[00:00:00] Welcome back to Own Your Impact. I'm Macy Robison. Today's episode is framed by a memory from my very first year of teaching. I was 22 years old, teaching choir and general music at an inner-city school in Columbus, Ohio, and I had this class of eighth graders. They were creative, they were energetic, and they were very opinionated. They did not want to be told what to do, so I decided to try something that I thought would unleash their creativity. I gave them a songwriting project. No rules. Create anything you want, any style, any key, any length, any instruments, total creative freedom. I thought they would love it. That's what everyone wants, right? And they froze, every single one of them. For two full class periods, most of them just sat there. Some doodled, some talked to each other. A few of them tried to create something and then immediately threw it away, and by the end of the second class period, not a single student had finished a song, [00:01:00] not one Now, when something like that happens, I do not assume the problem is the class. I assume the problem is with the teacher and with the assignment, and I was right. I looked at it again, and I realized what was missing. They needed constraints. They did not need total creative freedom. So I came back the next day and I said, "Let's try this again, but this time, here are your guidelines. The song needs to be 12 measures long. You write in the key of C. I need notes in the treble clef only. You're in four/four time, and you must start on middle C and end on middle C." That probably sounds like a lot of constraint coming from total freedom, but every single student finished their song. Some of them were finished in 30 minutes, and here's the thing. The songs were good. They were creative, and they were completely different from one another. One girl wrote this beautiful lullaby, another wrote a love song. One of the boys wrote something that sounded like an R&B, and he was trying to put a hip hop [00:02:00] section in there. Exact same constraints, completely different songs. The constraints didn't kill their creativity. They actually unlocked it, and on the surface, I know that sounds strange because it doesn't match what we've been taught. We've been taught that freedom is the gift. The more options you have, the more room you have, the better. The more money, the more time. Limits are the things that are standing between you and your best work because if I had more time, more money, I would have everything at my disposal, and I could create exactly what I needed to create. But those eighth graders did their best work in the moment I took some of that freedom away in the form of a constraint. So today, I wanna talk about why that unlocked their creativity and what that means for you building your thought leadership right now. Here's what I see. I see brilliant people freeze every single day the same way my class froze. People who are genuinely gifted, who could go a dozen different directions with their expertise and excel. [00:03:00] It's just true of who they are. They're brilliant, but they can't make a move. They can't make the decision to try something. The picture I have in my head when I watch this happen is this: it's like someone standing at the edge of a wide-open field. Any direction is possible, full of possibility. They could run anywhere they want. No fences, no paths, total freedom. We think that should feel exhilarating, but I've been in a situation like that where I've felt like I'm at the edge of possibility with infinite directions available, and it's paralyzing. It feels almost like nothing, and often we don't move because the moment every direction is equally available, no direction is calling you forward. If we can do anything, sometimes we do nothing There's another scenario here. Have you ever seen a group of kids let loose on that same open field? They don't run somewhere specific, they run everywhere, in circles, all directions at once, enormous energy, no focused [00:04:00] destination. And a lot of that is what a multi-talented expert feels like and looks like, too. They're not unclear about who they are, they're just running every direction 'cause they don't know what's possible, and nothing has told them which way to go. So here's what I've come to believe. In both scenarios, what you need when you're on the edge of that field is not more room. You have plenty of room. What you need is an edge or a constraint or some scaffolding, something to bump up against so that you can actually move in a direction, something that you can grab onto so you can grow. And I think there are two kinds of constraints that get you off the edge of that field. They're not random. They're the two halves of what I call your resonance compass. Now, that, those two halves, one half is the source and one half is the signal, and each half hands you a different kind of constraint. I'm going to take them one at a time, because once you see both, you can move The first is a source constraint Your source is who you [00:05:00] are and what you've lived. I call it your essence and your experience. It's the half you did not build and you cannot return. A source constraint is simple. It's one you didn't choose. It was handed to you. It's built in. You didn't pick the way you're wired. You didn't pick the gifts and talents you came with. You didn't pick most of the experiences that shaped you, and you can't trade them, and you can't pretend they're not there. It's the raw material you've been handed. Those eighth-graders, that assignment, the 12 measures in the key of C, that, in essence, was a source constraint. I handed it to them. They didn't choose it. It was the conditions they were working inside of. Here's the way I used to think about this when I taught voice lessons. One of the very first things I would do with a new student was find their range, the lowest note they could sing and the highest. Because since I'm not able to crawl inside their throat and look at their vocal cords, that data will tell me about how their instrument is built, how long and how flexible their vocal cords are. I'm not putting a limit on that student's possibility. Their range could expand and [00:06:00] grow. But if someone is a bass Based on how their vocal cords are built, I can't hand them soprano music and expect that to go well. They will sing their best, they will go their furthest when we honor the constraints of how their voice is actually built. That's what I mean by a source constraint, and the move with a source constraint is this: You don't get to choose whether or not it exists. You only get to choose whether you fight it or honor it. When you fight it, you spend all your energy on the one thing that was never going to move, and it's exhausting, and underneath it, there's a friction that never goes away. But when you honor a source constraint and you stop spending energy on changing the unchangeable, and you take what you're handed and you build inside of it, you're able to go further than you even thought you could 'cause you're no longer fighting the ground you're standing on. Let me give you an example with myself For years, I thought something was wrong with me when it comes to discipline. I'm a very hard worker, but disciplined time every [00:07:00] day, getting stuff across the finish line, I can get something 90% of the way there, and I just lose steam at the finish line. Planners didn't work. I've purchased them all. Content systems didn't work. The kind of work that requires consistently landing the plane week after week, it just didn't click for me, and I beat myself up about it. I figured I lacked discipline, and what I would end up doing is racing toward the finish line toward deadlines. I was able to respond to deadlines, but that's exhausting. And then I took the Working Genius assessment, and it named the thing. I'm not wired for sustained tenacity. I'm also not wired to spend my days galvanizing, pushing people, rallying people through force of will. Those are two of my genuine frustrations. They literally drain me. And what that was like to find out, it was not bad news. It was almost the opposite. It was liberating because the moment I had a constraint that I could name, I could stop beating myself up for it and start designing for it. A constraint you can name is a constraint you [00:08:00] can work with. So here's what honoring it looks like for me. It doesn't mean I never get things across the finish line. I already was by rushing headlong at deadlines so I am able to get things done, but I'm not building structures in my business that require my tenacity. A while ago, I was working with AI to solve a problem with an operational sequence, and it built this amazing thing that required that - I update a spreadsheet every day. And I was really excited about the system that it built, and then I took a step back and thought, "That is gonna require me to update a spreadsheet every day." And so in the conversation I was having with my AI tool, I said, "Remember that I don't have tenacity. That's not gonna work. We need to design something different." And we did Another thing that I do is I put tenacity time on the calendar. I have a block a week where I land the things that need landing, and whenever I can, I build alongside people for whom tenacity is a source of genuine energy, they love it, [00:09:00] people who are wired for the exact thing that I'm not wired for. None of that's a failing. That's me looking at what is true about me and making decisions accordingly, and when I honor that constraint instead of fighting it, I get more creative. Designing around a limit - actually produces better, more inventive solutions than I ever came up with staring at unlimited options. Constraints make me more creative, not less. So that's what I mean by a source constraint. It's one you are handed, it's one that's built in, and when you name it and honor it, it can , carry you much further than you thought. Now, the second kind of constraint is different because this is one that you do choose. This is a signal constraint. Your signal is the other half of the resonance compass. It's about how who you are travels out into the world, and a signal constraint is a constraint you place on yourself on purpose. Remember the open field. The world really is open. You could sing any song, run in any direction, and we're told that openness is the dream. Endless [00:10:00] options, endless time, endless possibility. But you already know how that story ends because we started there. The open field is where nothing gets done, either analysis paralysis or children running everywhere chaotically across a field. So a signal constraint is the direction you choose to commit to on purpose, so you can finally move. You choose it. No one hands it to you. You pick it, and the picking is the whole point. I think this is where the archetypes become useful for people because your archetype is a signal constraint you can choose I've talked a lot on this podcast about the 10 archetypes and the four frequencies they cluster into. Expression-led, experience-led, insight-led, embodiment-led. Those frequencies describe how you're wired to send your signal into the world, how your ideas come alive, how you naturally guide transformation in other people. But that wiring doesn't slam doors. You could technically build any way you want. The field is open. But when you choose to honor your archetype, when you say, "This is where I [00:11:00] start, this is the song I'm going to sing," you've chosen a signal constraint, and the moment you choose it, a whole set of directions comes off the field, not because they were impossible, but because you picked a direction to go. So what that looks like for me, my primary archetype is transformational guide, and then I have two more that sit very closely behind it, resonant orator, strategic advisor. The raw scores are very close together. That is my specific blend. Now, I could treat that as interesting information, and I could keep running in every direction anyway, or I can treat it as a signal constraint, and I can actually choose it. I can say, " Those three, that's the song I'm gonna sing." I build from transformational guide. I work with people in real conversation. I pay attention to what's happening there. I use my voice as a resonant orator to talk about it I use my strategic advisor to solve problems in real time. When I choose that, lots of stuff comes off the field. Sitting down to write a framework cold from scratch in isolation, that's off the field. Going off to do months of research and [00:12:00] bringing it back to present to someone, not a possibility. And that on top of what my source constraints already tell me, things built on sustained tenacity, that's already gone. There's a whole bunch of stuff that is off the table when I lean into my constraints. But here's the thing I want you to hear. When that happens, it doesn't feel like loss. It feels like possibility. I can actually see the path clearly. Because standing on the edge of the field with everything available, I most often do nothing, and the moment I choose a constraint, I can move. I talked about a version of this back in episode 66, that your archetype is a starting line, not a ceiling. This is the same truth. Choosing constraints doesn't shrink what you ultimately can build. Any destination is still possible, but you only reach that destination - if you honor how you're wired from the start. Start where you're built to start, and you go so much further, so much more effectively than someone standing still at the edge of the field admiring and considering all their [00:13:00] options Now I wanna bring this to the ground floor ' cause I know some of you have real decisions in front of you this week. So let me take a common one, choosing what to offer. You might be staring at everything you could build, a course, a mastermind, one-on-one coaching, a workshop, a membership, a book, and you cannot decide. Most people try to break that tie by research, gathering more information, doing research on what sells, what's marketable right now, what's working for other people. But more information just makes the field bigger. It doesn't get you moving. So I would suggest running it through constraints instead. Start with source. What are you actually wired for? If your source tells you your genius is about maybe discernment and invention, looking for patterns, inventing new possibility in real time Maybe a book isn't the place to start. Maybe it's still possible, but it's not the place to start. And honoring that source takes some options off of the field, and honestly, that's a gift. And then signal. One of the directions is still standing. [00:14:00] There's still some possibility there. Discernment and invention can show up in a mastermind, it can show up in one-on-one coaching, it can show up in a workshop, it can show up in a membership. So let's look at your signal. Which one will you choose and commit to in this season? Your archetype can tell you that, so you choose it and test it and let the rest go quiet, not forever, but for a season so that we can test it and get some data. And here's what happens the moment you do that. You start moving. You make a choice, and the moment you start to move, something changes that doesn't happen at the edge of the field holding still. You start to get data, and I think that's the whole reward of embracing constraints. Making decisions is genuinely hard when you're the face of your business. Even if you have a company sitting alongside you, like an agency or a - consultancy, you're still the face of your business, and every decision feels like it's carrying everything, and when every direction is equally open, every decision feels equally arbitrary. It's [00:15:00] exhausting. Constraints give you something to choose toward. And when you choose and you move, you're no longer guessing. You're starting to get feedback. You're getting data. The next decision you make isn't a shot in the dark. It's not even a constraint-based choice anymore. It's a decision based on real data about what is actually happening when you show up as you. And I think decisions built on data build confidence. That confidence makes the next decision easier, sharper, and more clearly yours. You start to recognize where you are. You start moving in a way that is unmistakably your own. Your voice gets honed, your judgment gets honed, people start to move, and here's where it lands. You know those people that are thought leaders, that are experts that you watch, that show up unapologetically, so sure of their own voice, confident, clear, the people you quietly wish you were, the confidence you wish you had. That certainty is not a personality trait they were born with, and it's certainly not confidence that comes first. Confidence is a result of courage [00:16:00] exercised. Confidence is the product, the visible product of someone who honors constraints and builds from them. They choose their edges, and they start to move. The data comes back, the decisions are made, and the confidence compounds. What you're looking at when you see someone who's confidently owning who they are, that's honored constraint worn as confidence, and that's what's on the other side of this. Not a smaller life with more constraints, a surer one, more confident one. So here's what I'd love for you to sit with. Constraints aren't the enemy of your genius. They're the tools. Some of them you're handed through your source, and your work is to name them and honor them instead of fighting them. Some of them you choose through your signal, and your work is to actually choose them instead of standing frozen in front of every option at once Either way, a constraint is not a fence around the field. It's the path, the scaffolding that finally lets you get across it Here's where you start if you don't know where to begin. If maybe you understand your source constraints, [00:17:00] but you're really still standing on that edge of the field wondering which direction to run, I would suggest you take the Thought Leadership Archetype Assessment if you haven't. That's your first step. It's free. It's at macyrobison.com/quiz. It takes about 10 to 20 minutes, and it's the beginning of seeing your own resonant compass, your source and your signal, which is where both constraints come from. Once you have your results, I would love to see you at a live workshop that I teach every week called Find Your Frequency. It's 90 minutes long, live with me on Zoom in a group of no more than 10 people, and it's built for exactly what we've been talking about today. In that room, you get your expanded archetype report, not the free results page you see right away when you take the assessment, but your raw scores of your top five archetypes and a personalized read of how that frequency pattern works specifically for you. We'll walk through the four frequency framework together, and you'll get a chance to apply it live to your actual [00:18:00] business decisions. Bring decisions you're stuck on, the ones you have to make this week, and we'll find those edges together, the constraints you're handed and the constraints you get to choose This episode explains the concept of all of this, but the workshop is where that concept becomes directional. It's $99, and you can pick a date that works for you if you go to macyrobison.com/workshop. Your genius doesn't need more room. It needs the right edges and the permission to stop standing at the edge of the field, to choose a direction, and start moving

