0:00 Macy, 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. 0:21 Over the past several episodes, we've been exploring the 10 thought leadership archetypes that have emerged from my resonant thought leadership system, and how understanding your natural pattern of expression can transform your approach to building influence with those 10 archetypes. I hope you've had a chance to review those. I hope you have a sense of which archetype you align most with, and if you're not sure, we'd love to have you take resident thought leader archetype quiz at Macy robison.com forward slash quiz. But today I want to shift our focus to something that applies regardless of your archetype, something that is fundamental to every successful thought leadership journey. Here's one of the most critical things I've learned after years of working with thought leaders, the most dangerous moment in your thought leadership journey is not when you face criticism. One of the biggest objections I hear when people are starting out, they're worried about putting their ideas out in the world because they don't want people to criticize what they think and what they're out there saying. But that really isn't the critical point, or dangerous moment. The most dangerous moment in your thought leadership journey is when you abandon your authentic voice and your consistent approach, because the world is not responding as quickly as you expected it to. 1:35 We live in a world of supposed overnight successes, of people going viral and has created this dangerous illusion that breakthrough results should happen quickly if you just find the right strategy or tactic or approach. But the truth is, what looks like overnight success is almost always the result of years and years and years of consistent effort that no one was paying attention to. So today, we're going to explore why consistency in your authentic approach is so critical, how real growth actually happens, and how to stay the course, even if progress feels slow. Let's start by talking about one of the most damaging myths in the thought leadership space and really in the kind of public discourse space in general, and it's this idea of overnight success. We see someone have a breakthrough moment, land a big speaking gig, publish a best selling book, build a massive following, and we assume that it happened quickly. But here's what we don't see. There are years of consistent work that precede that breakthrough moment. An example, James clear, this is a monster, runaway book, millions of copies sold, and when atomic habits burst onto the scene and became such a huge bestseller overnight and has continued to have staying power, it looks like he just came out of nowhere. Had burst on the scene, but James had been writing consistently for years before that book was published. He started his blog way back in I think 2012 was writing about habits, human behavior, a couple of times a week, every week, for years, before anyone was reading, he wasn't building a massive audience. At first. He was developing a distinctive voice, a distinctive approach. He was testing his ideas and refining his thinking through his writing, and slowly built credibility with a very small but engaged group of readers. Those early years were not pre success. They were an essential part of his success. And the difference between where James is now and where most people are isn't luck or talent. It's consistency when the results weren't visible yet. One of the things that I've said for years to clients, they will come to me and say, I want to build a business just like Amy Porterfield, just like Jenna Kutcher, and here's what I want to do like that is great. The difference between where they are and where you are is often a path that's marked with consistency, showing up again and again and again and again. Now they show up on social media. There are other ways to show up. We'll talk about that in another episode, but it really is the consistency. I think about this story my friend Brooke shared on her podcast. It's one of my favorites. She lives up in northern Utah, has a beautiful, huge backyard. Had this vision of tall, mature trees lining her backyard, where her kids could go outside and play, and she decided to start planting these trees. Went to the nursery, looked at what mature trees would cost to plant, and the cost was so prohibitive, she decided instead to buy 100 little seedling trees, tiny little trees, five or six inches tall, and plant those all around the perimeter of your yard. Took a long time, obviously, to plant 100 of those trees. She did it and just sat excitedly waiting for these trees to grow, and that first summer, nothing happened at all. In fact, she, I think, mowed over with her lawn mower a couple of the seedlings because they were so tiny. 4:50 And then she shot for sure, we're going to water, we're going to fertilize next summer, next summer, they'll grow. And they didn't grow as quickly as she expected. 5:00 Too, and she was frustrated, and went and talked to her mom. Her mom was a master gardener, and her mom said, here's the thing about trees, first they sleep, the first year they sleep, the second year they creep, and the third year they leap, talking about their growth. So the first year they sleep, and Brooke did not see any growth those seedling trees that first year. The second year they creep, she saw growth, but it looked slow on the outside, and then they leap. 5:27 The trees look like they weren't growing for the longest time. They grow slowly, and then they take off. They're establishing a root system. There was growth happening. It just was below the surface. And consistency is like that. It's growth below the surface that maybe others can't see, so they don't have the opportunity to respond to, but it gives you a solid foundation to grow from when people do start to notice, when people do start to interact with what you're building. This is exactly how thought leadership works. This is exactly how most growth works. It's not a hockey stick of immediate growth where we decide to do something and all of a sudden the growth metric goes up into the right on