Input/Output: The Creator System For Experts | with Shawn Buttner

It's happened again. For the third day straight, you're producing your episode, pulling your hair out, wondering why you're suffering so much in the process. Sometimes you even think about quitting altogether. If you've ever said to yourself, "Not this again," or "If I just fix this one thing, it'll all be okay," this episode is for you.

Workflow is the creative work, and it's for you.

Shawn hit that third day a couple of months ago. Mid-rebrand, the shape of this show changed three times in two weeks while he was building AI automation on top of it. The recording documents were clunky to speak through, and takes got scrapped and re-recorded the next day.

The episode names three shirts that don't fit. The copied shirt is someone else's process cut to someone else's measurements. Shawn's came from Brendon Burchard, who certified him in high performance and whose post-consistently model worked well for Brendon. It carried Shawn through 700 YouTube videos and made him comfortable on camera, then quietly became a default he never questioned. That's the 20-year shirt: holes, faded, and loved too much to replace. The third is the fabric shop, where you fall for a new tool and wrap yourself in it instead of making something that fits. Each one feels like a personal failing. Each one is a fit problem.

The turn comes from Shawn's years automating at Apple. The computer does exactly what you tell it to do, even when you think you told it something else. Your workflow works the same way. If it frustrates you every week, you designed the frustration in, which means you can design it out.

The redesign starts with one rule: slow down and map the steps as manually as you can, with a human doing the work. Then four moves. Define the questions and goals for the process. Map your best version, grounded in what has actually worked for you (Shawn walks through his own best mornings: journal first, decide the work, block the calendar, start with the one thing that matters). Compare that map against what you really do, starting with what bugs you. Loop, so the process learns from every run. Each step tailors one of the shirts, and together they produce the three lenses of Input/Output: workflow, voice, and confidence.

Your move this week: pick the main process in your work and run the Define step. What questions do you have about it? What is it for? Where does it frustrate you?

Want help with Map, Compare, and Loop? Book a Creator Diagnostic at shawnbuttner.com/clarity-call. It's a free half-hour call, and Shawn reviews your website through voice, workflow, and confidence before you talk.

Prefer to start on your own? Download the free Goalprint at shawnbuttner.com/goalprint. It's the Define step done for you: what each key process in your business is for, and the outcome it serves.

Input/Output is the creator system for experts: people who built a track record in another career and are now turning that into a creator business. Hosted by Shawn Buttner, certified high performance coach. The premise is simple. You are the ultimate input into your creator system. Get yourself clear, and the tools, team, and content follow.

0:00 Third day straight, thinking about quitting
1:24 Show Intro
2:01 The goal: a workflow tailored to you
3:41 Copying Brendon Burchard
4:44 Shirt 1: the copied shirt
5:29 Shirt 2: the 20-year shirt
6:07 Shirt 3: the fabric shop
7:23 Why my workflow kept breaking
8:46 Your workflow is working exactly the way you designed it
9:28 Redesign: slow down first
10:34 Step 1: Define
10:59 Step 2: Map your best version
12:28 Step 3: Compare
13:42 Step 4: Loop
14:21 Each step tailors a shirt
15:30 The three lenses
17:03 Your move: define one process

Episode 13. 

Many things run your expert business. Your content, services, team, and so much more. Before any of that there is you, the expert. Much of what gets done depends on how energetic you feel when it's time to write, record, or get on that call with your next client. Today's guest, Dr. Alicia Newsome, is a functional doctor who runs the tests other doctors don't, to make sure her patients get to the root of what ails them. One thing the tests can show is why you are exhausted at 2pm, and we get into a few broad reasons why that might happen, and how energy is an essential input for creators.

You'll learn the four things Alicia sees draining her patients' energy, why breakfast is the cheapest one to fix, and the check engine light test for deciding who to trust with your health.

Topics discussed:

Dr. Alicia Newsome is a functional medicine physician and founder of the Body Wellness Institute. Her book, Worthy of Rest: For the Woman Who's Tired of Being the Strong One, releases October 2.

