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Russ Johns 0:00
Welcome to the #PirateBroadcast, where we interview #interestingpeople doing #interestingthings. Where you can expand your connections, your community, #kindnessiscool and #smilesarefree. Let’s get this party started.

It's beautiful day for the #piratebroadcast. I welcome you into the community. Hopefully, you'll be able to make some new connections, meet a few new friends, and also connect with some people that might be able to assist you in your journey. Today, we have someone that can assist you with your journey on a number of different areas and influences interest in information. Pam Terry is here and I just wanted to say hi to an old friend that I've known for years. I just wanted to introduce her and welcome her into the pirate community. You're now a pirate. Thank you, Pam for being here.

Pam Terry 0:57
Oh, I'm gonna have to get me a patch or a hat or something.

Russ Johns 1:00
Sheri Lally sent me a batch and I have some eye patches here. I'm gonna create a campaign with them.

Pam Terry 1:10
Awesome. Well, I don't know, it doesn't go with makeup though. I have think about that. Maybe I'll have to have special makeup on the other eye.

Russ Johns 1:18
We can do something.

Pam Terry 1:20
I can do "arrrghhh." It's great to be here. It's great to be here. This is fun. It's good to see you. Thank you for having me.

Russ Johns 1:29
Well, you know, it's been a minute since we talked to each other. I used to teach classes with Marian LaSalle and I know that that's when I think we first talked about zoom sessions and meetings. We actually had, I don't know if you were there or not, we had an event where we were actually bringing remote speakers into the meeting and having them teach different topics.

Pam Terry 1:56
I think so. I think that actually, I arranged one of those meetings for powerful women International. It was on like, Pinterest or some expert in some social media thing. It was really awesome. It was really awesome. I was so intrigued with your audio visual setup and everything. I was like, okay, I gotta find out everything you're using. But the first time I met you was at some networking meeting and everybody had their laptops and I spilled coffee on my laptop. I think I tanked it, remember that?

Russ Johns 2:29
I remember that. That was in a co-op working space down in...I can't remember where that was.

Pam Terry 2:36
And when was that? I don't know.

Russ Johns 2:37
I felt so bad. I was like, oh no.

Pam Terry 2:42
Oh, well, you know, hey, here we are. I have a new laptop, so everything's cool.

Russ Johns 2:49
Everything's cool.

Pam Terry 2:50
And #smilesarefree.

Russ Johns 2:52
Exactly. #Kindnessiscool.

Pam Terry 2:54
#kindnessiscool, yeah.

Russ Johns 2:55
Yeah, we got it covered. So tell us a little bit about what you're doing what you're focusing in on because I know that you're doing a lot of great things. You've been involved in so many different projects that help others. So what's your current focus and what do people need to know about you?

Pam Terry 3:13
Okay, well, I am a public speaker, and a coach, a public speaker coach, and a marketing strategist. I'm also really into technology. I actually have a virtual event coming up where I train experts how to host, how to successfully host their own virtual event, okay. But it's not just about hosting, it's about being a compelling speaker. How do you do that versus an in person event? What are the nuances, the differences and how do you prepare all the technology and stuff? So I really make it real simple. I've done it a couple of times. I've gotten some really good feedback. I used to do live events, a live event could be virtual. Okay, this is a live event right now. Of course you listen to it later. It was recorded. Everything's recorded live, okay, we're not going there. Okay, so anyway, semantics, I get into words so but, you know, I love helping people express themselves, get their message out. I have this belief, Russ, that public speakers are out to transform people's lives in some way, even if they're a salesperson, who's selling a product, that product is to help them in some way. So I love transformation. I love communication, expression. I have a secret I'll tell you. I mean, I'm a born ham. Okay. I'm a born ham. I'm a twin and I have an older brother and an older sister. So I had five people plus the maid, we had a Spanish speaking housekeeper. I don't think she could understand, but anyway, I gathered them all in the living room and I do my little pantomimes. I think one of them was Charlie Brown. You're a clown song or something like that, or I would do little play/sketch that bored my mother to tears, but I just wanted to perform. But when I grew up, oh, I was in a lot of dramatic and humorous readings and plays in junior high and stuff like that. Cut a bunch of ribbons. I mean, all is good, but I kind of left it all behind and got married, I was working. I was about 30. I thought, you know, I want to get back in touch with those speaking roots. So I joined Toastmasters and you're not going to believe this, but I was a nervous wreck. Oh, God. So they have this thing in Toastmasters, where it's called table topics. Have you ever heard of that? Have you ever been to a Toastmaster? Okay? It's a really awesome tabletop. It's is great training.

