Healthy Wealthy & Smart 488: Jason Van Orden: Establishing Your Personal Brand
In this episode of the Healthy, Wealthy and Smart Podcast, I welcome Jason Van Orden on the show to discuss personal branding strategies. Jason helps thought leaders to reach a larger audience with their ideas, create new income streams from their expertise, and build business models that align with their values and goals. As a consultant, trainer, and strategist, he draws from more than fourteen years of researching top Internet influencers and experimenting with his own personal experience. His experience includes creating multiple successful brands, launching over 60 online courses, teaching more than 10,000 entrepreneurs, generating seven figures in online course sales, and 8 million downloads of his podcast. His mission is to help visionaries with impactful ideas to connect with the people they serve best and the problems they can most uniquely solve.
In this episode, we discuss:
-Three keys to good brand positioning
-How to overcome imposter syndrome and position yourself as an expert
-The magnetic messaging framework
-The compounding effect of your impact on the world
-And so much more!
Resources:
Free Gift: https://impactdownloads.com/messaging
For more information on Jason:
Since 2005, Jason has worked with over 6000 students and clients, teaching them how to monetize their unique brilliance with content marketing, scalable courses, and automated sales systems. Many of his and students have built multi-million dollar businesses and have become top authors, bloggers, podcasters, and speakers in their field.
In September of 2005, Jason co-founded the first ever podcast about internet business and online marketing. It quickly became one of the top business podcasts in the world. To this day it’s one of the most profitable podcasts on iTunes — having generated millions of dollars in sales directly from his podcast.
Jason has spoken around the world at some of the biggest conferences (such as CES, National Association of Broadcasters, New Media Expo, and many others) teaching how to use Internet media to launch and grow influential personal brands. In 2006, he wrote the bestselling book, Promoting Your Podcast, in which he was the first to “crack the code” for optimizing podcasts to get maximum exposure on iTunes. His work has been used to teach marketing at the university level and has been referenced on sites such as Forbes.com and Entrepreneur.com. He also practices what he preaches, having created world-class, influential brands of his own.
Read the full transcript below:
Karen Litzy (00:01):
Hey Jason, welcome to the podcast. I am so happy to have you on today.
Jason Van Orden (00:05):
Well it's great to be here. Karen, thank you so much for having me.
Karen Litzy (00:08):
Yes, and as you know, I've been a fan of yours for a while and as my audience knows, I actually took your course on how to kind of juice up your podcast last year and I thought it was super helpful. So I want to thank you for that and I sort of raved about it to my fans on social media and here in the podcast. So it's such a, it's going to be so great to have you on today. So, yeah, thanks. And today we're going to be talking about if creating an irresistible brand and then once you have that brand, how do you create sources of income? Because of course we all want to make a living, we all want to help as many people as we can while we're doing it. But the first question I have for you is, what is your definition of a irresistible brand?
Jason Van Orden (01:04):
Sure, yeah. Good question. So in the work that I do, you know, I work with people who have expertise that they want to get out there in a bigger way and you know, some kind of message, some kind of stories. So you know, they really want to be recognized or known or even just increase their own ability to help and impact and reach people with what they do. So just to let people know, I'll be talking mostly in the vein of what a personal brand is. I know sometimes we would hear a brand and we think like Coca Cola or AT and T and certainly there are much bigger brand companies as well, but we also don't want to confuse it with brand identity like logos and like your letter head. And certainly, you know, those are assets that get used in order to maybe establish a recognition of a brand.
Jason Van Orden (01:49):
But really, yeah, what we'll be talking about and how I define as much more about like how are you perceived in the marketplace, especially by those that you want to reach and do business with you, you know, the people that you want to serve and that you want to perk up, pay attention, and listen when you've got something cool to share or sell or you know, offer as help. So, it has to do with, you know, them seeing, you know, here's who you are, here's what you do, here's who you help and here's what you have to offer to them. And hopefully those perceptions are accurate and complete and compelling so that you successfully can get their attention and move them towards doing business with you. So that's kind of an in brief how I would make some of the specifications of the word brand to make sure that we're clear about what we're talking about.
Karen Litzy (02:38):
Yeah. And I think that's really helpful because I think you're exactly right. When people think of brands, they do think of those big international, huge brands, like you said, Coca-Cola, Nike, Apple, which is certainly a brand. But I think for the sake of the audience listening to this, they want to know about that more personal brand identity that you were talking about. So let's talk about how to create that. So how do you create this sort of irresistible brand that you want your ideal customers, you want to be perceived as something that is so necessary for them. How do you create that?
