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Foreign. Welcome to the Courage and Clarity podcast. I'm your host, Steph Crowder. I'm a former sales training director who's helped thousands of entrepreneurs earn a living doing something they love over the past 10 years. On your journey, you'll need the courage to be bold, to take risks, and to do what looks crazy on paper. You'll also need the clarity, the brass tacks, simple strategies that actually work. And on this podcast, we deliver both in equal measure. Oh, and by the way, we've got absolutely no time for bs, gross marketing tactics or get rich quick schemes. Just sustainable business strategies for good humans with big dreams. If that sounds like you, you're in the right place. Let's go. Hello there, friends. Welcome back to the podcast. I am so excited to be hanging out with you today. Let's talk about how you're going to show up on five times the platforms without five times the effort. Because here's the thing, most entrepreneurs are trying to outwork their way to momentum. And I have done this myself. I've been guilty of this myself, for sure. I'm talking about trying to crank out lots of different posts, hustling across all the different platforms. When I say platforms, I really mean, like, all the places online that you're trying to show up, whether that's your podcast, your email list, all the social media platforms, and you find yourself kind of feeling like you're starting from scratch on every platform. This has gotta be one of the number one questions that I get, especially when we're talking about launching, right? With doing big sales campaigns and big promotions, where I'm asking you to be highly visible. A question that I often get from people is, how are you everywhere? Like, that's one of the things we talk about with my launching system, which is called Buzz Blitz, is we talk about how that really teaches you how to be seen everywhere. And in order for that to happen, what you'll find and what I want to talk about today is that what actually moves the needle in your visibility is not more effort. I'm not going to say it's going to be effortless. Of course there's effort. It's work, right? There is going to be effort, but it's not going to be more effort. It's not going to be five times the effort to show up in five times the places, okay? Instead, I want to talk to you today about how to have more creativity, right? So it's gonna be learning to spot one good idea and express it in five different ways. See, when you move from Effort to creativity. You expand your visibility without expanding your workload. Really think about that, really see if you can get on board with the fact that that could be possible, right? That you can expand your visibility without expanding your workload. When I ask people to be more visible, when I tell people that they're going to have to learn to visible in order to sell more, the number one thing that comes up, and I completely understand why the number one thing that comes up is I don't have the time and space for that. I don't have the first of all, I don't have the desire, I don't have the time, I don't have the energy, I don't have the capacity. And so it should hopefully come as really great news that you don't need to grind harder in order to grow. Genuinely, I mean that you just need to start thinking like a creator again. Okay. You don't need to grind harder in order to grow. In fact, I've been thinking, I'm going to share with you probably a number of stories in this episode of how, like I'm going to try to give a lot of examples of how I'm able to do this, how I'm able to show up in five times the places without five times the effort. I actually feel like it's some of the easiest times in my business. I know that sounds crazy, but again, it's not effortless. I am putting in effort, but it really flows and I think that comes from again, thinking like a creator. So we're going to walk through exactly how to do that, to do that. So this is officially the third part, the third piece in the series I've been working on called the New Rules of Launching. And two episodes ago ago I talked about how to fall back in love with launching, how to love launching for the first time, or maybe love it again if you loved it before when it was working and you've kind of started to resent it. That was two episodes ago. And then my last episode in this series was about how to plan your six week Runway for launching. Exactly how to sit down and plan out your six weeks in that one sitting. So this episode is really about how to stay in creative flow when you're actually showing up. Because the beautiful thing is we're going to capitalize on the momentum. Truly I've been thinking about this. If you show up in one place, like I actually want to encourage you to start to believe that that's the hardest part. The hardest part is not showing up in five different places. It's. It's even daring to having the courage to show up in one place. If you show up in one place, you can show up in five. And that's what we're going to talk about today. Okay, so let's talk about a little bit about the problem here, which is what I'm referring to as the effort trap. So this is where you're trying to be everywhere. You, you know, you. It would be. You think to yourself, like, I'm sure it would be great for me to be everywhere, but it feels treadmill. We talk about the content treadmill and how you can be like a hamster in a wheel, running and running and running, and