The Mirror, Not the Microphone

Tuesday, I sat at a table for 2 hours. Eight students came through, one after another, fifteen minutes each, no breaks between them. It's hard to remember names, sometimes it's difficult for me to remember each project... All the while, they're each launching businesses — or trying to — and pitching to a room full of bankers, private investors, manufacturers, marketing people, faculty and other coaches. A lot of expertise packed into a short window. A lot of pressure packed into fifteen minutes, for them, and for the rest of us!

Meeting students during Sunday evenings meet and greet. Photo courtesy: Helen Alexander.

I could have used that time to tell them what I know about marketing. I know a fair amount. But I didn't.

What I've learned in the 23+ years I've been in this field, is that marketing changes too fast for that to be the most useful thing I can offer.

The internet, then Google shifted it. COVID shifted it. Now, AI is again, shifting it.

The data never quite catches up to what's actually happening in the field — by the time a trend is documented, it's already old. So if you're trying to get ahead of marketing instead of chasing it, the data isn't where you start. You start with knowing yourself, knowing the people around you and knowing your audience. And the fastest way I've found to get someone there is to mirror them — reflect back what they're saying and what I'm hearing underneath it.

This isn't a new idea to me.

Someone did this for me over the past year in my personal life and it's some of the best coaching I've ever received. I've felt what it does from the inside — how it clarified my sense of purpose, how it opened up new questions about where I'm headed instead of closing them down. What I want my everyday, boring and not-so-boring life, to feel like, minute by minute, hour by hour and day by day.

So when I sat down with these students, I wanted to give them the same thing - a mirror and an echo chamber - not another voice telling them what to do.

I still open by asking what they want out of our fifteen minutes. But the real work is in what comes after.

I listen for whether their words match their body language. Whether their voice is steady or hedging. Whether they're clear, or whether they're circling something they haven't quite named yet. And then I say it back to them — not advice, just what I heard and saw.

Sometimes that lands as a correction. "No — that's not what I meant at all," a student will say, and then explain further, and in explaining it they get clearer, and so do I.

That's useful too. I don't think that's a failure on their part, nor mine.

It's the process working.

But sometimes — and this is the part that gets me every time — a student hears their own vision reflected back exactly as they meant it, and something shifts in their face.

"Oh my God. Yeah. That's exactly it. You got it." 

The smile that beams over their face says it all.

That's all some of them needed. Not new information. Just confirmation that they're on the right path, that they're solving a real problem for someone and — this is the part that catches people off guard — that they're solving their own problem too.

Every business I've ever seen launched is somebody trying to hand someone else's suffering back to them a little bit lighter, in the hopes that the person can spend their time on what actually matters to them.

When a student sees that in their own idea, sees that their business isn't just a product but a problem they've decided to carry for somebody else, it changes how they hold the whole pitch.

I get emotional watching that happen. I've learned to hold back my tears at the table, but I know they reflect my feelings back to me too in those moments. It's humanity and our collective wanting to make our short stay here on this planet just a little bit lighter for someone else. I feel that glow when they leave the table, it's inside of me too and it's one of many reasons, I will say yes to volunteering for this anytime I'm asked. It gives me something that carries me forward in hope and aspiration too.

I'm not going to pretend otherwise. Watching someone realize they're allowed to trust themselves — that they can gather knowledge from every expert in that room, but the decision, the signature, the name on the contract, is theirs — is one of the better parts of doing this work.

Two students from Tuesday's sessions are still sitting with me.

One is building a business around upcycled fashion — taking old, discarded clothing and turning it into one-of-a-kind pieces, made for the specific person who's going to wear them. You tell her the style, she builds it around you, sews it by hand from materials that already existed in the world. A college friend wanting something authentic for game day. A staff of teachers wanting individual pieces that ties them together as a team. A hospital wing putting some real care into an item for a hospice patient's family, something that says more than words can. She's the one who can make that. And she's doing it with "Hart," which is the part that doesn't show up on a spec sheet but is the actual product.

My job in that fifteen minutes wasn't to teach her anything about upcycled fashion. It was to reflect back to her that HER heart is the pitch — that "unique-to-you" isn't just her process, it's her whole value proposition and she should say it louder.

When she heard that reflected back, something surfaced for her, and it went straight into her slides during our session... a photo of her grandmother. While the world around her was handing kids memes and screens, her grandmother handed her a needle and thread and taught her to sew. She didn't just learn a craft. She built a memory that comes back to her every time she makes a piece for a client now — which means every piece she sells is carrying two stories forward, not one.

Follow Grace and her fledgling business on Facebook here.

The other, Kaden a student at Iowa, worked part-time at Lowe's while he was putting himself through school. He calls it a low rung, a job he wasn't sure he even wanted. But every day, coming in or leaving, he saw what everyone of us visiting a big-box store sees and mostly stops noticing... plastic strewn everywhere, wrap and packaging that it seems nobody's system is built to catch. One day he photographed a single piece of it, strung from one tree to another, and it stuck with him. He couldn't let it go. Recyclers won't take that kind of material, so he built out — in his own head, on his own time — an entire process for a reusable wrap that could move through closed distribution systems, manufacturer to manufacturer, medical facility to medical facility.

Then he told me he was afraid to say anything to anyone at work. Afraid to be the one who causes a stir, who doesn't just get along and climb the ladder quietly like everyone else.

Want Kaden on your team? Connect with him on his website here.

I know that fear. I've lived on both sides of it. And that's exactly where I wanted to reflect something back to him - that what he's describing isn't a complaint, it's a skill. Seeing a broken system and methodically taking it apart to find the fix — that's rare. It might not feel good to be the one who speaks up in the room. But he's the same person in five or ten years that people will come to specifically because he won't lie to them about what's wrong, and best yet, he'll already have a way to fix it.

That's why I do this. Why I want to sit with students and let them hear their own voice echo back to them.

Being different isn't a liability.

It's the thing that lets you solve a problem nobody else was positioned to see.

It must have felt strange for Benjamin Franklin to stand under a metal roof flying a kite with a key tied to a string, waiting for lightning, while his neighbors watched and wondered what exactly he thought he was doing. Now that electricity runs our homes, powers data centers and sends rockets toward the hope of another place to live if we can't collectively take care of this one.

These students are the next round of that same instinct — explorers, builders, people who notice a problem and can't put it down until they've solved it.

So instead of telling them it can't be done, I want to get better at saying, "I don't know how that works yet, but your idea makes sense and here's where I think it could get stronger."

That's the world I want to help build. One student, one reflection, at a time.

Less "here's what you should do," more "here's what I'm hearing you already know."

A mirror does something a microphone can't. It doesn't add volume. It gives someone back their own reflection clearly enough to trust what they see. Tomorrow I want to write about my last day coaching — about what it takes to set yourself apart, even when it's scary, even when someone else in the room is telling you not to.