[00:00:00] Welcome back to Own Your Impact. I'm Macy Robison. Now, I want to name something today that I think almost everybody believes, usually without examining it, and then I wanna take it apart. And this applies to you whether you are looking to invest in a program to develop yourself further, or if you're contemplating how you're going to share and commercialize your offers and your intellectual property. I think it applies to both sides. But here's the belief: one-on-one is the premium option only, and a group is the discount version. I think all of us have absorbed this. One-on-one is the expensive tier, it's the bespoke, it's the VIP, it's the real thing, and a group program is what you do if you can't afford the real thing, or maybe if on the offer side, it's what you offer when you wanna make more money for less of your time, and that feels like it's a little bit less impressive or important. More attention for a [00:01:00] one-on-one, that's better. Group is less attention. That's worse. And a group means you're sharing the coach, you're getting a thinner slice. And I get it, like I understand why this belief exists. I have had this belief and been challenged on it recently, which is why I wanna talk about it. I think for some kinds of work, One-on-one is the better option for specific situations. If I have specific narrow technical problem and I need an expert to co-create to solve it with me, one-on-one is exactly right. Just two people, full attention, focusing on my exact situations But after watching a lot of thought leaders develop programs and working on shifting and developing my own commercialization offers, I am beginning to believe that for the work of becoming a thought leader, that belief is incomplete. A group is not the discount version of what I specifically offer or what other people might offer. For some people, I think for a lot of people, a group might [00:02:00] be the better version because it's the more accurate one. And so that's what I wanna spend this episode talking about. Because if you've been waiting to invest in one-on-one help before taking your own work seriously, or if you've been hesitant about offering something in a group format, you might have been waiting for the wrong thing. And so here's the question that kind of unlocked all of this for me: What are you actually building? For me, I'm helping people become a more resonant version of themselves as a thought leader, to create a signal that cuts through the noise, that doesn't compete with, with all of the volume that's out there, but feels like the source that they are, the clear signal that they're sending out, and they can send out again and again and again to help people resonate and move. And so if I'm helping people become a thought leader, they're building a body of work that goes out to rooms, to audiences, to individuals in those rooms, and individuals in groups of [00:03:00] people. But I don't give a keynote to one person, I give it to a group of people. .. While I write a book that will be read by one person, I have to market it to thousands of people and speak about it to thousands of people that I might never see in person. I- they might hear me on a podcast. A workshop or a course or a framework or a message, all of those things, they're built to land with one person and many people at once. So a thought leader doesn't just build for one person, a thought leader builds for a room. So if I have to hold that next to the way most people try to develop and the way I've actually been positioning my offers, trying to develop thought leadership one-on-one, just them and a coach. And I think in a lot of different types of offers and expertise, there's a mismatch hiding there that people might not notice you're trying to build something for a broad audience, [00:04:00] an audience that you're trying to invite in to work with you, but you're practicing in a one-on-one container with one person. So when I put this in music language, it made a little bit more sense, so I'm gonna do the same. A one-on-one coaching relationship is like a voice lesson, and I want to be clear, voice lessons are wonderful. I have taken them my whole life. In a voice lesson, it's you and the teacher, and they know your voice, and they can hear every detail. They can stop you on a single note. They can calibrate to you and only you. It's precise, it's deep, and there is real, genuine, true work that can only happen there. But here's what a voice lesson is not. A voice lesson is not a performance. There is no audience. The acoustics of that little room, that little studio where you take your voice lessons are not the acoustics of a concert hall. Nobody is sitting in the audience receiving what you send. The voice lesson does develop the instrument, but it doesn't [00:05:00] rehearse the performance But there's another way, a masterclass. It's a both/and. I studied music in college. If you've never seen a masterclass or know what that is, a masterclass is a format from music theater world, anywhere where there's performance involved. There's a master teacher, a group of performers, and the performers take turns performing for one another. Usually, it's aligned with your voice teacher or your percussion teacher or your piano teacher. You take your private lesson, and then in a masterclass, one person gets up and performs, and the teacher coaches them right there in front of everyone, gives them feedback. The students in the room can also , give feedback, and then the next person gets up and performs. And here's the thing everyone discovers at a masterclass. When you're the one being coached, it's valuable. It's a forcing function. It gets you on your feet, and it makes you practice. It gets you ready. But I think the thing most people don't expect is you can learn just as much and sometimes [00:06:00] even more by watching the master coach somebody else. Because when the teacher's working with a performer before you or after you, you aren't just watching. You're hearing an issue that you also have, and it's named out loud in someone else's voice. You're watching a fix that you needed , being demonstrated on someone who isn't you, which means you can actually see it clearly instead of being in the middle of it. You're calibrating a lot of different ways because you're hearing five different singers, and you're starting to understand what your own voice is in contrast with theirs. I loved my masterclasses in college for that reason. And when you're in a masterclass, you're doing the thing that a one-on-one lesson can't give you. You're performing in front of people. You're feeling what it feels like to send your signal out to actual people and have it either land or not land, and you figure out how to adjust. Masterclasses are not discount voice lessons. It's a different thing. The master classroom [00:07:00] actually resembles the stage, and I think that's what a good group program can do. And for thought leadership specifically, the group is not the lesser version, it's the truer one. Hopefully, we can combine it so it's one-on-one and group. So let me get specific about what group gives you that one-on-one structurally can't. Three things. The first thing is contrast. Contrast is not a nice-to-have, it's how you actually see yourself. I've talked about this on the podcast before. You can't see your own distinctiveness and uniqueness in isolation. Your wiring, the way you're built, it feels normal to you. It feels like air. It feels like a fish swimming in water that it doesn't know is there. It feels like how things are. But the only way you can see it clearly is next to someone that's built differently from you. In a one-on-one container, you have one point of reference: your coach. They're the ones who you are looking to for a reaction, for a response, for learning, for recognition. And in a [00:08:00] group, you have a whole room full of people. You watch someone whose ideas come alive in writing express , what they have to share, and then you realize, "Well, mine, mine come alive when I say them out loud." And suddenly, you understand your own wiring in a way that you never would have. Or even better, two sopranos, like in a voice lesson, when they hear one another sing the same song, they learn something about themselves and how their own voice is unique. Two wisdom writers in the same group might learn something about their specific writing style and their specific archetype that helps them dial into their own signal that they're sending out a little bit better All of that becomes visible by contrast. Contrast helps you see. The group is a room full of mirrors. A one-on-one is one single mirror, and you can see more of yourself and all sides of you with more mirrors in the room. The second thing a group can give you is real conditions, the actual acoustics of sharing your ideas out there. If you're going to put them out into the world, [00:09:00] ideas out into the world, you need to learn what it feels like to do that, to say the thing you actually believe out loud to a room full of people who did not have to agree with you and watch what happens. To feel a moment land or to feel a moment not land and survive and stay standing anyway. You can't rehearse that by yourself into a hairbrush, into the mirror, or one-on-one in a voice lesson. One-on-one is a conversation with one safe person. The group is the first real room. It's where you find out your signal can go out to people who are not your coach, not your voice teacher, and still carry, and that is not a small thing. Because for a lot of people, that's the fear that keeps them back, and a group is where that fear gets metabolized and becomes useful because you face the smaller version of it Before you face the bigger one. The third thing a group gives you is the part that it's really hard to put on the sales page, and I think it's the most valuable. I think a group is where the work actually happens. In my case, when someone's in a room [00:10:00] of people all developing their thought leadership at the same time, their idea doesn't just get my response, it gets the whole room's response. Someone might ask a question that I wouldn't have thought to ask because they're wired differently than I am. I see that happen every day. Someone else hears your half-formed idea and reflects back a piece of it you couldn't see. Your signal goes out, and it comes back with data points from eight different people instead of just one. A one-on-one gives you one set of ears, and even if they're really great, highly trained, calibrated ears, a group gives you a whole room full, and I think that helps you pick up velocity because there's more signal coming back. There's more data, and data helps you make more confident decisions. Now, I don't want this to sound like I'm dismissing one-on-one work. I am not. I include it in all of my group containers, me personally. Here's the real distinction, and it matters. One-on-one work is the right tool when your work is genuinely about your single specific situation, and you need [00:11:00] depth on that and nothing else. It's really the work of calibration. It is the voice lesson. Sometimes you just need a voice lesson. And in my case, very established thought leaders, someone already out there, already performing, who hits a very specific growth edge in their work and needs calibration, I work with them one-on-one If someone is just starting out and they're calibrating their resonance compass for the first time, that's a one-on-one conversation, and that's included in the group containers that I create. But most people aren't at that calibration stage. Most people are at the development stage. They're still building their body of work. They're still figuring out what it feels like to send out the signal. And for that, the group is not the compromise. It's exactly the right room. It's the masterclass and the voice lesson. You would never learn to perform on stage by only taking private lessons and never getting on a stage. And you don't become a thought leader, someone who has great thoughts and people following [00:12:00] them, by only ever developing in private and never being in a room. There's one more thing to clear up, and I think it's the fear that keeps people choosing one-on-one to either offer or invest in when the group might be the right decision. And the fear is this: If I'm in a group, I'm gonna get something generic, something that's self-serve, something that's a template or one size fits all, and I won't get something that fits me. But I wanna take that apart because it comes from mixing up two words: customized and personalized. Customized means built from scratch every time, bespoke, every person, nothing shared, blank page for each individual. That is really rare work, and it's important. Customization is good, and it matters, but it's not required 100% of the time. I think personalized work is. That means there's a shared structure, and it gets calibrated to you. It's, it's the difference between getting a bespoke garment created for you [00:13:00] and something that you buy off the rack that you then take the time and care to tailor to you so it feels like yours. Or to bring back my voice lesson analogy again, my daughter and I take voice lessons together. We split an hour with our teacher's time. We are decades apart in age. We have completely different voices and completely different goals. So the structure of the lessons you would think would be different, and the outcome, what you hear if you were just listening to both of us, would feel different, but the underlying structure is exactly the same. Our teacher warms us up, we talk about what needs to be worked on, and then we work on applying it to songs. Our teacher does not invent a brand-new art form from nothing every time someone walks in their studio. The structure is shared. It's the same. And inside that structure, she is able to completely personalize to our actual voices as she works with us. And I think that's what a well-built program does. [00:14:00] The structure is shared, and what makes it trustworthy and makes it teachable is what gives you the opportunity to personalize, and having IP and a framework for people to work with is what does that. It... You can personalize it then to your wiring, to your archetype, to the specific thing you're building. A group isn't a customized experience, and it shouldn't be, but a good group is deeply personalized. And if it's personalized inside a shared structure in a room full of other people that learn from the contrast that you see, I don't think it's less than customized and alone. And I think, and like I said, I've been challenged on this lately. I think it actually is the better thing. So here's what I wanna leave you with. If part of you has been waiting, waiting till you can afford one-on-one help, waiting for a VIP or premium tier before you take yourself seriously and your thought leadership seriously, I think you might have been waiting for the wrong room. One-on-one is not the graduation of this work. [00:15:00] I think the room is. A group program is where you can see yourself by contrast, where your clients can see themselves by contrast. It's where you can feel your signal land on real people and give your clients the gift of that signal landing on real people. It's where work can develop faster because it's coming back to you from lots of different directions. That's not a budget option. That's the rehearsal that actually looks like the performance, and that is very valuable So whether you're looking to invest in something and you're unsure if group is worth it, or you're looking at your own commercialization structure and you're wondering if you're copping out by offering a group program, I want you to rethink it Regardless, here's the first step. Before you step into any room, you need to know a lot about the intr- instrument you're bringing to it. You can't have a voice lesson inside a studio full of tuba students. So you have to know how you're wired, and that's what the archetype assessment is for. It's free. It's at [00:16:00] macyrobison.com/quiz, and it gets you started calibrating your own unique resonance compass and how you express yourself, and that's how you start in the room. You can't do well without it. And when you're ready, in my case, for the room where you can build this, that's what the Resonant Thought Leader Conservatory is for. It's a group on purpose, not because it's easier for me to run, but because it's the master class version. You get one-on-one time with me, you get group time with me, and you get to develop in that together. If you want to learn more about that, please reach out. Or the fastest way to learn more is to come to one of my weekly Find Your Frequency workshops. We spend real time in that Find Your Frequency workshop, helping you see how your archetype assessment applies and is personalized to you. And at the end of that conversation, if it's the right fit for you to come into the conservatory, I issue you an invitation. If it's not the right fit, I'll let you know. But if that's a room you [00:17:00] wanna be in, taking the assessment, coming to the workshop, those are the next two steps. Your ideas matter. The way you containerize them matters. The way you engage with developing new ideas matters because your expertise has value to share with others, and investing in it matters. It was always built to go out to rooms. So at some point Thinking of what you're actually building, what you're actually working toward, and creating the conditions that give you a chance to practice that in a safe way is the next critical step. And I hope as you're thinking about what you're building and offering to others and what you're trying to do while building and investing in yourself, you take that into consideration. We'll see you next week

00:00:00] Welcome back to Own Your Impact. I'm Macy Robison, and today I want to pull back the curtain on something I think a lot of people in the thought leadership space get backward. There's a widely held belief that building a thought leadership business works like this: first, you create your framework, then you build your content around it, then you create offers to teach it, and then you go find an audience. And it sounds logical, but in my experience building my own system, helping dozens of other experts co-create theirs, it almost never works that way. Not for people who build something that actually lasts. What I think actually works is the reverse. You just start doing the work. You have conversations, you coach people, you facilitate transformation, and then almost as a byproduct of that work, frameworks start to reveal themselves. Your intellectual property shows up because you're paying attention, not because you sat down and designed it and drew it out. I know this because I've lived it, and I'm about to walk you through exactly how. But let me [00:01:00] tell you about a moment from my group program last summer that shifted how I think about IP development. We were together in a cohort, six thought leaders in the Zoom room, all at different stages, building different things, and one of them, after we'd spent an hour working through a challenge she was facing with her offer, said something that stopped me. She said, "I just realized I pulled out seven frameworks today, not from planning, but from answering questions." Seven in one session. Not because she sat down at her desk with a blank whiteboard and said, "I'm creating seven frameworks today." She didn't even realize she was creating them until she looked at her notes. They emerged because she was in conversation with real people who had real problems, and her natural expertise kept organizing itself into teachable patterns in response to what they needed. And for me, especially as a transformational guide, that's how intellectual property actually gets built, not in isolation, in conversation. Now, I wanna be specific about what I mean, because "just start doing the work" could sound vague. And if you've listened to earlier [00:02:00] episodes, I don't like vague. So I've talked about how different archetypes naturally develop their ideas in different ways. Expression-led people like your resonant orator, wisdom writer, visual thought architect think by expressing. Experience-led people think by facilitating transformation, transformational guide, experience facilitator, digital thought architect. Insight-led people think by solving problems, by analyzing, strategic advisors, analyzing and solving a problem in the room. Research innovators going away and researching and bringing back the right answer that's applicable and easy. Category creator is solving the problem by coming up with a new solution entirely. And embodiment-led people, principle practitioners think by testing on themselves. But what I wanna teach today is the meta principle underneath all four of those pathways. Regardless of your frequency, regardless of your archetype, your intellectual property doesn't come from theorizing. It comes from guiding transformation in others and paying attention to what happens. Here's what I mean by paying attention. When you're coaching someone and you notice that [00:03:00] you asked a specific question that unlocked something, that's intellectual property emerging. When you're facilitating a group and you notice a pattern across three different people who are stuck the same way, that's a framework forming. When you're on a call and you're talking, and you find yourself explaining a concept using a metaphor you've never used before, and the other person's face lights up, that's transformation, and that's a principle being born. The difference between experts who develop powerful IP and experts who stay stuck waiting for their, quote, "big idea", it's not intelligence, it's not creativity, it's attention. The ones who build strong frameworks are the ones who notice what's happening, and they capture it. So I'll give you the short version of my own story here because I told the long version in the One-Year Retrospective episode a couple episodes back. So if you want the full timeline, every wrong sequence, every workshop that revealed something I didn't expect, you can go listen to that one. But here's the part that matters for today. Every framework I now teach emerged from doing work with people, not from [00:04:00] designing it in advance. The four E's emerged because I was teaching and watching what landed. The connection to resonance and the 10 archetypes emerged from two different conversations with my friend and coach, Cassie, who you also heard a couple of episodes ago, that jogged a memory of patterns I'd been observing for months and years. The expanded archetype analysis, which is one of the most valuable tools in all of my work, where we take the raw scores from behind the scenes of your free results and go through them in the workshop or in an archetype strategy call, that analysis emerged from one offhand comment a participant made in a cohort about his second archetype, and all of a sudden the light bulbs went on for me. Not one of those frameworks was designed at a whiteboard or a desk for me. Every single one emerged from doing the work, my work, from being in conversation with real people facing real challenges, and the transformation that happened revealed the truth every single time So if you really want to make an [00:05:00] impact, and you know you have something to teach, and you've been sitting at your desk trying to figure out your framework before you start working with people, you're running the sequence backward. If you've been waiting until everything's complete before you launch an offer, you're asking the finished product to exist before the process that creates it. If you've been comparing your half-formed ideas to someone else's polished system and feeling behind, you might be comparing your ingredients to their finished meal. I believe that intellectual property, that transformational intellectual property, doesn't come before the work, it comes from the work. And the container matters. The container in which you do the work determines what can come up. When I was coaching one-on-one, I could see individual patterns. I could see that there were individual archetypes. I could see it happening in their specific path. But the expanded analysis and the way I talk about it now with, like, the archetype blend, because everybody's blend is slightly different because of their raw scores, that didn't emerge until I was [00:06:00] working in groups, and that's the thing that has truly made that assessment a diagnostic tool for me Not only did I need to see multiple people side by side to see the differences in how they were wired, how two transformational guides could show up completely differently, but As we were working and reflecting and resonating with one another, all of those things came to the surface. The four frequencies didn't emerge until I was teaching at a speaking engagement. I needed the pressure of explaining the archetypes to a room full of people to notice the bigger pattern underneath. To have 30 minutes and go through 10 different archetypes was kind of daunting, but when I realized they grouped into jobs that they do, it suddenly clicked. Different containers produce different insights. One-on-one coaching revealed some depth to me that I didn't see, the nuances of individual transformation. Getting a chance to teach something to a group or teach it in a different way, that showed me some similarities and differences across people. Teaching [00:07:00] reveals structure, the logical flow of how ideas connect, and speaking reveals simplification. You need to think about what people need to hear first, second, third, in order for your idea to actually land. If you're only working in one container, you're only seeing one dimension of your intellectual property, and I think the deepest, richest intellectual property comes from