Russ Johns 6:01
For those that don't know about Toastmasters, kind of expand a little bit on what it is because it's a huge opportunity to learn how to speak. It's been around for a while and a lot of people may not be aware of it.

Pam Terry 6:17
So Toastmasters International is a club group, I mean that they have clubs, there's probably 30 or more in Houston itself. But they've gone virtual, a lot of them. So they meet and if you pay any dues, I don't remember, but you learn how to speak and so you have these set speeches that you do, icebreakers is the first one. I forget what all of them are you can achieve. Table topics, let me tell you about that. So the table topics Master, which changes each each time you meet weekly, calls on you, without any prep, it's an impromptu presentation that you have to make for a minute or a minute and a half, and they give you the topic. So the topic could be like, why is a banana yellow? Or it can be on something you totally disagree with, like, who you should vote for, and why you should vote for them. Whatever it is, you have to get up there. Well, when I got called on I don't know what the topic was the first time and I got up there. I thought you could see my blouse going like this because my heart was beating so hard. My knees were actually knocking. I was just trembling. All I could think of was everybody was staring at me. It was all about me, it wasn't thinking about, and I didn't really have very many opinions when I was 30. I was married to a very opinionated person. So I guess I don't know. Anyway. But, here was the clincher. Okay, so after everybody does your table topics, you vote on the best one? Well, obviously, I'm very competitive, and I wanted to win, so I said, I'm gonna do better. So I got really, really good at it. I won almost every time. I just wanted whatever the prize was. A book. I don't know, it was just different things.

Russ Johns 8:16
Whatever it happened to be.

Pam Terry 8:18
Yeah. I got to be so good, but the really cool thing about doing that is I became so confident at work. I worked at an accounting firm, I was the marketing coordinator. I don't even think they said marketing back then, it was practice development coordinator. I'd have to be in the meeting with partners. I didn't have a college degree. They all had college degrees, but they didn't know jack about marketing. Okay. So I would be in there and it was amazing how I felt so at ease with whatever questions they asked me. I could joke around, I could be serious. If I didn't know, I'd find the answer, whatever. But I highly recommend if you've got any nervousness, join Toastmasters, and get the table topics.

Russ Johns 9:09
Right. Well, you get practice until you get okay with it, right?

Pam Terry 9:14
I used to be like call on me, call on me, please call on me.

Russ Johns 9:21
It's also part of the Toastmasters process. I think it improves how you tell stories. I think in any social situation, especially online, you have to be able to articulate some of these ideas and concepts in a story format, that allow your audience to be kind of interested in what you're talking about.

Absolutely.

And provide some feedback. Wherever it can land, either it's in a conversation or comments and in the in the zoom session or whatever it happens to be because, like right now, we're all working on improving these skills and skill sets. So taking the speaker's aspect, and moving it on to a virtual platform, I think it's even more critical now than, or equally critical as Toastmasters and being able to speak in front of a crowd.

Pam Terry 10:21
Think about it. When you're in front of a crowd, that eye contact that you have, is really powerful to get people's attention. You kind of lose that, although you just kind of lose that on the virtual event, you don't have the power of the eye to eye contact. But stories don't have to be elaborate. They can be little anecdotes. Here's the thing about your credibility as a speaker, when you can bring in an anecdote whether it's about yourself, or someone else, it adds credibility to whatever point you're making. So if you're just giving people like, this is how you do it. Bla, bla, bla, yada, yada, yada. It gets boring after a while, but you need to intersperse it with, well, this is what happened. This happened, you know, this happened with this person, or it happened with me. They're like, oh, yeah, I can relate to that.

