Hello {{ name | there }},

It feels important to me based on recent events that I share a little more about why I started writing this book. I was 30, very little dating experience and wondered why I didn’t have the family I always thought about having. Sitting there weekend after weekend, while happy with the family connections, travel and friendships I had made, still felt empty. I recall years of hit or miss advice, pressure, YouTube videos of how to be successful, but I was stuck and going nowhere fast.

Now I’ve long been a self-improvement/personal growth book reader, but nothing quite spoke to me to help me with this. I somehow finally stumbled into the realization that, there may be more of an issue than just the clearest symptom I was trying to solve “dating”. The issue wasn’t really dating at all, it was a combination of reenvisioning how I see self worth, self confidence, my outlook on relationships (stop the blame game), and more importantly, awareness of my drag. Drag is a concept I touch on in many chapters from the book of identifying drag that keeps you stuck at different layers. For me, this was anxiety here. I had accumulated mental scars of failures here that added up over the years and the negative self talk was so loud, I couldn’t pep talk myself out of it. I had tried things on Amazon for anxiety, but they never worked and I wanted to keep it legal. In this moment of clarity, I turned to a GP, explained my issue, and she readily gave me low dose anxiety medication.

What felt like over night, the noise about what I told myself stopped. I was still me, but I took risks and chances, that I would have otherwise been stuck in analysis paralysis. I never needed higher medication and I stopped after 6 months since I was dating and didn’t feel the need for them. To be clear, I’m not advocating you or anyone needs anxiety medication. What I am advocating for and the purpose of writing this book is, I wish some structured way of thinking about this existed that could have helped me sooner and hopefully many others. Having said that, I am also very aware of this almost cosmic coincidence, that a girl just so happen to become single, and a friend just so happen to think of me, and set us up on a blind date very shortly after I started medication. We're now married with 2 kids, but prior to me making some of these realizations, I don’t think the outcome would have been the same, or at least different, but we will never know. 2 things I cannot overstate, stepping back to get clarity about yourself and being intentional.

So that’s why I built this framework and wrote this book so that others, even myself might try this to see if it brings clarity quicker than stumbling through did for me. This is where the subtitle was also born; Map who you are, before deciding who you will become. I think this actually happens at several points of our lives, the above was just one of 3 examples in the last 10 years I took that step back for the bigger picture

My question to you is what needs a pause, a step back, and look at the bigger picture of you, and for you?

The in-person workshop I mentioned last issue I was building during this 2 week writing break I had didn't get traction despite some marketing dollars behind it, so I pulled the plug and pivoted. Instead, I spent that time building the digital assessment I envisioned to be used in the workshop, and I’m excited to share that with you now!

When I took my own assessment, the report named something I'd been feeling for a while but hadn't connected the dots on myself. I hope it finds something valuable for you

"Map Where You Are" is a short digital self-assessment that maps where you stand across the four Modern Compass directions: Self, Trust, Character, and Relationships. Takes about ten minutes, only email is required, no name. You'll walk away with an AI-personalized report that reflects a read on where you are right now. The more honest you are answering the questions and in the open text, the more valuable the report will be to you. You may have noticed I used “map where you are” here not who you are. The reason for that is, in a 10 min assessment or even a 2 hour workshop, it’d be hard for me to claim you can map who you are. Thats a much longer game, but a general sense of where aligned to this framework, that should be possible.

For the next couple weeks, newsletter subscribers get the full AI-enabled premium report at no cost. Sometime next month, the premium AI-enabled version will have a cost (since AI has a cost), but it’ll still be heavily discounted for subscribers. So don’t miss out trying it free now, download your report, share your thoughts in the apps embedded feedback form and have others try it out with you if you’d like. It will only get better with feedback! The data is secure and no name is ever captured.

[Take the assessment and Map where you are] map.themoderncompass.io

Hot off the press for this issue, the editor I hired for the manuscript assessment provided their report back, lot of work to do, but very encouraging!

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