Aggressively Human

Most program pages tell you what you get — the calls, the modules, the bonuses. They almost never tell you why the thing is six weeks instead of six months, or why the schema markup lesson moved from week three to week six.

In this episode, we walk through our own fall programs: Meg’s Signal, a year-long mentorship focused on AI discoverability, and the seventh round of Jessica’s Define Your Foundations cohort. We’re not pitching them so much as taking them apart — what’s in each phase, what order things go in, what we changed after watching people get stuck, and what we’ve learned about how long it actually takes for work to sink in.

We talk about why Meg teaches live twice a year instead of going evergreen, why Jessica spread the “intellectual horsepower” decisions across six months instead of front-loading them, how the BEACON framework maps to positioning work, and where our two programs hand off to each other. We also get honest about who each program isn’t for.

* Why the length of a program should be dictated by what’s actually in it

Signal Details:

* Meg’s Signal: four three-month cycles, and why it’s a mentorship, not a membership

* Why “learn it twice” beats “learn it once” — and what happens between the training cycles

* Why Meg won’t make the program evergreen (spoiler: the material changes every six months)

* The BEACON framework: brand entity, expertise, authority, content infrastructure, omni-channel presence, narrative

Define Your Foundations Details:

* Jessica’s four phases in Define Your Foundations — and why phase one is setting down the shoulds

* “Business model Tetris”: how your client, offer, and price point change what marketing you actually need

* Why front-loading every big decision makes people feel behind

* Co-working and laser coaching vs. office hours — designing for people who don’t ask questions in groups

* The three things that separate cohort members who get results from those who don’t

Which Program Might Be Right for You:

* Where positioning work ends and discoverability work begins (and which one to do first)

* Who each program is not for

“There’s another business coach who does a six-week accelerator, and she goes through her six core systems, because she has six systems similarly. And I’m like, ‘that is like pouring a flood of water onto concrete.’ It’s so fast. Her whole thing is fast, and my philosophy is that if you try to learn six full business systems in six weeks, you’re not gonna retain any of it.

So my point of view is not just about what the systems are, but how it informs the offer itself and the client I’m serving. And if they want speed, awesome. My narrative has to connect to what I’m selling and why.” - Jessica

Resources

Signal — Meg’s year-long mentorship program

Define Your Foundations — Jessica’s six-month cohort

The Deeper Foundations Membership

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Meg Casebolt

Jessica Lackey

[A note before you listen: This episode includes candid discussion of suicide, suicidal ideation, mental health crisis, psychiatric hospitalization, addiction, and chronic illness. Please take care of yourself — skip it, save it for later, or listen with someone.]

Failure is one of the only universal experiences in business, and it’s also the one we’re least willing to say out loud. Most of the time when failure does get talked about publicly, it’s been sanded down into a tidy redemption arc or it’s behind a paywall. Jess Manuszak decided to throw a party instead.

In this episode, we talk with Jess Manuszak, owner of the Denver copywriting studio Verve and Vigour and founder of The Failure Ball, a biannual black-tie event where people get on stage in gowns and crowns and tell the truth about how they failed. The Ball started in 2020 with a goal of 30 attendees, sold out at 78, and last year filled a Victorian mansion with 200 people. All profits go to To Write Love On Her Arms, because the connection between shame and suicide is exactly why the event exists. The next one is September 19, 2026 in Denver.

We talk about the difference between the failures we actually caused and the ones the online business world decided to call failures, why the format has to be in-person (and glamorous, and not under fluorescent lights), and how to know when your story belongs on a stage versus in your therapist’s office.

