welcome to own your impact. The podcast designed to help you transform your expertise into a platform of purpose and influence. I'm your host, Macy Robison, and I'm here to help you uncover your authentic voice, create actionable frameworks and build a scalable platform that turns your ideas into meaningful impact. 00:22 Have you ever wondered why some thought leaders, some experts, seem to connect effortlessly with their audience, while others struggle to gain traction despite having brilliant ideas? The difference isn't just about the quality of their content or their marketing budget. It's something much more fundamental. 00:37 Last episode, we dove into the full thought leadership resonance system, and today we're exploring what I think is the bedrock of all effective thought leadership core resonance. This concept changed everything in my work with thought leaders and with experts, and I think it will transform how you think about your own influence, whether you're ready to step on a bigger stage or not. Discovered this principle after years of watching clients struggle Despite following all the right strategies. They had great content. They had pretty solid platforms, strong connections, business models, something was missing, and in every single case, the thing that was missing was authentic resonance, that natural frequency at which they connect with others by the end of our time together today, you'll understand why trying to sound like someone else, is actually diminishing your impact. How to Identify your natural expression mode and how to leverage your personal journey, even the messy parts, to create deeper connections with your audience. So if you're ready to stop forcing strategies that don't feel like you and start building influence that flows naturally from who you are, you are in the right place. 01:41 Now it's easy to believe in an online world of follower counts and likes that the person with the loudest voice wins. So we try getting loud online. We push ourselves into this frantic cycle of creation, five posts a day, three newsletters a week, podcast episode every Tuesday. The metrics become our masters, and when the numbers don't climb fast enough, the solution is always the same, create more, get louder. But what if volume isn't the answer? What if impact comes not from shouting, but from having a clear, resonant signal? Let me share a personal story that transformed how I think about this. I use a lot of music words because I was a music education major in college, and before that, a musical theater major, I had a lot of friends who were opera singers. Several of these friends were apprentice artists in an Opera Festival production of The Magic Flute by Mozart one summer, and because I am the supportive friend, I dutifully sat in the audience to witness their operatic debut. So when the Queen of the Night ARIA started, which, if you've heard any of this opera, this is the one piece you will remember the [singing] 02:51 oh, that's about two octaves lower than she actually sings it, because I am not a coloraturasoprano, but you get the idea. It's that one. When that ARIA started, I was transfixed. It wasn't her beautiful voice that got my attention. It was because I suddenly realized none of the opera singers were using microphones. And as a musical theater performer who had depended on microphones every time I performed, I was stunned. How is this happening? How is this possible? How could I hear her so clearly? I knew it was because her voice was high, but nobody had microphones, and they had a 50 piece orchestra, but I could still hear these singers as clear as day. 03:29 What I witnessed during that performance was something called the singer's formant. This is a fascinating acoustic phenomenon that explains how opera singers can be heard without amplification, and it's not about volume, it's about resonance. So we're gonna get nerdy here for a second when it comes to music and science and sound. Opera singers trained for years to create a special vocal resonance that sits in a specific frequency range. It's about 2500 to 3500 hertz, if you would like to know, this is a range where the human ear is very sensitive, and crucially, where orchestra instruments don't produce very much sound energy, so their bands of sound waves don't fall into that 2500 to 3500 frequency range. And the opera singers, using their technique to slightly lower the larynx, to slightly widen their throat, they create a natural amplification that allows their voice to cut through all of that sound without having to shout. They don't compete with the orchestra. They find the frequency gap and they fill it, and that is what effective thought leaders do. They don't try to out shout everyone in an overcrowded marketplace of ideas. 04:37 Think of Seth Godin. He sits happily with his glasses in front of his bookshelf, and just talks so calmly and so wonderfully and so clearly. He doesn't exhaust himself trying to create more and more content. He shows up and does what he does every day. There are other thought leaders that are exactly the same. They find their unique resonant frequency, that specific audience, that particular insight. That distinctive approach and that creates natural amplification for their ideas to reach the people. 05:06 So I define core resonance like this. It's a simple formula. It's your essence, which is who you authentically are, your natural talents, your accumulated wisdom, your values, your hero's journey, your lived experience. All those things together are your essence multiplied by your expression. Your expression is how you share that essence with the world. It's your communication style, your teaching approach, the chosen mediums you use to get your message across. There's often one that is more impactful than the others in terms of how you communicate. So essence multiplied by expression equals your core resonant impact, and that's the transformational influence you create when those two things come together, when your essence and your expression align, your message is able to cut through and create impact. It fills that gap, and that's even before you think about building any kind of sophisticated platform or connection system to amplify your message further. The resonance does the job on its own. Your authentic voice activates a response in other people who