I am not new to this world.

I enrolled in a high-ticket mastermind in 2009, was hired as the supporting coach for my coach’s next group in the second half of 2009 and the first half of 2010. And I offered my own mastermind group in 2010, though at $8,000 for the year, it was not exactly in the league of the going rates of $25,000, $40,000 a year or more.

When I first stepped into this world of high-end offers, and high-ticket masterminds, it was a giddy experience. I had plugged away for 11 years and built a nice, solid private practice including private clients and small group trainings. I had developed rock solid content and an original approach to messaging that was a welcome antidote to the traditional marketing messaging. I knew what I was offering, but I had no idea how to jump from $75,000 and into six figures (funny now, it seems like such a small step).

Like the good student I was, I bought into the high-end mastermind mystique. Staying at luxury hotels for our in-person retreats. Bonding with the other group members as we dreamed bigger and bigger about who we could be and what we could create. Expanding my sense of possibility. I watched my group mentor sell over a million from the stage in one afternoon at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas.

I imagined becoming like the women in this world. Thin and beautifully groomed. Shining on stage. Sharing their voices. Wanting people to be look up to me. Imagining how good it would feel if more people invested in me at those high levels.

I went full in. I raised the price of my introductory course, and gave everyone a short window to buy at the old price, telling them it was the last one I would be offering. I offered a six-month mastermind to my favorite private clients. I turned my four-week introductory course into an information product (remember those?) and launched that. I planned a live three-day event where I proudly offered my $8,000 mastermind.

I did end breaking six figures ($137,000 to be exact).

Some of what I did was hugely successful. But a lot of it wasn’t.

I made the most I had ever made from my introductory course, but the info product bombed, selling only five copies. I got six people for my six-month mastermind, but I struggled to sell spots in my live event, and ended up with nine people, including the people I’d comped from my six-month group and others who came in on a bring-a-friend ticket. We were a tiny pod in the huge ballroom I had rented.

I would have lost my shirt except I had the good fortune of having signed a contract with the hotel where I paid per person, with no minimum, instead of a flat fee for the conference room and for the meals they provided.

That fall, I was calling regularly to check my credit card balances to see if I had enough to pay for things as small as my airport shuttle.

But the live event helped me get five people into my year-long mastermind group, and I was okay.

I spent 2009 and some of 2010 traveling once a month or more, barely spending time with my eight-year old son. I was spending big on event tickets, and travel and lodging, and buying info products to help me learn to sell from the stage or charge what I was worth. I just knew that everything I spent would come back to me in greater revenue and greater success.

Many of the folks in the mastermind I was a member of ended the year disappointed, never having gotten clear enough on what they were offering to put together new programs of their own.

In January of 2010, the members of the mastermind I was the support coach for revolted and all but the two who had paid in full quit.

I loved the folks in my own mastermind group, and offered them my insights on how they could position themselves and what they could offer. What their powerful message could be. But somehow they weren’t able to get off the ground and launch their own offers and make the kind of better money I had implied they would.

I was exhausted and financially stretched. Despite having nearly doubled by income, I had tanked my profitability with all this optimistic spending on products and programs I didn’t even have the bandwidth to implement well.

Not only that, I had made most of my money with offers I didn’t want to continue offering. I didn’t have a sustainable business model. Fortunately, I love creating programs, offered a few new ones, and finally came back to the training I’d been offering before that was at the heart of my work.

By mid-2010, the bubble had burst for me.

I realized this world of high-ticket offer was a fairyland.

An illusory world where everything spins faster and faster and everyone reassures themselves and each other that it’s totally normal to charge $1000 an hour, if you can get it. That you’re doing people a favor by inviting them to take on credit card debt or take a mortgage on their homes in order to seize the opportunity to be part of the dazzling group you are assembling and work with you as their mentor. To live in a world where you don’t ask “what is the track record of this program?” or “what percent of people in your program get that result?”

Where skepticism is a sign of having a poor mindset or poverty mentality.

Where you hear glowing testimonials from the people who’ve succeeded, but you don’t ever get to hear from those who didn’t. Or know the proportions of each.

Where you don’t test and refine your programs, you build them while you offer them and hope they work out.

