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I believe that when your value is obvious, sales get easier, and when it isn't, sales get harder than they should be. Most of the experts I work with are not short on value. It is getting lost somewhere between what they are capable of delivering and the way they describe it. My guest this week is Tasha Randle, a marketing and brand strategist who helps people who are exceptional at what they do, and who struggle with marketing, accelerate sales with less hustle. Tasha spent more than fifteen years as a marketing executive, eleven of them at Procter & Gamble and before that at Hallmark Cards, so she has lived and breathed buyer behavior, value perception, and business growth at a scale most of us never see. In January of 2025 she left P&G to go all in on her own business, because she felt clearly called by God to do it, and called to go bigger than where she had left off. Her primary archetype is Transformational Guide at 58%, nearly double the 30% mark where I start paying attention, with Strategic Advisor right behind it. When we first met, Tasha was doing executive leadership and career coaching and writing a book about leadership. She noticed that almost every woman she coached had a long-term dream of starting her own business, and that what she was offering them was a short-term solve. When she turned her own pattern recognition on herself, she saw the work had always been the same. She was helping people understand their value and say it clearly, first to leadership and headhunters, and now to the marketplace. What I love watching her do is take her own medicine, and in this conversation you get to hear her do it out loud. IMPACT POINTS FROM THIS EPISODE: ⚡ Experts talk from the solution while buyers listen from the problem. — Tasha calls the gap between those two the communication disconnect, and it is usually what she can spot in a founder's business in the first ten minutes. She pictures a plane coming in on a landing strip. Drift too far one way and you get so niche and nuanced that buyers can't see themselves in what you're describing. Drift too far the other way and you're selling what she calls an untethered aspiration, a dream house to someone whose current house is on fire and who is looking for a fire extinguisher. The message lands when it meets buyers in their lived reality and connects the dots to the relief they actually want. ⚡ The most accurate description of what you do may be the one that doesn't land. — At networking events, Tasha used to introduce herself as a strategic business advisor. It was true, and she could watch people's brains working to figure out what category to put her in. When she started with "I'm a marketing and brand strategist," people already knew what marketing was, so they had a handle to hang everything else on, the same way you teach a five-year-old to tie his shoes with bunny ears. She watches faces for the lean-in and the eyes lighting up, and when part of her message gets that reaction, she moves it to the front. And if someone asks whether you do something like EOS, her advice is to build on the familiar thing instead of pushing it away. ⚡ Make your value obvious before you try to get louder. — Tasha got caught in what she calls the cult of do more, posting twice a day on Instagram and TikTok because that was the advice everyone gave. When she slowed down and looked at where her clients actually came from, it was live conversations, in online communities and at in-person events. At P&G, working on brands like Tide, they called this commercial innovation: they didn't touch the formula, they got clearer about the value, and it drove millions of dollars in new revenue year after year. You can stand on a stack of platforms shouting into a megaphone at 10,000 people who have zoned out, or you can sit at a small table where every person has a light bulb going off. PEOPLE & RESOURCES MENTIONED: Tasha Randle (tasharandle.com)Five Signs Your Value May Be Getting Lost in Translation, free audio guide (tasharandle.com/macy)How to Accelerate Sales with Less Hustle masterclass (tasharandle.com/masterclass)The Book AcademyThe Resonance ConservatoryEpisode #84: Sell the Transformation, Not the Conversation: Danielle Bornowski and Ben Patton's Transformational Guide StoryEpisode #85: Show Up Where People Can Walk Away: What Busking Teaches About Building an AudienceCONNECT WITH MACY: Take the Thought Leadership Archetype Assessment: Find Your ArchetypeFollow on Instagram: @macyrobisonConnect on LinkedIn: Macy RobisonVisit: macyrobison.comSUBSCRIBE & REVIEW: If you loved this episode, please take a moment to subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts! Your support helps me reach more thought leaders who are ready to make an impact with their ideas. 🎙 Thanks for tuning in to Own Your Impact!

I believe building an audience is never an "if you build it, they will come" situation. We wish it were, and when you are the face of your business, it really is not. In the middle of September I was walking through the town square in Franklin, Tennessee, in 95 degree heat and heavy humidity, when I passed a really amazing singer sitting in the shade with a guitar and a speaker, busking. Just south of Nashville you can hardly walk down a street without hearing live music, but it is usually inside a restaurant or a club, often as background. Putting yourself front and center on the street is a different decision. Not many people were stopping in that heat, and he was still singing when I walked back to my hotel later that day. Busking is a long tradition for musicians. My son has done it with friends, and on Grafton Street in Dublin my family and I watched musicians from all over Europe take a permitted spot, play for an hour, and move along, so people always knew where to find them. I have never busked myself. Talking about myself in public has been tricky for me, which is ironic considering it is what I teach. When it comes to sales, I anticipate rejection, and more often than not I just don't say anything at all. Busking has been a helpful reminder that if I believe my ideas are helpful, I need to make the deliberate decision to send my signal out anyway. IMPACT POINTS FROM THIS EPISODE: ⚡ The room that chose to be there can't tell you how to grow beyond it. — A planned show is wonderful, and everyone in that crowd chose to be there, which makes their feedback a little like your mom telling you that you are great at what you do. Busking leaves no room for wondering. Some people walk by without noticing, some stop politely and move on, and some stay and maybe pay, which is a picture of how a sound wave works: it bounces off, it gets absorbed, or it meets something free to move. My son's band plays planned shows and busks too, and they take what busking tells them about what people want to hear straight back into their shows. ⚡ When nobody stops, the question is where you're standing, not whether you're any good. — On a street corner, a quiet hour leads to useful questions about what you are sharing, and whether to try this corner again or move to a different spot. None of those questions are about whether your music, or your ideas, are any good. Compare that to a planned show with 100 seats where you sell 50. Most of us don't look at the 50 people in the room, we look at the 50 empty seats and feel like a failure, and that is the wrong data. It is also the kind of story that can stop us from sharing anything at all. ⚡ You can go where people already are instead of rallying them to come to you. — A few weeks ago my son's band opened for a big local band at the club where Neon Trees and Imagine Dragons got their start. Both bands shared reels, put up signs, and texted everyone they knew, and it worked, but it was one night and a lot of energy. Galvanizing is one of my Working Genius frustrations, so getting strangers to show up at a specific time and place feels especially draining for me, and I have started asking what would happen if, alongside those invitations, I also just showed up and shared. I think about a video of Chappell Roan busking "Pink Pony Club" on a portable keyboard with almost nobody around, cut against her singing the same song to a huge festival crowd at Austin City Limits. You don't get gifted the stage without the courage to sing the song that's yours to sing when it feels like nobody is listening. PEOPLE & RESOURCES MENTIONED: Chappell Roan singing "Pink Pony Club"The Resonance Conservatory (fall cohort starts October 7)Free workshop, Tuesday, September 29 at 9:00 AM Mountain Time: macyrobison.com/workshopCONNECT WITH MACY: Take the Thought Leadership Archetype Assessment: Find Your ArchetypeFollow on Instagram: @macyrobisonConnect on LinkedIn: Macy RobisonVisit: macyrobison.comSUBSCRIBE & REVIEW: If you loved this episode, please take a moment to subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts! Your support helps me reach more thought leaders who are ready to make an impact with their ideas. 🎙 Thanks for tuning in to Own Your Impact!