Russ Johns 11:15
One of the masters at that kind of analogy and storytelling that I reflect on right now, it just came up in my head was Paul Harvey. Now for the rest of the story.

Pam Terry 11:29
Oh, he was a master, wasn't he?

Russ Johns 11:31
Yeah, just his voice was incredible. It would draw you in. It would just allow you to be able to see the story unfold.

Pam Terry 11:45
It was like, I don't know what the word is to describe that sound effect, it was like velvet or something, but very deep. Another good storyteller is Steve Jobs. When he did the commencement speech for Stanford University, it was all a story to make this one point. Be foolish, stay hungry, or stay hungry, be foolish or something like that. But what I love about his opening, so when you do an introduction, you want to grab people's attention, so how do you do that? Well, a lot of times a question will work. You could make a provocative statement. So the first time I watched it, his statement was, I never went to college. And I just went, oh my God, he's serious. He's speaking to Stanford graduates, and he says, I never went to college. What's he going to follow up with? You? I never graduated from college. He did go to college and never graduate. The story is fascinating. Because his parents, he was adopted, his parents paid for him to go and then he dropped out and didn't tell them and kept going. It's like 14 minutes and I think if you just Google Steve Jobs commencement speech, it's really worth watchin. Have you ever seen it.

Russ Johns 13:07
Yeah, I have. It's a great speech. We could go down the rabbit hole of Steve Jobs. He learned a lot of his design skills, or picked up a lot of cues on his design skills from going to classes, college classes that he wasn't even registered for.

Pam Terry 13:32
Yeah, it was a calligraphy class.

Russ Johns 13:34
Yeah, it was.

Pam Terry 13:35
I love that. It's incredible.

Russ Johns 13:38
It's amazing and a lot of people, because they make the storytelling so transparent and it flows so easy that they just make it look so easy. It's not necessarily an easy thing to pull off when you're not involved in storytelling. You just get up on the stage. I was fortunate enough to be up on the stage of The Moth. I don't know if you're familiar with The Moth. It's a show that's on NPR. It's a national organization. It's a speaking event where you get up and draw your name out of...

Pam Terry 14:18
I'll have to check it out.

Russ Johns 14:19
Yeah. You get up on the stage and you tell a small story, and they have a subject and you have to stick to the subject. The subject actually is announced in advance of the event. So you can craft your story in advance; however, it's really an interesting place to tell stories and and then when you get up into the next ranks, and as they go up in the ranks and the winners and you get more proficient at storytelling, then they put you on the radio as well or they put you on the podcast.

Pam Terry 14:59
Cool.

Russ Johns 15:00
We can get a lot of attention there. It's just a matter of being able to practice and be able to really put yourself out there. Like you said, get your audience as a child. You didn't have any problem dancing and singing in front of an audience, because it was a safe place. And then if you expand it, it becomes a bit scary. So, I want to take a moment here and share a couple of people that are in the room. Sherry Darden says, good AM. Thanks for being here.

Pam Terry 15:38
Hi Sherry.

Russ Johns 15:40
Jeffrey Berger says, hello Russ and Pam. Catching you live this morning. Whoo-hoo. Thank you so much for being here. Wendy's here. Good morning pirates. LinkedIn user says, hello, #RussJohns, long time no, see. I suspect that's Laurie. Is that Laurie? Tell me if it's Laurie or not. Gabriel's in the house. Good morning, fellow pirates.

Pam Terry 16:09
Hello, Gabrial.

Russ Johns 16:10
He's a fellow live streamer. He does amazing work online. Here's a name you might recognize.

Pam Terry 16:19
Hi Hiett. How are you doing?