a chart immediately, like a rocket ship in the sky. It's an S curve. There's this long, seemingly flat period where it feels like nothing really is happening. And then there's some gradual growth, and then there's a tipping point and there's exponential growth that looks sudden to the outside observer, but it's not sudden because you've worked hard to get there. Most people give up during the sleep phase because they don't understand how real growth works. And here's something fascinating about how attention works in our crowded information landscape, most people need to encounter your ideas multiple times in multiple contexts over an extended period of time before they really start to pay attention. Marketing research tells us that people need to see a message seven to 12 times before they act on it. But in the thought leadership space, I think that number is higher. And I I've heard other metrics, like people need to spend two or three hours with you in order to really know like and trust you. And if you think about the number of tiny, little social media posts it would take to fill up three hours of face to face interaction with you. That's a lot of time, and to know that in order to decide they want to work with you, encountering those ideas multiple times in multiple contexts before they really start paying attention, that's a long time. We're not just encouraging people to buy something, we're trying to change how they think. And that's why consistency is so critical when it comes to breaking through the noise and establishing yourself as a credible voice in your field. That's why knowing your core resonance, especially the expression component of it, is such a big deal. I remember one of the first times I realized this a client I was working with years ago, I had helped them reformulate, retool, make more consistent their podcast. They were doing it every other week. They just weren't getting the traction, and they were spending a lot of energy on this podcast. So I had the opportunity to take over as producer. We shifted and started talking more about this, thought leaders, core content every single week, and it was growing. We were getting more listeners. We were getting more downloads. I didn't really have a solid metric on how it was affecting the growth of the business, but I knew from the things that were being posted on social media, from the emails we were getting, that the content was having an impact. 8:17 And one day, this CEO came to me and said, I would love to get a cost breakdown of the podcast. And in my head, I was like, oh, okay, I know this is an expensive line item, but it's helping. So got the numbers, including this thought leaders time, which was very expensive, my time, the editor's time, everybody's time. Got everything together how much it cost to create an episode every week, because this person ran interview based episodes, and there was a lot of editing, and there was a lot of other pieces that were part of that podcast production. And so got the numbers was was really nervous, because in my head, I thought, Oh, I know this is working. I would hate for them to abandon this. And I gave, I gave the CEO the numbers, and said, Here's where we are, here's what it costs. I know that it's an investment, but here are the ways that anecdotally, I see the investment paying off. And shared some stories of people who had interacted with us on social media as we'd posted content things like that. The CEO said, Oh, for sure. Actually, the last four speaking engagements we've booked, when we asked them how they found us, they said the podcast, and those were five figure speaking engagements, which more than covered the annual cost of the podcast. So all that to say this podcast production for this client, the key was consistency. You know, if we'd been measuring our success based on number of downloads or going viral or becoming the next, you know, armchair expert podcast, we might have gotten discouraged and stopped, but we knew there was a specific message. 10:00 Message that needed to get out to a specific audience, and we showed up and provided it consistently, and it paid off, because it wasn't just about repetition, it's about credibility building this client and really any thought leader who shows up with valuable insights in their authentic voice. It's almost like you're making deposits in a trust account with your audience. These individual deposits might seem small, but they compound over time. You don't know how often and how long people are listening to you. In this case, with this client, the people who wanted to hire her and spend that much money to have her come in and speak had listened to multiple episodes of the podcast, had spent multiple hours with this thought leader in their ears, and you don't know what the result is going to be, the only thing you have control over is to show up as an authentic human who you are with ideas you have to share with your core residents, and show up consistently in the way that makes the most sense for who you are and how you want to show up. Because here's the thing, I know, the thought leaders who break through aren't necessarily the most talented or the ones with the best ideas. They were the ones who were willing to keep showing up consistently when it felt like no one was listening. I mentioned earlier that real growth follows an S curve, not a hockey stick. So let's dive deeper into that for a second, because understanding the true shape of growth can help you stay committed during challenging early phases. So when I say an S curve, think of a chart with an X and a Y axis, and that beginning of the s curve, when it starts out in the lower left hand corner, that growth is slow. It kind of just creeps along. If you think of the beginning of that S curve, I that would be the sleep phase. It's where foundational work is occurring. But it's really invisible to outside followers. You're developing your voice, you're refining your ideas, you're building systems, you're slowly attracting the first people that are part of your audience, and progress can feel really slow, because the metrics that you are tempted