you're just never done. Right? You might be opening Instagram or opening LinkedIn or opening threads, wherever you are, TikTok, et cetera. And you think to yourself, what should I post? It's like, blank, blinking cursor every time you open those apps, which doesn't feel good, which probably leads you to open them less and less, right? Maybe something you've tried is repurposing the same asset across platforms. So, for example, if you record a podcast episode and you have a. You have a video from that podcast, you try to take a clip from it and you try to put it on Instagram, or you try to take a quote from it and you try to put it on TikTok, and no matter what it is, whatever your repurposing is that you're trying to do, it's been flopping. Okay? And we're going to talk about that. Everything starts to feel really mechanical and disconnected in that system. Right? And that's what happens when effort is leading and we're thinking, like, how do I let effort drive this? Notice, there's really no creativity. If we go back a couple years in online business, there was this big rise of repurposing. It was like. That was the big. One of the big buzzwords was like, make one piece of content and repurpose it across your platforms. And oh, my goodness, it's like, so smart and it's. And honestly, it did work for a lot of people, for a very specific moment in time. But what ended up happening, and this is my take, is that we've trained our audiences. They've seen it before. At first it was interesting, but now we've seen it a million times and the jig is up. And what I mean by that is when you are just creating a podcast and you record the video and then you take a clip of the video and you Put it on your Instagram. Your audience knows that you're not really there, right? It's like, you're there, but you're not there. And I. This is a little bit of an unpopular opinion, maybe a little bit of a hot take, but I'm even gonna take it a step further and say your audience reads it as lazy. Okay? Your audience may even read it as entitled. They're like, she thinks that she can just, like, have an assistant cut this up and put it here. And, like, we're supposed to engage with it. Like, they've disengaged. Notice how you disengage. So they disengage, and then we want to be mad that they disengaged. And I've been through. I'm talking to myself. Like, I went through this whole cycle where I was trying to repurpose, because that's what a lot of people were doing. And it was working for a lot of people again for a specific period of time. And then it still stopped working. And when it stopped working, I found myself feeling even more resentful about my platforms and frankly, feeling resentful towards my audience. Like, why don't they want this? Why don't they get this? Why don't they engage with it? And then one day, it really hit me that I disengaged first, right? By thinking that I didn't have to show up on these platforms like a creator, by thinking that I got to take a shortcut around innovation and creativity. That's boring. That was boring to my audience, right? And so let's think about the shift, because you might be. Just bear with me. You might be hearing that and thinking, oh, my God. Well, the whole point of repurposing was, like, that was the only way it was possible, Steph, to be on the platform. So if you're telling me that I can't do that, how am I supposed to. Again, 5x my effort. Now we're back to the conversation. We're back where we started. It's like, how am I supposed to be on five different platforms? Here's the shift I want to offer. Creativity is your multiplier, okay? So creativity isn't about adding more. It's about seeing more possibilities in what already exists. And when you lead with the creativity, your effort becomes exponential instead of linear, right? When you can think creatively, it actually doesn't use a ton of your energy. And in fact, I think it can actually be giving you energy. I feel electrified. It almost feels like a game to me. Maybe I'm Just a weirdo. But to me, it's exciting to think about, how can I pick an idea? This is so good. Instead of. Instead of trying to take a piece of content and just like cut and paste that content across platforms, I want you to think about an idea and ask yourself, how does that idea have a life of its own and a spirit of its own across the different platforms? Because you need to understand your platforms. You need to understand the spirit of every platform. Every platform is a little bit different. And hear me loud and clear, that does not mean that you start from scratch on every platform, but you need to understand the ecosystem of your platforms and what purpose each platform has in the overall ecosystem of your business. And then you can take one idea and ask yourself how that idea wants to shape shift, how that idea wants to transform and take shape across the different platforms. Okay, so I'm gonna give you a couple different examples right now. This one is literally from today. And when I tell you about the day that I. I've had and how productive I've been today and how many different places I've shown up today. And now here I am recording a podcast. I feel like this is living proof that when you harness this, when you capture this, it is not soul sucking. It is not draining. It is quite the opposite, okay? Because today I wrote and created an entire webinar which takes. That used to take me like a week. Okay? I did it in part of a day. Today I coach my clients for two hours. I