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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.
Unknown Speaker 0:00
Macy, 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.
Unknown Speaker 0:20
Welcome back to own your impact. I am Macy Robison, and if the description I'm about to share sounds like you, then this episode is specifically for you. You create your most powerful transformation in group settings, and you do that through carefully designed experiences. You have the ability to read the energy in a room intuitively and adapt your facilitation in real time to help people have breakthrough moments, the kind of breakthrough moments that happen in community or as a team, things that don't happen when people are on their own. Because of that, you're naturally drawn to working with groups, and your best work happens when you can respond to what is happening in the room. Now, if this sounds like you, you're what I call an experienced facilitator, and this is the second episode in my 10 part deep dive series on all 10 archetypes that are part of the resonant thought leadership system. You can learn a little bit more about these archetypes by revisiting episodes eight through 12 of the podcast, but just know, as I continue to work with clients, I learn more and more about how these archetypes show up, and that's why I wanted to do this series. So you're an experienced facilitator. Now, what if you're taking my quiz? If you know you're an experienced facilitator, what does that actually mean? And what do we do with that information as it relates to building a platform, building a business around your expertise through this archetype. Now there are some experienced facilitators that have figured out how to showcase their genius naturally. You probably see them running powerful workshops, leading transformative retreats, building businesses around their ability to move those groups from point A to point B, and they're using facilitation skills as their primary tool of creation. But if you identify with this description, and you know that's what you do, but you're struggling to build your platform or talk about what you do on your website, it might be because you're following advice that's designed for other archetypes. If people keep telling you you should scale by building an online course, or you need to systematize your process, and it makes you feel like you're dumbing down your work. You're probably using different advice than an experienced facilitator. Needs to start building authentic thought leadership. So if this sounds like you and you haven't taken my quiz yet, you want to get that confirmation that you're an experienced facilitator, I would love to have you take the free thought leadership archetype quiz at Macy robison.com, forward slash quiz. So you're an experienced facilitator. What does that actually mean? We talked a little bit about this in the resonant orator episode. Think about the difference between a classical musician and a jazz musician. A
Unknown Speaker 2:57
resident orator is more like a classical performer. They master their material. They perform it with Nuance for each audience, but if you're more like a jazz musician, you've got a loose form you're going to follow. You've got some fills. You've maybe figured out if you're a drummer, you've got a solo in mind, some things you want to do to follow the form of the song, but you're going to improvise, and you're willing to change direction completely mid performance if you need to to get the group from point A to point B, and that's what it feels like. That's what it the energy is in the room. When you're an experienced facilitator, especially when you're really doing it with excellence, you're also different from a transformational guide. So think Mr. Miyagi from the Karate Kid versus Mary Poppins, both are guides and they're individual stories. They help the hero win the day, but Mr. Miyagi gives Daniel as an individual, individual tools and techniques to help that one person transform. But Mary Poppins walks into the banks family system and transforms the entire family dynamic, coming up with exercises and things to do as she goes. That's you. If you're an experienced facilitator, you're creating conditions where the group transforms together. And while you are helping individuals, you're not helping them individually, one at a time, the magic happens in the room with the group through the shared experience that you design and facilitate. Here's an example. Tony Robbins, if you've watched his documentary, or you've been to one of his events, he built his entire empire on live demonstrations of this group facilitation genius. He moves them as a whole group. He's very keyed into the energy that's happening, and he will sometimes facilitate an individual transformation in the room, but everybody in the room watching is able to go along with him. And he didn't start with courses, necessarily. He started with experiences that showed what he could do with a group in real time, and those demonstrations have become the foundation for everything else.
Unknown Speaker 4:57
So let's talk about your natural genius zone. What.