Where you have to keep up appearances because part of what you are selling is the fantasy of how great your life is.

It finally dawned on me that this wasn’t a world that reflected my values.

Those beautiful ladies on stage? They weren’t my role models. I heard more and more stories about the ugliness behind the pretty pictures. The failures. The anger. The burnout. This was no longer what I aspired to be.

I started to look for mentors who sold with less ick. Who valued creativity and originality and treated those who didn’t invest in their high-end programs with as much care and respect as those who did. Business owners who talked about humility, something I didn’t see much of in that high-ticket world. Who talked about the risk of charging more and not finding the clients you needed to fill your practice.

I slowed down.

I let go of trying to be a shiny lady on stage and focused instead on doing my best work in my small training and coaching groups. On doing my best work with my clients.

I had to put down so much of what I was taught in all those live events and information products so I could find my way to be in the world with integrity. So I could feel good about the work I did and about how I engaged with people before, during, or after they bought from me.

And it’s still taken me years to let go of some of the embedded values of that world: the exhausting, relentless pursuit of personal wealth, the urgency to produce and the urgency pushed on potential clients to buy, the worship of who makes the most money, the demand for more and more productivity. The insistence on monetizing anything and everything at your disposal. The refusal to look at collective or community impact.

As many of you know, life also gave me a lot of other things to focus on instead: my mom’s health, my son’s health, my own health. So I had a lot of time to reflect and almost no capacity to do much beyond serve my beloved private clients once I stopped leading groups.

I was drawn to this week’s virtual bootcamp because the promise was a new way to do a high-ticket group, one that created true connection and community. That was something I could get behind.

During the virtual bootcamp, I worked with one of the volunteer coaches on the pitch for a potential high-ticket program I might offer. I shared “I am starting an intimate group of fierce women coaches and consultants 45 and up, who are ready to ditch colonialist and capitalist values so they can step into being powerful, original thought leaders and share their voice with greater impact and reward.”

Guess which part of the pitch she didn’t like?

Yeah, she said I lost her at the “ditching of colonialist and capitalist values” and that I should just take that out.

But the truth is THAT is what I think liberates us to create our True work in the world. To do our Life’s Work in a nourishing and sustainable way. To be brave enough to reject models and systems that don’t work for us and don’t reflect our values.

And it’s hard because in that world it can feel like what they are teaching is the only way to succeed.

But it’s not.

You can make money in innovative ways with integrity.

I promise you.

To be continued . . .

Your copy – the words on your web page, your emails, or your social media posts – don’t just convey information about your offer.

Nope.

Those words are telling the world:

• Where you feel strong and where you feel weak
• How confident you are about what you bring to the table
• What brings you alive
• What you believe
• What you value
• Where you are confused
• What you are ready to own and claim about your work
• and where you are trying to people-please or fit in

Any piece of writing you put in the world potentially reveals what you are most passionate about and where doubt or fear may be clouding your communication.

The words, all together, convey energy. They convey your spirit.

Most copy writing training focuses on things like how juicy your headlines are, or if you can write “magic bullets”, or having good calls to action, and so on. Those are useful but they don’t really cut to the heart of your presence out in the world.

If your copy isn’t connecting with your audience the way you would like, there may be something off in your presence, in your energy, that is clouding the communication of the magic of your work.

When we look at the big picture of Trueing – of figuring out who we are at our core and designing our lives and businesses around that – we get pulled off our True by many things: confusion about our value, fear about whether the heart of who we are will be recognized and wanted, cultural pressure, and the pull to conform.

The same is true about our copy.

All those same forces can take the beautiful, fierce, and alive story we want to tell the world about what we do and clutter it up so that original energy gets clouded and lost.

That can look like:

• softening our message so it’s more palatable
• choosing a message that we think is more marketable but not really the message we want to share
• not having confidence in our message so trying to pile five or seven different messages into one piece of copy
• not recognizing which bits of what we are sharing are most potent and most alive

So what to do?

You don’t have to become an amazing copy writer overnight. Or spend six months developing and refining your message (though that is great work in the right context).

I have a quick and easy solution for you if you sense something is off in your expression in the world but you can’t quite put your finger on it.

Use my eyes and my heart and my sense of all things True.

