Does some part of you wish that you could just nail your message and be done with it?

I’m not sure that’s useful or realistic.

Trueing your work is a lifetime process.

As long as you are living and learning and growing and evolving, guess what? Your message will too.

What you can say today with your whole heart and being will probably remain true and vital.

But what you’ll be able to say two or three or five years from now may be more rich and complex.

I don’t think your message fundamentally changes. But you continue to evolve the heart of what you are here to say.

What’s nice about this attitude to your message is that it keeps you humble.

It keeps you curious and looking.

Your message is a living, dynamic thing. Something you have a responsive and intimate relationship with.

Just as your friendships don’t lock in and stay static, nor does your message.

Somewhere along the line, there may be a moment where the life starts to dip out of what you are saying. Where it becomes not quite enough, or not quite dialed in right.

And then the cycle begins again.

What is true? What is not true? Where is the aliveness?

Some of my clients live for a while in that space between what they can say today, and what they feel and sense is coming down the pike.

I don’t think we can rush or force the next evolution of our message.

But we can get help looking at the pieces, playing with the language, and considering what rings true.

That’s what I do. I have clients who have worked with me eight years, ten years, twelve years. When they cycle back, we pick up the conversation. We figure out what wants to be said without losing touch with everything they’ve articulated before.

Your message evolves through exposure to the real world. Through you living. Through you showing up and sharing. Through you having conversations with your clients. Through seeing what resonates with them, what most helps them shift.

It’s an ongoing dance. You are rooted in yourself and what you know.

And every experience you have shapes you further and adds to what you know.

And over time, a new version of your expression comes forward.

Too often I see people measuring the success of their message by how people respond. By how many people say they like the message. Or how many people opt in for the e-book, or how many people sign up for the program.

Those are important. Of course they are important.

But something gets lost when you make those your measures of success.

I want you to measure your success by how true you are being to yourself.

I want you to measure your success by the degree of rightness you feel when you right and speak.

I want you to be able to look at your website or your latest blog post and say “wow, this is me, this is EXACTLY what I want to be saying to the world.”

I want you to know undoubtedly that when someone says yes or no to you it’s because they got fully who you are and what you bring to the table. No hiding. No appeasing. No soft pedaling. No dancing around things.

Sometimes we don’t get the cookies and the yeses and the pats on the back when we first land on our real message.

That’s because we might be hanging out in the wrong crowd. Or because  people are shocked because we are showing up differently. Or because something we are saying is provocative and uncomfortable.

But it’s only when we show up in that full color that we not only connect, but we connect with the right people for the right reasons. Believe me, I’ve had clients who have no trouble getting people to show up for the wrong things, for the work they don’t really want to be doing.

We’ve got to get to that rightness first. To that sense of being on point and on message.

We might not do it perfectly at first. We might have the right message but rough edges in how we say it.

But when we keep saying the right message, as best we can, over and over, those rough edges get smoothed out. We see the better way, the right entry point, we find the turn of phrase.

So if we are patient, and we focus first on the aliveness we feel when we are telling the story we are here to tell, that’s where we start.

To me, there is a fulfillment in that that is unmatched by anything else. I’m here for a reason. I’m alive. I have a voice. I am using it.

And the more we do that, and the longer we do that, then we start to get the yeses, and the cookies, and the pats on the back. From the right people.  For the right things.

If you are going to step out in the world and show up in your full glory, writing and speaking your Words on Fire, it helps to assume that people care about what you have to say.

It helps you open up your mouth.

It helps you take up space.

It helps you keep going.

Is it true? Is it absolutely true that every single human cares what you have to say? Of course not.

But you know, it’s useful to believe they do.

Or at least, it’s useful to believe that ENOUGH people care about what you do that you keep showing up. You keep writing and speaking. You keep offering what you know, and offering what you offer.

I promise you, if you are a sensitive and good-hearted human, the things you know to say matter. The things you know to say are going to be useful to other humans.

The things that come from your belly? The things that are borne out of your lived experience, good and bad?

Those have value and I promise you someone out there is going to care that you said it.

So think of that when you feel shy or hesitant.

Who out there is waiting for you to speak up?

Who out there is wanting someone to say what you have to say in just the way you say it so something can change in their world?

Who out there needs your words like plants need water?