I believe the thing that makes a Transformational Guide so good at the work is the same thing that makes the work so hard to sell. The transformation happens inside a conversation, and if you weren't in the room for it, it is really hard to describe. This week is a first for the show. Instead of one guest I have two, and all three of us share the same primary archetype. Danielle Bornowski is the founder and CEO of DQB Strategies, where she works with business owners on marketing and sales strategy and loves telling her clients to write their own rules. Her Transformational Guide works right alongside Strategic Advisor. Ben Patton just left his full-time job as a software content engineer at an AI infrastructure company to help people adopt AI in a way that fits who they are. His Transformational Guide came back at 64%, more than double the 30% mark where I start paying attention, with Experience Facilitator and Principled Practitioner behind it. In his words, his gift is seeing people for who they are, and he is so attuned to the exact words someone uses when they are stuck. Here is what I want you to listen for. Same wiring, two very different businesses. Danielle is referral-driven and runs her business on "let's test it for science." When she ran her own offer on herself, client Danielle turned out to be overwhelmed by what strategist Danielle delivered, and that changed how she built the offer she has now kept consistent for about a year and a half. What ultimately pushed Ben out of his last role was realizing that, in his words, "if I'm not having conversations, I feel like I'm suffocating." Both of them are working out how to describe something that feels easy to do and hard to explain, and so am I. IMPACT POINTS FROM THIS EPISODE: ⚡ People buy the transformation, not the conversation. — Ben has had fifteen to twenty conversations helping people who were overwhelmed by AI figure out where to start, and he has made his offer to many people. All of them said no. His read is that he offered it as "have a great conversation" rather than "this is what you get out of it." Danielle's advice lands right on it: people don't want to hear about the seven playbooks and the every-other-week meetings, they want to know how they are going to feel at the end and what you are going to overcome together. Ben heard it and realized the answer was already in his testimonies. They were overwhelmed, and now they're not. ⚡ Ask permission before you share what you see, and the invitation gets easy. — Danielle was on a get-to-know-you call when she could hear where the other person was stuck. She asked questions first, and then she asked, "I've got some thoughts and some questions and some feedback. Is that okay if I share it with you?" By the end of the call the other person said, "I think we might need to work together," and Danielle offered her hourly advisory sessions as a simple first step. That kind of call is exactly what she and her COO are now working to create more of, because in her words, "nobody likes to sell. But when it can be an easy invitation to work together, that's what I want more of." ⚡ Answering one person's question can teach the whole room. — Right after our strategy call, Ben led a Working Genius workshop for a ministry he used to work for. Trying to lead the whole group toward an outcome drained him, even with Experience Facilitator as his second archetype. But when one person asked a question and he answered them specifically, that person was served powerfully, and everyone else in the room got the benefit of listening in. Ben called it really clarifying. It is the same thing I learned sitting through voice master classes in college, and it is what finally let me build a group program as a Transformational Guide. PEOPLE & RESOURCES MENTIONED: Danielle Bornowski on LinkedInDQB StrategiesBen Patton (benapatton.com)Ben Patton on LinkedInWispr FlowThe Resonance ConservatoryEpisode #76: Own the Room You're Built For: Dustin Riechmann's Experience Facilitator StoryCONNECT WITH MACY: Take the Thought Leadership Archetype Assessment: Find Your ArchetypeFollow on Instagram: @macyrobisonConnect on LinkedIn: Macy RobisonVisit: macyrobison.comSUBSCRIBE & REVIEW: If you loved this episode, please take a moment to subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts! Your support helps me reach more thought leaders who are ready to make an impact with their ideas. 🎙 Thanks for tuning in to Own Your Impact!