Russ Johns 16:19
Good morning y'all, from Hiett Ives. Jeffrey Berger says, oh boy, Pam. I'm an identical twin here.

Pam Terry 16:29
Another identical twin. Boy or girl, buy hey, twinsie.

Russ Johns 16:33
Hiett says, Table Topics Traumatics. Our club is every morning at 6:45am

Unknown Speaker 16:48
It's obviously virtual, I would imagine.

Russ Johns 16:51
Is it virtual, Hiett. I believe that he said it was earlier. He's a pirate, he's been on the show.

Pam Terry 16:58
I love Hiett. Love ya, Hiett.

Russ Johns 17:02
Kenyatta Turner, good morning.

Pam Terry 17:04
Hi Kenyatta.

Russ Johns 17:05
Hellooo! She's here in Arizona. Wonderful energy, Pam, Wendy, says.

Pam Terry 17:11
Thanks Wendy.

Russ Johns 17:12
Alfredo says, good morning.

Pam Terry 17:15
Love your last name. Tigolo. Great name.

Russ Johns 17:19
Kenyatte says, good morning to ya. #PirateBroadcast rocks! Oh, thank you so much.

Pam Terry 17:26
What is MM, I wonder. What is MM, Kenyatta?

Russ Johns 17:31
Put in the comments, Kenyatta what MM stands for.

Pam Terry 17:35
You know, one of the things that you're doing is one of the things I teach for virtual events is to say people's names and to acknowledge them. This is great for participating. It gets people involved. I just had to say that. Yeah, You're a master at it.

Russ Johns 17:51
I'm realizing there's still room to grow. I'm good to be able to reach out and get the community involved and get the audience involved.

Pam Terry 18:02
You're very good at that, yeah. Well, I want to give it I want to give a shout out to a friend of mine who's now passed away. His name is Rick Butts, B-U-T-T-S. He was a motivational speaker. He was phenomenal. He said we're all in the same room, the room for improvement. That was one of his sayings. Loved him.

Russ Johns 18:22
Room for improvement. Yeah.

Pam Terry 18:25
And that's great, I think, because wouldn't it be sad if we'd reached our potential that we couldn't get any better? I think that would be sad. I love that we can continually improve.

Russ Johns 18:38
Well, I was looking forward to at least 1% every day. If I can improve something every single day, look what happens in a year's time. You get to be able to do something. You get to provide intent for the new day. So I learned something. I learned or added to or I enhance the skill I have today, like speaking or presenting or storytelling. I can actually improve on that every time I do this show, every time I do the #PirateBroadcast.

Pam Terry 19:18
Absolutely.

Russ Johns 19:21
You know, it's like, you know, or ums and ahhs and things like that because I'm doing it live, I need to continue to improve my diction, my articulation, remove those from those moments of those pauses, and allow people to actually respond to that.

Pam Terry 19:45
Okay, so you want to know...should I share? Not just for you, but for everybody, how to stop saying um? Mine are basically and like. More basically, I say that all the time.

Russ Johns 19:57
How do you fix "you know?"

Pam Terry 19:58
You know? Okay. All right. So okay, the way you stop it is you just stop it. Okay, so now that's the thing, but how do you do it? Right? So the way you do it is first, you decide, okay, I'm going to work on it. That's the number one step, I'm going to work on it. Then when you know you're going to start to say, just bite your tongue. You pause, you don't say anything. Collect your thoughts, and then you talk. Then just practice like anything else. The other thing is, if you really know your material, you're going to do a lot better. I was listening to someone on NPR, it was some dean of a university and it was bad. It was so bad. You want to know how bad it was?

Russ Johns 20:51
How bad was a it, Pam?

Pam Terry 20:55
It was so bad. He had this deep voice and it was like, Uhhhhhh. You couldn't hear anything he was saying? Because all you could you start focusing on, at least for me, focusing on the eyes, it was so bad. It's so bad. I mean you don't usually hear it that bad. But being on the radio, and he was a dean of a university. Oh my god. Okay. Anyway, it is possible to improve in that area.