Alicia's website: dralicianewsome.com
Worthy of Rest (signed copies): go.dralicianewsome.com/checkout-worthy-of-rest

→ Running on empty at 2pm? Book a Creator Diagnostic: shawnbuttner.com/clarity-call

Input/Output is the creator system for experts: people who built a track record in another career and are now turning that into a creator business. Hosted by Shawn Buttner, certified high performance coach. The premise is simple. You are the ultimate input into your creator system. Get yourself clear, and the tools, team, and content follow.

This episode is about creator energy, creator burnout, and functional medicine for entrepreneurs.

0:00 2pm and you are exhausted
3:33 Show Intro
4:10 Meet Dr. Alicia Newsome
4:34 What functional medicine actually does
8:25 Tired all day, wired all night: cortisol
11:35 The four things draining your energy
15:11 Business, body, belief
21:20 Who to trust with your health: the check engine light
26:05 Morning, evening, and transition routines
33:24 Widen the river: stress resiliency
36:51 Test, don't guess: remove the stressors
39:28 Savory breakfast and warm lemon water
42:00 Your coffee is charging you interest
45:43 Recap and the emotional guidance scale
49:43 Worthy of Rest and the final question
52:28 Wrapping Up
55:47 Show Close

If I took a look at your website, would I get a sense of who you are as a person or brand? Many experts struggle with putting themselves in their marketing because they are so focused on what they do. Why?  

Most people start with marketing, when they should start with their POV.

This episode opens at Shawn's desk, mid website audit: a local therapist whose only line of personality ("If I ever ask you if you're fine, you can fire me") sits buried in a template from the late-90s internet. Her voice exists. The site hides it. And a stranger who can't see who you are won't buy.

The usual fixes make this worse. AI polishes a site into sounding like everyone else. Outsourcing can run long and expensive; one coach paid five years of hosting and maintenance for a website that never brought her a client. Both fail for the same reason: AI, agencies, and teams are amplifiers, not sources. An empty input produces expensive generic output. Marketing is downstream of your voice.

Shawn lived the upstream version of this. Ten years on YouTube, two into a podcast, and he could not say what made his content different from any other high-performance coach. The search that followed ran through show-premise work with Kevin from Grow The Show and Jeremy Enns of Scrappy Podcasting, and each fix moved further upstream: the premise was wrong because his voice was not in it. The Input/Output rebrand came out of that work, along with a rubric for auditing how voice, workflow, and confidence show up on an expert's website. Across coaches and therapists, three failure modes keep appearing: experts who can't explain what they do (voice), sites that say everything to catch everyone (confidence), and offer sprawl or no offers at all (workflow). Shawn ran the rubric on himself and found 420-some landing pages.

The answer gets its first public airing here: the POV framework. Perspective is the lens, how you approach problems and what your prior career taught you. Opinions are the claims, where you break from your field's defaults. Vision is the direction, what you see for your clients that they can't yet see for themselves. Your voice is your POV expressed, and with those three in place, the same AI, the same designer, and the same website finally have something to amplify.

The episode closes with the 3x3 exercise. Write three ways your perspective is unique, three opinions your peers would push back on, and three things you wish for your clients going forward. That page is the core of your POV and the guiding light for every piece of marketing you touch.

→ Want to go deeper? Book a Creator Diagnostic at shawnbuttner.com/clarity-call — a free half-hour call. Shawn reviews your website through the Voice, Workflow, and Confidence lens before you talk.

Input/Output is the creator system for experts: people who built a track record in another career and are now turning that into a creator business. Hosted by Shawn Buttner, certified high performance coach. The premise is simple. You are the ultimate input into your creator system. Get yourself clear, and the tools, team, and content follow.

0:00 Cold open — the therapist audit
1:31 Show intro
2:09 What experts want when it comes to marketing
3:46 How experts undercut themselves (the failed fixes)
6:25 Reorientation — I lived it (the search + the three failure modes)
11:27 The POV framework (Perspective, Opinions, Vision)
18:22 Wrap-up — the 3x3 + Creator Diagnostic

The past year has been a journey to rebrand the podcast. But why? In this episode of Input Output, I share the new driving idea for this new show, the journey to get to here, and the realization that changed it all.

Two podcasts, more than 170 episodes, and one broken publishing streak led to a single question: across ten years of experiments, what was the one constant input into the business? The answer became the name of this show.