It’s a sweeter path if you believe people care about what you have to say. It feeds your commitment to keep refining your message, and to keep sharing your message.

And you know the beautiful thing?

The more you show up and write and speak, the more it will become true.

That’s because the people who resonate with your message will move in, will move closer. And the ones who don’t get it, they’ll start to move away.

Come on out here. We’re waiting for your voice to join the chorus.

Sometimes we have unrealistic ideas of messaging. We think an hour here or there and boom, we’ve got it.

That’s not what I’ve experienced or seen with my clients.

It can take a minute to dial your message in right.

Depending how sensitive, complex, and nuanced a world you live in, it can take a while to sort through all the pieces and parts of you and bring them together into a cohesive message.

It can take a while to feel into who you are here to serve and who you most want to bring your magic to.

It can take a while to experiment with the focus and theme of what you are sharing with the world.

And it can take a moment to refine the language so it’s clear and it’s simple and it lands.

To be honest, a lot of the reason business owners don’t have a solid message is because it’s messy, hard work and it can be frustrating when you aren’t there yet. Most people who take my message development trainings confess that without the structure of the course, they wouldn’t have hung in there with it.

We live in a world that wants quick answers and quick fixes. We start to think getting our message should be quick, should be easy. And then when it isn’t, we think something is wrong with us.

I think it’s better to think of it this way.

Your messaging is your master work, your masterpiece.

It’s the culmination of all your lived experience and wisdom distilled into something another human can digest without having to walk the path you walked.

So it’s not going to jump out in a half-hour or in three weeks.

My Words on Fire message development training is a six-month program. The first three weeks, we dial in the core message (with help and guidance, it goes faster). And then we expand from the core message to the core wisdom you carry. And then we figure out how you unfold the story of that to someone who hasn’t heard it before. And then we can start creating that Coherent Public Presence.

You need time.

You need time to bring up all the bits that need to be included. You need time to write long and explore what wants to be said. You need to time to write stuff that is messy and incomplete and even off base. You need time to keep circling around and asking “is this right? Is this true?”

And yes, there is a moment it all comes together. Where the pieces line up and fall into place and you get that inner affirmation “yes, this is it!”

To me the greatest tribute I get from clients is when they look at the words I’ve helped them pull together and they say, without question, “this is me, this is the message I want to bring to the world.”

So, “Isabel”, you say, “I don’t know if I can take that long.”

Here’s the deal.

You don’t wait until your message is perfect to be out in the world.

You stand up and say what you can say today, knowing what you have to offer is already beautiful.

You stand and speak and write knowing that in the speaking and writing you’ll learn more about what wants to be said.

And then you commit to doing the work. To holding and working with that message until it rings true. To not stopping until you feel in your bones that it’s dialed in right.

And if you need it, and you probably will need it, to getting help from someone who can hear you.

Who can hear all the parts of you. Who can point out what shines and what falls flat. Who can help you hone your own sense of what’s vibrant and alive and what’s inauthentic. Who can help you weave those parts together.

This is your life. You only get so much time to show up and share what you know.

Start today.

Let it be imperfect.

And keep doing the work to bring it home.

You only have so much energy in a given moment, in a given day.

And you can either use that energy to manage people’s perception of you or you can use that energy to show up and say what you are here to say.

Look, getting backlash for showing up as who you are is real.

My clients have over the course of a lifetime been smacked, insulted, shunned, and shamed for it.

So when I say show up as who you are, I don’t mean it as a happy inspirational meme.

There can be costs. Repercussions.

It’s natural and right that we want to protect ourselves, particularly the most tender and vulnerable parts of who we are. And we should take protective action when we are in real danger.

But, if you can discern that the cost of showing up and speaking up is NOT your bodily safety or the wholeness of your being, consider if you can take bigger risks to be seen and heard.

If you can risk the discomfort of disapproval. Of disagreement. Of criticism or judgment.  If you are willing to risk having people think you are stupid, or wrong, or unhelpful. Or selfish or self-centered.

If you can do that enough that you can start to feel in your body and hear with your ears when your voice is true and when it’s muddied or modified. Dumbed down to be more appealing.

There is a place where your language comes alive.

Where what you say breaks through the monotony of what everyone else is saying and how they are saying it. Where something you say strikes a chord that wakes people up, that creates that frisson of awe and delight that opens up something new in their world.