* Why shame festers when failure gets left in the dark

* The rule that a failure has to be one you actually caused

* Getting a job isn’t a business failure — but the industry treats it like one

* Why the format is a ball, not a summit, a conference, or a podcast

* The failure behind the failure: what speaker coaching actually uncovers

* “You don’t have to turn your trauma into content” — and how to know when you want to

* Knowing why you’re sharing: to feel less alone, to be witnessed, or to get input

* Where the line sits between authenticity as a human and your brand’s story

* Holding space for clients versus asking clients to hold space for you

* Why at least one Failure Ball speaker every year is actively failing, with no gold bow on it

“We know the psychology behind shame. We know that the antidotes to shame are community, non-judgment, sharing, and self-kindness. That’s really what we’re here for — drag your dark secrets into the light. You feel like they’re so dirty. Bring them into this room and you’ll see how squeaky clean they actually are, because I guarantee someone in this room relates. It’s the failure behind the failure. Everybody wants to be loved. If you’ve had a launch that failed, maybe everyone hasn’t lost a million dollars at launch, but everybody wants to try to have financial stability in their life. It’s those underlying threads that connect everyone and help heal that trauma — versus, for $27 in four installments, we will heal your shame for you.” — Jess Manuszak

Resources Referenced

The Failure Ball

Mike Ganino’s episode

Nicole Lewis-Keeber’s episode

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Meg Casebolt

Jessica Lackey

We’re both getting pitched constantly by emails that clearly came from a bot that scraped our show notes, and the reason they don’t work isn’t the outreach itself.

It’s that there’s no distinct perspective behind it.

In this episode, we talk about the chicken-and-egg problem underneath developing a reputation and referrals: you need a point of view to get in the room, but you need to be in rooms with actual humans to sharpen a point of view. We get into why AI-workshopped positioning defaults to the average of what everyone else is already saying, what it actually takes to be referable, and how long it really takes for an angle to become something people seek you out to talk about.

We’re honest about the awkwardness of testing out your language with other humans and provide a “call me when” framework to help you sharpen your positioning for your network and for AI.

* The chicken-and-egg problem: needing a POV to get in the room, and needing the room to build a POV

* What it actually takes to be referable: category, persona, approach/angle

* The “Call Me When” exercise, and why specific scenarios are often clearer than results-based messaging

* Semantic vs. somatic: reading the face of the person you just pitched

* The “take your name off of your website” test

* Why “I could do that” is a trap, and how naming what you don’t do tightens your referrals

* The three-year timeline of turning a topic into inbound requests

* Being known for a feeling, not just a framework

* The linguistic throat-clearing AI adds, and how to cut 20–30% of it

“The perspective has to come first. The uniqueness, the differentiator has to come first. Because people are busy, inboxes are crowded, DMs are full of garbage, and if your pitch sounds like everyone else’s pitch, or if your website sounds like everyone else’s website, or if your email sounds like everyone else’s email, then I don’t care how many times you workshop it — I could take your name off of it and put someone else’s name on it, then I’m not gonna hire you. I’m not gonna bring you into my membership. I’m not gonna bring you on the podcast. You might be the nicest human alive, but if I don’t hear something different in your messaging, then I don’t know how to amplify your message.” - Meg

Resources Referenced

Angie Stegall - Coach

Sharon Wagner - Branding

Hillary Weiss Presswood - Campaigns

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Meg Casebolt

Jessica Lackey

Most of us who work for ourselves aren’t one clean thing—we’re cartoonists who also teach, consultants who also write, coaches who also run the whole business. And after a couple decades of that, you can end up with an enormous body of work that almost nobody can actually see, least of all the AI tools now deciding who you are. To talk through what to do with a career’s worth of ideas, we’re bringing on Meg’s friend, colleague, and client, Jessica Abel.

Jessica is a cartoonist and author turned business coach for professional creatives, helping them finish the self-generated work that has no deadline and get paid well enough to actually have time for it. In this episode, she walks us through the very unglamorous process of taking 10-plus years of courses, newsletters, and frameworks, most of it locked behind paywalls or buried in podcast audio, and making it cohesive and legible for both people and AI. She and Meg get honest about why podcasting is great for ideas and terrible for discoverability, what it actually takes to update a Wikipedia page, and why The Guardian counts as proof but a marketing podcast doesn’t.

