We were trying to schedule this conversation and our calendars were just NOT friends, but she took a long garbled list of availability from me and made it work. An hour before talking she messaged me, “I’m not sure my brain is 100% today, but we’ll figure it out!” She’d been glutened at a restaurant that had promised her they could handle celiac restrictions and then messed up, so she was moving through the morning in a fog she described as having three brain cells. Any one of those was a perfectly reasonable no to get on our live call together.

She just kept looking for a way to make it work.

I told her that on the Live — that she had this whole vibe of yes to opportunity. She fished around for the right word for a second and then supplied the technical term herself: “I’m a jumper.”

Which, okay. This is a woman who had one of the first hypnosis apps in the App Store back in 2008, when the App Store was a few months old and nobody knew what it was for. Who became a telehealth therapist in 2018 while the people in her own office told her flatly that her clients would leave. Who put everything she owned in storage in February 2022 and became known as The Traveling Therapist. Who started teaching therapists to use AI roughly a month after ChatGPT came out, which in our profession is a social risk, to say the least.

Her explanation is not complicated: Her risk tolerance is high.

And that was the thing I thought I wanted to understand going in. How do people get more willing to say yes? How do we follow our inspiration from Kym and take more risks?

(You will find out later how it was only a small part of the picture, but it’s still a good place to start.)

What actually gets in the way of yes

Here’s what I’ve noticed after a lot of years of sitting with people who are trying to decide something: a lot of times it can look like constraint but actually is something else altogether.

They’re stopped by three things that don’t look like fear at all.

The first is that the no arrives disguised as an assessment. Someone’s already doing that. I’d need to know more first. That’s not really my lane. I should probably focus. These don’t feel like avoidance while you’re having them. They feel like discernment — like the mature, seasoned part of you finally weighing in. Which is precisely why they work so well. You never get to decide against the idea, because the idea never gets articulated clearly enough to evaluate. It just quietly stops being a thing you were considering.

Kym doesn’t run that filter. When ChatGPT showed up, her response was not let me see how this shakes out. Or, I don’t want to get this wrong. It was, in her words, I’m not going to wait.

The second is that we’ve made the yes conditional on a feeling that isn’t coming. We’re waiting to feel ready, or qualified, or unafraid. That isn’t what Kym did. She’ll tell you outright that some of this scares her. She might guess that many therapists think she’s reckless. “People either love me or hate me.”

That’s not fearlessness. It’s willingness. The distinction matters enormously, because “stop being afraid” is not available to any of us, and “do it anyway, afraid” actually is (and it gets easier and easier with practice).

The third is that without knowing what your work is for, every opportunity has to be evaluated from scratch. That’s exhausting, and exhausted people default to no. Kym has one clear thing running underneath all of it: every single time she learns something, she immediately builds a door for other people to walk through. Her words — “whenever I’m doing something in my life, I decide I’m going to create a product around it. I mean a way to help other people be able to do the same thing.” The app, the group, the course, the club. She’s checking the decision against a framework, a decision algorithm in her head. That’s what makes her yes fast.

Values (specifically, clarity in her values) make the yes fast. Willingness makes it possible while afraid. And catching the story before it decides for you is what keeps the idea alive long enough to be considered at all.

So: seems like we all just need to take more risks with yes.

Which is where I would have left it, honestly, if the conversation had ended at the halfway mark.

The bigger picture

I went into that Live thinking Kym’s story was about accumulation. Say yes enough times and you end up with an app and a group and a course and a book and three brands. And freedom.

But that’s not actually what she’s built. She’s built a practice of putting things down.

That hypnosis app? At one point it was making twenty thousand dollars a month in in-app purchases. It’s what let her leave the group practice she was in without having to build a caseload first. And she let it go. She jokes about it now — looks at the Calm app and says she could’ve been a multimillionaire. My guess is that she knows that holding onto something is not what opens the next door. We need room to create and evolve, and you cannot do that while carrying every good thing you’ve ever made.

Same with insurance billing. Kym built Bill Like a Boss when she was trying to figure out telehealth regulations, ran it for years, and then — her words — “I hate insurance now.” So she handed it to two certified billers who run it while she takes a percentage.

Her yeses are only possible because of what she’s let go of.

And that’s the part nobody warns you about, because it turns out a no is a risk too. Not the tidy kind where you decline an unideal opportunity and feel disciplined about it. The other kind — where you let go of something real, something that’s working, without any way of knowing whether you’re about to regret it.

Then she told me about the membership.

A hundred paying members. Running smoothly. People liked it. And she hated it — hated showing up for it, dreaded planning the content, kept throwing it together at the last minute for a year and a half because she didn’t want to be doing it anymore. So she made a plan in about two weeks, refunded the annual members, and closed the whole thing down.

I sat there while she told me that story feeling a very specific kind of recognition, because I’ve done a version of it.

I had a content membership. I adored the people in it — genuinely, some of my favorite humans, showing up every month. And something was off the entire time, and it took me some time to name what it was. It wasn’t them.

It was that I’d built the format and the method by over-borrowing from someone brilliant whose work I admired, and it fit her perfectly and it did not fit me at all. I hadn’t found my own way of doing it yet, so I’d borrowed hers, and every month I was running a membership as a slightly worse version of another person.

It was a relief to stop trying to be someone else, but the doubt creeps in…was it the right move?

I left that conversation more interested in the no than I thought - I thought we were in the land of keep saying yes and it felt so sunny and simple! (we could use simple)

But, something here clicked: the nos aren’t the price Kym pays for the yeses. They’re what make the yeses possible.

Yes energy is the most renewable thing you’ve got, and it is still not infinite. When it’s spread across everything — the membership you’ve outgrown, the platform you’re tired of, the offer you keep because it made money once, the collaboration you agreed to in a generous mood eight months ago — you don’t end up with a lot of yeses that compound. You end up with a lot of maintenance and nowhere to put anything new.

When you have yes energy for everything, you end up having it for nothing.

Here’s the case for the brave no. Not the kind of no that’s about discipline, or boundaries, or focus in the productivity sense.

Room. You are making room, and the thing you’re making room for hasn’t shown up yet, which is precisely what makes it feel so unreasonable at the time.

Saying yes isn’t the only risky move on the table. Sometimes the biggest risk available to you is ending something that’s working — and nobody throws a party for that one. There’s no launch. No announcement anyone celebrates.

You just quietly stop, and sit in the space, and hope you were right.

Some of us are in a season where a lot of yeses are necessary — where we need the growth, the momentum, the feedback that only comes from putting things into the world and finding out.

And some of us are in a season where the courage is going to come from saying no to things that feel unreasonable to say no to, in order to get space for what’s next.

What helps with knowing the difference?

1. Prioritize what actually matters — and zoom out to your whole self, not just your business.

Values work is fun right up until I ask people to start prioritizing.

In vocational and career counseling you will always, eventually, hit a prioritization exercise. The list of values gets whittled down and down until you’re left holding two. And it’s brutal, especially for those of us who want to be a lot of good things at once — who want to be generous and ambitious and present and excellent, all at full volume, forever.

But that’s the point. Not because the ones you cut stop mattering. Because in this season, right now, something has to go first. And once you know what that is, a startling number of decisions answer themselves.

2. Notice when scarcity is doing its job.

Scarcity will tell you a great deal about the world and about yourself. That’s what makes it so effective — it doesn’t arrive feeling like an external voice you could disagree with. It arrives fused to your own thinking, sounding exactly like you.

If I launch this, I won’t have the capacity to answer the inquiries.

If I shut this down, I’m never making that money again.

You don’t have to argue with either one. Arguing keeps you in there with it. The job is smaller and stranger: get a tiny amount of space between you and the thought — enough that it can be there without deciding for you. Not gone. Just no longer the driver.

3. Notice which feelings are welcome, and which ones you’re spending energy trying to get rid of.

There’s a classic metaphor in ACT — Acceptance and Commitment Therapy — about passengers on a bus.

You’re driving. The passengers are every thought and feeling you’ve got, and some of them are loud and unpleasant and say things like who do you think you are and this is going to fail publicly. You have options. You can pull over and try to throw them off — and some of us are very skilled at this, we’ve been doing it since childhood — but here’s the thing: while you’re back there wrestling with a passenger, the bus is parked. You’re not going anywhere. Or you can keep driving with them yelling from the back seats, which is deeply annoying, and also the only version where you arrive anywhere.

The passengers aren’t the problem. The pulling over is.

In business we are absolutely committed to keeping our mindset up. And I notice we’ve built a whole culture around not letting disappointment or grief actually land — we name it, we caption it, we fuel forward. From the outside it looks like people moving through the ups and downs of building something. My suspicion is that a lot of us are intellectualizing it rather than feeling it, because grief doesn’t work loudly. It works in the quiet, and quiet is the one thing an entrepreneur’s calendar has no room for.

So: which of your passengers get to ride? And which ones are you pulling the bus over for?

If you want to go deeper with values work

This is the exercise I described above, adapted so you can do it with your AI in about twenty minutes. It works best in an account that already knows something about you — your business, your writing, your context. Give it a few minutes and don’t rush the cuts.

I want to do a values prioritization exercise with you, one step at a time. Do not skip ahead, and do not give me all the steps at once. Wait for my response before moving on.

Step 1. Using the Brené Brown Dare to Lead list of values as your source, and based on everything you know about me — how I write, what I’ve built, what I keep returning to, what I complain about — tell me what you think my top 15 values are. For each one, give me a single sentence on why you picked it, drawn from something specific about me rather than something generic. Then ask me what I’d change, and let me swap any of them out.

Step 2. Once I’ve confirmed my 15, ask me to cut them to 8. Tell me to take a breath first. Do not help me choose. Do not offer opinions. Just hold the list and wait.

Step 3. When I give you my 8, ask me what it felt like to cut the other 7, and which one was hardest to let go of. Then ask me to cut to 4.

Step 4. When I give you my 4, ask me to cut to 2. Tell me this is the hardest step and that the ones I’m cutting don’t stop mattering — they’re just not what leads right now.

Step 5. Once I have my 2, ask me these, one at a time: What surprised me? What did I fight to keep, and what did I let go of more easily than I expected? Is there a value I kept because I think I should hold it rather than because I actually live it?

Step 6. Now bring it to my work. Given my final two, show me: where my current business is clearly built on them, where it isn’t, and what decision in front of me right now those two values would answer differently than I’ve been answering it. Be specific and be honest with me but also concise. If my top two suggest I’m in a season of saying yes to more, say so. If they suggest I need to be putting something down to make room, say that instead.

End this with 5 of your most thought-provoking questions based on all this data.

The list is here if you want to work from it on paper instead.

You can find Kym at aifortherapists.com and thetravelingtherapist.com, and the full conversation is here. [LINK TO LIVE]

You can find me here and on Instagram @drstephthrower where I am knee-deep in trying to grow there. Attempting a trial reel method and ooof is it something! Follow along to see how it goes.

Maybe you left a job with benefits. Maybe you closed a practice, or didn’t go back after the baby, are storing all your time away to build the side-hustle or moved for someone else’s career and rebuilt from nothing on the other side. Whatever the specific version is, you made a choice that was genuinely yours — and somewhere in the making of it, you signed a promise that might be taking you under.

The underlying idea…because I picked this, I have to carry it alone.

When you’re an employee and something goes wrong, the blame gets distributed — the org chart, the workload, the manager, the market. When the whole thing was your idea, there’s nowhere for it to go. It all lands on you.

I saw this fantastic post the other day talking about creating AI agents in our businesses. At first I scrunched my face when Cat (@AskCatGBT) said “I want to be able to blame another human when something breaks or the ball is dropped.” She talked about our ability to create agents all day to manage accounts receivable or build software. But you ultimately are the ones that are responsible for managing those agents and making sure they are built correctly.

Great, not only do we feel like we should do it ourselves - now because it’s possible with AI, we may feel that even more.

This pattern — I chose it, so I forfeit the right to need anything — is a very reliable consequence I see of women business owners. It’s also especially loud for entrepreneurs who are also caregivers.

And I’m wondering what we can do to shake this idea up a bit to come to a more sustainable and more resourced mindset in our business.

The conversation that made me say it out loud

I had the pleasure of talking to on my Substack Live and I learned so much about her incredible journey. She’s a nurse turned entrepreneur — with years of serious experience in emergency medicine and surgical oncology, a former Air Force flight medic, wilderness paramedic, military spouse, mother, and now the person behind three businesses in Hawaii. She calls herself the burnout queen and is very clear it is not a crown she wears proudly.

About halfway through, she said this:

“Sometimes I get caught up in — I don’t want to ask my husband for money, or tell him about my day, or ask him to watch my son so I could take a break. Because this was my choice. I decided to leave nursing to become an entrepreneur, and I can’t come to him until I become successful.”