Your job is to figure out what needs to be said.

To figure out what is YOURS to say and how to say it so it makes sense.

And then to have the courage to say it.

One of my clients does deep, shamanic work with her clients. Part of her message is talking about what changes in life when you tap into danger, into wildness. “You can’t say that!” she was told by a business mentor. “People don’t want to hear that! That will scare people off!”

Sometimes that voice is internal. “People don’t want to hear how their worlds might get turned upside down when they work with me!” or “I can’t talk about my struggles with depression, clients won’t have faith in me.”

We underestimate the power of those “dark” experiences. They way they shape us. And they way they alter how we show up when others walk through darkness.

The work that comes through us is shaped by  the challenging experiences we’ve had.

The places we’ve been laid low, the ways in which we have been humbled.

The ways in which we may have been ground down to our very bones, letting go of everything that no longer matters.

It’s not just that there is value in our speaking hard things.

There is beauty in our speaking hard things.

There is nourishment in our speaking hard things.

There is redemption in making those unspeakable parts of our journey part of the dialogue of our work.

I am NOT talking about the self-conscious, faux-vulnerable social media post designed to make you relatable. I’m not talking about a rags to riches story.

You don’t even have to share the details of what your journey was.

But allow the shaping force of those difficult experiences to change your course.

Being someone who has been to the underworld is something to be proud of.

Owning those experiences and making them part of who you are is hard work, but worth it.

Being someone who can stand with someone who is going through their own dark night is a rare gift.

Don’t mute your voice because what comes out might be dark, or hard, or tender, or painful.

To speak from loss, or trauma, or despair is an art.

The problem with most marketing training is that it teaches us to try to get into the heads of our potential clients and tell them we’ll give them what we think they want.

And while there is absolutely, absolutely a place to know and understand and name what our people want, if you aren’t first grounded in what you are here to say, it’s a slippery slope.

The moment we start to slip away from what we are here to say, from what we know to be true, and start to alter our message to be palatable or hooky or marketable, we start to give away our power.

It’s as if we are saying, without realizing it, “who you think I am is better than who I actually am.”

It’s as if we are affirming, “I’ll be who you want me to be so you like me, and if somewhere down the road I can show up as I really am, great.”

Don’t wait.

Let people know who you are right now.

Don’t play mind games with yourself thinking “people want this thing, not what I do.” Or “maybe if I say my work is about x, more people will raise their hands, say yes, and pay me.”

I want you to be paid.

But I want you to be paid to be you, in your full glory.

I want you to be paid for doing that thing you do. Which people won’t know about or understand if you bend yourself into a pretzel trying to sound like what you think they want you to be.

By trying to force your square ped into their round hole.

I get it.

It’s a primal human thing to want to be seen, to want to be liked, to want to be valued.

But the moment we get that at the expense of the expression of who we are, we are lost.

There is a wonderful poem by David Wagoner called Lost. It begins:

Stand still. The trees ahead and the bushes beside you

Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,

And you must treat it as a powerful stranger, Must ask permission to know it and be known.

Wherever you are is called Here.

Stand still in the fullness of who you are. Say the things that are dying to come through you. Speak what you know is true that resonates with every fiber of your being.

That’s your source of power.

Once you are rooted in that, you can meet your people where they are. You can speak their language and then invite them into your world.

But if you start there, you will be lost.

Sometime we get a little nuts trying to get our words right.

“Should I say use or utilize?”

“Am I inviting people to make a pivot or reach a milestone?”

“Am I offering support or am I offering guidance?”

I’m a big nerd, so of course I LOVE these questions.

For years, I was known as the Word Lady or the Language Lady. And it’s a title I’ll still accept.

But more and more I realize, it’s the words, but it’s really about much, much more than the words.

Words are the access point. Words are the portal.

Words aren’t the point.

Words are the practical thing we can play with that creates a channel for our energy and our presence to come into the world in its full force and power.

When we write about our work, we are challenged to COMMIT to something (unlike speaking where we can endlessly edit and amend what we say).

When we consider the words we use, we consider the idea behind those words, and the energy behind those ideas.

When we play with words, with the rhythm and tone of the words, we dial in to the frequency of what we bring to the world so it comes out more cleanly, more directly, with more signal and less noise.