to measure don't reflect the foundation you are building. It's at this stage that consistency really does matter, and I would encourage if you're in this stage, to find a different way to measure growth in this sleep phase, progress feels painfully slow, because the metrics that you're tempted to measure in this stage don't really reflect the foundation that you're building. You haven't gone viral. And I would say viral growth isn't necessarily something you want. It has no foundation. This foundation building that happens in the sleep phase is really important. So think of phase two as the creep phase that S is starting to slowly inch upward. This is where you start to see some momentum building. Your audience is growing slowly but steadily. People are starting to reference your work. You might get invited to speak. You might be you have the opportunities to collaborate with other people. The growth is real, but it still feels slow and it still feels gradual. And then phase three is the LEAP phase. That's when that S curve goes up into the right it's that tipping point. It's what overnight success looks like to an outside observer. Your audience explodes. Opportunities multiply rapidly. Everything seems to accelerate. But this phase is only possible because all of the things that you did in phases one and two. So the key thing I want you to remember is this, you can't skip phase one and phase two to get to phase three. The Leap phase is built on the foundation of sleep and creep. So if you're not experiencing success as quickly as you would like, to keep that in mind, my friend Dustin is experiencing this right now. Dustin rieman, he had an opportunity recently to appear on a massive podcast, the Nathan berry show. I will link it in show notes. It's really great episode to listen to. Nathan is the founder of kit, which is an email service provider for creators. He has a huge following. He only invites a certain handful of people to come be on his show. Dustin got that opportunity because of what he's been building over the last three years. And you might be tempted to look at that episode and think, oh, man, he has this massive opportunity. I don't he's doing something I'm not, and copy his tactics and and figure that you can get there the same way he has. And what you've not seen, he talks about this in the episode. This has been years of building different businesses based on his podcast guesting strategies that he teaches as an accelerator, how that relationship marketing and the way that he approaches that has helped not only his business grow, but so many other businesses grow, and gave him this opportunity to be on this show. When I see someone burst onto the scene, I never assume that there has been some sort of viral success, and I I don't think going viral is a sustainable growth strategy. I always assume there's massive consistency and years of work behind any breakout moment, consistently showing up is the thing that brings the breakthrough. And it applies to whatever connection strategy you choose, speaking at events, writing guest articles for other people, building strategic partnerships, creating consistent content, all of these things require the same patient consistency to break through people's attention. 15:00 And establish credibility. So how do you maintain consistency when results feel slow? It's hard. How do you stay committed to your authentic approach when it seems like everybody else is getting faster results by dancing on Tiktok? First, you've got to shift your definition of success. Looking at external metrics is always going to lead you astray here, and you can choose instead to shift to internal indicators. Instead of measuring your audience size or engagement, just measuring those things, I would encourage you to also measure, are you getting clearer in articulating your ideas? Are you attracting the right people to your work, even if it feels like it's slow? Are they the right people? Are you energized by the work you're creating? Do you love getting up and doing it every day. Are you building meaningful relationships inside and outside of your field? And are you developing expertise and credibility in your area of focus? Another really great measurement tool I love is just thinking of the things you can control. We want to focus on the lead measures. These are the things that we can control lag measures like how many people follow us, or how much revenue we're bringing in those things are not in our direct control. We want to control the things we can control. How often do we show up? How consistently are we talking about our our business? One of my friends, Veronica Romney, has a really great metric that she gives her leaders that she works with. She calls it a visionary CEO KPI, and it's essentially, how many times per week are you talking about your business in public? That is something you can measure, that is something you can control, that is something you can be consistent around, especially because you can say, I guessed it on this podcast, there's one I talked about what we did on social media. There's two you can rack up those opportunities to talk about the business by being deliberate about a metric like that, and those are the things that are the lead measures that guide you towards success. Before I started working as a consultant, my mom was in sales. She was she was a school teacher, raised us and decided to go back to work. And the easiest thing for her to start doing was working alongside my dad. He was a funeral director, or he is a funeral director, and my mom would sell pre need insurance, which is not a fun thing to cold call people to sell. You're basically paying for your funeral in advance. But my mom was really great with relationships, really great with reaching out to people in her circle and providing the service, which, it is a really important service. But she also had to build her network and get people to know what she was doing. The way she did that was by this back in the day before the internet, she had little postcards that the insurance company would send her of people who were interested, and she called Five