139. Building Trust in a Digital World with Brad Powell
Breaking through the noise of a content-saturated online space isn’t just about being different—it’s about being real.
A couple of weeks ago I hosted a masterclass that was addressing what I think is the biggest online dilemma of our times:
Everyone is publishing content online…but very few are actually showing up authentically…
So, this week I’m sharing the replay from that masterclass where I went in depth on how to show up as yourself and how you can stand out in a crowded market, and build trust in a digital world, by bringing more personality into your marketing.
Takeaways:
- It’s not just about being seen—it’s about being seen for who you truly are, and understanding the profound impact that can have on your business relationships.
- How you can outshine the biggest brands by offering a touch of humanity.
- The undeniable power of video content in building trust and creating an intimate bond with your tribe.
- How solopreneurs can wield this tool to carve out their unique space, even in markets crowded with giants.
Whether you’re looking to inspire, engage, or grow your audience, this episode is your blueprint for forging genuine connections in an ever-evolving digital landscape.
Resources:
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Transcript
More than ever these days, it’s more important for us as business people to show up as human beings and if we want to connect with the people that we’re here to serve, if we want to connect with the folks who are going to be collaborating with us around the change that we are trying to bring to the world, we need to make connection with those folks that is very genuine and really move away from what has been a lot of old school way of the business world dealing with the real world. So let us all try and be more in the real world. Welcome to the Standout Business Show. I’m Brad Powell, your guide to making a bigger difference by doing business differently. A couple of weeks ago, I hosted a masterclass that was addressing what I think is the biggest online dilemma of our times. Everyone is publishing content online, but very few are actually showing up authentically. So this week I’m sharing the replay from a masterclass that I did just a couple of weeks ago, where I went into depth on how to show up as yourself and how you can stand out in a crowded market by bringing more personality into your marketing. All right, here’s the replay. Enjoy. I’m going to spend the next 10 or 15 minutes talking about ways that you can be presenting yourself in a very unique and distinctive way. But I also want to remove a lot of the friction, because people have a lot of roadblocks to being able to show up and to literally allow themselves to show up as themselves. And this is a really big part of the work that I do when I’m working with my clients and helping them be genuine even though they’re doing something frightening like staring straight at a camera lens and trying to communicate their message. Right now, one of the easiest ways to do that to make that connection at scale in a large way is by using video. Well, how do you do that and how do you get there and how do you remove a bunch of the daunting parts that seem to make showing up in the world so difficult? The goal here is a question you want to be connecting on a much deeper level with the people who you’re talking to.
Brad Powell:
When people talk about connection, the thing about it is that connecting as humans, this is the thing that actually gives us the most purpose and meaning to our lives. But when you ask people about connection and say, okay, well, you know what about that If they tell stories about their connecting. Usually they’re talking about disconnection and they’re thinking things like is there something about me that, if other people see me as I am, that I won’t be actually worthy of making the connection? And there’s this huge fear around connecting. And this is when we talk about, you know, getting up on stage or spreading our message online or any of the ways that we do going to a meeting and speaking with our colleagues. We tend to hold ourselves back, and the older we get, the more we do that, and this is the part that I want to try and bust through with what I’m sharing with you today. One of the things that comes up for me is like this question of well, who do you think you are? Who do I think I am, to get on camera and talk to people and say anything?
Brad Powell:
In Australia, they have an expression that is tall poppy, and you don’t want to be the tall poppy. Like you know, it’s a slang term that is very derogatory against a person who’s basically trying to show off or trying to be better than everyone else around them, and they look at that person and go that person’s just a tall poppy, and I think it’s a fairly universal theme that we don’t want to be that person. We don’t want to be that person who actually does stand out, and so we hold ourselves back and we end up not being very distinctive and not showing who we are and, as a result, we never actually do make the connection that we’re seeking. Brené Brown talks about this and she, you know, as well as being this very successful author and very successful speaker you can see her TED Talk she is basically a researcher and she’s done a lot of research with people who have succeeded by making connection, and what she learned in her research is that those folks, they have this strong sense of love and belonging of themselves, like they believe that they are worthy of love and belonging and thus they are able to make a connection because they feel they are worthy of connection. So this is an inside job. Here I mean the first step in all of this. You start figuring out, well, who am I and move it to and I am worthy of connecting. This is this is the thing, and this takes courage and it was really interesting.
Brad Powell:
You know, there’s a great scene at the end of the most recent Cinderella film, and I know this because I have a daughter and because of my daughter. I’ve seen a lot of Disney movies and I don’t know if any of you have daughters, but you will end up watching lots of princess stuff. And anyway, at the end of this scene Cinderella is in this place where she literally starts to. You know she has to show up as herself. You know she’s been literally hiding in the closet. The prince has arrived at the house talking to her stepmother and her stepsisters and looking for the person who can fit the glass slipper. And now Cinderella has to come out and show herself as the person who she really is, which is totally different, because she’s been kind of a fraud. She went to the palace ball as something who she wasn’t, and now she has to reveal to the prince that, number one, she deceived him and number two, will he love me and find me worthy when she? He finds out that this is actually all I am?
