Leverage Your Glamability Before a TV Show Even Airs With Shannon Walbran

Our guest today is Shannon Walbran who is known as South Africa’s top psychic. Her main message is, “You are guided.” Even though she guides you and she loves to teach people how to get their messages themselves … I love that Shannon, that, “You are guided.” You are guided by yourself, as well as by you, is that what you meant by that?

Thanks, Susan. Yeah. That’s really my sound bite. It was you who taught me how to make really brief sound bites. “You are guided,” is one of my best sound bites because I really want to put the power back interview people’s hands so that they don’t feel or believe that they have to pay an intermediary to get their messages.

I really love that. Although it is really wonderful to get the intermediary because I was just listening to your podcast and you're so fast and incisive.

It was absolutely fascinating. People were asking all types of questions. At the end of our interview, because we’re going to be talking about publicity today, but at the end of our interview, I'm going to get to ask you three questions. Wait until the end of this podcast to find out what Shannon’s going to discover for me. I'm really super excited about that. Also, Shannon’s website is ShannonWalbran.com. 

What we’re going to talk about today is something that’s really interesting that Shannon has done, which is she has gotten publicity for a Ukrainian reality TV show that is not going to be translated into English and yet she’s been able to get publicity for it. We, in the English-speaking world, are never going to be able to get to see that. Is it called the World’s Top Psychic? Is that the name of it, Shannon?

It’s called International Psychic Challenge.

Got it. You’ve already taped it?

Yes, I taped it in July of this year.

Before you even taped it though, you’ve started thinking about, “How can I get publicity for this?” that you're going to be on this show in Ukraine. What did you do first?

Susan, I have to give you a lot of credit here because I was part of your Sell Yourself Without Selling Your Soul membership club. You were throwing out a lot of ideas and the other people in the group were throwing out lots of ideas about media coverage. I was practicing even before I got the invitation to go Ukraine. I did a few things.

I had some professional photographs taken. I was really, really pleased with them. I thought they looked really cool. I worked on my sound bites. In addition to, “You are guided,” I have some other sound bites. I really honed them. Another one is, “I want to work myself out of a job.” That relates to what we were discussing about, I want other people to do this work, I want to teach people how to do the work that I do.

Joining the Sell Yourself Without Selling Your Soul membership club showed me how to craft a press release that sounded exactly like a news story. I got invited pretty much out of the blue to participate in this International Psychic Challenge, like world’s top psychics, like an Idols program, in Ukraine. The first thing that I did was I wrote a press release, “Shannon Walbran has been selected to represent South Africa in this international challenge.” That’s how I crafted the press release. I wrote it exactly as if it were a news story that you would see in the news section, in the "A" part of the paper.

That’s really brilliant. To do that, to write it as a news story because by doing that, producers or editors, the job is already done for them. You’ve crafted the story, you’ve shaped the story. I like that you put it … It’s not about you. It’s not about, “Oh, Shannon Walbran, this and that.” It’s like, “Shannon Walbran represents South Africa.” That’s the bigger story.

One of the mistakes that people often make is it’s just about me, me, me, and not about how it relates to the audience or why it’s important out in the world. By crafting that as a news story, that puts it in a different dimension and that makes it really considered as something important and for people to know. I love that you did that.

I also love that you said you did this and you were practicing even before you got that invitation. I think that that kind of mental preparation and then bringing it down to the physical world, and you really know about both of those worlds, is so important. There is a phrase that I love, which is, “Write it down, make it happen.” Even that much, taking the action, but you were actually practicing verbally your sound bites too, right, as well as writing down the press release?

Absolutely. I can add in that the tagline that I practiced for myself, which is South Africa’s Top Psychic, I crafted it after reading your material and working with you. By South Africa’s Top Psychic, I actually mean I have the highest listenership. I'm on a really popular radio station. That radio station’s program, the morning show, has 8 million people listening to it every day. I'm not on it every day, I'm on it once a month. But that means that 8 million people are listening to me. There are other good psychics in the world, there are other good psychics in South Africa. There are other very accurate and helpful psychics in the world.