And twenty minutes later, without either of us noticing we’d landed in the same place, I heard myself say that the hard part is “I have myself to blame if something goes wrong. I made this choice.”

Two women, two different careers, same story we are telling ourselves.

She calls it the permission gap — the gap between how freely we hand out grace to everyone around us and how completely we refuse it for ourselves.

Let’s break this down and see what we can do to decrease that gap.

Three goals, borrowed from ACT

I use Acceptance and Commitment Therapy a lot, partly because it doesn’t ask you to argue yourself out of anything. It’s less interested in whether a thought is true than in whether holding it tightly is doing you any good.

Three of its goals seem useful here, and they map onto the three parts below.

Defusion is loosening your grip on a thought so it stops running the show. Not disproving it — just getting enough distance to see it as something your mind is saying rather than a fact about the world.

Committed action is the small, concrete, slightly uncomfortable thing you do anyway.

Values are the directions you’d choose for yourself if you weren’t busy following instructions you never agreed to.

We’ll take them in that order, because I think the story has to loosen a little before self-compassion becomes remotely possible.

Part 1 — The stressor is not the stress

Emily and Amelia Nagoski wrote Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle, and their central distinction is one I wish everyone in business had read.

A stressor is the thing that causes stress. The unpaid invoice, the launch that flopped, the child who woke up at 4am. Stress is what happens in your body in response — a full physiological cycle that evolved to run its course and then finish.

Here’s the trap. Dealing with the stressor does not deal with the stress. You can solve the problem completely and still be carrying the whole biological response around in your body, unfinished, for weeks. The Nagoskis’ point is that the cycle has to be completed — through movement, breath, laughter, crying, affection, creative expression, connection with another person — and that solving the underlying problem does none of that.

Now watch what I chose this does to that. It convinces you that the only legitimate response to feeling awful is to work harder on the business. Fix the funnel, fix the offer, get the launch right, and then success will provide you with a permission slip to get relief.

Anacani found this out the hard way at twenty-five. She discovered she had two heart conditions while teaching a med student to take a manual blood pressure — on her own arm. The reading was 220 over 110. A cardiologist told her that without treatment she had about three months. She had, at that point, just run a marathon in four hours and twenty-six minutes and was working three jobs. Her words: “my body was on point until it wasn’t.”

This is where defusion can be powerful. I chose this, so I have to carry it alone isn’t a fact you need to argue with. It’s a sentence your mind produces, reliably, usually when you’re depleted AND feeling doubt about your decisions.

And you can notice it doing that. You can learn (with some effort for sure) how to either let that thought pass because it makes sense it happened OR you can make a meal out of that thought.

My favorite metaphor shows up here - just imagine you have an octopus wrapped around your head (credit for this metaphor goes to a wonderful person). So that octopus is quite magical and cool… and also blocks you from seeing the world.

But the more you try to unwrap the octopus from your head, the more she latches on. Don’t fight her, just learn how to peel back one leg…arm…oh my gosh what are they called (I feel like this is a daily picture book animal). You get the point, fighting our thoughts won’t work. We are aiming to get a tiny bit of distance so we don’t feel fused with the octopus.

Hence defusion.

Reflection questions

• When “I chose this” shows up, what time is it, and what happened in the twenty minutes before?

• What’s your body doing when it arrives? Hungry, wired, dull, running on four hours of sleep?

• Is it louder on days you were with people or days you were alone?

• And the octopus question: when it shows up, do you let it pass — or do you make a meal of it?

Try this prompt

I want your help building a personal menu of ways to discharge stress from my body — not a list of what works generally, a list of what works for me, given my actual life. Interview me first. One question at a time, and wait for my answer before the next one.

Step 1 — My constraints. Ask me about the shape of my days: caregiving, hours I control versus hours I don’t, what my body can and can’t do right now, what I’m too tired to consider, and anything that’s off the table. Don’t suggest anything yet.

Step 2 — What’s already worked. The research on completing the stress cycle points to seven routes: physical movement, breathing, positive social interaction, laughter, affection, crying, and creative expression. Take me through them one at a time and ask what my real version of each has been — including things I did as a kid, or before I had children, or that I’d be a bit embarrassed to name. Push past my first answer; it’s usually the one I think I’m supposed to give.

Step 3 — Reality check. For everything I’ve named, ask me honestly whether I’d do it on a bad day. Sort them into would actually do, would do if someone made me, and sounds good, never happening. Keep the third pile out of the final chart.

Step 4 — Build the chart as text. Give it to me as a table before you make anything visual: tiers down one side, and for each entry the specific action in my own words, roughly how long it takes, and what state it’s best for — wired, flat, tearful, numb. Let me correct it.

Step 5 — Then make the image. Once I’ve approved the text, generate an image AI prompt I can put on my fridge or my phone lock screen. Ask me about visual metaphors or styles of art that fit for this image (give me choices if I’m not sure).

Part 2 — Asking is the action

Once the story loosens a bit, doing gets slightly easier. In ACT that’s committed action — small, specific, and usually uncomfortable (not a sign you’re doing anything wrong, could actually be so right).

For most of us the action here is asking for help. And asking is hard for reasons that go well beyond personality.

The Nagoskis borrow a distinction from the philosopher Kate Manne: broadly, our culture sorts people into human beings, who are entitled to their own personhood, and human givers, who are morally obligated to give their time, attention, affection and bodies to the human beings. Most of us can guess which one we were handed.

It shows up as a felt duty to be pleasant, calm, generous, endlessly attentive — and to never have needs of your own that inconvenience anybody.

Anacani named the receiving half of it: “We are awesome at giving. When it’s receiving time, we put our hands up.” She described her husband noticing she was struggling and offering to take their son so she could rest — and hearing herself say no, it’s okay, I got this.

And I think the self-chosen part makes it heavier. If giving already feels like the job, and the thing you’d be asking for help with was your own idea in the first place, then the ask starts to feel like it needs justification. Not just can you take the kiddos for two hours but can you take them for two hours, and I better get everything done and make money too.

So the committed action is asking for help because you want to try on this human being thing.

Here are some ways to baby-step into this when it feels uncomfortable.

Make it specific and time-bound. “I need more support” is almost impossible to respond to. “Can you take the kids Saturday from nine to eleven” is a yes-or-no question.

Drop the justification. The urge to explain why you deserve it is the rule talking. You can just ask.

Expect it to feel bad, and go anyway. In ACT this is acceptance & willingness — not waiting until the discomfort clears, but bringing it along. The discomfort isn’t evidence you’ve done something wrong. It’s usually evidence you’ve done something new.

Practice receiving separately. Asking and accepting are different skills. If someone offers you something this week, the whole practice is saying yes without adding are you sure or only if it’s easy.

Reflection questions:

• What did you say no to this month that you actually wanted?

• Do you find it hard to identify what you want when the to do list is so primary - what happens when someone asks you, “what do you want to do (that isn’t work)”

• Who has offered you help recently, and what did you say instead of yes?

• If a friend described your exact workload to you, what would you tell her she was allowed to ask for?

• What’s the smallest ask you could make this week that you’d actually follow through on?

Try this prompt:

I’d like your help designing one small request I’ll actually make this week.

Step 1. Here’s what I gave this week — time, labour, emotional support, unpaid work, care — and here’s what I received. Lay the two side by side and tell me what the ledger shows, without softening it.

Step 2. Based on that, suggest five possible asks I could make of a real person in my life. Range them from very small to genuinely uncomfortable. Make each one specific and time-bound — a yes-or-no question, not a general appeal for support. In my voice, write a few different scripts to ask for help.

Here’s my week: [paste what you gave / what you received]

Part 3 — What do you actually value about your own care?

There’s a term in ACT for following a rule because of what other people will think: pliance. You do the thing because approval follows, and disapproval follows not doing it.

Here is the heady definition:

A form of rule-governed behavior under the control of a history of socially-mediated reinforcement for coordination between behavior and antecedent verbal stimuli (i.e., the relational network or rule), in which that reinforcement is itself delivered based on a frame of coordination between the rule and behavior. Stated another way, pliance requires both following a rule and detection by the verbal community that the rule and the behavior correspond. Mere social consequation does not define pliance. The rule itself is called a ply.

Oh my gosh, a ply. Sounds kinda cool?

Until you follow it, because damn I feel like ply’s are all around me as a mom. A good mother doesn’t need a break. A real entrepreneur figures it out alone. If you chose this, you don’t get to complain. Asking for help means you couldn’t handle it.

Things that I notice people say to themselves but never to others. And unfortunately, I think these rules run our calendars, our offers, our goals, and our fees.

A value works differently (dear lord, let’s hope so).

It’s chosen rather than inherited (or re-chosen if it’s from our family), it’s a direction rather than a finish line, and it can’t be completed — only moved toward or away from. Playing & being present with my kids reflects a value. A good mother doesn’t ask for help is a rule.

Self-care is where this gets confusing fast, because so much of what’s sold to us as self-care is just another rule with nicer branding. Five a.m. wake-ups. Cold plunges. A morning routine with seven steps. If you’re doing it because someone credible said this is what well people do, that’s still pliance — you’ve just changed who you’re seeking approval from.

Anacani and I got into a version of this on the Live — the productivity books where every celebrated early riser turns out to be a man, the strategy advice built for people with no caregiving load. She’s built her own work around cyclical energy and lunar rhythm. She came to this practice by finally listening to her body.

The tricky part is that a ply doesn’t feel like a rule from the inside. It feels like integrity. It feels like being a decent person who takes her commitments seriously. Nobody experiences themselves as obeying — we experience ourselves as caring.

Which is why asking yourself “what are my rules?” mostly doesn’t work. You get your best answer, and your best answer is the rule.

So we come at it sideways instead, with two lists that don’t look related. The first is what you actually want. The second is what you feel guilty about. Then we look at where they run into each other — because I think that collision is where a lot of the tiredness is coming from.

Reflection Questions

First — describe an amazing day, two years from now.

Not plan it. Describe it. Wake-up to lights-out, in present tense, in detail. You’re not committing to anything, so don’t edit for realism and don’t be reasonable.

• Where are you when you wake up, and what happens in the first hour?

• Who else is in the day, and what are you doing together?

• What does the work part look like — what are you actually doing, and for how long?

• What’s in this day that isn’t in your life now? What’s absent that currently is?

• Which detail did you almost not write down? Keep that one.

Second — make the guilt list.

Five to ten things you feel guilty about when you drop them. Not the ones you think ought to make you feel guilty. The ones that actually produce the sinking feeling.

• What did you drop this month that you’re still thinking about?

• What do you do that nobody would notice if you stopped — but you’d feel it?

• What would you never let a friend or client feel bad about, and feel terrible about yourself?

• Whose voice is each one in? Say the name if you can.

Try this prompt

I’m going to give you two things: a description of an ideal day two years from now, and a list of things I feel guilty about when I don’t do them. I want you to find where they collide. Please be direct, don’t flatter me, and don’t rush to resolve the tension — the tension is the useful part.

Step 1 — Values from the day. Read the day and name the values underneath it. Phrase each one as a direction in my own words, not a generic value word. Not “family” — something more like “I want to be someone my kids interrupt.” Then ask me which ones I’d want to argue with, and why.

Step 2 — Sort the guilt list. For each item, ask me where I first heard it, whose voice it’s in, and what happens socially and internally when I break it. One at a time, waiting for my answer. Then classify each as: a rule I follow to avoid disapproval, a real value of mine, or a rule with a value buried inside it. Most will be the third. Separate the two parts when they are.

Step 3 — The collision map. This is the main event. Build me a table: each value from Step 1 in one column, and every rule from Step 2 that directly obstructs it in the next. For each pairing, name the mechanism — not “these conflict,” but specifically how obeying that rule spends the time, energy, or permission that value requires. Include the collisions I probably haven’t noticed.

Step 4 — Where this breaks. Given the map, tell me where I’m most likely to hit a wall in the next six months. Which value am I quietly giving up to keep the peace, and what does that usually cost by month four? Be concrete, and don’t soften it.

Step 5 — The cheapest first move. Name the one rule that, if I loosened it slightly, would free up the most room across several values at once. Suggest one specific thing I could do this week — and tell me honestly what it will probably cost me socially, so I can decide with my eyes open.

Here’s my day: [paste]
Here’s my guilt list: [paste]

What I keep coming back to

Late in the conversation Anacani told me she’d been trying to price a private yoga session. She had a number. It felt, in her words, icky.

So she took it to her yoga therapist friend on the island, who asked what specifically felt icky, then walked her through the hours, the prep, the real cost of delivering the thing — and she landed somewhere she could stand behind.

