The bravest thing I'm doing lately: not trying to talk to everyone at once.

When Aaron Strout walked away from a 14-year run as chief marketing officer at Real Chemistry in early 2025, he said the first six months on the other side were disorienting.

Not depressed. Not regretful. Disoriented.

He told me when I interviewed him for a profile that every day could theoretically be a weekend, and that turned out to be its own kind of problem.

I’ve been thinking about that since the call. Not exactly because I left a job (the chaotic CMO and founder said I wasn't a good culture fit, even though they promoted me for being a great culture fit three weeks earlier). It was because I made a quieter version of the same decision in April, when I narrowed my practice to brand positioning and executive ghostwriting for B2B founders and financial services executives.

I stopped leading with the work I used to lead with. Career transitions. Personal branding for senior leaders between jobs. The lighter consulting projects I’d taken for years to keep the calendar full. I still take referrals for that work. But I deprioritized it on my homepage and About page. It's become 10% of the conversations I have on LinkedIn, down from 80%.

The first few months were disorienting in the same way Aaron described. The work didn’t stop. The work I’d been doing for a decade just stopped being the work I was visible for. And the silence between I cut the language and the right kind of client started recognizing me was longer than I expected.

It’s quieter now. The clients who show up cold show up because of what I led with, not in spite of it. The people who referred work for years are still referring work. The inbox stayed wide. What is changing is who walks in cold and what they think I do when they get here.

So in the interests of helping you, here’s what I want to ask since I’ve been sitting with this question for six months myself:

What’s the work you wish you were getting more of, and what are you getting instead?

The gap between those two answers is usually where the positioning work hides.

Just hit Reply. I read every one.

P.S. I wrote a full profile of Aaron for RestlessUrban and a book review of his new book, Wired for Purpose. Both are here and here. And I went deeper on a different piece of the interview — what Aaron heard when he listened back to 20 years of his own podcasts — on the Friction Free blog here.

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