created Instagram stories, an Instagram reel, and an email. Like a blast. Like an email blast. Like a campaign, right? And now I'm here on my microphone to make a podcast. How is this possible? I assure you, I have. Oh, also picked up my kid from school, picked up my dog from daycare, made dinner, got a kid to practice, and now I am recording this while one of my kiddos has a little bit of downtime in the other room. So this is not about creating more time, okay? This is not about working a 12 hour day, all right? This is truly about using your creativity as a multiplier. So here's the example from today. I was coaching my clients and we were doing our call inside my sold out group programs Mastermind. They have my clients have the opportunity to get coached by me two times a week, every single week. So we have lots of, we have lots of material to work with and I recommend that, right? Like taking inspiration from the stories of your real clients. And in today's call, I felt that there was a theme and A lot of times there tends to be a theme. It's like we end up talking about the same thing multiple different ways or, you know, in multiple different situations. And so that happened today, where we were talking about my clients. A bunch of my clients were really expressing, like, having difficult circumstances in their personal lives and wondering how they were going to be able to launch through those difficult circumstances. So this was a theme. We had it manifested across multiple different people. And so I had the thought, that's really interesting. If it's happening with my clients, it's probably happening with my audience. So let me go to Instagram. I actually literally hung up the call when the call ended, and I was like, I'm gonna make some lunch. Went out to my porch, and as I was eating my lunch, I was like, let me record a couple Instagram stories about this. Just me talking to the camera, nothing rehearsed, Just me sharing, hey, this came up on the call today. Here's what I want you to know about how you actually don't need more time, you don't need a clear schedule in order to launch, and in fact, lear, how to launch is going to save you time. That was the concept, and that came from my coaching call. Talked about it on Instagram stories, created for Instagram stories. Okay, great. Now I've shown up on Instagram stories. That's fantastic, right? Well, then I thought to myself, gee, this would also be a great email campaign. Okay, so that was the spirit of the Instagram story. Face to camera, me and my lunch, conversational, us sitting down and chatting. Notice how that has, like, a life of its own, right? Then I think to myself, well, I've got a bunch of people on an email list. I want to tell this story to them. So here's what I did next. I sat down on my computer, pulled up my phone, played my Instagram stories. There's probably easier ways I could have done this with AI. I want to talk about the role of AI in this as well, but I didn't use it for this. I just played my Instagram stories and I. And I typed and I typed as fast as I could. Like listening to myself. I just typed. I just opened up a campaign in kit, and I just. I didn't edit. I just was, like, copying down the words of what I said, what came out of my mouth. Okay, Wrote all that out. It was obviously, like, not edited, mess, and there was typos and stuff. So I cleaned it up and I turned it into an email. No new ideas, just moving around what I Already said and making it appropriate for my email campaign. So that means shorter, punchier lines, breaking up the text, making sure the story, like maybe adding a couple sentences here and there to make it feel a bit more of a complete story. Have my call to action to make sure to come to my free training, I have coming up on November 3rd, called Double your launch, because that is what I'm promoting right now. Sent it on its way. Okay, great. Now I've got an email done that took me 10 to 15 minutes, right? And I already gotten, you know, some texts from friends and a couple comments from people being like, that was really great email. And it felt like I didn't have to come up with a new idea again. I was just like. If you think of it as like modeling clay, I was just shooting, shaping the same idea. It's like, like literally picture having a ball of clay in your hand, and it's like you shape it one way. That's Instagram stories. I shaped it another way. Now that's in an email, right? And I literally plan to. I haven't done it yet, but I'm gonna. Now, here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna take that email copy and paste. I'm gonna come over to Chat GPT and I'm gonna paste that in and say, help me break this, like, sort of chunks for threads for the platform threads. Right? Now, this is where I also like to tell Chat GPT I have a bit of a complex relationship with Chat GPT. I am very anti. Hear me loud and clear. I do not want Chat GPT writing your emails. I don't want it, you know, creating your creative. No, no, no, no. I literally will tell Chat GPT, take this email, preserve my voice. Do not add anything. Do not search the Internet. Literally make it sound like me. Take what I already wrote and just help me put it into a form. Would make sense for threads. If you're on threads, you know that a lot of times what people do is they post one thread and then they keep replying to their own thread. Kind of like Twitter used to be, where it's like just like ends up be kind of being like a thought piece on