Jason Van Orden (03:21):
So yeah, there are three pieces to having a good brand positioning. And, and by position, I mean, again, establishing that place in the marketplace that you want to sit. And so the first is to know like, okay, well here's who I ideally want to reach and serve and being very clear about that. I mean, there's an example I use for instance, digital photography is, I have a recently a client I was working with, who wanted, you know, a successful digital photographer wanted to get out there and help other digital photographers. You know, had great career, great clients and projects and things, and he knew there are a lot of people who kind of knew his work and wanted to be, do some of what he had been able to accomplish. And so, you know, I was like, okay, great.
Jason Van Orden (04:09):
I want to build up my brand more and not just you know, do this. This work where I got hired to go and do thermography and digital photography. And so I said, well, we need to get very clear about who do you want to help with these skills. Is it the already established professional? Is it the somebody who wants to make that jump now to being a professional, you know, they've studied and they've, you know, pretty serious hobbyist or something. Or do you want to help people who just have an iPhone and wanting to take more beautiful pictures with their iPhone? Like these are all different audiences, but under that umbrella of digital photography. So it's being very clear. And sometimes that's specifying a specific demographic though it needs to go. I think even in much, much deeper than that.
Jason Van Orden (04:51):
And you know, are there certain age groups, but the biggest thing to really understand is what are the outcomes or results that you want to help them to reach? I think it's really important to define the target customer, the intended customer in that way. Because when it comes down to it, I mean their age and their gender or these different things might help you if you're running ads and want to know where to reach them. But really ultimately the way you want to define them as it's like, Oh, these are their unfulfilled needs. These are what are the things they're actively looking for. These are the pains they're experiencing or the goals that they haven't met that they would like to meet. And those are the things that I can help them with, which is the second piece.
Jason Van Orden (05:35):
Once you know the ideal customer that you want to reach and serve, the second piece is, Okay, well how do you want to serve them? What are you going to deliver if you are there specific ones of their pains that you want to help them with or the unfulfilled goals that you want to help them with. And we call that, you know, the value proposition or the thing that you are presenting to them, whether, you know, and might be as services or products or other things we can get. It's a into that later. But so it's who are you serving, how are you going to serve them? And then there's also this third piece that's just who you are. And particularly in the work that I do and helping people with their personal branding there's a lot of noise on the internet and it can feel sometimes if you are somebody who ever does post on Facebook or put something out there and maybe you're hoping people might see it, it's easy to feel like, Oh, that's just going to get lost in this sea of sameness.
Jason Van Orden (06:31):
And so many people saying different things or the same seemingly the same things. And it's knowing that as tried as this might sound, you know, we each have our unique perspective, our unique approach, the experiences we've been through. We have our you know, our approach to things to bring to the table. And in the same way, here's my vision for people who want to have a personal brand is that in the same way that Spotify now has really trained us to be able to find whatever we want to listen to. I mean, whatever genre, whatever into your popular music like you can, there's a vast catalog and now it's not about what 100 CDs you own. It's like now you like near infinite choice. And so you have these very personalized playlist and stuff and Spotify is insanely good at them.
Jason Van Orden (07:19):
Making recommendations for us as well in that same way, be thanks to the internet over the last 10, 15 years, all the other myriad of problems and populations who need help out there and in solving and guidance, you know, there's a slice of the world that's looking for your approach, for your flavor. You are that hidden gem of a band on Spotify, quote unquote, right. So it's something about the way you show up and make them feel they're present the information or guide them or the values you have or some kind of shared meaning or something where you know, you seem a lot like they, you know, you've been in the place that they have in the past and they resonate with that. So that's the third piece of the personal brand is knowing what you bring to the table in those ways.
Jason Van Orden (08:06):
And it just really owning and realizing that you do have that perspective that many people will want to specifically hear from you.
Karen Litzy:
Okay. Wow. Okay. So I am going to recap that really quickly. So first you're where you want to be clear about who you want to serve. Then you want to be clear on how you're going to serve them. And then who are you and what do you bring to the table? I mean these are, I feel like number one kind of getting clear about who you want to serve. I don't know for me that's probably the easiest of the three. But getting, I think drilling down to who are you and what do you bring to the table that can be kind of difficult to pull out of yourself. Do you have any tips for the listeners on how they might be able to do that?