Her line: “Not AI. Somebody who’s actually doing it with you.”

I think that’s the part I’d want you to keep, more than any exercise above. She didn’t need better information. What she needed was a person who knew the work, looking at her actual situation, telling her what she was allowed to charge.

The Nagoskis end their book close to this — that the cure for burnout isn’t self-care so much as all of us caring for each other. Which makes me think the isolation isn’t only a symptom of burning out. For a lot of us it might be part of what’s driving it.

And the belief that we chose this, so we have to carry it alone, is what keeps the isolation in place.

Where to go from here

So here’s what we did.

We separated the stressor from the stress, and found a half step of distance from the thought that keeps us working when what our body needs is to discharge something. We made one small ask, and practiced letting the discomfort of asking be ordinary rather than evidence we’d done something wrong. And we put what we actually want beside what we feel guilty about, and looked at where the two run into each other.

None of it is finished, and I don’t think it’s supposed to be. The most common agreed upon definition of values is that they cannot be completed — you only get to move toward them or away from them, which means this is less a project than a rhythm:

If you take every exercise in this guide and do it alone, in a notebook, at eleven at night — you’ll have technically done the work but now I have one more brave ask for you…

Do at least one piece of it with somebody. Read your dream day out loud to a friend. Send someone your guilt list and ask which ones sound like her own mother. Make your one small ask of a real person this week rather than planning a better version of it for next month.

It’s a muscle, as Anacani said about all of this. You just have to practice doing it — and you don’t have to practice by yourself.

Anacani Walters is at @EmpowerHerWave across socials (LinkedIn under her own name), and she’s just launched Dopamine Oasis, an app that asks you a couple of quick questions and points you toward either a nervous-system reset or a push. There’s a free content bingo app in her Facebook group too.

The full conversation is here — we covered burnout, career U-turns, breastfeeding, gender studies and a marathon that nearly killed her. [Watch the replay →]

I run these Lives most weeks and the next few are already booked. Subscribe and you’ll get them in your inbox, plus the replay if you can’t make it live. PLUS THIS BONUS GUIDE!

You built it once (or someone built it for you), probably in a push, probably later than you wanted to. And now you kind of avoid it. You send people to it…with ambivalence. You know a few things are out of date or you don’t love it. You’ve been meaning to “redo the whole thing” for a while. When someone compliments it, you say “oh, it needs work.”

Here’s what I’ve been sitting with since my conversation with Andy Klepner: that flinch you feel about your own website might not just be about finding more time or money to stay on top of it. You could maybe use a shift in the way you think about your website.

Andy has built close to 5,000 web properties over twenty-five years, and the thing he kept coming back to was a reframe I hadn’t heard before.

He treats every website like it’s real estate. Actual property. And most of us don’t because a website is, in his words, “of the mind.” You don’t touch it. You don’t walk through it. So it doesn’t feel like a thing you own.

But, it certainly feels like a bill you pay and a chore you’re behind on.

He sees the cost of that everywhere. People who don’t even know if they own their own domain name. Folks who find out — too late, when they try to move — that they were only ever renting the thing they thought was theirs. A whole mindset where your most public, most valuable business asset gets treated like a disposable afterthought.

So let me offer you the opposite.

What if your website is a house you own? A property worth improving, worth maintaining, worth loving? Not because you feel the pressure to have a nice shiny brand, but because it genuinely reflects the value of the work you do. They way it can feel exhausting but good to finally get the gutters replaced so there’s no more random water in the basement.

Two principles from Andy make this doable instead of daunting.

First: urgency is not an emergency. You don’t have to panic-renovate the whole house this weekend. Steady care beats crisis response — the client who lost his site right before our interview would’ve been fine if he’d just clicked the backup button once a month.

And second, the one I quote constantly: we learn with our hands. You don’t improve a website by planning the perfect redesign in your head. You get in and tend one part

Here are the three parts worth tending.

Part 1: Design — make it feel like somewhere you’d want to live

It’s really hard and overwhelming to decorate a house without any inspiration. I’m no expert in this domain, but when I wanted to set up my airbnb I knew I was going to get very lost very fast in figuring out how to transform the 7-bedroom into something fresh and welcoming.

My recommendation is to start by going somewhere beautiful on purpose, but also somewhere that has a limit on the available options. For example, if I send people to pinterest to gather their vibe, a lot of people are overwhelmed immediately. It helps to send my clients to somewhere where there is not an infinite number of options they can choose.

Go browse the sites at Tonic or Showit. These are where design-forward creatives live, and it’s a feast — sites that feel warm, editorial, intentional, alive. We’re not going to copy. (and if we tried to I find that’s when we get a little disappointed) Instead, go to notice. Screenshot every single thing that makes you lean in. The generous white space. The serif headline. The way the photos feel like a real person, not a stock library. Here’s where pinterest is handy - store those photos there on a board.

Then here’s the move that I have been appreciating a lot: take those screenshots to ChatGPT or Claude and ask it to describe what you’re looking at. Because we often can’t put words to what we’re drawn to — we just know it feels right and “vibe” is just not enough to communicate to a designer nor AI.

Ask the AI to give you the style vocabulary like: “warm and editorial,” “cottage-core meets clean,” “high-contrast and confident,” “lots of air.” Now you have language. And language is what lets you actually build (or tell a designer) instead of endlessly gesturing at “I don’t know, something different.”

Reflect on:

• When you land on your own homepage as a stranger would — what does it say about the value of your work?

• What are three sites that make you feel something, and what specifically do they do?

• If your website were a room in your home, would you want to sit in it?

Try this with your AI: You’re an expert brand and web designer with a rare gift for putting precise language to visual taste. My goal: turn my vague sense of “I want it to look nicer” into a design direction I can actually build from or hand to a designer.

First, ask me up to 5 questions about my business, who I serve, and the feeling I want a visitor to have in the first 5 seconds. (If I paste in screenshots of sites I love, factor those in — but don’t require them.)

Then give me:

1. Three distinct visual directions, each with a NAME, plus its mood, typography feel, color palette, imagery style, and layout energy.

2. A tight “style words” vocabulary list I can reuse with a designer or an AI image tool.

3. One sentence per direction on the kind of client it attracts and which of my values it signals.

Push back if a direction is trendy but wrong for my audience. I want taste that fits me, not a template.

Part 2: Writing — a house feels alive when someone lives in it

An empty house and a lived-in one are different the second you walk in. The lived-in one has warmth, signs of a person, evidence someone’s here. On a website, that’s your writing.

I know. “Blog regularly” sounds like one more chore for the resentment pile. Writing on your website keeps the place alive — and our search mechanisms (Google and AI) notice. Fresh, consistent writing sends a signal: ‘We’ve got a live one here! People like it, it’s still pulling traffic, it’s still interesting — let’s move it up the list because it makes us look good.

And here’s where houses and websites part ways. You can neglect a house for years — life happens, I live it — then do a frantic push to fix it up right before you sell, and that works. A website doesn’t reward the last-minute glow-up the same way. Its value compounds from consistent tending and sharing over time. Neglect shows. Care shows more.

But here’s the thing I’ve built my whole content life around: you do not have to sit down and write. You have to talk.

My actual system is simple. I catch an idea while I’m walking the dog or driving to pickup, and I talk it into a voice memo — no structure, no polish, just the thought while it’s hot. Then I hand that memo to AI and let it help me shape the raw talking into a real post. Or, I take my long podcast transcript, I talk in a voice memo on what I want the angle of my guide to be and along with a prompt I get a decent 1st draft and then do editing to make something I really love.

Two things happen when you do this consistently. Your house fills with rooms (every post is a new door into your work). And your voice — the thing that makes the site unmistakably yours instead of generic — gets stronger every single time. That voice is the difference between a property people click through and a property people come back to.

Reflect on:

• What do you find yourself explaining to clients over and over? (That’s your next three posts.)

• When in your week could you talk one idea into your phone — dog walk, commute, folding laundry?

• What makes your voice yours — and does your current site sound like you or like a template?

Try this with your AI: “You’re a content strategist and ghost-editor who specializes in protecting a person’s real voice. My goal: build a month of blog posts I can create by

TALKING, not writing.

First, interview me: ask 5–7 questions about what I do, who I help, what I believe that others in my field don’t, and the questions clients ask me most.

Then give me:

1. Twelve post ideas drawn from my actual expertise and opinions — each with a working title and the ONE felt problem it solves for the reader.

2. For each, a single “talk prompt”: the exact question I’d answer out loud into a voice memo to draft it.

3. Which 4 to start with, and why. Everything in plain, spoken language. Nothing that sounds like a template or a LinkedIn thread.”

Here is another one: “:Here’s a voice-memo transcript of me thinking out loud. Shape it into a blog post that sounds unmistakably like ME — keep my phrasing, my rhythm, my examples, even my good digressions. Do NOT smooth it into generic “content.” Then tell me the one place the argument is weakest and how to strengthen it.”

Part 3: The backend — oh dang, the plumbing

This is the space I am most inclined to ignore. And you know what, one of my favorite quotes: “what you avoid controls you,” rings very true right here.”

Because of course, what was the first problem we had in our airbnb? The plumbing, it was not for the faint of heart. And we got through it, after a lot of realizing what we were made of. My point is, we can deal with s*&$.

And that’s what it can feel like when we are behind on all the backend problems of our website, because of course we are confused. All the SEO and AEO stuff — the structured, technical, acronym-heavy maintenance that lives under the floorboards. I don’t love it, I think mostly because I don’t fully understand it.

But I did love what Andy said, business first, technology second. You do not need to master the plumbing. I did not need to know how to fix our plumbing problem, but I did need to keep finding good, smart people and resources to troubleshoot the problem. As much as I wanted to hand someone the keys, it was always going to be up to us to figure it out.

A few pieces worth knowing by name, so we’re a little less confused:

Schema is the one people talk about most. It’s structured data — a little code in the background that spells out to search engines (and increasingly to AI answer engines) what your page actually is: this is an article, this is the author, this is a review, this is an event. It’s the label on the box. It helps AI understand you well enough to recommend and cite you. You don’t have to hand-code it; most site platforms and plugins can add it, and AI can generate it for you.

The other basics: give each page a clear title and description (the little blurb that shows up in search), write real alt text on your images (describe the picture — it helps both accessibility and search), and link your own pages to each other so the house has hallways between rooms.

Reflect on:

• Do you actually own your domain and hosting — and do you know where the “keys” are kept?

• What’s one backend basic you could learn just well enough to not be at anyone’s mercy?

• Where have you been intimidated into inaction (or into overpaying) by tech that isn’t as scary as it sounds?

Try this with your AI: “You’re a friendly technical SEO and AEO (AI answer-engine optimization) consultant who explains things to smart, non-technical business owners without ever condescending. My goal: understand and prioritize my website’s backend without becoming a developer.

First, ask me: what platform my site is built on, what my business does, and what I most want the site to do (get found, book calls, sell a course).

Then give me:

1. The 5–7 backend fundamentals that actually matter for MY situation (including schema) — each with a one-line “why it matters” and a quick “is this a problem for me?” check.

2. A prioritized action list: quick wins first, deeper work after, each labeled DIY or hire-help.

3. The exact steps or plugin/setting names to add schema on my specific platform.

Flag anywhere business owners commonly get overcharged or scared into buying something they don’t need.

The part you can’t hand off

I am increasingly thinking about what we can delegate and what we can’t in our businesses and work. As strange as it sounds, AI acts as a foil to trying to understand what is “human” and I think we’re all trying to figure this out.

In the space of your website, you can hand the backend to AI or over to someone as expert as Andy.

But the taste — knowing which beautiful thing is actually you — and the voice, the lived-in warmth that makes the house worth visiting? That part stays yours. AI can describe the style once you point at it, but it can’t feel the pull for you. It can draft the post, but it can’t have the thought

.When we change our relationship with the care that is required for our homes and our websites, whether it’s the gutters or updating the information, the chore becomes a labor of love. That love is the part that cannot be automated.

So the loop I’m leaving you with is a homeowner’s loop, not a renovation project:

1. Walk your own site like a guest.

2. Tend one part — one small improvement.

3. Come back and take on a new small job next week.

Not the whole redesign. Not this weekend. One part. Urgency is not an emergency, and you learn with your hands.

If you want someone who treats your site like the real property it is — Andy’s over at Brighter Idea. His whole thing is making the scary tech un-scary, and his tutorials are built to pause-and-build right alongside you.

And if you want the reflective, psychology-underneath-the-building version of all this — the reason we resent the thing we should love — subscribe. I’ve got more of these conversations booked and more guides to come!

