Own Your Impact

Macy Robison
  • 5.0 (33)
  • Entrepreneurship

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.

  1. 3d ago

    #87: Known for What You Share: Clarity Comes After You Speak Up

    I believe you become known for something when you share what you know. That sounds simple, and it is, but I don't think most of us act like it's true. This past week I had two different conversations with two different people about the exact same thing. Both of them said some version of, "I just don't know what I'm known for." I hear this a lot from the people I work with, and if I'm honest, it's been a common refrain of mine too, which is a little ironic considering that helping people describe their work has been a big part of what I do. So many of us want a clear message before we put anything out into the world, so we keep studying and learning and writing things down, waiting to figure out what we're known for before we start talking about it. I don't think it works in that order. Without any material to shape and craft, it's very hard to come up with something clear from scratch. In this episode I lay the work of my client Luvvie Ajayi Jones next to the work of Kit founder Nathan Barry to show where the clarity in what they're known for came from. I also share an experiment with a piano that I used to show my choir students, because it's the clearest picture I have of what happens when you send what you know out into the world. IMPACT POINTS FROM THIS EPISODE: ⚡ Being known for something means other people know it, too. — And they can only know it if you share it. When I was preparing for a session with Luvvie, it was very clear to see what she's known for, because she has been sharing online publicly for twenty years. She started blogging in college in 2003, published I'm Judging You in 2016, gave her TED Talk "Get Comfortable With Being Uncomfortable" in 2017, and published Professional Troublemaker in 2021, almost twenty years after she started writing online. The clarity in what she's known for came from the sharing. Nathan Barry made a commitment in 2012, before Kit existed, to write 1,000 words every day, and decided, "I now share and teach whatever I can, and you should, too." A lot of people know him now as the person who helps creators earn a living from what they know, and he got there by sharing what he knew long before anyone knew him for it. ⚡ You find out what you're known for by what people reflect back to you. — The next time you're near a piano, hold down the sustain pedal and sing a note over the strings. The strings that match your note start to ring all on their own, but they can only answer if you sing. Sharing what you know works the same way. The people who need it ring back: they repeat a phrase you said, they ask you a follow-up question, they send someone your way. At Craft and Commerce, after years of fumbling my own introduction, someone who'd heard me talk about my work handed the words back to me over a lunch hour, and none of that could have happened if I hadn't been in those rooms sharing first. ⚡ Sharing what you know doesn't have to happen in public. — You don't have to start a podcast, post on LinkedIn every day, or write a book. You can share what you know in a conversation with a client, in an email back to someone who asked you a question, or in a small room with five people working on the same thing you are. What matters is that it gets out of your head and in front of someone who can reflect it back to you. This week, pick one thing you know to be true, share it with one person, and write down what they repeat, what they ask you more about, and what lights them up. Then do it again. It's going to make sense after you share, not before. PEOPLE & RESOURCES MENTIONED: Luvvie Ajayi Jones - https://luvvie.org/I'm Judging You: The Do-Better Manual by Luvvie Ajayi Jones"Get Comfortable With Being Uncomfortable," Luvvie Ajayi Jones's TED Talk - https://www.ted.com/talks/luvvie_ajayi_jones_get_comfortable_with_being_uncomfortableProfessional Troublemaker: The Fear-Fighter Manual by Luvvie Ajayi JonesNathan Barry - https://nathanbarry.com/Kit The Ladders of Wealth: Master the Skill of Making Money by Nathan Barry (coming March 2, 2027)Craft and CommerceEpisode 73: The Room Reflects: Why You Can't Find Your Signal AloneEpisode 56: Resonance Is the Mechanism: The Real Science Behind Authentic Thought LeadershipCONNECT WITH MACY: Take the Thought Leadership Archetype Assessment: Find Your ArchetypeFollow on Instagram: @macyrobisonConnect on LinkedIn: Macy RobisonVisit: macyrobison.comSUBSCRIBE & REVIEW: If you loved this episode, please take a moment to subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts! Your support helps me reach more thought leaders who are ready to make an impact with their ideas. 🎙 Thanks for tuning in to Own Your Impact!

