So I’m on a podcast recently and I go off.

Saying stuff like, “Isn’t it so cool that we’re all going to die?”

Yeeeeaaaaah…I’m shifting.

Fully adopting the line from Emerson when he said, “To be great is to be misunderstood.”

But I’ve got one little poky struggle—like a Lego stuck to my heel:

What to call myself.

See the Corporate Construct—spiraling into LinkedIn, networking groups, mastermind events—has told us that you must brand yourself.

I can’t tell you how many networking events I’ve been invited to where the remit is…

[1] Tell us your name.

[2] Then, pitch your business in 60 seconds or less.

And they have the gall to say, “We foster deep connection.”

But connection with what?

To the human being or the label?

And here’s my struggle.

It’s easy to say I’m a coach because that’s what the world understands.

But I’ve never vibed with it…never.

I’ve been pretty damn public about getting into the coaching world kicking and screaming.

Not only because everyone and their brother is a coach nowadays, which has turned a valuable space into a bunch of opportunists who recycle someone else’s work.

There are a handful of amazing coaches out there, but they’re few. And it’s hard to tell between the pretenders and the real deal.

So, the last thing I wanted to do was inhabit a world that I had no desire to own surrounded by a majority of people who are coaching based on some other person's rehashed system versus their core beliefs.

But I grabbed the label because helping people in this manner felt like a calling, not a business decision.

And I couldn’t be asked to be a snowflake and say, “I’m different!” when I hadn’t earned it.

So, I took on the label, and it helped a lot of people.

I visited a client for a few days. She’s a local celebrity and she kept introducing me as her coach.

And I bristled.

To the point where she rightly made fun of me for being so awkward about it.

And for the last handful of months, as someone who has spent over a decade in the marketing and sales world…

I’ve been committing the number one sin:

Thou shalt not be confusing.

This is why we adopt labels.

Why networking groups fostering “deep connection” can ask you to pitch in 60 seconds and not see the contradiction.

But there’s a problem: Once you start labeling something, you stop seeing it.

It’s only when you stop labeling and naming things that you actually begin to see and hear them.

And so, despite the consequences of sounding like a marketing noob, I’ve stopped calling myself a coach.

Or anything.

I’ve been going on like that for a few months.

And I’ve started to see the work take shape before my eyes.

The burden of having to be a convenient something has removed so many anchors holding me in place.

It’s been an indescribable expanse lately. Some wellspring of work that gives me more energy the longer I do it, not less.

And then, the podcast host said I sounded like a guru.

And I bristled again.

But in a different way.

Because, I don’t believe I’m a guru, nor do I have any fucking clue how one would be assigned that title.

But when he said it, I immediately thought of Alan Watts.

I’ve been listening to his lectures a lot. Playing the same ones over and over and over.

And Watts had no problem calling himself a guru.

How the label came to him, I don’t know. But I’ve admired for a long time how he could just say it and not bristle.

Not flinch.

To know who he is, live, in the moment.

Obviously he’s long dead, but when I hear his lectures, and he says the word, it doesn’t sound like a label.

It feels like embodiment.

And the alteration begins in my mind.

A label can amplify when you embody it, not submit to it.

And ever since I started helping founders and execs, I felt I was submitting to the label of coach.

It’s not me.

Never has been.

But here’s where I get real vulnerable with ya.

Because a word I’ve never bristled at is philosopher.

Except in one way…

The world may look at me labeling myself as a philosopher as pure arrogance.

And yet I ask the question, who is the world to tell me what I embody?

And I don’t say I’m a philosopher to sound haughty.

I say it because it’s the living, breathing manifestation of the work I’m taking on.

As someone who places way more value on direction than goals…I have but one goal.

I wrote it in my notebook about four months ago:

Hone your philosophy over the next 10 years and see where you end up.

And if the work is the substrate for the label, I 1000% am a philosopher.

I read. I write. I ask questions of the world and of people. I form theories.

I’m working on a few theories at the moment, and like all philosophy, they’ve started with a question, and then I go looking for the answer.

So, am I some snowflake?

No.

We all have our own theories, values, principles, doctrines.

I’m just psycho enough to be pretty public about it.

I look at the world and see a tidy box that I don’t resonate with.

Specifically the optimization of everything.

People will tell you how to write your LinkedIn bio using a framework.

They’ll tell you how to assemble your business working backwards from some EOS blueprint.

They’ll reverse-engineer, and automate, and workflow, and explain…and all of these are useful, but they’re terrible places to start.

Because they are “big label” energy and I find them incredibly limiting.

When we label it, we stop seeing it.

We start conforming to the label instead of embodying our true selves and discovering what life means to us.

We have to let go to reveal the unlimited truth.

In so doing…

We discover.

We go from colonizers to explorers and adapters.

We don’t submit the world to us, we submit to it, and create cool shit.

So, I’m at a crossroads…sharing it with you live.

Because I have one rule:

Never look back on any decision you made and ask, ‘Where was your courage?’

And, if I’m honest, I know I’m a philosopher, but I’m afraid.

Afraid if I put that label into a pre-existing box that it’ll turn people off.

That it’ll be misunderstood.

And then my brain ping pongs right back to Emerson’s quote.

What a gift it would be to be misunderstood.

As far as I can tell, it’s the most certain path to greatness.

Combine it with the conviction I have and the thoughts I possess are insanely powerful.

So, there you have it.

I’m still chewing on it, but probably already know it and just need a bit of courage to go all in on it.

The purpose behind any of this—not that I knew it at the beginning of typing this email—is to reveal to you the danger of saying you’re a specific something.

You can live a perfectly successful life. And in the modern marketing and sales world, they’re not wrong, the more clearly you brand yourself the more understood you’ll be.

I’m just not sure we can still be great when we start with the label.

Because we’ll adopt the conventions that come with it.

And stop exploring.

So, like a good little philosopher, I’ll ask the question:

Is my belief on this true?

And then I’ll go searching and see what I find.

Til next time,

C

P.S. I recorded a yap video on this subject here, too.​