— Steph

Or maybe you share a post that teaches beautifully and then just... stops, no invitation anywhere in sight. The email you wrote and didn’t send. The person you’ve been meaning to reach out to for six weeks because they’d be perfect for your program, and you know it, and you haven’t.

Or heck, they even reached out to you and you just aren’t sure you can deliver what they’re looking for.

If any of that echoes, you’ve probably been telling yourself you’re bad at sales. Or not a natural marketer. Or “just not salesy” — said with a pinch of pride, because at least it means you’re not one of those people.

Here’s what I think is actually true: you’re fine at sales. But you’re untrained in rejection.

Those are different problems with different fixes. I’m a vocational psychologist who also spent my first years of work coaching gymnastics — a résumé combination that usually earns me either polite nodding or a swift change of subject — but what it means is that I’ve spent my whole career watching what people do when they are scared. And what many of us do is find a very reasonable, very respectable way to reduce that unpleasant feeling.

And this isn’t just about sales calls. It’s the course you haven’t launched, the collaboration or podcast you haven’t pitched, the price you haven’t raised. Anywhere an ask could be met with a no, this pattern lives.

All of this crystallized during my Substack Live conversation last Friday with — digital marketing strategist, former Broadway performer, the person who started the world’s first AI-focused content membership, and (full disclosure) my own coach. We planned to talk about teaching AI and leadership, and we did — but what people responded MOST to in our conversation was somewhere a bit different: what performers know about hearing no that the rest of us could really learn from as entrepreneurs.

The Forgotten Offer

Molly told a story about her own sales pipeline that people seemed to resonate with on Instagram. In her CRM, she uses a pipeline that has two separate stages. A client she was talking to said, “Why do you have two different stages for a sales call? If someone completes a sales call, aren’t they already making an offer?”

She responded in her special way (that only Molly can do) where she tells you with both validation and nonjudgment, while also communicating between the lines: after years of running this amazing business, here’s where you may want to change. Which someone she also says it in a way that gives you confidence that you can indeed make that change.

“Sometimes people actually forget that they’re supposed to make a freaking offer on a sales call.” And then, very honestly: “There are times where we chicken out.”

But what she does there is encourage people to be human in the sales process and ask technology to act as a reminder in that moment we might shy away from really selling ourselves.

Avoidance is negatively reinforced. The moment you decide not to make the ask, your anxiety drops — instantly, reliably, every time. Your body logs that relief as a win. Which means every skipped offer literally trains you to skip the next one.

Reflection questions:

• Where do you tend to forget to make the offer? The call, the post, the email, the DM?

• What do you say to yourself in the exact moment you decide not to ask?

AI prompt to try:

“Act as a psychology-informed sales coach. I’m an entrepreneur who avoids making direct offers. Here are three recent moments where I ended an interaction without making the ask: [describe them — the more quality detail the better: who it was, what was said, what I did instead of asking]. For each moment: (1) name what I likely told myself right before deciding not to ask, (2) name the feeling I was avoiding, and (3) write the 20%-scarier version of the ask I could have made. Then look across all three moments and tell me the pattern you see. Finally, write 3 different versions of a script for the situation I’m most likely to face again this week — ranging from lowest-stakes to boldest — in my voice: warm, direct, no pressure tactics. [Optional: paste a sample of your writing so it matches how you actually talk.] Before you finish, ask me two questions that would help you sharpen the scripts.”

Reps in the Snow

Before Molly taught entrepreneurs, she was a working musical theater performer in New York. Which meant sitting outside audition buildings in the snow, sometimes for eight hours, sometimes to be turned away without ever entering the room. And when she did get in: thirty seconds to introduce herself, a fragment of a song, “thank you,” and no feedback on the way out.

Again and again and again. For years.

“Those muscles were strengthened again and again,” she told me. “And that has helped with sales. It’s helped with social media. It’s helped with ALL of it.”

That right there describes what we are talking about a lot... reps. It’s the same principle I used as a beam coach in gymnastics: graduated exposure to fear while increasing self-efficacy in more and more advanced skills. Little girls never just jump on the high beam and start flinging around flips and leaps. We start with a line taped to the floor, go to the floor beam with mats stacked level to the top, and work our way up week after week after week.

Graduated exposure builds the tolerance, and the confidence trails behind the doing.

A lot of experts-turned-entrepreneurs have the inverse training. Our training taught us to avoid being wrong in public at all costs. So we arrive at entrepreneurship with world-class expertise and very few rejection reps in sales. Meanwhile the 25-year-old with the ring light has four hundred.

Reflection questions:

• In the last ten years, how many times did you make a direct ask that could have been refused? What stands out as the hardest time you put yourself out there professionally, knowing you were taking a big risk?

• Who could witness your process of making those offers so you’re not white-knuckling this alone?

AI prompt to try:

“Act as a performance psychologist designing a graduated exposure program. Help me build a two-week plan for making offers and asks in my business. My current comfort level: [describe — which asks feel easy, which make your stomach drop]. My business and offer: [describe]. My actual weekly capacity: [describe]. Build it like a gymnastics progression — start me on the line taped to the floor (low-stakes asks) and work up to the high beam (direct offers to real prospects). Give me 2–3 reps per week, each slightly harder than the last. For each rep include: the exact ask, my predicted fear rating (1–10), and a two-line log to fill in afterward (what happened / what I felt). Add one rule for when I’ve earned the next level, and one rule for what to do when a rep goes badly so I don’t quietly quit. At the end of the two weeks, ask me what you need to know to design the next two.”

From Rejection to Redirection

At some point in the conversation, Molly said the line that moved me: “There’s never truly a rejection. It’s a redirection.”

I know this rhyme sounds trite, but I’ve literally never heard her say that before. Like every good teacher, Molly has some strong repeated phrases to keep her clients focused. But this one was authentically generated from our deep-dive conversation.

Turning rejection into redirection in our minds is certainly a skill, and I think many might worry we might be tip-toeing toward toxic positivity land.

But I don’t think so. I’ve heard Molly talk about how she has developed foundational techniques for building resilience against internalizing rejection. Because that is where the risk is.

Let’s think about performers and the dehumanizing supply-and-demand math of getting hired. Acting is by no means a seller’s market. There is only one part and hundreds of performers auditioning.

Molly came to realize that she needed to actively defend herself from thinking that being picked proves her worth or value as a person. She even developed a process for herself and her clients to keep her value top of mind so those rejections become an expected part of business rather than proof of self-worth.

Putting on my psychologist glasses: this is exposure plus emotional processing plus cognitive reappraisal, wearing a much friendlier outfit. It’s the difference between a no that ends your momentum and a no that becomes data. The performers had to build this or they would quit after the first (highly statistically) inevitable NO. We need to build it too.

Reflection questions:

• Think of the last no you received (or the silence that felt like one). What did you decide it meant about you — and what did it actually prove about the offer, the timing, or the fit?

• Molly keeps her value “top of mind” so rejection stays business data instead of a self-worth verdict. What would your version of that practice look like — what would you need to reread, remember, or have someone say to you before your next ask?

AI prompt to try:

“I want to process a rejection without internalizing it. Here’s what happened: [describe the no — or the non-response — you’re still carrying]. Walk me through it one question at a time: first help me name what actually happened factually, then what I felt, then what I’ve been making it mean about me or my offer. Then help me sort the no into what it says about the offer, the timing, and the fit — separate from my worth. When we’re done, help me write a short ‘value reminder’ in my own voice — 3–4 sentences I can reread before my next ask — and end by asking me what that next ask will be and when I’ll make it.”

The part AI can’t do

AI can write your pitch, draft your follow-up sequence, build the funnel, polish the sales page until it gleams.

But AI cannot absorb the no for you. Rejection tolerance is the one skill whether you want to get the part, the sale, the job or opportunity. You can’t delegate this to a team, to a template, or to a model. The ask still has to travel from one body to another, so you’re gonna feel something no matter what.

So here’s the loop I’m leaving you with:

1. Make one ask.

2. Whatever comes back, feel it — then file it as data about the offer, not a verdict on you.

3. Ask again.

Molly made something for you: her free Ideal Avatar Generator — because you can’t build rejection tolerance asking the wrong people. Grab it at molly.live/drthrower. (Yes, it has my name in it. Yes, I gasped.)

If you missed the Live, [the replay is here] — including Molly spontaneously singing on my podcast, which I did not have on my bingo card.

And if you’re new here: subscribe. I do these Lives once a week with people so worth learning from, and the summer is already booked.

Subscribe now

Oh yeah, and here’s my other ask: if you like instagram, follow me there too. Doing a lot of vulnerable visibility (and ridiculous editing).

Use the big words. Don’t stumble when you speak. Say “research says.” Keep yourself out of it. Nobody handed you a document — you absorbed it, the way you absorb a dress code: from the professors with their little entourages, from the supervisor reviewing your videos and notes, from the quiet understanding that this is what professional sounds like.

And here’s the thing I want to say before anything else: it was important and a survival skill. That voice got you through comprehensive exams, licensure, or defending your dissertation. It got you taken seriously in rooms where — especially if you’re a woman, especially if you’re the first in your family in those rooms — being taken seriously was never guaranteed. The armor was reasonable. In some seasons it was survival.

The problem shows up later, in a very specific moment. You sit down to write a post, or record a video, or describe your new offer — the thing you’re building beyond the credentialed job — and the memo kicks in. The big words arrive. The protective armor to be seen in certain rooms, makes it hard to be seen on social media.

I spend my working life (in vocational psychology) on the relationship between who we believe we are and what we’re able to do. And what I keep seeing —for anyone whose expertise came with an institution attached — is that the biggest barrier to building the next thing isn’t strategy. It’s that the professional armor gets fused to your whole being, and nobody taught you how to take it off.

This is not just a therapist problem, by the way. If your training rewarded jargon and penalized stumbling — this is about you too.

All of this got a lot more clear during my Substack Live this week with Dr. Angie Pulido-Banner — a psychologist who did everything the “right” way, ended up burned out and $50,000 deep in unpaid insurance claims, and then built two businesses by doing the exact thing we were trained not to do: showing up as her whole self. Her program for therapists is called Burn the Couch, and in our conversation you can tell she’s bringing her whole self (from silly to serious) to her offers.

Angie’s clinical foundation, like mine, includes ACT — Acceptance and Commitment Therapy — and the conversation kept landing on three ACT ideas that I think are the actual work of professional un-becoming.

So for this week, our human and AI prompts are going to draw from theory (pro-tip with AI - I love integrating theoretical models and frameworks because it provides a focus to your conversation rather than pulling from many other potential divergent models).

1. The armor was the achievement

The theory, plainly: ACT distinguishes between self-as-context (the you who notices your experience) and self-as-content (the descriptions you’ve collected — the roles, the credentials, the labels). Fusion is what happens when a description stops being something you have and becomes something you are.

Angie told a story that named this better than any textbook. When she finally hung her doctorate on the office wall, she didn’t choose a modest frame. “I didn’t put it on a small frame — I’m like, this is how big it is,” she said. “But it really was hiding a lot of those insecurities.” She thought a doctorate would ensure that her voice was being heard — and somewhere along the way, the credential stopped being a tool and started being the self.

What it looks like in your life: The bio that’s a paragraph of ANDs because a simple sentence feels naked. The “research says” reflex when you’re perfectly qualified to just say what you think. The post you wrote in your actual voice and deleted, because a supervisor from years ago still runs quality control in your head.

Reflection questions:

• Which parts of your professional voice are you — and which parts are armor you’d never have chosen without the grading?

• What did the armor protect you from when you earned it? Is that threat still real, or is it a memory with a badge?

• Finish this sentence honestly: “If I stopped performing ‘professional,’ I’m afraid people would decide I’m ___.”

AI prompt (copy-paste):

Here are 3–5 pieces of my public writing (bio, recent posts, an offer description). Analyze the voice: 1) Where am I using jargon, credentials, or hedging language that reads as protection rather than communication? 2) Quote the specific sentences. 3) Rewrite each one the way a confident person would say it to a friend — same substance, no armor. 4) Tell me what pattern you notice about when the armor shows up.

2. Try it on

The theory, plainly: One of the most underdiscussed part of ACT’s theoretical framework (yet maybe one of the most important parts) is Committed Action. I mean, it is in the title of Acceptance & Commitment Therapy. I always see such a strong relationship between committed action and values work with clients.

We know when we act in alignment with our values, we tend to feel…(as simple as it sounds)...better.

The most effective way I have helped people loosen the grip of a fused identity isn’t through building insight. It’s through experiments.

You don’t think your way into a new identity; you try one on and see what happens.

This is where Angie is genuinely playful. She grew up fifteen minutes from Hollywood — “it’s all about costumes, like, can’t I be a Disney princess today?” As a kid she was goth one week and a skater the next, and it horrified people: make up your mind.