I believe most of us already have the diagnosis. What stands between you and getting unstuck is almost never another framework, and it is almost always the deliberate decision to run the one you already have on yourself. Last week I was in Nashville for the StoryBrand Your Business Live workshop. I have been a certified StoryBrand guide for about ten years, and for three of those years I worked inside the organization as the director of the certified guide program. If there is one framework I should be able to run on my own business in my sleep, it is that one. Somewhere in the middle of the week I realized I never had, not on this version of my business, the one I have been building for the last eighteen months, the assessment and the Resonance Compass and the Resonance Conservatory and the podcast you are listening to right now. I have run it on hundreds of other people's businesses. I had never sat down and deliberately done a messaging pass on the thing I am actually doing now. I knew that, too. I have been reaching for language to talk about my work for months, starting to answer a question about it and feeling the answer not land, and telling myself it is just hard for a transformational guide to explain what they do. Which is true. It is hard, and the work looks different for every single person I do it with. But "it's hard" had quietly become the reason I hadn't done the work, and those are two different things. What moved it was a hallway conversation with my friend Dr. J.J. Peterson, who took the assessment a few months ago and told me exactly what he says when he sends people to it. He gave me the sentence in about thirty seconds, because he was standing outside my business and I was standing inside it. What I did not expect is what happened after that, and it is the reason this is an episode instead of a story I tell at dinner sometime. The pass didn't fix my messaging. It exposed everything I had stopped doing. The minute I had the words, I had a reason to reach out to people, and the minute I had a reason to reach out to people, I noticed that I hadn't been. Not the newsletter, not the five people a day, not the content drawer, not LinkedIn, not the people I hadn't talked to in six months. I want to be clear about whose system I mean here, because this is not a StoryBrand episode. StoryBrand was the door. What was on the other side of it was mine, the Resonance Compass and the Four E's and the embodiment question that asks whether you are taking your own medicine. I built those. I teach them every week. A deliberate pass through somebody else's framework is what showed me how many of my own I had let go quiet. IMPACT POINTS FROM THIS EPISODE: ⚡ You can teach the diagnostic and still not act on it. — This was never a knowledge problem. I know what I mean when I say embodiment, I have a whole episode about it, and I had told a client the week before that when I get stuck in my own business it is always that piece of my framework. I could draw the diagram. Knowing wasn't the thing that was missing, and neither was teaching it. ⚡ One deliberate pass won't fix the thing you aimed it at. It will show you what you stopped doing. — I went looking for language and found five of my own systems sitting quiet, every one of them something I would never let a client skip. That isn't the pass failing. That is the pass working, and it hands you three more places to walk your talk than you had that morning. ⚡ Learning feels productive, and it is not the same as leading. — My friend Evan Cox tells new StoryBrand guides that you go back and forth between two hats, and the learner hat is the fun one to wear. Another book, another certification, another podcast episode, honestly, and all of it feels responsible. But a thought leader is someone who has decided to lead, and my friend Tyler Pigott put the cost of not deciding plainly to our guides last week: a B-minus website that is live beats a perfect one that never gets published, every single time. PEOPLE & RESOURCES MENTIONED: Dr. J.J. Peterson: https://www.badasssoftie.com/Why Your Message Isn't Landing (Yet) - Macy Robison and J.J. Peterson on the Badass Softie podcast: https://www.badasssoftie.com/episodes/why-your-content-isnt-resonatingEvan Cox: https://evancoxconsulting.com/Tyler Pigott: https://www.tylerpigott.com/StoryBrand Your Business Live workshop: https://storybrand.com/live/The Resonance Conservatory: https://macyrobison.com/resonance-conservatoryYou Know Your Archetype, Now What? workshop: macyrobison.com/workshopCONNECT WITH MACY: Take the Thought Leadership Archetype Assessment: Find Your ArchetypeFollow on Instagram: @macyrobisonConnect on LinkedIn: Macy RobisonVisit: macyrobison.comSUBSCRIBE & REVIEW: If you loved this episode, please take a moment to subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts! Your support helps me reach more thought leaders who are ready to make an impact with their ideas. 🎙 Thanks for tuning in to Own Your Impact!

I believe you have already built the process you are trying to build. Not the book or the framework itself, but the way you make things, and you have probably run it several times in several different mediums without ever stopping to give it a name. My guest this week is David Peck. David is a designer who has spent twenty years in fashion and owns a boutique in Houston, and before any of that there was a degree in classical cello, a job at Ralph Lauren, and five years in Paris. He hosts a podcast, and his first book, Artful, comes out on November 11th. We started working together in the fall of 2025 and he has been in my strategic advisory group ever since. David is a builder. He has made and created so many things over the course of his life, and he comes from a world most people would not traditionally connect to thought leadership, which is part of why I wanted this conversation on the show. His primary archetype is Resonant Orator at 58%, with Category Creator right behind it at 39%, and thirty percent is the mark where I start paying attention to an archetype at all. Both of those are carrying real signal, and it is a combination I do not see often: the speaker who is also creative enough to want to solve a problem by building a new category for it. Here is what I want you to listen for. David held the title of his first book for eleven years. That book, a memoir, is outlined and mostly written and essentially ready to go, and he made the decision to set it aside and lead with a different book instead. Things solidified for him around November and December, by February he was writing, and his book Artful comes out this fall. He did all of it alongside the store and a more than full-time day job, without blowing any of it up. IMPACT POINTS FROM THIS EPISODE: ⚡ You already have a process. You just have not named it yet. — The framework in David's book is assemble, refine, try. He did not sit down and design it. It surfaced partway through him describing it out loud on a group call, and once he heard it he could see he had been running it his whole life: the senior thesis at Parsons that he collaged in Photoshop instead of drawing, because his drawings never carried the same weight his made things did, and which won him the Designer of the Year award. The store he built, watched come apart, and rebuilt. The TikTok account he did not tell anybody about. The word of the year workbook. In his words, the book came out of "a repetitive process that I didn't realize I was doing until I was able to name it." ⚡ Speed usually means you stopped starting over. — The book came together fast, and I am not sure speed is quite the right word for what actually happened. He did not get faster. He stopped starting over. Every earlier attempt began at a blank page, in a medium that drained him before the ideas ever got out, and he would lose the thing he was trying to say somewhere in the effort of writing it down. Once the process had a name, the next thing he made did not cost him all the years he had already spent learning how to make things. ⚡ Ask AI to interview you instead of asking it to write. — David wrote Artful in five and ten minute pieces, after carpool drop-off and on the way to work, by talking into voice notes and transcribing them. What he would not let the tool do was write, because what came back was paraphrase, and it was never as nuanced or as funny as what he actually meant. So he used it two ways instead: to group and organize his own words without changing them, and to ask him questions. "Can you help ask me questions that would help me figure out how these things are interrelated or connected?" Then he answered with another voice note. Letting it find the thread for him would have flattened the writing. Asking it to make him find the thread is what got the book out of his head. PEOPLE & RESOURCES MENTIONED: David Peck (davidpeck.co)Word of the Year workbook (davidpeck.co/yourword)Inside the Design Studio with David Peck (davidpeck.co/podcast)Wispr FlowThe Book AcademyCONNECT WITH MACY: Take the Thought Leadership Archetype Assessment: Find Your ArchetypeFollow on Instagram: @macyrobisonConnect on LinkedIn: Macy RobisonVisit: macyrobison.comSUBSCRIBE & REVIEW: If you loved this episode, please take a moment to subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts! Your support helps me reach more thought leaders who are ready to make an impact with their ideas. 🎙 Thanks for tuning in to Own Your Impact!

