My Mindset Exercise for Bigger Opportunities

Jaclyn Mellone  

Hey, Jaclyn here. Before I tell you what number episode of Go-To Gal this is, and that I’m always your host yada-yada. I wanted to let you know about something really amazing and exciting. Selena has put together this really inspiring yet also actionable video series all about how to really go after these bigger opportunities that position you as that Go-To  expert. I’m going through this training series myself right now, and I’ve just been really inspired. I feel really called to go bigger. And the more I see that for myself, the more I see that for you. 

So I plan on joining Impacting Millions this year. And maybe you want to join too. And you’ll come along with me and see if you can get reconnected with your why and start thinking bigger and seeing opportunities that may be available for you now that you didn’t realize. Go to jaclynmellone.com/selena. That’s going to give you access to that free training series from Selena and that is also going to give you her publicity calendar and a list of over 200 media outlets that you can pitch for more visibility for your business. And spoiler alert Go-To Gal is on there. Okay, now that we got that out of the way, let’s get to this episode. 

Welcome to Go-To Gal episode number 167. As always, I’m your host. And today’s episode is a little bit different. Today, I’m actually giving you a little peek behind the scenes. It’s not really a sneak peek. But a peek behind the scenes of one of my recent programs, our plugin pitch live or as we love to call it Pitch Fest. So I kicked off pitch fast diving into some mindset, some of my favorite mindset exercises and a little bit of a mindset pep talk to really get our Pitch Fest participants, experts in the right state of mind because truly yes, you can have the right strategy and please.

But if your mindset is not aligned with that, you’re likely not even going to see the opportunities that are in front of you. You may have heard me say before that one of the first opportunities I had to get into Forbes. The article came out in September, but the opportunity came up over the summer in August. And if I did not believe that it was possible to get into Forbes, I would have thought the email that came my way was spam. I never would have opened it. I would have archived it. If I was really not believing it was possible, I probably would have marked it as spam. Like what are they trying to con me into? Not really. But I really wouldn’t have thought that it was the opportunity that it was if I was not already in a state of mind of well, yeah, of course that’s possible for me. And sure, easier said than done. And that’s why exercises like this help us to get into the right state of mind. 

So I’m excited to share this with you. If you were in Pitch Fest. This is a good little refresh for you. Or maybe you were in it and missed this portion of one of our training sessions. So here it is. And if you weren’t in it, this is your peek behind the scenes of mindset for religious thinking bigger in terms of your visibility. Yes, this clip is specifically talking about podcasting. But with the exercise, I’m going to walk you through and be used for all media and visibility and beyond that as well. I don’t know if I mentioned this in the clip. But I’ve used this exercise and other programs before in other contexts. It’s one of my favorite things to take students and clients through. So if you have maybe been in one of my other programs before and done this, this is a great time to bring this exercise into what you’re doing with your visibility and media. All right, well, I’m going to stop blabbing about it. Let’s get to it. Here is your behind the scenes talking about mindset and visibility. 

What I want to do today is open up your mind to that. Sometimes when we set a goal, we’re so focused and forcing ourselves to be focused and tunnel vision on this is the goal and I’m gonna like to grip it and make it happen. I’m going to work hard, keep my head down and get to work and hustle and do the thing. That we don’t realize all these other things that are around us. All these other opportunities that could be helping us with that goal. But because they don’t look exactly the way that we think they’re going to look or that we maybe imagine that they’ll look or want them to look, we miss out on them. It’s kind of the whole once you get a car. My husband got a Subaru Forester this year and I never even heard of that before and now they’re everywhere. Are there actually more foresters on the road? No but now I’m aware of them so I see them everywhere. And part of going into this new opportunity here for you to up level your game as a podcast guest is for you to be aware of opportunities you’ve never been aware of before. 

So I want to take the time to really stretch that mindset and have some fun with it. But to really broaden that okay, we’re gonna pitch these exact podcasts. And it’s gonna get us this result, to hear all of the ways, or all of the opportunities. Here’s some really crazy outrageous things that can happen, that can help lead to those goals. So this is not going to be a list that is. So I want you to make a list of 25 ways that outcome goal that you want could happen. And podcasts casting is going to be some of those ways. But I want you to really stretch the limits and really go big, go huge, go ridiculous. The more ridiculous, the better on other ways that it can happen. So what I mean by this is let’s scroll back up and look at one of these goals here. 

