74. Self-worth, Marketing, and the Myth of More with Tara McMullin

 
 
 
 
 
 

Communicating For Impact

If content is king, what is that leaving on the table?

How do we begin to settle into ourselves, do things differently, and show up as we are?

We are living in a world where we’re told that we need to produce more and more to be witnessed, to be noticed, to be able to call people in to what we’re selling or what we want to influence them with.

But the myth of more often comes at the expense of the quality and purpose of our content. What if we communicated for impact and transformation rather than just feeding the algorithm?

Tara McMullin joins India to discuss the evolution of her content, her business, and how distancing herself from the myth of more has impacted her work and creativity.

Listen on your favorite podcast player or keep reading to learn:

  • How the process of filtering ourselves through content marketing impacts our sense of self

  • Why shifting your mindset about credibility from income to impact supports your integrity

  • How unhooking your self-worth from how you make money can open you up to opportunities and experiences

  • Why we need to build awareness of the stories behind our goals, values, and vision

Small Business Scholar

Tara McMullin is a writer, podcaster, and producer. For over 13 years, she’s studied small business owners—how they live, how they work, what influences them, and what they hope for the future. She’s the host of What Works, a podcast about navigating the 21st-century economy with your humanity intact. Tara is also co-founder of YellowHouse.Media, a boutique podcast production company. Her work has been featured in Fast Company, The Startup, The Muse, and The Huffington Post. Her first book, What Works: A Comprehensive Framework to Change the Way We Approach Goal Setting, will be released in November.

How Tara Flaunts Her Fire

On the Flaunt Your Fire® podcast, Tara McMullin (she/her) says that Flaunting Her Fire means paying attention to what fuels her and what fuels her fire. 

“This whole year for me has been an object lesson in trusting that what fuels my fire is also going to be, in one way or another, a path to meeting my own needs.”

Career Trajectories and Shifts

Tara explains that her educational background is in the philosophy and sociology of religion, but the career trajectory that she is on now started in 2009 with blogging.

During that time, she found that she enjoyed learning about business, marketing, and operations, particularly as the evolution of the internet and platforms began to allow people to build careers and businesses online.

For roughly ten years, she worked directly with business owners through coaching, group facilitation, community building, and education, with her offerings centering on how to build stronger businesses.

But in 2021, she recognized that she needed to make a career change and that she wanted, in a way, to get back to her blogging roots and pursue writing as a full-time career that encompasses her written work, her podcast, freelance writing for other outlets, and her forthcoming book.

“I’m feeling very confident owning writing or being a writer as a career and as an identity.”

Branding, Identity, and Burning Out

Tara began making shifts in her career as far back as 2017, when she switched from running group coaching programs to facilitating a community-based model.

“I was very much interested in not being seen as a guru, as not even so much being seen as an expert, and instead being seen as someone who could curate and gather, and definitely lend my own experience and observations and insight, but someone who was sort of part of the community at the same time as I was leading the community.”

That shift began moving her in the direction of building a brand around the community, where she had previously been building a much more personal brand, “something that was bigger than myself. And I think that was a really necessary change because I can realize now, I had completely lost touch with my own identity.”

She says filtering ourselves through the lens of creating content for social media or newsletters and constantly asking ourselves what we should or shouldn’t post has a profound impact. “I don’t know that we quite realize the impact, and the depth of the impact, that those questions have on how we relate to ourselves and how we relate to others.”

She was happy with the direction of the group and the small-group masterminds she was hosting, and then 2020 happened.

For her, the constant emotional whiplash of meeting and talking with business owners about the state of their businesses was deeply challenging. 

The unpredictability of the emotional tenor of those meetings, “for my neurology and my personality? That is not good. It is not sustainable. And balancing that throughout the year got harder and harder and harder.”

It took a major toll on her emotional wellbeing, her relationships, and her business.

“The business was working in a number of different ways, but I was becoming extremely run down, losing my sense of identity again, just losing any love for what I was doing.”

As that toll accelerated through 2020 and into 2021, Tara knew that she needed to step back from the kind of facilitation work that the community and masterminds required of her.