I believe the impact you have is the direct product of the decisions you make. It isn't given to you, it isn't discovered, and nobody awards it, which means the whole thing starts with you deciding, and then deciding again after that. This show has been called Own Your Impact for a year and a half and I have never once sat down and said what the title actually means. Dolly Parton died this week, and the tributes filling up my feed are what finally made me do it. One of them, from a woman named Krista, listed the Grammys and the CMAs and the hits and then pointed out that at the end of a life like that, nobody talks about any of it. They talk about the kind of person you were. That's the first half of what I mean. The second half is more literal, and it's the one I don't say out loud nearly enough: I also mean actual ownership, building something that pays you for being exactly who you are and still belongs to you years from now. In this episode I use one decision Dolly made in 1974 to show why those two halves hold each other up, and why the second one usually costs something. IMPACT POINTS FROM THIS EPISODE: ⚡ Impact isn't handed to you. You decide it, and then you keep deciding it. — It doesn't arrive because you got lucky or because somebody important finally noticed you. Every tribute I read this week was really a description of somebody who was recognizably the same person in every decision she made, in the songs, in the books she mailed to children, in the theme park she built in the county she came from. The money and the meaning went the same direction because they came out of the same set of choices. ⚡ Wanting the opportunity and accepting the terms are two different things. — In 1974 Elvis Presley wanted to record "I Will Always Love You," which was the largest amplification available to a person on the planet, and the night before the session his manager said Elvis takes half the publishing on anything he records. Dolly had been building publishing companies since the sixties specifically to hold onto her own songs. She said no, and she cried all night. Eighteen years later Whitney Houston recorded it and it paid Dolly for the rest of her life. A creator named Jamie Rachelle put the distinction better than I could: she wanted the opportunity, she just didn't want the terms. ⚡ A decision that hurts is not a decision you got wrong. — The crying is the part that usually gets edited out of stories like this one, and it's the part I want you to keep. She wasn't crying because she made a mistake. She was crying because she got it right and it still cost her something she badly wanted. Every real decision cuts something off, and the cutting is the only reason there is anything left in your hands afterward. PEOPLE & RESOURCES MENTIONED: Dolly PartonKrista Demcher's (@kristademcher) tribute post on InstagramJamie Rachelle's (@thisisjustjamie) tribute post on InstagramLoving Dolly Was Easy. Understanding Her Was Hard. by Tressie McMillan Cottom for The New York TimesAustin L. Church and the Freelance Cake communityYou Know Your Archetype. Now What? workshop: macyrobison.com/workshopCONNECT WITH MACY: Take the Thought Leadership Archetype Assessment: Find Your ArchetypeFollow on Instagram: @macyrobisonConnect on LinkedIn: Macy RobisonVisit: macyrobison.comSUBSCRIBE & REVIEW: If you loved this episode, please take a moment to subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts! Your support helps me reach more thought leaders who are ready to make an impact with their ideas. 🎙 Thanks for tuning in to Own Your Impact!

I believe the thing you are built to do is the thing that will feel most exposing to do in public. Not because you are bad at it, but because when it is your strongest signal there is nothing else in the room to stand behind. My guest this week is Mark Leruste, a storytelling and leadership communication expert, a guest lecturer at INSEAD, the host of The Unconventionalists, and the author of Glow in the Dark. His primary archetype is Resonant Orator and it came back at 94%, where thirty percent is the mark at which I start paying attention at all. Mark is very good at this, and one of the things I tell him on this call is that the things he writes sound like his speaking voice, which is much harder than he makes it look. He is also generous with me here in a way I do not take for granted, because what we end up talking about is how exposing it is to do the one thing you are actually built for. IMPACT POINTS FROM THIS EPISODE: ⚡ You can practice being exposed before it counts. — For his birthday, Mark's wife gave him a two-day folk singing retreat, and he was terrified. Years before that she gave him a six-week stand-up comedy course, which he found dreadful right up until a scruffy comedy night above a brasserie, where a desk lamp on a rope served as the stage light and all the second-half acts dropped out. He offered to fill the time with no material at all. He bombed, and he got exactly what he needed from it: "I'm just as comfortable being in front of this random crowd of people that I am in front of a crowd of founders, CEOs, speakers. I just need material." Not long after, he got up at the real show and loved it. ⚡ Whatever you hold onto on stage may be protecting you from the room. — Mark's singing teacher made him sing without his guitar, and told him that people who play and sing often use the guitar as a shield from the audience. When I turn that back to his speaking, he moves it straight onto the stage: the guitar becomes the slides, or the words you wrote down, or the structure, or the framework. It is also why he loves Q&A. There is nothing prepared to stand behind, so he has to be raw and in the moment, and in his words, he can dance in it. ⚡ Being excellent and being overlooked can both be true at once. — Mark did not get shortlisted for a speaker award, and he wrote about it publicly. His wife and close friends told him not to, because someone thinking of booking him might see it. He published anyway, because keeping it quiet felt "incredibly out of integrity" with himself and with the people he is trying to serve. He can be an exceptional speaker, and he can also not have been nominated, and both of those can sit next to each other. It is the same thing he tells the people he coaches: the story you are most afraid to share is the story your audience most needs to hear. PEOPLE & RESOURCES MENTIONED: Mark Leruste (markleruste.com)Mark Leruste on LinkedInGlow In The Dark: How Sharing Your Personal Story Can Transform Your Business and Change Your Life by Mark LerusteMark's TEDx talkCONNECT WITH MACY: Take the Thought Leadership Archetype Assessment: Find Your ArchetypeAttend the workshop: You Know Your Archetype - Now What?Follow on Instagram: @macyrobisonConnect on LinkedIn: Macy RobisonVisit: macyrobison.comSUBSCRIBE & REVIEW: If you loved this episode, please take a moment to subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts! Your support helps me reach more thought leaders who are ready to make an impact with their ideas. 🎙 Thanks for tuning in to Own Your Impact!