Russ Johns 21:29
Hey, let me give a shout out. I just want to give a quick shout out, Pam, to SlapTagz, which is Sheri Lally, who actually sent me eye patches for this campaign. She's an amazing individual and a gift to the world.

Pam Terry 21:47
That's so great.

Russ Johns 21:48
Then Kenyatta says, my graduate degree was a Masters of Management (MM).

Pam Terry 21:51
Masters of Management, ooh, love that. I'm going to have to connect with you.

Russ Johns 21:56
FYI, Pam, Kenyatta, Art Jones and myself, created a virtual event called #LinkedInLocal Popup. We did that. We brought quite a few people together. So, I'm really interested to see how it evolves. But you're always welcome to join us because it's virtual. Hiett Ives says, Daybreakers. Yes, virtual. Y'all are great. Thank you.

Pam Terry 22:26
Ah, thank you. Thank you,

Russ Johns 22:27
HoustonDaybreakers.com. That's a little early for me. Paulo says morning Russ and Pam and all the pirates.

Pam Terry 22:37
Bargellini, what a great name.

Russ Johns 22:38
Love that. Love that. That's the thing, Pam, is this. I've been doing this over a year and over 260 episodes. The reality is, that there's a lot of people that bring so much value to the world. I like to highlight an individual, #interestingpeople doing #interestingthings every single day. It''s really about what can we develop in the community to help each other, either be inspired or motivated to do something different, or use that 1% of your improvement every day, to make a difference in the rest of the world? I think it's important for us to all set that standard and attempt to move the needle forward in a positive way.

Pam Terry 23:33
Absolutely.

Russ Johns 23:33
I know you've always been that way. You've always been so helpful in speaking and setting up and organizing events and getting people together. The woman's international was a huge thing that you did for a lot of years. Talk a bit about what you're doing now and how people can get involved in this virtual speaking coaching session that you have going.

Pam Terry 24:00
Thank you asking, just briefly, the 1% per day is called Kaizen, you know that, right? Now, that's a whole nother podcast.

Russ Johns 24:13
Yeah, that's a whole nother podcast. You can come back and we can talk about Kaizen.

Pam Terry 24:17
Okay, so what I'm doing, I've got this virtual event, it's a training, it's two and a half hours, but I also add another 15 minutes at the beginning, because I like to network and want people to sign in it is a paid training, very affordable. It's how to successfully host your own virtual event, from the technology to presenting. So how to be a compelling speaker. I've been working on this and let me tell you why I'm doing it. I've been developing an online course of how to be an in demand speaker. It was so close ready to the launch when COVID hit and the course is based on doing your own in person events. That's not going to work during COVID.

Russ Johns 25:07
Right.

Pam Terry 25:08
So I was like, okay, well, I need to do some virtual events. So I can add that as a module. Now, my course goes into the marketing, the promotion, it's got checklists galore, it's awesome. But I've got to add the virtual event. So I decided, well, let me start doing some of the virtual events. I'll teach people how to do their own virtual events. I mean, I've done virtual events before. I'm really glad to be doing this, because I'm not glad about the pandemic, nobody is, but the digital virtual event for hosting events is not going to go away. We all know that, and then live events in person will come back. But there'll be hybrids too. So that's why I'm doing the virtual events, I did one with just some friends, Marian, was there to get feedback. That's what I recommend people do. Do your first one with some colleagues, that you're not charging for, if you're an expert. But offer your training, if you need to make some money. You're an expert, you've got value to offer people. So this tells them how to host it. People who are experts, like coaches, consultants, CEOs, entrepreneurs, authors who aren't doing virtual events, or maybe they're thinking about it, maybe they've done them, but they didn't like the way it went and they'd really like some direction. This training will go through all of that. It's very interactive, there's a lot of participation. I have to do that to keep people's attention. You've got to have people participating. It's not just me, yak, yak, yak, the whole time, although it feels like it's sometimes. It's limited to about 20 people. So you know, there's 10 people, that's fine. But after the event, everybody gets an action guide that documents everything that is covered. In addition to having a handout after the event, it's a full documentation of everything, so they can use it, it's a Word document, to create their own checklist from it. So that's what I'm up to. This will be my last one that I think I'll do for a while until I can get the modules done for my course. Then launch the course. Now, I'm going to be starting a podcast, my now news podcast, on focusing on the issues that are sought that there's so many great things going on. As you know, there's so many great things going on in the world. There's not enough focus on them. So I'm going to bring together let's say, one of my programs will be trash talk, okay? It's all about recycling. I'm gonna bring in experts and have like a panel, or maybe one person, but I want to get people from all over the world who are doing really cool things. I've been cataloging this stuff on my Facebook group and on Twitter, where people are doing some awesome things with the oceans and stuff like that, or poverty or homelessness, or the prisons and get people talking and I know there's already some of that going on, but there's just not enough. You can't have too much of that going on. We just need more and more. I think CBS does a really good job of spotlighting, there's more and more spotlighting of the good things going on, but again, just not enough.