Shawn walks the road from The Meaningful Revolution (a year of weekly episodes, flat growth) to Creators That Crush (borrowed high-performance material he never felt connected to) to the deeper work that surfaced the real problem: he had never defined his own creative voice. Each fix moved further upstream. First from the episodes to the premise. Then from the premise to the person behind it.

0:00 You are the ultimate input (cold open)
1:42 Show intro
2:11 The rebrand: two shows, one broken streak
4:38 The synthesis: systems, coaching, and AI
5:31 The guitar metaphor: input, signal, output
7:03 The three lenses: voice, workflow, confidence
9:03 The diagnostic: which one is missing?
10:18 The inner layer: nine parts of the ultimate input
11:11 Wrap-up + the self-assessment challenge

The specifics covered: the guitar-to-amp metaphor that gives the show its name (input, signal, output), the three outcomes every content-forward business runs on (your voice, your workflow, your confidence), and the diagnostic that tells you which one is missing. Voice and confidence without workflow means five ideas and no progress. Voice and workflow without confidence is the frustration trap. Workflow and confidence without voice makes you a commodity anyone could replace. All three together make you the expert people come to. Behind each external dial sits an internal driver — identity, presence, and feeling — fed by your beliefs, habits, and influences: nine things the show will pull apart, episode by episode, to understand you, the ultimate input.

The episode ends with a self-assessment: rate your voice, workflow, and confidence 1 to 10, write three short statements on why you gave each number, then pick the one you need the most help with and email it to [email protected]. Shawn reads every one and replies personally with something to move you forward.

→ Rate yourself, pick your weakest dial, and email it to [email protected] — you'll get a personal reply.

Input/Output is the creator system for experts: people who built a track record in another career and are now turning that into a creator business. Hosted by Shawn Buttner, certified high performance coach. The premise is simple. You are the ultimate input into your creator system. Get yourself clear, and the tools, team, and content follow.

0:00 You are the ultimate input (cold open)
1:40 Show intro
~2:00 The rebrand: two shows, one broken streak
~x:xx The synthesis: systems, coaching, and AI
~x:xx The guitar metaphor: input, signal, output
~x:xx The three lenses: voice, workflow, confidence
~x:xx The diagnostic: which one is missing?
~x:xx The inner layer: nine parts of the ultimate input
~x:xx Wrap-up + the self-assessment challenge

 This episode, we talk about the difference between busy work and deep work and how understanding that difference and navigating it successfully leads to a better you as a creator, and as a business owner.

We talk about what goes into understanding busy work versus deep work. We run it through the lenses of the show: your voice, your workflows, and your confidence. At the end, there's a challenge on how to keep yourself on track and growing as a creator with a simple exercise.

Creator business growth doesn't stall from lack of effort. It stalls because busywork and real progress feel exactly the same from the inside.

This episode opens with three hours lost to a script that wouldn't come together, and the question that followed: is reworking the process real work, or avoidance? From there, Shawn defines busywork and deep work in concrete terms, collapses the productivity checklist into one question (is this moving a meaningful goal forward in your business?), and names the four inputs that build your awareness: your tells, your definition of excellent, your confidence, and your previous experience.

The specifics covered: the four questions hiding inside one, what work looks like with you in the process versus without you, the client who took courses for three years instead of launching (and what her launch finally taught her), the lesson from Apple about fixing friction instead of accepting it, why 85% accuracy beats 80% at AI scale (one degree off, over a long enough line, lands you somewhere else entirely), the Thor: Ragnarok magic cup that never empties, and the Harvard Business Review and Stanford finding on AI "workslop." It ends on the episode's real turn: the better input is you, knowing when an impulse to change is a signal and when it's a distraction.

If you've ever ended a busy week with nothing meaningful shipped, taken one more course before launching, or wondered whether tinkering with your process is progress or hiding, this one is about your week. That's the creator-led business growth problem: the tools and processes are the same for everyone; the input isn't.