Unknown Speaker 5:00
Energizes you. What drains you as an experience facilitator, because we're always trying to build things that energize us and make us want to go out and share what we know and help the people around us transform. So what really lights you up as an experience facilitator is creating transformative group experiences, making sure the conditions are right so that people can transform. You're able to read the room energy intuitively. You know when the energy shifts, when someone's not tracking, when the group is ready to go deeper, adaptive facilitation, that can respond to what's happening in real time. You love that. You're able to hold space for vulnerability, for breakthrough moments, designing processes that help people discover insights they never would have discovered alone. And you probably find that your best insights about how people work actually emerge when you're facilitating groups, when you're watching what works and what doesn't work. I have this archetype in my top five, and I do love when I'm teaching when I'm talking being able to read a room and make adjustments to what I'm doing based on what people are saying, what they're asking, what they're wanting to know more about. Sometimes that will happen in my workshops. I'll plan it completely out one way, and then I'll realize the group needs something different, and I'm able to pivot, even though I also have resonant orator in my top five archetypes, knowing that, knowing about how this energy works, how you respond to people, how you need to really demonstrate in front of people what you're doing. Here's what drains you and why. Traditional advice will sometimes fall flat for you. Passive content creation probably drains you unless it's grounded in the work that you do, solo work without any human interaction, rigid curriculum that doesn't allow for group dynamics, having to document every aspect of your process in written form, when your facilitation comes from these intuitive elements that can't be captured. If you've ever felt completely exhausted trying to build an online course or write out a detailed step by step process that you have to follow, that's because you're trying to capture experiential magic and static formats. It's like trying to bottle lightning. You might have been told that you need to scale through courses. You might have been told you need to systematize your process so you can sell it on a website, but like I said earlier, that's going to feel like you're dumbing down your work. I have found experienced facilitators often have the most difficulty displaying their expertise through traditional marketing formats. Your Genius happens in the moment, in dynamic exchange with groups. You probably get most of your business through referrals, where someone sees what you do, tells their friend they need you, and then you're stuck trying to explain how you do what you do when this person that's in front of you hasn't experienced it. It's really tricky. What really drains you is when you forget that facilitation in front of a group is really how you create and understand how you work. I often find myself trying to perfect things when what I need to do is get in front of a group and test. Let's talk about your fastest path to results. Where to start building now that you know you're an experienced facilitator, start by designing a simple group experience that might showcase your facilitation gifts just as an experiment. This could be a 90 minute workshop. This could be a conversation that has some structure to it. This could be a problem solving session. The goal is to demonstrate your genius of moving people from point A to point B, not creating perfect content. Your priorities when it comes to building you really need to understand, from a core resonance standpoint, your unique facilitation style, all the experience facilitators I know have a different approach to creating simple group experiences, or, I guess, more complex group experiences. The thing that is slightly different, that varies from person to person, is how they create the conditions where that transformation can occur. What needs to be set up ahead of time, what does the room need to be like? What has to be done in advance. And so understanding yourself and how you do that is pretty important, and that comes from getting reps in and connection. Your strategy is experience based, and so connecting with people who can give you an opportunity to showcase what you do, whether that's you being a guest on a podcast, whether that's you having a chance to do a training inside someone's community, those are the opportunities you want to be looking for to give more people the chance to experience your work. And when you do then you can grab those videos, those transformations, those testimonials after transformation, to put on your website. Instead of trying to come up with static copy to describe what you do, you could also do behind the scenes, glimpses of your process, your event calendar, your platform itself shouldn't try to deliver transformation. It should be the invitation into experiences where transformation happens and there's a difference as far as.
Unknown Speaker 10:00
Connection goes like I said, demonstration, experiences, retreat, partnerships, borrowing other people's communities to provide the value you provide through facilitation. One of my clients, just the other day, did an amazing job testing this for the first time, she's done a ton of facilitation in other people's communities, but has recently created some different conditions around the type of experience, the type of transformation she provides, and she was able to do that inside of the community of another one of my clients. And it was so fun to be there to experience what she did. She was able to move two different people she's never met before, through her frameworks, through the conditions she created for their transformation. Everyone that was there loved it. Learned a ton from listening to it. It was really cool to experience. And we got to that point and unlocked that by talking about people like Tony Robbins, who built their platform through live demonstration. That's what you want to try and figure out. That's the puzzle to unlock. That's the thing you need to coach yourself through.