Jason Van Orden (09:04):
Absolutely. For me, I'm being totally selfish, absolutely not a problem. It can be hard to uncover those things. And one of the reasons why is that we often don't see what is interesting or special or valuable because it's commonplace to us and you know, and then just get old human nature. We haven't yet imposture syndrome or just feel like, Oh to like, you know, say, Oh, I'm strong in this area. Just feels not humble or something. So, you know, these things get in our way of seeing what we have to offer. And so in the work that I do, I have a lot of exercises and frameworks and things that I walk clients through to help them uncover and discover the different parts of their voice and that we're talking about. So I'll just drill into to one area here that I think is really important.
Jason Van Orden (09:53):
Like I said, very noisy on the internet, but if you can get this, this sense of resonance resonances, you know, if you've ever you know, maybe you've been seeing it in the shower or something happened, just hear it just the right note and it's just like, Ooh, it just gets really big. And because you hit just that right note that in that space sounds really big and that's what you want when somebody comes across you and your message. So here's a little framework in my research about personal branding, I've seen a lot of work. I've seen a lot of research I've done out there about the importance of purpose based brands. And when I say that I'm talking about companies like whole foods or Patagonia, there's a very specific identity. They stand for certain things. They have a certain vision of the future.
Jason Van Orden (10:38):
They guide their company according to that. Their messaging community, certain things in a very clear and compelling way. And that's just two of many examples I could go to. And the research is clear that that leads to more loyal customers, repeat customers, you know, fans and advocates that share your stuff with other people. And this is what consumers want today. Thank goodness. You know, I think 10, 15 years of some really just like shenanigans in the corporate world, not only I dimension, just upcoming generation of millennials, that purpose based stuff has gotten really, really important. So what does that mean for you? How can you you know, if you're feeling driven by all this, you probably do have some kind of purpose inside you. But what does that even mean to like clarify and communicate that? So here's a little framework that I have.
Jason Van Orden (11:23):
I went and I study kind of the work I've done helping build personal brands as well as some of these companies and what they do. And I came up with five elements. I'll just briefly go through, I call this the magnetic messaging framework and it is one of many facets he can pull up to really find that uniqueness about you. So first thing is beliefs. What do you believe at the core that drives the core of the work that you do? What do you believe about the world? What do you believe that maybe goes counter to what is popular, you know, wisdom in your industry. What do you want the people that you want to reach and serve? What do you want them to believe after they've worked with you or come across, you know, your offerings, what do you want them to believe about themselves and about the world?
Jason Van Orden (12:04):
So I'll just use myself as a quick example here. I have this belief that we do need more people out there building that personal brand, rising up and owning it and going and finding that slice of the world that they can help. And if we can have a ground swell of that will solve a lot more of the world's problems than if we were just to leave it to, you know, big corporations, big organizations, government, whatever. I mean, Hey, they have their part to plead to. But this is a wonderful opportunity the internet has given us. And that's a belief that I have one of many that drive my work. Second of all, vision, what is the vision you have of the future? I'm not talking about just a vision statement for your business and all that might be important, but paint a picture like this is the future I want to see and work for and create.
Jason Van Orden (12:44):
I'll give you an example from another woman that I was coaching where she is in the health. And actually she was in the dieting, you know, what you'd call even the dieting industry and she has as a recently in last couple of years, stop using that word at all. She came across some research and things. She said, that's it. I gotta stop talking about dieting when it comes to the women I'm working with, you know, with helping them love their bodies and different things. And, you know, she decided I have to take a completely different approach and she now believes it has this vision of the future where like we get rid of the dieting industry or that world, it may seem like a huge daunting task, which is like, we absolutely need to take that down. It is not serving us well.
Jason Van Orden (13:22):
So that's, you know, a big vision thing. It's bigger than her. And when people do business with her, they are, they also see themselves as being a part of that and people want to be part of something bigger. Again, going back to companies like Patagonia or whole foods, there is a certain vision you know, Patagonia is all about like the sustainable future, right? So what does that vision you want to create? So beliefs and vision, value, we always talk already talked about it a little bit as being very clear about what you offer to them, what's in it for them if they do business for you. The fourth thing is contribution. So what do you bring? What does your work do that goes beyond the monetary exchange and the value exchange with your customer. I mean, that's important and they pay you and you render a service or give them the product or whatever the case may be.
