Background

What does it mean to belong? How do people develop trust in one another? And how can one person feel fulfilled in their relationships while the person next to them feels alone? As a pastor, Shasta Nelson found herself constantly asking these questions. She took on the role to show others love, to help them feel inspired, to make a difference. Creating connection between people, she found, could do all three.

Shasta set out to learn all that she could on the topic. The church became her laboratory, but to reach a lonely world, she ultimately left and spent the next decade plus leading one of the first online friendship-matching platforms, as well as diving into relationship research. The problem? She saw how lonely people were even though they seemed as busy and networked as ever. But not only were they largely ignoring their hunger for deeper relationships, almost all of the media at the time focused on romantic and parent-child relationships. Hardly any resources seemed to exist on platonic connections. 

So Shasta decided to create her own. 

She would bring the world relational intelligence, the ability to create connection, as a professional speaker.

Launch

Shasta knew how to speak, thanks to her experience as a pastor. She just wasn't quite sure how to turn that into a business. 

"So to me, getting up and speaking, this was the easy part," Shasta said. "The harder part for me was: Would people actually pay me to speak about this?” 

She would need to learn the business side of speaking, the industry in general and how to frame her message in just the right way to get bookings.

Shasta embraced these challenges and got to work. She gave speeches at women’s groups, chapter associations and any other group that would have her. Then one day, she got paid.

“I remember being so excited when somebody paid me $500,” she said.

“The harder part for me was: Would people actually pay me to speak about this?” 

Momentum

Eventually, $500 turned into $5,000, opportunities grew and Shasta landed an agent. But she still didn’t completely understand the industry and knew it was holding her back.

That’s when one of her friends, another professional speaker, introduced her to ImpactEleven, a speaker training, development and accelerator community. ImpactEleven’s mission is to put talented people with a powerful message in position to make an impact in the world, and Shasta was more focused on the impact she could create through connection than ever before. 

With a bit of uncertainty, she decided to attend an ImpactEleven event.

“I showed up at ImpactEleven with some skepticism,” she said. “I’d been speaking for a while and was thinking, ‘Do I really need this?’ ”

She left confident that joining ImpactEleven would help to support her mission.

“Recognizing the opportunity this has to accelerate the impact that we want to have, I think is really, really important,” she said.

Acceleration

As a member of the ImpactEleven Community, Shasta finally began to learn the industry. The more Shasta learned, the more she realized there was a lot she could do to grow her business. The other speakers in the ImpactEleven Community helped to inspire her.

“You're seeing other people rising, and it drives you. It's motivating you to be playing at a higher level — your best game, if you will," she said. “I feel like I've got a lot of resources and a lot of community and a lot of backup for sure."

Shasta leveraged that motivation to put all that she was learning into action and can see clearly now how it accelerated her speaking practice.

“If I had ImpactEleven ten years ago, my career would be in such a different place,” she said. “The amount of money I've left on the table in a decade of not knowing what I should be charging and how the industry worked behind the scenes! I would have given anything to have had access to the numbers, the knowing, the opportunities. I would have had so much more impact.”

“If I had ImpactEleven ten years ago, my career would be in such a different place..."

Today

Shasta now books speeches for between $15,000 and $20,000 each and gives 30 keynotes per year.

As she continues to grow, she remains active within the ImpactEleven community. Shasta prioritizes quarterly live Masterclasses and looks forward to "Friday calls," which give members weekly opportunities to collaborate.

“The Friday calls are one of my favorite things — just being able to ask questions, learn from each other's experiences, feel like you're building some relationship,” she said. “It's those Friday calls that help me show up at the next Masterclass and feel like I have a few more relationships with people and that we are in it together. Then the Masterclasses are just always a place to spend a day thinking about your business and getting ideas to take home and implement."

Through ImpactEleven coaching, Shasta has also begun to find more clarity on her messaging. It's helping her to increase new and repeat bookings, as organizations discover the business case around relational intelligence.

"In the last year, 80 percent of my business came from repeat clients or referrals," Shasta said. "This feels super validating that the message is landing with those who hear it!"

She's the legend doing the work. And between her increased speaking presence, thousands of coaching clients and the fact that anyone searching for a book on connection can now find three with her name on them, Shasta has already created tangible impact, just as she dreamt of doing as a pastor. Her main focus now is expanding it.

“I'm hoping to stir that piece of people that they sometimes just skate over or dismiss or deny — that piece that hungers for more connection. And then I want to make sure that they have the tools and know-how to get that need met,” she said. “It just lights me up.” 

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Interested in learning more about the ImpactEleven Community? Read more here, or schedule time to chat here.