[00:00:00] Welcome back to Own Your Impact. Today, I want to go a little bit deeper into the science behind everything I teach. We're gonna nerd out just a little bit today. If you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you've heard me use the word resonance a lot. You've heard me talk about the singer's performance, about the piano key that vibrated a snare drum across the room when I was teaching choir early in my teaching career about finding your frequency, filling your unique gap. I told a lot of those stories early on because they're the reason that I think about thought leadership in the way that I do in relating to music to the voice, because it's a lot of my lived experience, but I've realized something recently. I've been using resonance as a metaphor, and I think it's time to lean into it a little bit more as a methodology. People who understand their archetype, who've defined their commercialization container, the way they monetize what they're teaching, who know their frequency, who know how they express themselves most effectively, and guide transformation. Even with all that knowledge, [00:01:00] sometimes they're still pushing. They're pushing toward people coming to work with them and learn from them. They're creating content and they're trying to chase people down and get people to listen. They're still networking in rooms that drain them. They're showing up on platforms that don't feel right, and hoping that effort and consistency will eventually break through. Effort and consistency matter. But I wanna offer a fundamentally different way to think about this, because what if the goal isn't to push your message out to more people, but to align and send a clearer signal so the right people move toward you? So let me take you back to that classroom in Columbus, Ohio. I've told this story before, but I wanna tell it a little bit differently today. When I started my teaching career, I was teaching general music and choir. I was in a very tile lined, brick lined room, and I had an old piano in the front of the room and a bunch of different instruments sitting in the corner, one of which was a snare drum sitting on a stand in the back of the room. And when I [00:02:00] started to teach my unit on the science of sound, I always started with pushing a G above middle C on the piano. That one note, when I pressed it, the snare drum across the room would vibrate. Not because I walked over and hid it, not because I aimed a speaker at it. I pressed a key 30 feet away and the snare drum responded. That's sympathetic resonance. You can see examples of this on YouTube with a tuning fork that is tuned to a four 40 next to another one with a ping pong ball hanging on it. When the first tuning fork gets hit, you don't see it, but the other tuning fork starts to vibrate, and what you do see is the ping pong ball starts to bounce because it's free to move. It's a genuine acoustic phenomenon. When one object vibrates at a frequency that matches the natural resonant frequency of another object, like that snare or like that second tuning fork. The second object begins to vibrate too, without even being touched. The energy transfers through the air, that sound wave that we can't see, but exists as a tangible [00:03:00] object that can be measured, moves invisibly automatically. Now, here's the part I don't really go into very often. Not every key on the piano could make the snare drum move. I could have pounded on a dozen different keys. Played them louder, played them harder, played them longer, and the snare drum would just sit there completely still. Volume didn't make a difference. Effort didn't make a difference. Force didn't make a difference. The only thing that actually mattered and made a difference was matching the frequency. And I think about this a lot, probably more than I should or is normal because I watch brilliant thought leaders pound on keys that don't match the snare drums that are out there for them to help. They're pushing harder, posting more networking, more saying yes to every stage, every podcast, every collaboration, and the people they're trying to reach aren't moving. Not because the message is bad or wrong, [00:04:00] not because the audience doesn't exist, but the signal they're sending out doesn't match how they're wired. And the moment you shift from pushing harder to calibrating and sending a clearer signal, everything changes. You're clear about the source that that signal's coming from, and you send it out without effort. You stop chasing people start coming to you. Not everyone, not millions, not the whole world, but the right people, the ones who are already tuned to your frequency, waiting for a signal, clear enough to respond to. Now, I apologize to any acoustic engineers out there, but I wanna go a little bit deeper into the physics of this because what happens after you press that key on the piano after you send a signal out into the world, has been teaching me something really important about how all of this works. So when a sound wave travels outward from its source of the vibration and encounters an [00:05:00] object to simplify this. A lot. Three things. Usually happen or are possible. The first thing that can happen is the sound wave bounces off. If that object is rigid or reflective in some way, the wave hits and deflects it. Think of sound hitting a concrete wall. It, it bounces back, the energy goes somewhere else. In thought leadership, this is the person who sees your content, hears your talk, reads your post, and it just doesn't land. It's not for them. They're not tuned to your frequency. The wave bounces off and just keeps moving and that's fine. It was never meant for them and they're not to be chased. The second thing that can happen. Is a sound wave can be absorbed. The object that it meets takes in the energy, but doesn't move. Think