Jason Van Orden (14:04):
But how does that contribute to the community or the industry or even the world at large? And I'd like to think that in the work that I do helping elevate all of these thought leaders that it contributes in that will solve more of the world's problems. I mean, I'm not claiming that myself, I can go in and help enough people to solve all the world's problems, but I'll make more of the dent if I help more people find with their ideas and their expertise, the people in the problems in the populations they can help the most. And so that's how I see my work contributing even beyond what it does for directly to my icons, my customers. And then the final thing is a reason why you do what you do other than making money. And for me, once I was one simple example is I see it as a compounding of my own impact and specifically working with people who want to have a personal brand and be a thought leader or get their ideas and things out there in a bigger way.
Jason Van Orden (14:58):
It's like, well, Hey, it's like compound interest. I help you know, a person they go help 10 or a hundred or a thousand. Then I helped another person and they help 10 or a hundred or thousand. And so that's a reason why I do what I do besides money or the freedom directly benefiting to me. So those five things, beliefs, vision, value, contribution, and reason why, if you flesh those things out and then talk about them in your content and your keynote speeches with your clients in your marketing, in your say on your website, on your about page, on your social media, now you're going to be creating something that really has a uniqueness around it. And that's one key way to do that.
Karen Litzy (15:35):
That was great. Thank you so much. And I really loved that end piece. How you finished on that? That concept of compound interest. Yeah. Because oftentimes we don't think about what we do as effecting the, we kind of only think about it as I am working with a patient and I make a difference in that patient's life. Right? But I'm not thinking that because I made a difference in this patient's life. They were able to make a difference in their children or their parents or their friends or their family because they're going out and doing what they're meant to do because I help them do that.
Karen Litzy (16:18):
And I just, yeah, I just, I love that concept and I don't think I've heard it really put quite that way before. And I think it's just wonderful to think about it that way so that when, cause oftentimes as healthcare providers we can be a little shy, I guess it could be the word or uncomfortable with asking for monetary exchange for what we do. Right, right. And yeah, a lot of times, especially in healthcare, you're tied to that insurance system where, you know, you're waiting for the insurance to pay you or you could have a cash based business where the patient pays you directly. But so often there's this shyness or this inability to kind of ask for that monetary contribution. And I think people get so fixated on that that you forget about all the other stuff that you're doing. That sort of compound interest that you said goes beyond that monetary amount. Because I think if people see that, then the monetary amount, yes, we need to make a living, but people will be like, yeah, sure, here you go. I get it.
Jason Van Orden (17:33):
Yeah. Right. And when they understand yeah, and it definitely comes across again, by the time they do business with you, with this kind of messaging. Yeah. People, not only are they just like identified with you and like, no, I want, I want you, I want to be the one to help me. But yeah, they understand that and whether it's conscious or unconscious and says, yeah, this idea of like, Oh, I'm also part of something a little bigger than me here. This is cool. You know? And that's what people want these days.
Karen Litzy (17:59):
Yeah, absolutely. Well, now let's say we fast forward. We have gone through that framework. We feel like we have a good solid footing on what our brand is and our messaging. So let's step into now how to create sources of income from that messaging. And that messaging, of course, is using our expertise.
Jason Van Orden (18:28):
Yeah. So when it comes to creating different sources of income, there's one key asset to be very clear with. And then I can share another four-part framework. I'm big fan of frameworks and we've actually covered some of the pieces of that framework which are being very clear. So there's four pieces to coming up with some kind of offer. When I say offer, it could be a service, it could be a product, you know, something that you're offering to people to buy and exchange value with you. So the first piece is well, we already talked about knowing very clearly who your ideal audience, customer client is. And then the second piece is being very clear about understanding the outcomes and the results and the unfulfilled needs. What's most important to them, what's top of mind? What is their, what I call their tooth ache, pain and other, they literally have a two thing.
Jason Van Orden (19:18):
But I use that as an example because if we have a tooth ache and it's not going away, we're going to call the dentist and go get it checked out. Right? It suddenly becomes a top of mind thing. So how do you know what that is? Well, you go when you talk to them. I'm always encouraging my clients to go and do market research in the form of having conversations with people who fit the description of their ideal person, the person that they want to reach. And this could be current clients or past clients are also just people who aren't, haven't done business with them. But you know, for you, Karen could be listeners of your podcast or people who are on your email newsletter list and you know if you regularly get on the phone with them and it's not to say like, Hey, I have this idea for a product.