→ Make your AI sound like you, not like everyone else's AI. Free 30-minute setup: shawnbuttner.com/voiceprint → Want a read on where your creator business is actually stuck? Book a Creator Diagnostic: shawnbuttner.com/clarity-call

Input/Output is the creator system for experts: people who built a track record in another career and are now turning that into a creator business. Hosted by Shawn Buttner, certified high performance coach. The premise is simple. You are the ultimate input into your creator system. Get yourself clear, and the tools, team, and content follow.

This episode is about creator business growth and the creator-led business growth that comes from knowing your own tells.

Episode 8

A fully edited conversation between two friends was supposed to launch the same week on both our feeds. A version of that is finally happening, months late. And nothing went wrong. No fight, no falling out. That's the unsettling part.

This episode is the story of how the plan actually died: one reasonable, gracious, "no rush" week at a time, inside the very meeting we built to keep it alive.

In this episode:

Hear the other side: → The conversation this episode references is live on Diana Ordonez's feed: "Ep 35: Be The Light — Thriving in Uncertainty" on Courage & Purpose: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/courage-purpose/id1780717738?i=1000775330821

Go deeper: → The practical version, including how to give an overdue update without it sounding like an accusation, is in this week's issue of my newsletter, The Output: shawnbuttner.com/joinus

Input/Output is the creator system for experts: people who built a track record in another career and are now turning that into a creator business. Hosted by Shawn Buttner, certified high performance coach. The premise is simple. You are the ultimate input into your creator system. Get yourself clear, and the tools, team, and content follow.

This episode is about creator identity and finding the urgency behind your creator voice.

Episode 7 (soft-launch)

Your team, tools, workflows, and systems all have one thing in common: you. Get clear on your part and everything downstream improves.

You are the ultimate input.

This is the premise episode of Input/Output. Shawn Buttner lays out the show's core bet: every outcome you chase as a creator traces back to one input, and that input is you. He walks the Input → Signal → Output model that names the show and makes the case for why getting yourself clear comes before the funnel, the tools, or the team. Input is everything that kicks off your system: your character, your values, who shaped you, and the creative DNA that flows downstream into everything you make. Signal is the work that carries it: the team, the SOPs, the AI workflows, the actual making. Think songwriter, then the band and the studio, then the song on the radio. Output is what the world experiences: amplification, not origination. Shawn argues that AI raises the stakes on the input instead of replacing it. Feed a blurry creator into the workflow and you get generic output at scale, with the "80% is good enough" rule compounding into drift over time. He also breaks down Jay Clouse's Creator HQ launch from Creator Science #191: the best launch of Jay's business that still felt flat, because there was no milestone set to celebrate. The lesson: how you measure success internally is itself an input.

If you've ever thought "if I'd just shown up differently, I'd have gotten a different outcome," this is the show that makes that the whole point. It's for creators with a lot of ideas who need a process and a system to sort through them, people aiming for greater impact through their work, not people chasing hype with nothing underneath it. Input/Output is the creator system for experts: people who built a track record in another career and are now turning it into a creator business.

Hosted by Shawn Buttner, Certified High Performance Coach.

The premise is simple: you are the ultimate input into your creator system. Get yourself clear, and the tools, team, and content follow.

0:00 The one input every creator overlooks
1:21 You're the only input that matters
1:34 Who Input/Output is for
2:02 The Input: character, values, and creative DNA
4:53 The Signal: the work that carries it
6:13 The Output: amplification, not origination (where AI fits)
7:53 The Output newsletter
8:23 Why this show is different — and the Jay Clouse launch lesson
10:56 Growing as a creator and a person
11:12 Wrap-up

Check out the Output Newsletter mentioned in this episode!
Link to Jay Clause's Creator HQ Launch episode.

Most creators are told the way to fix engagement and growth is more volume. So they make more. More posts. More videos. When “more” doesn’t move the needle, then what?

In this solo episode, I lay out the contradiction that ran my creative life for a decade: 700 videos, ten years, under 20 subscribers, all while doing everything the playbook said to do. The problem was never volume. It was presence. And every safe choice I made, no opinions, no stories, a smaller face on the thumbnail, was a quiet decision to not be seen.