Her answer, then and now: “This is my mind. I like to try something different every week.” She even brought up superhero-themed therapy and cosplay — the way a costume gives people permission to access a part of themselves the everyday identity won’t allow.

What it looks like in your life: You don’t have to become “a content person” or “an entrepreneur” — those are exactly the kind of giant identity purchases your nervous system will veto. You try on one behavior, for one week, as a costume if you have to. A week of writing posts without citing anyone. A week of saying “I think” instead of “research suggests.” A brand voice, Angie pointed out, can work the same way a superhero suit does — not a mask that hides you, but a costume that gives you permission.

Reflection questions:

• What’s one professional rule you follow that you’ve never actually tested — you just inherited it?

• If you could try on a bolder version of your voice for seven days, deniably, as an experiment — what would that version do first?

• When people push back on you changing (”make up your mind…be ONE thing”), whose discomfort is that actually about?

AI prompt (copy-paste):

Based on what you know about my work and voice, design 3 one-week identity experiments for me. I am showing up in my marketing and want to feel more like myself and shed some of my professional armor, but I’m not sure where I want to land, what I want my branding to depict in my marketing, and what identity feels most like me. Ask me questions about different parts of myself I would like to show and then develop these identity experiments. Each should: 1) name the inherited professional rule it tests, 2) describe one small way of being visible to try daily for 7 days, 3) predict what I’ll be tempted to do to armor it back up, 4) give me one question to journal on at the end of the week.

3. Workability, not rules

The theory, plainly: ACT famously doesn’t ask whether a thought or strategy is true. It asks whether it’s workable — does following it move you toward a life you’d actually want to live? That question dissolves an enormous amount of expert advice.

Here’s the moment from our interview that crystallized the whole conversation for me. Angie mentioned that past coaches have told her to stop chasing shiny objects — standard, sensible-sounding advice.

Her response: “The shiny object is my life force.” She’s neurodivergent, a lifelong learner, someone whose practice was built by following curiosity — hanging out with the neurodivergent community since before she had a degree, weaving somatic art and neuroscience into a trauma method she now runs as five-day intensives in quiet mountain retreats because, in her words about the standard model, “who the hell decided this?”

The advice wasn’t wrong in general. It was wrong for her — and following it would have amputated the thing that makes her work hers.

That’s when I said the thing I’d been circling for weeks: we think so hard about how to be good therapists, and in the coaching space, I’m not sure we think hard enough about how to be good coaches. Handing every client “stop chasing shiny objects” is a scaled framework of a person — and we already know those don’t work.

Somehow we accept business advice compressed into nuggets with no context, no nuance, and no room for the person receiving it.

So here’s my counter-position, and it’s the sentence I’d want you to keep: some advice is not meant for you — and we have to get good at not internalizing other people’s strategy as our personal failure but instead just plain bad advice for US.

Reflection questions:

• What piece of standard advice have you been dutifully following that has never once felt alive in your hands?

• What’s your version of Dr. Angie’s shiny object — the pattern you’ve been told is a flaw that might actually be your life force?

AI prompt (copy-paste):

Here’s the business/content advice I’m currently trying to follow: [list it]. And here’s what you know about me — my energy patterns, my constraints, what’s worked before. For each piece of advice, assess workability, not truth: 1) Does this fit how I actually operate, or does it require me to become someone else first? 2) What’s the adapted version that keeps the principle but accounts for me? 3) Which one should I just delete?

The loop

Professional un-becoming isn’t a decision you make once. It’s a loop you run:

1. Notice the armor (fusion caught in the act)

2. Try something on (one small experiment, one week)

3. Keep what works (workability, not rules)

Then run it again. Angie’s version of this loop ended with her crying and falling down a black diamond run in Mammoth that her Marine husband hadn’t fully warned her about — and getting to the bottom saying, look what I did.

You are more resilient than you think, and if things feel overwhelming, try on the small experiments to prove my point.

If you’re a therapist ready to raise your rates, leave insurance, or build intensives — as your whole self, no straight jacket — go look at Angie’s program, Burn the Couch. She’s the real thing.

And if this found something in you, subscribe — the replay of our conversation is here, the next Lives are already booked, and this space is where I think out loud about keeping your work innovative, authentic, and brimming over with integrity.

Also, we talked A LOT about the yap challenge. To watch that journey come over to the world of instagram.

— Steph

My guest on this week’s Substack Live, Uriah Guilford, just returned from 16 days in Europe with his family. Small roller-bags and one personal item. They even bought vintage clothing in London and Krakow and still made it fit.

Please don’t ask my husband how I pack for a weekend away, I would like to blame it on the small children and dogs, but the never-ending totes are all me. I feel like I close my eyes and dump my whole t-shirt drawer in the bag.

So of course, like any good therapist might do, Uriah and I found a way to drive this metaphor to the ground for how we think some good ways to learn about how to use AI for our business.

There’s a name for what most of us are experiencing with AI tools, and I don’t think “overwhelm” quite covers it. It’s like FOMO, but it’s more like FOBLB. Fear of Being Left Behind (doesn’t really have the same ring, does it?)

FOBLB is different from regular overwhelm because it’s not just that there’s too much — it’s that every new thing you don’t use or learn feels like evidence that you’re falling further back. And unlike suitcase FOMO, which at least only happens when you’re packing, FOBLB is there for you 24/7.

It hits when you’re on social media. When you’re posting your own content and your unconsciously do the thing you are always doing and start scrolling and somehow end up watching someone explain why you absolutely need to connect your MCPs to your calendar and a Dittliobop app or you’re basically obsolete. Or it hits when you see someone in your space talking about a tool you’ve never heard of, and within thirty seconds you’re wondering if your whole business model is outdated.

Uriah described it well: it’s like going to Target for toothpaste and getting to the toothpaste aisle and realizing there are forty-seven kinds of toothpaste and you somehow leave with a throw pillow and a new vision of a skincare routine that will most certainly change your life. You went in with a clear goal and left having added to the list.

FOBLB is that feeling about AI every time you open your phone.

As someone who has lived with a minimalist packer for over 20 years, this is what I think they might understand. Even though I have no interest in becoming a better packer, I open to learn about applying how we approach learning AI so I can droping a few mental bags out of my head.

1. Know where you’re actually going

(I hear) that the most common mistake in travel is packing for every possible scenario rather than for the actual trip. The result is a bag you can barely lift, full of things you never use.

The most common mistake in AI adoption is the same. You find a tool, get excited, and then try to figure out what to do with it — rather than starting with where you’re trying to go and asking what would actually help you get there.

Uriah’s framework is disarmingly simple: start with the problem. What is your biggest actual challenge right now? What, if it worked better, would change something real for you? Whether AI ends up being the answer — that’s a secondary question. The destination comes first.

For most of the therapists and coaches I work with, the real problem isn’t tool selection. It’s time. Energy depletion. Decision fatigue. Too many things that don’t require their specific expertise eating the hours that do. That realization doesn’t come from finding the right tool. It comes from getting clear about where you’re trying to go.

Reflection questions:

• If you had to name the one problem in your practice or business that costs you the most time or energy, what would it be? (Not the most interesting problem. The most expensive one.)

• When you last tried a new AI tool, did you start with the tool or with a problem it was meant to solve?

• What is your actual destination this quarter — not what you’re excited about, but what you’re working toward?

AI prompt to try:

I’m going to describe my biggest current challenge in [my practice / business / work]. Ask me clarifying questions until you understand the actual problem — then suggest whether AI could help, and if so, what type of help would be most relevant. Here’s my challenge: [describe it in a few sentences].And here is my answer to: “What would it look like if this was working really well?” [what do you think would get better or feel better if this problem was solved].

2. Leave most of it at home — in a specific order

Uriah has been teaching the same framework for years: eliminate, delegate, then automate. And in our discussion, I was realizing how the order of that process really matters.

Not because automation is bad — it’s genuinely transformative. But because you cannot automate your way out of a task you should have eliminated. And when you automate something that should have been delegated, you’ve just made yourself more efficient at doing someone else’s job.

Eliminate first. This means taking things off the list completely — not handing them to a tool, but asking whether they need to happen at all. For some of the people I work with, it’s posting on every platform. For others, it’s systems they built that they’ve outgrown. The answer to “how do I use AI for this?” is sometimes “you stop doing this.”

Delegate second. This is where Uriah’s team at Productive Therapist lives — the work that doesn’t require you, handled by people who do it well. And increasingly: work that doesn’t require human judgment, handled by tools that do it consistently. Delegate requires you to know what you want - not blindly handing decisions over to other people because you might be scared of making the wrong decision.

Then — and only then — automate. Because when you automate the wrong things, you’ve optimized for a destination you didn’t actually want to reach. The bag is lighter, but you’ve still packed the wrong shoes.

Uriah said something I keep coming back to: most solo practices don’t need something complex. The goal is to ask what’s simple, what’s sufficient, and what actually fits. Good enough organization is still organization. Good enough systems still run.

Reflection questions:

• What’s something you’re currently doing that you could stop entirely — not delegate, not automate, just stop?

• If you had to identify three tasks to hand off today (to a person or a tool), which three would they be?

• Where are you automating something that first deserves a harder question?

AI prompt to try:

I’m going to describe my typical work week. Help me run a quick audit using this sequence: Eliminate (what should I stop doing entirely?) → Delegate (what should I hand to someone else or to a tool?) → Automate (what should I keep but make more efficient?). Ask me clarifying questions before making any recommendations. Here’s my week: [describe it].

3. Leave room to discover what you couldn’t have planned

Here’s the part of Uriah’s packing story that seemed to have the most lasting emotional impact. And gosh, we know the value of making memories with the people we love the most.

Uriah’s daughters love thrift stores. Because they’d packed light — because they hadn’t filled every available inch of the suitcase before they left home — they had room to find things they couldn’t have planned for. A vintage piece in London. Something in Krakow that didn’t exist in any American shop. They only found those things because they’d left the room.

When every AI tab is open and every newsletter is shouting and you’re trying to implement seven things at once, you lose the capacity to notice. And noticing is where the interesting stuff lives.

I asked Uriah how he manages the constant incoming stream of new tools and ideas, and he said something that I’m still sitting with. He told me he’s built his Claude to act as a business coach — a project he calls Steve — with his goals, his values, his quarterly priorities, and personal context like his daughter leaving for college.

When he brings a new idea to Steve, it doesn’t just evaluate the idea in isolation. It says: shiny object. Your goals are X, Y, Z. This doesn’t serve them right now.

He built himself a filter to protect the room he’d made for the things that matter.

He also told me that earlier this year he was journaling every day — business thoughts, ideas, frustrations, the full mess of running something. And at the start of each month, he’d photograph his journal pages and upload them to Steve, asking Claude to look for patterns. What do you see? What am I circling? Where am I making decisions from my feelings without realizing it?

This is AI as a qualitative analysis tool. And you can only access it when you’re not stuck in the entrepreneurial pinball brain.

Reflection questions:

• When did you last use an AI tool to actually think something through — not to produce something, but to work something out?

• What would you want a genuinely useful AI business coach to know about you? What context would matter?

• If you let AI look at your patterns — your week, your recurring decisions, your frustrations — what do you think it would notice that you’re currently not seeing?

AI prompt to try:

I want you to act as my business coach for this conversation. Before you give me any advice, I’ll share four things: my top three goals this quarter, my biggest current constraint, my most common shiny-object temptation, and one personal factor that’s relevant to my work right now. Once I give you that context, ask me two questions before you offer anything. Here’s my context: [fill in the four things].

The counter-position worth naming

AI can help you decide what to eliminate. It can surface what you should probably delegate. It can reflect your own patterns back to you better than most humans can — especially the patterns you’re too close to see.

But it cannot make the actual cuts. You still have to decide to stop. You still have to close the tabs. You still have to say “not this quarter” when something genuinely interesting arrives.

Making space is yours to do. And I often tell my clients:

Don’t just defend your time and space. Start playing OFFENCE.

Think two steps ahead of the things (including yourself) trying to steal time and energy from you.

What to do with this

1. Name your destination — One sentence. What problem are you actually solving this quarter?

2. Leave three things at home — What can you stop using, stop monitoring, stop feeling guilty about?

3. Book the flight — Pick one thing. Go deep on it. Find someone who can teach you how to do it for your specific situation. Don’t try to learn it all at once.

If you’re a therapist or group practice owner and intake is eating your time, Uriah’s work is worth knowing about. He’s built Simple Intake (simpleintake.ai) — an AI receptionist and intake CRM built specifically for therapy practices, HIPAA-compliant, nine months of real-world testing behind it. It is the most practical thing I’ve seen in this space.