working across multiple containers and noticing what each one reveals just doing the same thing over and over again can give you a lot, especially if it's aligned with your archetype. But doing the work of getting yourself in front of different audiences, potentially in different containers, and teaching these same concepts can reveal other things. It's almost like a pressure test So if you're building your thought leadership and you feel like your intellectual property isn't fully formed yet, that's good. That's not a problem. It's a sign you're early in the process, and the process requires you to be in conversation with real people. a three-step approach I've seen work well across every archetype and [00:08:00] frequency. First, get into some kind of coaching transformational container. If you're not already working with people, coaching, consulting, facilitating, teaching, advising, start. It doesn't have to be at scale. It can be three people. It can be a small workshop. It can be a monthly call. What matters is that you're in real conversation with real people who have real challenges that your expertise can address. If you're already doing this work, you are sitting on a goldmine of IP, and you might not know it. Everything I just described about my own business happened because I was already doing the work.... I just started paying closer attention. So get into a coaching container of some kind. Step two, capture what emerges. After every coaching call, every group session, every workshop, every teaching moment, every sales call, take two minutes to answer three questions. Number one, what pattern did I notice? Number two, what question or intervention created a breakthrough? And number three, what would I want to teach someone else about what just happened? You don't need a fancy [00:09:00] system for this. I use Whisperflow, which is an app that's on my phone and on my computer. You could jot it down in a notebook. You could send a quick text to yourself. The goal isn't to create something polished. The goal is to capture the raw material before it disappears, even if you record the call. Because your best frameworks are hiding in the conversations you're already having. You just have to notice them and write them down. And then third, look for repeating patterns. After you've been capturing for a few weeks, review what you've collected. You'll start to see themes. The same types of questions keep coming up. The same intervention keeps creating breakthroughs. The same metaphor is landing with people. The same gaps keep showing up across different clients. Those repeating patterns are where your intellectual property lives. They're the bridges, they're the frameworks, they're the principles, the practices, the processes that are trying to emerge from your work. Your job isn't to invent something new. Your job is to notice what's already working, name it, organize it into something teachable, so people can take it with them I had a client that this happened for [00:10:00] recently. They just finished the Resonance Conservatory, They're a digital thought architect, and we talked about how they structure not courses, but other things that guide people through transformation: websites, physical products, things like that. And they were in the container in the conservatory with us, and we're starting to see that pattern emerge. And then something really cool happened. They were invited to teach a workshop with someone else, and I will never forget, I got an email from this person. They reached back out and said, "I do have a process. I do have a framework for thinking about how I construct this, how I construct..." In this case, it was websites, website wireframes. "I have a process, and I didn't even know." And it was getting into a situation where they weren't learning and, and working on their own stuff and figuring it out, but actually taking all the things they had learned, getting into a different container, teaching it, number one, new container, teaching it, paying [00:11:00] attention to what emerged, and looking for the repeated patterns. Suddenly, there's a framework that was there the whole time, but we didn't see it before And that's what happened with my archetype assessment. The patterns were there in my coaching calls. I had literally sat down with a bunch of pieces of paper and reverse engineered and made a spreadsheet of all these different thought leaders where I had either worked with them personally or I knew their businesses from knowing, you know, people who knew them, and I'd, I'd reverse engineered all of this stuff and started creating archetypes. And it wasn't until someone asked me in a different place in a different time, "Didn't you have something like that?" I do. I did. The four frequencies were embedded in that archetype assessment data, and I didn't have language for them until I had to stand up on a stage and talk about it. IP actually existed before I named it. Naming it was the last step. Organizing, organizing and naming it came at the end. It didn't come at the beginning. Now, I know some of you are listening, and you are perfectionists, and I love you, and you feel like you [00:12:00] have to , have everything figured out before you even start. But let me say this, if I'd waited until everything was fully developed before I launched this podcast, I never would have discovered it. All of the things that I teach emerged because I was teaching. I was saying things out loud, watching what landed, listening to questions people asked, and places they got stuck. And your framework, your platform, your impact, your unique thought leadership is going to emerge through sharing it, through sending the signal out. You have to be in proximity with people, and you have to send a signal out, and the message gets clearer through the sharing. Your authority builds through the doing. Your teaching is what reveals truth. You don't need a complete system. You need a clear signal and the willingness to start sending it out. Now, if this episode has you thinking, "Okay, okay, I need to get into a container to do this work," that's what the Thought Leader Conservatory is for. The Resident Thought Leader Conservatory is a group container where you build your platform alongside other thought [00:13:00] leaders with direct co-creative support from me, group sessions, two one-on-one sessions, the kind of real-time conversation that produces exactly what I've been talking about today. You bring your expertise, your archetype results, your emerging ideas, and the container does what good containers do. It gives your IP a place to emerge. This isn't a course where I hand you a formula. It's a working environment where your unique system gets built through doing, through conversation, through the kind of attention I've been teaching you about for the last little bit here. But the first step before knowing any of that, before stepping into that container, is knowing how you're wired. So if you haven't taken the archetype assessment yet, I hope you will. Macyrobison.com/quiz. It's free, it takes ten to twenty minutes, and it will show you how you're wired to develop your intellectual property. That is the first signal, the first transmission, the beginning of the process that reveals everything else. Your content, your transformational intellectual property isn't something you have to invent before you [00:14:00] start, before you begin. It's something that can emerge as you show up with a heart to help other people. So go do the work. Get in the room. Have the conversations. Pay attention. Trust that there are frameworks that will have impact, and they're already there. They're just waiting to be noticed. Thank you for being here and for spending the time to think about building something that matters, especially when you can build it in a way that actually fits who you are

[00:00:00] Today we're going to start with a confession, because I think the most useful way I can teach this particular concept is to show you what it has looked like in my own life before I give you the framing. A little bit over a year ago, I left full-time employment with an organization I've been part of for many years. I'd been working for them full time for about three years. I'd built programs, trained coaches, shaped curriculum, done work I was genuinely proud of even when it was hard, and I feel like I was good at it. I feel like I left things better than I found them. When I left, I knew what I was walking toward. I had been building the Resident Thought Leader system very quietly for a while at that point. I'd been testing it with people who were raising their hand and volunteering to go through it with me. I'd been reverse engineering thought leader platforms, working toward the archetype framework, seeing what happened when people got clarity about their own wiring and the impact they wanted to make and [00:01:00] started building from that place instead of copying and pasting someone else's playbook. I felt certain enough that it was real and important that I was willing to take a bet on it and step away. Almost immediately, invitations started arriving. People I had worked with and respected and had real history with, they wanted me to come back, not to my old role, but to new ones, bigger visibility, more impact, more reach. New people were showing up to have me do things I had done for some of those other clients. These were not bad opportunities, and some of them were genuinely extraordinary on paper, and they were all in some way asking me to do the thing I was already known for being good at. And I had to sit with that for a while, because the competent thing to do, the safe thing to do, the thing I already had proof I could do, the thing people were confirming I was good at by inviting me to come work with them was right there. And what I hadn't built yet, what I was walking toward with this resident thought leader archetype, wasn't [00:02:00] fully formed. I didn't have an assessment yet with 900 people who have taken it. I didn't have the conservatory that I'm launching next month. I didn't have my one-on-one clients who are excelling. I didn't have even the language for the full framework yet. And so I had to ask myself a very honest question: Is what I am creating important enough for me to give it the time and the oxygen it needs to grow, or am I going to keep doing what I'm competent at and pour my best energy into someone else's platform because I'm good at it and it's available and it feels responsible? Ultimately, it was one big opportunity in particular. I decided I couldn't live with myself unless I gave this resonant thought leader framework a real shot, and I'm grateful, genuinely, deeply grateful that I made that choice. Because what has happened since has shown me what becomes possible when you stop letting your competence be a distraction from your calling. Here's what I want you to notice about that story. [00:03:00] The invitations I was receiving weren't bad. They weren't traps set by people who were trying to derail me. They were real opportunities extended by real people who I value my relationship with and who valued what I could do. The trap wasn't the invitation. The trap is in how easy it would've been to say yes, because yes felt responsible, and it felt like evidence that I had value, and it felt safe in a way that building something new and something unproven doesn't feel, especially at the beginning, and that's the competence trap. And I think it's one of the most under-diagnosed problems in building a thought leadership business, an authority-based business, something where you are the face of what you're building Let me say this in a different way because I think when you hear it this way and when I say it to myself this way, it's a little bit more convicting. The competence trap is what happens when your competence masquerades as your calling. It's [00:04:00] not failing loudly. It doesn't announce itself as a crisis. It drains you very quietly, very slowly over months and sometimes years of doing work that you're genuinely good at, work that other people value, work that pays you well, work that generates real results, but something deeper in you goes unfed. This name comes from your competencies in Working Genius. If you've taken that assessment, the yellow letters in the middle, those are the ones that drain you because you're good at those things. They just aren't the things that light you up and give you joy and satisfaction There's a difference between your geniuses, the activities that give you energy and, and where you do your best work, and your competencies, the things that you've learned to do well, often because you've been rewarded for doing them, but they don't give you the same energy. Competency activities don't crush you. Like frustrations, that's the third category in working genius, those really actively drain your energy, your frustrations. Competencies don't. You can do them, [00:05:00] and you might do them well, but if you spend too much of your time there and not enough time in your zones of genius, you'll burn out. Not dramatically, just a slow, sustained drain that eventually becomes very hard to explain to yourself or anyone else because the evidence around you says you should be fine. So the competence trap, the way I'm naming it, is when competency work becomes so available, so validated, and so rewarded that it crowds out the genius work entirely And the danger is precisely that it doesn't fail. It keeps working well enough to justify continuing. You can be in that competence trap for years and never have a crisis that forces a reckoning. The bill just arrives slowly in the form of a life that feels smaller than you thought it would be by now. So what does that actually look like? Let me give you a few patterns that I see consistently. The first is what I experienced, the invitation that looks like a great opportunity. Someone offers you something that draws on what you're already known for, and you say yes, because you're [00:06:00] available, you're qualified, and it would be strange to say no to something that's reasonable. And so you do it, and it goes well. And then another invitation arrives, and over time you look up and realize you've built a body of work entirely out of what you were already good at, and the thing you actually wanted to do and wanted to build is still waiting The second pattern is the offer you keep saying yes to because it converts easily. You have something you can sell without very much friction. Clients come easily for this. Revenue is reliable, and you keep selling it even though delivering it doesn't light you up the way it used to, or maybe the way it never quite did. The ease of the sale becomes the reason you keep going because it's comfortable rather than the alignment of the work. The third pattern I think is the hardest to see, and it's where competence is also so attached to your identity that it's hard to disentangle. When you've been excellent at something for so long, it starts to feel like it's who you are, and the idea of stepping back or deprioritizing it ... It feels like you're giving something up instead of making [00:07:00] room for something better. The competence has become so bound up in your sense of self that genius work, the thing that would deeply energize you, the thing that would send a clearer signal out into the world, almost feels like a risk, like you might not be good at it, like you have to start over. And the last one I think is worth sitting with because sometimes the competence trap isn't about external pressure at all. It's self-imposed. It's that familiar feeling of safe, and the new thing feels uncertain, and choosing the familiar even when you know, somewhere you know that the new thing you want to do is actually the real thing you should be doing. Now, here's what I've noticed in working with people who are in the competence trap, and that includes me. The signal they're trying to send is muffled. It's not absent. They're still showing up. They're producing. They're getting results. But there's a quality to the signal when someone is operating from deep genius that is fundamentally different than when they're operating from competence. Your audience can feel it even when they can't name it.[00:08:00] When you're working from your genius, from your true essence, from the thing that genuinely energizes you, there's a specificity to how you talk about it. There's a texture. There's something in how you hold the material that tells people, "This is a person that lives inside of this," and that quality is magnetic in a way that competence, no matter how polished, is not able to replicate. I have watched people build their entire offer around their archetype and their essence and have their conversion rates go up while they were working less, not because they were better at sales, but because the signal got clearer and the right people recognized something and they moved. That's what happens when the source and the signal are that strong. Competence does produce a solid signal, but genius in combination with your archetype produces a deeply resonant one, and resonance travels in ways that solid [00:09:00] competence signals just don't. So if you're hearing this and you're like, "I don't know what to do with this," if something is landing right now, if some part of you is recognizing yourself in one of those patterns, I wanna give you something practical to hold onto. First, the way through this is not dramatic. You don't have to burn everything down. You don't have to fire your clients. You don't have to abandon everything you've built and make some sweeping declaration. The competence trap is usually exited incrementally, not all at once. I think it starts by naming the thing you really desire to do that's aligned with your geniuses. What is the thing, even if it's still forming, even if you don't have the language yet, that you would do even if it was harder? What's the work that feels like you're operating at your most native level that you would do for free? What would you build if the competent thing wasn't so available and rewarding? And then ask yourself, what would it take to give that thing just a little more time, a little more oxygen? Not all the time, not immediately, just a little bit [00:10:00] more. What's one thing you could start saying no to to give some space and create some room for that oxygen and time to, to build up your genius And it can happen slowly, sort of like turning a big cruise ship around. It doesn't have to happen right away. We don't have to blow everything up, but we can start to move, and when we start to move, things start to happen. I was listening to a conversation between Myron Golden and Dr. Benjamin Hardy. If you don't know their work, I'll link this video in the show notes. I think it's genuinely - worth your time. And Dr. Ben said something about what happens when you make the decision to give your genius a little bit more room, or what he calls raising your floor, committing to the new thing. He said, "The moment you set that new floor, you will immediately be tested. Compelling opportunities will appear that are just below it, things that would've been easy yeses before, things that feel responsible, things that are hard to say no to precisely because they're not obviously wrong." And he said, "Holding that floor through that test [00:11:00] is the actual work." That is exactly what happened to me 'cause I heard that and thought, "Yeah, that's what happens." And that's what that competence trap looks like in the moment of decision, because naming the genius work is the first move. Identifying it is the first move, but it's not the hard part. The hard part is what happens in the days and weeks after you decide, and you start to work more in your genius. The invitation for competence arrives. The easy client that just needs you to do a couple things comes back. The familiar thing resurfaces, and it's available, and it's validated, and it would help you so much right now, and you would feel so safe. And then you have to decide again whether you're going to hold the floor that you set to work in your zone of genius. I said no to those invitations after I left that safe full-time role, not because they weren't real opportunities, but I'd already decided to step away from something full-time and was building something that I felt like was worth protecting, like a tiny little flame I was trying to protect from the wind. And every time I held that floor, something shifted [00:12:00] in me and eventually in the work itself. My signal got clearer because I stopped splitting my energy between what I was capable of and what I was actually called to be doing. And I feel like that's the real exit from the competence trap. It's not a single dramatic decision. It's a decision and then a series of smaller decisions to keep honoring it. Because at the end of the day, nature abhors a vacuum. And so if you raise your floor and you make space for what's possible, and you can hold that space with some discipline, the right things will flow your way. They always do. I've never seen it not happen. So one more thing before I close. I've been thinking about the real transformations I see in this resonant thought leader work, the moments when someone names the genius they've been wanting to develop, the thing they've been wanting to build, raising their floor, holding it, watching the signal that they're sending out come alive. And I've realized that the most powerful way I can share those stories isn't me telling them secondhand. It's [00:13:00] you hearing them directly. So I'm gonna start inviting some of the people I work with to come on the podcast and share what they're building, live in conversation, so you can hear not just the outcome, but the thinking that got them there. Not polished case studies, real conversations about real work in progress. That is coming soon, and I genuinely can't wait. In the meantime, if you want to start figuring out where your genius lives, the archetype assessment is a great place to start. It's the fastest path to that data. More than nine hundred people have taken it, and the results will give you a clear picture of how you're naturally wired to create transformation. So take it and ask yourself, "Is what I'm building built for my genius? Or have I been staying too closely linked to the things I'm good at, but that don't give me joy and satisfaction, my competence?" Your ideas matter. You have an impact to make, and your expertise has deep value, and there is specific work that only you are [00:14:00] wired to do for the people that you're meant to serve, and that is what they're actually waiting for. Not more safe competence, but more uniquely genius you.

