How did we reach the end of July? It's rodeo weekend round here - which means more fireworks - feels like we have fireworks and parades in this town every weekend in July - next month will be the fair and then life will settle down for fall. (my very favorite season). Yesterday's Mastermind was all about notes and it was so great to have so many of you join live! Highlights? 📝 Post Notes daily. (Three per day is the sweet spot, but one consistently is far better than none. Use the scheduler so you never miss a day.) 💬 Spend at least as much time commenting as posting. Meaningful conversations are what make Notes work. 🌎 Don't stay inside our community. Support each other, then intentionally branch out into conversations happening across Substack. ❤️ Leave comments that add something to the discussion rather than simply saying "Great post!" The goal is to become memorable. 🤝 Build relationships before trying to build subscribers. Subscribers are the byproduct of genuine connection. 🔄 Return to older Notes and continue conversations. A new comment can bring an older Note back into circulation. 📚 Engage with articles and Chats, not just Notes. Every interaction increases your visibility. 🎯 Think of Notes as networking, not broadcasting. You're joining conversations, not posting advertisements. 🚪Use your Notes to open the door to your publication rather than trying to sell directly in the Note itself. 📈 Consistency beats occasional bursts of activity. Showing up every day compounds over time. 💜 Your personality is your advantage. People subscribe because of the person behind the publication as much as the content itself. Catch the replay w/transcript here 🌱 ✨ 💜 🤝 📝 💬 🚀 ☕ 🌿 Tuesday we'll be doing the Substack Setup Intensive LIVE again - we begin at 10am mtn #🎯START HERE to join us.

Well, another night without A/C - a nice young man came at 8am yesterday and thought he had fixed the issue - several hours later the unit is dripping again. Not an insignificant amount of water either. I picked up gallons of water off the floor of the basement with a sponge. Though he did come back at 9pm last night (poor guy was driving all over the place as the company services a 2-hour radius) by 11pm he thought he had it fixed but wanted to let the floor dry over night before we turned it back on. It's on now - we shall see what the day brings. 🌿 🌲 🍃 ☕ ✨ ☕ 🍃 🌲🌿 Let's chat!! About Substack Chat that is... Yesterday I created a thread about using the Chat feature on Substack, a feature, admittedly, I've not really leveraged all that much myself. But that will change today. I've posted my first "Daily Ripple" over there - I've decided I'd like it to be a space for inspiration and conversation around raising the global frequency and making the world a better place. My plan is not to email them out to my subscribers, though you do have that option. And I'm restricting new threads to paid subscribers - this will add an upgrade/subscribe button to my chat. Substack offers so many ways to help us help subscribers upgrade I feel like we should lean into them. Here's the link to my first one: https://open.substack.com/chat/posts/e45ecc81-1456-4586-9e7b-645668d66e1d (first daily ripple - not my first chat thread) and here's the link to the thread about Chats Love to hear your thoughts on using chat - I think we shall include a conversation around it as well as notes next Thursday for the Mastermind. 🌿 🌲 🍃 ☕ ✨ ☕ 🍃 🌲🌿 And speaking of the Mastermind did you all go watch the last one? We talked about Skool Communities and I shared a tool for finding your next move to boost your Skool community.