The full replay of our conversation is here:

And if you’re not subscribed yet — I’d love to have you along. I write a weekly reflection that goes deeper than anything I post anywhere else, and I have more conversations like this one coming.

Subscribe now

If you are ready to build your course by the fall - let’s talk. We are enrolling some new students this week to The Innovative Expert Lab and you will be amazed at what you can get done in a few months.

Uriah Guilford is the founder of Productive Therapist and author of The Productive Practice. Find him at productivetherapist.com.

If you’re like most of the therapists, coaches, and credentialed experts I know, you’re vaguely aware of this, vaguely uncomfortable about it, and have been meaning to update it for somewhere between eight and thirty-six months.

You haven’t. And I want to offer you a reframe on why — because it’s not what you think.

I had been having a battle about LinkedIn in my head for years, dipping in and out. So, I was thrilled to actually get that conversation out of my head and talk to , a LinkedIn Top Voice, author of Comment Currency, and someone who helps coaches and therapists build their businesses on LinkedIn, onto my Substack Live to explain what I was missing.

My reasoning for dipping out of LinkedIn had felt thoughtful. I just couldn’t find my voice or my style after starting my business. That old profile and my history just was so different, post baby, post covid, post multiple more business (and babies). And it’s just no fun to be on a platform where you can’t find your voice. On top of that, I wasn’t seeing returns. I started telling myself stories. One of those stories was that LinkedIn was a platform I was performing on rather than actually connecting.

What I found, talking with Wendy, is that the problem wasn’t LinkedIn. The problem was that I was trying to show up as a version of myself that had already moved on.

From my vocational psychology lens, I know that who we believe ourselves to be determines where we think we’re allowed to be seen. And for a lot of experts who built their businesses during a major life transition — leaving academia, leaving corporate, having kids, losing a professional context that used to structure everything — LinkedIn still belongs to the former self.

If you’re a coach building something beyond your 1:1 practice — or wanting to reach organizations, speak on stages, or simply be findable by the right people — this is worth working through.

This guide will help you make that shift, but probably more importantly, it will provide you with actions you can find your voice on LinkedIn and becoming the person that people (and AI) recommend.

Part 1: The Identity Gap

In vocational psychology, we talk about “career identity transitions” — the lag that happens between who you’ve become and how you’re presenting yourself to the world. When your professional context shifts significantly (role change, sector change, life-stage change), there’s almost always a period where the inside and the outside don’t match yet.

Your LinkedIn profile is almost always in the lag.

This shows up practically: your headline describes a job you no longer have. Your About section tells the story of credentials rather than the people you help. Your posts — when you post at all — feel like they’re being written for an audience you no longer belong to.

Something Wendy said early in our conversation is staying with me. She was talking about how she discovered — through an early ChatGPT session — that her CPA background was the most interesting thing about her professional story. She’d been trying to write a bio for a stage presentation, threw all her career details in, and the AI stopped her: “Wait — you’re telling me you have a background in accounting. This has to be front and center.”

She hadn’t realized she’d been discounting it.

The version of your professional story you’ve been leading with may not be the most interesting one. And LinkedIn — both the algorithm and the humans reading it — will mirror that back to you.

Wendy explained that LinkedIn’s algorithm now reads context. It matches your headline to your content and uses that alignment to decide who sees you. If your headline says one thing and your posts say something else, there’s a disconnect the algorithm registers as a signal to not show you to people. You become invisible not because you’re not good, but because you haven’t told the platform who you are now.

The algorithm is just mirroring a problem that already exists. You haven’t told LinkedIn — or maybe yourself — who you’ve become.

Reflection questions:

1. If someone landed on your LinkedIn profile today, would they find the version of you that you’re building toward — or a former version you’ve quietly left behind?

2. What part of your career story have you been discounting that might actually be what makes you interesting?

3. What’s the one-line description of who you help and what you do that your LinkedIn profile doesn’t say yet?

AI prompt — LinkedIn profile identity alignment:

Paste this into Claude or ChatGPT with your current LinkedIn headline, your About section, and one piece of content you’ve written recently (post, email, article):

“I’m a [credential/title] who helps [specific audience] with [specific problem or outcome]. I’m in the middle of a professional identity transition — I’ve built a new practice or business that looks different from my previous professional context. Review my LinkedIn profile and recent content for alignment. Does my headline match what I’m actually doing and writing about now? Does my About section reflect who I’m becoming, or who I used to be? Give me 3 specific edits: a new headline option, a revised opening sentence for my About section, and one thing I should stop leading with.”

(Have you subscribed yet? Seriously — I have weekly Substack Lives booked this summer with guests who are going to make us all inspired to grow. Come watch.)

Part 2: The Comment Muscle

Here is the thing Wendy said that I want to make sure doesn’t get buried: you don’t have to post to start on LinkedIn.

You have to comment.

Commenting is a lower-stakes, higher-leverage entry point than most people realize. When you leave a thoughtful comment on someone’s post, you don’t just show up to your own network — you show up to the poster’s network. Depending on how many people follow them, you can exponentially increase your chances of being seen by people who’ve never heard of you. LinkedIn may also resurface that comment days later, showing it to people in your network who didn’t see the original post.

More importantly: commenting builds what I’d call the commenting muscle. The fear of posting is real. Wendy confirmed she’s worked with CEOs who close million-dollar deals before breakfast and freeze when asked what to post on LinkedIn. The exposure feels disproportionate to the stakes. Commenting is how you start developing the muscle without the full exposure of a published post — it’s more like a conversation than a declaration.

The goal of a comment isn’t to perform expertise. It isn’t to hijack the thread, which I feel like is so present in the facebook space (literally when the evocative comment is highlighted for you to stop scrolling so we all slow down to read the fight as if it is some wreck on the side of the road…I digress).

It’s to add something that genuinely continues the conversation. One additional insight. A question that comes from real curiosity. A brief experience that connects to what the author shared.

“Great post” barely registers anymore, Wendy even explained it might not even help with visibility for the author. But a comment that adds one thing the original poster didn’t say? That’s currency. It brings the right people to your profile — and your profile (once it reflects who you actually are) does the rest of the work.

For therapists and coaches specifically: comment on posts by peer-adjacent experts — people whose audience overlaps with yours but who aren’t doing exactly what you do. That’s where your ideal client is already hanging out and reading. Start there before you go looking for the biggest influencers in your field.

Reflection questions:

1. Whose posts do you read on LinkedIn but never engage with — and what stops you from commenting?

2. What’s the difference between a comment that adds to a conversation and one that performs for the room? Which do you tend toward?

3. What would 20 minutes a week of genuine commenting — not posting — feel like to try for the next month?

AI prompt — building your LinkedIn comment practice:

Use this to develop your commenting habit with AI support:

“I want to build a LinkedIn commenting practice. My professional niche is [e.g., maternal mental health / career coaching for mid-career women / AI for therapists]. I’m not ready to post regularly yet, but I want to start showing up in comments.

Help me with two things: (1) Suggest 8 types of LinkedIn posts I should be engaging with — from people whose audience overlaps with mine but who do different work. (2) Write 3 example comments I could adapt for a post about [specific topic relevant to your niche]: one that adds a clinical or professional insight, one that asks a question that comes from genuine curiosity, and one that connects a brief experience from my practice.”

Part 3: Visible vs. Recommendable

This was the reframe that landed hardest, and I want to give Wendy full credit for it.

She said: “Visibility, just for the sake of visibility, is almost a waste. You’re so much better off being seen to 100 people who really resonate with you than 10,000 people who don’t care who you are.”

I’ve been thinking about this distinction since our conversation ended. Visible means people saw you pass by. Recommendable means when someone says, “I need a therapist who understands maternal mental health and business,” or “I’m looking for a coach who actually gets the academic-to-business transition,” your name comes up. Those are completely different outcomes. They require completely different strategies.

Visibility chases vanity metrics. Recommendability builds authority that humans trust.

Here’s what this means practically: you don’t need to post every day. You need to post with enough consistency and clarity that when the right person lands on your profile, they immediately know you’re the one they’ve been looking for.

Wendy said two good posts a week and twenty minutes of genuine engagement is enough to build traction on LinkedIn — not because volume doesn’t matter, but because quality of resonance will always outweigh frequency of impression.

This is the AI visibility moment we’re all navigating. LinkedIn’s algorithm is now a large language model reading the context of your content, not just the keywords. If you post AI-generated content that anyone could have written, it becomes noise — it fades into the content universe that AI already fills adequately.

But if you post from your specific training, your honest professional takes, your actual experience in the work? That’s the content that builds what Wendy calls “recognizable authority.”

It’s the content only you could have written.

And here’s my push back: I believe that AI can help you write that content, but it cannot produce it from nothing. The integration has to flow the other direction. You tell AI what you’ve seen in 15 years of practice, what the pattern is that keeps showing up in your clients, what you’d say if you had no fear of being judged for having an opinion. Then AI helps you shape it.

The expertise is still yours. It just gets out of your head more efficiently.

Reflection questions:

1. If the right person for your work found your LinkedIn profile today, would they immediately recognize that you’re for them? What specific thing is missing?

2. What’s one piece of knowledge from your professional training that you’ve never written about publicly — and what would happen if you did?

3. What would it mean to optimize for “the right 100 people” rather than reach — and how would that change what you post about?

AI prompt — building your recognizable authority on LinkedIn:

Use this to generate your first LinkedIn post, or to get traction on content you’ve been sitting on:

“I’m a [credential, e.g., licensed therapist / vocational psychologist] who helps [specific audience] with [specific problem]. I want to write a LinkedIn post that builds recognizable authority in my niche — not a generic tip list, but a post that only I could have written because it draws on my specific clinical or professional experience.

Help me do this in three steps: (1) Ask me 5 questions about my professional experience related to [topic I want to write about]. (2) Based on my answers, help me identify the one specific insight from my experience that would genuinely add something to the LinkedIn conversation about this topic — something a non-expert couldn’t say. (3) Draft a 150-word opening that starts with a specific clinical observation, moment from practice, or professional experience — not a hook line, a real thing I’ve seen or done in my work.”

Your Homework

Here’s what I’m taking with me from this conversation — and what applies whether you’re ready to commit to LinkedIn or still in the “maybe someday” phase:

1. Name who you are now, not who you were. Update the profile before you post.

2. Comment before you post. Build the muscle with lower stakes and wider reach than you expect.

3. Write for recognition, not reach. The right 100 people change your business. The wrong 10,000 don’t.

The people your work is for are already on LinkedIn. They’re following people, reading posts, scanning comments. The question isn’t whether to show up — it’s whether what you say when you do will help them recognize that they’ve found you.

You can find Wendy Shore’s book Comment Currency — a genuinely useful guide to the strategy behind LinkedIn engagement — and connect with her here. Our conversation covered a lot of ground in under an hour; I’d especially recommend her work if you’re at the intersection of building a coaching or consulting practice and figuring out where LinkedIn fits.

If you've been meaning to build a course and somehow it keeps not happening — this is worth 10 minutes of your time. Course Correct gives you an honest score across five dimensions and a real report on where you're actually stuck. FREE with my actual tech stack plus my recommended shoestring stack.

He’s an Android user. She’s an Apple user. He doesn’t want Google Calendar — he wants things written down, on a magnet pad stuck to the fridge, but the reality is the only things that actually get looked at there are the grocery list. So now, once a week, an AI reads her calendar — her appointments, his work schedule, whose turn it is with the shared car, which nights are good for client calls because he’s on bedtime — and drafts a text. She skims it, throws in anything extra, sends it. He never opens an app. She never has to sit down and recite the week out loud.

I mean, I could write an article on how AI might be taking over the mental load of husbands and dads…but that’s probably an article for my other business.

You have a business that’s working, even a little bit. But you keep putting off the back-end, because the priorities have been marketing, building and selling. Maybe you’ve put it off because you’re not totally sure what that even means.

So it becomes a looming task of “get organized” on a forever to do list.

You know this (but I’m still going to say it)

Things don’t slow down.

Lucretia had the kind of energy you want going through your metaphorical messy basement. As someone who works a lot with psychotherapists and occupational therapists she highlighted a really important point: the reason your back-end hasn’t been built isn’t that you’re disorganized. It’s that you’re actually really good at what you do. Competent people hold an enormous amount in their heads — therapists tracking dozens of clients’ histories, coaches remembering what someone said two sessions ago, consultants navigating relationships no CRM could ever capture. For a long time, you’ve been more reliable than anything you might have built.

The catch is that you are not scalable.

Listening to Lucretia talk through her work, what struck me wasn’t the tech stack. It was how much of what she does, in a different vocabulary, is the work I do with clients: helping people stop carrying things they were never meant to carry alone.