[00:00:00] Welcome back to Own Your Impact. Today I wanna clear something up because I have been hearing a pattern in strategy calls, in DMs, that tells me there's something that is causing a misunderstanding about how the archetype assessment works, and I think it might be holding some of you back. Here's what happens. Someone takes the assessment, and they get their result, and their first reaction is relief. They see their primary archetype. They feel seen. They might think, "Oh, that's why that felt so hard," or, "I've been trying to build like someone I'm not." And I hope that that's the reaction. That's exactly what the assessment is designed to do. That moment of relief means that it's working. But then something else happens, and that's the part I wanna talk about today. Then they look at the archetypes where they didn't score as high, and they start building beliefs or almost building, like, a wall around themselves. They'll say things like, "Well, I'm not a wisdom writer, but I really wanted to write a book, so what does that mean?" Or, "I didn't score high in resonant orator, and I really am working on a great keynote speech. What does that mean? Maybe that's not on the [00:01:00] table." Or, "If I'm not a digital learning architect, should I not create a course?" That actually happened to me on a call very recently. Very sharp, accomplished individual, someone who has built real expertise over a real career. They looked at their results and asked me almost timidly, like they were afraid of the answer. They said, "I really have a great idea for a book, but this test says I'm not a wisdom writer, so does that mean I can't write a book?" And I would love for you to sit with that question because I have. There's real apprehension underneath it. He had taken an assessment, gotten a result, and read the result as a verdict, as a list of things he wasn't allowed to do. He saw not wisdom writer and heard writing is closed to you, and I understand why. Like, w- we're used to assessments that sort us and fence us in. You're this, therefore you're not that. So when people get their archetype results, a lot of them brace for that, that fence. But today let's take it down 'cause it was never there, and I wanna say this very [00:02:00] clearly. That's not what the assessment is telling you, and it's not what any of these archetype, archetypes mean in terms of what you want to ultimately create. So if you've been limiting your ambition based on what you didn't score high in, I wanna undo that today. S- so here's a principle I wanna carry out through this episode. Your archetype is a starting line. It's not a ceiling, and let me tell you why this matters before I tell you how it works. When you misread your archetype as a limitation or a ceiling, one of two things happen. Either you can quietly write it off because who wants a tool to tell you something you can't do? Or I think the worst thing is you believe it. You let it close doors or make decisions for you, or you think, "I wanted to write the book," and now you think you aren't allowed because a quiz told you you were something else, and both of those are a loss. Both of them come from one mix-up. People confuse with how they are wired to create something with what they are allowed to produce, and I think those are two completely different things, and this episode is about pulling them apart. So here's the [00:03:00] distinction. I wanna give you two concepts. First genesis, and then final form. Now, genesis is , the term we often use for how something gets created, where it begins, where it starts, the mode the idea comes alive in. The genesis is the messy, alive, early part. It's you at the beginning making the thing exist. The final form is the deliverable, the thing other people receive, the book, the course, the keynote, the article, the workshop, and here's the thing I need you to understand. Your archetype describes your genesis process, your creation process, how you start, how you begin. It doesn't govern the final form. Your archetype is part of what we call expression in the Resonance Compass. It's the answer to one question: how do my ideas come alive , and get into the world? It's not the answer to the question, what am I permitted to make? One of my clients said this very cleanly on a call recently. He said, "This wiring is about the genesis of something, not the final product. It could end up as a [00:04:00] keynote. It could end up as a book. It could end up at a- as anything. What we need to worry about is how we start." So think for a second about a songwriter. A song might be written at a piano, just a person and keys. That's the genesis. That's the beginning. They're great at the piano, so that's what they use to create. But that same song might end up as a full orchestral score in a film or a quiet acoustic recording No one hears a film score and says, "Wait, wait, wait. That was written at a piano, so it's only allowed to be a piano piece." , The piano was where the writing happened. It doesn't limit what the song is allowed to become. So maybe it helps to think of your archetype as you at the piano. It tells you where the creation happens for you. It doesn't tell you what the song is allowed to become. Now, let me make this concrete with an example I know best, me. , If you've listened to this podcast for a while, you know that I'm in the process of writing a book, words on pages that people will hold in their [00:05:00] hands or read on their reader, their screen reader. And I'm not a wisdom writer. I have some points there in my results, but wisdom writer's not at the top. It's not even in the top five. My top three are transformational guide, resonant orator, and strategic advisor. Now, if I believed archetype was my ceiling, that because I'm not a wisdom writer, writing is off the table, I would not be writing a book at all. And I will be honest with you, for a long time, I didn't, because I kept trying to write it the way I thought books get written, and I do this with content online as well, sitting at a keyboard, typing, staring at a blank document or blinking cursor, waiting for words to magically arrive, and they don't arrive when I write that way. So here's the thing. - The problem was never that the book was the wrong final form for me. It's a wonderful final form for me. It's a great opportunity to get my ideas into a room ahead of me. The problem was that I was trying to make the creation of the book or the genesis process happen at a keyboard, and a keyboard isn't where my ideas [00:06:00] come alive. They come alive when I talk This idea first came to mind when I read Elizabeth Gilbert's book, Big Magic. She talked about how Brene Brown doesn't write her books at a computer. She teaches her books to her friends, and then she goes and writes down what she teaches while they sit and eat chips and, and salsa in, in the lake house that they, they rent. it's... It actually opened my mind to this idea in the first place, , the thing that we use to create, the tool that we use to create just doesn't dictate the final format of what we deliver. let me show you what my book-writing process looks like, because the contrast is the point. A wisdom writer, and I work with several, they journal, or they sit down and discover what they think through the act of writing words. Their first draft is their thinking process made visible. They need the pen in their hand, or they need to be typing to know what they believe and what they think. Writing is the creation of their thoughts that they then express and distribute. That is not how I'm writing my book. My book is being built from [00:07:00] transcripts, from conversations that I've had, from transformations I've walked people through, real coaching conversations, real strategy calls Even episodes of this podcast where I've been saying my ideas out loud and figuring out what landed based on the feedback that I get from you. I'm not sitting alone at a desk waiting for words to come. I'm looking at the work that already exists because I have been doing the work with my voice and with my conversations and with solving problems in real time with people, and I'm shaping it into written form. Now, the final product's going to look just like a wisdom writer's book would, chapters, paragraphs, a cover, but the reader's not going to know the difference. The creation, the genesis, the pathway from idea to finished thing is completely different, and it has to be because I'm wired differently. And if I tried to force myself to write like a wisdom writer does, I would still be staring at a blank page, I would feel like something was wrong with me, and I might have concluded that I'm just not a writer and given up. Or I might borrow some AI template to organize my thinking [00:08:00] or jam my ideas into someone else's written template, and I might come up with a book that way, but it wouldn't be a resonant book that represents my ideas, where you can feel who I am and what I have to say coming through the page When I sit and look at a blinking cursor, I'm not failing at writing, I'm just not a wisdom writer. Now, you might not be wired like me either, so let me widen this out, because wherever you land, the principle holds. If you're expression-led, , if you're a resonant orator, a wisdom writer, a ... visual thought architect, your ideas come alive in the act of expressing them, if you have any of those three archetypes. So you need to speak it, you need to write it, you need to draw it, or see it in space. Those are three different points, and every one of them could end up as a book, or a course, or a talk, whatever it needs to be at the end. If you're experience-led, and a lot of you who listen to me and have taken this assessment are, your ideas come alive in the room. So if you're a [00:09:00] transformational guide like me, or an experience facilitator, and you wanna build an online course, you might look at your results and think, "Well, I'm not a digital learning architect, so maybe courses aren't my thing." No, that's the wrong question. The right question is: what does the course building process look like for an experienced facilitator? It doesn't look like sitting at a desk building curriculum models in a logical sequence. That might be how a digital learning architect does it, and it's beautiful when they do, but that's not your path. Your path is to facilitate the transformation with people first. Run the workshop, lead the group, record yourself doing the real in-the-room version of what you do, and then package that into something people can access on their own. The course isn't built from a blank outline. It's built from documenting you doing what you do best. Same final form, completely different creation process. If you're insight-led, your ideas come alive against a real problem. Strategic advisors don't get clear in a vacuum. [00:10:00] They get clear when there's an actual problem to push against. So the book, the keynote, the framework, all of that has to start with a real problem, not a blank page. If you're embodiment-led, if you're a principal practitioner, your ideas come alive when you've lived them, tested them on yourself first. The book starts in what you've personally proven. Now, I have a whole episode on the four frequencies if you wanna go a little bit deeper on yours, and I'll put that in the show notes. But here's the sentence to keep: Your archetype is not telling you what you're allowed to make. It's telling you where to begin so that the making isn't miserable, and so that the final product is as resonant as it possibly can be I think sometimes the misunderstanding here might happen because of what people feel when they take the archetype assessment for the first time, and what we often talk about. We talk about how people copy and paste others' tactics, and they are frustrated. And, and so I try to focus heavily on what drains the different archetypes and what [00:11:00] energizes them so you can see yourself in them. And so many people have been forcing themselves into creation processes that don't fit their wiring, that relief of, "You don't have to do it that way," is sometimes the most important thing I can give someone. But I think somewhere in that message, people might have been hearing, "You can't do it that way," or, "That format isn't available to you," and that's not what I'm saying at all. When I'm saying a wisdom writer is drained by getting forced to do video or speaking off-the-cuff, I'm not saying that a wisdom writer can't do video. I'm saying the creation process is different. They need to write the script down first, because writing is how they discover what they think, and then they need to figure out how to present that on camera so their written words sing. The idea is born in writing, but the final form can be anything. When I say a transformational guide is drained by creating content in isolation, I'm not saying they can't create content. I'm saying there's a different path. Their content starts with the actual transformation work, [00:12:00] the actual conversations when they are advising people or coaching people or co-creating with people. They walk someone through something first, and then the content gets built from what happened in the room. The creation happens in the conversation. The content can take any form it needs to. So your archetype is about that creative genesis signal process, where the signal originates from, not the final form that it actually takes. Now I wanna go one level deeper, because you might be thinking, "Okay, okay, fine. If I can get to the same final form anyway, does the starting point really matter? Can I not just push through and write the book at the keyboard, even if it's hard?" Well, here's why it matters more than you think. When you start in the wrong place, one of two things happen. The first, I hope, is obvious. The work just doesn't get made. , I've been helping people create and ideate and produce and market books for years. And I haven't written one. That friction has been so high that I've been [00:13:00] stalling, and then I might assume I have a discipline problem, when really I have a genesis problem, a creation problem. I think the second one is sneakier, and it's a little worse. Because sometimes you do push through, and you force it, and the work gets made, and technically it's fine, but it doesn't land. It doesn't ring true, 'cause it doesn't feel exactly like you. Here's an example of what I mean. I worked with a client once on a course, and I wrote a lot of the curriculum and the content for it, and the scripts were great, and the words were good, and the course was, on paper, totally correct. My client recorded the videos to teach, and we packaged it up, and we launched it out, and it just didn't sell very well. And for a long time, I didn't understand why, but I do now. It didn't sell as well, I believe, because it wasn't resonant. She was delivering words that came from my words, my mouth, my pen, not hers. The final form was complete, but the [00:14:00] creation process was wrong. It didn't start in her. It didn't start with her writing her words. It didn't start with her speaking her way that she is so known for speaking. People could feel that, even if they couldn't name it, and I think that's the real cost. Because genesis, that creation, that starting with your own archetype, that's not where... That's not just where the work is easiest to make, it's where the work connects with your signal. Start the work in the wrong place, and even a finished, polished, final form will quietly sound like someone else. If you're really good at writing music on the piano, and you decide one day randomly to compose something with your flute, it's just not gonna feel the same. Where you're skilled, where it feels natural, that's how you need to start Now, what I usually ask clients is this. When something starts to feel heavy or like a grind, I don't ask, "Should I quit doing this?" I ask, "What's the natural starting medium?" 'Cause the way you finish [00:15:00] doesn't have to be the way you start. There are paths anywhere. If you've been told you really should be on YouTube, and you don't feel wired to create content that way, we can figure it out. The way we finish doesn't have to be the way we start. You can finish in writing, but you may need to start by talking. You can finish with a course, but you may need to start in a room with the same person. You can finish on video, but you might need to start with another conversation that leads to you returning and reporting what you solved in the room. If you find the natural starting medium, the whole thing gets a little bit lighter. So if you've been putting off taking the archetype assessment because some part of you is afraid it's gonna hand you a list of things you're not, I want you to take a deep breath and set that down. It can't do that. It doesn't have that power. It's not a guardrail. It's ... Doesn't close doors. All it can tell you is, if you answer it honestly, where you're wired to begin And if you've already taken it, and your result's been sitting there feeling a [00:16:00] little like a box you didn't wanna be in, I would say this: You don't need to read it as a ceiling. Go back and read it as a starting line. It was never the list of what you can't do, it's the map of where to begin. My client who asked if they were allowed to write a book, of course, they can write a book. They're just not going to write it the way a wisdom writer does. They're gonna start where their ideas actually come alive, and then shape what comes out of that into the book they want. Same final form to hand to someone, but their own creation process, their own genesis. So here's what I want you to do. If you've not had a chance to take the archetype assessment yet, that's where you start. It's free. Go to macyrobison.com/quiz. Takes about 10 to 15 minutes, and I want you to take it the way it's meant to be taken, not as a verdict on what you are, but a map where you begin. And once you have your results, the next step is to actually work with them, and that is what my weekly workshops are for, Find Your Frequency. We take your wiring, and we get specific about your [00:17:00] pathway, the thing you're actually trying to build, and you can find the schedule at macyrobison.com/workshop. I limit those workshops to 10 people per session, so that we have time to dive in a little bit to your individual results, and you can get some real direction on what you should be doing with the way you're wired. But all of it starts with the assessment. You can't design the pathway until you know how you're wired, and that wiring is not a ceiling, it's a part of the compass to direct you down the path you're meant to forge. Your ideas matter, and they have the ability to have an impact in the world. The book, the talk, the course, whatever final form you've been dreaming about, it is available to you. You just have to stop trying to begin in someone else's path. Begin where you actually naturally come alive, and the form will follow

Macy Robison 0:00 welcome to Own Your Impact, the podcast designed to help you transform your expertise into a platform of purpose and influence. I'm your host, Macy Robison, and I'm here to help you uncover your authentic voice, create actionable frameworks, and build a scalable platform that turns your ideas into meaningful impact. Welcome back. This is part two of my conversation with Cassandra Shea. If you've not listened to part one yet, I would start there. We cover the origin of the archetypes, talk a little bit about the copy-paste trap that all thought leaders find themselves in at some point or another. We talk about the physics of resonance. We tell a story about my mom that is starting to shape the way I help people operationalize the day to day actions they need to take to live out their resonance compass. This half of the conversation gets more into the business. Cassie asks me to give a full state of the union and asks what has surprised me most about the last year, how my offers have changed and what I'm hoping is true a year from now about my thought leadership business. And then she closes it by asking me to introduce myself, and like for all of us, that question is harder than it sounds like it should be to answer. So let's pick up where we left off. Here we go. Speaker 2 1:19 Let's chat a little bit about the state of the union. Where's your business today? Because I know that if we were having this conversation a year ago, which we do, and we will in a year from now, bring me back on for the anniversary episode. I'd love that. Macy Robison 1:36 Got Speaker 2 1:36 it. Should be our birthday tradition. What's true now that would have surprised Macy a year ago. Macy Robison 1:44 So many things. The first two things that pop to mind do have to do with state of the union, in terms of of how I've structured this and what my offers are. I think the first thing has to do with the framework itself. I started out really just talking about essence and expression. I didn't have the archetype, I didn't have any of the things I do now, but I did know that those two things have a multiplicative relationship with one another, that who I am and how I share. If I can get clear about either of those things, I'm going to be more magnetic. I'm going to be more resonant, and I really just started with that. And I also knew I needed to start talking to people, and part of that was your encouragement. Part of that was just having run a marketing business as a story brand guide for seven or eight years. I know that I need to get in an actual or a virtual room with people and start having a conversation with them, so the fact that the framework has developed in the way that it has, that it is as clear to me as it is that there are measurable aspects to it, that as I've watched people take this, what I now am calling a resonance compass, I was calling it core resonance before, but there are reasons I've kind of shifted the name, which we'll talk about in a second, showing that to clients and having them say, actually, I think there's even more, and anyway, the using that compass to get direction to make decisions about where you're headed, the confidence that that gives, the depth of that create has been really cool to watch, and just try to be a good steward of as more realization and more clarity has come watching people live this out. So I think that's the first big surprise, and then adding the Marsha method on top of that, like that's been really, really cool. I think the second piece has to do with my own commercialization model. When I started, I really, I just did not see any path to doing this work any other way than one on one. It's what I'd always done. I Speaker 2 3:57 remember that. Macy Robison 3:58 It's how I'm wired. It's Speaker 1 4:00 such Speaker 2 4:00 a transformational guide, I think, wound, but also maybe lie would even be equally true, I think, for anyone. There's probably an outsized number of people in your universe who are transformational guides, just because I've looked at some of the data and nerd it out with you. It's such a lie, and it's such a wound, though, of like, oh, I, I go deep with people, people are my thing, I can't conceptualize it a different way, and just benchmarking that off of what you said earlier, our creation process, like, as I'm evolving my own business method, it's looking at the 3500 hours over the last six years of one to one work and asking what does that body of work make possible because my commercialization doesn't have to be the depth that I just did of basically getting paid to do R and D for six years and 3500 hours plus of deep transformational guiding, I just want to name that because I think there's probably so many people that have that belief in wound and if they could set the. It down like for one second, like why did you believe that was true? I think for me it was because that's how I got paid, but like why did you believe that's the only way that this work could happen was one to one. Why did you believe it was true? And then what shifted, and then we'll go back into the share, because I think this is just so important to your own story. Macy Robison 5:18 I think I believed it was true because I felt like I had tried to do something different, but when I look at those experiences now, I can see that I didn't approach them as a transformational guide, and I could have in a creation way. One of the stories I've told as a guest on podcasts, and I think I've told it here, is going to work with Amy Porterfield's team in person to create an online course. Created online courses for other people. I had a good idea about, like, take your book and turn it into a business, and I had what I thought was an outline, and I wanted to go learn from the best to put the best product I could out there, and really start to make my mark in this way that I'd helped other people make theirs, and I, you know, went through the online sessions that were live leading up to this in-person experience, listened to the whole day as Amy talked, took a ton of notes, went to actually create in the space that they'd given us to create, and I couldn't do it. I had story brand stuff at my disposal, I was like trying to message it, I was trying like start from the end. I was trying to think about the transformation. I could not get any sort of lesson plan on paper, and as someone who has a master's degree in education, I cannot tell you how frustrating it was. I actually found a video the other day of me sitting on the side of the room in this ballroom, just like filming everybody else working, and me, I didn't film myself, but I know, like, I looked at, Speaker 2 6:40 you know, what the face would Macy Robison 6:42 have, what it was, I know what the face was, and I just gave up, and I went and sat with one of Amy's team members, her name's Jill, she's amazing, she's our content supervisor, and has been for, you know, many, many years, and I just sat with Jill back to back and started helping people message, you know, the marketing, and make sure they were clear with their courses, and what I didn't know then that I do know now is I hadn't taught that material to anyone, and even if I'd taught it one on one, if I'd done the activities, but I hadn't taught the curriculum, and so I couldn't write it, and if I had a chance to do that again, I would do that differently, I would do a pilot session, in fact I actually did have one, I feel like successful course that I built right before I went to work for Story Brand full time, where I was helping people not learn about podcasting, but create their own podcast episode. We created the trailer, and we created the first episode as part of this teaching experience, and that actually went pretty well, and I think I was on the right track at that time, which I'm remembering now in real time, so that to me that was part of the belief that I've tried it. I didn't really try it. I did it once, and I didn't examine the experience. Speaker 2 7:52 Yeah, so many of Speaker 1 7:54 us have Macy Robison 7:54 also tried. Yeah, I tried to build a group program too, and you know, I think there are a lot of people out there that are doing a great job teaching, taking your one on one container and turning it into a group container. I had gone through one of those programs, and again was not satisfied with the way that it worked. The difference maker was, and I think you challenged me to do it. I had reached this point where I was like, I, I have no more time left in the day, I feel like this is working, and I don't know how to make this go any quicker. And we came up with the idea to experiment with not just a group program, but a one on one group hybrid, and I called it a lab at the