The Medicine of Riffing
When we were running the Vision Society as a membership-based model, we talked about the medicine of riffing at least once a week.
Riffing is opening a document—or an IG post, an IG story, an email—and letting stream of consciousness move through you. Writing or speaking what’s alive, unfiltered, on any given topic. If I’m honest, this is the only way content gets made in my world (I’m riffing right now 👐). I open a doc, a Canva file, an IG story, my Flodesk, my Notion, my Google Drive—and I riff.
One morning on a coaching call, we brought up Simone Seoul’s Garbage Post Challenge (which I love, by the way) and talked about how essential riffing is for entrepreneurs and founders and how it’s the one step most people want to skip.
We want to bypass voice development because it doesn’t offer an immediate fiscal ROI. We want to jump straight to virality, ad funnels, and high-converting content, when we haven’t even built a foundation of organic, native, and clear voice expression. We haven’t tested whether people are actually interested in the things we’re here to say or sell. We haven’t grounded into Proof of Concept or the Relational Environment that makes selling sustainable.
We chase virality while cursing the platforms we’re trying to grow on. We want instant results but don’t want to play with the constraints and capabilities of the tools in front of us. And when it doesn’t all click right away, we turn inward and spiral as if Brand Voice is something we were supposed to crawl out of the womb already knowing.
Creating content can feel raw, awkward, even a little dull at first, especially when you’re new to showing up with clarity and intention around your work. And honestly, it’s easy to lose your voice in the sea of sameness. To water yourself down. To mistake the collective ramble for your own truth. And when that happens, we start to mistrust our wildness, our weirdness, our divergence, and our medicine.
Riffing helps you come back to yourself. It gets you comfortable with your ideas being seen, even by people who won’t understand them. It softens the jaw. It unclenches the gut. It invites your voice back into the room. Not someone else’s.
Riffing is powerful medicine.
If you are a Dreamer, riffing—getting your ideas down out loud, exploring your voice, building the muscle of articulation—is the work.
And for the Risktakers, Magicians, and Weavers—I’ve seen time and again how stuckness takes root when this practice is skipped. Your voice may get tangled in other people’s opinions, cultural expectations, the fear of exile or misunderstanding. You may forget: your voice is the umbilical cord feeding the baby that is your vision, your business, your body of work.
Riffing is the first step in developing content and marketing that actually connects with people and moves strangers toward community, curiosity, and commitment.
When you riff and share your strong point of view—yes, even the riskier or more polarizing points of your view—your presence becomes more alive. More magnetic. More you. And the people who are meant to find you? They will. They’re not looking for a polished brand chatgpt bot. They’re looking for the fire, the softness, the vision, the clarity that only you can carry.
They want to work with someone who stands for something. Who leads with intimacy. Who has your background and your rebellion. Who brings lived truth to the table, whether that looks like academic rigor or “fck college” altogether.
What riffing really does is show you where your shame is still hiding Where your fear of losing belonging still lingers. And that’s what makes it holy.
Riffing shapes you into someone who can withstand the wild mess of offering something no one else but your right-fit client can see yet. It builds courage. It calls you into your essence. It makes you braver and more resilient.
Plus, there’s so much medicine in getting to know your voice before it gets tethered to a brand, a business, or a polished offering.
Because often the reason we don’t know what to say, how to show up, or how to sell—is this. It’s the voicework we skipped.