are tuned into you. 06:12 If I have a guitar and it's tuned to a C, I can pluck it and it can move something else across the room. I used to do this when I taught. At the very beginning of my career, I was teaching choir and general music in an inner city school in Columbus, Ohio, and my favorite thing to do because I had this room had a tile floor and brick walls and so much sound energy would bounce off the walls in this room that I could show them exactly how this resonance worked. There was one key on my piano that I could push down, and it would vibrate a snare drum that sat in the corner of my room. And I would show them how this works, push the key, the sound waves, invisible sound waves shoot through the air, and that one spring on the bottom of that one snare drum was exactly tuned to that frequency, and it would vibrate and your voice, your message, your everything of who you are when it all comes together with your expression, can do the same thing. You don't have to force connection to activate a response in other people who are tuned to your frequency. You don't have to manipulate engagement. You don't have to create a whole bunch of content to get people's attention. The right people respond naturally when you share your authentic voice. I know you're wondering, what's all this sound science gobbledygook, but hear me out, because here's an example. 07:28 Consider Brene Brown. Brene Brown had been researching vulnerability and shame for years, but all of that research, all of that work, didn't come to the forefront until she combined her ability to tell stories well and owned her own journey of walking through shame and vulnerability and sharing that in an impactful way, that's when she burst onto the scene. Her expression as a storytelling researcher aligned with who she was like that academic rigor plus authentic personal nature of hers is what people started to resonate with before she took the stage at TEDx Houston in 2010 she'd published a book on the exact same topic she was speaking on, and there were other professors that really chided her for that and looked down on her for studying this topic. 08:16 But when she made the conscious decision to share her research by telling stories and sharing the mess that helped create her powerful message. She leaned into that storytelling ability. She gave a life changing talk, and it has more than 67 million views and counting countless books all over the world. So was that luck? Was that timing? I think both of them helped, but Renee Brown became a household name starting with that talk because I believe she made a deliberate decision to embrace what I call her personal core resonance. She shared the essence of who she is authentically, her natural talents, her accumulated wisdom, her values, her lived experiences, and she leaned into the way that she uniquely expresses herself as a storyteller. She was able to create her own type of singer's formant that filled the gap and allowed her message to be heard. This alignment creates impact that extends far beyond her research credentials or her personal story. Could have done alone. It was the two together. 09:11 So let's break this down a little bit further. The things that make up your core resonance, like I said, it's your essence. Your essence includes your natural talents and strengths. When I work with clients, we identify these through specific assessments, like the six types of working genius. It also includes your fundamental motivations, your accumulated wisdom from your lived experience, your personal values, your beliefs, your hero's journey, the mess that has become your message. All of that needs to be included and it needs to be acknowledged. You don't have to stand on a stage and share everything you've ever gone through, but to be a trustworthy guide, you've got to have empathy for what the people you're teaching are going through, because you've been there too, and you've learned something that you can turn around and help guide them on their path. And they need to know that that comes from a real place, that it's not just you. You pretending to connect, but that you actually know what they've been through, and people can tell your expression. That includes your natural communication style. Are you really methodical and detailed, or are you big picture conceptual? It also includes your preferred teaching approach to teach your stories or data or examples or experiences, the medium that you use to teach, speaking, writing, facilitating creating visual models, your authentic voice, your language patterns, and then your just unique way of connecting with other people. 10:28 Let's go back to this hero's journey idea and the essence part, because one particularly powerful element of your core resonance is that hero's journey. It's how your personal challenges become your wisdom. It's not powerful thought leadership that comes from theoretical knowledge alone, but lived experience that helps transform that into transferable insight. There are plenty of folks who do research at the university level, and they don't become more than five mile famous inside their university. And it's because their hero's journey isn't part of what they're teaching. Your mess becomes the medicine that you teach other people, and the challenges you've overcome are the exact medicine others need to do the same thing sharing that matters. Brené Brown's personal struggle with vulnerability and shame has become central to her core message, and it's why people listen to her. Dave Ramsey's journey through financial hardship shaped his approach to teaching financial freedom and your own journey contains a wisdom that other people desperately need. Think of the people that you listen to and that you really learn from. I guarantee there is something in their personal journey that is attached to the wisdom they're sharing. You can tell that they're speaking from a place of authenticity. 