  2. Sep 30

    #86: Make Your Value Obvious: Tasha Randle's Transformational Guide Story

    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, and who struggle with marketing, accelerate sales with less hustle. Tasha spent more than fifteen years as a marketing executive, eleven of them at Procter & Gamble and before that at Hallmark Cards, so she has lived and breathed buyer behavior, value perception, and business growth at a scale most of us never see. In January of 2025 she left P&G to go all in on her own business, because she felt clearly called by God to do it, and called to go bigger than where she had left off. Her primary archetype is Transformational Guide at 58%, nearly double the 30% mark where I start paying attention, with Strategic Advisor right behind it. When we first met, Tasha was doing executive leadership and career coaching and writing a book about leadership. She noticed that almost every woman she coached had a long-term dream of starting her own business, and that what she was offering them was a short-term solve. When she turned her own pattern recognition on herself, she saw the work had always been the same. She was helping people understand their value and say it clearly, first to leadership and headhunters, and now to the marketplace. What I love watching her do is take her own medicine, and in this conversation you get to hear her do it out loud. IMPACT POINTS FROM THIS EPISODE: ⚡ Experts talk from the solution while buyers listen from the problem. — Tasha calls the gap between those two the communication disconnect, and it is usually what she can spot in a founder's business in the first ten minutes. She pictures a plane coming in on a landing strip. Drift too far one way and you get so niche and nuanced that buyers can't see themselves in what you're describing. Drift too far the other way and you're selling what she calls an untethered aspiration, a dream house to someone whose current house is on fire and who is looking for a fire extinguisher. The message lands when it meets buyers in their lived reality and connects the dots to the relief they actually want. ⚡ The most accurate description of what you do may be the one that doesn't land. — At networking events, Tasha used to introduce herself as a strategic business advisor. It was true, and she could watch people's brains working to figure out what category to put her in. When she started with "I'm a marketing and brand strategist," people already knew what marketing was, so they had a handle to hang everything else on, the same way you teach a five-year-old to tie his shoes with bunny ears. She watches faces for the lean-in and the eyes lighting up, and when part of her message gets that reaction, she moves it to the front. And if someone asks whether you do something like EOS, her advice is to build on the familiar thing instead of pushing it away. ⚡ Make your value obvious before you try to get louder. — Tasha got caught in what she calls the cult of do more, posting twice a day on Instagram and TikTok because that was the advice everyone gave. When she slowed down and looked at where her clients actually came from, it was live conversations, in online communities and at in-person events. At P&G, working on brands like Tide, they called this commercial innovation: they didn't touch the formula, they got clearer about the value, and it drove millions of dollars in new revenue year after year. You can stand on a stack of platforms shouting into a megaphone at 10,000 people who have zoned out, or you can sit at a small table where every person has a light bulb going off. PEOPLE & RESOURCES MENTIONED: Tasha Randle (tasharandle.com)Five Signs Your Value May Be Getting Lost in Translation, free audio guide (tasharandle.com/macy)How to Accelerate Sales with Less Hustle masterclass (tasharandle.com/masterclass)The Book AcademyThe Resonance ConservatoryEpisode #84: Sell the Transformation, Not the Conversation: Danielle Bornowski and Ben Patton's Transformational Guide StoryEpisode #85: Show Up Where People Can Walk Away: What Busking Teaches About Building an AudienceCONNECT WITH MACY: Take the Thought Leadership Archetype Assessment: Find Your ArchetypeFollow on Instagram: @macyrobisonConnect on LinkedIn: Macy RobisonVisit: macyrobison.comSUBSCRIBE & REVIEW: If you loved this episode, please take a moment to subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts! Your support helps me reach more thought leaders who are ready to make an impact with their ideas. 🎙 Thanks for tuning in to Own Your Impact!