people a day. That was the thing she could control. She couldn't control who set an appointment with her. She couldn't control who ended up buying the insurance policy, but she could control how many cards, how many people she picked up the phone and called that day. Which is not fun. Consistency isn't always fun, but it's the thing that gets results, and staying the course is really all about those lead measures. So first, we shift our definition of success. Second, you need to have a realistic timeline. If you're expecting to see significant results in three to six months, there might be some disappointment. There a lot of successful thought leadership platforms really mature within a couple of years, as far as gaining momentum. And the people who feel like overnight successes have likely been doing this work for five years or more. And I say that not to discourage you, but to help you anchor in what happens behind the scenes, the people who you see as overnight successes, like James clear, like I talked about at the beginning of this episode, there has been years of consistent work behind the scenes going on someone like Amy Porterfield. Amy Porterfield has had this business for 15 years, and if you just learned about her last week, it might look like she's an overnight success. But here's another example, Sharon McMahon. Sharon McMahon Sharon says so on Instagram, one of my favorite people to follow on Instagram. She is America's government teacher. Had a really great New York Times best selling book last year. Has a massive platform on Instagram, really just sharing what's happening in the world. From a very fact based standpoint, she is 19:21 just fantastic. I really love her. You might think she's an overnight success. She has been running businesses online for many years. She was a photographer, and then COVID shut everything down from there, she really had to be careful about working outside the house. So she started talking, this is 2020, she was talking about politics online. People were asking questions. She'd been a government teacher for years before she was a photographer. So you know, you may think she burst onto the scene overnight, but years and years of study leading to meeting an opportunity when it came, and slowly building a platform over time, suddenly a whole. 20:00 Do people know about her? And it's it's taken a couple of years, and she'll continue to grow from here, but having that realistic timeline helps you stay consistent. And it doesn't mean she wasn't seeing success, or you won't see success in year one in year two. It just means, if you're expecting to go viral and have hundreds of 1000s of followers overnight, there's going to be disappointment there. 20:27 Third thing you need to do is document your progress. Keep track of small wins, keep track of positive feedback. Keep track of that incremental growth that matters. When you're in the middle of the sleep phase, it's easy to forget you're making progress. Ironically, this podcast is for me as much as anyone else. Years behind the scenes doing this for other people, it's been really interesting learning these lessons for myself, and this is the thing that I need to hear the most. I've worked very hard to just stay consistent with this podcast and make sure at least one episode goes out every week, and I've managed to do that, but it has felt slow. When it comes to my growth. I haven't been as consistent as posting on LinkedIn as I intended to be when we started this podcast. I haven't been as consistent at posting on Instagram as I intended to be, podcast guesting, all those other things, and I've just had to remember I am in the sleep phase. This is a busy season in our lives. Right now as a family, I need to stay consistent to this one thing and see what happens and accept whatever happens. And the happy thing for me has been I've had little incremental wins where, man, it doesn't seem like anybody's listening to this, and someone out of the blue will reach out and say they've been listening to episodes which is so exciting to hear. You hope that your ideas are reaching people. You hope that the things that you want to share as a thought leader are landing with people that you hope to serve and hope to help. It can be hard to keep momentum going if you're not sure. But here's the thing, I hope you take away from this episode. There are people paying attention, there are people listening. You may not ever hear from them, and that needs to be okay. That's not the reason we're doing the work. We're doing the work, we're sharing the ideas, because that's who we are. That's how we want to show up and help. We do that with consistency, and things will naturally grow. I've seen it happen again and again. Your ideas matter and your voice matters. There are people out there who need exactly what you have to offer, exactly how you'll say it, but they need time to find you, and you need time to refine your message and build the credibility that will make them trust you when they do so when we look at this through the lens of the resident thought leadership system, consistency isn't really just about your core resonance. It applies to every single component of what you're doing, whether it's developing your content or building your central platform, implementing those connection strategies, refining your commercialization model, it all requires patient consistency to create breakthrough results. Leaders who create lasting impact that they can own aren't just the ones chasing the latest trends. They aren't pivoting constantly in search of faster results. They're the ones who understand that real influence is built through consistent expression of their authentic voice over extended periods of time. That's the thing I want you to keep coming back to, and keep coming home to consistent expression of your authentic voice again and again and again. One of my favorite clips, I relate all of this to singing quite often. One of my favorite clips I've seen online over the past few years is a clip someone stitched together of a pop star. Her name is chapel Roan. Your kids have probably heard of her. If you haven't. It's