I believe the material you teach matters far less than the precision you bring to it. Your voice is as unique as your fingerprint, and that is what makes the work yours, whether you wrote the song or someone else did. There is a moment I hear constantly in my work. Someone is describing their expertise, walking me through how they actually help people, and then they stop partway through to explain where they learned it. Well, I teach that, but it's not really mine. I'm certified in this. I learned it from so and so. The wording changes, but the voice does the same thing every time. It drops. It gets apologetic, like they have just confessed to something. And I think that quiet apology is costing a lot of genuinely capable people the chance to own their impact. Here is what I want you to understand about that hesitation. It comes from integrity. Someone who stops to say where they learned something is refusing to take credit for a thing they did not build, and that is exactly why people trust them. Nothing is wrong. It is just unnamed. The certification has a name. The book has a name and an author and a cover you can point at. The wisdom you brought to it has not been labeled yet, and that does not make it less important. It just makes it harder to point at. In this episode I use Kelly Clarkson to show you what I mean, because her career is the clearest version of this I know. Other people's songs, then her own catalog, then back to other people's songs on purpose, and at no point along the way was anyone confused about the artist. I also tell you about my friend Raj Lulla, who came to a workshop of mine in Nashville planning to be supportive and left with his year changed. The tools he uses did not change at all. What changed was the name on the door and his understanding of what he brings to the tools once he is holding them. IMPACT POINTS FROM THIS EPISODE: ⚡ The hesitation is integrity, not a deficiency. — When you stop to credit the person you learned something from, you are refusing to take credit for a thing you did not build. That instinct is the reason clients trust you and keep sending their friends. The problem is not that you have too much integrity. It is that the part you contributed has a name attached to it yet, and the part you borrowed does. ⚡ The song will change more than once, and that is not a ladder. — You might start out licensing something because someone built a good tool and you are excellent with it. Then you build your own material. Then you do both at the same time, which is what most of the people I work with are actually doing. Licensed material is not the bottom rung and original is not the top. It is just what a twenty or thirty year career looks like when you are the face of your ideas. ⚡ Knowing your voice is what gives you agency. — This is not a nice feeling to have about yourself. It is what lets you choose. When you know what you bring, you can look at a tool someone is selling you and tell in about a minute whether it will sound like you or fight you. If you do not know, you will keep apologizing for whichever song you happen to be holding, because you have no way to tell the difference. PEOPLE & RESOURCES MENTIONED: Kelly Clarkson - KellyokeRaj Lulla - Lulla ConsultingGrowing a Fruitful Brand podcast - Build Your Business Without Doing Tik-Tok Dances with Macy Robison | Episode 70Fruitful DesignThought Leadership Archetype Assessment: macyrobison.com/quizYou Know Your Archetype, Now What? workshop: macyrobison.com/workshopCONNECT WITH MACY: Take the Thought Leadership Archetype Assessment: Find Your ArchetypeFollow on Instagram: @macyrobisonConnect on LinkedIn: Macy RobisonVisit: macyrobison.comSUBSCRIBE & REVIEW: If you loved this episode, please take a moment to subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts! Your support helps me reach more thought leaders who are ready to make an impact with their ideas. 🎙 Thanks for tuning in to Own Your Impact!

I believe some of the best advice you will ever receive can still be the wrong advice for you to take. Not because it is bad advice, but because it was built for a different kind of wiring than yours. This week I am talking with Kelsa Dickey, a financial coach who has been doing this work for about 17 years. She started as a financial advisor, left that world because the part of money her clients most needed help with was not the part she was being paid to manage, and built a boutique practice called Fiscal Fitness back in 2008, when almost no one was doing financial coaching at all. In 2017 she launched the Financial Coach Academy to train other coaches, and this year she is bringing everything she has built together under one methodology she calls Spend First. Kelsa and I share the same primary archetype, Transformational Guide. In the raw scores we look at behind the scenes, hers came back at 43%, higher than mine, and well above the 30% mark where I start paying attention. Strategic Advisor and Category Creator sit right behind it, all three working together to create her signal. This is the first time I have interviewed a guest who shares my primary archetype, so as you listen, notice where our experiences rhyme and where they diverge. Here is what I want you to listen for. Kelsa did exactly what growing founders are told to do. She stepped out of delivery, built a team, and moved up and out of the day-to-day client work, because that is what a leader is supposed to do. She followed all of it, and the business grew. Everything worked the way it was designed to work. And for a long stretch she kept saying she missed the work, without being able to name why. What she had handed off was not a task. It was the source of her own inspiration and knowledge. Once she understood her archetype, she could finally see it, and getting back in proximity to the people she is built to help changed everything. IMPACT POINTS FROM THIS EPISODE:⚡ Good advice can work and still be the wrong advice for you. — Kelsa did what growing founders are told to do. She stepped out of delivery, built a team, moved up and out of the daily client work, and the business grew exactly the way it was supposed to. What the standard playbook could not tell her was that, for her wiring, the one-to-one work she handed off was her "number one source of inspiration and knowledge." If you quietly miss a part of the work you were told to delegate, that feeling is data, and it is worth taking seriously. ⚡ She could diagnose everyone but herself. — Kelsa has a high Strategic Advisor score and reads patterns for a living, and the one pattern she could not see as clearly was her own. When she finally read her top three archetypes, it landed as a wave of clarity, because she realized she had been following that exact wiring for sixteen years without a name for it. Naming the pattern was what let her move. Once she could see it, she reconstructed her offers and unlocked a velocity she had not had before. ⚡ You can document the work instead of creating content about it. — Marketing had felt performative to Kelsa for years, because talking at a camera is the opposite of how she creates transformation, which is in conversation with one person at a time. Her bridge was to stop manufacturing content for broadcast and start capturing the real work instead: coaching live on her podcast and releasing only her own side of client sessions. She was documenting, not creating, and that one shift let her marketing finally sound like her. PEOPLE & RESOURCES MENTIONED: Follow Kelsa Dickey on Instagram - @moneycoachkelsaSpend First websiteMoney Made Human podcastSpend First book - releasing November 11Financial Coach AcademyAtomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James ClearJust Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan StevensonCONNECT WITH MACY:* Take the Thought Leadership Archetype Assessment: Find Your Archetype* Connect on LinkedIn: Macy Robison* Follow on Instagram: @macyrobison* Visit: macyrobison.com SUBSCRIBE & REVIEW:If you loved this episode, please take a moment to subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts! Your support helps me reach more thought leaders who are ready to make an impact with their ideas. 🎙 Thanks for tuning in to Own Your Impact!