Finding a New Framework

Tara came back to writing and podcasting, and what she refers to as “thoughtful communication work.”

But even as she began pulling back from facilitation work in early 2021, she was feeling worse.

“I realized that there was more that I needed to unpack there.”

A significant piece was questioning whether she might be autistic. She found herself strongly relating to other people’s experiences through interviews, articles, social media posts.

“I was like, oh, wait, if these people are autistic and they’re experiencing these things, and I feel more seen by these little snippets of stories than I probably ever have, maybe this is something I need to look into.”

Through a process of taking assessments, talking to her doctor, and talking to her therapist, she came to the conclusion that she is autistic.

“That gave me a whole new, and very fruitful, helpful, productive frame for understanding what was going on with me internally. But it also really put into focus how much my work was structured in a way that played on every single one of my weaknesses or deficiencies or impairments.”

She had built her business around her values and belief in the collective, but for her personally, the environments she had created were extremely difficult to navigate.

At the end of 2021, she transitioned out of her position in the community.

“The tectonic shift that I think people have noticed, even though it’s been sort of building in this direction, is that I stopped being a content marketer.”

Releasing the Filter

While her work always included writing and podcasting, now, Tara says, “when I put out an article, when I put out a podcast episode, when I pitch a piece to a news outlet, I’m not thinking about what does this piece get me.”

With nothing to market tied to the content, concerns about visibility and building an audience are secondary.

“Now it’s literally, what is the question I want to explore? What ideas do I want to connect for people? What do I think is going to be the most valuable for people right now, in this moment? What is the most valuable for me right now, in this moment in terms of ideas and thinking and creativity?”

Shifting out of content marketing has allowed her to be more true to herself, and to be “a writer and thinker, first and foremost.”

She says content marketing means always asking yourself questions about whether and how an audience will respond to a piece of content. “It’s a way of connecting an idea or a piece of information to a particular response that you’re hoping to elicit from your audience,” whether that’s likes, signing up for your mailing list, or purchasing a product or service.

This sets up the filter for what we post or not.

“A lot of what was interesting to me didn’t make it through the filter…For content marketing, it was more like, okay, what are the things that I can talk about? What are the things that I want to talk about that are also going to meet these external goals?”

Now that she is no longer a content marketer, Tara doesn’t have to have the same filter.

“I get to say, I know this is a question that people are asking, even if it’s not a question that it going to elicit a response like buy my product or hit the like button…This is a question I enjoy exploring and it’s my job to connect those dots…Because the filter is gone, it’s less of a filter now and it’s more of a craft question. How do I do this in a way that’s interesting?”

Releasing that filter has been liberating.

“I get to ask really interesting craft questions…[and] building that out makes me feel not just happy, but it makes me feel whole in a way that I just couldn’t before.”

Credibility and Integrity

India says that letting go of the title “content marketer” and the freedom that comes with that has been on her mind and has also been a topic of discussion in the Community.

“One of the biggest things that can tend to come up as you are encouraging people to explore their natural curiosities, their natural fuel for their fire, what they’re passionate about, or even sharing about their values and what matters to them, and what’s important is the rebuttal of well, how will I make money? How will that fuel my business?”

Tara admits that changing directions with her career has had major impacts on her revenue.

“I essentially blew up the business. Which is not typically something that I recommend…This was, for me, a choice of last resort.”

When she transitioned out of running the community at the beginning of 2022, she then had minimal revenue coming in. The advance on her book and some project-based work and freelance writing brought in enough money for her to pay herself on her side. 

The production company she co-founded with her husband Sean, Yellow House Media, makes enough money to pay Sean a regular salary and generates some profit, which gives Tara wiggle room.

She recognizes that her position of having successfully started a second company and sold her book proposal is a privilege. “I could not have done this eight years ago…But I needed this space to just step away from having to, quote unquote, make money.”

Another piece of the financial shift, she says, was getting over the mindset that your credibility is tied to the amount of money you make.

