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Sozo Studio True-to-you branding packed with personality and purpose to help you be yourself and in demand

10/14/2026

Five years ago I chose to walk away from a whole group of people I loved, and yesterday I found out one of them had died, and I cried like I still had a right to.

For most of my life I treated grief as something you earn by having a loss happen to you, like a death, a betrayal or a door someone else closes. When you’re the one who walks away, the unspoken rule is that you give up the right to miss what you left because everyone assumes you got what you wanted.

I’ve lived under that rule more than once. I left the religion I grew up in at seventeen and lost people I loved in the process. Almost five years ago I chose my daughters’ safety and my own over my marriage and the family that came with it. Every one of those choices was right and every one of them cost me something real.

So much of my work is helping people see who they are underneath what they were conditioned to be, and grief is one of the places where that conditioning shows up loudest.

There’s a name for it, disenfranchised grief, which is grief that goes unacknowledged because nobody thinks you’re entitled to it, and choosing the loss yourself is one of the fastest ways into it.

The way we rank whose grief counts tells us far more about our own comfort with it than about the person living it.

You can stand by a decision and still miss what it took. You can protect yourself and still mourn the life that would have existed if protecting yourself had never been necessary. I made the right call and I’m grieving what it cost and I’ve stopped asking anyone whether I’m allowed. The people. The years. The life that never got to happen. It’s all allowed.

I talk through all of it on the newest episode of I Have Something to Say, and the link is in my bio.

I taught myself to ride a bike at five and still didn’t know how babies were made at twelve, which tells you most of wha...
10/07/2026

I taught myself to ride a bike at five and still didn’t know how babies were made at twelve, which tells you most of what you need to know about being raised in the space between youngest daughter and only child. I didn’t fit the tropes of either one, so I’m giving it a name of its own.

My siblings were grown and gone, my parents had already done the hands-on parenting years, and what I got instead was a front-row seat to adult life.

I learned to read a room before I could read my own reactions. I learned that being low maintenance earned approval and that asking for help cost something. I turned to Ask Jeeves for answers about puberty because there was nobody else I was going to ask.

For a long time I treated all of that as damage to work through, and some of it was. I’ve had to unlearn the people pleasing, the need to be needed, and the habit of setting a bar so high I could use it as my reason to never start.

What I didn’t expect was how much of it would become the instinct I run my studio on.

The kid who tracked every adult’s mood grew up into the strategist who notices the story you rushed past, hears the hedge in your homepage copy, and doesn’t take your self-description at face value, because she spent twenty years getting her own wrong.

Most founders I work with have already done the values worksheet and the brand words exercise, and they still feel like a stranger to their own website. The answers they gave were sincere. They were also rehearsed and a brand built on a rehearsed answer will always feel like a costume you have to keep putting on.

The thread was there the whole time, running through the kid on the bike and the woman who needs three days alone after a party. It’s running through yours too. Under the worksheet. Under the rehearsed answers. Under the version of you that’s easiest to explain. Waiting.

Comment THREAD and I’ll send you the details.

Someone told me recently that forty-five minutes couldn’t possibly be enough time to figure out a brand, and I understan...
10/06/2026

Someone told me recently that forty-five minutes couldn’t possibly be enough time to figure out a brand, and I understand where that belief comes from, because most of us were taught that clarity is something you earn slowly, through workbooks and questionnaires and months of sitting with the question until it finally gives up its answer.

If you’re the kind of founder who has lived several lives inside one, that slow process tends to bury you deeper. You come with a coaching practice, a clinical background, the instincts you built as the one everyone leaned on growing up, and a handful of interests that light you up but never seem to fit on the same page, and every new exercise hands you one more layer to sort through without ever showing you what holds the layers together.

The client in this post had been carrying her occupational therapy years, her coaching work, and a lifetime of being the eldest daughter as three separate stories she’d learned to explain one at a time. Thirty minutes into our call she heard the thread running through all of them, said it out loud in her own words, and the room went quiet in the way it does when something true lands. From there, her visuals, her voice, and her website finally had one clear idea to build around.

Forty-five minutes is enough when the person across from you knows how to hear the pattern underneath everything you’ve done. The depth was already there in every chapter, waiting for someone to recognize it and hand it back to you whole. One conversation. One sentence. Every role accounted for. Known. And paid.

Comment KNOWN and I’ll send you everything you need to book your Known for This session.

Before a strategy session, I send a short set of questions so our time together can go deeper. This client’s answers had...
09/24/2026

Before a strategy session, I send a short set of questions so our time together can go deeper. This client’s answers had me circling one thing before we’d even spoken: the name on her offer was working against her every time a buyer read it.

A buyer decides what something is worth partly by deciding what it is, and the name is usually the first clue she gets. “Vision board” asks her to file a six-hour program alongside every quick workshop and free template she’s come across. That means the work has to argue its way out of the comparison before anyone sees what it involves.

“Becoming Board” opens the conversation with the woman and the change she’s after, which is where this work earns its price.

She’d already done the hardest part by naming it herself. The next step is putting that name everywhere the old one used to be, on her sales page, in her bio, and in the way she introduces the offer on calls. Then buyers arrive already knowing what they’re signing up for.

Comment KNOWN if you suspect your best language is still sitting in your notes.

She spent forty-five minutes on a Known For This call telling me the thing she’d built her entire business to avoid. Not...
09/14/2026

She spent forty-five minutes on a Known For This call telling me the thing she’d built her entire business to avoid. Not a niche. Not a client type. Herself, mid-sentence, in front of strangers.

She started the business partly to hide from the stutter. Build something online, control the narrative, skip the rooms full of new people and the exact moment someone’s face changes while she’s talking. Then a podcast happened. Then other people’s shows started booking her. The thing she built to disappear behind became the most visible version of herself she’d ever had to be.

I didn’t find what actually makes her unforgettable by asking what makes her different. I asked what still happens to her today, grown, successful, running a real business, and she told me adults still laugh in her face. Still interrupt her mid-word. Still finish her sentences like she asked them to. And she keeps talking anyway. Every single time.

That’s the throughline. Traced it back through the kid who wished on every birthday it would disappear, through the woman in her twenties who finally stopped waiting and decided to just live inside it, through the business owner who hasn’t missed a beat online since 2019, through every hard season, because showing up became the one thing she could control when her own voice wasn’t always cooperating.

She was terrified the first time she said any of this publicly. Thought people would think she was strange. Thought clients would walk. What happened instead was resonance. Women hired her because of it, because watching someone keep speaking through the exact thing she was told would disqualify her is its own kind of proof.

The word you’re tempted to cut from the take is usually the word your dream client needed to hear you push through.

Comment KNOWN, and I’ll tell you if I sense you’re editing out your best self in your content.

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