You are not out of ideas. You're just not sure where to put them. For the past few weeks I have been doing something slightly strange on client calls. I have been opening the junk drawer in my office, second drawer down, and showing people what is inside it. A marching band pin from 2022. A crystal someone gave me. Bruno Mars and Hello Kitty stickers I stood in a very long line for. It looks like a pile of random objects, but nothing in that drawer is random. Every single thing in there got in for the same two reasons: it mattered to me, and it did not have a home yet. That is the entire admission policy, and I think it is also the answer to the problem I run into most often with brilliant people who are convinced they have nothing to teach. I hear it constantly from clients who have been excellent at their work for years. They have range, depth, a track record you cannot argue with, and when I ask what they want their intellectual property to be, they say some version of "I don't think I have anything good." I do not believe that is true, and this summer's Resonance Conservatory cohort helped me understand what is actually happening. One of the women in the group told me the homework felt awkward, and when we dug into why, it turned out she thought every idea she wrote down had to arrive polished, sticky, and slide-ready. So nothing ever qualified. Nothing cleared the bar. We are auditioning our ideas and ranking them before we have even made them real, and then we are surprised when the content calendar feels empty. So I changed what I teach. I used to call the collection document a principles bank, and I now think that name was part of the problem, because a bank is where you store finished, precious things. I have started calling it a content drawer instead, and I mean that practically, not poetically. I have a literal folder on my hard drive with that name. In this episode I walk through why ideas arrive half-formed and clumsy by nature, why judging them at the moment of arrival is what actually leaves you feeling empty, and what to do this week instead. There is a separate job called sorting and curating and crafting, and it deserves its own episode. But you cannot do that work on something you never collected. IMPACT POINTS FROM THIS EPISODE: ⚡ You are not out of ideas. You are throwing them away at the moment they show up. Ideas arrive unfinished, a little clumsy, sometimes at three in the morning as five usable words in a phone note. When I interrogate that fragment about whether it is good enough to share, whether it could go viral, whether I could say it out loud without wincing, it never survives. Then I sit down to make something, feel empty, and tell myself a story that is not true. ⚡ The admission policy for collecting content is curiosity, not quality. I would never stand over my junk drawer holding a marching band pin and deliberate about whether it deserved a spot. It mattered and it did not have a home, so in it went. Your content drawer works the same way. If something made you stop and go "oh, interesting," that is the whole bar. You do not have to see the talk or the chapter or the post it belongs to yet. ⚡ You cannot curate, craft, or codify something you never collected. The people I have watched build something that lasts across years, not one book or one moment, are all running the same mostly invisible practice. Something sparks their curiosity, they record it somewhere, and later they sit down and do real work on it and turn it into a practice, a process, or a proprietary framework. That later work is real work. It just has nothing to operate on if the collecting never happened. PEOPLE & RESOURCES MENTIONED: The Resonance ConservatoryProfessional Troublemaker: The Fear-Fighter Manual by Luvvie Ajayi JonesJ.J. Peterson, Badass Softie podcastWork Life Remix: Keep What Works, Change What Doesn’t, and Design a Life That Fits by Ronnie Dickerson Stewart (coming this fall - pre-order here!)Wispr FlowOwn Your Impact Episode #20: Finding Your Natural Way to Share ExpertiseCONNECT WITH MACY: Take the Thought Leadership Archetype Assessment: Find Your ArchetypeFollow on Instagram: @macyrobisonConnect on LinkedIn: Macy RobisonVisit: macyrobison.comSUBSCRIBE & REVIEW: If you loved this episode, please take a moment to subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts! Your support helps me reach more thought leaders who are ready to make an impact with their ideas.  Thanks for tuning in to Own Your Impact!

I believe the room you're most afraid to walk into might be the room you were actually built to lead. And I believe the proof of that is rarely a mystery, it's usually sitting in your own history, waiting for you to notice the pattern. That's the story my friend Dustin Riechmann, founder of 7Figure Leap, brought to this episode. Dustin's primary archetype is Experience Facilitator, and his raw score came back at 63%, more than double the 30% mark where I start paying attention as a diagnostician. When he first saw the result, his instinct was to argue with it. He's spent his life identifying as the quiet engineer in the room, not the person running it. But when he traced his own career back far enough, he found the evidence had been there the whole time, starting with a public hearing he got thrown into alone at 22 years old. This conversation isn't just about one archetype. It's about what happens when you stop treating your wiring as a nice to know and start rebuilding your marketing, your mastermind, and your offers around it. Dustin walks through how that shift changed Seven Figure Leap's entire product stack, and the one recommitment that ended up being the real turning point in his year. IMPACT POINTS FROM THIS EPISODE: ⚡ Your wiring leaves evidence long before you have language for it. Dustin didn't train as a facilitator. He was an engineer who got thrown alone into a packed auditorium of angry residents at 22, with a mayor, a city council, and opposing experts all in the room, and he found a way through it. Years later, a client on one of his own calls told him he must be certified in a facilitation method called the XChange Approach. Dustin had never heard of it. The skill was never learned. It was always operating. ⚡ When a signal is that loud, stop arguing with it and start building around it. A 63% raw score is not a suggestion, it's data. Once Dustin let that number settle, he stopped trying to write a book the way other people write books, stopped running his mastermind like a generic add-on, and started designing his marketing, his offers, and even a new sales role around the way he actually leads: in real time, in the room, in relationship. ⚡ The breakthrough isn't always new information, it's recommitting to what you already teach. Dustin spent years as "the podcast guesting guy" without actively guesting himself. The single biggest inflection point in his last year wasn't a new strategy, it was going back and practicing his own craft. He had his most successful guesting stretch yet, and it unlocked confidence and opportunity that no amount of new tactics could have. PEOPLE & RESOURCES MENTIONED: Dustin Riechmann - LinkedIn7-Figure LeapPodcast Profits Accelerator7-Figure Leap PlaybookResonance ConservatoryThe XChange Approach - Jon BerghoffMichael Bungay StanierThe Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More, and Change the Way You Lead Forever by Michael Bungay StanierWisprFlowCONNECT WITH MACY: Take the Thought Leadership Archetype Assessment: Find Your ArchetypeAttend the Find Your Frequency WorkshopFollow on Instagram: @macyrobisonConnect on LinkedIn: Macy RobisonVisit: macyrobison.comSUBSCRIBE & REVIEW: If you loved this episode, please take a moment to subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts! Your support helps me reach more thought leaders who are ready to make an impact with their ideas. 🎙 Thanks for tuning in to Own Your Impact!