time, because I really did feel like it was a crazy experiment, and even the way we started the lab, and the way it was structured, it did not end the same way. I cut it down from 12 sessions to 10. It now is eight sessions with one on one calls that are interspersed throughout, and that shift in the container and shift in my mindset was like it worked. And not only did it work for the people who opted in, I think it worked better than the one on one group, than the one on one container would have worked, Speaker 2 9:06 because I'm here to say it did, because I was a part Macy Robison 9:08 of the lab. You're a part of Speaker 1 9:09 it, Speaker 2 9:09 and I wouldn't have gotten the transformation without others in the room who I have now a deep relationship with. One became my client, one was already my client. I'm already their client, and now I'm going to go hire some of the people that I met in that container to take my business to the next level. So that one lab for eight weeks last summer generating like a lot of money between participants, because we got to go into a deep transformation container where you were still the transformational guide, but I believe that I never would have gotten the confidence, clarity, and conviction to move my work out of that container into the world. It was the fastest loop I'd ever undergone for idea to market, and I. Didn't keep going with the business model I came up with at the time, but the question was simply, How could I teach someone else to coach like me? Those are the first question you asked me. What would you do? And I was like, Well, I guess I'd have to like download everything in my brain into a thing, and I sent you like a 37 page document. The next day, I was like, Well, I would start here, and then that became a certification, and then I shut that down, and then that became a group program, and then I shut that down, and now we're building software, which I'm not shutting down, so I couldn't have gotten to here in 11 months if I hadn't had, I think, literally other bodies to bounce those sound waves off of to bring back to that metaphor. Macy Robison 10:38 Yeah, Speaker 3 10:38 so kind of the picture of the state of the union, Speaker 2 10:44 you becoming the transformational guide, and not allowing the stories of perceived failure, or the ways that we start and stop things, or we put them down, perhaps too early, but then there's the other side, where maybe we don't put certain things down early enough, like the belief that you could only coach one to one for this material. What's possible now we just covered that wasn't before, but an even deeper questions. What do you hope we're talking about this time next year when we have our next anniversary episode? Another year older, healthier, happier, more vibrant, more abundance, more in-person connections, which we already have on the calendar. Love that, press love it. What do you want to be true when you sit down next year and record this? Macy Robison 11:26 I love this question, because the other thing that the group work has made possible, and having the conviction that's becoming more consistent to go out and talk about it has given me people asking for the opportunity to be certified in my methodology, which is not something I ever thought I would have built or created. I've been inside and created a lot of certifications for other people. I've led a multiple seven figure certification for Story Brand, of which I was a part, and I just didn't think that was going to be part of my business model at all. But I think when people ask you for things, you need to pay attention, and I started asking myself the same questions I had asked you, which was, How would I teach someone to coach like me? Does the system hold it, and can I get someone 80% of the way there with the system, so they can bring the 20% of their own uniqueness and magic to this system, which is what I think a good certification gives you the opportunity to do, and could I structure it in a way that they're not just practitioners, but they're living it, so that their business grows as they're helping other people with this model. And I'm hoping that a year from now that certification is alive and thriving. I have practitioners that are, you know, this is something you challenged me on. Practitioners could help me deliver some of this work, that they might even be better at delivering it than I am, and I am excited about that possibility that I have people who are helping deliver this work, and that I have a book, or two, one on the Marsha method, and one on resident thought leadership, and how tuning into our own wisdom and our own wiring actually helps our voice be heard in ways we couldn't have imagined. That is what I hope is happening by next year, because I have even bigger visions beyond that of bringing people together in person to do this work and having a space for that to occur, and so that's the first step to that becoming true. Speaker 2 13:23 What's so interesting is a year ago you were asking the question. Gosh, I don't know how this could even live outside of the one to one container, right? And now the declared vision, which now that it's declared will line, we don't know how exactly or when, but super, super important to realize that literally in 12 months or less, your vision of yourself, your identity has progressed from I know I have something that solved my own problem, and I've delivered it one to one, I've tested it, I know that that container drives results to opening the doors to your certification, and for that transformation to occur in a year that's been true, I believe, embodiment and mastery of your own principles, while also questioning your own assumption and questioning the assumptions that you came in with about how this might work in the world, but you chose to give yourself room to allow the signal to go out, and oxygen, similar to a fire burning, oxygen is so necessary, the breath is so necessary for our singing to go out. So, where I want to end is really this anchor word that we've referenced many times in this episode. I would love for you to define resonant, like why did you choose that word, why is that an anchor to this work, and the important thing about anchors is we have to know when to pull them up, so we can actually go on the journey as well. Anchors aren't meant to keep us stuck, but they are meant to mark the moment and provide security and stability and awareness. So, why resonance and how does that affect our compass and our journey? I. Have often expressed, and you pointed it out to me that that I reflect this back to people, that when someone says something that we recognize as truth and it feels like our truth too, we use music words to describe that sensation, or if we're seeking help or seeking information, we're trying to get tuned into a different source, or that rings true, or that resonates Macy Robison 15:30 with me. We always use music words, and as someone who has lived a life that music is such a big part of, I've just naturally noticed that, because I think that, you know, in a musical, when words fail, the characters start to sing, and some people find that corny, and some people find that brings tears, and it just depends on how you're wired, but there's just something about the word resonance. It's one of those things that you hear it, and you know what that feels like, and I think that was the best word to describe that sensation when something does cut through the noise, when it does go through the singer's formant, as it were, and connects with the right person. And my favorite thing, when I taught music, and I know I've told this story before, was to demonstrate what resonance is, because I think it's pretty magical. There's a lot of power, I think, in the things we feel, but can't see, and to some extent sound waves fit that description. They're measurable, we feel them. There's vibrations in our eardrums when we hear people say something or sing something or do something. Every sound starts with a vibration that signal, and it has to interact with some sort of source, and I used to show that to my students by playing a piano key and having a snare drum vibrate across the room. They thought it was a ghost. It was not a ghost that science piano, that's the science, the note on the piano that I was playing, the frequency of that sound wave, and the resonance it created with that other object, the connection is the resonance they were tuned to the same wavelength, which is another thing we say, and shared that frequency, and that snare drum had no choice but to move because of the way it was tuned, and I think that if we can build on things that are true principles that are true, and kind of draft behind them. It gives us a faster path to impact and to sharing things that we know are true. And to me, that was the best word to encompass that. And when I realized that, you know, sound waves, when they just kind of go out, they don't always have a direction to them, but good sound engineers know how to control the acoustics of a room to give them direction, and that's where the compass came from. That idea of a compass to give direction, you may not know the end, but you do know the direction you're headed in. And it was really fun to be together in St. Louis last week, we were near where Lewis and Clark took off on their expedition to explore the western United States, and that idea of them going out and exploring, at least knowing the direction to go, but they took the extra step to come back to make a map to give to others, and I think that's what thought leaders do they understand the direction they walk with their own trust in the compass that they have, you know, created, learned how to use, and they create maps so other people can follow. Speaker 2 18:33 Very last questions. Want you to reintroduce yourself. Who are you becoming based on embodying the resident resonance, I was just gonna say resident resonance, but you're now the resident of resonance. Who are you now walking into this year of life of opportunity of business? Please reintroduce yourself. Macy Robison 19:01 Oh, well. my name is Macy Robison. I help thought leaders uncover the unique voice and unique contribution that they make in the world, so that they can own the impact that they have on others and do that clearly with confidence. I do that through the programs that I've created that help you build that confidence, build that resonance, so that the impact you choose to make is the impact you are making in the world, and I, I love it. It's, it's my favorite thing to talk about, favorite thing to do, and the confidence that it's given me, and the confidence that it gives clients has been some of the most exciting work I've ever done, so those of you who've listened over the past year and, and have felt compelled to take the assessment, whether you've worked with me in a more formal capacity or not, have let me. Know that it's been helpful just to have that information in terms of a direction that you're headed, and I would love to invite you to take the test, and I would love to have the opportunity to work with you as I continue to build what I'm building, so that you can build what you are called to build. Speaker 2 20:14 I love it. Thank you for reintroducing yourself. What I'll end with is a word that really came up for me during this entire exploratory adventure, and that's proximity, and I would not be the person I am today without the proximity to you as a friend, as a mentor, as a colleague, as a client, as my strategic advisor, but the proximity for me to others in resonance has actually changed my business. I'm not always.. I'm your one to one client right now. So, as much as we've said, and I've also done the lab, so I've done two out of three.. no, I've done all three experiences. I upgraded, so I've done all the things. Oh, find me online if you have questions about Macy's work, and I will continue to you. What really stands out to me, though, is when you're in community with other people tuning their resonance, all the voices look different, but the harmonious aspect of being in the room with people who are becoming clearer and clearer on the signal they're sending out into the world has made my signal clear, because of that proximity. I think we all need partners in believing when we're going to step out and create something that doesn't yet exist. We're going to sing a song, create a genre, produce a sound that doesn't yet exist. And one of my favorite quotes is, like, one mistake is a technicality in singing or music, but two mistakes make it jazz. So I just want to say, thank you for for the archetypes, because it gives the nonlinear thinkers in the world, the rebels, the contrarians, the people that didn't fit in other boxes, it gives us language to say I'm going to go out and I'm going to sing and I'm going to do something and I'm going to create something that I know doesn't exist, but my body, my biology, my soul is calling me forward to create, and so what I'm taking away from this conversation is how we create mighty different than what we end up gifting to the world, but both processes are so needed to be anchored in the truth of who we are, and your assessment gives the compass into that depth, and so I'm so excited for the practitioners to bring that to the world, but more importantly, I'm so excited for them to experience it for themselves, because that's where the magic really, really starts. So, thank you for bringing this work into the world with courage and clarity and conviction. I can't wait to re-record the next birthday episode. Thanks for having me. Macy Robison 22:35 That is a wrap on this two-part conversation led by my dear friend, Coach Client Cassandra Shea, and I want to thank her for flipping the table and holding that mirror up for me. It's a different experience being on this side of the microphone, and I think that's the point. The work asks us to keep excavating, and sometimes you need to see someone who knows the system as well as you do from a different angle to help you see what you're still sitting on. If you want to connect with Sandra, and you do, and follow her work, the best place to find her is on LinkedIn or at her website, The Possibility Investor. And I will put her information in the show notes. And if anything across these two episodes has stirred something in you, whether it's wondering if you're following the copy paste trap, you'd like to know more about the Marsha method, or just permission to put something out before it feels finished. I would love to know. You can find me at Macy robison.com or take the archetype assessment at Macy robison.com forward slash quiz, and I'd love to have you hit reply to the emails that follow that, and let me know what you're thinking. Thank you for being here for any part of this first year. Here's to the next. Thank you for joining me on Own Your Impact. Remember, there are people out there right now who need exactly what you know, exactly how you'll say it, your voice matters, your expertise matters, and most importantly, the transformation you can help others create matters. If today's episode resonated with you, I'd love for you to become part of our growing community of thought leaders who are committed to creating meaningful impact. Subscribe to the podcast, leave a review, and share this episode with someone you know who is ready to amplify their voice. And if you're ready to dive deeper, visit Macy robison.com for additional resources, frameworks, and tools to help you build your thought leadership platform with intention and purpose. And remember, your ideas don't need more luck, your ideas don't need more volume, your ideas need a system, and I'm here every week to help you build it. I'm Macy Robison, and this is Own Your Impact.

Macy Robison 0:00 Welcome to Own Your Impact, the podcast designed to help you transform your expertise into a platform of purpose and influence. I'm your host, Macy Robi son, and I'm here to help you uncover your authentic voice, create actionable frameworks, and build a scalable platform that turns your ideas into meaningful impact. Today marks a new kind of episode. This is the first time I have had a guest on Own Your Impact, and I want to talk about why it took a full year for that to happen. This podcast has always been built around my own process of walking through my framework, teaching it, bringing things to you when I'm learning things in real time, and walking through ideas out loud, so that you can use the ones that serve you well, and bringing someone else into that into this podcast felt like a big move, and I wanted to wait until it was the right decision and do it for the right reason. Having a one year anniversary felt like the right decision, and Cassandra Shea felt like the right person to bring on Cassandra is a client, a close friend, and someone who has been in the coaching chair on the other side of me more times than I can count. We cover a lot of ground in this conversation, and so I'm releasing it in two parts, and it's a retrospective of how my work has changed from Sandra's perspective over the last year. In this first episode, you'll hear the origin story of the archetypes. Why copying other people's systems doesn't work the way we hope it will. The physics behind the singer's format, and what that has to do with your thought leadership. And a story I've never shared publicly before about my mom, and about another framework to operationalize the resonance compass that I'm now calling the Marsha method. I'll talk about that more in future episodes. Cass asked me things I would not have thought to ask myself, so let's get into it. This is a first for Own Your Impact. I am here with guest host for the first time. We've been a podcast officially for about a year, and I wanted to mark the moment by inviting my dear friend, client, and also coach and advisor, Cassandra Shea, here to help me walk through. As I've been using this system on myself, things have been developing and changing in real time, and I wanted to just get a state of the framework and have a chance to reflect with Cass here, so I'll hand the mic over to you. I'd love to have you introduce yourself and tell a little bit about the work that you're doing, and then I'm just going to turn myself over to you, Speaker 1 2:33 Macy. Thank you so much. I'm super excited to be here, and it's auspicious for a couple reasons. Both of us have a birthday coming up, yours is may 1, mine is may 7, which I feel like is another layer of our fun connection. And I started as a client with you last June, so it's been about 11 months. And how I would have introduced myself at the time was, hey, I'm cast, I do executive coaching, I specialize in identity transformation, and I take clients on a really deep journey into becoming who they are meant to be, coming home to themselves and becoming a match for their future goals. And I came into your container with a really specific question, and it's so interesting thinking about what can happen in the span of less than a year. It feels like five years in some ways, in a really good way, because so many things have happened in my life and business as a result of engaging with your work, but the question that I have been working with for 11 months is, what if I put that identity down? What if I put the identity of the coach down? What else is out there for me? And one of the coolest things that I've learned over the last year is if I don't have the form or the function yet to describe what I'm doing, the purpose is I need to go back into my work, because the excavation tool of what I will become in the next iteration is in my own body of work, and that's what I think makes you one of the most unique thought leaders right now working with thought leaders, so if we have this conversation in 90 days, you're like, "Hey, guess who are you? I'll have a different answer, but what you've given me permission to do is show up messy, show up not unclear, but show up without a final polished answer, and ask better and better question, and what that's done for me specifically is it's increased my testing velocity in the past. I didn't want to test things because I wanted to show up polished and clean and clear, and what the resonance system has given me as a compass is to go back into my work and excavate and mine that for the answers, and you've held that mirror up to me all year, so I'm super excited to flip the table, hold that mirror up for you, and explore a little bit about how you've gotten into your own work today and embodied this journey, and what it's made possible for you, and then also some highlight stories of what it's made possible for the people who've gone on this journey. With you, Macy Robison 5:01 I love that, and I think the thing that's cool about that answer as well is even with that filling in progress, filling in process, you've had a lot of transformation, and we can talk about that more as questions come up, but there's still been revenue generation, there's still been growth in your business as you have done that experimentation, and that's been really cool to have an opportunity to be behind the scenes as part of that, but also witness it in public. Also, one Speaker 1 5:30 of the things that I've really reflected on, thinking about your podcast being a year out, is how we started with the archetypes, and for me, when I first read the archetype assessment in the baby beginning form, I don't know if I told you this, I kind of started crying because I hadn't seen who I was at that core element, not simply because of the words on the page, but the way the words had a relationship to each other, so my top three archetypes are transformational guide, which I remember kind of being sad about. I didn't think I told you this. I was like, super bummed. I was like, no, like I want to be somebody else, like choose anything else, like.. and I don't know why that's part of our journey, right? Like our makeup, like so many of us grow up and we see these businesses, and we want to have success, like we've seen the blueprint from others, and so when I first got that, I was like, oh no, that must mean that all I can do is be a one to one coach, like I internalized that as, oh, that shoot, the question I have, I don't know if I have the answer to it. Second one for me is category creator, and third was experience facilitator, and one of the most interesting components for me about the way the podcast started was telling the stories of who these archetypes were. So, where I actually want to start is why archetypes, like, why did that come to mind for you? How did you possibly start conceptualizing this? And this is a question I've never asked you, so this is really fun to do live. Macy Robison 7:03 I love Speaker 1 7:04 it, but to me, I think about archetypes as like the stories we tell ourselves around the campfire, like it's like something ancient, it's wisdom driven, it's communally sourced, because we're looking at patterns, and I know that's such a gift for you to look at patterns, but Where did you come up with this idea that there's these archetypes moving in the world, and they somehow map to how we do business and show up as thought leaders or business leaders in the world. Like, what? What is the origin point of this? Macy Robison 7:32 That is a great question. I, you know, the assessment I launched a little less than a year ago, so the podcast came first, and then the assessment came after I was working on it about a year ago at this time, but I didn't launch it right when the podcast launched, I the genesis of it was pattern matching, reverse engineering thought leaders platforms, because I'd been working inside of these businesses long enough and had enough exposure to not only what I thought they were uniquely gifted in, in terms of how they communicated and constructed a business around their ideas, but how that then mapped to monetization, and I just kind of wanted to figure it out. I, I took a really deep dive on a couple of the thought leaders I've worked closely with, because I knew that there were things that worked and didn't. For example, I have a client that I've worked with for about eight years. We had tried to launch an online course for them five years ago, and it didn't sell, and it's always bugged me. And as I started reverse engineering, and, and was thinking about, you know, there's some tie, so in doing the deep dive of this client, realized that, oh, I think the course didn't sell because this client is very wired to just express themselves first. The course was on public speaking, and they're an expert in that, as well as a New York Times best-selling author, and I thought the course would sell well, but as I was reflecting, realized they were reading a script that I wrote that they didn't write, I wrote, and so they were my words and my structure that I borrowed from an Amy Porterfield course, and it just, nothing, nothing lined up, there was dissonance, and it didn't feel clear, and that lack of clarity translated to the marketplace in a way that I did not have an explanation for at the time, but as I was doing the work of reverse engineering, I thought, I bet there's more here. So I started doing that with other thought leaders that I knew a little bit more about their business, and I kind of left the work for a couple of months, and you were actually the one that helped me resurface it. We were in Florida at a mastermind meeting with Dustin Reekman. The three of us were talking, and you said, "What did you ever do with that? And I said, "Oh, I forgot about that. And I came back home and dug it up, and as I was looking at these models, like I had had the speaker, writer, the professor, author, you know, I'd kind of. Hold together an archetypal structure to explain what they were good at, and how that was showing up in the marketplace, and it kind of just flowed from there. And I think to what you said earlier about the definition of archetype, I don't know that I necessarily chose it actively, but I think there's a lot of resonance with the idea that they're about stories, they are patterns that we see, and they help us understand ourselves and others when we talk about archetype as a construct to understand things, and that just felt like the right word as I dug into the work and started to see it's not just the final product that matters, but the creation of the final product, and the creation is a different skill than the final product, and, and that's true with the archetypes as well. So, to your point about I didn't want to be a transformational guide, that doesn't mean anything in terms of what is possible as an end result, as an end thought leader identity, I guess, to kind of call into in your work, but the creation, the way you communicate, the way you guide transformation in others, the way you see the world and express your ideas. All of that starts with these archetypes, and we can use it as scaffolding to start to create the end result could be different from how we're actually wired. We've got to work with how we're wired. Speaker 1 11:19 There's so many things I want to dive in on. One of the things that I've heard you explain so clearly right now that I think deserves a pin in it, and I have a question: is there's a difference between the creation vehicle and the output where we go to market, and so our process, it sounds like as close as our process can come in congruence with our archetype, that's where we're going to get the clearest signal to then go to market with a monetization strategy, which is one of the things you're so expert at, is just knowing this catalog of information about the way thought leaders can bring ideas to market and monetize, but I think where a lot of us get tripped up, and what I