  3. Sep 23

    #85: Show Up Where People Can Walk Away: What Busking Teaches About Building an Audience

    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 south of Nashville you can hardly walk down a street without hearing live music, but it is usually inside a restaurant or a club, often as background. Putting yourself front and center on the street is a different decision. Not many people were stopping in that heat, and he was still singing when I walked back to my hotel later that day. Busking is a long tradition for musicians. My son has done it with friends, and on Grafton Street in Dublin my family and I watched musicians from all over Europe take a permitted spot, play for an hour, and move along, so people always knew where to find them. I have never busked myself. Talking about myself in public has been tricky for me, which is ironic considering it is what I teach. When it comes to sales, I anticipate rejection, and more often than not I just don't say anything at all. Busking has been a helpful reminder that if I believe my ideas are helpful, I need to make the deliberate decision to send my signal out anyway. IMPACT POINTS FROM THIS EPISODE: ⚡ The room that chose to be there can't tell you how to grow beyond it. — A planned show is wonderful, and everyone in that crowd chose to be there, which makes their feedback a little like your mom telling you that you are great at what you do. Busking leaves no room for wondering. Some people walk by without noticing, some stop politely and move on, and some stay and maybe pay, which is a picture of how a sound wave works: it bounces off, it gets absorbed, or it meets something free to move. My son's band plays planned shows and busks too, and they take what busking tells them about what people want to hear straight back into their shows. ⚡ When nobody stops, the question is where you're standing, not whether you're any good. — On a street corner, a quiet hour leads to useful questions about what you are sharing, and whether to try this corner again or move to a different spot. None of those questions are about whether your music, or your ideas, are any good. Compare that to a planned show with 100 seats where you sell 50. Most of us don't look at the 50 people in the room, we look at the 50 empty seats and feel like a failure, and that is the wrong data. It is also the kind of story that can stop us from sharing anything at all. ⚡ You can go where people already are instead of rallying them to come to you. — A few weeks ago my son's band opened for a big local band at the club where Neon Trees and Imagine Dragons got their start. Both bands shared reels, put up signs, and texted everyone they knew, and it worked, but it was one night and a lot of energy. Galvanizing is one of my Working Genius frustrations, so getting strangers to show up at a specific time and place feels especially draining for me, and I have started asking what would happen if, alongside those invitations, I also just showed up and shared. I think about a video of Chappell Roan busking "Pink Pony Club" on a portable keyboard with almost nobody around, cut against her singing the same song to a huge festival crowd at Austin City Limits. You don't get gifted the stage without the courage to sing the song that's yours to sing when it feels like nobody is listening. PEOPLE & RESOURCES MENTIONED: Chappell Roan singing "Pink Pony Club"The Resonance Conservatory (fall cohort starts October 7)Free workshop, Tuesday, September 29 at 9:00 AM Mountain Time: macyrobison.com/workshopCONNECT WITH MACY: Take the Thought Leadership Archetype Assessment: Find Your ArchetypeFollow on Instagram: @macyrobisonConnect on LinkedIn: Macy RobisonVisit: macyrobison.comSUBSCRIBE & REVIEW: If you loved this episode, please take a moment to subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts! Your support helps me reach more thought leaders who are ready to make an impact with their ideas. 🎙 Thanks for tuning in to Own Your Impact!

  4. Sep 16

    #84: Sell the Transformation, Not the Conversation: Danielle Bornowski and Ben Patton's Transformational Guide Story