By saying, “I'm South Africa’s top psychic,” I just gave myself a tagline that is true and that works. It’s also, as you say, what makes it relevant to the audience. I want to represent this country. It’s not my country at first. I am American, but I live here and I'm going to live here for a long while. I'm raising my child here. South Africa is a good place to be right now. I'm very happy to be here. It all ties together.

That is really a great point. That your moniker, what you name yourself, really needs to be true. Because there are a lot of people who are calling themselves America’s top this and America’s top that and there’s no basis behind it. Before you give yourself a name, you do have to have the gravitas and the statistics or whatever the experience behind it. You did, and you just proved that, that you have the highest listenership. You’ve also worked with over 20,000 people. That gives you a huge amount of credibility.

I remember one of my clients, when she first was starting out. By the way, now she’s a New York Times Bestselling author. At the time, she had written a self-published book and she said it was a bestseller. I said, "An Amazon best seller?" I said, “How many copies has it sold?” It was like 20. I said, you cannot call … yourself a bestseller because you sold 20 copies on Amazon. I said, “You just can't do that.”

I don’t know what the amount is to become a REAL bestseller because for the New York Times it can be many different things based on the other books that are published at that time, but it’s typically a minimum of 20,000 [books sold]. That’s not really even considered a bestseller at that. I love that you have the gravitas and you back that up. Do you think that giving yourself that tagline … How then did the reality TV show find you? How did they find you?

I talked to the producers about how they found me. I talked to them while they were in the process. They said that they were Googling and they were Googling to look for people in vastly different countries. Australia, Scotland. They were looking all over the place and for people who speak different languages. They had somebody from Mexico and they had somebody from Turkey. I think that because I put “South Africa’s Top Psychic,” I'm pretty sure that that helped them find me.

That’s great. What was the interview process like in order to vet you to be on the show?

It was that they made me make a video of myself because they wanted to see that I was lively and talkative and could string a sentence together. They had me describe what my special skills were. I sent in my video. There were more than 100 candidates from many different countries. If they were from neighboring countries, they were given train tickets. We were all flown to Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, in the beginning of July. The filming went on for six months.

The thing is, is that I told them that since I have a small child, I would only be able to be there for a maximum of three weeks. I was with them for three weeks. I made it to the top 10, which is fantastic and I was really thrilled. But because I was only there for three weeks,I was seriously filming about 16 hours a day. It was so intense. In the long run, when I'm watching the show now, they chose to edit out my segments because I couldn’t complete their story arc because I couldn't stay the whole six months.

The people who are still there … Actually, I believe it’s finished now. I believe it’s finished this month. They were the people who could stay. They were people who didn’t have the same family obligations that I did. When I talked to you before the filming and I said, "Look, I'm leveraging all of this publicity before I go,” you said, “That’s great because we don’t know how it’s going to turn out anyway.”

Here’s the thing, even though I did make it into the top 10, they chose not to use the footage because of my limited time. Thank goodness I did all of that leveraging beforehand.

You never do know how much you're going to be actually in any kind of storyline that has extensive footage or even has footage for a top show by the way. One of my other clients, he’s a regular on a reality TV show. He said the same thing, that they do film quite a lot of segments but he’s not sure necessarily which ones are going to air.

Because they have to craft the story after the fact and then they piece it together so that it makes sense. The people who win in the end, then they [the producers] go back to the beginning and they find all of the footage of those people and really put a lot of them in at the beginning.

This is the same in a reality TV show as it is with any kind of extended news show or even sometimes a four-minute segment. You were talking about creating an arc. There is an arc to a story, to the entire story with all the people involved. There are also story arcs or arcs for each of the people too.

Like in Game of Thrones. There’s a story arc for each character and a story arc for each season. For a little while, I was a documentary film producer. I was working on a documentary that was made by some really famous people in the UK about kids behind bars in Brazil. I was one of the translators. I played a really minor role in producing the film.

One of the kids was 9 years old when he first went into jail. He was 14 years old when he was released from jail but he looks so different from 9 to 14 because of the changes that he’d gone through while he was in prison. They almost couldn’t use the footage, if you know what I mean. The audience would not have been able to identify him as the same person.

