What is a message, really?

There are so many people saying, “I’m looking for my message. I haven’t found my message yet. I don’t really know what my message is.”

Your message is the reason why you do what you do.

Why did you get out of bed in the morning? Why do you want to go into business? Why do you care about what you care about?

When you find that message — even though it may be tricky to find — it’s so worth it because it’s the thing that motivates you every single day. That fuels you and drives you to do things that you never imagined were possible.

Because people who have messages, they’ve got a reason why they’re alive. They’ve got a reason why they’re living everyday. They’ve got a reason why they’re doing the things that they’re doing.

So my message is that: I help people become the superhero to their tribe so they can change the world from their living room.

And why does that even matter? It matters because each of us has so much potential and so much power inside of ourselves that just needs to be unlocked and when we tap into that power, when we find our message, then we become a change agent. Instead of looking to others to make the change, we look to ourselves to be that person, to be that hero we thought we were waiting for.

And a big part of what I help people do is to find the words to express what they care about, to express what’s meaningful to them, to express why they do what they do.

The reason why this is so important to me is because, for the vast majority of my life, I struggled to express what was meaningful to me. I struggled to express what I cared about.

It got so bad that in high school, I tried to learn every single word in the dictionary because I thought that if I just knew the exact, precise, right word to say, then all of a sudden it would open a space where people could understand what I was trying to say.

But it didn’t work like that. The more words that I learned, the more I actually missed the mark in terms of my communication. So, instead of really communicating, I spoke over someone’s head. I used these giant words and nobody understood me. So all the attempts that I made to connect at a greater and greater level just created more separation.

I realized that having a message and communicating what you do isn’t about finding all the right words, it’s about making that connection between you and whomever you’re talking to.

Your message is like a bridge that allows them to walk from where they are to where you are. And when you create that bridge between what you care about and who someone is, then so much transformation becomes possible.

I remember the moment when this pain of not being able to communicate really hit me like a brick. I was in Wisconsin spending the summer with my grandparents and they lived on a lake in the middle of a golf course, and I used to love reading these big, thick, Russian novels of psychological realism like Dostoevsky, War and Peace, and Anna Karenina.

That summer, I decided to make my way through everything that Dostoevsky wrote. Every day I would wake up, canoe out to the middle of this lake, and sit on an island where I had a hammock strung up. I’d read those books until may grandma called me in for lunch.

One day, my grandma called me in and she had made sandwiches and sun tea, and I started to share what I was thinking about, what I was reading. At the end of it, my grandma just kind of looked at me and said, “Marisa, I didn’t understand a word that came of out of your mouth.” A

I was like, “Wow, not even my own family understands me. Wow.”  

And that feeling of not being able to communicate and not being able to share really felt so much more painful than ever before because, if my family doesn’t understand me, who else is going to understand me?

But what I didn’t realize then is that it would take me another 20 years to really develop my gift with language, my gift with words. To realize that it wasn’t about being able to communicate as precisely as possible and find that exact right words to say what I was trying to communicate, but to really make that connection between people.

And I got to say that now that I understand what my true gift is, now that I understand my message. It’s like every single painful experience, every heartbreak, every challenge that I’ve ever had — there’s a reason for it. I was put on this earth for a reason…

And I believe there’s a reason why you’ve experienced everything that you’ve experienced — good and bad.

And the moment when you really find your message and you tune in to why you’re here, it’s like a movie when all of a sudden the clouds part and it’s like “woah!”. You’ve realized why you’re here and your entire life starts to make sense. Your challenges make sense. Your pain makes sense. And your heartbreaks make sense.

All the gifts that you’ve had and you just didn’t know what to do with, those things that you thought, “Can’t everybody do this?”

No, they can’t. Everybody can’t do what you can do. Everybody hasn’t had the experiences that you’ve had. Everybody hasn’t been able to walk in your shoes.

All of that is an incredible gift and when you find your message, you find a reason for that gift. It gives you so much more power, so much energy to wake up every single morning and do the work that you’re here to do in the world.

And it’s worth the search to find your message.

You have a message.

Every single person has a message.

It’s all about slowing down for long enough to listen in and ultimately find it. And when you do, oh my gosh, life will never be the same.

So here’s to you finding and living your message!