of sound hitting carpet or felt or acoustic tiles. I was recently watching my son perform with his jazz combo, and we were in a room that was designed to listen to music and there were acoustic panels everywhere on the [00:06:00] ceiling. There were rugs on the floor, there were things on the walls, and all of that was meant to absorb all of the extra. Sound so you could really focus on the music and that is how people design rooms , and things like sound booths to make sure that only the signal that is coming from the instrument goes into the microphone. Another thing that absorbs the sound waves are our eardrums. So the energy is received, it's felt, but it doesn't create a visible or observable vibration in thought leadership. This is the person who maybe reads your work or listens to your podcast or sees your YouTube video and thinks, huh, that's interesting, but you never hear back from them. They absorbed the signal, it landed somewhere inside them. But maybe they're not free to move right now, or maybe they're not quite tuned to respond. Maybe they will later, maybe they won't, but the signal reached them even if you can't actually see the result of that. Now, the third thing that [00:07:00] can happen, and this is the one that changes everything, is sympathetic resonance. When that sound wave meets an object that is free to vibrate and it's tuned to the same frequency it moves. Without being touched. That's the snare drum across the room. Or, you know, back to that, , room where I watched my son play jazz. The bass player in his combo, he was soloing and there was a pane of glass in the door that kept rattling when he would play certain notes on his bass. Kind of the same thing that was happening with the snare drum. That pane of glass was free to move, and when the bass player was playing certain notes, it started to rattle without being touched. Now in thought leadership, this is the person who hears you and thinks they are talking directly to me. They share your post, they DM you. They book a call, they tell a friend. They're the person in your audience who can buy, who can amplify, or who could potentially do both. And they move toward you. Not 'cause you chased after them, but because your signal, your clear [00:08:00] signal matched their frequency. Now you don't control which one of these three things happen. You can't make someone resonate who isn't tuned to you. You can't prevent the signal bouncing off. You can't force absorption to become resonance. The only thing you can control is the clarity of the signal that you're sending out, and that's actually what most thought leaders get into trouble around. Not with the sending of the signal, but what happens next. you share an idea, you share a post, you send out a signal, it bounces off. Some people, it gets absorbed by others with no visible response, and you panic. You think crickets. You think maybe my message is wrong. Maybe I need to say it differently. Maybe I need to do a YouTube video instead of a podcast. Maybe I need to send a newsletter. 'cause that's what that person is doing and it seems to be working for them. So I'm gonna copy and paste what they're doing. And even though I'm, I really feel wired to write, I'm gonna start making videos. And that fundamentally changes the frequency of the signal you're sending out. The way that you are designed to communicate your ideas most effectively [00:09:00] and guide transformation in others. You might shift your message. You copy someone else's way of sharing you water down the thing that was most authentically yours to try and get a visibly broader response. And here's what happens acoustically when you do that, the people who were tuned to your original frequency, those snare drums, just waiting to vibrate, can't find you. 'cause you change the note, the match isn't there anymore. And now you're pressing random keys hoping something will respond, which is exactly where you started in the first place. The discipline of resonance is this. Send a clear signal, keep sending it, and don't let the bounces convince you to change your frequency. Now, I don't mean don't ever evolve. Your signal should deepen and clarify as you grow and as you learn your content more effectively and efficiently. What I teach today is more refined than what I taught a year ago. The system has gotten clearer because I've kept doing the work, but. The other thing that's happened is the frequency has gotten clearer as well. I know that my [00:10:00] voice matters, but I've gotten way more clear about what that looks like day to day and how I share content. I also know that as a transformational guide, that it's helpful when people actually spend time with me, whether it's here on this podcast, whether it's in a workshop, whether it's me guesting on someone else's podcast or in someone else's summit. That frequency, the more I can lean into it, the more snare drums I have that are ready to listen and vibrate along to just beat the analogy into the ground. The core of who I am and what I teach is my responsibility, and it's my responsibility to remain consistent, even as I've shifted some of the language, some of the frameworks, and made that more clear. There's a difference between refining and deepening your signal and abandoning it. If we think of it even as a voice, like a singing voice, my singing voice doesn't sound the way it today that it did 10 years ago. It's changed. It's refined. I've worked on it. It's [00:11:00] different, but my voice is still my voice, and it's very similar when it comes to. Your thought leadership and your expertise. So I wanna share a story that made this real for me personally. 