I had a Substack Live this week with Lucretia — known in her world as SoCretia — a strategic systems architect who builds the operational brains that expert businesses are missing. She works with therapists, OTs, coaches, and founders: websites and funnels, automations in GoHighLevel, client workspaces in Notion and ClickUp. Connected and working together.

What I didn’t expect was how much of our conversation turned out to be about psychology. And how much of it turned out to be about something else entirely — who gets to have a business that doesn’t run them into the ground, and why that question matters to Lucretia far beyond client work. More on that one.

Here is the replay:

Here’s what stuck with me and I think you could take action on today:

Part 1: Getting It Out of Your Head

The brain isn’t built for storage. It’s built for processing.

When you’re holding the location of an intake form, what you told a client last week, whether an invoice went out, what time pickup is — all of it in working memory at once — you’re spending capacity on retrieval that should be going toward judgment, creativity, the parts of the work only you can do.

What Lucretia described, and what I found myself nodding at, was using AI the way you’d use a colleague at the water cooler. When the day goes sideways, she dumps the chaos into a chat, it gets organized, and she walks into her next call without dragging the last hour behind her. “You’re externalizing a mental process,” she said — the looping, the trying-to-remember, the thing your brain keeps circling back to just so it doesn’t lose it. Once it’s somewhere else, written down and actually processed, you can go back to it. Or you can just let it go.

That grocery list and calendar text aren’t a quirky habit. They’re the same instinct that drives a good Notion workspace or an automated invoice trigger: a decision made once, so it doesn’t have to occupy your brain again.

Reflection questions:

1. Think about the last time you onboarded a new client, sent a proposal, or wrapped up a project. What did you do — and in what order? Could you write it down right now, or is it mostly “I just figure it out each time”?

2. What’s something you do for every client that takes way longer than it should — not because it’s hard, but because you’re recreating it from scratch each time?

3. At the end of a full week, what are the tasks that made you feel like you were winging it?

Step 1 — Pick the right process to start with (copy and use with Claude or ChatGPT):

“I run a [describe your business — e.g., private therapy practice, health coaching business, consulting firm]. I want to build a simple process map for one part of how I work so I can stop reinventing it every time — but I’m not sure which process to start with.

Ask me a few questions about my week to help me figure out which one would give me the most relief: the thing I do repeatedly, the thing that feels chaotic, or the thing I dread because I always have to think through it from scratch.”

Step 2 — Build the process map (use this after Step 1 identifies the process):

“Okay, I’ve picked [name the process — e.g., onboarding a new client, sending a proposal, wrapping up a project]. I want to map out every step so it’s written down somewhere instead of only in my head.

Walk me through this as a conversation — ask me one question at a time. Start by asking what triggers this process (what has to happen for me to start it), then help me walk through each step in order. After each step I describe, ask: ‘What happens next?’ and ‘Is there anything you do here that you always forget to mention, or that depends on the client?’ Keep going until we reach the end of the process.

When we’re done, give me the full map as a numbered checklist I can actually use.”

Part 2: The Martyrdom Myth

Somewhere in our conversation, I said something I’ve been thinking about ever since: “I think that martyrdom energy comes into it when we own our own business.”

I was talking about invoicing — the quiet belief that some administrative tasks are just “part of the job,” and that tolerating them is the mature thing to do. But that belief isn’t maturity. It’s something a lot of us carried over from W2 work, where you had parts of the job you didn’t like and you did them anyway, because that was the deal. Running your own business was supposed to change the deal.

Lucretia’s invoicing system is the best argument I’ve heard for that. When a contract is signed, the first invoice goes out automatically. Recurring contracts get set up with two button presses. Auto-pay handles the rest. Three days before a bill is due, she gets a prompt to review it — and if she hasn’t responded within 24 hours, it sends itself, because she knows herself well enough to know the friction of hitting send was costing her actual income.

I shared about an affiliate agreement I have: a single post, a single invoice. I didn’t send it. And because I hadn’t, I felt too awkward to keep promoting the offer, so I just stopped — quietly killing a partnership over one unsent invoice.

Lucretia shares these stories as a simple problem we can eventually solve. The tasks you resent doing aren’t proof of some character flaw you need to work on. They’re just systems nobody built yet.

Reflection questions:

1. What’s the task in your business that, when it shows up on your to-do list, makes you feel a small but specific sense of dread — even though it’s not hard, it just takes something from you?

2. Has that task ever cost you something — a relationship, income, time you didn’t get back — because you avoided it or did it late?

3. When you imagine handing that task off entirely, what’s the first reason your brain gives you for why that wouldn’t work?

Step 1 — Pick the task (copy and use with Claude or ChatGPT):

“I run a [describe your business]. I want to fix one administrative task that I keep doing manually even though it drains me. I’m not sure which one to focus on first.

Ask me about my week — what I do repeatedly, what I avoid, what I’ve done late or badly because I just didn’t want to deal with it. Help me narrow it down to the single task that’s costing me the most, whether that’s time, money, relationships, or just mental energy. Ask me one or two questions at a time until we’ve landed on the right one.”

Step 2 — Map the friction (use once you’ve picked the task):

“The task I want to fix is [name it — e.g., sending invoices, following up with leads, scheduling calls, writing session notes].

Ask me everything you need to know about how I currently do this — walk me through it step by step. After I describe it, dig into:

• How long it takes me each time, and how often it comes up

• What I actually dislike about doing it (the specific moment it feels bad)

• Whether I’ve tried to fix it before and what happened

• What I tell myself about why it has to stay this way

• What I’m worried would go wrong if I stopped doing it personally

Ask one question at a time. Don’t move on until you understand not just what I do, but why I’m still doing it this way.”

Step 3 — Find the solutions (use after Step 2 is complete):

“Now that you understand how I currently handle [task] and why it’s stayed this way, give me at least three different ways I could fix this — ranging from the simplest possible change to a more complete solution.

For each option, tell me:

1. What it would actually involve to set up

2. What it would cost (time, money, or both)

3. What friction or barrier it directly addresses

4. What I’d have to let go of or trust in order to make it work

Then tell me which one you’d recommend I try first, and why — based on what you now know about how I work and what’s gotten in the way before.”

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Part 3: The Perfect Ice Cubes

I told Lucretia about my basement. It has boxes in it from two houses ago, and with three little kids, it’s stayed that way for longer than I’d like to admit. It’s fine — I can survive unopened boxes — but I know if it were more organized, I’d flip the kids’ clothes faster, think more clearly about the space, let go of things I don’t need or maybe I wouldn’t forget to dress my youngest that one 18 month t-shirt with ducks that all my other babies wore.

A few minutes later, I realized that the basement organization is a perfect hiding location for perfectionism shame to come up. Social media has us all us convinced we need the perfect ice cubes in the freezer — a kind of polished-order performance that has nothing to do with what we actually value or need.

This is totally the trap with back-ends, too. We compare our cobbled-together reality to an imagined perfect version — the fully integrated Notion workspace, the completely automated onboarding, the client portal that practically runs itself — and the gap feels too big to start closing.

Lucretia told me almost everyone she works with opens with some version of: “I don’t want to show you because it’s messy.” The Google Drive. The inbox. The process held together with duct tape.

Her answer is always the same: “I’m not going to be mad. Show me everything.” She’s not being polite about it, either — she genuinely doesn’t care what it looks like. She wants to know how you actually work and why, because if you’ve built a successful business doing it that way, the way isn’t wrong. It just hasn’t been organized yet.

She also told me something I keep coming back to: we get so much satisfaction from clicking “done” that finishing a task at 90% can feel like failure, even though that 90% probably saved you hours and caught most of your errors along the way. “These systems aren’t magic,” she said. “They’re dynamic.” You’re allowed to keep adjusting one instead of waiting until it’s finished to start using it. We don’t need to be planning ten years out, or even ten months out — that kind of planning becomes its own anxious loop of hyperfocusing on the perfect thing instead of the thing you actually need this week.

So: build for now, not for the business you hope to have. The system you need matches your current volume, your current team, your current friction — not the polished version of you that exists somewhere down the road.

Reflection questions:

1. Is there a system, tool, or process you’ve researched, maybe even started, but never finished — and if so, how long has it been sitting there?

2. When you picture the “right” version of that system, what does it look like? How far is that from what you have right now?

3. What have you tolerated this week — a manual task, a clunky workaround, something that took twice as long as it should — because you were waiting until you could do it properly?

Step 1 — Name what’s been waiting (copy and use with Claude or ChatGPT):

“I run a [describe your business]. There’s something I’ve been meaning to build or fix in how my business runs — a process, a system, a way of handling something — but I haven’t done it yet.

Ask me about it. Start by asking what I’ve been putting off and for how long. Then ask me to describe what the finished version looks like in my head — the one I’m comparing everything else to. Help me get specific about both: what I’m avoiding, and what ‘perfect’ looks like so we can actually see the gap between them.”

Step 2 — Understand what’s really in the way (use once you’ve named it):

“The thing I’ve been avoiding building is [name it — e.g., a client onboarding process, a system for following up with leads, a way to organize my files].

Ask me everything you need to understand why it’s stayed undone. Dig into:

• What I’ve already tried or researched, and what stopped me

• The specific moment where it always seems to fall apart or feel too complicated

• Whether I’m waiting for more time, more money, more knowledge, or just waiting to feel ready

• What I’m afraid will happen if I build something imperfect and it doesn’t work

• Whether there’s a smaller version I’ve already dismissed as ‘not good enough’ without really trying it

Ask one question at a time until you have a clear picture of what’s actually in the way — not just what I say is in the way.”

Step 3 — Build the version that actually gets built (use after Step 2 is complete):

“Now that you understand what I’ve been avoiding and why, help me design the smallest version of this that would still make a real difference — not the complete version, just the one that solves the most painful part of the problem I actually have right now.

For that minimum version, tell me:

1. Exactly what it would include — and what it would deliberately leave out

2. What I could build or set up this week with what I already have

3. What ‘good enough for now’ looks like, and how I’ll know it’s working

4. What I should resist adding until this version has actually been running for a month

Then give me the first three steps to get started — small enough that I could do the first one today.”

Part 4: We Are All So Capable

Lucretia has cerebral palsy and is ambulatory wheelchair user, which means some days she’s walking and some hours she’s not — sometimes both in the same afternoon. She runs two podcasts. One is called Living in a Handicapable World, where she talks about the systems she’s built just to get herself out the door safely. The other, The Fashion Rewrite, she co-hosts with a friend who also has cerebral palsy, and it grew out of a styling business she runs on the side — helping wheelchair and walker users find clothes that actually work for bodies that move between sitting and standing in the same day, when most clothing is only ever designed for one or the other.

For a long time, she kept all of it separate: the systems business, the podcasts, the styling work, like they belonged to different people. Then she noticed they were all the same thing. “I’m helping business owners feel more capable in their business,” she told me.

So the brand became So Capable — because, in her words, we are all so capable. It sits alongside SoCretia, the name that started as a joke about how often the word “so” shows up in everything she does, and somewhere along the way just became true.

She’s also got a longer-term dream: an integrated treatment space — aquatic and equine physiotherapy, chiropractic care, a spa, a hairdresser, all under one roof. The reason is specific. Cerebral palsy is one of the most common childhood disabilities, and once you turn eighteen, the support that existed around you as a kid tends to quietly vanish. You’re left rebuilding a care team from scratch, on your own, often for years. She wants there to be a place where someone can come do an intensive, build their program, train their caregiving team, and not have to solve that puzzle alone.

I think this is the actual throughline of our conversation, more than the Notion templates or the invoicing automations. The same instinct that has Lucretia building a system so she can leave the house safely in the morning is the instinct she brings to a client’s back end. Systems were never optional for her, never a luxury reserved for businesses with the budget for an ops team. One of her favorite recent projects was helping a therapist deliver an entire course through Google Drive instead of a paid platform, specifically to keep the cost down — because a good system shouldn’t require the biggest budget in the room to access.

The thing underneath all of it

If there’s one idea I want to leave you with, it’s that this was a conversation about access.

Most coaching & therapy businesses don’t have the back-end they need not because the tools are too complicated or the investment too high, but because building one means looking honestly at how your business actually runs — and for a lot of us, that look is uncomfortable or unclear.

Your back-end is always going to have a relationship with your front-end. If your systems are unclear to you, your process is unclear to your clients too (oof, that hits home).

And the people who most need a back-end that doesn’t run them into the ground are often the ones least likely to feel like they don’t have the energy or clarity to build one yet — because they’re busy, because they haven’t made “enough” money, because sharing their messy with someone feels to vulnerable.