We talk about the difference between productivity and capacity, why “decide” and “reflect” are the phases everyone skips, and what it means to pay yourself first with your time instead of your leftover minutes. We get into cyclical burnout, idea debt, and the genuinely hard work of deciding what you’re not going to do—and being at peace with it.

* Why “multi-hyphenate” isn’t a bug of entrepreneurial life

* Cyclical burnout: what happens to someone who always has new ideas

* How Jessica consolidated a career-long body of work into something legible using a bottom-up, feedback-driven process (and Claude)

* Capacity as a lens—not just your time, but your neurological and emotional bandwidth—and why it fluctuates by the day and the season

* Grow work vs. build work, and the tension between expanding your audience and cementing a legacy

* What it actually takes to be legible online—AI discoverability, entity confusion, and why Jessica still shows up as a cartoonist first

* The Creative Engine’s four phases—collect, decide, act, reflect—and why decide and reflect get skipped even though they’re the shortest

* The “flexible container”: building a finishing structure with edges that can still absorb a sick kid or a health flare-up

"I actually hate the word productivity and try to not talk about myself as a productivity coach, because—I still have to use it a lot 'cause it's the word people know. But productivity literally means: how do you have the same amount of capacity and jam more stuff into it? How do you get more stuff out of whatever you have available? And of course you can look at it different ways, but that's literally what it means in the economic sphere. Which is just a point of view that doesn't work for humans, and especially creatives and people who have big ideas and are trying to do the self-generated stuff." —Jessica Abel

About our Guest

Jessica Abel

Out on the Wire

In the Weights

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Meg Casebolt

Jessica Lackey

Aggressively Human went on hiatus for July, and we’re back to talk about what the break actually looked like!

In this episode, we catch up on what our month off actually looked like — Jessica’s West Coast “book tour” meeting Deeper Foundations members across four cities, and Meg’s glaucoma surgery and a quieter, more foundational summer of business work.

We talk about travel, illness, eye surgery, membership relaunches, and the discomfort of resting without immediately filling the space with something new — plus why a genuine pause turned out to be exactly what both the business and the podcast needed.

* Why Jessica took her book on an unofficial “tour” through Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and LA

* The public transit challenge: one rideshare in twelve days across four major cities

* Meg’s glaucoma surgery, what a week without screen time actually looks like, and why she scheduled it for the slow season

* What it actually looks like to let go of “big, hairy, ferocious projects” for a season without the business falling apart

* Relaunching the Deeper Foundations membership without ever having done a formal launch sequence before

* The “collective pause”: a shared sense that clients, colleagues, and the industry at large all pulled back at the same time this summer

* Why reflection is the step that gets skipped in a weekly podcast cadence — and why that’s a problem worth solving

* The World Cup as a rare moment of monoculture in an increasingly fractured media landscape

* What “resting but not regenerating” feels like when travel and motion replace actual stillness

“I think sometimes when you’re in a production content creation process, you don’t have a chance for reflection. When it comes to podcasting, because of the weekly cadence, you’re always gathering ideas, lining up guests, and thinking about what you want to talk about. Then we have to get together, we have to record, we have to produce, we have to create the show notes — we have to do all these different things. And that fourth step, reflect, is the easiest one to miss, because the cadence has been determined, and we lose sight of what it is we’re trying to do here.” -Meg

Resources

Leaving the Casino

Just for the Summer by Abby Jimenez

Succubus Blues series by Richelle Mead

School of Moxie with Mary Williams

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Meg Casebolt

Jessica Lackey

Taking the whole month of July off breaks the weekly cadence we’ve held all year—and one of us is famously bad at taking time off. But this isn’t a best-of rerun or a quiet fade; it’s a deliberate choice to downshift, and we wanted to talk openly about why we’re making it and what it actually takes to pull off.