I offer an Online Message Review where I’ll take your writing and do a deep and thorough analysis of what is working and what feels off.

This won’t be your typical copy writing feedback. It will focus on the power and clarity of your and your energy coming through on the page.

My goal (and my gift) is to help you see quickly what is already working, so you can do more of that. And lovingly point out where you might be holding back or not letting the full force of the power of your being out, so you can correct that.

My goal is to give you input that lets you quickly adjust your copy so more of you comes out on the page, and more of your right people can feel your spirit, and respond accordingly.

It’s not a copy course where you have to go through lessons, and complete assignments. It’s faster and easier than that.

The Online Message Review is just $300.

Consider it a loving kick in the pants and call to action for you to show up bigger and brighter and bolder than you are now.

You’ll get a detailed written report, a video summary of what I saw, and a 15-minute Zoom with me to ask any questions about both of those.

https://isabelparlett.com/online-message-review

If your online presence isn’t feeling like you, if it’s not showing the world all of you are, get your Online Message Review today and get on track to your bigger expression in the world.

Although I kept doggedly pursuing creative interests, I lost the sense of creative community support I had in high school. I struggled to find community, or support, or guidance, or a path into more interesting and expansive opportunities. I let other voices, outside voices, pull me away from the choices that were more directly connected to my creative longings.

My father’s dream had been to spend a year in Paris before college but he was called up to Oxford and I guess in that time and place you didn’t just say “no thanks, how about next year?”. So when I failed to get into my top choice schools (Yale, Harvard – where I was a legacy, and Brown), my parents proposed that I spend a year in Paris and try again the next year. I was only just 17, and they felt I could use another year to mature before starting college.

The truth was that I was feeling lost. Despite good grades and being in the top 10% of my class, I’d failed to get in to a prestigious college. A year in Paris sounded like an exciting thing to tell people I’d done, and I spoke good, if not fluent, French. And I would be fulfilling a dream of my father’s, which probably had a deeper pull on me than I realized, so I said yes.

It’s funny now to consider that my parents thought I was too young to go to college, but old enough to fly six thousand miles away from home and live alone in a foreign country for a year. In hindsight, it would have made more sense for me to spend the year at home, and get an internship at a theater or dance company in San Francisco and see if that was something I wanted to pursue.

But that didn’t fit the family script. My creative interests weren’t what my parents wanted to cultivate or encourage in me. So off to Paris I went.

I had a decent set up in Paris, living in the Latin Quarter with a friend of a friend of a friend of my mother’s. An oncologist who was gone a lot for work and wanted someone else in the house for company for her 16-year old daughter. I took classes most mornings in French Language through the extension of the Sorbonne, where I met tons of young people from other countries doing much the same thing I was.

Paris was beautiful and vibrant in all the ways that have made it the City of Light. But living there was a lonely effort. And a lot of my daily energy went to coping with the particular culture shock of not being able to have deeper conversations with the people I lived with due to my language limitations, and planning enough activity to keep me busy so that the loneliness wasn’t so heavy.

Soon after arriving, I found a dance studio across the River in the Marais. I signed up for ballet classes and tap classes, and probably jazz classes as well. I took as many as 10 classes a week but there was none of the community I had in high school and no opportunities to choreograph or perform. Just showing up to class with students I never got to know and teachers I never really connected with. My ballet teacher pushed me to force my turnout, and I hurt my knees. But I kept dancing because that was what I knew to do and who I knew myself to be.

Every week, I bought a little magazine called Paris Partout, I think, that listed all the cultural events happening throughout Paris that coming week: movies openings, theater, museum exhibits, and concerts.

When I wasn’t in French class in the morning, or dance class in the afternoon, I found free concerts at churches and radio stations and visited all of the museums that tickled my interest. I rode the subway but then more often the buses since I wasn’t in a rush and it helped me learn the layout of the city. I loved seeing old classic American films like Gilda or Casablanca that showed at small theaters in the 5^th Arrondissment on little cobbled streets near where I lived.

For comfort, I brought home loaves of warm pain de campagne from the local boulangerie and slathered the slices with butter. I bought the good swiss Nestle’s chocolate.