'cause I have learned this lesson the hard way when I talk about refining my signal over time. About a year and a half ago, I was, , trying to get started with doing this work, doing this consulting around thought leadership, taking all of the lessons that I've learned from being behind the scenes in thought leaders businesses and helping them build. Businesses and platforms and influence and figure out a system to teach it. I'd helped other people do it. I was trying to figure out how to do it myself. I'd been encouraged to start coaching because I would be able to test the things I was learning and I. Was getting on calls and talking about what I was doing, and I had a great conversation with someone. The call went well. There was genuine connection, there was resonance. The energy was great. We were aligned on what this person [00:12:00] could create and wanted to create and whether or not I could do it. So I followed up with a written proposal. I wrote it beautifully. I spent time on it. Thought through every detail. Crossed every t dotted, every, I sent it off with an email and I got nothing in response. I even followed up. I don't usually remember to follow up sometimes, and I followed up with an email about five days later, still nothing, and I was sharing with a friend what had happened 'cause I was just trying to figure out what I was doing wrong. I felt like everything had gone so well on that call and to get nothing in response. Just felt like there was something wrong with me, and she said something back to me that stopped me in my tracks and has changed the way that I refine the signal that I'm sending out to this day. She said, just out of curiosity, did you send a voice note without proposal or put a video in it because you tell me all the time that your voice matters, [00:13:00] that you're a verbal processor. And did you send a video And I just sat there like Face Palm. Um, she was right. I hadn't, I hadn't even developed the archetype test, but I knew I was a verbal processor. And what I know now is that one of my top three archetypes and they're very closely clustered together like. A couple of percentage points apart is resonant orator. Part of that clear signal that I send out depends on my voice, my ability to connect verbally. That's how people experience who I am. But I had sent a typed, not just a written document, typed with my fingers document. I didn't even like say something out loud and then translate it to text. I just typed it and I expected that typed document to carry the same magnetic resonance as a conversation. I sent that signal out through a format that muffled it, that deadened it almost. It's like a singer performing, [00:14:00] makes people lean in, is hidden. Now, here's the big reframe. Attaching a video to that proposal would not have guaranteed a yes from this potential client. I have no idea how they would've responded. The signal might still have bounced off. It might have been absorbed, but it would've guaranteed that I sent the clearest possible version of my signal that I did everything that I could do to match the frequency that was actually mine. The only part I can control is that I can't control the response. I can only control the clarity of what I send. I had a client recently who illustrates the other side of this, what happens when you have the right instrument, but you're playing someone else's song. This client is a wisdom writer. Writing is genuinely how they think. They discover what they know by putting words on the page. When they are writing down their own ideas and thinking through, it needs to be done in writing. And when that happens, the frameworks come, the insights connect, the language finds itself like that [00:15:00] is the clear signal. And writing has always been a first love. That's the key on the piano that makes snare drums move for her. , Somewhere along the way though, and I think this happens when we start to monetize our gifts, , this client stopped writing their own ideas. They were writing for other clients, writing copy, writing other people's content, writing a lot, but not writing to express their own thinking anymore. And. It felt like visibility, stalled and content that, you know, they tried to write, felt forced and couldn't figure out why everything felt stuck when technically they were writing all the time. So when we go back and we looked at the, at the archetype results again, and kind of dug into it a little bit, it was clear this client was using their expression properly. They were writing. They were doing it on behalf of other people, so the signal that was being sent out through her writing gifts wasn't actually hers. The format was right, but the source wasn't there. [00:16:00] It wasn't coming from her about her. When your signal isn't actually coming from you, it doesn't create resonance. It might look like thought leadership from the outside, but it doesn't vibrate . Anyone toward you because there's no source from you behind it. There's the source and the signal, and both of them matter. And the moment she started writing her own ideas, again, a newsletter got unlocked posts, uh, personal branding content for everyone in their organization. Ideas started connecting. Not because the format changed, but because she started sending her own signal again. Using her wisdom, writer gifts and way of expression, and that expression led frequency to figure out what she thought and share it. And that signal when it's clear and un muddled, instead of filtering it through what everybody else needed, became clear and people have started moving again. Now I wanna bring this back to the concept of the singer's format. I've talked about this in a couple episodes. Opera singers don't use microphones. They train their [00:17:00] voices and , they. Learn technique as singers to try and create this specific frequency sound wave that fits in the gap where orchestras don't have any frequency energy. So the flutes, , the violins, the oboes, all of the instruments in the orchestra, they all create their own