In this episode, we get into what’s behind our summer sabbatical: the planning required to step away (turns out you have to prep in advance), why listenership naturally dips in the summer, and why we decided against reposting old episodes under a “best of” label. Meg talks about her seasonal rhythm—short summers in a cold climate, kids’ camp schedules, less desire to sit at a microphone—and Jessica walks through a stretch of heavy travel, a meaningful family transition, and finally having the room to take a real beat.

We talk about the difference between maintaining and growing, why a body of work keeps earning for you even when you slow down, and the case for “mental composting” as actual business strategy. We also get into relationship marketing that doesn’t look like marketing, and why taking time off doesn’t mean you’re bad at your business. Plus a live tarot pull that may or may not predict another book.

* Why we’re taking all of July off—and why it’s a sabbatical, not just a slowdown

* The prep it actually takes to step away (hint: start two to three months out)

* How summer listenership shifts when everyone’s out living their lives

* Meg’s seasonal rhythm: cold-climate summers, camp schedules, and working less on purpose

* Jessica’s summer of travel, a family transition, and finally taking a beat after years of building

* Why a “body of work” keeps working for you when you stop pushing

* Mental composting and the case for creative downtime (see: Lin-Manuel Miranda in an airport)

* Maintaining vs. growing—and why you don’t always have to be in growth mode

"Taking time off doesn't mean you're bad at your business. But it does mean that if we're going to take time, we need to prepare for that two to three months in advance. Otherwise it's that vacation-y feeling where you cram.

I don't have a whole bunch of curriculum that I'm creating. I'm not writing and launching the book. I'm at a place where I can take a beat, so I'm gonna take it. Past Jessica did a good job, present Jessica is gonna take advantage of that, and future Jessica already knows what she's doing in August and September. There's more launches coming. They're just not happening in July." -Jessica

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Meg Casebolt

Jessica Lackey

When you need a VA, a podcast producer, or just a new place to get your nails done, what do you actually do? You ask someone. But we don’t recommend someone who just gets the job done — we recommend those providers with outstanding customer experience.

In this episode, we talk with Nikki McKnight—Meg’s romance-podcast co-host, operations expert, and newly minted Certified Customer Experience Professional—about why she niched her business down into customer experience and launched a new business podcast called Would Recommend. Nikki walks us through how she went from “I can do everything” operations work to building a practice around a single belief: that for founder-led businesses, customer experience is the best marketing and retention strategy there is.

We dig into the difference between customer experience and customer journey, why emotions are what actually drive referrals, and how matching your brand promise to your real experience builds (or breaks) trust. There are frameworks—Nikki cannot help herself, and neither can we—but mostly it’s a conversation about the gap between what we say we deliver and what it actually feels like to be on the receiving end of it.

* Why Nikki niched down in belief rather than service or audience—and why that’s easier to sell and refer

* The customer experience pyramid: satisfaction → ease → enjoyment—and why advocacy only lives at the top

* Customer experience vs. customer journey: “the journey is a lane, the experience is the whole highway system”

* Why emotions create memories, memories create perception, and perception is the only thing that drives behavior

* Brand promise as an operational standard (not a mission statement)—and why you can control your promise and experience but never your customer’s perception

* The Mr. Rogers writing rule that changed how Nikki thinks about every email, sales page, and support reply

* Category expectations: how to spot what customers already assume about you—and deliberately disrupt it

* Giving your customers the language to refer you (because “you just need Nikki, go” doesn’t convert)

* When great delivery meets AI-generated marketing—and why a mismatch quietly destroys trust

* Principles vs. methodology, and why lead magnets built on tactics expire the moment the platform changes

* CX train wrecks (yes, QuickBooks and Canva, we’re looking at you) and reporting “from the scar, not the wound”

“Your whole job is to create memories. Because if you can elicit an emotion in someone, emotions are what create memory. When someone creates a memory, then they have a perception of something, and it’s perception that drives behavioral change. You can’t just jump straight to a behavioral change.