threads. So I'm going to take that same email, and now it's on threads, right? I'm going to clean it. Chat GPT will give me that back. I know this because I've done it and I'm going to clean it up a little bit, make sure it makes sense, make sure it feels like me. I don't like when it's overly polished and boring and generic. So I'm going to make sure that it pops and it feels like me and it feels appropriate for the platform. Right now it's going to be on threads. Perfect. I'm not done yet. Now I'm going to take that thread and I'm going to turn it into a carousel for Instagram. So the way I've been doing carousels is I will take a photo from my camera roll from my branded images. I will take that image and come up with a hook. Come up with an interesting hook that is going to serve as the first slide of my carousel. And then I'm going to either one of two things. One thing I've been doing, I've done a couple times recently that has worked pretty well is go over to threads and take screenshots of the threads that I already published and use those literally, like screenshot, like one blurb at a time and put those together as a carousel. Done. I have the same handle across my Instagram and my threads. It's just, I guess everybody does. Cause those two are connected. So it's hey, Steph Crowder. So it shows my little face and my name and it shows each one of my thoughts. Put that together as a carousel. Write up a new caption specifically for Instagram. Now I have a carousel. Notice that one is a little bit repurposed. Like it's sort of the same story, it's the same content. Because I'm screenshotting the threads, but I've still taken the time to think about what platform I'm I'm on and come up. Like, if you think about being on Instagram, when you look at a carousel, when you make the decision to flip through somebody's carousel, it's pretty, pretty important with that opening image is. And if the hook is interesting. So I spend some time thinking about that. Another thing I've done, if you don't want to do the screenshots, if you feel like that's still like too much repurposing. I've also just taken the same words and written them up on just. You literally can just have a, like pick a color for your background and just type up the same thoughts again. It's like mindless work. It does not take long at all. You can just do it on your phone when you're doing lots of other things. I tend to do stuff like this when I'm waiting for cheer practice to let out or sitting in a carpool line that's not moving Again, it's mindless. This part's mindless. This part's not creative. It's, you know, just sort of transferring the idea over and making it fit like the heavy lifting has. That's what I'm trying to say is the heavy lifting has already been done in that original idea creation. Because coming up with new, brand new ideas, that is the tiring part. Sometimes, like idea generation and creating, birthing your thought leadership can be tiring. So what isn't so tiring is just figuring out how to shape that clay into the different platforms. And so for today, like here I am right now, I'm still going. I'm recording this podcast. I am not tired. I didn't work five times as hard today. I just stayed curious about how one spark could live five different lives. That's what I want you to think about. So here's the method just to dive into it a little bit more. I walked through it. I could give you another quick example. I did this multiple times in my last launch in June of the sold out group programs Mastermind. I would go live on Instagram, did my first Instagram lives in forever. I would go live and as I obviously my phone is propped up and I'm speaking to the camera and I'm doing a live. Cool. Some people are seeing me on Instagram live. They might be catching the replay. Awesome. At the same time, I'm speaking into my podcast microphone and recording on my computer. Awesome. Now that's going on to the podcast. Now I can take that recording again using ChatGPT. Take the transcript, my real words, and ask ChatGPT to use my words and mold my podcast episode into an email blast. I'll have to edit it to make sure that it still sounds like me, to give it some personality and give it the Steph Crowder touch. But in that email, I was literally able to say, would you like to listen to this email as a podcast? Here you go. It's on my podcast. Would you like to watch it as a video? Here you go. It's on Instagram. And if you want to read it as a story, here's the whole story. Notice how I just did one thing and was able to use it in so many different ways. So here's the method, here's how to create once and show up everywhere. Step one is to catch the spark. So we think about catching the spark. You want to ask yourself where your best ideas actually come from. It could be client calls, coaching that you're doing, rants that you go on DMs I mean, inspiration is everywhere, right? Sometimes I get ideas from just interactions with my kids or interactions with other parents or the conversation at the cocktail party, like wherever that idea comes from. I have a client shout out to my client Mara, who has been catching a spark with the new Taylor Swift album, right? She is a book writing coach and an editing co, an editor of People's Writing and she's been as a English teacher, formerly an English English teacher with I believe her master's degree. She's been breaking down the new Taylor Swift album through the lens, through a literary lens. It's been blowing up, it's been, it's