want to hear from you next is this sort of addiction to copy and pasting, and I think that comes because we don't feel safe, or we want security, like we want to know that when we put the effort into bringing this idea to market. Gosh, I hope it makes money, or gosh, I hope it like actually lands with somebody, and part of the pattern interrupt for the archetypes, and I'd love to have you explain a little bit more about why copying and pasting other people's systems or models doesn't work, and I think there's a uniqueness in the thought leader industry because we're watching personality-led brands go to market and succeed, and we're not sure how to work with our own personality, because I think we're trying to jump to the monetization, like we're trying to jump to. Gosh, I need to know that this is actually a business model. It's going to work. It's going to feed my family. I'm going to be okay. And so that almost scarcity rush component pushes us to look at, oh, these are the things that are succeeding the market. This is how that leader show up. I think it's different than other industries in that sense. It's almost harder to navigate, because not because it's noisy, but because it means that we have to work with our personality at a different level. So, what is the pattern interrupt you see both within yourself when you stopped copying and pasting this year? And then maybe even examples from other clients as to how they're taking the system and actually using resonance to create impact in the world, Macy Robison 13:23 that is such a good question, and I think there is a lot to unpack there. I think the addiction comes from, like you said, lack of certainty. It feels very scary to step out and do something new, and to use a music analogy, like I often do, it's scary to step on stage and sing a solo for the first time, or even the second time, or third time. It just feels very exposed, and you're not sure if it's going to work. And are people going to laugh? Are they going to not respond at all? We care about what other people think, and I think that's one of the wonderful things about us as human beings, but the thing that I feel that has been the proof of copying and pasting doesn't work for everyone is just seeing the proof of my own thought leadership growth of clients when they decide actively not to do that anymore and to trust their own voice, it's not easy. It's actually still a little bit nerve-wracking, but again, I look to a lot of artists and musicians and people who are choosing to put their voice out there because they have no other choice. They want to make an impact, they know they have something to share, and they're willing to bet on themselves. I think the benefit of this framework for me has been I'm able to give clients, and I've been able to give myself the gift of solid footing as they make that choice, as solid as can be expected in something that feels a little fuzzy, a little luck-based. Think everything is a little luck-based in the end of the day, but back to a voice analogy again. Like, when I've practiced, when I've worked on a song, I can basically tell myself I've prepared, I don't need to be afraid, like, and when I'm not afraid, I can still maybe feel a little bit nervous, but I'm willing to send the signal out there because the source is strong, and I might make a mistake, and I might crack, and I might do something when I sing that feels a little bit embarrassing, but if I'm more worried about the signal that I'm sharing and not about myself, there's confidence in that as well. If I'm willing to believe that I can make an impact. I'm willing to stand up and share and do that consistently. The system is going to take care of itself. One of the things I've been talking about a lot recently is it's hard because we rely on feedback to understand if something's working Speaker 1 15:59 right, but Macy Robison 15:59 this is a unique space where we don't always get the feedback we hope to get, and we have to keep showing up regardless if we feel like this is the thing we're meant to do. When a sound wave, when a signal goes out, there really, this is a very simplified explanation of this, but there are three things that can happen: it can bounce off a hard object, it can get absorbed by a soft object, or if something is tuned to the same frequency, it will move effortlessly, and when we don't see people moving effortlessly, we mistakenly believe that the signal is wrong, and that's where I think to go back to the original question, we get trapped again and again and again in this copy-paste mode, because we're not seeing immediate results, immediate movement from our signal that is calibrated, going out, and so we banded the task almost right away, instead of being persistent and consistent, and just showing up. Speaker 1 16:53 I was sitting on one of your strategy calls. I'm excited later to kind of get into a little bit of your offer evolution, like how the containers themselves have evolved as you've evolved as a thought leader in the last year, but I remember sitting on a call, it's probably within the last two months, and it was myself and maybe two or three other people, and there was this shared sentiment going around the room where we're like, I don't know how anyone is going to listen to the song that I'm singing metaphorically, but I'm gonna keep singing it because it's like necessary to come out of my body, and I know at least for me that's been a reclamation of the category creator archetype, which I think, especially as a kid, I wasn't contrary to be like annoying, I just don't see limits. I don't see boxes. I don't see the world, like if other people are looking at what the world in black and white, unlike in spirals colors. And so one of the most healing things for me, in terms of archetypes, is actually looking at no, no, no, like I'm going to send that signal out, I'm going to keep sending a clear signal, because this is work that I believe in. This is work that I know is going to help someone else, and it's okay if it's still iterating, you and I share a similarity, you have much more accomplishments in this field than I do, but we both were trained as professional singers, and you and I have also been each other's coach and client, and coach and client, and we've traded seats, I don't know, countless times, but one of the things that I think was something that I will remember until my dying day, was the day that I asked you, like you were feeling very stuck. This is probably two, two and a half years ago. It was a while ago, before any of this work started coming to light and coming to stage in the way that it is now. I remember, I'm like, gosh, like I was in the seat of coach, and I remember asking, like, what can your vocal training tell you about this, because we started talking about sound waves, I didn't have the music theory knowledge that you did, I didn't go as far as you did collegiately and training wise, but I knew enough to be like, wait a second, let's go back to how sound carries, because as we train as singers, it's about breath work, it's about posture, it's about alignment, there's so many things that if you're not a trained singer, you might not realize go into the production of sound, you think it's like coming from here, you're singing from almost every orifice of your body, you're definitely, if you're only singing from your throat, we know that sound is not going to be very pleasant. Please don't do it, it's going to hurt you. We sing from a place of soul, we sing from a place of igniting all of our cells, and for me, if we get a little more nerdy, my favorite form of singing is opera, because operatic singers are not microphoned, right? They are filling a stadium. I was in Chicago a couple years ago, watching an opera, 4000 seats in the opera house built in the 1930s in Chicago. Gloriously beautiful building. And I am in the back, back, back, back, and I can hear just as well as the person in the front row. Why? What's the science here? Macy Robison 20:00 So the science is what you encouraged me to dig into, and I had forgotten that it was there, back in the back of my brain. I, as a singer, took voice lessons, and you know, was going through that practice from the time I was young, but I didn't really have a specific pedagogical understanding of my own voice. I knew what it felt like, but I didn't know how to describe that feeling to other people, and I found that particularly frustrating when I started teaching school, and I had a lot of people asking me to teach them voice lessons because they liked the way I sang and they liked the way I taught in a choir setting, but I just said no, I don't, I don't know how to teach this to you. Part of that is because I was also a tennis coach in high school, and in college, that was my job in the summers, and I knew from teaching tennis that I could see what was happening if there was something that needed to be fixed, and I could help you fix it, but I can't crawl down someone's throat and fix their vocal chords, so I just stayed far away from any type of singing lessons, anything like that. That changed when I had a chance to move back to Utah and start teaching school, and my choirs suddenly expanded in number by a factor of four or five. I had gone from 25 kids in a room to almost 100 kids in a room, and I realized I might be their only instructor in terms of their voice, and I deeply believe anyone can learn how to sing, and I just started looking for a teacher that could help me. Ironically, it was a professor who shared the same last name now, we didn't at the time, Clayne Robison, who was teaching group vocal beauty boot camp lessons to the freshman vocal performance majors at a nearby university, and I was kind of shocked. That's not usually done. Opera is not usually taught in groups, but they were getting really great results, and that was enough to get me curious. And from him I learned about this acoustic phenomenon called the singer's format, and he had done a study. Similarly, was a really great singer, did not, in my opinion, when I was at school, understand how to teach that explicitly, but he dug in and figured it out, and he did a really interesting study where he was measuring sound waves from singers to try and pinpoint what people call the singer's formant, which is this acoustic gap in the energy of other musical instruments and the sound waves that they create, where a singer's voice, if properly trained, can create a sound wave that you can measure on a spectrograph that fits in that gap, where there's no energy in the sound that the orchestra is making to compete, and it literally is a perfect place for the voice to fit. And when you encourage me to go back and look at my singing career and my teaching career, and how that could inform what I was trying to teach and uncover with all the things I've done with thought leaders, and that was really where it clicked into place. Our voices are instantly recognizable, they're memory markers, you know, if an old friend calls that you haven't heard from in a while, you recognize their voice. We recognize people singing voices, we just know, and we know people's work when we hear it, even if they're not the ones transmitting it. So that was really the start of it, and having that to anchor things in, that there is a way to fit in the gap without competing in a noisy volume filled way was really intriguing, and that it was a measurable signal was very intriguing, because I've struggled as a client of folks who have tried to help me, asking why am I good at what I do, and why do you like what? Like, how are you? I just couldn't answer any of those branding questions that a lot of really great practitioners of branding ask. It's not that their work is wrong, it just didn't work for me. And I've certified in a lot of different things, I've coached in a lot of other people's containers, in part to try and understand myself better, so I could teach what I felt was locked inside of me, and I couldn't make it quite work. It just didn't quite land. And your encouragement to go back and look at my lived experience to see what was there to teach me was the first thing that really helped me figure it out, but to remember all of that years later and use that as an organizing mechanism to help me articulate what I have had in my brain all of these years, as I've helped thought leaders build their platforms, Speaker 1 24:30 coming up for me as you're sharing this, and I don't think I've ever told you the story, but I have been a trained singer, I trained from age nine to 16, when I was 19, I ended up getting tonsillitis so bad that I'd sleep apnea, like waking up like couldn't breathe in the middle of the night, so they shipped me off to tonsillectomy surgery, and I asked only one question, because I'm 19, I don't know what questions to ask, that I was like, hey, I'm a professionally trained singer, is this gonna change my voice, like I assume, so we're getting surgery pair. Currently, is like a little bit of a worse than normal case, and they said, "Oh no, honey, you're going to be just fine. It's not going to change a thing. Come out of surgery. The only thing I want to do is sing. 19 years old, super drugged up from the anesthesia, and I just go like my voice doesn't sound like my voice. My speaking voice completely changed, the register dropped. I was a high soprano, but I would have to diagnose myself now as an alto, or even a low alto, because now I can sing jazz. I have a different registry, there's a different tonality, there's a velvet-ness that wasn't there, and I was like, okay, maybe I matured, but really, like, the surgery fundamentally change the sound quality, and I remember going, "Oh no, like I've just erased almost a decade of work. I've been given a completely new voice. I have no idea what to do with this voice. I've lost everything. And the reason why I bring that up is because I think all of us in our thought leadership journey go through this mess, a perceived complete meltdown and failure. We're like, I've been given if it was a gift at the time, now I see it as a gift, but I've been given a gift. Everything's now different, and all the training that just came before is somehow nullified. When you work with people, I know that you've said many, many times that the medicine we give ourselves through the thought leadership business, I think this is a uniqueness to our industry in a lot of ways, is the thing we most need to develop into the products we're building are usually for ourselves, just as a conversation with you 24 hours ago, I'm like, oh, the solution to my current business question is I need to go do a deeper identity work, and then explain it to my team, because they're still seeing me as cast from a year ago, or cast six months ago, or even cast 90 days ago, and I've changed so rapidly from a lot of the work that I've done with you and our tools. I don't yet have a system to go back and show them the delta between they need to make decisions based on my updated identity, the updated identity of the company. So, what have you built specifically? Like, if we even just think about the last year that really served you in that time of transition and change, like, what did you build because you needed the day you woke up with the metaphorical, like, different voice and realized, oh, what got me here won't get me there, and the medicine that you, I believe, have been working out over the last year was probably probably certainly because you needed it. So, what have you built recently that met your own, and how are you currently embodying the work? Macy Robison 27:40 I think I'm still discovering it, but I can think of two things. One was the leaning into having something that was measurable in my mind, so I use assessments to calibrate source, use working genius, use a couple of other assessments, and we use that to give you a more solid foundation to build from, in terms of let's build a business that is that really does feel like you, instead of just missing. I started with working genius because I was certified in it, and that gave me a lot of data around it's going to help us not build something we want to burn to the ground, because that's really something that happens quite often with thought leaders, if they're not building something intentionally, but having the archetype assessment now on the other side to also like replicate that measurability of a sound wave from a singer to take that and say we can actually measure and give you some solid data on how you communicate, how you guide transformation in others. Those two things felt like the medicine that I needed to take, and I find that when I can anchor in that, when I'm making decisions, especially those two measurable pieces, that is really game changing in terms of when I'm stuck, I can take a look, or like I don't know, maybe a month and a half ago I sat down to write a LinkedIn post, and I typed it, I didn't reflect on a transformation I helped someone walk through, and I didn't verbalize it, because I have Transformational Guide, Resident orator, and then strategic advisor, and they're very close to one another in terms of me taking my own test, and I just typed this thing out, because I was like, proof of life, I've got to get something on LinkedIn. It didn't do that well. Speaker 1 29:32 Yeah, you gave me permission slip, by the way, two days ago to not do that, which I'm going to print out and put on my desk, like we don't have to just push things out because we have a business as a thought leader, but you said something really important, which was you didn't take a step back to verbalize it and to connect it to the transformation. Like, how did you know that that's what was missing? Like, how did you know it was a missing ingredient? It Macy Robison 29:58 didn't do very well. Now that can't be my only marker, but I had had posts on either side of this particular post that I felt like I did create in accordance with my own expression wiring that did well in terms of well-meaning people were curious, they were commenting, they were sharing, they were liking, and while we don't want to completely rely on external data to put our work out there. In that specific circumstance, it was good data to say I didn't do it the same, and I can see that something didn't work. And even when I was typing it, it was like, this sounds like Justin Welch, this doesn't sound like me, and I'm not Justin Welch, he's great, he can type all day, so yes, definitely, permission to follow your own wiring there. That's one thing that I feel like has been the mess has become my medicine, and as I continue to take it, I feel a lot more confident about the work I'm putting out into the world and the people I have the opportunity to help. Second one actually came up last week and I haven't talked about this really publicly much at all. I did post on LinkedIn about it, and I started with a verbal processing session to get it there, but you and I were together at a mastermind last week again, and Speaker 2 31:13 things Speaker 1 31:13 happen when good people get together in person. Proximity is a, it's a good thing, Speaker 2 31:18 it is. Macy Robison 31:18 It's way more fun to go to a concert than listen to a CD by yourself at home, even though the Speaker 1 31:24 second best are albums recorded from Speaker 2 31:28 live Macy Robison 31:29 events, Speaker 1 31:29 specifically to the 70s, because I can't go there, so that time capsule is so rich, because you feel it, you know that it was a live transmission. Okay, continue. Exactly, Macy Robison 31:38 so this live transmission came from being in the room doing work on our self leadership, our team leadership, our thought leadership. According to Dustin, who went through the accelerator with you, the thought leadership he's developing, and I was examining where things are. I feel like these are going well in my own business, but was looking at this team leadership component and had an opportunity to reflect on how my family is involved in the business now. How I want to involve them going forward. Thought about my extended family, and that brought me back to my mom. You know, I've already mentioned my mom in terms of a lot of the things that I am grateful for as a singer, as a performer, she saw some patterns in me and pushed me to develop in ways that I don't know I would have done on my own, and I was reflecting on her in terms of business and her trajectory of going from stay-at-home mom to school teacher and back and forth a little bit, and then when I moved out early in college, she started selling pre-need funeral insurance from my dad's funeral home. I grew up in a funeral home. It's my two truths and a lie. It's a fun one, but I remember I wasn't living at home at the time, but you know, would hear she's selling really well. She's getting to go on these trips. She was really excited by that affirmation. I knew that she had a practice as a salesperson where she would call five people a week, a day. She had a stack that she would like, had the discipline. She didn't love doing it, but she would go into her office and she would call five people. And I've shared that story with a lot of clients. There's something about, yes, it's great to set goals, but you need to control the things you can control, and I shared that story many times as an example of, well, this is what my mom did. I have not always done that, and so I was reflecting on, you know, I'm at this inflection point where I learned this lesson from my mom. I've not had disciplined consistency when it comes to sharing my own voice, something I preach, but don't practice, so I need to embody that better. And as I was reflecting and journaling and thinking about that, I thought of another story of my mom, and she passed away when I was 26 She was only 49 years old, and I'm a couple years older now than she was when she passed away, and that's been an interesting journey to walk through. That's probably better for a therapy podcast, but as I was thinking about her and her voice, and how she taught me, and still teaches me, remembered a story that was on a video that our neighbors very kindly made for us, because she died very suddenly. It had a huge impact on our community, both our faith community and our neighborhood, and one of the videos was from a neighbor, a longtime neighbor, and she was just sweetest woman, and she told this story about her parents, and that my mother had come over to visit them one day, this is her telling the story that our mom, Marsha, had come over to visit one day and was visiting with her elderly parents, and suddenly just stood up and started doing the dishes, and this woman said, my dad talked about that for five years, that Marsha came over and did the dishes, and I last week thought of that story and realized almost since. Containously, because I'd been thinking of my mom in this business context. I remember when she sold pre need insurance to that couple, and I realized she was on a sales call, and there was this pattern of radical service, like doing the thing that is so unexpected that helps people feel seen, that allowed her to build trust with these sweet little couples and widows and widowers that were trying to take care of themselves and take care of their family by buying this insurance, and then she also had the discipline to make the phone calls to people she didn't know yet. I actually learned from talking to my sister that she not only had the postcards once a week, she would grab the white pages and she would cold call 25 people from the white pages and mark it in the phone book, and it was just a really deep lesson around I have that in me too, and I have an opportunity to embody that as an extension of when you know who you are and you make decisions about how you want to show up with your thought leadership with your business, then you have the opportunity to show up consistently to be the person that you know from a performing standpoint. I'm going to get on as many stages as I can. I can control that. Going to try and give the gift of the song that I have to sing to as many people as possible. They may not love it, they may hate it, but that's not my business. It's my business to employ what I now call the Marsh Method, which is radical service combined with disciplined consistency, and, and working this week, this is new, but working this week to try and embody that and share it when appropriate with clients has been really, really healing. We had a couple people in the mastermind that have taken that on as a, as a way to put their work out in the world as well, and have been texting me and checking in on me, and I've had a couple clients I've shared that with, and, and I would say that's the newest iteration of leaning into how I'm wired, not just how I express myself, which is what the archetype measures, but when I work with clients, we go through this full resonance compass, which is, you know the signal, how you're meant to express yourself, how you embody that, and that's the piece you were talking about earlier, of that's always a kind of spiraling learning of man, I have a new way to show up, and that's kind of what I'm experiencing right now, and then the signal of yes, I know what my working genius is, and I'm going to make sure I design for that, but there is lived story and lived experience that some of it's business related, but some of it's personal. It's not all meant to be shared publicly, but the more we can excavate and lean into our lived experience, our hero's journey, and use that as teaching material when we show up as a guide, as a thought leader, as someone who is trying to help others and have an impact with the things that we know, it's really just this beautiful self-generating loop that creates confidence, that helps us make decisions, that then brings more confidence, and it really deepens and further magnetizes, and I guess clarifies the resident signal that we have the ability to send out. Speaker 1 38:07 I am super, super grateful to have seen the video that you mentioned that your neighbor made when we were in person last week, and I'm so excited to have Marcia as a mentor for all of Speaker 2 38:22 us. Macy Robison 38:22 That is where we're going to pause today. Part two is coming next, and it shifts into a different gear. Cassandra puts on her strategic advisor hat and asks me for a real state of the union of my business, where it is today, what would have surprised me a year ago, and what do I hope is true when we sit down and record again in another year, if you have your own version of a framework that's accurate, but maybe still incomplete, a place to start understanding how you're wired to express it is the archetype assessment. You can take that for free at Macy robison.com forward slash quiz. I'll see you next time in part two. Thank you for joining me on Own Your Impact. Remember, there are people out there right now who need exactly what you know, exactly how you'll say it. Your voice matters, your expertise matters, and most importantly, the transformation you can help others create matters. If today's episode resonated with you. I'd love for you to become part of our growing community of thought leaders who are committed to creating meaningful impact. Subscribe to the podcast, leave a review, and share this episode with someone you know who is ready to amplify their voice. And if you're ready to dive deeper, visit Macy robison.com for additional resources, frameworks, and tools to help you build your thought leadership platform with intention and purpose. And remember, your ideas don't need more luck, your ideas don't need more volume, your ideas need a system. And I'm here every week to help you build it. I'm Macy Robison, and this is Own Your Impact, Unknown Speaker 39:58 you.

