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