That’s interesting, that’s fascinating. That’s another way to connect because that could be an advantage too. “Look what happened.”

That’s what they decided. They did a split screen with his name on it. They said before and after. They had a choice. They had many different child candidates to show. They preferred to show the ones that it was really easy to identify. I'm sure you coach your clients on this also. When I was a child actor, I was a child actor for like 1 season one a TV show. Really. I decided to cut my hair, I cut my hair really short without consulting the director. She said, “What have you done? Now there’s no continuity at all. We’re going to have to make you wear a baseball cap for the rest of the show.”

Wow. You don’t think about those kinds of things.

I was 11, I didn’t think about that.

Because it’s not something that …

My hair was blonde by choice. I thought a lot about the way I looked. I like the way that I look, but I'm glad that I liked the way that I look because I'm going to need to look like this for a long time now.

That’s interesting. Keep that consistency of image so people recognize you. That’s something that’s really interesting. I'm talking to a woman about branding right now. She’s talking about if she wants to wear the same clothes over and over again. These are branding choices about how you look and how you want to be perceived and creating a consistency. They're really there sinking deeply, even something about your hair color and your hairstyle, about keeping that really consistent. Let’s go back to how else you’ve maximized your publicity when the show did air and now you're not even in it.

Before I went, I got covered in national newspapers. That was really important to me because I'm holding seminars, teaching seminars not only in Johannesburg, where I'm based, but also in Durban and Cape Town which are the other main cities in South Africa. The story was picked up by a Durban newspaper. In that article it said, “She’s going to Ukraine and she’s going to represent South Africa,” and then said, “She will be giving seminars when she returns.” I did, I came back and then I gave the seminars. They were sold out. I was thrilled about that.

Wonderful. When you said national newspaper, it was in the Durban newspapers, was it picked up by other newspapers? What did you say, Cape Town and Johannesburg?

Right. The news was spread via a national news service which is called News 24. That was a syndicated news. It was picked up, but more on a personal basis, and I’ll get to that in a second, by the features editor of the Durban Newspaper which is called The Mercury. It was also in the Saturday Star I believe and also in the Johannesburg papers.

I hired a publicist even though maybe I didn’t need to. I don’t have a healthy up to date list of the names and numbers of the journalists and the editors that I wanted to send this to. I hired her basically just for her email list. Because I had crafted the press release by myself, the news press release, and because I had really good high res photographs that I was really proud of, all she had to do was hit send.

Wonderful. I just want to recap what you did and what the effect was. What you had said first was that photographs are super important today, especially in our visual age where a photograph can make a story. You look really beautiful, you've got your blonde hair. You've got some other photographs where you’re more full body and face. Sometimes even action photos are really helpful, certainly on the Internet.

You also did local publicity which went national in Durban, Cape Town, and Johannesburg that then got syndicated. You never know when a story is going to get syndicated when it’s interesting, but obviously yours is interesting enough to get picked up and circulated and then to make it into local papers which then helped you fill up and sell out your seminars. Which was the goal, right?

Totally. One thing I want to say is after it went syndicated and after it made it to the other town’s newspapers, then individual journalists called me to do individual interviews. I don’t know if they were more or less interesting than the original news story, but they had a question and answer format which some people like better and it’s a little bit more engaging and talkative.

Nice. I just want to say also, sometimes people, because we’re in a digital age, sometimes people are really discounting newspapers and magazines. But they're actually a super powerful way to get publicity. The most powerful strategy is to use those digital and offline media. Now, because it’s becomes so crowded online, actually offline, if you can do it … Shannon is really experienced and obviously you’ve had a lot of other experience too that really made this effective, just the fact that you know what a good story is from doing documentary films. These are the kinds of things that play into a background and that also are impressive to the media.

The other thing that I wanted to point out is that they needed to know you were mediagenic. When you were applying for that Ukraine reality TV show, your video was of the essence in order to pass the producers’ test to even get on the show. Every one of you, if you're looking to do TV, you have to have a little demo video of at least two minutes that imitate … If you haven’t been on a local TV show, it’s what imitates a real TV interview in order for the producers to know that you're mediagenic and that you can handle yourself on TV.

