Let's get into it…

There is this background noise question I come back to more than almost any other when I look at the state of online marketing, the state of business education, the state of the entire cultural conversation around how women are supposed to show up and communicate.

Is society still running 1930’s software?

Because from where I am sitting, and so you know, I am sitting at the intersection of multiple angles simultaneously, always looking forward and backward and sideways at once; it really seems like 1990 is taking a grip on the current era.

The same formulas. 

The same frameworks. 

The same one hook, one point, one call to action, repeat until numb.

The box has not changed. It has just been digitized.

I learned about boxes in 7th grade. Before that, I was educated in a private school classroom of twelve students across two grades. That environment did not teach in lines. It is taught in connected webs. 

Quadrivium thinking: arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy, as interconnected disciplines that illuminate each other. Where the relationship between things is where the meaning lives.

Then I moved to the Pacific Northwest in 1989 and walked into public school and the message was immediate and unmistakable: fit this box or be shunned. 

Fit this box or be treated as irrelevant.

And what was more ironic, the public school in 7th grade had NO curriculum for me in middle school, but the option of putting a 13 year old into a cesspool of 17 year old boys, let’s just say back in the 1990s would have been clearly questionable, let alone today 35+ years later.

AND so the box back then, was too small to start with.

The conditioning though, was not subtle.

It was structural. You learn fast at 13. You learn to translate yourself into something 5 years delayed, to be contained, so the entire system can process you. Sadly, most of us have been translating ourselves ever since.

Here is what nobody in the content strategy world will tell you: the formulas were not built for the way women think.

Hook, problem, solution, call to action. One idea per post.

Linear narrative arc. Beginning, middle, end. 

And the problem with this…?!

These structures were not designed for minds that hold multiple angles simultaneously. They were not designed for thinkers who “future cast” into an unknown calculus diagram -- who are already standing three moves ahead, dropping seeds for conversations we have not had yet, planting language that will matter in a context that does not fully exist yet.

That linear arc was designed for the average. For the median. For the broadest possible comprehension across the widest possible audience.

And the difference with so many women across the globe comes down to one simple statement: You are not average. You never were.

The divergent mind, the one that sees how arithmetic connects to astronomy, how a sales conversation connects to a somatic pattern, how a pricing decision connects to a woman's relationship with her own worth…
… this mind does not create content in a straight line. 

It produces content inside a web. In layers. In spirals that come back to the same truth from a different angle each time.

That is not a liability. That is a category.

Non-linear messaging is not chaotic. It is not unfocused. It is not the thing you get told to fix in every writing workshop you have ever attended.

Non-linear messaging is layered. 

It trusts the reader to hold more than one idea at once.

It is designed to plant seeds — words, frames, questions —  that do not fully land until three issues later, or three months later, or the moment a reader is standing in her kitchen at 5:20 in the morning and something you wrote six weeks ago suddenly clicks.

That is future casting. That is what it looks like to write for where people are going rather than where they currently are.

Most content is written for the present moment of the reader. Here is your problem. Here is your solution. Here is your button. It is transactional. It converts once and disappears.

Content written from a non-linear mind does something different.

It accumulates. Each piece adds another layer to a worldview that is being built slowly, deliberately, across time. The reader does not just consume it. They grow inside it. 

And when they are ready to step across the line, they are not responding to a hook. They are responding to a transformation that already happened.

That is the difference between content and curriculum. 

And curriculum is what Utopia is building.

The autonomy question.

Here is the future cast I keep coming back to.

Every human being is capable of full autonomy. Full ownership of their thinking, their decisions, their lives, their businesses. The capacity is there. What is missing, for most people, is the permission structure. The framework that says: you do not have to keep running in these mediocre circles. You do not have to keep repeating the same patterns dressed up in new vocabulary.

The role of a non-linear communicator { of a woman who thinks in webs and builds in layers }  is not to simplify that message into something the box can hold. 

It is to drop seeds precise enough and strong enough that they grow into something the box cannot contain.

That is the work. 

Not fitting the formula.

Not flattening the thought to make it more digestible. 

Trusting that the right reader can hold the full complexity of what you are actually saying and will be changed by it.

Society is not stuck in the 1990s because people are incapable of more. It is stuck because nobody is planting seeds that reach further.

You are. WE are.

01 - Write one piece of content from your actual perspective, not the formula. No hook structure. No problem-solution arc. Just the thing you are actually thinking about right now, from the angle you are actually seeing it from, in the way your mind actually moves through it. 

Do not edit for linearity. Write it the way it arrives.

02 - Identify one seed you have been holding back. One idea, one frame, one question you have been sitting on because it felt too complex, too ahead of where your audience is, too hard to land in a single post. 

Write it down in full. You do not have to publish it today. 

But name it. It belongs in your body of work.

03 - Stop apologizing for the spiral. The next time you catch yourself saying sorry, I am going off on a tangent or let me get back to the point -- stop. 

The tangent is the point. 

The spiral is how you think. 

Let the people who can follow it follow it. 

They are your people.

Issue 05 is about the conditioning that taught you to translate yourself into a box. Take it to Willow, a somatic pattern tool built for women doing this work, and ask her to help you locate where in your body that conditioning still lives. Because the non-linear thinker does not just need permission to think differently.

Next week in Utopia: Visible does not mean everywhere. The strategy behind showing up in fewer places and being impossible to ignore.

I have spent most of my life being told, in one way or another, that the way my mind works is too much. Too many angles. Too far ahead. Too unwilling to stay inside the lines. I stopped hearing that as criticism a long time ago.

The women who change things are never the ones who stay inside the lines.

They are the ones who were too inconvenient, too clear-eyed, too committed to the seeds they were planting to be distracted by a box that was never built for them in the first place. 

Keep planting.

See ya soon~ Lisa Anne

Founder, Alpha Warrior Women
Creative of Utopia