a clip of her singing one of her biggest hits, pink pony club at a, I think, at a local county fair. It's just her standing behind a keyboard, a little electric keyboard on a rickety looking stand in the middle of what looks like a parking lot, singing her song with a little portable speaker and a microphone. You can't see anyone there listening gathered around. There's just the person that's filming her, and she's singing in this little microphone at this little county fair. And then about 10 seconds into this clip, it cuts to chapel performing at Austin City Limits last year in Austin in front of a crowd of 10s of 1000s, 1000s and 1000s of people in Zilker Park in Austin, jumping up and down, singing along with her to that same song. And then it cuts back to her by herself, that little keyboard, and then again, to all the 1000s and 1000s of people singing along. They needed time to find her. They needed time for her song to reach them. And it's the same with your ideas. It takes time. It takes consistency, and it takes showing up at whatever version of the county fair with you, by yourself, with your little keyboard. 25:00 Sharing your message, singing your song, whatever that looks like, whether you're doing it online, sharing your ideas on social media, whether you're reaching out on LinkedIn, whether you're writing blog posts every week, whether you're creating podcast episodes, whether you're guessing on other people's podcast episodes. That showing up matters, and the thing to measure 25:22 is consistency over time, not response to what you think people should be responding to. 25:30 That growth. It's going to sleep, and then it's going to creep, and then it's going to leap. You've got to give it time. What I what I see thought leaders do when they abandon consistency because they think it's not working. It's the equivalent of what my kindergartner used to do when he would bring home bean sprouts in a cup. You can't see that the plant is growing, so you pull it up and look at it, see what's going on, and essentially slow down the growth of that poor little bean plant. Or if my friend Brooke had pulled up the seedling trees instead of leaving them alone so that they could have that time to sleep and creep and then leap, staying the course, doing the thing, being consistent, sharing what you know is important for someone to hear and measuring yourself in such a way, measuring your results in such a way that you can focus on lead measures instead of lag measures is the way forward. Because truly, truly, the leaders who create lasting impact are not chasing the latest trends. They're not pivoting constantly in search of faster results. They're the ones who understand that real influence is built through consistent expression of their authentic voice over extended periods of time. So I want to invite you this week to take an honest look at your own expectations and your commitment level to this. I'm going to do the same thing. Here's some some questions I want you to think about and potentially journal on, where have I been expecting results too quickly, and how might this be causing me to doubt strategies that are actually working if I give them time? What would it look like to commit to my current approach for a full year measuring progress through internal indicators as well as external metrics? Just a really quick aside, when I was a strategist at brand builders group and when I would teach this podcast power event and do strategy sessions for podcast power we would tell our clients not to look at download metrics until 100 episodes had been published. That's hard to do, but the lesson there is, you're not putting out the podcast to get downloads. You're putting out the podcast to get your voice out in the world, to get your expertise out in the world. So keep that in mind. What would it look like to commit to that current approach for a year to 100 podcast episodes measuring progress through internal indicators as well as external metrics, or just don't even worry about the external metrics, if that's not helpful. Question three, how can I better document and celebrate the small wins and incremental progress that might be easy to overlook. And then lastly, what stories am I telling myself about other people's overnight success that might be discouraging me from staying consistent with my own approach? Brene Brown says, in the absence of information, we make up a story, and nowhere is that more true than a situation like this. You don't have all the information for what brought someone to that overnight success moment. There's no such thing as an overnight success. There's years and years and years of work, years and years of preparation, years and years of being consistent. So don't tell yourself a story that isn't true about where someone else is compared to where you are. Examine those stories, because they're They're stories, and knowing that they're stories and knowing that you are writing a different story for yourself is really critical when it comes to this type of work, because the difference between where you are now and where you want to be isn't usually a different tactic or a different strategy. It's often just time and consistency with an aligned approach. Your voice matters, your ideas matter, but they need time to take root and grow. Just remember, first they sleep, then they creep, then they leap. Trust the process and don't give up during the sleep phase. In our 29:15 next episode, we're going to explore another dimension of core resonance, your natural expression mode. We're going to talk about how to identify the specific ways your voice carries furthest, how to amplify it with deliberate focus and consistency, rather than spreading yourself then across every possible platform. Thank you for joining me this week on own. Your impact. Just keep in mind, there are people out there who need exactly what you know exactly the way you'll say it, say it consistently in whatever way makes the most sense for you and how you love to show up. 29:49 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. 30:00 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.