You did all of these things right. It sounded like the results were really great for you in terms of filling up your seminars. Were there also other results that came from that? Your immediate plan was to fill up your seminars, are there other benefits that happened?

Sure. I'm looking to host my own television program and/or to be a guest on a regular television program. I already got radio down. I'd like to transfer my skills and my availability and the help that I can get people to TV. Working on the Ukraine TV show and even just talking about that I worked on the Ukraine TV show, boosts my possibilities of making TV here.

You're absolutely right that I think the demo video, which I then put in my YouTube channel obviously, really elevated my profile. Also, I decided then, even before I went to Ukraine, now I'm going to film everything that I do. When I have these seminars with 50 women in a room and then giving each of them an answer, now I film it with their permission. Each woman comes up to the front, sits in the chair next to me, kind of like Oprah. I give her her answers and then everybody claps and we’re filming it. It’s like having a TV show. It is that. It’s almost “fake it till you make it” but it’s “create what you want and show people what it could look like.”

That is so brilliant. That follows along the lines of what the Mormons do by the way when the Mormons need to go out and convert people. Each Mormon needs to do that. They practice in a real studio of a real living room. They're going to go into people’s living rooms. They have a studio with a real living room and they sit down and they do role-play with people as if they're sitting in their living rooms because that’s enacting the real scenario that they're being sent out to do in order to convert people to Mormonism.

We have friends who are running podcasts even like this one. We have friends who have radio shows or blog talk radio or whatever, we can get interviewed on those radio shows and we could offer them content and value that will be useful to their audiences. It’s just creating a huge body of evidence and proof that we are mediagenic, as you say, and that it's useful and helpful and should we have more than what we have been given, we can multiply.

I love that. I love that you said it’s a body of evidence, a future reality. By you doing filming every single time you do a seminar where you said it’s like having a TV show, you actually are creating your reality. You're putting this out into the world and showing that you can do it. By doing it, the actual act of doing it, actually puts you closer to your goal as well.

Absolutely. Both in, as you say, both in the world above and the world below. In the practical sense, figuring out how to do it, figuring out the timing, figuring out the lighting, figuring out the logistics. Do I have the person come up? Do I have them stay in the audience? Which works better? It’s amazing practice.

It is. I love that you mentioned the logistics because I think a lot of people don’t realize how much work there is in the logistics and that that’s really an important part of making the whole thing flow, both energetically and visually. You’ve been experimenting with having some women come up, having women sit down and other things. Have you experimented with other things as well? What other things are involved in the logistics?

I'm coming here from the side of psychology. I have a friend who is a practicing real psychologist, a licensed psychologist. She and I talk a lot about the container. Whether you're doing coaching, which you do a lot of, or therapy or helping people in any way or hosting a TV show, there’s such a thing as a container, which is letting people know how long it’s going to go for, giving them a beginning point and an end point, benchmarking them, “How stressed are you? You're stressed 9 out of 10? Oh my goodness, we’ll be addressing that in this session.”

Doing the work and then recapping, which you're also very good at, and then benchmarking them again, “How’s your stress level now? It’s down to a 3, fantastic. Are you clear about what you're going to do going forward? Okay. Thanks very much for coming up and giving your answer. You go back to your seat and we’ll be ready for our next client.”

That container, which works so well in psychology because a person who’s going to a therapist wants to know, how much is this going to cost, how long is this going to take me, am I going to feel better? It works very well in coaching and works very well in TV. You can see that they're all related.

What you're talking about is creating a consistent structure and also a way of setting expectations both for the audience and the people involved live. That also creates a safety. The safety-ness and the comfortableness both with the people involved and also in the audience themselves. If you notice, all TV shows and all news shows, they have a format, a consistent format that you can expect.

It’s even the same thing in a book. Books have a certain structure so we can feel comfortable as we move through that structure. That creates an underlying comfort level in both your participants and the viewers to understand what to expect.

I think what you were talking about in terms of also showing what your results are. For you, results are a really important aspect of your work. Also, anyone who’s doing media, when you want to actually do media appearances and have them result in actual sales and clients and experiences and real things happening in the world, it’s super important then to structure your sound bites in such a way that people really get your experience and that they get that you're effective.