“What matters is how many people I work with are taking what I share and using it to generate their own results. And even beyond that, it matters what questions I ask that get them asking new questions…For a lot of them, it’s a permission…to stop striving for more…It’s questioning growth as a constant goal.”

India adds that integrity is “a big part of credibility that sometimes we leave behind…It’s not just the money, it’s can you be proud of who you are at the end of the day?”

Income, Self-Worth, and Freedom

The question of, how does this support my business, Tara says, is absolutely legitimate in that people do need to make money. 

“But the question itself points to a larger cultural discourse and cultural value for productivity, for efficiency, for earning your keep, essentially, or earning your self-worth through the system and process of capitalism.”

She says the question is just about being able to make money, but about proving your worth to the rest of the world.

“When you realize that that’s the full question, you can subtract the money part for a minute and…essentially you can separate those things…We can look at the question of how do I make money as a question that is disconnected from self-worth.”

That could mean turning a hobby into a business, but that could also mean being open to pathways that might provide opportunities and experiences that aren’t directly tied to growing your business.

Tara says she has some LinkedIn alerts set up should the right thing come along, and India says she has noticed many entrepreneurs quietly being more open to part-time employment recently.

Tara adds that freedom, which is often sold as entrepreneurship and freelancing, could also be the freedom that exists when you have company-sponsored health benefits, unemployment insurance, disability insurance, and guaranteed income.

When our security and safety nets are tied to traditional jobs, “business ownership is not a path to freedom, just sort of unqualified. It’s a path to some sort of flexibility. Sometimes it’s a path to a certain brand of freedom. But it’s not freedom with a capital F.”

She continues, “the more we have kind of steeped in this stew of ‘new work,’ ‘the future of work,’ we’re starting to really recognize that there is no best solution here. There’s just making the most out of what our options are.”

Practical Confidence Building

Tara says that one very practical thing that gave her confidence in making writing into a career this year was taking a short class on how to pitch creative nonfiction.

She says the class helped her realize that pitching wasn’t as difficult as she thought it would be, and helped her understand the process of working with an editor to shift an angle or make other editorial choices that would lead to its acceptance. And that experience shifted her perspective on how viable a career in writing could be.

“I think that so much of what I was doing around building a business was allowing the message that I didn’t fit in the traditional work world. You know, there is no career path for me, there’s no job for me that’s going to actually utilize my skills in the way that I think they could be. Instead of accepting that framing, realizing that there was absolutely a place for me in traditional media. There is absolutely a place for me in traditional publishing…That was a big shift for me.”

Storytelling and Goals

In her upcoming book, What Works: A Comprehensive Framework to Change the Way We Approach Goal Setting, Tara touches on her personal experiences and processing around identity, emotion, and fitting into the world, and the idea that we can understand and reframe the stories that are acting on us.

“When we go to set goals, when we say what our values are, when we say what our vision is, there are so many stories at play. There are cultural stories. There are stories of morality. There are stories of response to oppression. There are so many ways that stories act on us and they all impact what we choose to pursue in terms of goals.”

She says if we aren’t to unpack those stories, identify them, be aware of them, and to work with that awareness, we will always be caught up in them. 

“We’ll constantly be framing our self-worth as external to us. We’ll constantly be seeing ways that we don’t belong in the job market or the future of work.”

The book deconstructs those stories and examines where they come from and how they show up in our lives. Then, it reconstructs a new scaffolding around what she calls, “little g goal-setting, as opposed to big G goal setting, so that we can create structure in our lives. And so that we can make plans and we can accomplish projects, but to do them from a place of real inner knowing.”

Question the Story

With deconstructing stories in mind, Tara says that for her, it’s been valuable to sit with problems, questions, or goals and ask, “what else is going on? Why does this feel like a problem? What unspoken thing is influencing me or framing things in a particular way?”

That thought action can change your external actions.

She says when, “you feel a little pulled in a particular direction, what is going on there? What’s the story? What’s the cultural influence? How is money impacting those things? And peeling back the layers to really dig into what those other stories might be and how that frames your perspective on what you think you should do next.”

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India Tizol