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You're an expert, a therapist, consultant, or business owner, and content is part of how you grow, and you're not sure if the leverage is there anymore. Maybe it's this feeling that your wor- website isn't working for you. It's generic. It's missing that, that something, and you can't name it. Or maybe you've hired a marketing firm, the leads aren't coming in the way that they should.
They're not qualified, they're not buying, they're not happening at all. And so maybe you've also tried AI, and you're spending more and more time setting up Claude than it'd take to just do the work yourself. And what you actually want is to focus on your expertise. You want to just hand over the marketing, hand over the tech, hit a button, and it just works, and you're not babysitting the process or the tools.
And most creators think that the way to get there is the new system, the new process, better topics, more content skill, and it's none of those. It's you showing up in your work because you are the ultimate input. Your voice, how you work, your confidence operating it, that's what's determining your results, your output in your marketing with AI, with content, with your growth.
Get the input correct and everything downstream amplifies it, and that's the whole premise of this show, and we break it up into three parts.
[00:01:40] Show Intro
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If you've come from a previously successful career and now you are a year or three or five into your creative career and the breakthroughs are not showing up, this show is for you. Input/Output runs on one idea: You are the ultimate input into your creator system. Get yourself clear, and the output follows.
I'm Shawn Buttner, and let's get into it
this show used to be Creators That Crush. It is now Input Output: Here's how I got here. The first show actually was the Meaningful Revolution. It was me figuring out podcasting, and the premise was more meaning in your work would lead to more success. In the first year of episodes, I published every week.
There was virtually no growth, huge time going into the show, not building my business, right? So the first podcast coach that I had diagnosed the problem was the premise was too broad, and thus Creators That Crush was born. Now, Creators That Crush was just taking that more meaningful work premise and refining it to be more into the high performance coaching framework that I was doing.
So Creators That Crush is how do you get success as a creator?what are the skills and habits that crush it? So that had some growth, but I didn't really feel connected to the premise. There was resistance every week coming up with episodes, and, for the first time, I broke my streak of publishing every week after like 120 episodes.
And that was incredibly frustrating, and, you know, I started to think, "What's going on?" And so working with another coach, uh, we started-- decided to do some deeper work on the premise, and this is when I really discovered I had never truly defined my own creative voice. Like, Creators That Crush was borrowing high performance material from the High Performance Institute and Brendon Burchard, the guy who teaches that framework, and it was me just trying to repackage it, uh, unskillfully I would say.
And I also discounted my own experiences coming, you know, from tech and with a business background and This is exactly what I think a lot of creators do. We discount our own experiences to focus on the one thing that we are interested in, or we learn something from a big process or from, something that somebody else is doing, and we try to run with it, and we don't do the work to synthesize who we are as a creator with the thing that we're trying to accomplish, right?
And this synthesis for me had three th- threads that finally combined together. First is systems and automation. I'm a former Apple automation engineer, a former Walmart software business analyst programmer. I've been certified as a high performance coach for the last 11 years, and the last two years I've been trying to use AI with the question, like, what are the use cases that make sense for a solopreneur that move me forward?
And, thinking of all of these different parts of me trying to be-- run a coaching business, trying to use a podcast and content to grow that business, I realized that, you know, business is just a process. Content is an information system, and the-- there's inputs that go into both that get transformed, and something co- comes out.
And think of it like, you're playing guitar, you have your guitar. You plug it into an amp. You strum the guitar, which creates noise. There's a wire that carries that into a series of pedals and processing, which finally goes to the speaker of the amp, right? So there's the input, which is the guitar.
There's the signal, which is the amp and the effects, and then there's the noise or output into the crowd. So my question is, after experimenting as a creator for ten years, what was the constant input into my business, into my coaching, into the things that I was creating, newsletters, YouTube, Facebook, all of that?
And the answer was me, and that's when I arrived at the new premise of this show. You are the ultimate input. So Creators That Crush was creator performance. Input & Output is the systems lens. How do you change you to lead the signal and output the results in your business?