Brad Powell:
And so in this scene she catches her reflection in a mirror and the narration voice, which is basically the voice of her mother, saying have courage and be kind. In this context, I just want you to take that down, like write this down have courage and be kind to yourself, because when you’re showing up. You’re going to need a certain kind of courage to be worthy of the connection that you’re seeking, and you want to be kind to yourself. Because when you do this, when you step up to the plate, you will make, have missteps, you will have things that go wrong, you will have things that make you feel cringy and you feel like a rabbit that wants to jump down into a hole. And that is okay, it’s normal, it’s actually human.
Brad Powell:
And there’s a couple of things to think about. One is that there’s two effects that affect us psychologically. One of them is the Pratt fall effect, and the Pratt fall effect is people find you more relatable when you slip up. So if you are less than perfect, if you are less than professional, if you are less than whatever it is that you were trying to be, and you do something that’s a mistake, people will actually relate to that and they go oh, you’re a human being, I would have made that mistake, that’s the kind of thing that I would do, and they will relate to you more. So people in studies have been shown a film of some guy who’s doing stuff super perfectly and really getting all the right answers on a test and that kind of thing, and the people who watch that film go. Well, this guy’s too perfect. I don’t really connect with him, but when they show that same footage, only at the end the guy spills coffee in his lap the people who watch that version Rated this person as much more likeable, and so this is something that you can give yourself a break that If you show up and you do something that’s not quite the way you planned and you mess up in some way, well, actually, people will find you more likeable and more human and more relatable, and so that can be part of your authenticity.
Brad Powell:
The other thing that I want to point out is there’s this thing called the spotlight effect, which is almost the opposite, which is that when we do something, especially when we do something online or or even when you’re up on a stage somewhere, we think that there’s more people paying attention to us than actually are, and this is especially true when you’re posting content. We think that if we post this piece of content, you know a million people are going to see it, and if it’s not the right thing, or it’s not the right message, or if it, if I do something really goofy and and it’s cringe worthy and it’s going to go out there and live on forever on the internet and I’m never going to be able to live it down. Well, actually, not so much. You should be so lucky that a million people see it, which probably won’t happen. I mean, you’ll be lucky of three or four people see it, at least when you’re first getting started. So the spotlight effect is the thing where you’re not as visible as you thought you might have been and and it’s okay, like it’s, it’s okay, and the work is, in fact, trying to become more visible and being okay With that visibility, that level of visibility.
Brad Powell:
Now I’d like to talk a little bit about how you can Express yourself like okay, so we’re gonna get ourself to a place where we’re feeling like we’re ready to go here, and we’re gonna talk about specifically doing it on video. And when I you know you look at, well, why should we think, even think about doing something on video Right now, in this world that we live in? We’ve just come out of the pandemic period, and one of the things that the pandemic period Did for us is that it pretty much forced everyone to get on camera. So whether you ever had any ambition of being on camera, of talking to people through a lens. You now have done it, because the only way to meet with someone over the last two and a half three years Is to get on zoom and have a zoom call, or to join a webinar, like we’re doing right now, and this has created a new normal where communicating via video is the normal way to meet and talk and connect with people. And, of course, once you do that and you’re connected to the internet, this is something that can enable you to do this at scale and to do this with large numbers of people.
Brad Powell:
So, and then, when you look at the social media sites, what’s happening on social media is that TikTok has shown that video in the form of short videos really short form videos has become very popular. In fact, it’s become the most popular way that people are consuming content, and it’s so popular that all of the other social media sites have looked at TikTok and said, oh, we need to catch up because they’re doing all these short form videos and they’re kind of taking over the social media world and we need to compete with that. So now Facebook and Instagram have Reels and YouTube has Shorts, and even on a platform like LinkedIn, short form video there works extremely well. Great news, because a short video that only lasts a minute is really easy to create and for the people who you want to talk to, it’s very easy to consume. And this is now. This is also part of the new normal. It’s the part of the piece that you know we can now create content easily and it’s the content that is the content of choice and bonus.
Brad Powell:
You’re getting this face to face connection with your ideal prospects, your ideal clients, the ideal people who you’re actually wanting to make connection with. And, of course, doing this like being able to show up as the human on camera. People will see your personality, they’ll see your quirks, they’ll see your slip ups when you do prat falls and you will become more personable and more likable. And when you compare yourself to, say, a large brand or any large company or large competitor, the interesting thing there is that the larger the brand and the larger the competitor, the less likely they are to show off their humanity and so, as a single solopreneur, a bigger advantage. You can just be yourself and be a human being, and a lot of your competitors aren’t going to do that. In fact, a lot of your competitors are going to be stuck way back at the beginning, where they’re thinking I am not worthy of showing up and you know so great, you can step out and do this.