So looking to grow my podcast with love visibility, and to help move more people. So let’s say you want to grow your podcast or you want to find new clients, so we could put down what some of the goals are of podcast guests. But you could also say that the host of the show hires you or the host of the show wants to be an affiliate for you and promote you to their audience, or the biggest podcast in your industry hears you on another show and invites you on as a guest, or you end up getting featured in the media. And then all of these opportunities are filling up your inbox without you even pitching. We’re here to pitch. But I want you to be really open to ideas that might sound wild and crazy or exciting or just different than you were originally imagining. The idea isn’t that these are things that you’re going to actively pursue or do. This isn’t a to do list. This is just to get you to start thinking differently, start thinking bigger. And then all of a sudden sending one pitch doesn’t sound all that scary or hard. All of a sudden getting on the one podcast that you already are thinking about doesn’t sound all that crazy either. So I want you to really, the bigger, the better here because it’s just the bigger that you’re expanding that perception that you have, it’s not necessarily saying these things have to happen. It’s the opposite of that. It’s I’m open for this to happen any of these ways.

So make that list of 20 ways that you could achieve those outcomes. I want them, some of them to be related to podcast guests, that’s why we’re here. But definitely don’t limit the list to that. I’m not sure if any of you have seen my emails promoting this or not. But some of our past students set out to pitch to get on podcasts and were handed other opportunities. They were actually, can I pay you to come speak at this event? Or do you want to be in this virtual summit? I’m hosting these other opportunities. And they were literally just trying to pitch themselves to a podcast. So I want you to stay really open to what can happen. And this is a fun way to do that. 

Alright, so the next step with our mindset exercises today is a really fun way that I thought of to take that ripple effect that I want you to be brainstorming and journaling on and make it a little bit more tangible. So this is something that is an exercise I’ve used for clients in the past when they’re doing a new program. You may have even heard from a year ago, maybe even two years ago, I have an episode called Why You Should Create An Imaginary Testimonial and I thought this would be a really good exercise to put towards podcast guesting. So for the purpose of this program, we’re going to create an imaginary review for a podcast. 

Now this is based off of a real event because I had one of my clients and actually a team member Jillian O’Keefe, who’s an expert on Instagram, on my podcast a year and a half ago. And after she was on, we had one, it was very popular, it’s still one of my most popular episodes, which is really cool to see when you go back and look at the statistics. But I had a couple of reviews that spoke specifically to Jillian and how knowledgeable she was and how inspired they were and how many great actionable strategies they got from that episode. It’s really cool when someone writes a review and actually calls out a guest. So this is not some like crazy thing that never happens. This is real life happenings on people shows. There are listeners who leave reviews, and specifically mention these incredible, inspiring, thought provoking, really smart, really helpful, strategic, whatever other adjectives you want to add in. I guess they call them out specifically. 

So you don’t have to get fancy on Canva. But if you are comfortable with Canva, I think it’ll make it a little bit more fun. You can just write this out on a piece of paper and a Google Doc. But if you want to have some fun with it, I wanted to give you a template to use where you can actually put the podcast that you want to to be on, like the top one. And write a review from the perspective of that person listening. So I want you to really get in that mind space. On this show, I’m talking to him on the show that I really want to be in. This is an audience that I’m passionate about serving. I know I can help them with something and get into the headspace of that listener who is listening to you, sharing your message, your ideas, your strategies, your stories, all of that. And the impact that that’s going to make on them so it might feel a little bit hard to ripple effect. 

Where do I go with that? But with this, it’s a way for you to just think about one person. Is it going to help their business? Is it going to help their health? What action are they going to take after listening from your words? How do they feel listening to you? Do they feel connected to you? Is there a certain story that really resonated with them or sparked something for them?  What was that AHA moment that they had during the interview? Are they going to go listen to your podcast? Did they already hire you and they’re like gushing about you? Did they hire you to speak at their event today? This could be on a different scale. 

So let’s say you have a book, it could be a book publisher that leaves a review. It’s like I want to publish this self-published, I wonder if she would let me publish it. So what are those big dreams, those big goals you have and how can you capture that. Embody that in this review. So have fun with it but this is a way to if you’ve listened to the training of the get booked strategy in the course area I talked about. Really connecting to the emotion of that ripple effect. It’s not just oh yeah that would be nice but you want to really connect to the emotion of it. You want to feel something and sometimes it’s hard to get there. It’s how I think about that and this is a fun way to help you get there, from their perspective. Think about what that ideal scenario is going to be. 