00:00:00] Welcome back to Own Your Impact. , The podcast is almost a year old now. It started in April of 2025. Now, I'm not really a balloons and confetti person, but I went back this week just to look back. I do like to reflect. I do like to be retrospective and reflective. So I went back and listened to some of the early episodes, and I wanna be honest with you about what that was like. It was uncomfortable. Not because the early episodes were bad. I think they were fine. They were honest. They were me doing my best with what I understood about the work that I was putting out into the world at the time. It was uncomfortable because the framework I teach today is not the framework I taught a year ago. The language is different. The process is different. The flow is different. The shape is different. Some of the things that I said with real confidence in episode two, I would definitely say differently now, and a few of them I would maybe not say at all. So here's what I wanna do with this episode. I'm not gonna give you a [00:01:00] greatest hits. I wanna walk you through how the Resonant Thought Leadership Framework has changed over this year because the way it changed is the lesson. Honestly, the whole thing I teach is kinda how this works, except just told backwards. So let me start with why this matters to you before I get into the what. Let's start with the why. I see this all the time. I work with brilliant people, experts who have done remarkable work, and they just need to be unlocked. So many of them are sitting on a framework, an idea, a body of work that they haven't put out into the world yet because it doesn't feel finished. So they're waiting, waiting until it's complete, till it's airtight, until they're absolutely sure, And I understand that. I have done that. But I decided to do things differently this time when I decided to launch this podcast and start talking about the work that I've been doing with clients. And I wanna show you what a year of a framework being in process looks like in public out [00:02:00] loud on a podcast with my name on it. And better, specifically because it was out loud and not hidden on my computer, we can actually see the, the process that it went through. So if you've been holding back on something until you believe it's ready, this episode is for you. Sometimes you've gotta, you know, get on stage and sing your song before you're quite ready to do it, just to get some feedback on what is happening, and make some changes to do a better job the next time you get on stage, to use a singing analogy. So let's go back. When this podcast started, the center of everything I taught was an idea called core resonance, and I created a formula for it 'cause I love frameworks. Core resonance was equal to your essence, who you are, multiplied by your expression, how you communicate. Essence times expression. And when one gets stronger, it makes the whole core resonance grow and deepen. I was so excited about that formula. I felt like it was clean, it was easy to remember. I [00:03:00] remember running down to my husband's office in the basement and making him listen to me talk through it and make sure it made sense. I liked that you could say it in one breath, and it wasn't wrong. But here's what I couldn't do with it yet. I didn't have a way to discover your expression. I could just ask really broad questions. Are you more of a speaker? Are you better at writing? , Do you think in visuals? Are you a coach? It was just big buckets of possibility and a best guess. And there were two other things that the formula didn't account for at all. It didn't account for lived experience, the lived wisdom that you bring to the things that you teach. And I know from working with thought leaders and experts for the last 10 years, that the first thing they come out of the gate with, it's always the thing they most needed to learn, if you look at the experiences that they've had. So knowing that that lived wisdom needed to be part of it was something I knew was missing, and the other thing that was missing was embodiment, whether you live what you teach, you walk your talk. I talked about some of those things on the podcast, but they weren't in the formula 'cause there wasn't a place for them.[00:04:00] And I didn't know what to do about that yet, but I found my way through it by teaching it And even though I had the formula, when I started doing workshops and started stepping into spaces where I could talk about the things that I was doing, I actually led with content. I was helping people build their intellectual property and their frameworks and the things that they would be known for, 'cause that was the most tangible thing I felt like I could lead with. And I believe, and I still believe every thought leader needs that. I still teach workshops on that both publicly and inside my community. But in those workshops I learned that even though I knew about core resonance and I was talking about it with private clients, I couldn't skip it. People couldn't build their content and have it feel like who they were until they understood who they actually were underneath. I had the order wrong. I was leading with content. I was going from the outside in, and teaching it in person, , and on Zoom made me realize I needed to teach it from the inside out. So I went to work on the part of the formula [00:05:00] that I could, not get a good measurement lead on, which was expression. I didn't wanna just guess. I didn't wanna look at the work that they'd put out and label people, , speaker, writer, , all those different things because I knew there were people who were more talented as speakers who had also created books. I wanted something real, and I wanted something measurable, and I wanted it to connect to their skills and the way they actually generated revenue, and that's where the thought leader archetype assessment came from. I was reverse engineering thought leaders' platforms 'cause that's what I love to do in my spare time. I get really excited about it, and was trying to see the connection points between, okay, this person has books, but they also do this, and where did they first burst onto the scene? And as I reverse engineered all of that, I could see these archetypes forming. So we started with 10 archetypes. It really was meant to be a lead generator. As I continued to have people take the assessment and talk about what they saw in their results in [00:06:00] themselves, different things started to shape. The four frequencies came into shape, and that some of these archetypes had things in common that helped us understand them better. And this way to actually see and measure, objectively measure, like a sound wave gets measured, how someone is wired to communicate and guide transformation felt so much better to me than just asking people to self-diagnose into vague categories. So if you've ever taken the assessment at macyrobison.com/quiz, that's what you're taking. It exists because my original formulas that I was teaching and talking about on the podcast had a hole, and teaching the formula showed me the hole and showed me what I needed to do to fill it. Then later that summer, last summer in 2025, I ran a small group program for the first time. I'd been working with individuals one-on-one and had seven people in the first cohort, and everybody kind of hit a wall at the same time. They were clear on their essence because we [00:07:00] took Working Genius and, and another assessment to help measure their motivation. We had the archetype assessment, and so they got clear on their expression. And so we had that core resonance formula taken care of. They would really get clear, and then they still got stuck. And that's when essence and expression became the four Es: essence, experience, expression, embodiment. And it gave us this calibrated place to begin from where they had a deep understanding of who they are and how they could show up in the world. So I have an episode about all of this if you want a longer version, but a formula can be accurate and still be incomplete. Essence times expression was totally accurate. It just didn't give people enough to actually build with, and the four Es did. It gave us a better foundation, a more complete compass. Now, I wanna tell you about a mistake I made inside of that because w- I had the four Es, but I was treating them like a checklist. Do you have essence? Check. Experience? Check. Expression? Embodiment? And the idea was the more boxes you check, the stronger your [00:08:00] resonance, and that made sense to me. But I kept seeing people, including myself, who had them checked, but maybe one of them was weaker than the other and things were still a little out of balance. So those four Es, expression, essence, embodiment, and experience, they aren't a checklist. They're multiplicative. They... Just like the original formula, if any one of them is low or any one of them feels like it's sitting at zero, it doesn't matter how strong the other three are. Anything times zero is zero. I have an episode on that too. It's in episode 60, the multiply by zero problem is something I want you to notice. But that came from not me sitting at a desk and, and spinning through this. It came from me teaching a model and seeing it didn't quite fit in real people, and trying to connect it and correct it in public Now the last big shift, that's the one that gives the whole framework its name that it has now. For most of last year, I taught the center of everything was core [00:09:00] resonance, and the larger system around it I taught as the four- the five Cs. I almost said it wrong. Uh, so core resonance, five Cs. Core resonance was one of the five. The others were content, your transformational IP that you create, your content, your central platform, your connection, and your commercialization. And I had core resonance in the middle, and the rest of them were kind of oriented around it like a flywheel And again, there were some ordering problems and some sequencing problems, and we worked those out in different one-on-one sessions and different group cohorts of my program, and we figured it out. And eventually, what formed was what we now call the Resonance Compass, which is your own calibrated tool to help you forge the path you need to forge in the world to make the impact that you wanna make. Yes, we talk a lot about sound, and we talk a lot about music. We talk a lot about finding your voice, [00:10:00] but once you figure out who you are, you need to start forging a, a path that people can follow you down. That's what unlocking thought leaders really looks like, and having that tool that is specific to you, this Resonance Compass that, that means you know how you're wired to express yourself, you know what your essence is, you know what things you've walked through and the mess that you've walked through that becomes your medicine that you give to others, and you embody that by taking that medicine yourself and using your own systems and processes and frameworks on yourself so that you can grow and your experience can deepen. All of that together gives you this great tool that is yours alone that you can take out into the world and make an impact on others. And so when I realized the combination and the construction of it was a little bit different than, like, a circle in the center with a flywheel, that there really was a compass in the middle, and then those other four [00:11:00] Cs became where we make decisions for where we're going. Making decisions is one of the hardest things, especially when you're the face of your business. Whether you have a personal brand or whether you have a company that you started that sits alongside the work that you're doing, you're still very connected to that work, and when you are the face of the business in some sense or another, making sure you understand who you are and how you're wired to make an impact is critical to succeed. And so this idea of having a Resonance Compass, and we're making decisions about how do we connect with other people? How do we build a central platform that feels like our business, that feels like the transformation we wanna help people make? How do we commercialize our ideas? There's different combinations of things that we can put out into the market for sale, whether they're our services or products that we create, or books that we write, or a combination of all of them. What's our unique combination? And, and what are... what is it we're actually teaching? What is the content that we [00:12:00] actually have to share with the world? We make decisions about all of those things connected to and returning to and checking in on that Resonance Compass, and that's what- makes our work deepen and strengthen and become more and more and more magnetic, and it's really exciting to see that happen for clients. They're making decisions with more confidence because they own the instrument that they're using, and they understand it so well that they can not just make choices and test things, they do that too, but they're getting data, and they're making really strong decisions about the impact that they're trying to make in the world. And that, that's growing, not just from a people help to standpoint, but from a revenue standpoint, and it's been so exciting to see that work for their businesses as well as mine. So core resonance didn't get demoted from the list. It got moved to the middle and became something new, that compass. So that's kind of where we started with at the beginning of the year, essence times expression, moved to the four E's.[00:13:00] I added some ideas around source and signal that, you know, there's who you are and how you express yourself, and, and that's part of the compass too which is now... The, the way I talk about this is a resonance compass. So that's just one component of how things have shifted in real time, in person, in public over the last year. But I wanna pull back a little bit because if you only hear that list of changes, you might miss the actual point, how every single one of those changes happened. I didn't change these frameworks by sitting alone and thinking harder. Every change came from the same place. I was in a room with people teaching the version I had, and the room showed me what the version couldn't do. Even the archetypes themselves and the, the four frequencies and all of those things that have developed in the just expression section over the year have been because of doing things with people. So some of the order was wrong. The formula was incomplete. That came, that insight [00:14:00] came from having conversations with people. And if you look at my own embodiment, my own resonance compass, I'm a transformational guide, and then I very closely have that followed by resonant orator, which is another archetype, an expression-based archetype. And then I have strategic advisor very close. They're in a almost three-way tie for how I express myself. And when all of those things were coming together in person with people, in conversation, solving problems out loud, that's when all of these changes started to occur. And all of that became available to me because I kept coming back to the way I'm wired and using it, even though in public that sometimes feels a little bit scary to do. So here's what I wanna say to you. You're gonna have a different approach than I do to coming up with your work. You might be a wisdom writer, and you do need to write things down on your own. That's great. You might be a resonant orator with a really high score [00:15:00] on that specific primary archetype, and in that case, you need to get talking. But the thing that all of us need to have in common is that signal's got to resonate with someone. You've got to put the work out there, whether it feels finished or not. The things you teach, the content you share, you know, the songs people sing when they are music artists, they, they aren't necessarily supposed to arrive complete and 100% finished. We need to get them in front of people and see how they respond. My framework is probably still not complete, but the version I'm teaching today is much clearer than it was a year ago, and I have a lot more confidence in it than I did a year ago, and I was pretty excited about it back then. I might look back at this episode the way I looked back at my early episodes a year from now, and that's not a flaw in the process. That is the process. I tell clients this all the time, and I will tell you, your ideas are not half-formed. They might just be early, [00:16:00] and the thing that you're protecting because it's not ready yet, you need to put it out there because you can't change the world while it lives on your computer or on a little Post-It note on your desk. You don't need the finished framework to start. You need to start so the framework can get finished A couple of quick things before we finish today. My client, Cassie, interviewed me recently, and that episode is coming up soon. This episode was kind of a retrospective of my inside view, looking back at how the work has changed, and that conversation with her is the outside view. Someone who's watched me over the last year up close, who's worked with me, who helped me develop some of these ideas in the first place, and asking questions I wouldn't think to ask myself. So I'm genuinely excited for you to hear it. And if listening to this stirred something in you, if you have your own version of an essence times expression equals core resonance formula, an early clean but maybe incomplete version of your work that you've been waiting to feel sure about, here's what I would tell you to [00:17:00] do. Don't wait to feel sure. Start where your resonance lies and where you express yourself most clearly, and put it out in the world. If you're not sure where that is, I would point you to the archetype assessment. It's free. You can take it at Macy Robison, M-A-C-Y-R-O-B-I-S-O-N.com/quiz, and it will give you your primary archetype that- encompasses how you express yourself, and it will give you some good information about some of the other archetypes that are also part of your unique blend. And that can get you going in the right direction toward where and how you should be sharing your voice and sharing your ideas That's the beginning of building your own compass Thank you for being here for this first year. Your ideas matter. Your expertise has real value, and the world doesn't need a more finished version of you for you to begin. It needs you sending the clearest signal you can one signal [00:18:00] at a time

[00:00:00] Maybe you've been building your thought leadership platform for a while now you're showing up, you're creating content, you're doing the things you're supposed to do, but something isn't working the way you think it should. There's a gap between the effort you're putting in and the results you're getting out, and you've tried to fix it maybe more than once. New strategy, new offer, new platform, new coach. And the thing that's frustrating is that nothing changes. If that sounds familiar, I wanna offer you something today that might reframe this for you. The problem might not be your strategy. It might not be your consistency. It might not even be your offer. The problem might be that you're treating a source problem. Like a signal problem or a signal problem, like a source problem. And when you apply the wrong kind of fix to the wrong problem, you can work incredibly hard and still not get any movement. So today I'm gonna give you a diagnostic question that I've been using a lot more lately, and I wanna teach you how to use it on yourself. [00:01:00] The question is simple. When something isn't working in your thought leadership, is it a source problem or a signal problem? That's it. That's the question, but the answer and knowing what to do with the answer changes everything. Let me give you some context. If this is your first time hearing me talk about source and signal, because this diagnostic only works if you understand what you're diagnosing. I've talked about this in a couple of episodes recently, but every instrument that makes music to use an analogy has two things happening. There's the instrument itself. Its physical properties, what it's made of, how it's been shaped and aged and used, and then there's the sound wave it produces, or the signal it sends out into the world. Two violins can play the exact same note at the exact same volume and sound completely different because the instruments themselves are different. That difference has a name in music, timbre. That timbre, that color [00:02:00] comes from the source, not from the note being played. And I think thought leadership works in the same way. You have a source, the instrument that you are, and you have a signal what you send out from that instrument and all together that makes up your core resonance source then is made up of two things inside of core resonance, which you've heard me talk about here before. Your essence. How you're naturally wired, what energizes you, how you create value and your experience, the lived wisdom, what you've walked through, what you have authority to teach sources about the instrument, who you are and what you've actually lived. All of those things together. Signal is also made up of two things. Expression, meaning how you naturally communicate and guide transformation, a k, a, your archetype on my assessment and embodiment, meaning whether there's alignment between what you're teaching and how you're actually living and operating. The signal is about the sound wave in this [00:03:00] analogy, how you're sending what you have into the world. When the source is strong and the signal is clear, you don't have to work as hard for things to land because the resonance is real and it travels. But when one of them is off, when there's a problem with source or there's a problem with signal, you can feel it and so can everyone else. Things are harder than they should be, and the effort you're putting in often doesn't match the result you're getting back. The most important thing I want you to hear today is this, A signal fix will not solve a source problem if the instrument is what is a little bit off. Getting better at sending a signal, just broadcasts the misalignment more clearly. You're turning up the volume on a muffled note. The first move is always the same. Let's figure out what we're dealing with. Source problems and signal problems have different textures in my experience, and when you know what to listen for, they can be more recognizable. [00:04:00] Source problems tend to feel like identity questions. They live in the territory of, do I have the right to say this? Is this really my work or am I performing something I think I should be doing? Why does this feel so draining? Why is this sapping all my energy when this is what I thought I wanted? I've been building this for years, and I don't feel like myself. Those are quiet source problems. They're persistent and they don't announce themselves as strategy failures. They show up as this low grade friction that you can't quite name. Something about the foundation, everything is built on, doesn't feel quite right, and that's a source issue. That's your essence or your experience calling for attention. Specifically if the work you're doing is consistently draining you in a way that goes deeper than hard work. Just being hard. I think that's an essence issue. You may have built something in your business around what you're competent at rather than what you're truly wired for. Or maybe you feel a little fraudulent when you teach a particular topic because you've never [00:05:00] lived it, like you're reaching a little bit beyond what you've actually lived, and that's an experience issue. Both of those are source problems and they need source solutions, . Now signal problems feel different. I think they feel like execution issues. They live in the territory of, man. I know what I should be saying. I know what I wanna say, but it's not landing. I'm creating content, but no one is finding me. My message makes total sense to me in my head, but something gets lost when I try to say it out