    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 founder and CEO of DQB Strategies, where she works with business owners on marketing and sales strategy and loves telling her clients to write their own rules. Her Transformational Guide works right alongside Strategic Advisor. Ben Patton just left his full-time job as a software content engineer at an AI infrastructure company to help people adopt AI in a way that fits who they are. His Transformational Guide came back at 64%, more than double the 30% mark where I start paying attention, with Experience Facilitator and Principled Practitioner behind it. In his words, his gift is seeing people for who they are, and he is so attuned to the exact words someone uses when they are stuck. Here is what I want you to listen for. Same wiring, two very different businesses. Danielle is referral-driven and runs her business on "let's test it for science." When she ran her own offer on herself, client Danielle turned out to be overwhelmed by what strategist Danielle delivered, and that changed how she built the offer she has now kept consistent for about a year and a half. What ultimately pushed Ben out of his last role was realizing that, in his words, "if I'm not having conversations, I feel like I'm suffocating." Both of them are working out how to describe something that feels easy to do and hard to explain, and so am I. IMPACT POINTS FROM THIS EPISODE: ⚡ People buy the transformation, not the conversation. — Ben has had fifteen to twenty conversations helping people who were overwhelmed by AI figure out where to start, and he has made his offer to many people. All of them said no. His read is that he offered it as "have a great conversation" rather than "this is what you get out of it." Danielle's advice lands right on it: people don't want to hear about the seven playbooks and the every-other-week meetings, they want to know how they are going to feel at the end and what you are going to overcome together. Ben heard it and realized the answer was already in his testimonies. They were overwhelmed, and now they're not. ⚡ Ask permission before you share what you see, and the invitation gets easy. — Danielle was on a get-to-know-you call when she could hear where the other person was stuck. She asked questions first, and then she asked, "I've got some thoughts and some questions and some feedback. Is that okay if I share it with you?" By the end of the call the other person said, "I think we might need to work together," and Danielle offered her hourly advisory sessions as a simple first step. That kind of call is exactly what she and her COO are now working to create more of, because in her words, "nobody likes to sell. But when it can be an easy invitation to work together, that's what I want more of." ⚡ Answering one person's question can teach the whole room. — Right after our strategy call, Ben led a Working Genius workshop for a ministry he used to work for. Trying to lead the whole group toward an outcome drained him, even with Experience Facilitator as his second archetype. But when one person asked a question and he answered them specifically, that person was served powerfully, and everyone else in the room got the benefit of listening in. Ben called it really clarifying. It is the same thing I learned sitting through voice master classes in college, and it is what finally let me build a group program as a Transformational Guide. PEOPLE & RESOURCES MENTIONED: Danielle Bornowski on LinkedInDQB StrategiesBen Patton (benapatton.com)Ben Patton on LinkedInWispr FlowThe Resonance ConservatoryEpisode #76: Own the Room You're Built For: Dustin Riechmann's Experience Facilitator StoryCONNECT WITH MACY: Take the Thought Leadership Archetype Assessment: Find Your ArchetypeFollow on Instagram: @macyrobisonConnect on LinkedIn: Macy RobisonVisit: macyrobison.comSUBSCRIBE & REVIEW: If you loved this episode, please take a moment to subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts! Your support helps me reach more thought leaders who are ready to make an impact with their ideas. 🎙 Thanks for tuning in to Own Your Impact!