Jason Van Orden (19:59):
What do you think? It's really to listen a lot and ask good questions to hear about their experience. You know, what are they dealing with? What are they trying to accomplish? Why haven't they reached that? That's the big thing is why haven't they been able to do that thing that they want to do yet? What myths and misconceptions are they maybe dealing with? What questions do they have? What's not? What knowledge gaps, what tools do they need to acquire, what have they tried before that maybe didn't work for them? So you know, the better you understand their experience in this way, then you as the expert can, you'll see the through lines, the thread that draws the jury, that ties these conversations together. And you can kind of like read the tea leaves so to speak and go, Oh, okay, I'm seeing something that's missing here.
Jason Van Orden (20:36):
Or something that I think that I could do in a particularly helpful way. And then at that point, you've got, you know, those first two key components, your ideal customer and their ideal thing that's really important to them. And that's, we're going to come up with a great, a great offer. Now to get a little more specific at that point, you as the expert have some kind of process and this is the third piece, some kind of process for helping them get from a to B. You know, so if you're a physical therapist, I mean, I, I'm not claiming to know that much about physical therapy, right? But like I've done some before. I had a knee injury and then you need to get some range of motion back. Right? So the third, the physical therapist I went to see, you know, immediately, you know, it was assessing and everything and then in her mind was, you know, going, okay, yeah, here are the things we're going to need to do to do over the next several weeks.
Jason Van Orden (21:25):
Then a process to bring that to bring that about. I have a certain process that I go through to help my clients, you know, figure out what their personal brand is or you know, create and launch their first online pro, you know, I different. And so if you're very clear about what that process is and particularly kind of your unique approach to it, again, going back to what's unique about what you offer that process now is something that you can wrap in a variety of what I call experiences, which is the fourth piece. So we have the ideal client or customer, we have their ideal outcome. We have your process for helping them reach that outcome. And now it's just a matter of wrapping it in different experiences. Now, here's what I mean by that. If we imagine a spectrum and on one end of the spectrum is kind of your, what I call your high end high high touch offers.
Jason Van Orden (22:13):
So that would be, you know, as a physical therapist, the hands on one-on-one work as a consultant, as a coach showing up one-on-one or the, you know, so it's much more nuanced and direct and people are going to pay more for that kind of experience and expertise on the other end of the spectrum with clients that I work with is something that would be like purely hands off. Something like a digital course for instance, that you know, somebody can buy the so, you know, say I went online and I'm sure there's a lot of physical therapists can be like, Whoa, bad idea. You need to actually go to a physical therapist and understand that maybe you know, putting aside my ignorance about all of the physical therapy, you know, maybe then as a thing, after they worked with you for several weeks or whatever, there's some, you know, downloadable set of videos that then they can go through on their own at home or you know, whatever it is that you're wanting to help people with.
Jason Van Orden (23:02):
So that's at the other end of the spectrum, purely digital do it themselves. And then there's everything in between and you're basically asking yourself three questions. It's like, okay, how are people going to get access to me through this offer? And so, you know, is that going to be direct one on one? Is it going to be, maybe there's some kind of, you know, a lot of my clients end up performing some kind of like group Q and a or coaching calls, whether they can help a group of people at once. It's kind of like, you know, your Lyft or Uber share ride. If the driver has three people in the car, they're getting paid by three people as opposed to one person. Right? So that's a, you know, how do they get access to you and finding a more scalable way to do that.
Jason Van Orden (23:38):
The second thing is how do they get access to the information? And that might be, you know, through like you did that podcasting course. I did that, the information, there was a series of group calls, several people on a call and I was doing those trainings and then saying, here's where you can walk away now and the action steps and what to do next this week with what we've talked about. So how do they access the information or the knowledge or the tools? And then the third question is how do they access each other? And this is a powerful thing and wrapping in an experience. Because if you have a lot of people showing up, have similar goals and desires, it's actually you really valuable for them to be a part of a group of people who are working towards similar things and normalizes, you know, the issues that they're dealing with.
