds big mistakes that people make are doing what she had been doing. For example, she was looking for opportunities in sales, but she was aligning herself as a job seeker. Her target audience wasn’t recruiters, it was sales managers and other people in her industry. She overhauled her profile, and the right people started to find her because she was align...
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    23 mins
  • How to Develop the Mindset for Successful Networking with Dr. Ivan Misner

    How to Develop the Mindset for Successful Networking with Dr. Ivan Misner
    Oct 1 2024
    Networking needs to begin with the development of a successful mindset long before you get into tactics and strategies. I discuss how to develop that mindset in this episode with my guest, Dr. Ivan Misner. Dr. Ivan Misner is the Founder & Chief Visionary Officer of BNI (Business Network International), the world’s largest business networking organization. Founded in 1985, the organization now has over 11,100 chapters in 76 countries throughout every populated continent of the world. Last year alone, BNI generated 15.2 million referrals resulting in more than $23.4 billion dollars’ worth of business for its members. When I asked how he learned the mindset for networking, Ivan replied “I have a lot of grey hair, I learned the hard way.” Fortunately, you don’t have to do that with a little guidance! One of the big problems with networking (the right way) is that we don’t teach that in colleges and universities. It’s not taught in schools anywhere in the world. So, what happens from lack of education? People go out and they have the wrong mindset; they use networking as a face-to-face cold calling opportunity. Some people teach to end every networking conversation with: “Here are three copies of my card, maybe you’ll pass them along to your friends”. If you don’t know, like and trust someone why would you do that? Ivan was recently the keynote speaker for an event in London with some 900 people in attendance. He asked the audience, “How many of you are here today to hopefully sell something?” 900 people raised their hands. “How many of you are here today hoping to buy something?” Nobody raised their hand. That’s a problem. V-C-P in Action That’s what Ivan calls the “networking disconnect”. People show up to networking events hoping to sell, but nobody’s there to buy. So why go? You go to work your way through the V-C-P Process. This is the beginning of the mindset. V-C-P stands for visibility, credibility, and profitability. First, you must have visibility. Of course, you want to let people know who you are and what you do. Then you must establish credibility, that’s the one that takes a long time. It doesn't happen overnight. It’s more of a marathon than it is a sprint. You must go into networking situations understanding that. Then the third is profitability. Once people know who you are, what you do, and they know you’re credible, they’re willing to pass you referrals because then you have this relationship with them. What tends to happen is we try to jump over visibility, jump over credibility, and get right to profitability. That’s not how it works. Ivan refers to that as “premature solicitation”. That’s the foundation of the mindset. It’s all about relationships, it’s not about transactions. We discuss how to develop those all-important relationships in this episode. We dive into topics such as: How to bridge the gap faster between visibility, credibility, and profitability without being “salesy”. Why givers gain, it pays to be a giver in the long run. How to make quality, meaningful introductions for your network. How to build credibility. Networking is a contact sport, we discuss how to win at that sport. What to say and do in your 1:1 networking meetings to move along the visibility-credibility-profitability (V-C-P) continuum faster. The best way to get more ongoing, qualified referrals with the GAINS methodology. What “profitability” looks like when it’s done the right way. Why the V-C-P continuum is a referral process, not a sales The (big) difference between a lead and a referral. The case for looking for referral partners at events instead of clients. Why the closing rate from referrals is significantly higher than from advertisements. More reasons why if you build a relationship with someone then you’re more likely to get referrals. Why the chances of a referral leading to closed business is much higher than hunting for your next sale...
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    24 mins

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