You don’t have to earn it. AI can help. Experts like Lucretia can help. But neither of them can replace the decision to start.

The loop

1. Name it. What’s the one operational task eating the most mental bandwidth right now? Not the most glamorous one — the one you think about at 11pm.

2. Get help with it. Not someday. This week. A systems architect, a VA, a well-placed AI prompt, or a twenty-minute conversation with someone who’s already solved it.

3. Build for now. One system, built for today’s problem. Not the whole back-end — just the one thing that, if it existed, would change the quality of your week.

Lucretia is available for systems audits, back-end builds, and the kind of conversation where someone smart looks at the mess with you and doesn’t flinch. You can find her here.

If you haven’t subscribed yet, I’d love to have you here. More of these coming — interviews, solo essays, and a lot of upcoming thinking on the space between expertise and infrastructure.

The next Live is already booked. Stay subscribed and you’ll get the notification (if you want your email to notify of scheduled lives, you have to adjust your settings).

Also…this week I am building something so cool. If you want more of my resources and trainings, I’m going to have new ways of working with me and leveling up your AI skills without that even being the focus!

Steph

From there she shares three working habits for using AI well as a course creator: keeping AI accounts organized with project folders so context stays clean and relevant, recognizing that prompt quality matters most when a task is new (not when it’s repeated), and understanding that large language models and image generators run on completely different mechanics — prediction versus diffusion — which is why image prompting needs a different approach (more creative room, specific “vibe” words, borrowing language from reference images).

Throughout, she weaves in the “jagged frontier” concept to explain why AI can be brilliant on one task and clumsy on the next, and flags the trap of mistaking AI’s confident-sounding language for actual confidence.

Resources & concepts mentioned (worth linking or expanding on)

• Claude Projects — the project-folder feature she uses to keep files and context organized by business/category.

• ChatGPT — referenced alongside Claude for prompt help and pulling descriptive language from images.

• Markdown (.md) file exports — downloading docs (e.g., from Google Docs) as Markdown so AI tools read them faster and more cheaply.

• The Jagged Frontier — a concept from a 2023 Harvard Business School/Boston Consulting Group study. The researchers coined the term to describe an uneven boundary of AI capability where tasks of similar apparent difficulty can land on opposite sides, with AI acting as a booster on one and a disruptor on the other, and it was later popularized in Ethan Mollick’s writing. This would be a great deeper-dive link for the show notes if you want listeners to read the original research. Substack

• Midjourney — the AI image tool she references for diffusion-based image generation (and the “ponytailed paper” anecdote).

• Pinterest — suggested as a place to find a reference image when you don’t have the right descriptive words yet, which you can then feed to Claude or ChatGPT to extract usable prompt language.

For a long while, you could opt into a different public school if you thought it was a better fit for your kid. And I watched something happen — parents, myself included at moments — agonizing over elementary school placement like it was a hedge fund strategy. Research, tours, weighing programs, worrying about which choice was optimal, trying to figure out what you wanted from schools when your child was only. For public schools that were supposed to be essentially the same.

We are tired of optimizing. I think that’s something we typically want to steer clear of when writing an article that is, technically, about optimization. But if you’re a therapist or a coach or a consultant who has been told to optimize your SEO, then your content, then your funnel, then your visibility, then your AEO — and you feel a low-grade exhaustion at the idea of one more thing to make better — I want to start by saying: um hmm, yep…I agree.

So how we I learn about AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) without the “O” energy?

Let’s: 1) ground your business in reality and 2) understand the mechanics of the “AE”.

If you’re a therapist or even a coach offering a group model, you are not trying to capture a mass market. You are trying to reach a specific person who has a specific problem and is actively looking for someone like you. Which means the pressure to be everywhere, optimized in every direction, is actually disproportionate to what you need.

What you do need is to be findable to the right people. And right now, a meaningful number of those people are asking AI to find you.

I talked with , founder of Lens on Luxury, on a recent Substack Live about exactly this. Tracey has been doing this work for optometrists and specialty practices for years — she came up in the luxury optical world, spent decades inside brands like Chanel and Bulgari and Tiffany, and when she left corporate she took everything she learned about digital presence and started helping independent practitioners get found. She knows what she’s talking about and she was generous to give us a lot of tips.

My goal of this article is to put those tips into context and make them actionable. I designed this guide as a map of the three layers of AEO, organized so you know what you can do yourself, what your website actually needs, and what might belong with a specialist.

But before we get to the layers — one more thing. The most foundational question in all of this isn’t technical.

It’s this:

The niche, the specialty, the specific person you help and the specific thing you help them with. If you can say it in one sentence, it’s helpful.

I know, having spoken to those of you, that niching down hard doesn’t work for the way some of you you practice. That’s why AEO is not all you can do (or should do) to grow or maintain your business. Taking this from my coach Molly Mahoney, all of our strategies should be coupled with talking to real life humans about what we offer.

But, if you’re still circling — still describing yourself in ways that could apply to a dozen people — that’s the first work. No amount of schema markup will fix a clarity problem.

The Three Layers of AEO

These run in parallel, not in sequence. Start where you have capacity.

Layer 1 — Your Content Presence

What you’re saying, and how consistently you’re saying it

This is everything you put into the world publicly, Instagram, LinkedIn, your blog, your Google Business Profile. AI systems build a picture of who you are by reading this content across platforms. The more consistently and specifically you name what you do, the clearer that picture becomes.

Some tips for instagram: Your niche keywords need to show up in the first two sentences of every Instagram caption. The first two sentences carry the most algorithmic weight for both reach and search. If you work with high-achieving women navigating burnout, that language should open your captions, not show up somewhere in paragraph four after you’ve warmed up.

Since July 2025, Instagram is open to Google scanning, meaning every caption and image description is searchable. Alt text on images is now part of how the algorithm decides who to show your content to. Tracey has found her posts get meaningfully more reach when she includes it.

The 50/40/10 content framework, as Tracey describes it: half your content should reflect your ideal client’s world — what they care about, what their days look like, things that make them feel seen. Forty percent tells the story of you and your work: your perspective, your approach, what it’s like to work with you. Ten percent is direct selling. Accounts that post about their services constantly, she says, look like they’re out of business.

Check yourself:

• If someone scrolled through your last ten posts with no other context, what would they understand you do?

• Does your specialty appear in the first sentence of your captions?

• Are your profiles consistent across platforms — same specialty, same ideal client, same language?

Prompt — Content Audit:

“I am a [credential/role] who helps [specific audience] with [specific problem or outcome]. Review these 10 recent social media captions: [paste captions]. Tell me what an AI system would likely understand about my expertise based only on this content. Identify: 1) the niche language that is clear, 2) what’s missing or inconsistent, 3) where my first two sentences are too vague, and 4) rewritten opening lines that lead with my specialty, in my voice.”

Layer 2 — Your Website

Whether AI can actually read it

Tracey describes most expert websites as “a little black box on the internet.” You can drive traffic to them. But if the AI systems doing the recommending can’t read them well, they don’t pull them up as options.

There are three distinct problems here, worth separating because they need different kinds of fixes.

Content structure. Your pages need to answer the questions people are actually typing into AI engines — in plain, conversational language. Think about what your ideal clients are searching before they find you: Is this the right support for where I am right now? What does working with you actually look like? How is this different from just regular therapy? Those questions should be answered explicitly on your site. Tracey recommends finding them by spending thirty minutes in any online community where your people gather — they type their real questions there, exactly as they’d ask an AI.

Schema markup. This is code on the backend of your site that tells AI engines what type of content is where — who you are, what you offer, your credentials, your location. Your website builder may have a plugin for it; a developer can add it. The important thing is knowing it needs to exist.

Crawlability. There’s a file format called llms.txt that tells AI crawlers where to find your most important content efficiently. Old blogs written for a previous niche or an earlier keyword strategy can also muddy the picture of what you do now. De-indexing them is often worth doing.

Before you hire anyone, run a free check on your own site. CheckAEO (checkaeo.ai) gives you an overall AI readiness score. And Tracey does her own scan as well — tell her I sent you :) Or, run the prompt below on how to check your homepage or service page.

Check yourself:

• If you searched the exact question your ideal client would ask before finding you, where does your site appear?

• Does your site answer “is this right for me?” within the first thirty seconds of reading?

• Do you know whether your site has schema markup? (Ask your web developer — their answer will tell you a lot.)

Prompt — Question Map:

“Act as an AEO strategist for an expert-led business. My work helps [audience] achieve [outcome] through [approach]. Generate 20 natural-language questions my ideal client might ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google before hiring someone like me. Sort them into: problem-aware, solution-aware, comparison, trust-building, and ready-to-hire. Then tell me which questions belong on my homepage, service page, about page, FAQ, and blog.”

Prompt — For checking your homepage or service page::

"I'm going to paste my website copy below. Read it as if you are an AI answer engine deciding whether to recommend this person. Tell me: who would you understand this person helps, and what specific problem do they solve? What language is doing that job clearly? What's vague or missing — meaning, what would a potential client need to know that isn't here? Then rewrite the first paragraph of this page so it's clearer for both humans and AI systems trying to understand what this person does. [paste your copy]"

Layer 3 — Active Maintenance

The work that moves because the landscape moves

Google released a significant algorithm update two weeks before I wrote this. Tracey described spending part of every working day rewriting content for her clients — pages that had been performing before the update and needed reworking after it. This is the ongoing reality of AEO, which is part of why sometimes it makes sense to have someone watching it for you.

Your Google Business Profile needs regular posts (one to two times per week), current hours, and photos. Reviews factor meaningfully into local search ranking. For therapists this is genuinely tricky — soliciting reviews from current clients considered ethical in most states, but colleagues, supervisees, collaborators, and podcast guests are fair game. For coaches and consultants, the constraints are fewer.

Voice AI infrastructure — tools that let your business register as available 24/7 — factors into Google’s local ranking in ways most people don’t realize. Most businesses appearing on page one of local results are listed as 24/7. A specialist can set this up in a way that’s realistic for a small practice.

For anyone in healthcare or mental health: HIPAA-compliant marketing infrastructure is its own area of expertise. Most general agencies haven’t built for it, and it matters, so ask about it explicitly before you hire anyone.

If you’re considering hiring a specialist — and I say this because I have heard from so many people who have been burned by website, SEO and AEO “experts” — here are some questions worth asking:

“What is AEO, and how is your work different from traditional SEO?” Someone current in this space will answer this clearly and specifically.

“Can you show me a client currently appearing in Google AI Overviews — live, right now, not a screenshot from six months ago?” Real work leaves real evidence.

“Do you build custom strategies for each client, or do you use a template?” Ask to see two or three client sites. Similarity across them tells you something.

“What happened to your clients after Google’s most recent update?” You want to hear that they caught it, adjusted, and communicated. A quarterly review schedule is not the same as active monitoring.

“How do you work with industries that have privacy or ethics requirements?” If they don’t immediately know what you mean, they haven’t worked in regulated fields.

“What does your reporting include, and how often do I see it?” Organic traffic trends, page-level performance, AI overview appearances, Google Business Profile comparisons against local competitors — regularly, not summarized once a month.

“What are you watching right now that you think will affect results in the next 90 days?” Someone actively doing this work has a real answer to this question.

Prompt — Diagnostic:

“I asked [ChatGPT / Claude / Perplexity] to recommend someone in my specialty, and my name didn’t appear. Based on what you know about AEO, create a diagnostic checklist of the likely reasons. Organize them into: unclear positioning, weak website structure, missing authority signals, inconsistent content, technical issues, and lack of third-party credibility. Then tell me the first three things to address.”

Prompt — Google Business Profile Posts:

“Write three Google Business Profile posts for a [type of business] specializing in [niche]. Each should answer one natural-language question my ideal client is likely asking. Keep the tone warm and expert. Include my location or service area naturally. End each with a soft invitation to learn more.”

You might be over optimization like me:

But, here’s the deal. What we are doing in this article are small pivots to changing our approach with new information. Change is certain. How we adapt (and cope with being super adaptable) is part of our interesting, meaningful human story.

Then pick one thing from Layer 1 this week. Try adding alt text to your next three Instagram posts, rewrite the first sentence of your most recent caption, or go through your last ten posts and look at whether your specialty shows up consistently.

You don’t need to be optimized everywhere.

You need the right twenty or thirty people — or hundred, if you’re building a group — to be able to find you when they go looking. That’s a smaller, more human-scaled problem than the marketing world makes it feel. And it’s solvable, one layer at a time.

Tracey Bauer is the founder of Lens on Luxury and offers a free AEO scan through her website — she’ll run your site and socials and show you exactly what’s missing. Worth doing.

Catch the full replay of our Substack Live in the archive.