loud. I'm working as hard as anyone I know, but the results don't match. I think signal problems are visible. They show up a lot more glaringly in metrics and in feedback, or even in the absence of feedback. If you feel clear about who you are and what you have to offer, but the execution breaks down, that's a signal issue, that's expression or embodiment, asking for attention specifically. If your message isn't landing or if you're not getting traction despite consistency, I would check [00:06:00] expression first. You might be using a format or a platform that doesn't match how you naturally communicate. Go back to your results on the archetype assessment. If you've taken it a resonant orator who's trying to build a writing first business or, or even using a writing first channel like LinkedIn without saying the things you wanna post first. That content's always gonna feel forced because writing just isn't how you think or process your ideas or guide transformation in others. A transformational guide like me who's trying to scale through a passive course, removed the relationship that makes their work actually work. So if you've got a really strong source, but the wrong signal, it gets really muddy. Even if everything looks right on paper, but something feels a little bit off. If people seem interested, but they don't convert. If the content is solid, but something feels like they're leaning away, that's embodiment and that's a little bit trickier to see, but there's probably a gap between what you're teaching and how you're actually operating. People can [00:07:00] sense that even when they can't. I think most of us go looking for signal solutions because they're easier to spot. There is no shortage of programs, strategies, coaches, consultants, who will tell you exactly what you should do to fix your offers, your content, your platform. Signal solutions are visible and actionable. You can buy one, you can implement one. You can feel like you're doing something, but that's where it's so easy to get caught in a copy paste trap. Source work is harder to find, and it's a little harder to do because it requires some honesty about whether you're actually wired for the work that you're doing, whether you're building a playground and not a prison based on the energy you have to run your business, and it requires some uncomfortable questions about is the transformation you're teaching when you've lived or when you've just studied. It requires looking at the gap between what you believe and what you're building, and so people do what they naturally find the easiest. They just overinvest in Signal solutions. I can't tell you how many people will hop on a call with me and will tell me they've tried [00:08:00] everything and when we go through all of the programs that they've invested in and all of the things that they've tried to calibrate their signal, they're right. They have, they work really hard. But if we're not starting with the right source and the right signal, nothing fundamentally changes. You cannot content strategy your way out of a source problem or sending out the wrong signal. It's really a deeper version of this copy paste trap. It's, it's not that you're just copying someone else's strategy. You're actually using that signal fix or solution to solve a problem that is around your energy or your source and happens over and over, and then you wonder why nothing sticks. But I think the fix is always the same. Is this a source problem or a signal problem? Name it before you try to fix it. So how do you actually use this as a diagnostic? Well, here's, here's something practical you can try. Think about the one thing in your business, your thought leadership, your authority [00:09:00] based, your expert based business that feels most stuck right now. The place where effort and result aren't matching Now. If you've got it, ask yourself, does this feel like an identity question, like who I am and how I'm wired, which is source? Or does it feel like an execution question what I'm showing up to do? If your gut answer is, man, it's an identity question. If there's something that feels uncertain at the level of who you are, what you have the right to say, whether this content, whether this thing is really yours, it's a source problem. So start there. Don't buy the content strategy program. Go back to your essence. Maybe look at some assessments you've taken in the past. Go back to living experience and ask yourself, honestly, am I building this around who I actually am or around who I think I should be? Or when it comes to what you're teaching? Am I teaching from a place I've actually been? Am I sharing something? I've actually learned? That's a great place to start. [00:10:00] Now if your gut answer is execution, if you feel really clear and grounded in who you are and what you have to offer, but the mechanics of getting it out into the world keep breaking down, it's probably the signal. Now, the strategy conversations make sense, but even then start with expression and how that expression is is meant to be created before you go looking for tactics. It's really not the end result. At the end of the day, it's the source of the creation. I was on a call earlier today with some really amazing copywriters, and again and again as we looked at their archetype results, the thing that came up was this is the way you're wired to start creating, to think through things, to guide transformation in others. It doesn't have an effect on what we deliver at the end. But it does make a difference when it comes to where you start. If you are expression led, if you are a wisdom writer, if you are a resident orator, you need to [00:11:00] actually express yourself to get the ball rolling. It may end up in some other format at the end, but the actual talking it out is the thing that gets things moving. It's uncanny. I've seen it happen again and again and again. That if things feel stuck, if things feel like you're not getting traction, if you're feeling like you're spinning, even if you're using like AI tools to try and figure out some of this stuff, you've really gotta go back to how you're wired to express yourself, how you're wired to guide transformation in others, and that's what this archetype assessment tells you to start to get things moving. Then you can start looking at different mediums, different tactics, different platforms. It gives you some scaffolding to decide, like we talked about last week. The question is not what platform is gonna work magically. It's which platform, which process, which way of communicating matches how your brain works. And if you can't genuinely tell [00:12:00] if both things feel true at once, that's not unusual either. I've had plenty of roadblocks that I've run into that are signal and source problems happening all at once. And so in that case, I try to go back to expression because it's measurable and take a look at how I'm showing up 'cause it's actually observable and measurable and I can start to make some tweaks. Look at the data you're getting, sometimes seeing concrete evidence of how you're naturally wired to express yourself, solves it and gets things moving in the right direction. 'cause it gives you something to do, it gives you a place to start. Now here's what I want you to take away from today. When something isn't working, the most important thing you can do before you invest more money, more effort, more time into fixing it, is looking at what the problem actually is. Is it source or signal? Is it identity or execution? Is it the instrument or is it the sound wave? Because the right fix for the wrong problem doesn't just fail to help. It [00:13:00] costs you. It costs you time. It costs you resources. It costs you confidence that this is ever gonna be possible for you, and you deserve better than that. Source problems need source solutions. Clarity about your wiring, honesty about your lived experience. Alignment between who you are and what you're building. And signal problems need signal solutions and expression mode that matches your natural communication style, embodiment that closes the gap between what you teach and how you live. And when both halves of core residents are working. When the source is strong, the signal is clear. The resonance that comes from that. It doesn't require force. It's aligned. It fits in the gap, the it cuts through the noise, and when you find that alignment, it feels that way. It feels like things are finally working the way they were supposed to work all along. If you need some help with this, if you wanna start with the measurable piece. That I think is the easiest to begin with. It kind of puts a compass in your hand and gets you moving in the right direction. The thought Leadership Archetype assessment is free and it's [00:14:00] waiting for you at macy robison.com/quiz. We've had hundreds of people take this, and the thing that has been most helpful for me and for clients is that it gives you a data-based starting point for the signal side of this conversation. It gives you some scaffolding to build from. So take it and sit with the result and ask yourself, is the way I'm showing up in my expertise, in my thought leadership actually built for this archetype? And if you've been sitting with that for a while, that question for a while, and you're trying stuff and you know something is off, but you haven't been able to name what it is, sometimes you just need a thought partner. You need someone to be a strategic mirror. And my archetype strategy call is probably the fastest way to get you that we look at your specific results. We map them to your current work and we get you going in the right direction through the misalignment so things get moving again, and you can find the link to that@macyrobison.com slash call. Thank you for [00:15:00] being here. Your ideas really matter and your expertise has value and that signal that you only you are meant to send. The world is out there listening for it and looking for it. We just need to send it as clearly as possible.

[00:00:00] Last week we talked about the multiply by zero problem. The idea that the four E's aren't additive for core resonance, they're multiplicative, and a single misaligned E can collapse your resonance regardless of how strong everything else is. If you haven't listened to that episode, I'd go back and start there before this one, because today is the natural continuation of that conversation because here's what happens when someone does that diagnostic work. Once they identify that zero and start to close the gap and their source gets clearer, a new question almost shows up immediately, and it's really practical. Okay, now what? Where do I start? I know my archetype. I've done the assessment. I understand my frequency, but when I sit down to build something, a new offer, or a new content strategy, a way of marketing my work, I'm not sure where to begin. This question is what today is all about. I want to offer something I haven't fully named on the podcast yet, even though I've been teaching it in my group containers and in coaching calls for a few months now. It's [00:01:00] this idea that your frequency isn't just a description of who you are and how you're wired. It's a starting direction. It's scaffolding, it's a constraint. And understanding where your frequency tells you to begin can change everything about how you build. I'm probably gonna use the word scaffolding instead of the word constraint, because people don't love the word constraint, even though I deeply believe that constraints are tools of creation. We really need to limit our ability to get overwhelmed by choice fatigue, and that's starts with sometimes bringing our own constraints to a problem and starting there. But scaffolding works too. So scaffolding, if you think of it in terms of construction, it's not a building. It's what goes up around a building to support construction. It helps you build from the right position at the right height in the right sequence, and then it comes down. The point of scaffolding isn't the scaffolding, it's what it enables you to build. And I think your frequency can work the same way. [00:02:00] Knowing your archetype, knowing your frequency that it fits into doesn't tell you everything about what your thought leadership business will look like. Your offers, your content, your platform, your ip, those things develop over time through doing the work. But it does tell you where to start. It narrows infinite possibility down to a workable starting point, and that's not a small thing for most of the people that I work with. The infinite possibility is exactly what's paralyzing them. Here's what I mean. There are 10 archetypes and they cluster into four different frequencies, expression LED, experience, led, insight led, embodiment led, and each of those frequencies really has a natural starting point. A place where you begin, where the work tends to flow, not because the other starting points are wrong for everyone, but because some entry points require you to fight your own wiring from day one. And fighting before you've even built anything is how people get exhausted before they've started. So let me walk you through the four starting points. One frequency at a time. If you're expression led on the [00:03:00] archetype assessment, that's resonant, orator, wisdom writer, visual thought architect. Your starting point is to express yourself first, to share maybe before you're ready to get it out of you before it's fully formed. I know that sounds counterintuitive because most of us think we need to have everything fully figured out before we start to share it. But expression led people actually discover what they know through the act of expressing it. The resonant order doesn't fully understand what they're teaching sometimes until they've said it out loud to a real person and watched it land, or watched it Miss the wisdom writer doesn't understand what they think until they can see the words on the page and can work with them. The visual thought architect doesn't know what they're seeing until they've mapped it out for someone else visually, for expression LED people. Waiting until it's fully formed means waiting forever because the expression is how it forms. Start there. Share the half-formed thing. Go to a platform where it's not so high stakes. Say it out loud before you figured out all the implications. Write the essay before you have the perfect framework. The [00:04:00] clarity comes through the expression, not before it. If you're experience led, transformational guide, experienced facilitator, digital learning architect, your starting direction is to get in the room first. Before you try to build content, before you think about your framework, before you worry about your positioning, go do the transformation work. Get with someone who needs what you have and walk them through it. I've watched experienced, led people tie themselves in knots trying to write content about transformation they haven't done yet. In their new context, at their new level with their new offer. I've done this trying to build documentation before they have evidence, and the content feels hollow because it is, it's built from theory instead of being in the room. The room comes first for experience led people. The content, the framework, the teachable ip, all of that emerges from doing work with real people in real time. If you're an experienced facilitator and you're trying to figure out your content strategy, my honest advice is stop trying to figure out your content strategy and go run an experience. [00:05:00] Content strategy will reveal itself from what happens in the room, and you'll get real content from what happens in the room. It feels like a chicken and egg problem. It doesn't have to be a big, massive room. It just has to be a place where people are, that you can walk through a transformation. If you're insight led, strategic advisor, category creator, research innovator, your starting direction is diagnosis and a problem. You have to start with a real problem. You have to encounter something you don't fully understand yet sometimes and work your way through it. Insight led people generate their best stuff and their most valuable IP through the process of thinking and diagnosing, but they need something to push against an abstract invitation to share what you know often produces nothing. Not because they don't know things. But because knowing is activated by a specific problem to solve, or a specific question to answer, or a specific thing that doesn't quite make sense yet, the opposite also occurs. I've seen strategic advisors in particular sit in isolation and try to presolve everyone's problems and come up with a huge framework [00:06:00] that can account for every single possible thing. And when you try to talk to people about it, they just feel confused and back away. You really need to get in front of people with problems or just get a problem to solve and push against to make this work. So if you're a strategic advisor wondering how to build your thought leadership platform, the starting move is not to sit down and write your philosophy. It's to get in a diagnostic conversation with someone whose problems genuinely interest you. Work through the problem with them. Notice what you see that they can't see. Notice what questions you ask that unlock something. That's where your IP lives in the pattern of how you think through hard problems. Try to verbalize your thoughts as much as you can, because the only way to access this is to have a hard problem in front of you, and if you're embodiment led. Principled practitioner, your starting direction is personal validation. Before you teach anything, go live it. Document what you've tested, prove it on yourself first. You can do it in real time if you want to. You can go away and run the experiment and then come back and share it. But you have a specific type of authority that's hard to fake, [00:07:00] and the audience can feel the difference 'cause that authority comes from having done the thing. Not reading about it, not coaching others through it, but having done it yourself, documenting what happened, and then have the starting move of taking stock of what you've lived and built and tested and shared it. What have you done in your field that others haven't, or what systems have you built? You can show the results of start there. Your content, your IP live in what you've already proven. You just may not have named it yet. Here's what I've seen over and over in working with clients who've been at this for a while who are still grinding without the traction they feel like they should have. The problem is almost never that they lack expertise. It's almost never that there isn't an audience for what they do. There's an audience there. It's that they started from the wrong direction for their frequency, usually because they followed advice. It was excellent advice for someone else with a different archetype. Maybe they'd done what I did and tried to, as a transformational guide, build a course first, because that's what everyone said to do. I couldn't even build my course. But maybe now you have a course that you dread 'cause there's no relationship in the [00:08:00] room. Or the strategic advisor who started a daily newsletter because that's how someone else built their audience and now they're staring at a blank page three days a week wondering why they chose to do this. Or the resident or, or who wrote a book before they taught the material live. And the book sits on a hard drive 'cause it doesn't sound like them. It doesn't sound like the person who's been speaking these ideas out loud for years. These aren't discipline failures. They're starting direction mismatches and the drain that results isn't a character flaw. It's data. It's your frequency telling you something got started wrong, but you have the ability to make a different choice, make a different decision based on that data. It's very rarely too late to reorient, and you usually don't have to burn what you've built. You just have to find the place where you started fighting your wiring and back up and then start the right direction. I wanna bring this back to where we started, 'cause I think there's something important to close the loop on here. Back in episode 58, I talked about the idea that source and signal are aligned. When you understand the instrument you are and you're sending a signal that comes from that [00:09:00] instrument, something shifts. It doesn't just feel right. It works better. Then last week in episode 60, the multiply by zero principle that explains why misalignment collapses everything. This episode is on the other side of that. When you close that zero, when you start from the right direction for your frequency, when the source is clear and the signal is coming from a real place, the effect is disproportionate in the other direction too, not because you suddenly have more content or a better strategy or a bigger platform. But because the signal you're sending is coherent, it's coming from the same place in every context. The person who hears your podcast, and the person who gets on a call with you are meeting the same person. There's no gap between the signal and the source, and that coherence, that alignment, is what resonance actually is. I have found this again and again and again in my business, and even though I teach it, man, I wish I remembered it better every day. That's part of the reason why I keep showing up and teaching it here when I am able to be [00:10:00] in coherence and be clear with my signal and my source when I'm walking my talk, when I'm practicing what I preach. It just flows effortlessly. It's so much more easy. I don't have to work harder. You just have to work from the right place and your frequency tells you where that place is so you can start showing up consistently. So here's what I wanna leave you with today. Two questions, and I'd encourage you to actually sit with them rather than just listening to me say them and then move quickly on with your day. So first question. What's your frequency? Not just your top archetype, are you predominantly, if you look at the top five on your test expression, LED or experience led, insight LED or embodiment led? If you're not sure, you can look at your initial results and, and kind of figure it out from the top five that are there. Or the easiest way to do that is to hop on a call with me with the archetype strategy call. We'll talk about that in a minute. Second. Once you know your frequency, does the way you're currently building your thought leadership match your starting [00:11:00] direction? Are you an experienced led person who's been trying to start by just writing? Are you an expression led person who keeps waiting until it's perfect before you share it? Are you an insight-led person who's been trying to create content in a vacuum without a real problem to think through and push against? The mismatch between your dominant frequency and your starting direction is often the exact source of the friction that's been slowing you down. It's really not a lack of discipline. It's not a lack of leads. It's not a lack of ideas. It's not a platform problem. It's not a strategy problem. It's a starting direction problem. When you find the right place to begin and start there. You can let the signal build from the source. And if you wanna go deeper on this, we can go into the actual raw numbers behind your archetype, blend your frequency, how we build and start from the right direction. I do one hour archetype strategy calls with just you, where we look at your specific results, map them directly to your current work, and you can find all of that at macyrobison.com slash call. And if you've been listening for a while, [00:12:00] and this has been landing. I would genuinely love it if you'd share this episode with someone who's been grinding without the traction that they deserve, because these ideas travel best person to person. That is the whole point. Thank you for being here. Your ideas matter. Your expertise has deep value, and the world doesn't need a louder version of you. It needs a clear one.