I didn’t really get along with Edith, the daughter in the apartment I lived in. She had a much older boyfriend who took up a lot of her time. She blasted the Eagles’ Hotel California over and over. We just didn’t have much in common.

I had a good friend Anne who lived outside of Paris who I saw every month or six weeks as she was madly studying for her baccalaureate degree. I made a few friends through my extension classes and we sometimes went to the movies or to a museum exhibit together, but never made a deeper connection. I made friends with a reporter who lived in the tiny former maid’s units on the top floor of our building.

I tried again with college applications and this time got into both Columbia and Barnard (though not Harvard and Yale).

The second half of my year, I sought out an acting class at the American Center, though it was conducted in French. I fumbled my way through a scene from the Importance of Being Earnest. I also took cooking classes at a school for girls from wealthy families and scored invitations from two of the girls to visit their families in Normandy and Bretagne. I learned to make amazing cakes and also less welcome dishes like stewed rabbit. Another family invited me to a week at their home in Provence, where they fed me local delicacies and drove me around to show me the famous sites.

I learned from my friend Anne to be a chic French woman. I traded my American clothes for sleek mini skirts and black pumps with clip on bows on the back, fishnet tops and cropped jackets. I grew my hair long and parted it on the side, and put on heavy makeup. I came home far more glamorous than I left. My French got so good that if I didn’t talk too much, I was sometimes mistaken for being a French woman.

I came home that summer a weird mix of triumphant about my new look, proud to talk about my glamorous year abroad, and anxious and depressed and afraid about what was next.

Though deeply uninspiring, my French dance classes left me at the top of my game. While home for the summer, I sank back into classes with my high school teacher Elvia, dancing out a song of deep heartbreak to an R&B song.

And then, too suddenly, I was off to New York for my freshman year as part of the first coed class at Columbia.

To be continued…

But I realized that my Trueing journey started before then, and that that big decision had everything to do with what had happened in high school and college.

In high school, I found myself. I found myself as a dancer, as a choreographer, and as an artist in a community of creative people.

In college, I lost the thread.

And I think that is true in our Trueing journeys. Some seasons bring us closer and closer to the core of who we are and some seasons see us spinning away from our real path. And we need both experiences to know what is really ours to do. And to recognize the forces that pull us away from our True.

I had always loved dance. But for a long time it was a hobby alongside other passions like horses and making chocolate chip cookies. I studied ballet from 10-12. I liked our funny curly haired teacher, and I was thrilled when I got into toe shoes. But I dropped dance when I got my horse Rosie.

In ninth grade, when we lived in England, my mom signed me up for a jazz dance class. My best friend Annika (another foreigner like me, half American and half Swedish) would walk to the train after school in Didcot, and take the train in to Oxford for the evening class.

I mostly remember warm ups to Marvin Gaye’s I Heard It Through the Grapevine and learning to do isolations, moving one part of your body at a time. It was a high point at a time that was challenging and stressful in so many ways.

When I got back to California and started 10^th grade, I was signed up for dance as my PE class. There was a popular teacher named Marcia who taught Modern Dance, but her class was full, so I was placed in the “other” class. At first, we had a little old lady who put us in a circle and taught us folk dances, but she suddenly disappeared, and instead we had Elvia, a tiny black woman from Panama with large eyes, who played Michael Jackson and R&B.

Eliva was as strict as could be for the technique portion of our class. Pushing us to build our arms and our core, to raise our legs higher.

But as soon as we moved to the choreographed part of the class, it was all about heart and expression and feeling the music. Unlike a lot of dance teachers, who might teach you a different short routine each week, Elvia would choreograph an entire song, and each week, we’d learn the next portion of the song, until we had the whole number down.

The songs she choreographed to were all about heartache and pain. Being alone, or having your heart broken. Finally, someone was giving us permission to feel as much and express as much of the most hidden and tender parts of ourselves. For three and a half minutes, laying our souls bare was all that mattered.

At some point, Elvia left the high school, but she taught classes in the evenings nearby and many of us migrated with her. At school, I took class with Marcia who was fine, but a little subdued next to the fire that was Elvia.

Our school offered something once a year called Dance Production. A group of chosen dancers would choreograph and perform individual numbers that together would make up a full-length dance concert.

