Hello {{ name | there }},
A few weeks ago I quietly opened up Map Where You Are, a free self-assessment I built as part of the Modern Compass framework that provides an AI-powered report. Ten people have taken it so far, (11 if you count me) and several offered feedback.
I want to share what they said at a high level, the good and the constructive, because together it tells a story worth paying attention to.
The positive feedback was genuinely encouraging. Some said it connected dots they had not connected before. They said the way their four directions ranked felt accurate, and it was deep. The one that really surprised me the most: not one person out of ten disagreed with how they ranked across the 4 directions. I was prepared for that pushback. I expected at least one person to say their results felt way off and it never came. I’m sure it will though.
The constructive feedback was just as consistent. People felt the assessment was more of a mirror than a roadmap. They wanted more to do with what they found. More suggestions across all four directions, not just the lowest ranked one. This one I implemented immediately. More meat on the bone of what comes next was desired.
That feedback told me a couple important things.
People find this framework approachable and accurate enough to trust. That matters more than I can say at this stage of building something new.
People want more, which is actually the entire point of what comes next. The book goes deeper on every direction. Future iterations of the app will become an ongoing companion of sorts. The assessment is the beginning, not the destination.
The mere fact people were willing to spend 10 minutes of their time on this assessment vs 10 minutes talking through it with an AI chatbot told me a lot
The problem with chatbots, while incredibly diverse in their knowledge (after all they are trained on everything across the internet), they will give you tactics for the symptom you gave it and steers the conversation based on what you say. This assessment gets deeper because the framework was designed around the roots, not the fruit we bear on the surface.
A high level aggregated pattern in results in early users is that their goal was rarely the mystery. Most people had a clear enough sense of what they wanted next in their life. What kept showing up underneath was something quieter and harder to name. A hesitation in some to fully trust themselves to move or do something toward what they already knew they wanted. This resonates with me too, as you’ll see me sharing my experience below.
Self trust is a topic that was on my mind a lot writing Modern Compass and it’s not a layer in any of the four directions. The reason for that decision, was it’s hard to measure and it’s more like an output. The state of your self trust is a reflection of the whole compass or whole being, not any single one like just Self or just Trust. When you understand where you are across all four directions, self-trust begins to surface on its own. When self-trust grows, so does clarity, and clarity is how we navigate our lives, our decisions, and the people we're responsible for.
Now that I’ve shown you a little of what others have said, and a high level pattern, I’ll share my take. Of course I was day 1 consumer wanting to test this out once built, and on the very first iteration, I got something valuable. These exact words came up in my report:
The two things you've named—public speaking and building authority—
aren't separate from trust; they're tangled with it. What might be worth
exploring is whether some of what feels like a "lack of domain authority" is
actually a hesitation to trust your own hard-won knowledge enough to step
into visibility.
I was already locked in on the idea of bringing this assessment to fruition, but that v1 report hit deep right and cool to see through this lens of the framework I built. Funny enough on timing, I had just had a brief email back & forth with Jason Fiefer, the editor and Chief of Entrepreneur who also runs his own newsletter and I reached out on the off chance he’d respond and he did. I asked in a nutshell, how do I post on LinkedIn about what I’m working on without risking my existing job. His “how” back to me was tie what you’re doing to your industry somehow or something people in your industry might value, so he gave me the how. My assessment gave me the why now. So I leapt into action, and started posting once a week, usually Wednesday on LinkedIn and I repost to Threads, Insta, and Facebook. This is how it turned out so far in terms of visibility.
Interactive Activity
My assessment told me I was hesitating to build authority because I didn't have enough self-trust to step into visibility yet. I knew what I wanted, I just wasn't moving toward it.
The assessment didn't fix that, but it named it, and naming it was enough to get me moving.
What are you sitting on right now, waiting for the right moment to start? If you haven't tried the assessment yet, that's a good place to begin. Feel free to share this newsletter or link to app with a friend or family member.
Modern Compass Book Updates
I’ve decomposed what I need to do with all the editing feedback I got from editor and marked up manuscript with their feedback as well. I ended up buying this whiteboard just to visually see it all at once. I’m very behind where I should be this month, but I took half day off today (Friday) to get cranking on this.
I have till end of June to finish editing before I have to keep moving on to meet an early 27 launch
I’ll tell you something that was an utter disaster this month. I had $60 left in my Meta Ad account, so I ran it and pointed it at my assessment. Despite optimizing my assessment landing page and seeing 330 people clicked the ad to go to my assessment, maybe 1 person completed it. The rest didn’t even submit their email to get the sign in link. Lesson learned in how hard it is to convert cold audience to spend 10 minutes and giving their email despite they clicked to see more on the ad that explained all this. Somehow, I always come away disliking Meta a little bit more.
One question before you go: If you've taken the assessment, what shifted for you when you saw your results? Even if nothing did, I want to know that too. Hit reply to this email and or drop the feedback in the app and tell me.
Always…Follow Your Compass!
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