You cannot help the people you're meant to help if they can't find you. And the visibility that actually carries your work has to come from your own signal, not from standing close to someone else's light. This episode is different from most. I'm not teaching a framework or walking through a client's transformation. I'm telling my own story, one I almost waved off as not worth telling, about the decade I spent building real expertise while calling it "just helping." What I didn't notice while it was happening was that the sentence I kept saying to myself ("I don't have their level of expertise") stopped being true somewhere in the middle of my career. I just kept wearing it anyway. This episode is about what it took for me to see that, why visibility isn't optional if you want the impact you actually came here to have, and why borrowed light from someone else's platform will never carry your work the way your own resonance will. The reason I'm telling this out loud isn't to give you a tidy before-and-after. I still do this work of tuning into my own frequency every single day. Some days it's easier than others. But if you've been building something real for years and you're still calling your sharpest skill "just helping," or waiting for someday when it feels safer to be visible, I want you to hear what that looks like from the other side of it. The expertise is already there. The only thing missing is the permission to stop hiding it. IMPACT POINTS FROM THIS EPISODE: ⚡ Borrowed visibility doesn't carry your work because it isn't yours. — I spent years standing close to big platforms, helping build them and amplify them, and I thought that proximity would eventually reflect some light back on me. It didn't. The moment I stopped straining toward someone else's frequency and started tuning into my own, everything shifted. Not because I pushed harder, but because I stopped competing with resonance that was never mine to begin with. ⚡ The story you most want to wave off is usually the one with the most of you in it. — I almost didn't tell this one. My actual words before I started recording were "this isn't a great story." And then I looked back at what I'd said and realized it was the thing, the reason I do all of this. I tell clients all the time that the thing you most need to teach is the thing you most needed to learn. I'd just done exactly what I tell them to stop doing. If you find yourself dismissing a story because it doesn't seem polished enough, or relevant enough, or big enough, pay attention to that. That's usually where your most important work is hiding. ⚡ You can outlive the story you keep telling about yourself without noticing it happened. — At the start of my career, it was true that I didn't have the same level of expertise as the people I was working with. That sentence was honest then. But somewhere in the middle, while I was pattern-matching launches and platforms and business models for a decade, I built real expertise and kept telling myself the same story as if nothing had changed. The sentence I was wearing as humility had become a hiding place. If there's a description of who you were at the start of your career that you're still carrying without questioning it, it might be worth asking whether you've outlived it too. PEOPLE & RESOURCES MENTIONED: Episode #74: The Spark Lives on Stage: Tricia Rose Burt's Resonant Orator StoryWisprFlowThought Leadership Archetype Assessment: macyrobison.com/quizThe Resonance ConservatoryCONNECT WITH MACY: Take the Thought Leadership Archetype Assessment: Find Your ArchetypeFollow on Instagram: @macyrobisonConnect on LinkedIn: Macy RobisonVisit: macyrobison.comSUBSCRIBE & REVIEW: If you loved this episode, please take a moment to subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts! Your support helps me reach more thought leaders who are ready to make an impact with their ideas. 🎙 Thanks for tuning in to Own Your Impact!

If something isn't working in your thought leadership, the explanation most people reach for is effort. They assume they need to try harder, show up more consistently, or commit more fully to the format someone told them would work. What they rarely consider is that the format itself might be the problem. Tricia Rose Burt is an award-winning storyteller who spent years on stages with The Moth, trained storytelling for corporations and private equity firms, and hosts the podcast No Time to Be Timid. She also spent years writing a memoir that never got picked up. A publisher told her, after all of that work, that the spark she had on stage didn't show up on the page. She kept pushing because people kept telling her a book was the right next move. What nobody named was that Tricia is a Resonant Orator with a primary archetype score of 77%, one of the highest scores I have seen in this assessment, and that asking her to channel her stories through a keyboard instead of her voice was a wiring problem dressed up as a discipline problem. This conversation is the first in a series of client interviews I'll be weaving into the show, and I wanted to start here because Tricia's story illustrates something I see over and over again: talent and format mismatch. When we worked through the archetype assessment together, something shifted for her. Not because she suddenly had new information about storytelling, but because she finally had language for why the memoir never landed. The format was wrong. And once that clicked, the archetype became a daily decision filter: how she designed her website, what containers energize her versus drain her, whether she leans toward group facilitation or one-on-one coaching. This is what becomes possible when you stop working against the way you are built and start working with it. IMPACT POINTS FROM THIS EPISODE: ⚡ The way you start does not have to match the way you finish. — For Tricia, writing a memoir felt excruciating because she was trying to begin at the keyboard. Resonant Orators know what they know because they say it out loud, and the creation process has to honor that first. Once she understood her wiring, the path became clear: start with voice, then shape the material into whatever form it needs to take. The final product is not the problem. The starting point usually is. ⚡ Your archetype is a decision filter, not just a label. — Tricia describes using her Resonant Orator score to make everyday decisions: standing up when filming video content, designing her website to lead with her voice, choosing group workshops over isolated solo work. The assessment gave her a lens for reading her own energy and selecting the right containers. When something drains her now, she has a framework for understanding why and a clear direction for what to do instead. ⚡ It is far more painful not to use your voice than to use it. — Tricia spent years being told to stay quiet, and did, until her late 40s. The suppression of her natural expressive mode showed up as exhaustion, misalignment, and work that never seemed to land the way it should. For Resonant Orators especially, staying small has a real cost. The riskiest thing you can do is play it safe, and Tricia built an entire manifesto around the hard-won truth of that. PEOPLE & RESOURCES MENTIONED: Website: Tricia Rose BurtDownload Tricia's No Time to Be Timid ManifestoNo Time to Be Timid podcastTricia Rose Burt on YouTubeThe MothThe Practice: Shipping Creative Work by Seth GodinDavid PeckCONNECT WITH MACY: Take the Thought Leadership Archetype Assessment: Find Your ArchetypeFollow on Instagram: @macyrobisonConnect on LinkedIn: Macy RobisonVisit: macyrobison.comSUBSCRIBE & REVIEW: If you loved this episode, please take a moment to subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts! Your support helps me reach more thought leaders who are ready to make an impact with their ideas. 🎙 Thanks for tuning in to Own Your Impact!

