Own Your Impact

I believe that when your value is obvious, sales get easier, and when it isn't, sales get harder than they should be. Most of the experts I work with are not short on value. It is getting lost somewhere between what they are capable of delivering and the way they describe it. My guest this week is Tasha Randle, a marketing and brand strategist who helps people who are exceptional at what they do,...

I believe building an audience is never an "if you build it, they will come" situation. We wish it were, and when you are the face of your business, it really is not. In the middle of September I was walking through the town square in Franklin, Tennessee, in 95 degree heat and heavy humidity, when I passed a really amazing singer sitting in the shade with a guitar and a speaker, busking. Just sout...

I believe the thing that makes a Transformational Guide so good at the work is the same thing that makes the work so hard to sell. The transformation happens inside a conversation, and if you weren't in the room for it, it is really hard to describe. This week is a first for the show. Instead of one guest I have two, and all three of us share the same primary archetype. Danielle Bornowski is the f...

I believe most of us already have the diagnosis. What stands between you and getting unstuck is almost never another framework, and it is almost always the deliberate decision to run the one you already have on yourself. Last week I was in Nashville for the StoryBrand Your Business Live workshop. I have been a certified StoryBrand guide for about ten years, and for three of those years I worked in...

I believe you have already built the process you are trying to build. Not the book or the framework itself, but the way you make things, and you have probably run it several times in several different mediums without ever stopping to give it a name. My guest this week is David Peck. David is a designer who has spent twenty years in fashion and owns a boutique in Houston, and before any of that the...

I believe the impact you have is the direct product of the decisions you make . It isn't given to you, it isn't discovered, and nobody awards it, which means the whole thing starts with you deciding, and then deciding again after that. This show has been called Own Your Impact for a year and a half and I have never once sat down and said what the title actually means. Dolly Parton died this week,...

I believe the thing you are built to do is the thing that will feel most exposing to do in public. Not because you are bad at it, but because when it is your strongest signal there is nothing else in the room to stand behind. My guest this week is Mark Leruste, a storytelling and leadership communication expert, a guest lecturer at INSEAD, the host of The Unconventionalists, and the author of Glow...

I believe the material you teach matters far less than the precision you bring to it. Your voice is as unique as your fingerprint, and that is what makes the work yours, whether you wrote the song or someone else did. There is a moment I hear constantly in my work. Someone is describing their expertise, walking me through how they actually help people, and then they stop partway through to explain...

I believe some of the best advice you will ever receive can still be the wrong advice for you to take. Not because it is bad advice, but because it was built for a different kind of wiring than yours. This week I am talking with Kelsa Dickey, a financial coach who has been doing this work for about 17 years. She started as a financial advisor, left that world because the part of money her clients...

You are not out of ideas. You're just not sure where to put them. For the past few weeks I have been doing something slightly strange on client calls. I have been opening the junk drawer in my office, second drawer down, and showing people what is inside it. A marching band pin from 2022. A crystal someone gave me. Bruno Mars and Hello Kitty stickers I stood in a very long line for. It looks like...

I believe the room you're most afraid to walk into might be the room you were actually built to lead. And I believe the proof of that is rarely a mystery, it's usually sitting in your own history, waiting for you to notice the pattern. That's the story my friend Dustin Riechmann, founder of 7Figure Leap, brought to this episode. Dustin's primary archetype is Experience Facilitator, and his raw sco...

You cannot help the people you're meant to help if they can't find you. And the visibility that actually carries your work has to come from your own signal, not from standing close to someone else's light. This episode is different from most. I'm not teaching a framework or walking through a client's transformation. I'm telling my own story, one I almost waved off as not worth telling, about the d...

If something isn't working in your thought leadership, the explanation most people reach for is effort. They assume they need to try harder, show up more consistently, or commit more fully to the format someone told them would work. What they rarely consider is that the format itself might be the problem. Tricia Rose Burt is an award-winning storyteller who spent years on stages with The Moth, tra...

I believe getting clear on who you are and being able to hear yourself from the outside are two entirely different things — and the second part requires other people. You can do all the inside work in the world, and you will still need a room to show you what you can't see from in there. Last episode I told you I was heading to Craft and Commerce and I was going to try something — I'd been practic...

I believe the most powerful voices in any room are never the loudest ones. They're the ones who know their resonance well enough to carry it through the door and trust that it will land for the people it's meant to reach. This episode is built around a concept I call felt resonance, and it starts with me describing a 20-year-old video of me singing at a vocal beauty boot camp. In that clip, you ca...

I believe the experts who have the most to give are often the ones giving the least publicly. Not because they don't care, but because they care too much about their integrity to risk being mistaken for someone hollow. This episode is about a failure mode I see constantly in the work I do with experts, consultants, and thought leaders. I call it the Humble Hero Trap. It's the pattern of backing aw...

Freedom is not always the gift we think it is. The open field — every direction available, no fences, no paths — is where the most talented people freeze. What actually gets you moving is an edge to push against and a direction to commit to. At 22, teaching eighth graders in Columbus, Ohio, I gave my students total creative freedom on a songwriting project — any style, any key, any length — and ev...

The room you practice in should resemble the room you perform in. A thought leader does not build for one person — they build for a room. So at some point, the room is where the real development has to happen. There is a belief most people have absorbed without examining: one-on-one is the premium option, and group is the discount version. The expensive tier is bespoke, VIP, the real thing. The gr...

Your intellectual property is not something you invent before you start. It is something that emerges while you are already doing the work — and the difference between experts who build powerful frameworks and experts who stay stuck waiting for their big idea is not intelligence or creativity. It is attention. There is a widely held belief about how thought leadership gets built: first you create...

The most dangerous obstacles in building a thought leadership business are not the ones that fail loudly. They are the ones that keep working well enough to justify continuing. This episode starts with a confession. A little over a year ago, I left a full-time role I had held for years — work I was genuinely good at, work I was proud of, work that other people valued enough to invite me back to in...

The archetype assessment is not a sorting hat. It is a compass. And a compass tells you where to begin, not what you are allowed to become. Something has been coming up on strategy calls and in DMs, and I want to address it directly. People take the assessment, feel that first wave of relief — that moment of finally being seen — and then turn to the archetypes they did not score high in and start...

A framework does not become real until someone holds you accountable to living it. That is what this episode is. This is part two of my conversation with Cassandra Shea. If you have not listened to part one yet, start there — we covered the origin of the archetypes, the copy-paste trap, and the Marsha Method, a principle I named publicly for the first time. In this half, Cassandra does what she pr...

The clearest frameworks are not built from a desk. They are built in rooms, in dialogue, with people who trust you enough to show you where your thinking still has gaps. This episode marks two firsts for Own Your Impact: our first guest, and the first time I am not the one asking the questions. Cassandra Shea — executive coach, client, close friend, and someone who has also coached me through some...

The thing that makes a framework trustworthy is not how long it stayed hidden before you shared it. It is how many real people it helped while you were still refining it. This episode is a one-year look back at how the Resonant Thought Leadership Framework has evolved since this podcast launched in April 2025. I walk through the real timeline: from the original formula of Essence times Expression...

If you've been showing up consistently, doing the work, and still not getting the results you expect, the problem probably isn't your effort. The most costly mistake thought leaders make is applying a signal solution to a source problem — and when that happens, working harder only makes the misalignment louder. In this episode, I introduce a diagnostic question I've been using more and more with c...