Jason Van Orden (24:22):
And they can get insights from others who are in the same place as they are. And this is where we see things like Facebook groups or LinkedIn groups or Slack you know, channels or ways that your clients can actually talk to each other, which again, it's huge value without your direct input. Other than that you connected them. So when you have those four pieces, the ideal client, their ideal outcome, your process for getting them there and then deciding of what is the experience, you know, now you can craft. And the cool thing about knowing clearly what that process is and maybe take that first piece of the process that's like an assessment piece or whatever the first step is. And you can make that a smaller product and make it lower price. So it's easy for people to go like, okay, yeah, I'll say yes.
Jason Van Orden (25:04):
Did that baby step into doing work? You know, or experiencing your expertise in some way. And then all the research tells us they're likely that way. More likely now to do business with you again and spend more money with you at that point. Or maybe you decide it's time to write a book. Okay. The book is maybe an overview of your process or you get invited to do a keynote. It's like, okay, there's, well here's one slice of my process, one, one, one piece of what I help people with. And that can be the basis for that for that keynote. Or maybe you decide, okay, now I want the entire process packaged up as a group coaching type experience that happens over eight weeks online or a two day workshop or right now you can, you can play with it in a lot of different ways, but that process is a really important asset. So those are your four steps and kind of how all those pieces come together.
Karen Litzy (25:51):
Awesome. Well, I love a good framework. So thank you for that. And there's one thing that you said as you are kind of going through that framework that I just want to back up and touch upon is that idea of being an expert. So oftentimes, and again, you touched upon this as well, is that feeling of imposter syndrome and things like that. Is that feeling of, am I really the expert? Like there are people out there who might have more experience than I do. How can I put myself out there as the expert? So what do you say to that?
Jason Van Orden (26:29):
Well, there probably are plenty of people out there who have more expertise than you. There always will be there. People have there have more expertise or experience in marketing branding to me. But again, it goes, there are too for people to do business with you. It's about trust. And trust is actually made of two components. It's made of credibility, which, you know, that's expertise. Have you, you know, done the hours of mastery. You've gotten the degree if you need it or whatever. It goes into that credibility. Have you gotten results for people before? And we lean on that a lot and that's okay. It is important. But then likability, credibility plus likability is trust. And often that likability is even more important than the credibility. Now again, you need to be able to deliver the results, but what does that likability, well, that goes back to resonance and for some reason, I mean, I think we've all, you know, I could have gone to one physical therapist and been like, yeah, something just doesn't drive here.
Jason Van Orden (27:16):
I need to go to another whatever for whatever reason. Right? And at that point, it wouldn't have been like, which one has more experience? It's like, which one do I vibe with? Or if you've ever gone to like hired a therapist or something like that, right? Just to kind of give a little more of an extreme example. But so that's one thing I would say. Another thing is that you know, if you do struggle with impostor syndrome, a great Google search to do is imposter syndrome celebrities. And you're gonna see a huge list of like Tina Fey and Tom Hanks and Maya Angelou and people who are like stories. Like, why are these people like doubting themselves? They're like, amazing. Then another thing that I would say to that is, you know, that process of going and having those conversations with your marketplace, those can be very energizing and actually confidence boosting.
Jason Van Orden (28:04):
Cause as you're talking and hearing their experience, it starts, you start going seeing it's like, Oh yeah, I can help with that and start getting excited about it and wanting to do it. And so that's another, you know, little anecdote to that. And in the end it's, you know, you don't ever have to be claimed to be something that you're not, you know, you very clear and you know, again, what your strengths are, where you can create results to what extent, and there are going to be people that just decide to work with you for a number of reasons. And it's not just going to be price or geography. Sometimes it might be, but again, if you know, that resonance piece comes in a lot too. So there's a few different things. And then the last thing is all I can say is like, go back to my belief that it's like, look, there's so many people in this world, 8 billion plus lots of problems to solve. Lots of people looking for guidance and help. So, you know, be that one specific band on Spotify, be that one person that knows that slice of the world is looking for. I'm going, you know what, you're the person I've been waiting for to hear this from. So how can I work with you? And that's what we're going for.
Karen Litzy (29:08):
Perfect. I love it. Now as we wrap things up here if you could leave the audience, although I think what you just said was probably, I shouldn't have even asked this question, but I'm going to ask it anyway because I want you to be able to kind of give the major points you want people to walk away with from this conversation, even though there were so, so many, I took a lot of notes.