You may be pleased to know I survived then night without air conditioning. I even slept well - which is remarkable. @Ken Hyra asked in his note yesterday about mowing the lawn about appreciating the ordinary - I appreciate sleep. It's not something I take for granted but it is something I sincerely enjoy. The ritual for falling asleep - that I'm able to stay asleep all night and then thee waking up. Those moments between asleep and awake. Then the morning nuzzle from my dog who has sensed this could be it. Do you feel it too? Notes, I mean. When we read through the notes shared and get to glimpse into the lives of others - be encouraged - be challenged to experience something from a new angle - or simple to consider something differently. It is one of the things I love so much about Substack. Everyone has such interesting things to share - sometimes I laugh - sometimes I'll just sit with something for a long time and let it float around. @Deborah Oppenehim mentioned something in her note yesterday about not one more thing - which speaks to me of going to the edge and then letting whatever the last thing was expand on its own. I just love that image in my mind though I'm having a moment trying to explain it. It's like this for me with all of your notes... Someone once said that notes on Substack are like little therapy sessions you don't have to pay for. How about you - do you enjoy them as much as I do? 🎍👠🎳🥁🪅🥁🎳👠🎍 The utility of notes versus Chat on Substack When Substack first came out with notes & Chat - I have to admit I was really confused. I didn't understand why have both. Now I think of them as serving two completely different purposes. Notes are for discovery. They're the conversations happening out in the village square where anyone wandering by can stumble across an idea, join the discussion, or discover someone new to follow. They're public, they're searchable, and they have a surprisingly long lifespan because every new comment can bring an older Note back into circulation.

My heart almost stopped this morning when I read @Vinayak Ramesh's message about AI - I'm not going to lie. 🌟Substack now scans AI content (in partnership with Pangram). 🌟 You all know (or should know) I lean into AI pretty heavily for editing and consulting and getting other AI's to do my bidding - but the end product of everything I create is me. If I've learned anything from using AI over the last couple years it's that it is a great assistant but it can not replace me - I'm not even worried a little bit about it becoming sentient and taking over the world - in fact the longer it's around the more I'm convinced it NEEDS a human over-lord. It just makes WAY too many mistakes and then wants to brush it off with a weird sycophantic apology. What it can do, however, is synthesize things down to make them useful and findable. I like to give AI information/source material and an idea and have it create a starting place for me or give it a transcript from a podcast interview and have it write the post about it. When I first started my podcast - AI was just coming into being - It couldn't even hold the entire transcript! And it would take me an hour a podcast episode to get it posted on Captivate. Now it takes me 10 minutes max. AI allows us to do things faster and create things/tools we would have had to pay hundreds if not thousands of dollars for hiring freelancers for programming. I love it for that. Ultimately, I think the AI tag for Substack is a good thing. It will expose ai slop (which is kind of obvious really anyway) and also show how AI can be used to increase efficiency. ⚜️➿🚂🪂🛸🪂🚂➿⚜️ Speaking of AI... I've been busy building something new for you. For Thursday's Monetize Your Mission Mastermind, we're diving into Skool communities—how to build one that actually grows, creates engagement, and leads to revenue. 🔥I also created a brand-new Claude-powered audit tool that walks you through your community step by step and gives you personalized recommendations for improving your About page, Classroom, Welcome Post, discovery, engagement, and the money moves that will have the biggest impact.

"That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." spoken 57 years ago today... do you remember what you were doing then? I was 9 and playing in the alley behind our house in San Diego - We liked to throw rocks at each other and use metal trash can lids as shields. (I know... different times! 😂) I distinctly remember being called in to watch the moon landing on our 12-inch black and white television (this was the only tv we had until I was a late teen) Do I know for certain what happened that day? mmm No. Do I spend much time worrying about it? Not at all. What I find far more interesting is the idea behind those famous words. Every giant leap begins with one small step. It also reminds me that the words we choose matter. One sentence became part of history. Most of us won't write words remembered for 57 years... But we can write words that change one person's day. And that's where change begins. One thoughtful message can start a conversation. One conversation can become a relationship. And one relationship can change everything. That's one of the reasons I love Substack so much. It's not really about publishing more content. It's about sharing words that help people feel seen, understood, inspired, or encouraged. The kind of words that quietly build trust over time. 🎈If you're new to Substack, that's exactly what we'll be working on together during the Substack Setup Intensive on July 22 at 2:00 pm Mountain Time. We'll build the foundations that help your words reach the people they're meant for and create a publication for visibility that leads somewhere. If you're already an annual member and have access, I'd love to have you join us too. Even if you've been through the Intensive before, Substack keeps evolving, and so do the ways we connect with our readers. And for those of you joining us from Australia and New Zealand, I scheduled this one so you can actually be there live. 😊 Learn More Here