Notice the pattern. Every time my show was improved upon, the fix was not the premise, it was upstream of the premise. Never the output. That's what the show's about. It's about doing that work that helps you improve as a creator, as a business owner, as a business professional, as a content creator.
That's the show
So here are the three lenses Every creator running a content-forward business wants three outcomes. They want to have content in their voice. They want to have work that builds upon their strengths and shores up their weaknesses, and they want confidence that they will get the results that they want. So voice is your style and your taste in action.
as a musician, that would be your ear for music. And if you think of like the guitar, right? Your voice is the guitar player strumming the guitar. It's your experiences and everything that goes into processing that, your taste, you know, the, the music that you like. It, it, it's the, these influences on you.
It's, your technical skill and what you've practiced up to that point. It's, your belief on what is good music, that all shifts that signal to get shared with your audience, right? As a visual au- artist, it's your stylized way of drawing. It's the hours you spent trying to figure out how to draw your specific thing.
It's your taste on what you think is, is good and, you know, is it busy? Is it not busy? Is it, how expressive it might be? you would understand that if you saw a Basquiat, you know that it's him because of how it's composed and the components.
And the same is true with authors, right? Sentence structure, phrasing that's unmistakable- mistakably yours, or a, sense o- of taste that draw people to you. And underneath it all, it's your unique perspective. I have a POV framework that I'll share in next episode, which is perspective, observation, and future vision, but that's a whole other thing
So if we have three outcomes, your voice, workflow, and confidence, right? How do we know what's missing in, in the results, right? If you have voice and confidence but no workflows, you have inconsistent results, or you're chasing five ideas and-- at once without a particular focus and any particular progress on any one idea.
If you have voice and workflow but no confidence, you're in this, like, frustration trap where you're doing the work and you're not sure existentially if it's going to lead anywhere. So you show up every day, but you're not sure that what you're showing up to do is actually turning the dial for you.
you have-- If you have workflow and confidence but no voice, you're a commodity. Anyone can do what you do, and so no one has a particularly strong reason to pick you. But all three of these together, that's an expert people come to. You challenge how they think, which is-- informs their voice, you show them the way, which is your workflow, and you convince them emotionally with your conviction, and that's confidence.
These are all equal parts, voice, workflow, and confidence, but any one of them can be strong in your business and you could be missing one of the others. So-
What's really kinda cool about this too is if there's external things that people see, which is your voice, your workflows, and y- your confidence, internally there are other things going on too. Like, your voice is informed by your identity. Your presence in your work is showing up in your workflows, and how you're feeling about yourself internally is informing your confidence a- and feeding everything.
You know, if you're the ultimate in- input, your beliefs, habits, and influences are operating on this all. And so these are all nine different things that we can pu- pull apart to understand you, the ultimate input, and that's the show going forward. Every one of the episodes is going to be working on at least one of these.
Um, I have a diagram. I'll put that in the show notes, or you can see it up here on, on YouTube. So wrapping up
all of this work has buttoned up into this idea that you are the ultimate input. Your voice, your workflow, and your confidence is determining the quality of your work and the quality of the results in your business and life. So what do we do with all this,I'm gonna ask you three different questions,
So if you were to think about your business and the things that you make, where in your creative business are you not speaking authentically as yourself? Or where haven't you put you into the process, right? Question line number one. Question line number two: Is there repeatable work that's customized to your strengths and covers your weaknesses, or are you reinventing it every time?
Or worse, where are the processes that you just borrowed blindly from other people that you haven't gotten to work for how you are? Third line of things to ask yourself are where are you not showing up fully confident, and where is that getting in the way of the results that you want in your lifestyle, in your pocketbook, with your audience growth and audience value?
Rate yourself on a scale of one to 10 on each of these, write three short statements of why you gave yourself a number for your voice, your workflow, and your confidence after you think about those, and then pick the one that you need the most help with. And you can email it to [email protected], and I'll read every one of these and personally reply with something that should help you move forward, depending on your situation.
So with that, the next episode we're gonna talk about the POV framework, perspective, observation, and future vision, why that's important for every creator, and why that's important for you as the ultimate input. I am Shawn Buttner. This is Input Output. See you guys in the next episode.