Jason Van Orden (29:34):
Yeah. I mean, I'll just punctuate kind of the big point. And, and with just a very brief anecdote or story, and that is like back in 2008, I got a phone call from a woman in Austin, Texas. She had a child, she was pregnant or no, she had two kids at the time. And she, both of her pregnancies had been very high risk. In fact, she had gotten put on bed rest, you know, or you have to stay there for months and I'm sure that's gotta be so stressful. And it was a really difficult time for her. She from the African American community and she just found that particularly in that population, the resources for high risk pregnancies were really under like the date. There just wasn't enough of them. So, you know, fast forward, she's got her two healthy kids, thank goodness everything.
Jason Van Orden (30:19):
And she's like, I want, I need to share my experience and my story, you know, she's even gotten, you know, gone and gotten some what's the word I'm looking for, you know, accreditations or even, I can't remember exactly what she, you know, went and trained in, but she definitely got some that credibility expertise part, but then she also wanted to share her story. And so she said, can you help me launch a podcast? I said, yes, absolutely. So she hired me to coach her and consult her through that. And you know, fast forward a few months, or maybe it was a half a year or so, and she started getting emails from people in Ireland and Australia and Oman in the middle East. And you know, this one woman and in Oman said look, I gotta thank you for helping. Like save my child.
Jason Van Orden (31:04):
I hadn't, no, when I found out that I had to be on bed rest and there was this high risk of losing my pregnancy, like I didn't know what to do and where I live, there really isn't like what much support or empathy and so your story, your podcast, your perspective, your expertise gave me the strength, the will, the knowledge to be able to get through that difficult time. So what I'm trying to punctuate there is like how many of those connections are waiting for you out there, the listener, you know, who's listening to this right now and whether you reach them through a podcast or a blog or videos or through social media or speaking or whatever the case may be. There are absolutely those stories. You know, that that story can be true of you. And that's why I do what I do is to multiply that phenomenon that I've seen time and time and time again over the last 10 or 15 years.
Karen Litzy (31:54):
Yeah, I mean you just, you never know who's listening or reading or watching and you never know how the words that you say can truly, truly affect another person. And that's a great exit story is a great example of that.
Jason Van Orden (32:10):
And I don't know if you can hear a little bit of music, Karen? But somebody is having a dance party with their car suddenly. So that's not just me like, you know, winding down our interview with like, I'm going to do a saucer.
Karen Litzy (32:21):
You're in a play, you're going to play yourself off at the Oscars. Just slowly playing yourself off. That's so thoughtful. Well, actually before you exit, I have one last question. So I ask everyone this, knowing where you are now, in your life and in your career, what advice would you give to yourself as that young guy straight out of school?
Jason Van Orden (32:49):
Yeah. Well wow, that's a big one. I mean, I think what I would say is that, you know, you're only scratching the surface when it comes to what's possible for you and especially in getting to know yourself. So just, you know, keep searching, keep looking, keep discovering and uncovering the layers of yourself. And because, you know, that guy thought he was going to be an engineer for the rest of his life and so many other, I'm such a different person now and that's good. I mean a lot of growth and hard things and went very different directions than I thought, but it would just be that encouragement. It's like, look, you're just getting started and thinking is going to be very different. But you know, keep, keep digging and hoping and pushing and even when it gets hard.
Karen Litzy (33:35):
Great advice. Thank you so much. Now Jason, where can people find you?
Jason Van Orden (33:40):
Yeah, so I actually have a new podcast where we dive into stuff like this. It's a podcast called impact, a subtitle, how to build or how to grow your thought leadership brand and business. And so you can check that out and find it on all the major directories or at jasonvanorden.com. And then the one other thing I'll mention is if you go to magneticmessaging.download, you can download, you know, I went very quickly through those five aspects of the messaging, but you can download the framework, it's like a full guide with questions. Take you through that and if you want to dig into that exercise some more. So that's magneticmessaging.download.
Karen Litzy (34:20):
Awesome. Well thank you so much. And just for everyone listening, we'll have the links to everything that Jason just said. So his podcast, his website and the magnetic messaging over at the show notes for this episode at podcast.Healthywealthysmart.com. So if you weren't taking notes like I did, don't worry one click and we'll take you to everything that Jason just mentioned. So Jason, thank you so much for taking the time out and coming on the podcast. I really appreciate it. This was great.
Jason Van Orden (34:50):
Yeah, so much fun. Thank you Karen
Karen Litzy (34:52):
And everyone else. Thanks so much for listening. Have a great couple of days and stay healthy, wealthy, and smart.
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