Now, I just jumped into the mindset. So I just want to back up for a second and say I’m just gonna give you where I’m going. I’m giving you all these crazy mindset things so essentially whenever I think about or whenever I’m ready to take a big leap, a big shift, make that paradigm shift, I find that it’s your beliefs, your thoughts and your feelings are the main three things that you need to uplevel, to be able to implement that strategy. You can have the best strategy in the world but if your beliefs, your thoughts and your feelings are not in alignment with that, you’re not going to probably have that outcome that you want. So these are small activities to start helping you with that. 

So that first activity is really opening up your beliefs of okay, this is what your beliefs might be but now we’re going to really expand the realm of possibilities here. This next exercise is really a visualization to help you get your thoughts of thinking about the real impact. This isn’t about just getting a podcast book, this is about something so much bigger than that so helping to get your thoughts into that space. And that leads me to our next mindset activity here which is on feelings. So with feelings, this is something that I have known for a while but I feel like I’ve experienced so much more this past year is like everything in our lives has changed and I really felt I had to quadruple down hard on my mindset to just make it half the time. And what I realized is I think in the past, a lot of times, I felt like feelings were a reaction to what was around me and so I was always trying to control my feelings.  And this year, what I’ve realized is that I can create my feelings. And maybe in the past I’ve done that by accident, by doing certain things but this year I had to get really intentional about that and we can create feelin that we want. 

So with this, we want to create that feeling they want to have me as a guest on their show like podcasters want guests. So that feeling of like of course they want to have. I’m gonna be able to just serve that audience. Of course, I have this message to share. Of course, I can get on bigger shows and this feeling of confidence and excitement and certainty and possibilities and excitement. And maybe for you those are different, maybe that you have more of a view of serene energy than I have a little bit of crazy energy. So this isn’t about being like me but it’s about stepping into that feeling that makes you feel your best and has you show up with that certainty, in that confidence. That is what’s going to draw people to you. So what I want you to do is think about two different habits that you can commit to for the next week. I have suggestions for you but I want you to commit to two habits over the next week. Two things that can just help you get into that mode and it can be really small things. 

I mentioned the best month ever earlier and I’ll tell you a little story about that just so you kind of see where some of this is going even though it’s a very different program. The idea with the best month ever is we had a two week program and we worked on mindset and the simplest sales strategies ever go ask for referrals, go follow up with some leads. Very simple things that we layered with mindset and action and prizes. And very similar, you can see where a lot of my inspiration for this program came from and in that two weeks. So many students in that course had their best month ever. It was really wild and where that came from was it was the mindset and the taking action but also some of these daily habits that are just putting you in that energy because sometimes when it’s like we’re home and we’re by ourselves or we’re surrounded by family and it’s hard to get into that mindset of like well now, I’m going to be on one of the biggest podcasts out there. 

We don’t have that physical environment or those other cues that we might have in other areas of life that are giving us those signals. So a couple of things that we did in that program that helps kind of get in the best month ever energy. And if you want to take that spirit to like the best pitching month ever, over here was making our bed every day. So just that little step of making your bed and it’s one bright like a 62nd activity sometimes it could take me a few if I get fancy with pillows but no need to get fancy with pillows. But it’s that you did something and you created that you woke up and you accomplish something and you’re setting that tone for accomplishing more the rest of the day. It could be hydrating, drinking a gallon of water a day. When we’re well hydrated, we feel better, we think clearer and everything just works better. So it can be drinking a gallon of water a day. It could be writing a gratitude list every day and then maybe it’s exercise for you or taking a walk or something like that. But I want you to think about two things like that. You can commit to over the next week. We don’t have to get creative, you’re only literally, you could just take one of those. But if you have something else in mind, I’m not gonna force you into one of those and I want you to commit to doing those two things every day to really help you get into that right energy. Those right feelings to show up and implement from the right energy. 

Alright, so those are our mindset activities. So moving into the plan. Moving into getting ready for pitching and there’s a few things that we need to have in place before we actually start writing the pitches to make sure you’re getting the most out of this. You can get on podcasts. You can get on any sorts of podcasts but U want to make sure that if you’re taking the time to research and pitch and follow up and go on the show and interview and promote after, I want to make sure that those podcasts are the right fit that you’re talking to a relevant audience that’s going to help you hit those goals that you’re going after. With that, we need to really think about who is that perfect person for you to be getting in front of. So we’re not going to do a whole ideal client or customer exercise. 

