You’ve probably heard the trope, “You are the sum of your five closest relationships.”

It hasn’t been true for probably 100 years.

Each of us does have an echo chamber. Once upon a time in a village long ago, the echo chamber was all made up of people.

Now, it’s made up of the media we take in and the 1-2 people who have the most influence over our thinking and actions.

Newsletters, Social feeds, TV shows, podcasts, audiobooks, religious texts, conversations… much of our thinking is a bath of our most consistent inputs.

This sphere of inputs sets the ceiling and floor on how we show up. When we want to show up differently, the place to start is in our ordinary, everyday echo chamber.

It’s something we know like we know to change the A/C filter once a quarter.

How much attention does ‘echo chamber hygiene’ really get?

My stylist is just like me – except she’s doing 75 Hard.

I just went for a haircut with my Austin stylist, Mo. She’s my age, loooves to hear all the tea and chat with me for the entire appointment, and she’s just cool.

She told me today that she’s doing 75 Hard.

Whoa. Girl. How? Why?

75 Hard is a program where you do five things daily for 75 days straight:

1. Follow a structured diet of your choosing.
2. Work out for 45 minutes twice a day.
3. Drink a gallon of water.
4. Read 10 pages of a physical book on a self-help topic.
5. Take a progress picture daily.

I had thought 75 Hard was for young guys who wanted to replace their wandering self-worth with extreme discipline and self-flagellation. Why make your life harder in 5 more ways at once for 75 days?

But I didn’t say any of this to Mo. I know that sometimes hard transformation works wonders, especially if you have other people to support you.

So I asked her about her inspiration.

She said she just wasn’t inspired until she found a group online with people like her, who modified the 5 steps to include things that felt good alongside the difficult parts. It wasn’t about going as hard as she could, it was about feeling good and getting specific physical results.

She said her aha moment came when she found people to remind her what the outcome would look like. Videos online, mostly. Where her environment wasn’t pulling for a new habit before, she found a way to add in the input she needed.

Otherwise, the possibility of a great figure and serious hydration would have had a very short shelf life.

New possibilities have a short shelf life.

This is why the echo chamber matters.

We know that if we want to learn something, we start listening to podcasts or reading books or otherwise giving it more attention. ‘Brainwashing’ is happening all the time, with whatever you wash your brain in.

This includes close relationships- if they expect us to be one way and we’d like to start being another way, we have to train our echo chamber.

• When we decide it’s time to stop being hard on ourselves, we say so to the people closest to us. Ask them to affirm us and call out when we’re falling back on old habits.
• When we decide we’re an artist now, or an author, or a 75-Hard-er, we ask the people closest to us to send those opportunities and people our way.

It sounds obvious and simple, but the idea is still a skeleton key of life in communication:

We can train our immediate environment to pull for us to grow or change in any direction, rather than pulling us back to the status quo.

No one operates in a vacuum. Ink on a magazine page, doodled in 2017.

Covid was the ultimate echo chamber gauntlet.

We all remember who we spent it with, and who we became after so much time with them.

During Covid, I had moved back to Alabama and went through some health challenges that scared me. I was tired, my focus was erratic, and I was afraid that if I took on any more creative projects, I’d make it all worse.

I decided to accept that I may never build the events, community, art, and platform I hoped for, and that didn’t mean anything about me as a person. If my output was capped to a quiet, restful lifestyle, I thought, I’m going to learn to be happy with that and decouple my productivity from my worth for good.

My partner at the time reflected this back to me every day. He and my brother were a ceaseless echo for my own confidence, ease, and patience.

It was a very important time. I was so supported, and I let myself really rest and enjoy for the first time. I’ll treasure that time forever.

I highly recommend letting go of all future ambitions to deeply accept your ordinary everyday self. It’s transformational.

Covid was a great time to do it.

And yet, my friend Zach wasn’t having it.

We met up for the first time since we’d known each other in college. We’d worked together when I was starting my business, and he saw how unstoppable I was at the time (and unreasonable, and idealistic). He tracked right along with me: I never saw a pickle that Zach couldn’t turn into a six figure deal somehow.

We sat down for a drink and a catchup, and he was vague for about an hour.

Then, finally, he was like,

“Nope.
This isn’t you.
What happened.
Your vision is gone.
Try again.
Fix it.”

He grilled me until I saw what he saw: Katy has ideas, talks about them, and then they happen.

As much as accepting myself for being instead of doing was essential, he was a voice in my echo chamber that reminded me that I love creating things and gathering people together. The part that builds unreasonably brings me immense joy.

After that, I started hosting parties.

Then I hosted a retreat.

Then I hosted masterminds, art gatherings, and finally, my first sponsored art show.

All because the echo chamber pulled me forward.

Remember the last time you had a thought like an open window to paradise?

Those moments when you feel vividly alive, with a confidence breakthrough or a ‘new lease on life’?

Those moments tend to pass quickly, and though try as we might to re-presence them again, the effort feels like searching for a hidden latch on a pleated velvet ring box. In the dark. With velvet gloves on.

When we communicate those visions to the people around us and nurture them with our media inputs, their shelf life lasts a little longer.

Once the possibility is a living topic in our circles, our echo chamber will bring next steps, connections, and opportunities right in front of us.

Then, they’re on our team about being a motorcyclist, a highly dateable bachelorette, or a recovered people-pleaser.

The more we express fully within the echo chamber, the more it magnetizes raw materials to our doorstep.