I believe getting clear on who you are and being able to hear yourself from the outside are two entirely different things — and the second part requires other people. You can do all the inside work in the world, and you will still need a room to show you what you can't see from in there. Last episode I told you I was heading to Craft and Commerce and I was going to try something — I'd been practicing how to introduce myself, and I said I would return and report. This is the report. For the first day and a half, I bombed. I was over-explaining, I was pushing too hard, I was watching eyes glaze over — doing the exact thing I talk about not doing, over-singing the room. And then, on day two, something shifted. Not because I finally found the words on my own. Because I let the people around me help me find them. A friend saw I was stuck and refused to let me stay stuck. My clients reflected what my work had done for them in language better than I'd been able to use myself. Another friend remembered part of my own story I'd left out. And someone with a gift for this handed me the solution. The intro I hadn't been able to land in years came together in about an afternoon, built almost entirely from other people. The bigger principle underneath all of that is the one I want you to sit with. You can't find your own clearest signal entirely on your own. You're inside your own instrument — you can feel it, but you can't always hear it the way a room can. The inside work matters, and it's the right place to start. But at some point you have to get where other people can hear what you can't, so they can reflect it back and help you strengthen what's already there. IMPACT POINTS FROM THIS EPISODE: ⚡ The room can only show you what's actually there. — Other people can't manufacture a clear signal for you — they can only reflect what you've already built. That's why the inside work and the outside work go hand in hand. You need the inner clarity first, and then you need real people to hear it and respond, because what they reflect back is often the clearest read you'll ever get on what you're actually sending. ⚡ You can't read your own label from inside the jar. — No matter how much you sit with your own work, you will miss things that are obvious to everyone around you. At the conference, my clients described what I do better than I had, my friend remembered a story I'd left out, and someone I'd just met handed me an introduction I'd been looking for for years. The words were already there. I just needed other people to hand them back to me. ⚡ The goal isn't the perfect pitch — it's the perfect invitation. — When I finally led with a question instead of an explanation, everything in my body felt different. I wasn't performing anymore. I was inviting someone into a conversation, and the right people leaned in. That shift, from performing to inviting, is what felt resonance actually looks like in a networking moment, and it's what becomes possible when your signal is clear enough for a room to receive it. PEOPLE & RESOURCES MENTIONED: Craft and Commerce Clay Hebert, pitch and introduction expertMadi Waggoner - Building RemoteLayla Pomper - Process DrivenMike Pacchione's Speech ClubEpisode 2: Finding Your Authentic Voice: The Physics of Personal ResonanceFind Your Frequency workshop: macyrobison.com/workshopThought Leadership Archetype Assessment (free): macyrobison.com/quizCONNECT WITH MACY: Take the Thought Leadership Archetype Assessment: Find Your ArchetypeFollow on Instagram: @macyrobisonConnect on LinkedIn: Macy RobisonVisit: macyrobison.comSUBSCRIBE & REVIEW: If you loved this episode, please take a moment to subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts! Your support helps me reach more thought leaders who are ready to make an impact with their ideas. 🎙 Thanks for tuning in to Own Your Impact!

I believe the most powerful voices in any room are never the loudest ones. They're the ones who know their resonance well enough to carry it through the door and trust that it will land for the people it's meant to reach. This episode is built around a concept I call felt resonance, and it starts with me describing a 20-year-old video of me singing at a vocal beauty boot camp. In that clip, you can hear the moment the sound locks in — when my posture, breath, and alignment clicked into place and the note stopped being something I was pushing out and started ringing through my whole body. That lock-in feeling is what I want to talk about in this episode, because it's the exact same phenomenon that happens when you show up fully as yourself in your work, and it's what almost everyone trying to share their expertise in the world is missing. Felt resonance isn't a lucky accident. It's a practice, and it's portable. The challenge isn't finding the lock-in once in a practice room. It's carrying that alignment into every different space — a conference, a sales call, a stage, a networking conversation — without letting the size or energy of the room talk you into becoming a louder, bigger, or different version of yourself. The second you start over-singing to fill the room, you knock yourself out of alignment and lose the very resonance that made your signal carry in the first place. This episode is about how to stop doing that, and how to start building a felt reference point steady enough to hold onto no matter where you are. IMPACT POINTS FROM THIS EPISODE: ⚡ You can't carry resonance you've never felt. — Before you can hold your signal steady in a big room, you need a lock-in moment you actually remember — a time when alignment clicked and everything rang. Without that felt reference point, the room wins every time. You end up reading other people for cues and adjusting who you are instead of carrying who you are into the space. ⚡ Over-singing is the thought leadership failure mode no one names. — When a room feels too big, too quiet, or too hard to read, the instinct is to force it — to push louder, over-explain, or perform a bigger version of yourself. Singers call this over-singing, and it destroys resonance. The same thing happens when you let a room pressure you into changing your signal. Alignment breaks, and the clarity you worked for disappears. ⚡ Your presence is the instrument — not your platform, your slides, or your format. — It doesn't matter how polished the production is. What people are drawn to is the aligned, resonant version of you. That's the thing that's portable. Once you know what it feels like to show up as fully yourself, you can carry that into a one-on-one conversation, a podcast, a stage, or a sales call and keep it steady regardless of the context. PEOPLE & RESOURCES MENTIONED: Episode 2: Finding Your Authentic Voice: The Physics of Personal ResonanceFind Your Frequency workshop: macyrobison.com/workshopThought Leadership Archetype Assessment (free): macyrobison.com/quizCONNECT WITH MACY: Take the Thought Leadership Archetype Assessment: Find Your ArchetypeFollow on Instagram: @macyrobisonConnect on LinkedIn: Macy RobisonVisit: macyrobison.comSUBSCRIBE & REVIEW: If you loved this episode, please take a moment to subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts! Your support helps me reach more thought leaders who are ready to make an impact with their ideas. 🎙 Thanks for tuning in to Own Your Impact!