been actually going viral. And I feel like she's an example of such a great example of catching that spark. She had an idea and she did it on TikTok, she put it on Instagram, she played with it on threads. All of them are a little bit different. And also she started a pop up podcast about it. They're all different and they're all going viral, right? So that's the question is where do the bet? Where are your ideas? Can you catch one idea, one spark, and ask yourself, like, what's the truth underneath this moment? Whether that's a coaching call or wherever it's coming from, a story, an interaction with somebody, whatever it is. And again, I've been talking about this lately. Storytelling is big, big, big storytelling girl. For 2025 into 2026, people want to hear your stories, right? And so then you can kind of ask yourself, like, what's the takeaway of this story? What's the truth? What's the mic drop moment? What matters from this story? Okay, so step one is catch the spark. Step two, this can really help if you're not sure how to get to the truth of the moment. Here's what I like to do. And I don't know if this is a universal thing or if I'm somebody who is just unusually verbal, but this really works for me. Maybe you're different. I know this is going to work for some of you. Some of you may need, maybe you're going to be more of a writer. But for me, this step two is talk it out loud. Okay? So what I like to do is just start talking. I will just honestly open up a voice note on my phone. Sometimes I'll even open up like a Voxer message, if you know about Voxer, like the messaging app. And I'll even like send it to a friend and I will have an idea and I will just speak it. Not Overly edited. Just like blab about it. Okay. And notice that when I told you my story, I did it in Instagram stories today. Right? And I tried to be, obviously for stories, I tried to be a little bit more concise. I didn't want to go on and on and on because then I know people aren't going to watch it, but it's important to talk it out, get the idea? Talk it out. You could do it publicly in something like Instagram stories or an Instagram Live like the other example I gave you. Or sometimes it's me just opening up either voxer and then transcribing it, or going to ChatGPT directly and just hitting that microphone button and just start talking. Start talking about your story. Start telling your story. Start sharing your inspiration. Start sharing the spark. Okay? Your raw voice in step number two is more important than a polished draft. Okay? So what I like to do from there, and this is where I will use a little bit of chatgpt sometimes, is I will feed it into. And you could use, you know, if you like, a different program. I know some people have been talking about quad or Notebook LM or. Gosh, what's the other one? I don't know. There's a bunch of them out there. Whatever you like to use. Totally fine. The idea is to prompt whatever you're using, feed it your actual words, your how you speak, what you say and tell it. Do not change this. Do not, like, literally, I want you to, you know, turn this into an email based on how I talk. Turn this into an email based on what I actually said. Do not shortcut. Do not search the Internet. Like, sometimes you really have to be. I really am that direct with my prompts, and sometimes I still need to do major surgery on it. Typically, I'm really never somebody who's gonna just copy and paste what AI gives me and put it into an email. Like, never gonna happen for me. But it can often give me a little bit of, like, the rails on the road, right? And so what you're going to do is once you have that transcript, you can do all different sorts of things with it. So that's where you'll decide, like, okay, I have this raw idea. How do I want to distill it down into the other, like, what's the next modeling clay shape that I want to make right? For me, I tend to like to go to email. I feel like once I have an email about something, it can go a lot of different places as I already described. But maybe you're different, right? There have definitely been times where I just. I'm talking it out on a podcast episode and I can take the podcast transcript and turn that into email. You can do it. There's no right way. But here's what you do need to think about. Instead of just reposting it across all the platforms and having them being homogeneous and boring, you need to instead think of it this way. Instead of reposting, reinterpret. And what I mean by that is again, going back to what is the spirit of each platform? So here's how I think of it. Email. Email is your story, right? Your emails are where you tell stories. That's what's gonna make that interesting, right? Threads. Something like Threads is like the punchline, right? There's a lot of mic drop moments. Sometimes we can do, like I said, the more thorough, like thought pieces, but it's still very punchy. Even when you're replying to yourself on threads for carousels, you wanna think about what's your visual. What's your visual headline, right? What's your, like, Showstopper hook? And then you can back that up with the story. You can cut the story up into slides, for example. And then for your podcast, I like to think of this as like full context, right? Like the full circle, deep. The deep dive. The deep dive's happening on your podcast because of course, you're talking for 20 or 30 minutes, right? And so when you think about it that way, you can really start to see how I'm taking that