[00:00:00] I want to start today by picking up a thread that I started a couple of episodes ago. I've been getting a lot of responses to episode 58. The one where I introduce source and signal is the two halves of your thought leadership operating system. And what I keep hearing is some version of, okay, I think I understand the framework essence and experience make up my source expression and embodiment make up my signal. But how do I know which one is off? How do I diagnose this in my own work? Now that's something I can help you with, but I wanted to bring this to an episode as well. 'cause sometimes knowing where to start can get things moving. So that is what we're gonna talk about today. Your four ees aren't just a nice model for understanding your core resonance and yourself. They work in a very specific way, and once you understand how they work, this diagnosis becomes a little bit more obvious. Now, I'm a music person. I'm not a math person, but I'm gonna get a little bit mathematical today. Don't worry, it's like elementary school math. But there's a principle in this, I think changes [00:01:00] everything about how you use this framework and it's this, the four E's are, have a multiplicative relationship to one another, not additive. That's kind of the whole insight. So let's unpack that. When I first started teaching core resonance, I thought about essence and expression, and I put them together as a multiplication problem that if you understand essence or if you have a high understanding of your essence, and you thought of that as a number, but you had a low understanding of how you express yourself, maybe even a zero, 10 times zero is zero. We've gotta have both. Or if you had a very clear understanding of how you expressed yourself. Not so much an understanding of how you're wired, how your essence showed up. So again, zero multiplied by 10. That is also zero. But if we could start to get a little bit more self-awareness around where the zero was, and we were able to lean into that a little bit more, that core resonance number would go [00:02:00] up. And you would become more magnetic, more resonant, send out a clearer signal. Now that was before we had four Es. Now we have four. And I started thinking about them once I came up with four as a checklist. Do you have essence clarity check? Do you have experience check? Are you expressing an alignment with your natural wiring check? Are you embodying what you teach? Check. And so the idea at that point was the more boxes you checked, the stronger your resonance, which also made sense. More alignment equals more resonance. But I was seeing in myself, and I was starting to see an actual client work that it didn't exactly fit that model. I would work with people who had three of the four E's in solid shape and something wasn't working. They had figured out how they were wired. They had real lived experience. They were showing up consistently. But there was this one place where they were fundamentally disconnected. Maybe they were expressing themselves in a format that completely drained them. Or they were teaching a transformation they'd never actually lived. And that one gap, that single [00:03:00] misaligned e was collapsing the entire core resonance. Now, if the four ees were additive, having three strong ones in one week, one would still get you a decent score. You'd be it 75. That's a C. C get degrees. Maybe that was enough, but that wasn't what I was seeing. I was seeing people who felt like they were operating at 20% because the four E's don't add up. They multiply. So like I was dealing with before when I just had two. If I have essence at 10, experience at 10, expression at 10, and embodiment at zero, what's the product? Zero. That zero collapses everything else. It doesn't matter how strong the other three are, if one of them is absent or severely misaligned, if can make the whole equation bottom out. And honestly, once I named this again for myself, I couldn't unsee it. Because I had been the person in my own business and I still am some days the person in my own business who has three solid ES and one big zero. And I will think, oh, it's a strategy. Or, oh, I need to try harder. Oh, I need a different tactic. [00:04:00] But the issue wasn't any of that. It was that I had a zero on one of these four Es. So let me give you an example of what I mean when I say a zero. And it may not be an actual zero, but the lower the number. The lower the product score, right? So if we can concentrate on where there's a zero or a low score, a low way of showing up, it can give us some useful data to make better decisions. A zero in essence looks like this. You are building your entire thought leadership platform, your entire business around your expertise around work that is fundamentally draining to you. Not work. That's challenging. Challenge is fine. I mean, challenge is often how we grow. I mean, work that leaves you feeling hollow when you get to the end of a session or the end of a day creating content and you just don't feel like yourself. That happens when someone has built an offer based on what they're competent at rather than what energizes them. They can do it, they're good at it, but the instrument is fighting the player, and people can feel [00:05:00] that and the signal gets muffled. A zero in experience looks like this. You're teaching a transformation you haven't personally lived, and I wanna be careful here because this isn't about having your entire life perfectly sorted out before you're allowed to teach. That's not what I mean. What I mean is there's a difference between teaching from earned wisdom and teaching borrowed theory, and when you've actually lived the thing you're teaching, there's a texture to how you talk about it. There's specificity, there's nuance. There's the part where it got messy before it got clear. When that's missing, people can sense it. Even if they can't name it, they feel the distance between what you're saying and where you're actually standing. A zero in expression looks like this. You're showing up in a format that fundamentally does not match how you express yourself and come up with ideas or how you guide transformation in others. The wisdom writer who is forcing themselves to do a daily video. The transformational guide who's building a passive course without any room for relationship. The resonant orator who's trying to build a [00:06:00] writing first business and wondering why the words won't come through the keyboard. None of these people have bad ideas. The content might actually be really good when it does show up, but the friction of working against their natural expression is creating static in the signal. It's not clear and it can't travel the way it should. The zero in embodiment, and this is the one that is the most subtle and almost the most impactful. It's the one that I get caught up in a lot. This is when there's a gap between what you're teaching and how you're actually operating. Like I said, this one's bitten me more than once. I teach people about alignment. I teach people about doing work that energizes them, and there have been many seasons in my own business where I was giving that advice to clients while quietly building something in my own work that I knew wasn't right. People can feel that gap. Even when they