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