And customer experience is not just what starts when someone pays you. It’s not the customer journey. The journey is a lane. The experience is the whole highway system.” - Nikki McKnight

About our Guest

Would Recommend (Nikki's new podcast)

Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara

CCXP – Certified Customer Experience Professional designation

Acceleration Strategy Inc. (12-week customer experience program, Toronto)

Fixable with Frances Frei and Anne Morriss (the Southwest episode)

Derek Thompson's podcast: the NBA / Adam Silver episode

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Meg Casebolt

Jessica Lackey

SEO in 2026 doesn’t look anything like it did even a year ago, or even a month ago as you’re reading this in June of 2026. If you’re still thinking in terms of domains and backlinks and keyword-driven page views on Google, it’s time to update your worldview.

In this episode, Meg breaks down entity-focused search and discoverability: the shift from optimizing the domain versus optimizing the entity and the person. She explains what an entity actually is (think of it as a star in a constellation, or a suspect on a murder board with red strings connecting everything back to you), and why so many of us have fragmented, disconnected, or missing entity signals without realizing it. This is the same material that opens her Signal mentorship, compressed into one conversation.

We talk about why your full name needs to be on your website, what schema markup does and why it’s suddenly mattering again, and the difference between work you control (your own pages and copy) and the third-party validation you can’t fully control but absolutely need. This is the first step of the slow, compounding, multi-month play—and why the work pays off even if the AI citations take their sweet time to show up.

* Why “it’s not just Google anymore” changes everything about how you get found

* What an entity actually is—person, book, program, company—and how they connect like a constellation

* The three most common problems: missing entities, disconnected entities, and entity fragmentation

* Why Meg’s own podcast and business weren’t connected in the AI knowledge map (and how she fixed it)

* The copywriting habit that’s quietly hurting you: all client-facing language, no expertise or “who I am”

* Schema markup explained in plain English—and the “Same As” code that ties your whole body of work together

* How to narrate a pivot so AI (and humans) know you’re the same person who changed

* Why you can build a perfect entity and still not get recognized without external validation

* The referral guide idea: a “call me when” doc for both the humans and the machines

* How long this really takes—and why Perplexity shows changes before ChatGPT ever will

“We get to signal that we would like things to be entities, but we do not get to decide which are the entities that are recognized. So, Jessica Lackey already exists in the knowledge map. We know that because if you go to ChatGPT or Claude or Google and say, ‘Who is Jessica Lackey?’ there’s an answer there.

But unless you are super clear about this is what I want you to do, AI can pull from anywhere. So if you wanna be more in control of how you’re represented and the language that it’s using about you, then you need to be clearer about how you want to be defined.” -Meg

Resources

Signal Mentorship

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Meg Casebolt

Jessica Lackey

Most email marketing advice gets written for one audience: other online business owners. The cadences, the launch sequences, the “reply and let me know what you think” CTAs — they all assume the person on the other end is in the same world you are. They’re not, if you’re a therapist or a financial advisor or a lactation consultant. Your clients may not reply to your emails with “loved this!”, don’t expect launches, and aren’t waiting for your next email.

In this episode, we’re joined by returning guest Bev Feldman, email marketing strategist for credentialed professionals at Your Personal Tech Fairy. Bev recently repositioned her business to focus on credentialed service providers — and she’s having her best revenue months ever doing it. We talk with her about has changed in her business marketing, including the shift from “marketing” to “marketing AND sales,” replacing her freebie with a gated Services Guide, and the quarterly check-in email that’s converting her smaller, plateaued list better than it ever did when it was growing.

We talk about why most credentialed pros either email too rarely (out of spam fear) or too often (copying content-creator cadences), why “top-of-mind selling” works better than launch selling for service providers, and the difference between a newsletter (selling ideas) and email marketing (selling products and services) — and why that distinction matters when everyone is being herded onto Substack. We also get into welcome sequences, the Expert’s Paradox, the Gmail open-rate drop, and what happens to a sales call when a Services Guide does the qualifying for you.