can't name it, they lean away slightly and the signal loses some authority, not because the content is wrong, but because source and signal are disconnected. So how do you find which E is a zero for you? This is where [00:07:00] source and signal can become a diagnostic tool, not just a framework. This core resonance matters. It's where everything connects to and everything builds from, and everything starts from, so here's the question I want you to sit with. When something in your thought leadership isn't working, and I mean something that should be working, not something you've never tried, is it a source problem or a signal problem? Well, source problems feel like identity questions. They feel like, I don't know if I have the authority to say this, or I feel like a fraud when I teach this topic. This work is draining me and I don't know why. I'm not sure. This is really my calling. Those are source questions. They're pointing to essence, how you're wired and experience what you've lived through. Signal problems feel like execution questions. They feel like, man, I'm putting all this content out and no one's responding. My message feels clear to me, but it's not landing. I'm working hard, but the effort doesn't match the results I'm getting. People seem interested, but then they don't convert. Those are signal questions and they're pointing to expression and embodiment. And [00:08:00] here's what's important. A signal fix won't solve a source problem, and that's the heart of this copy paste trap. We talk about a lot why so many of the tactics people invest in don't work the way you think they should. If your source isn't clear, if you're operating outside your essence or teaching something you haven't lived, getting better at sending the signal, just broadcasts the misalignment more loudly, you're turning up the volume on a muffled signal. But when the source is solid, when experience and essence are both working, that signal work becomes a lot more straightforward. You're not trying to construct something from scratch. You're learning how to let what's already there travel more clearly. Now, I've struggled with this over the years, in part because diagnosing all of this in yourself can feel fuzzy. It's hard to see your own blind spots. It's hard to feel like we say this a lot as marketers. It's hard to feel like when you're inside the jar and you can't read the outside of the label. But the resonant thought leadership system is designed to give you some [00:09:00] measurable data. Two of these four E's are measurable and the other two are observable, and knowing which is, which changes how you can approach this diagnostic work. Essence and expression are measurable. I have actual tools for these. I use Working Genius. I use, , another assessment that measures your why. And if you have human design or Strength Finder or Enneagram or something else, we put those in the mix to look at Essence to get a complete picture of self knowledge, how you are wired. And for expression, it's the thought leadership archetype assessment that I built. These give you data. You're not relying on self-perception or questions that you answer that are self-reflective, which is good because that's often distorted by what we think we should be and not who we actually are. When someone sits down with their assessment data, they're not staring in a blank page. They have a starting point that isn't filtered through their own biases. Experience and embodiment are observable. These aren't things a quiz can tell you. You know, whether you've actually lived the transformation you're teaching. You [00:10:00] know, if you're honest with yourself whether there's a gap between what you teach and how you're actually operating, other people can observe it too, which is why the people closest to you can sometimes see your embodiment gap more clearly than you can. This matters because when you're trying to diagnose your own zero. Start with the measurable ease First. Look at your data. If your archetype shows you, you're an experienced facilitator and you're building a solo podcast where you talk to yourself, that's a measurable misalignment. And we might wanna try a different format for the podcast. If you're working, genius shows high discernment and wonder, but your business model requires you to be in tenacity mode constantly. That's really good data. Start there before you start to spiral into the harder to see stuff, and then bring your honest observation to experience and embodiment. Am I teaching from a place I've actually been? Am I doing this in my own life and work these questions require more courage to answer, but you already know the answers. You know, I know too for about me, it's [00:11:00] just living them. That's hard. Here's what I want you to take from today, because I don't want this to feel like a diagnostic exercise that just leaves you cataloging everything that's wrong. This multiply by zero principle is actually really good news because it means you don't have to fix everything. You don't have to do a complete overhaul of your thought leadership, your business, your identity, any of that. We just have to identify the zero and start there. One zero addressed changes the whole equation. If your embodiment gap has been quietly collapsing your signal and you close that gap, not perfectly but meaningfully, the effect on the rest of the equation is disproportionate because now all those other strong ease have something to multiply into the clarity that was already there gets to travel, it involves no effort. It involves alignment. I don't have to pound on the piano harder to get the snare drum to move. I just have to push the right key. And that's not a metaphor. That's how this actually works. When the equation doesn't have a zero in it, the effort required to [00:12:00] create resonance goes down. Not because the work is easier, but because you're not fighting the instrument anymore, your job isn't to add a whole bunch more. It's to find the zero and start there. In the next episode, I'm going to talk about what happens once you start closing that gap. How a clearer source creates a stronger signal, and how your frequency becomes the scaffolding for all your decisions about where to start, what to build, and how to show up. Because once you stop zeroing out your own equation, the question becomes okay. Where do I actually begin? The answer is rooted in expression in your frequency. So that's coming next week. In the meantime, if you want to start looking at the measurable e expression, the Thought Leadership Archetype Assessment is free, and it's waiting for you at macyrobison.com/quiz. As of this recording, more than 750 people have taken it, and the results will give you your first clear data point. Take the assessment, sit with the [00:13:00] results, and ask yourself, is my current business model actually built for this archetype? Is my content strategy built for this frequency? You might find your zero faster than you think, or if you need help, i'd love to help you on an archetype strategy call, and you can find more information about that at macyrobison.com slash call. Thank you for being here. Your ideas matter. Your expertise has real value, and the world needs the clearest vision of what only you can offer. Not a louder version, a crystal clear one.