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Own Your Impact equips experts and leaders to transform their expertise into meaningful influence. Host Macy Robison reveals how successful thought leaders use deliberate systems—not luck or volume—to amplify their authentic voice and create lasting impact. Through practical frameworks and strategic guidance, you'll discover how to build a self-reinforcing ecosystem of Core Resonance, structured Content, a Central Platform, strategic Connections, and intentional Commercialization. Whether you're just starting to share your expertise or scaling an existing platform, this podcast delivers the roadmap to turn your ideas into purpose-driven influence that resonates far beyond what you might imagine possible.
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. In our last conversation, we talked about the copy paste trap. Why borrowing other people's strategies without considering your own core resonance can lead to burnout. We're going to go a little bit deeper into that idea this week, because when you stop trying to execute someone else's plan, you need to build one that fits what you actually care about, who you actually are, and that starts with understanding what genuinely drives you, not what you think it should drive you. So we'll talk today about how to distinguish between what you think you should care about and what you actually can't stop thinking about why platforms built on surface level motivations collapse under pressure, even when they start out strong and a simple way to identify the authentic motivation that's going to sustain you through years of thought leadership. This is about discovering the questions that already drive you and building around them. So
Macy Robison 1:16
let's start with our first principle, which is your real motivation when it comes to this type of work, shows up in what you cannot stop returning to after working with so many thought leaders, what I've noticed is the ones who are able to sustain impact over decades aren't driven by what might sound impressive. They're pulled by the questions that they cannot seem to leave alone. I call this the persistence test. What problems, ideas, possibilities do you keep coming back to even when there's no external reward for caring about them? Here's what I mean. I had a client, we'll call him David, who came to me frustrated. He had been trying to build a platform around transforming organizational culture because it sounded very important, very marketable. But he kept procrastinating. He couldn't maintain consistency with his content. Every strategy felt like pushing a boulder uphill when we dug into it, he actually spent his free time thinking about something totally different. Emerged. David kept returning to one specific challenge, how technical experts transition into leadership roles without losing what made them effective in the first place. This wasn't just a narrower focus, it was a completely different motivation, and it came from his own journey from engineer to executive, watching brilliant technical people struggle or fail when they moved into management, when he rebuilt his platform around this authentic obsession, everything changed. Content Creation became energizing. Instead of draining, he started connecting with audiences who desperately needed exactly what he was thinking about all the time. Anyway, the lesson here is that your deepest motivation isn't something you choose or decide, necessarily, it's something you discover and uncover by paying attention to where your mind naturally goes so stop asking, What should I care about, and start noticing instead, what can't I stop caring about? The second principle at play here is that service motivations really break down when the work gets hard. Here's the pattern, sometimes people start thought leadership platforms like this because of motivations that look good on paper, but those motivations don't really have the depth to sustain their real effort over time. So some of these surface motivations are oh but I would consider surface motivations wanting recognition for the sake of recognition, or feeling like they have to build a personal brand or creating passive income, these motivations can carry you for a while, and they are things that matter. When you hit the inevitable resistance that comes with any kind of meaningful work, those motivations crumble. I worked with someone recently who illustrated this. We'll call her Elena. She'd built a moderately successful platform around innovation, methodologies, with innovation. And from the outside, everything looked great. She had good engagement. She had good speaking opportunities, steady consulting revenue, but when she came to me, she was exhausted. I don't care about this topic as much as I pretend to is what she said. I picked it because I saw a market opportunity, but I'm running on empty. So we started with that question I asked earlier. What is it you can't stop thinking about? And it turns out, her fascination wasn't with innovation, per se, it was with how organizations navigate periods of deep uncertainty. This wasn't just a semantic shift, it was it was a slight shift, but Elena had grown up in a really chaotic household, and it developed an unusual ability to find Stability in Unstable situations, that lived experience from her own personal journey that she'd walked through, how her mess had become her message that created authentic experience that. Innovation methodology frameworks couldn't match, so we realigned her platform around what genuinely drove her. And two things happened, her energy for the work returned, and her audience responded to the conviction that now infused everything she shared. External motivations like recognition and revenue are wonderful as side effects, as lag measures, but they can't sustain you when work gets difficult, and building meaningful thought leadership things that building anything that matters really always gets difficult at times. So if your motivation disappears when the external rewards are delayed, it might not be strong enough to build sustainable thought leadership on. So just keep that in mind. Third principle I want to talk about today is how authentic motivation creates natural resilience. So if we can dig in and find that authentic motivation, it can help propel us. Because thought leaders, who maintain both impact and personal fulfillment over years and decades have that in common. Their work addresses problems or possibilities that genuinely mattered to them, not just strategically, but personally. I call this meaning resonance, when your thought leadership connects to questions that hold real significance in your own life, and it's really