Do you know who your perfect person is? Is anyone I really don’t know, it’s okay if you don’t know but i want to know if you don’t. If you’re like I have no clue or if you’re like I don’t have a perfect person, I help everybody. This could also be a good way to test. I’m glad this came up so some of you may know my first interview, my first podcast interview ever.  I didn’t have a website. I had nothing for sale. I had an instagram account for five weeks and that’s it. I didn’t know what I was gonna sell. I like random things ever but I had grown that instagram account from zero to 1000 followers in a month. And I had been building relationships and someone I had connected with that recently launched a podcast and asked me to come on and tell that story. It’s not that I had all these years of insert. I had five weeks of instagram experience but I had a story to tell and could share that experience now. Over the years, I’ve pivoted my business and my ideal client many times. And one of the things I love about podcast interviews is you’re getting asked questions about what you do. So it kind of forces you to break down some of that jargon or think about things a different way. Maybe you wouldn’t realize people even have the questions they’re asking. 

Are you telling a story that you would never even think to connect right because through those conversations and through that genuine curiosity of the host, you’re gonna start connecting those dots and you’re gonna see what people are interested in. And if you’re testing out a few different audiences, you’re gonna see which one responds better. So if you do have a couple different audiences or if you are torn on this, I don’t want that to discourage you. Like  I can’t pitch until I totally know who my perfect person is. This could actually be a good way for you to see which audiences respond the best so we can also use this as data and feedback if you are going to do that. You want to make sure it’s gonna get a little techie and we’ll come back to it later. But if you are going to do that, you want to make sure you’re able to track where leads are coming from after so you can really see which one responded the best. But we’re not going to go too much into that now. Okay so for your perfect person, I  have demographics and psychographics. 

So demographics are: Is it a man or a woman? How old are they? Where do they live? What kind of job do they have? Is it a working mom? Is that a college boy? Different, different demographics. If you’re having a hard time figuring out, if demographics are important to you, but if you’re not seeing podcasts or thinking of podcasts, those demographics, sometimes not all the time, but sometimes a way around that is to look for a host that matches those demographics. So let’s say you’re looking to talk to female entrepreneurs over 40 and you’re not finding podcasts that are female entrepreneurs over 40, you can look for podcasts that have female hosts that are over 40. Is their whole audience going to be that? No, but a lot of times when we have a personal brand, we attract people like us. I don’t use the word Mom anywhere on my site, in my marketing or anything, but I share my life as a Mom. And because of that, the majority of my audience are parents. 

A lot of times we attract people who are like us inadvertently. So if there is something like that with your demographics, you’re like, I don’t know, if there’s podcasts like this, just keep that in mind to look for the demographics of the host. If you’re struggling with that and for many of you demographics may not even matter all that much. So don’t force it to matter if it doesn’t. For the scenario, the psychographics are more of the emotion of what they’re experiencing. So are they struggling with imposter syndrome or confidence. And if that’s something that’s tied to what you’re doing, shows that either on that topic or that cover, those topics are going to be helpful for you. So depending on what your niche is, what your expertise is, some of these are going to matter more or less.  But I want you to get really clear on the audience that you want to speak to because podcasts are like stages, you’re getting on a stage and you’re talking to your perfect people. Hopefully, not always, which is why we’re trying to be really intentional about this. Because you could talk to a room of 1,000 of the wrong people and that’s gonna bring you nothing. Or you could talk to a room with 20 people in it, who are perfect for you. And you could convert half of them or all of them. 

It’s not always about the biggest podcast, it’s about the most relevant podcast. And so the way we want to do that, though, is thinking about the audience. Because when we’re talking about a shirt, I mean, sometimes you can convert the host. And sometimes that is the goal. For some of you, maybe the goal is to convert the host. And that is as long as you’re not sleazy about it, that can be a strategy here. The host may also want to be converting you all these, all these side angles, area and butter. But sometimes you end up hiring, those are those hierzu, who know it’s all relationships. But in terms of talking to the audience, you want to make sure you’re pitching podcasts that have that audience that you want to talk to. It’s really not about pitching the host. It’s about showing them that you’re there to serve their audience. 

I’m excited. Thank you. Take care, take care. 

Can I just say thank you so much for listening? I don’t think I can say it enough. But I love that you’re here. If you enjoyed today’s episode, or if you’ve been getting value from this podcast, do me a quick favor, head on over to iTunes and leave a rating. And review when you leave a rating. Review basically tells iTunes that they need to spread the word and tell more people about this podcast and I am on a mission to get the word out. I’m so grateful for your support. We want to make sure to shout you out too. So if you do leave a rating review, keep your eyes and ears open. We will be either shouting out the podcast or Instagram stories.