I walk through what "doing everything right" produced, and the moment it cracked: cringing at my own videos. I share the year inside Evan Carmichael's group, where the push was to open every video with a big opinion. Looking back at 700 videos, I found almost zero opinions and almost no personal stories. I was terrible at sharing them, and it still moved the channel from 20 to 100 subscribers. That's when the real realization landed. It was never about more opinions. I was hiding. Protecting myself from what I call the flaming arrows of the internet, building content so safe there was no person left in it to criticize. I thought I was building an audience. I was building an invisibility shield.

If you've been consistent for years and the growth still hasn't shown up, this is why. If your last five pieces could have been made by anyone covering the same topic, this is why. Creator identity isn't a finishing touch on good content. It's the input the whole system runs on.

Input/Output is the show for coaches, consultants, and expertise-based creators building a creator system grounded in who they are. Hosted by Certified High Performance Coach Shawn Buttner, each episode explores creator identity, creator voice, content systems, and the habits behind sustainable creative growth.

Chapters:

[0:00] 700 videos, ten years, under 20 subscribers
[0:36] The reframe: a hiding problem, not a content problem
[1:15] The playbook that keeps you invisible
[3:17] When watching your own videos makes you cringe
[4:37] Evan Carmichael and the push for a big opinion
[5:55] Terrible at it, and it still worked (20 to 100)
[6:51] The real realization: I was hiding
[7:40] The flaming arrows of the internet
[8:45 ]Why opinions and stories move a channel
[9:31] The diagnostic, and the question to sit with

Finding your creator voice isn't a craft problem. It's an attention problem. If your content feels hollow or sounds like everyone else's, more reps won't fix it. But one story a day might.

In this solo episode, I share what happened during a coaching session with my own coach Jeremy that cracked open something I'd been circling for ten years. I was listing out everything frustrating me about my show, my brand, my offer. Somewhere in that list, I realized the real problem wasn't any of those things. It was that I'd been creating content that felt like me on the outside and wasn't me at all on the inside.

I walk through ten years of output: over 700 YouTube videos, as many newsletters, 150+ podcast episodes, 400+ landing pages. And what it felt like when all of it fell flat. Not because of execution, but because I was hiding behind borrowed ideas and other people's frameworks. 

If your content feels like a performance, or you've been consistent for years without the connection you expected, this episode is for you. One story. That's the practice. Input/Output is the show for coaches, consultants, and expertise-based creators building a creator system grounded in who they are.

Hosted by Certified High Performance Coach Shawn Buttner, each episode explores creator identity, finding your creator voice, content systems, and the habits behind sustainable creative growth. 

Chapters:

Join the newsletter to get a different take on todays' episode, right to your inbox every week: www.shawnbuttner.com/joinus

After creating 700+ YouTube videos, 430 landing pages, 175 podcast episodes, and 10 years of newsletters, I realized the problem wasn't showing up or producing. It was clarity about myself in relation to the work.

In this episode, I'm soft launching a new format for the show exploring the creator as the ultimate input into all technology, systems, and processes. I share my personal clarity journey and introduce a 5 step framework to help you get clear on who you are as a creator so you can lead your tools, team, and creative process. 

You'll learn why borrowed language keeps you disconnected from your work, how treating content as idea exploration changes everything, and the five elements that become your input for AI, team communication, and better results.

Topics discussed:

Intros: The 700 videos problem (00:00)
The Input: My background and hiding behind borrowed language (01:00)
The Signal: Five Areas of Creator Clarity (06:00)
The Output: How clarity changed my creative process (08:00)
Wrapping Up: Quick self assessment on the 5 elements (10:00)
New Workshop announcement (12:00)
Finishing Up: Final thought (13:00)

The 5 Step Clarity Framework:

Want to go deeper? Join the You First Framework webinar series at www.shawnbuttner.com/ai to get AI prompts that help you define these elements and create your communication document.

Have thoughts on this new format? Email [email protected]

→ Make your AI sound like you, not like everyone else's AI. Free 30-minute setup: shawnbuttner.com/voiceprint
→ The written version is in my newsletter, The Output: shawnbuttner.com/joinus

Input/Output is the creator system for experts: people who built a track record in another career and are now turning that into a creator business. Hosted by Shawn Buttner, certified high performance coach. The premise is simple. You are the ultimate input into your creator system. Get yourself clear, and the tools, team, and content follow.

This episode is about creator identity and getting clarity as a creator.