At the end of 10^th grade, they held the auditions for the fall Dance Production. I was excited. I idolized the performers I knew who were part of the high school musicals, some of whom were becoming my friends.

We auditioned in random pairs, performing choreography we had been taught, and filling a few counts with our own choreography. I was paired with Monica, a serious, classically trained ballet dancer. And I forgot my choreography and had to improvise.

Still, I was hopeful. I was starting to feel like I was one of the better dancers in my class.

So when results were posted, I was crushed. Not only did I not get in, I got one of the lowest scores. And at least two girls I knew I was better than did get in.

So my junior year, instead of Dance Production, I was in Advanced Dance. And we got to perform one number that we put together as a group as part of the big Production. The choreography for my section was fun for me and I took the lead in our four person group. I could easily picture fun things we could do that would look cool onstage, doing a special kind of leap onstage, and kicking over each other’s heads.

Advanced Dance was right before Dance Production, so as our class wound down, the folks for the next class would come in. And I started getting great feedback. That I was a great dancer, that I should be in Dance Production.

I continued to work on my technique (Elvia taught Afro Latin Jazz Blues, and then ballet for my technique). And when auditions came around at the end of junior year, I easily got in.

My friend Kirk and I put together two numbers, one a duet to Hall and Oates’ You Make My Dreams Come True, and one to Led Zeppelin’s Immigrant Song, a group number that represented the sole survivor of the Apocalypse. Kirk didn’t have much dance training so he came up with the music, and with wild ideas. I was good at putting his ideas into clearer form and connecting the pieces together. We spent many an evening in my living room, pushing the furniture back, and trying out crazy combinations and laughing.

I had also worked up the courage to audition for the high school musical, even though I didn’t really sing or act. It came up first in the fall. I was in the chorus for Anything Goes, tapping and dancing as one of the Angels. On opening night, me and another dancer were downstage, maybe six inches from the edge of the stage, turning and spinning. I felt so at home. I knew what I was doing, I felt good in the spotlight.

Dance Production a month or two later was even better. In addition to my two numbers with Kirk, I was in a number of other pieces, sometimes with featured duets or small groups.  And our duet was a huge hit.

I felt, rightfully, like one of the stars of the show. That my creative ideas, and my performances, made the show as good as it was.

Second semester was nothing as grand. But there was a class called Dance Projects that collaborated with Concert Chorale. The Chorale was singing Benjamin Britten’s A Little Nonsense Now and Then. Kirk and I once again collaborated. We were inspired, having the group march in a line on their buttocks, or to have one dancer run in, circle around the rest, and run out again. Choreography was easy, creative musing and experimentation. For all my academic success, I don’t know that I had ever felt so capable at something, gifted. And I was good at choreography without any real training in it.

And it wasn’t just being in the shows. It was being part of the creative group. I had felt pretty isolated in junior high and high school. Different. And now I belonged. The shows weren’t just me. They were all of us working together to make something rare. I belonged in the hang out space by the side of the theatre building. I belonged at parties that came after the shows.

So when I say I found myself in high school, what I mean is that I discovered something vital about who I was. I discovered something I was good at. I felt alive and invigorated. I cared about what I was doing. I found a place I could shine easily. I knew without a doubt that my presence, and what came through me, made a difference.

I would have loved it for what it did for me alone, but I also saw that people were touched, moved, enlivened by what I had created and that meant a lot too.

In high school, I Trued without knowing that was what I was doing. I was Trueing by luck and by accident. By finding myself in the right place at the right time to unveil this part of me that had never had life before.

But then in college, I lost it.

But that is a story for another day.

Up to and through college I had a game plan. And the game plan was basically to study hard and get good grades. And it wasn’t really my game plan, it was my father’s game plan.

And like the good student I was, I followed the game plan reasonably well. I was a year ahead in high school. I went to an Ivy League school. Columbia, if not Harvard or Yale. I graduated from an honors program (though not with honors).

The problem was I had never given much thought to what I would do AFTER college. I was too busy trying to be the good student to give much thought to what my life would look like when I was done with school.

As I kid, I had sometimes fantasized about being in some kind of business. Of wearing a suit, and having a fancy office. But that fantasy never translated into an actual career path that I wanted to pursue.