Unknown Speaker 11:05
Here's a critical mistake to avoid. Don't try to document every single aspect of your process. Your facilitation includes intuitive elements that really can't be captured. One of my favorite examples of an experienced facilitator is Michael Bungay Stanier. Michael is an amazing author. He's trying to provide tools and experiences so that people can accomplish the things they want to accomplish. He has a really great book called The Coaching Habit. And Michael came and spoke while I was the director of certification at story brand, while that was my full time role, and he spoke at our internal event last fall, watching him prepare for that speaking engagement was really cool in terms of what an experienced facilitator actually does. He created the conditions for the transformation. He wanted to take our audience through. Many of them are coaches. Many of them are marketing experts. He wanted to know who they were. He wanted to know what they were struggling with. He had a very loose plan when he came in, but in his prep meeting, he let us know exactly what he needed. He needed a certain type of microphone. He needed a flip chart. He came in and prepared it ahead of time, and he walked among the audience like it was amazing to watch. And every single person in that room said that that was their favorite session, and that's what it feels like when you're done working with an experienced facilitator. Now, Michael does have books. The Coaching Habit has sold, I think, a couple million copies at this point, but that book is not about capturing the magic that he can create in a room, that book, in and of itself, has seven questions to help you create an environment that's more coach, like if you're a manager. So he can talk about that, and he uses the questions when he facilitates his live transformations. But the book itself is not about what he teaches on stage like it would be for a resident orator. The book is about creating the container for a transformation. And I would say that's what all of his books are about. What do you need to ask yourself, what do you need to know? What do you need to walk through in order to get the result you're trying to get? That's what his books are like. But when he's live in the room, he uses those tools to create the transformation that the people in the room need. Even me trying to explain it is hard to explain. You have to see it to understand what's happening, and that's why, if you've had a challenge trying to describe what you do, or knowing how to market yourself when someone gives you a referral that you loved working with, just know that that's not a bug, that's a feature, and we can figure out how to work with that. We can figure out what to do to build around that. And the way you start, from a revenue standpoint, from a business model standpoint, is doing things like retreats, workshops, group facilitation, you could even train facilitators in your methods, once you figure those out. Organizational development work is really what a lot of experienced facilitators are drawn to, and when you're pricing things like that, you need to price for the transformation plus the group dynamic of your facilitation experience, not just renting a room and sharing information with people, you're creating conditions for breakthrough moments that people will remember for years. People talk about Tony Robbins events for years. They are peak experiences for people. So many people who do this work, well, that is the case. So now that you know you're an experienced facilitator, identify one core transformation you help with. Think through what are the conditions that are in place when someone comes to you and needs your help, when you are doing your best work, and then design a short group exercise around it. Make a loose plan around what transformation you're trying to.
Unknown Speaker 15:00
Help people walk through and then what's an exercise that would help the group discover that insight together? Who would you test it with? Those are some questions to ask yourself to start testing this. It could just be in a conversation, but you need to get in front of people and test what you're trying to accomplish.
Unknown Speaker 15:21
Now, if you scored high in some of the other archetypes, those combinations create unique approaches that might make it difficult to understand. You might have listened to this whole thing and thought, well, some of these things are like me, but some of them aren't listen. I feel the same way. This is in my top five, but it's not one of my top one or two archetypes, so I need to understand the role that it plays, and that's what makes me unique in what I'm trying to deliver, and to help you understand what makes you unique in the transformation you're trying to deliver as it relates to not just your primary archetype, but your full results that you can get on my quiz, I am hosting a live workshop called Beyond your Primary archetype. The first one is going to be held on August 6. I would love to have you there. You do need to take the quiz before you come to the workshop, so please go register at Macy robison.com forward slash workshop, and then make sure you take the quiz at Macy robison.com forward slash quiz. Remember, you're an experienced facilitator, and your genius happens in the room with the group in real time. So instead of trying to capture that magic in static formats, give yourself more opportunity to get some reps and try and capture what happens during and after, so that you can demonstrate instead of tell.
Unknown Speaker 16:44
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.