unique sound waves, like instruments do. But the singer's format is what? This gap is called where the human voice fits and manmade instruments don't. So opera singers, when they sing, they're not trying to compete with the entire orchestra in terms of volume. They're not trying to be louder than every instrument. If they tried, they would blow their voices out. They just can't win. Instead, they find their voices path to that specific frequency range. Where the human ear can hear that signal they're sending out with their vocal chords, and the orchestra produces the least sound energy, and their voice fills that gap. They don't out shout the orchestra. They cut through it by being [00:18:00] precise with their technique, with the source , of the sound and the signal that they're sending out. And thought leadership works the same way. You don't need to be everywhere. You don't need to be louder. You need to be where you're the most resonant. Sending the clearest possible signal and trusting the physics of this, some people will hear that signal and bounce. It's not failure, it's information. They're not tuned into. They're not tuned into your frequency. Some people will absorb and they felt something, but they're not ready or not able to move yet, and that's not failure either because they might move later. Or they might tell someone about you, and some people will resonate. They will move without being pushed or forced because you match their frequency. I shared something in a recent episode that illustrates this when I looked at the data from my archetype assessment, who's actually taking it in, what results they're getting. The top four primary archetypes people receive are transformational guide, resident orator, strategic advisor, and experience [00:19:00] facilitator. Those are my top four archetypes. The people finding me, many of whom now I've never met who've been referred to my quiz, are disproportionately tuned to my frequency. I didn't plan that. I didn't target those people with ads. The signal that I'm sending through this podcast, through how I teach, through the words I use through people spending time with me is naturally attracting the people who resonate with it. The signal goes out, finds the objects that are tuned to the same frequency and they're starting to move. That's not marketing, that's physics. But with marketing clarity matters. That clarity of signal that you're sending out matters. And so all of it combined is the signal that you send out that allows people to move if they're available to move. So here's what I want you to sit with this week. If you've been exhausted because you're pushing harder, posting more, saying yes to everything and wondering why the needle isn't moving, I want you to ask yourself two questions. First, when was the last time I sent a signal that was unmistakably me? Not the polished [00:20:00] version. Not the version I think I should be sending out the version that when people encounter it, the situation that I'm in, that you. Think this is me. This is me at my best. This is me at my most ease filled. This is what I'm meant to do. That thing that happens when you stop performing. When was the last time that happened? And then second, what am I doing right now that might muddle that signal? Am I trying to take on other formats that might be muffling my unique voice and signal? Are there platforms that are absorbing my energy without amplifying my resonance? Am I doing something to get customers or get people to pay attention? 'cause someone told me to, but it doesn't feel like me or sound like me? That's the beginning of a signal audit for you. Not am I doing enough, but is what am I actually doing? Is it clear? I think the first step to sending a clear signal is knowing more about your frequency. If you haven't taken the free thought leadership archetype assessment, that's honestly the best place to start. It measures the part of your core [00:21:00] resonance that I work with clients on that deals with expression, the way you most naturally express yourself and guides transformation in others, it's at macy robison.com/quiz. It takes about 10 to 20 minutes, depending on how long you wanna think about each question. And at the end you'll see your primary archetype, which tells you what kind of signal you most naturally send. You can't clarify a signal you haven't identified. But there's a lot more depth to it than that. If you want to see the full frequency blend behind your results, the raw scores, and understand how to use that information to further clarify your signal. I'm hosting a workshop in a couple weeks where we walk through the expanded archetype analysis together in a group. You'll get an expanded analysis that shows the raw scores, that shows the frequencies that align, and we'll walk through how different archetypes and the frequencies they send. Need different environments, different formats, different strategies. You'll leave with a little more clarity on what your clear signal truly is [00:22:00] and what might be muddling it. So you can take a different direction on things. You'll find out where to sign up for that and more information on those workshops@macyrobison.com slash workshop. But here's what I want you to carry with you today. You don't need to be louder. You don't need to be everywhere. You don't need to push harder. You need to send a clearer signal and then trust that the right people, the ones already tuned to your frequency, will move forward as you keep sending it out. Not because you chase them, but because of the physics. Sometimes the signal will bounce. Sometimes the signal will be absorbed, but the signal will resonate with people. If you keep sending out a clear signal, , you don't control which one of those things will happen. You control the clarity of your own signal, so send it and trust the resonance.