It doesn’t even matter if you have clients or not, or you're selling something. It’s about creating that confidence in you and being fascinating at the same time. That draws people to you. I think it’s the fascination, it’s the proof of your experience and it’s the trust. You and I, Shannon, were talking at the very beginning that now trust is established in 1/10th of a second. Believability, not in 3 seconds, in 1/10th of a second. You actually said that this is like the vibration reaching us even before, almost before we see a person, that we've already got the vibe, right?

I do think so. I think that we should trust that vibe more often about who we partner with, whether it’s romantically or professionally. I think we should really trust that vibe which is what what Sonia Choquette says all the time. Really trust that intuition and follow it. Don’t cross everybody off of your list just because you have not a very good first impression of them. But, at least give them the benefit of the doubt for a little while. But also pay attention to that and take them with a grain of salt. If it comes true that they aren’t really the person for you … Then, I really see a lot of that with my clients, that they have a hard time disengaging with someone with whom they’ve invested time or money. That’s romantically and in business.

Actually, if it’s not working, it’s not working. If you’ve tried to change it and it hasn’t worked, then it’s up to us. It’s up to us to have the authority to say I need better for my life, and I need to clear that out and go forward. It happened to me with another publicist. I told you about that one publicist that I hired. But my friend who works in radio with me was insistent that I work with her publicist. I said, “Okay, I’ll take both of them on and I’ll see what happens.” Have you ever done that, hired two people at the same time to do a job?

I have.

Just to see what happens, to see who does better . I did. The one that I told you about worked brilliantly. She had sent, and she also done follow up with me and she followed up with the journalists. She was really friendly and really nice. The other one, she said she had sent and she said she sent it to 35 people. I never ever got anything from any of the people that were on her list. I don’t know why that happened. My first impression of her was, “This isn't a fit for me.” I went ahead and did it anyway as a favor to my friend. I paid her, but there was no results whatsoever. Interesting, isn't it?

Very interesting. Obviously, I think that there are two parts to that too, that when you do hire a publicist, that you go by your first impression then you do your due diligence. You look at their past experience. You also can tell, like you said, your publicist that you felt good about was friendly and you trusted her to hit send and feed back the results of her hitting send so you knew that she had done it. The other one, it doesn’t even sound like you had any evidence that she actually done it.

I think she did do it but I don’t know why it didn’t work. It doesn’t matter. In fact, I'd like to say that this whole process … I'm going to say thanks to you again. Thanks to you and thanks to being part of your Sell Yourself Without Selling Your Soul group membership club. It was an incredibly low cost campaign. Really, really do it yourself, really low cost. I don’t think I spent more than $1,000 doing this whole thing.

Wow. That’s really wonderful. That’s kind of unusual because typically publicists in the US are much more expensive than that unless you go pay for placement. That’s pretty unusual. But you did a really targeted local campaign. You weren’t doing national publicity. Were you doing national publicity in South Africa?

Our prices are different from South Africa to America. I converted the money in my head right now to dollars. I had professional photographs taken. I did all of the writing. I said that I would follow up with all of the journalists. All I wanted her to do was hit send. She really didn’t have to do anything else. She agreed to do that for a price that was really low because it was our first feel. She wanted to see whether it would work. I wanted to see whether it would work. I was really satisfied with that. I will use her again for my next project.

That’s really wonderful. I love it. Also, I do want to say that in the Sell Yourself Without Selling Your Soul membership club, you did all the assignments. Obviously, that’s why you had success. You came to the Q&A calls every month. We’re now moving on to 12 modules. You did all of the modules and you actually put that into action and followed it through.

You hired a publicist, you’ve gotten your sound bites down, you did your video for the Ukraine show, you put your videos now up on YouTube. You're a psychic. You deal in the other world but you're also very grounded and you’ve dealt with this world too.

There are two parts of that equation. It’s not about like what some people interpret the secret as, that you choose whatever you want from a catalog in the universe and you sit in your desk and wait for it to happen. I don’t think it works like that. You choose what you want from the catalog of the universe and then you work your butt off to make it happen.