  5. Sep 9

    #83: Knowing Isn't the Missing Piece: Doing Is

    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 inside the organization as the director of the certified guide program. If there is one framework I should be able to run on my own business in my sleep, it is that one. Somewhere in the middle of the week I realized I never had, not on this version of my business, the one I have been building for the last eighteen months, the assessment and the Resonance Compass and the Resonance Conservatory and the podcast you are listening to right now. I have run it on hundreds of other people's businesses. I had never sat down and deliberately done a messaging pass on the thing I am actually doing now. I knew that, too. I have been reaching for language to talk about my work for months, starting to answer a question about it and feeling the answer not land, and telling myself it is just hard for a transformational guide to explain what they do. Which is true. It is hard, and the work looks different for every single person I do it with. But "it's hard" had quietly become the reason I hadn't done the work, and those are two different things. What moved it was a hallway conversation with my friend Dr. J.J. Peterson, who took the assessment a few months ago and told me exactly what he says when he sends people to it. He gave me the sentence in about thirty seconds, because he was standing outside my business and I was standing inside it. What I did not expect is what happened after that, and it is the reason this is an episode instead of a story I tell at dinner sometime. The pass didn't fix my messaging. It exposed everything I had stopped doing. The minute I had the words, I had a reason to reach out to people, and the minute I had a reason to reach out to people, I noticed that I hadn't been. Not the newsletter, not the five people a day, not the content drawer, not LinkedIn, not the people I hadn't talked to in six months. I want to be clear about whose system I mean here, because this is not a StoryBrand episode. StoryBrand was the door. What was on the other side of it was mine, the Resonance Compass and the Four E's and the embodiment question that asks whether you are taking your own medicine. I built those. I teach them every week. A deliberate pass through somebody else's framework is what showed me how many of my own I had let go quiet. IMPACT POINTS FROM THIS EPISODE: ⚡ You can teach the diagnostic and still not act on it. — This was never a knowledge problem. I know what I mean when I say embodiment, I have a whole episode about it, and I had told a client the week before that when I get stuck in my own business it is always that piece of my framework. I could draw the diagram. Knowing wasn't the thing that was missing, and neither was teaching it. ⚡ One deliberate pass won't fix the thing you aimed it at. It will show you what you stopped doing. — I went looking for language and found five of my own systems sitting quiet, every one of them something I would never let a client skip. That isn't the pass failing. That is the pass working, and it hands you three more places to walk your talk than you had that morning. ⚡ Learning feels productive, and it is not the same as leading. — My friend Evan Cox tells new StoryBrand guides that you go back and forth between two hats, and the learner hat is the fun one to wear. Another book, another certification, another podcast episode, honestly, and all of it feels responsible. But a thought leader is someone who has decided to lead, and my friend Tyler Pigott put the cost of not deciding plainly to our guides last week: a B-minus website that is live beats a perfect one that never gets published, every single time. PEOPLE & RESOURCES MENTIONED: Dr. J.J. Peterson: https://www.badasssoftie.com/Why Your Message Isn't Landing (Yet) - Macy Robison and J.J. Peterson on the Badass Softie podcast: https://www.badasssoftie.com/episodes/why-your-content-isnt-resonatingEvan Cox: https://evancoxconsulting.com/Tyler Pigott: https://www.tylerpigott.com/StoryBrand Your Business Live workshop: https://storybrand.com/live/The Resonance Conservatory: https://macyrobison.com/resonance-conservatoryYou Know Your Archetype, Now What? workshop: macyrobison.com/workshopCONNECT WITH MACY: Take the Thought Leadership Archetype Assessment: Find Your ArchetypeFollow on Instagram: @macyrobisonConnect on LinkedIn: Macy RobisonVisit: macyrobison.comSUBSCRIBE & REVIEW: If you loved this episode, please take a moment to subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts! Your support helps me reach more thought leaders who are ready to make an impact with their ideas. 🎙 Thanks for tuning in to Own Your Impact!