So my goal isn’t to get my clients to say just the perfect things every time they open their mouth.  Or to say the same thing the same way every time. Or to have perfect web copy. I want them to have such a loving, intimate relationship with their work that they can open their mouths and speak and be pretty confident that what comes out is going to be on point.

I don’t want my clients to agonize over every word on their web page. I want them to develop a strong enough sense of who they are here to be in the world that they develop an internal sense of when the words are good enough.

When we can’t use unlimited words to say what we do, we start to think harder about the words we do use.

And it’s more that act of choosing. That moment of “this, not that”, that process of sifting and sorting through the options to locate what rings true that changes who we are.

That changes how we show up.

That’s why we work on our words.

The words become the channel for the full force of the work that wants to come through us. The words become the channel for the bigger identity we need to inhabit to bring that work forward.

Principle #1: Your access to power is proportional to how true you are to yourself, to the work that wants to come through you, and to the people you are called to serve.

I know Power can be a loaded word.

But ultimately, I think most of us do want Power. That ability to show up in the world in our full Mojo, in the full force and power of our being, and to be able to direct that energy to support and heal and transform other humans.

So much of what we invest in in our businesses are things we think will give us more power. Branding. New photos. Marketing  guidance. Business coaching.

Whenever I want something, I am always interested in the biggest, broadest change I can make that ripples out to everything else.

To focus on the things that when we change, change everything.

So what is the Source of your Power?

What is it that allows the fullness, the depth, the richness, the complexity of who you are to come out in the world?

It’s the quality of your Presence, your Energy. The Potency of how you show up when you show up.

That will always, always, always be a more lasting, sustainable source of Power than manipulative marketing tricks, exaggerated claims, or the leveraging your likeability or authority.

When you show up in the world in ALL your glory, no parts of you left behind, like a channel for the energy and presence you are to flow through, that’s when you have impact.

That’s when people not only HEAR you, they FEEL you.

Your expression in the world lands. It moves. It makes a difference.

Listen, we live in a noisy world.

There is NO shortage of folks writing and speaking and putting out what they know.

We have blog posts, and social media, and podcasts, and YouTube videos. We have NO shortage of platforms from which we can express our unique access to Universal Wisdom.

So there is NO shortage of places you can express yourself.

Where we get sideways is when we muffle and mute ourselves. When we steer a few degrees sideways because some part of our brain decided that was more likeable, acceptable, or marketable.

And the moment we go sideways, the full force and power of our being dims. If half our energy is going sideways, there is a lot less available to go out into the world. Our light and intensity  starts to dim. We start to sound more and more like everyone else.

There is an art to finding your voice, to developing its expression.

But it’s the thing if you invest in, will pay off in the Power and impact of EVERYTHING else you do.

So they can write web pages, and emails, and blog posts, and prepare videos or design programs that feel real and rich and true.

And sometimes as we’re working on a piece of writing, a client gets stuck.

I was working this week with a client on a Story. We’d written a main story already, the Story of the collective work she does that is offered through classes and trainings.

She wanted to write a second Story about the work she does with private clients.

So how to write a Story wasn’t new.

But as we talked through the content of her private-client focused Story, she spoke up.

“I hear what you are saying, Isabel, and it makes sense. I hear the words but I’m not following you.”

So we paused. And these pauses matter.

What burbled up is that she’s not sure she wants that many private clients. Maybe not any.

And that what was calling to her much more strongly was to create a group program where she could have more direct engagement with the folks who currently attend her classes and trainings.

So we shifted her focus to that.

For you, that stuckness might be something different.

It might be a fear that you’ll draw too many clients too you and get overwhelmed.

It might that the voices of other teachers and coaches are too loud, and instead of writing what you know and feel, you’re trying to postiion it right.

It might be you decided that it’s not lucrative enough to pursue the clients you really want to serve.

Or some part of you still questions if what you offer has enough value.

Can you feel into what’s beneath any stuck you have around writing?

In my twenty plus years working with people on their communication, their expression in the world, what I’ve seen is that pretty much everyone is a great writer when they are lined up with what they most want to say in the world.

Pretty much everyone has great things to say. Deep, powerful, important things to share that would open up worlds for the people they want to work with.

It’s just a question of getting lined up with that so the work and the words come through. Naming what the work is, being precise about how  to express it so it rings true.

And then it can flow.