So there is a nuance here I want to explore.

We don’t find our Transcendent Message as long as we are worried about what to say that will sound good.

But that doesn’t mean when we write and speak out in public, in the world, that we take no consideration of who we are speaking to or what matters to them.

Here’s how I parse it.

As long as we are worried about how we sound or what people will think, we can’t find the richest, deepest, truest message that we are here to share. Our concern keeps us from diving into the nooks and crannies where our funkiest, most alive expression lives. We discard what is powerful because it scares us or embarrasses us or we’ve had some trauma that makes it feel unsafe to be seen and heard that clearly.

It’s only when we put that aside that we can start to really hear ourselves, to notice what is true, and to embrace the possibility of more fully being THAT.

So we have to start our message work, and Book of Language work, stepping away from what other people want, what other people think, and what other humans have dictated is valuable.

And the truth is, once we find that message, we could go out in the world and write and speak from that place. That is what some of my clients do.

But there is another level of magic, and it’s the magic that happens when the depth and power of what you know meets the yearning and desire of other humans.

And that’s the place where what others want and need, what they might pay money for, comes in.

And we neither want to ignore that information or drop what we know to align with it.

What we want is to do a beautiful weaving of what we understand is wanted and what we know is possible. We want to honor those desires (hopefully the way we honor our own) and yet tell no false stories. We want to share a promise of what is possible that feels true, honest, and grounded.

How do we do that?

One of the skills I teach in my Words on Fire training is a skill I call Bridging. And it’s exactly that, the meshing of what we know our people want with the deeper understanding we carry of what makes that feeling and experience possible.

It’s a language skill but it’s also a perspective skill.

So Bridging requires those two distinct elements: a deep connection to what we are here to say and share that comes from our lived experience and not our desire to please, and a sweet sense of what the people we want to serve want and need and care about.

I don’t hear a lot about this, but I find it helpful to make a distinction between your private, grounding, centering language and the language you use with your audience.

Your private language is the language you use to drop into yourself, to come home to your understanding of who you are and what you bring into the world. It’s the language that makes you go, “right, I remember, this is why I am here on the planet.”

Your private language might be perfectly good for public use, but it’s good to let the raw, unfiltered expression of who you are live somewhere on a page where you can go back to it. In fact, it’s powerful to use that private language daily to bring yourself back into clarity about the difference you are here to make.

Your public language then is your private language filtered through your understanding of what is relevant to other humans, to the humans you want to support. It’s your private language delivered with thought and care to other humans you want to connect with.

But we never get to the richest public language until we are willing to detour and develop the most potent private language possible.