Brad Powell:
So I just have a couple more things to talk about. I want to talk about well, how do you actually connect in a way that’s trust building? And then I want to get to just moving the friction out of the way, because when it comes to making video, people feel it’s really super daunting, and how do we, you know, how do we even do this in a way that isn’t going to drive me crazy? So I want you to think about when people go online, where do they go? What are the places that they hang out and why did they come back to those places? And the answer is that they go to places that they find familiar. And until you become one of those places, until you are one of the familiar things or, in this case, one of the familiar faces, people aren’t going to be paying much attention to you. You’re not going to be able to build trust with them. So how do you do that? And people look at this and they go. Well, this is going to be hard, it’s going to take a long time to build a familiarity where people trust me and my brand enough to start spending time with me. And I just want to point out that it’s not as hard as you think. In fact, it can happen rather quickly.
Brad Powell:
And there is something that happened with me recently when I was flying out to a three-day conference, and this incident showed me really clearly that familiarity comes just like that, in the right moment. So what happened was I was flying to this conference and on the flight down, when I was sitting there next to the other passenger stranger next to me, this was a young woman. She was sitting there with an iPad and earbuds and the whole flight down she completely ignored me, which there’s nothing unusual about that. This is the way most people treat you on a plane. They just ignore you, they pretend you’re not there.
Brad Powell:
But the thing that was really weird and kind of coincidental was that, after the three-day event and I got on the plane to fly back to Boston, when I got to my seat and sat down, the same woman was sitting there, and when I got to the seat, this time, you know, she looked up, our eyes met and she kind of started laughing and then we started talking and I learned all these things about her. You know she’d been down visiting her sister and she was coming back. She was a student here in Boston and she was studying accounting and we had this fairly long conversation, which was a totally different thing than experience from when I’d seen her before. And why that had happened like why she had been able to open up and be friendly and conversational with me was that I had become a familiar face and, in fact, in the context of the airplane and all of the other passengers on the plane who are a bunch of strangers, I was the only familiar face on the entire plane.
Brad Powell:
And so if you apply this to like what you can do, if you show up, let’s say, on LinkedIn, and you’re one of the few people who’s making video talking about the thing that you talk about on LinkedIn, whatever that is and you show up on day one, and then you show up on day two, and you show up on day three, and after three or four days go by, there’s going to be people who will see you more than once and by the time they’ve seen you the second or third time, you will become a familiar face and say, oh yeah, I’ve seen you before and you’re the person who talks about this thing, and if that thing is something that they resonate with, and if there’s something about you that they find relatable, they’re going to start coming back for more and you are going to be one of those familiar places that they start to pay attention to and you are now building trust with them, and this can happen remarkably quickly. All right. So one last thing I’m going to talk about how you actually start to create video and start creating your messaging on video. And again, this can happen easily. It doesn’t have to be this giant production. You don’t necessarily need to go out and get anything, and mainly what I want to talk about is removing the friction that stands in the way. So, if you are, I’ve been thinking that, well, it’s going to take a lot of time. I have to get a lot of gear, it’s going to be daunting. What about the editing? Don’t worry about that. We’re going to fix that right now.
Brad Powell:
So, instead of thinking about making videos like an extra thing to do, like I have to go sit somewhere and put my camera up and think about what I’m going to talk about, try and make video when it fits with stuff you’re already doing. So, for example, when you’re meeting with a client or when you’re doing your workshop, or you’re holding a class or whatever it is that you do it maybe you’re on a guest on a podcast, anything that you’re doing like that where you’re already engaging with people, and you’re doing it in the new normal, which means that you’re doing it virtually on camera Record yourself. Record yourself doing the thing that you do, the thing that is central to your expertise and will be core to who you are and your values and your principles. Just do that, and now you’re going to have a bunch of footage which shows you in your very best light and at the height of your authority, doing the thing that you know best. And it doesn’t take any extra work to do this. It’s just a matter of recording yourself when you’re already on camera doing something, when you’re already on camera in some kind of meeting space. Then you can take that footage. You can hand it off to somebody who knows how to do editing really well.
Brad Powell:
Don’t do this yourself, don’t even think about doing it yourself and get an editor to cut it up into little short, one-minute clips and then you can have that posted and scheduled, and then you have all the content. You can have all the content that you could possibly have just from taking that step. Beyond that, if you want to take one more step, you can think about any time your light bulb goes off and you have some sort of spontaneous inspiration to do something, to say something. You can also like simply pull out your phone, hit record and speak into your phone. This can be if you’re out on a run, or if you’re coming out of your workout, or if you’re making breakfast in the morning, or if you’re out with your colleagues, or right after a meeting with a client and the client asked you a question and you go oh, that would make good content. Well, as soon as that meeting’s over, pull out your phone and answer the question.
Brad Powell:
These are really simple things that you can do in the moment, and the cool thing is that if you do it in the moment when you are feeling spontaneous, there will be a certain kind of energy that you can bring right then in the moment, while you’re feeling the energy. And if you’re saying these things while you’re feeling the energy, that will be part of your authenticity code. So that is all I have for you. If you’re inspired to try your hand at showcasing your personality and growing your personal brand on video, then grab a copy of my Endless Video Ideas Guide. This guide will give you a set of video prompts which you can use again and again for an endless amount of video content. I’ll link to it in the show notes or you can go directly to 40videoideas.com. That’s the number, 40videoideascom, and until next time, so long.