part of your essence that creates the core resonance that helps your voice ring true. Look at someone like Simon. Sinek Brene Brown, Simon didn't just start talking about starting with why, because it was a clever framework. He was obsessed with this topic. Talked to his friends about it all the time. And when you watch his original TEDx talk, it has that energy of I just sat down with a piece of paper and started explaining this to my friends, and it grew from there. Brene Brown didn't research vulnerability because it would make a viral TEDx talk. She was driven by her own personal questions about connections and courage. That's what created the resilience for both of them to keep going and then to continue to expand the things they talk about from there, their authentic connection to their work and your authentic connection to your work creates a resilience that just can't be manufactured through better discipline or better systems. Another example, James clear. He didn't start out thinking that he should build a platform around habits because it was a good market. He became obsessed with habits because of his own serious baseball injury in high school that completely forced him to rebuild his approach to improvement, that led to years of experimenting with small changes, documenting what worked. He was genuinely fascinated by the question, How did tiny changes compound into remarkable results? And as he researched habits and dug deeper and deeper and deeper, the motivation became to create the seminal volume on habit creation, which by every measurable metric he has done, but he's continued to maintain that singular focus, and it's been really, really cool to watch his platform continue to grow, especially because he is more interested in the ideas finding an audience than he is about himself finding an audience. I heard him say on a podcast once he wanted people to recognize his name but not his face, and if you look at the way he's built his platform, that's exactly what he's done. But it starts with that driving need that he has had and that authentic motivation that has given him natural resilience. Or think about Tim Ferriss, his platform isn't built around productivity or optimization in the abstract. It's built around a specific question that genuinely drives him, that he repeats at the beginning of every podcast episode. What do world class performers across different fields have in common when he starts his podcast that is one of the things that he talks about. Talks about how he's here to deconstruct world class performers from eclectic areas, to extract the tactics, tools and routines that you can use in order to get better. So that curiosity leading him to uncover those things, to deconstruct those things to ask the right questions that revealed patterns that curiosity wasn't just strategically smart, it came from a genuine fascination for the patterns. He talks about studying himself and trying to improve himself, and naturally, that curiosity led him to study other people and see what he could bring into his own practice. He researches things for a long time. He experiments on things over years, and that comes from authentic interest, not from market opportunity. So the bottom line here is, when your thought leadership addresses something that holds genuine, personal meaning, you don't have to force resilience. It emerges naturally from the significance that work has in your life. This connects directly to what we talked about last week about not using someone else's commercialization system when you're building from authentic motivation, rather than borrowed strategies. Every single component of the resident thought leadership system works differently. Your core resonance becomes unshakable because it's powered by questions. You genuinely care about, not ones you think you should care about. Your content develops unusual depth because you're exploring territory that matters to you personally, not just professionally. And your central platform maintains consistency because it's built around work you do anyway, not just because it's trending. The connection you have with audiences deepens because they sense the authentic conviction behind your work and your commercialization becomes sustainable because all of it is built around work that energizes you instead of drains you. When all five of these things align around authentic motivation, you have the ability to create thought leadership that doesn't just impact others, it sustains you through success and struggle. So this week, I want you to try a simple exercise that cuts through the noise of what you think you should care about. Set aside 20 minutes and explore these questions. And I'll put these in the show notes as well, if you're walking and can't write this stuff down right now. So if all external rewards disappeared, no recognition, no money, no status, what aspects of your current work would you still feel compelled to pursue? What problems or possibilities do you find yourself returning to again and again, even when addressing them is difficult or unpopular, what questions keep you up at night, not because they're strategically valuable, but because you genuinely can't stop thinking about them. Look for patterns in your responses, often our authentic motivation is hiding beneath more practical or strategic consideration. Then ask yourself, how aligned is my current thought leadership platform with these deeper motivations? Where might I be building on what looks good rather than what genuinely drives me? If you discover gaps between your authentic motivation and your current approach, don't panic. This is exactly the kind of insight that can transform not just your platform's effectiveness, but your relationship to the work itself. So dig in and start aligning. Next week, we're going to explore something a little bit different about why having brilliant insights isn't enough, but why you need the right containers to actually help people implement what you're teaching. We're going to jump into content and transformational IP. We'll talk about the difference between sharing information and creating transformation, and I'll walk you through a very simple process for mining the gold that is already hiding in your existing work. Thank you for listening, and just remember you can't build something that lasts without digging down to the bedrock of who you are, to uncover that unique core resonance and figuring out what your motivation is, what actually drives you, is one of the best things you can do. See you next time.
Macy Robison 12:40
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. 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. You
Transcribed by https://otter.ai