I liked my major, psychology, well enough. But some part of me hesitated to become a therapist (one logical progression) or go on to grad school and more research.

I could go to law school but I wasn’t interested in law, even if I was good at arguing.

The problem was that the things I really loved weren’t about school.

I loved dance. I’d gotten good. Been a bit of a star in high school. Choreographed and performed. Onstage had felt like home.

I loved singing too, but didn’t have much musical talent. Just enough to be in Glee Club my last three years of college.

I was mesmerized by my friends who were actors. How bright they shined on stage. How full of life they were.

In high school, I’d found myself as a performer. That I could be that bright light too.

My gap year in Paris, I took 7-10 dance classes a week. But my father disapproved mightily. He’d sent me a letter on my 18^th birthday saying “God didn’t give you the body to be a dancer. But he gave you a brain and I hope you’ll use it.”

My freshman year in New York, I took classes at the Alvin Ailey dance school.

My sophomore year at Columbia, I joined a dance program at Barnard, across the street. The program included five technique classes a week, and on Fridays a kind of symposium where we analyzed elements of dance and played with choreography. Graduates of the program often went on to internships at New York City dance companies. Second semester, my teacher pulled me aside and said she thought that I had what it takes to be a professional modern dancer.

But then I pulled a muscle in my back, and had to stop dancing for six weeks.

I didn’t go to the doctor. I didn’t know if I would get past the injury.

I felt vulnerable pursuing something that demanded so much from my body. I felt foolish trying to do something that had such a limited lifespan.

And I didn’t know if I wanted to spend all day every day in class and rehearsal.

Even if I did get into a dance company, then what? How much could my body take? How long would that last? And then what would I do?

So I quit dance completely.

Acting was something I wanted to be able to do but didn’t know if my talent for dance translated into a talent for acting. I’d started to dabble in acting, so when I gave up dance, I shifted my creative dreams to being an actor.

I took my first acting class in Paris, at 18. But at the time I was there, Columbia had no theater department. The only options for acting were two classes in the school of General Studies (I took one my freshman year and one my junior year) and student club productions.

I did Guys and Dolls freshman year, in the chorus with a dance solo, and HMS Pinafore my sophomore year, in the chorus again, which didn’t really feed my soul.

I don’t think I was cast in anything I auditioned for my junior year, though in acting class we were creating and rehearsing an original piece melding Shakespeare, poetry, and The Three Sisters (Chekov).

My senior year I had two small parts in Play It Again, Sam, and a small part in an original one act based on the story of Noah called If You Can’t Swim.

The director of Play It Again, Sam told me he thought I had the most talent of anyone in the cast. But that’s all the proof I had of having some potential.

So when graduation loomed my senior year, I didn’t know what I was going to do. Or who I wanted to be.

I didn’t know if I would stay in New York, or return home to my parent’s house in California to figure out my next steps.

All around me my friends were applying for jobs – entry level stuff at arts organizations. A secretary at the Philharmonic. An associate editor at a publishing company. An assistant at New York City Opera.

I couldn’t do it.

I literally couldn’t do it.

I couldn’t imagine agreeing to show up in an office every day to put in my hours doing something that wasn’t meaningful. I couldn’t imagine a job that would make me want to wake up and spend eight hours a day doing it.

I couldn’t open a paper and look for a job much less apply for one. I wouldn’t have known what to look for. It felt like some part of my soul would die if I signed up for a nine to five job.

It’s not that I didn’t need money. My parents had informed me they expected me to be fully financially self-sufficient within six months.

I just knew that there was something important about this moment.

Something I needed to see or recognize. Something I needed to seize.

I met a boy I liked and I had a new group of friends who were all sticking around, and that felt like reason enough to stay in New York.

This felt like my last chance.

My last chance to find out who I could be as a performing artist. To feed that part of myself that was well fed in high school, and barely kept going in college.

But instead of finding myself as an artist in the smaller pond of a college program, I would be finding out in the wilds of New York.

So that was it.

I would stay in New York and pursue a career as an actress.

I had very little training. I knew nothing about the industry.

I had very little proof that I had talent or could get professional work.

But I had a dream of living a wildly creative life around other creative people.

My father always said the greatest blessing in life was to love what I do for a living.