  6. Sep 2

    #82: You Already Have a Process: David Peck's Resonant Orator Story

    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 there was a degree in classical cello, a job at Ralph Lauren, and five years in Paris. He hosts a podcast, and his first book, Artful, comes out on November 11th. We started working together in the fall of 2025 and he has been in my strategic advisory group ever since. David is a builder. He has made and created so many things over the course of his life, and he comes from a world most people would not traditionally connect to thought leadership, which is part of why I wanted this conversation on the show. His primary archetype is Resonant Orator at 58%, with Category Creator right behind it at 39%, and thirty percent is the mark where I start paying attention to an archetype at all. Both of those are carrying real signal, and it is a combination I do not see often: the speaker who is also creative enough to want to solve a problem by building a new category for it. Here is what I want you to listen for. David held the title of his first book for eleven years. That book, a memoir, is outlined and mostly written and essentially ready to go, and he made the decision to set it aside and lead with a different book instead. Things solidified for him around November and December, by February he was writing, and his book Artful comes out this fall. He did all of it alongside the store and a more than full-time day job, without blowing any of it up. IMPACT POINTS FROM THIS EPISODE: ⚡ You already have a process. You just have not named it yet. — The framework in David's book is assemble, refine, try. He did not sit down and design it. It surfaced partway through him describing it out loud on a group call, and once he heard it he could see he had been running it his whole life: the senior thesis at Parsons that he collaged in Photoshop instead of drawing, because his drawings never carried the same weight his made things did, and which won him the Designer of the Year award. The store he built, watched come apart, and rebuilt. The TikTok account he did not tell anybody about. The word of the year workbook. In his words, the book came out of "a repetitive process that I didn't realize I was doing until I was able to name it." ⚡ Speed usually means you stopped starting over. — The book came together fast, and I am not sure speed is quite the right word for what actually happened. He did not get faster. He stopped starting over. Every earlier attempt began at a blank page, in a medium that drained him before the ideas ever got out, and he would lose the thing he was trying to say somewhere in the effort of writing it down. Once the process had a name, the next thing he made did not cost him all the years he had already spent learning how to make things. ⚡ Ask AI to interview you instead of asking it to write. — David wrote Artful in five and ten minute pieces, after carpool drop-off and on the way to work, by talking into voice notes and transcribing them. What he would not let the tool do was write, because what came back was paraphrase, and it was never as nuanced or as funny as what he actually meant. So he used it two ways instead: to group and organize his own words without changing them, and to ask him questions. "Can you help ask me questions that would help me figure out how these things are interrelated or connected?" Then he answered with another voice note. Letting it find the thread for him would have flattened the writing. Asking it to make him find the thread is what got the book out of his head. PEOPLE & RESOURCES MENTIONED: David Peck (davidpeck.co)Word of the Year workbook (davidpeck.co/yourword)Inside the Design Studio with David Peck (davidpeck.co/podcast)Wispr FlowThe Book AcademyCONNECT WITH MACY: Take the Thought Leadership Archetype Assessment: Find Your ArchetypeFollow on Instagram: @macyrobisonConnect on LinkedIn: Macy RobisonVisit: macyrobison.comSUBSCRIBE & REVIEW: If you loved this episode, please take a moment to subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts! Your support helps me reach more thought leaders who are ready to make an impact with their ideas. 🎙 Thanks for tuning in to Own Your Impact!

  7. Aug 27

    #81: What Own Your Impact Actually Means: Decide It, Then Own It

    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, and the tributes filling up my feed are what finally made me do it. One of them, from a woman named Krista, listed the Grammys and the CMAs and the hits and then pointed out that at the end of a life like that, nobody talks about any of it. They talk about the kind of person you were. That's the first half of what I mean. The second half is more literal, and it's the one I don't say out loud nearly enough: I also mean actual ownership, building something that pays you for being exactly who you are and still belongs to you years from now. In this episode I use one decision Dolly made in 1974 to show why those two halves hold each other up, and why the second one usually costs something. IMPACT POINTS FROM THIS EPISODE: ⚡ Impact isn't handed to you. You decide it, and then you keep deciding it. — It doesn't arrive because you got lucky or because somebody important finally noticed you. Every tribute I read this week was really a description of somebody who was recognizably the same person in every decision she made, in the songs, in the books she mailed to children, in the theme park she built in the county she came from. The money and the meaning went the same direction because they came out of the same set of choices. ⚡ Wanting the opportunity and accepting the terms are two different things. — In 1974 Elvis Presley wanted to record "I Will Always Love You," which was the largest amplification available to a person on the planet, and the night before the session his manager said Elvis takes half the publishing on anything he records. Dolly had been building publishing companies since the sixties specifically to hold onto her own songs. She said no, and she cried all night. Eighteen years later Whitney Houston recorded it and it paid Dolly for the rest of her life. A creator named Jamie Rachelle put the distinction better than I could: she wanted the opportunity, she just didn't want the terms. ⚡ A decision that hurts is not a decision you got wrong. — The crying is the part that usually gets edited out of stories like this one, and it's the part I want you to keep. She wasn't crying because she made a mistake. She was crying because she got it right and it still cost her something she badly wanted. Every real decision cuts something off, and the cutting is the only reason there is anything left in your hands afterward. PEOPLE & RESOURCES MENTIONED: Dolly PartonKrista Demcher's (@kristademcher) tribute post on InstagramJamie Rachelle's (@thisisjustjamie) tribute post on InstagramLoving Dolly Was Easy. Understanding Her Was Hard. by Tressie McMillan Cottom for The New York TimesAustin L. Church and the Freelance Cake communityYou Know Your Archetype. Now What? workshop: macyrobison.com/workshopCONNECT WITH MACY: Take the Thought Leadership Archetype Assessment: Find Your ArchetypeFollow on Instagram: @macyrobisonConnect on LinkedIn: Macy RobisonVisit: macyrobison.comSUBSCRIBE & REVIEW: If you loved this episode, please take a moment to subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts! Your support helps me reach more thought leaders who are ready to make an impact with their ideas. 🎙 Thanks for tuning in to Own Your Impact!