Luckily I can say that it was super fun. I can say that the homework assignments were really helpful for my own self-development. Because as I defined myself more clearly and more closely and I was able to describe myself and what I wanted and what I was selling and what I was offering, I felt better about it. It was an upward feedback loop that got easier and easier every time I did it.

I like that, an upward feedback loop. In this feedback loop, one of the things that was necessary for you to do in order to even create your video was to create your sound bites. You said you had worked on those. You had four that you always included in your press release.

My tagline, “South Africa’s top psychic” is what I would consider one of them because it’s a short sharp phrase that defines, so I consider that a primary one. The next one is, “You are guided,” which I really believe is the soul of my work. The other one is, “Everyone has an angel.” I never want people to feel left out. I never want people to feel like only some people have angels and some people don’t. It doesn’t matter what religion you are, it doesn’t matter if you're an atheist. There is a divine intelligence and it’s working for you.

Another one is use is, “Life is for you.” Meaning, life is on your behalf, life is not working against you. You don’t have bad karma. There’s not exactly such a thing as having bad karma. The last one is, “I want to work myself out of a job.” Meaning that I want other people to be able to do this. A lot of my work is, “This is what your angels and guide would sound like if you wanted to hear them every day.”

I only allow myself to have one session with a client per year. That’s a 10 question session with a lot of follow-up questions. All of the information that she would need for the whole year, I do it in one session. Then I say, “Please don’t call me for the next 12 months.” I don’t have a business plan where she can call me in a week or that she’s keeping me on retainer. I really don’t have that.

That’s shocking.

Yeah, it is.

I had an acupuncturist like that, Dr. Ou She would say she didn’t want you to make an appointment after you’ve just finished an appointment. She says, “We’ll see what happens, you call me when it's necessary.” That’s a very unusual business model because I think a lot of people are taught, especially coaches, that you want someone to stay invested for as long as possible with you. Your model is about creating independence in that client right away. You don’t have repeat business unless, it’s once a year. You want to work yourself out of a job.

That’s the kinds of things that you express that I think tell people that you're both trustworthy and that you believe in all of those things that you just said. That we can each speak to our angels individually but you are a facilitator and once we understand … I think you give us that capacity or that container to understand that this is possible and then how to get those answers for ourselves because we’re not used to getting them.

What I like with what you do is that in your sound bites, you're talking about what you want for yourself and your clients in the future, not just now. Talking about your future business or your future daydream is a really important part of moving that into the conversation of your sound bite. You can be supported in not just where you are now, but supported in your future.

What a cool observation. I hadn’t actually noticed that angle, but I think you're right. I do my radio shows weekly as community service. I do say, “You can call in to one of my radio shows any time you want. You can always have one question and it can be anonymous. If you get stuck six months from now and you don’t know whether to take job A or job B, please feel free to call in for free.” I do offer them that. The thing is, it’s really hard to get through to my radio show because there are so many people who call.

I also say that they're allowed to come to a seminar and ask just one question as long as it’s a fresh question. I don’t know if you know this about people who visit psychics, it’s in one of my articles that I've written, it’s," 7 Things Not To Do When You're Visiting A Psychic." I also have one like, "5 Things Bad Psychics Do." They're related, the two articles. One of them is bad psychics ask you for a lot of background information and then just tell you what they heard. “Oh, you're a specialist, huh? I see you working with TV and newspapers.” Duh, you just told her that. There’s no point in going to somebody who’s going to take your information and give it back to you.

A lot of people I think would be baffled about your business model. You're turning people away, you're giving them... Read the complete transcript + listen to the full podcast.

About Susan Harrow

As a media coach, marketing strategist, (and former publicist), I’ve worked with thousands of CEOs, executives, authors, startups, entrepreneurs, speakers, coaches, consultants for over 26 years to clarify their messages, set up their systems, craft their signature Sound Bites + get life-changing media exposure. I’m the best-selling author of Sell Yourself Without Selling Your Soul (HarperCollins). I’ve helped my clients and course participants shine on 60 Minutes, Oprah, Good Morning America, Fox, NPR, Bloomberg etc. and in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Parade, O, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Inc. Entrepreneur and much more.

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