And this seemed like a living I could love.

It wasn’t easy or straightforward. It wasn’t a fairytale or a Hollywood discovery story.

I made my money at first temping as a receptionist because I could never get my typing speed up high enough. Some of those early months, I made $600 a month, and $450 went to rent on the shared apartment I had found around the corner from my friends.

I lived on pasta and saved money to go to bars and clubs to hear the bands our friends played in until the wee hours.

Slowly a few pieces came together.

I got hired to teach standardized prep for nearly triple what I made working as a receptionist. And then I got hired to write and develop course materials for the test prep company. My coworkers were fellow actors and writers and musicians so work there was both freelance and fun.

One of my test prep materials development coworkers told me about an organization that trained actors to think like business owners. I joined and started to learn how to map out where in the industry I wanted to work and who I needed to know.

A group of us at that organization decided to put on an industry showcase based on a retelling of Grimm’s Fairytales and I ended up writing some of the original pieces as well as performing my own monologue in it. Rapunzel dreaming of cutting off her long hair. Snow White complaining about the dwarves.

Another coworker at the test prep company cast me as a 13-year old in a one-act he was directing at a prestigious theater. No money but great on my resume.

I mostly didn’t make money acting. And I mostly didn’t make even $20,000 a year.

And I had all the angst most 20 year olds have to work through. But there were ways I was happy. I was always doing something interesting.

I got a makeover and learned how to do my make up and dress with more style. I started leading evenings at the organization for actors to meet industry professionals. I knocked on agents’ doors with my headshot and resume.

At the Actor’s Information Project. I joined a class called RISK where we were asked to take on an “impossible” project and pursue it for six weeks. I raised money to try to buy the rights to my favorite book (Wet Paint by Gwynn Popovac) as a film project I could star in. I reached out to well-known film directors. I handed my packet to actors I’d want to be in the production with me at the stage door of the Broadway theater where they were performing. I drove to the Yosemite area to meet the author Gwynn Popovac and discuss the project with her.

I didn’t succeed. ABC was reaching out to option the book at the same time, and the author wisely chose to go with them. But getting so close, actually being considered alongside ABC, felt like an affirmation.

I found a funky little acting school where I could get classical theatre training for a fraction of the cost of a big acting school. I did scenes for showcases. One of my teachers dubbed me a major talent.

I got my first paid job at a little theater outside of Pittsburgh, playing a hippie dippy sister in a play called Belles.

I got cast in an independent film with the promise of money (deferred pay contingent on the producers making a profit). I got strangled on screen under a overpass in Queens. I lay in a body bag in a real morgue.

I got a four and a half month gig at a Renaissance Faire as a mud beggar, spoofing Shakespeare and Greek Tragedy three times a day in a mud pit, and wandering the Faire grounds improvising with the other actors.

Despite getting paid work, I started to feel the most I would ever do was get small roles or understudy roles at regional theaters. I was tired of moving in and out of New York as my acting work was nearly always out of town.

I was finally starting to want more stability in my housing and in my income. I turned down the chance to go back to the Renaissance Faire.

The Actor’s Information Project had career coaches, and those coaches became very early adopters in the coaching industry, and I followed them, echoes of my psychology major, thinking that coaching would be a better support job for my acting career.

And then I blew a deadline for a group audition for summer theater (and therefore my chance to work that summer).

I decided to backburner acting to focus on coaching, and before long I realized that I was done. That I was a better coach than I was an actor, and that coaching had more potential for fulfillment and good income than acting did.

I wasn’t sad or discouraged when I quit.

I felt done. Complete.

Pursuing acting led me all kinds of amazing places. I learned how to feel my feelings. I learned how to dress and present myself to look my best. I learned to think like a business owner, to map my goals, and figure out my finances and market myself. I took risks and knocked on doors to try to get where I was going. I was part of beautiful, creative projects. I studied things I loved, like Shakespearean Verse Technique. I got to do scenes and showcases and plays I was proud of. I gave good performances.

I don’t regret a minute.

Until I graduated from college, I was following someone else’s plan. This was the first time I listened and chose something for me. Chose knowing that it would upset or disappoint my father. Knowing there was no guarantee I would succeed.

But knowing it was the right ride for me.

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.