one spark. And it's feeling like it's living these different lives across these different platforms. And if I didn't mention your platform, you're gonna just ask yourself the same question, like what. What is the vibe? What is the. Like what? All you have to ask yourself, like LinkedIn, for example. I'm not as well versed on LinkedIn, cause I. I mean, maybe one day I'll be all up on LinkedIn, but so far I'm. A lot of my clients are. But that's not really my platform. Everything I teach is platform agnostic. So it all. I have lots of clients on LinkedIn, but you're just gonna kind of ask yourself, like, what performs over there? What do. What are people looking for? What are. What. What is getting traction? And how do I shape this idea into something that kind of mimics that? Right. Notice how I talked about before, the repurposing. The laziness is not there. We're. We're creative now. We're just taking that little bit of extra effort and using your brain to figure out how to make the idea palatable for the platform that you're on. And then the step four is just a little bit of something to think about, right? Which is follow the energy, not the obligation. And what I mean by that is, if something feel like, follow the. Not to be too, like, woo with it, but follow, like, the life of it, right? Like, if it feels fun, if it feels alive, it's got that sparky quality. That's the right platform for it today. What I mean by that is there have been plenty of ideas that I have where, like, for example, in the story that I told you, I didn't get around to making it into a thread or a carousel today. I'll probably do that tomorrow or in a few days. The next time I'm like, ooh, I'm kind of due for a carousel. Let me. Let me go back to that day that I wrote that great email, right? So you don't have to do it all in one day. And I do it in a different order every time. I don't think we need to make it so mechanical. I know. I. I know. I know we love systems. I know we love processes, and I think that's great. And I am. I have my own processes that I teach. I have my own frameworks, and that is huge. And also creativity. You need to let the creativity breathe a little bit if you want to do it the same exact way every time, I'm not gonna stop you as long as you can be creative with it. But I think it's honestly maybe a little bit more fun to just let it be a little bit different every time. Like, I don't think I do the same process the same way twice. Like I said today, it kind of started on Instagram Stories, and it's making its way around my platforms. Other days it starts as an email, other days a podcast or an Instagram Live. So whatever your spark is, let it go where it wants to go. Sometimes they make it to. I didn't mention TikTok. A lot of my ideas make it to TikTok, but not all of them. And so follow the fun of it. Let it be fun. And going back to our falling in love with launching episode, like, let it be fun. Have some fun with it. God forbid. God forbid we let it be fun, right? I think we've lost touch with so much of the fun of it. I think that was part of what we lost in our highly repurposing world. Let's bring some of that back. People are loving that. People are loving the connection. They want to feel you. They want to know you're right behind the screen. So give that to them. Because here's the payoff of this whole thing. When you make the switch from effort to creativity, from having to, oh, I gotta work five times as hard to, no, let me just be five times more creative. You stop feeling behind. You literally stop feeling behind. Because there's nothing to be behind on. Creativity's on its own timeline, right? You start to trust your ideas again. You start to be like, I have good ideas. Right? Your audience feels your energy instead of your exhaustion. This one might be hard to hear, but if you are feeling exhausted and you're saying you're exhausted, your audience knows that. Your audience knows that. And I don't say that to make you feel bad. I say that as a little bit of a wake up call, which is that, like, you can plug back into energy. And when you do, here's the great news. The minute you do, they're gonna feel it. There's no time at all. It takes one day. You can be energized again. You can be electric again. You will multiply your visibility and your joy. Dare I say you're like, dare I say we enjoy the process, right? So if this clicked for you, if this was interesting, if you're, if this felt like a breath of fresh air, this is exactly what I mean when I talk about the new rules of launching and letting launching be fun again. You don't need more hustle necessarily, right? I think hustle has its place. I'm not really a hustle hater. I think sometimes we do need some elbow grease. But I want to encourage us to have more flow. And that's what I'll be teaching step by step in my free workshop coming up called double your launch. And in that training, we are going to talk about how you can hit your biggest sales yet in 20, only working 20 hours a week. And that's doing all of your other work too. So come learn how to build a launch that runs on creativity, not chaos. I cannot wait to see you there. You can go to stephcrowder.comworkshop to get signed up. Keep an eye out for my emails. I've been sending you lots of emails if you're on my email list, and I can't wait to see you there. Lots more great episodes coming your way very soon, my friends. And so until then, I am wishing you the courage and the clarity to go after what you love.