* Why the online business email playbook doesn’t translate when your audience is consumers, not other online business owners

* The two extremes Bev sees credentialed pros make — emailing too rarely vs. copying daily content-creator cadences

* Reframing email as a sales tool, not just a marketing tool (with full credit to Kendall Cherry)

* “Top-of-mind for triggering events” — what selling actually looks like for therapists, financial advisors, and other service providers

* The Expert’s Paradox: why experts default to DIY tutorial content and why AI just commoditized that

* Replacing the freebie with a Services Guide that pre-qualifies leads before they ever book a call

* Why Bev’s list has plateaued — and why that’s a feature, not a bug

* Different welcome sequences for different entry points (Services Guide subscribers vs. newsletter subscribers)

* The quarterly “I have openings — want to work together?” check-in email

* Newsletter vs. email marketing: why Substack and Beehiiv are the wrong tool if you’re trying to sell services

* Why unsubscribes are good news, and the recent Gmail change that dropped open rates across the board

"Email marketing is not just a marketing tool, it is very much a sales tool. But you can do that in a way that's not just, 'Let me hammer you over the head with my offers,' but invite people into that sales process with you when the time is right for them. Think about how you are doing that person a disservice by not showing up. They came to you because they're looking for support or help with a very specific problem, and you could be the person to solve that problem for them. If someone has given you permission to show up in their inbox, you are not spamming them. You are doing exactly what you said you would do." -Bev

About our Guest

Bev Feldman

Kendall Cherry for the Services Guide inspiration

Heart Centered Email Marketing (Previous Episode)

Bev’s Services Guide

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Meg Casebolt

Jessica Lackey

Getting ripped off online used to feel like the worst-case scenario for putting your ideas out there. Now it’s a near-certainty — your work has already been scraped, ingested, and trained on, whether you wanted it to be or not. But, on the other hand, if you don’t claim your expertise early and often… you can’t be the one cited and known for your work.

In this episode, we talk about the tension between wanting to be found and being afraid of being stolen from — and why the answer isn’t to publish less. We get into what AI models actually train on, what it means to claim your semantic territory, and why naming your frameworks matters more than ever in an era of linguistic convergence.

We talk about real examples of being ripped off, the myth-busting around AI policies, and why information itself is a leaky moat: what’s worth protecting, what’s worth releasing, and why your discernment — not your information — is what people are actually paying for.

* The first time Jessica was beat-for-beat plagiarized — and why she made the stolen idea a cornerstone of her book anyway

* Why you can’t copyright a concept (only the specific words)

* The myth that AI trains on your private workshops and client conversations

* What an AI policy actually does — and doesn’t — protect

* Claiming your semantic territory vs. resetting your authority every time you post a Reel

* Why naming things (Sacred Sales Hour, Building Blocks, the Beacon Framework) creates findable entities tied back to you

* Linguistic convergence: why everyone in your industry sounds similar, and what to do about it

* Information is a leaky moat — what people are actually buying when they hire you

* Why gatekeeping “the secret” behind an hour-long presentation burns goodwill

* The difference between compounding authority and constantly starting from zero

“I think there’s this tension between I want to be found, in order to be found I must be public, but I want to be credited. And more importantly, I don’t want to be stolen from. And when I say I don’t want to be stolen from, what I mean is I don’t want someone to put their name on my stuff and sell it as their own. But I do want to be found. I do want to be cited. I think I’ve just decided that I can’t do anything about [people taking it] now. The more I put it out there in the world, the more likely it is that someone’s gonna stumble across something I wrote, but I want them to know it came from me. That’s why you need unique terminology, unique nomenclature — that’s hard to replicate, hard to rip off.” — Jessica

Resources

Jessica’s What Business Model are you Running?

Nathan Barry’s The Ladders of Wealth

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Meg Casebolt

Jessica Lackey