Russ Johns 28:44
I think sometimes the negative news, because it grabs your attention, that it tends to overwhelm some of the great stories that are behind every day people and if the people like you and I can actually do amazing stories and share that information out, then at some point in time, we can continue to improve that.

Pam Terry 29:11
That's our job. Make the world better through communication. Hey, I like that.

Russ Johns 29:21
So a couple of other people have popped in. Kenyatta says #LinkedInLocalPopup. Paolo says, thank you, Pam.

Pam Terry 29:38
Ok, my internet just jiggled a little bit.

Russ Johns 29:41
Okay. Angie, good morning. Thank you for being here. Hiett says, Pam, let's get together. He's a busy one. Cathi Spooner, good morning, late to the show. Better late than never to get my day started. Thank you so much, Cathi. Appreciate you. So, Pam, how do we get ahold of you? How do people connect with you? What's your preference? Oh, did we lose Pam? Ok, you're back. I don't know if you heard my question or not?

No, I didn't. So how do people connect with you? How do they reach out? What's your preference?

Pam Terry 30:39
LinkedIn is great. LinkedIn is fine. I'm going to post the event on LinkedIn. So if you want to get an invitation on LinkedIn, just send me the event. That's fine. Facebook's fine, too. I have the indemand speaker Facebook group. I think I'm on Facebook as Noww News, it's actually N-O-W-W. Standard network of what's working in Noww News. Okay, anyway, that would be the easiest.

Russ Johns 31:15
We'll put links in the show notes. You can always find them on www.russjohns.com/piratebroadcast. You can listen to all the podcasts and track me down on LinkedIn, and subscribe to my YouTube channel. I love the fact that we have over 500 videos there and a little bit more out there. So subscribe to it, binge watch once a while, share it, like it, comment. And also on Facebook, and Twitter. We're also there. So wherever you happen to be, and I'm also on Instagram, so it's wherever you happen to track me down.

Pam Terry 31:54
I"ve got to follow you on Instagram. Yeah, I'll do that. Thank you so much, Russ.

Russ Johns 32:00
Well, thank you, Pam. Thank you everyone for being here. The whole point of the #pirate#broadcast is to bring people together to build a better community. Bring #interestingpeople doing #interestingthings to the table. We encourage you to share this, like this, comment and all the social activities that people ask for these days. Also, #kindnessiscool, #smilesarefree, #enjoytheday. Thank you so much, Pam. Appreciate it.

Pam Terry 32:31
See ya.

Russ Johns 32:35
Thank you for joining the #PirateBroadcast. If you found this content valuable, please like, comment and share it across your social media channels. I would love the opportunity to help others grow in their business. The #PirateSyndicate is a platform where you show up, we produce the show. It's that easy. If you want to be seen, be heard and be talked about, join the #PirateSyndicate today.

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