11:34 So there are some practical steps to uncover this. Here's how you get started. First, think about moments of flow. Think about communication style. Think about a time when you've communicated or taught something, whether it's in writing or speaking, and everything just clicked. What was it you were talking about? How were you sharing it? Who were you connecting with? Who were you speaking to? Those flow moments contain clues that reveal your natural resonance. I think taking assessments is a great way to uncover your core residence. Having something like the working genius assessment, six types of working genius to identify your natural talents and energy so you know where that alignment is. It really helps uncover where you thrive versus where you struggle. I think documenting your hero's journey is a great thing to do. What are the high points and low points? What are the challenges you've overcome, what did you learn through those experiences that other people might benefit from knowing? Have you written them down? Have you extracted the learning from the hard times you've had? I think it's also important, finally, to experiment with different expression modes. Try sharing your ideas through different mediums and see what happens if you're normally a writer. Try speaking and see how that goes. If you're normally someone who loves a facilitated conversation or coaching conversation or interview, try writing and see how that goes. It's good to know what your primary expression mode is, because when we know what it is, we can work around it as a constraint for creativity. 12:56 Brene Brown, again, we've used Brene a lot today as an example, but one of my favorite parts of Elizabeth Gilbert's book, Big Magic, was her talking about brene's writing process. Brene is not primarily a writer. She's a data driven researcher. She asks questions and she tells stories. She knows how to look at the data and tell a story with it, but she primarily loves to speak and teach, so when it's time for her to write a book, Liz talks about this in the book, Renee gets two of her friends, and they go down to the Gulf Coast in Texas. They rent a house, and Brene starts teaching the concepts she wants to talk about in the book, she stands in front of her friends, they're hanging out, eating food, and she teaches them what she wants to teach them. They give her feedback, and they sit and hang out and chat while Brene runs back to the guest room and starts writing things down. I'm sure she transcribes it now, but that's the way they describe it in the big magic book. And I remember reading that and thinking, Oh, that is the key. You can use your primary mode of expression and disseminate the things you want to teach in whatever form you want by using that as a constraint for your creativity. If you're a better speaker, use transcripts. If you're better at writing, get stuff written down and then practice your delivery. It's really important to understand how you most easily connect with others, not only so you can use that as your primary mode of connection, but so you can expand it from there, because your core resonance isn't something that you magically create, it's something you uncover, it's something you refine. It's something you learn to amplify. Because the goal isn't to be someone else, it's to become more authentically yourself and share that self more effectively with people who need your specific wisdom. 14:33 This core resonance, it really is the foundation, because when you communicate from this place of authentic alignment, you create a natural connection without straining to be heard, like that opera singer that found the exact right frequency above the orchestra and didn't have to shout, you can be heard above the noise when you discover your authentic voice and align to fill that gap. And when you do, you won't just be heard. You will move people who are uniquely attuned to your frequency to take meaningful action. Will. I'll get into this more in our next episode, because in our next episode, we're going to talk about how to structure your content, your transformational IP, and to do it in a way that makes your wisdom accessible and able to be implemented. Thank you for diving deep into this with me today, and if you're feeling energized about uncovering and discovering your authentic voice finding that unique frequency that makes your message most naturally resonate. I want to help you take the next step. I have a free, resonant thought leader starter kit, and in that there's a powerful flow state exercise, like we talked about earlier in this episode. It's designed to help you uncover those magical moments where your authentic voice cuts through the noise and creates that real connection with your audience. But here's what makes this whole kit very valuable. It doesn't just stop at core resonance. You get simple actionable steps for each of the remaining four components of this system. That means, while you're working on finding your authentic voice, you've got the groundwork for transforming that into IP, building your platform, creating strategic connections and developing a sustainable business model. So head on over to Macy robison.com, 16:05 M, A, C, y, r, O, B, i, s, o, n.com, or check the show notes. We've got the link there to download your free starter kit. I'd love to hear about your insights as you work through that flow state exercise. What surprised you, what you've learned. Connect with me on social media at Macy Robison and share your reflections. I'd love to hear them and make sure you subscribe to the podcast. I don't want you to miss this next deep dive episode into transformational IP. We're going to really explore how to structure your wisdom into frameworks and content that can really serve your audience and make the things you teach transportable. Thank you for joining me on own. Your impact. Remember, there are people out there right now who need exactly what you know, exactly how you'll say it. Your voice matters, your expertise matters. And most importantly, the transformation you can help others create matters. If today's episode resonated with you, I'd love for you to become part of our growing community of thought leaders who are committed to creating meaningful impact. Subscribe to the podcast, leave a review and share this episode with someone you know who is ready to amplify their voice. And if you're ready to dive deeper, visit Macy robison.com for additional resources, frameworks and tools to help you build your thought leadership platform with intention and purpose, and remember, your ideas don't need more luck, your ideas don't need more volume. Your ideas need a system. And I'm here every week to help you build it. I'm Macy Robison, and this is own your impact.