  8. Aug 19

    #80: Nothing to Hide Behind: Mark Leruste's Resonant Orator Story

    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 in the Dark. His primary archetype is Resonant Orator and it came back at 94%, where thirty percent is the mark at which I start paying attention at all. Mark is very good at this, and one of the things I tell him on this call is that the things he writes sound like his speaking voice, which is much harder than he makes it look. He is also generous with me here in a way I do not take for granted, because what we end up talking about is how exposing it is to do the one thing you are actually built for. IMPACT POINTS FROM THIS EPISODE: ⚡ You can practice being exposed before it counts. — For his birthday, Mark's wife gave him a two-day folk singing retreat, and he was terrified. Years before that she gave him a six-week stand-up comedy course, which he found dreadful right up until a scruffy comedy night above a brasserie, where a desk lamp on a rope served as the stage light and all the second-half acts dropped out. He offered to fill the time with no material at all. He bombed, and he got exactly what he needed from it: "I'm just as comfortable being in front of this random crowd of people that I am in front of a crowd of founders, CEOs, speakers. I just need material." Not long after, he got up at the real show and loved it. ⚡ Whatever you hold onto on stage may be protecting you from the room. — Mark's singing teacher made him sing without his guitar, and told him that people who play and sing often use the guitar as a shield from the audience. When I turn that back to his speaking, he moves it straight onto the stage: the guitar becomes the slides, or the words you wrote down, or the structure, or the framework. It is also why he loves Q&A. There is nothing prepared to stand behind, so he has to be raw and in the moment, and in his words, he can dance in it. ⚡ Being excellent and being overlooked can both be true at once. — Mark did not get shortlisted for a speaker award, and he wrote about it publicly. His wife and close friends told him not to, because someone thinking of booking him might see it. He published anyway, because keeping it quiet felt "incredibly out of integrity" with himself and with the people he is trying to serve. He can be an exceptional speaker, and he can also not have been nominated, and both of those can sit next to each other. It is the same thing he tells the people he coaches: the story you are most afraid to share is the story your audience most needs to hear. PEOPLE & RESOURCES MENTIONED: Mark Leruste (markleruste.com)Mark Leruste on LinkedInGlow In The Dark: How Sharing Your Personal Story Can Transform Your Business and Change Your Life by Mark LerusteMark's TEDx talkCONNECT WITH MACY: Take the Thought Leadership Archetype Assessment: Find Your ArchetypeAttend the workshop: You Know Your Archetype - Now What?Follow on Instagram: @macyrobisonConnect on LinkedIn: Macy RobisonVisit: macyrobison.comSUBSCRIBE & REVIEW: If you loved this episode, please take a moment to subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts! Your support helps me reach more thought leaders who are ready to make an impact with their ideas. 🎙 Thanks for tuning in to Own Your Impact!

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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.

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  • Creator
    Macy Robison
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    88
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Macy Robison | Uplight Strategy, LLC
  • Show Website
    Own Your Impact

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