Invited onto the advisory board of a leading hereditary-cancer organization

"I went from passive accounts I kept mostly to keep tabs on my teenage daughter to active ones with a real system, a transformed LinkedIn, and an invitation onto the advisory board of a leading hereditary-cancer organization." Lauren Berkowitz, Finding My Voice for a Hard, Important Topic Before this program, my social media was passive, accounts I kept mostly to keep an eye on my teenage daughter in New York City. The thing I actually wanted to say in public was the thing I found hardest to say. I write for people who have pathogenic gene mutations. I am one of them. I tested positive for a BRCA1 variant, so this is not a subject I observe from a safe distance. And it is not rare: 1 in 8 of us are walking around with a serious genetic risk we do not know about. It is a challenging situation and a hard topic to discuss, and for a long time I circled it instead of speaking it. I enrolled because I had decades of expertise and almost none of the craft to carry a heavy message to inspire the people who need it most. What I was hoping to learn was how to reach someone who just got news like mine and change what they do with it. Early knowledge is a gift and having choices is a gift, and I wanted the craft to make people believe that before a diagnosis, not after. The Hook Point sessions with Brendan Kane and Andrew Tarkington taught me that a hook can be built on purpose. Getting someone to stop scrolling is a skill with repeatable frameworks, not a gift you either have or you don't, and for the first time I got comfortable in front of a camera. Prince EA, Sarah Snow, and Chris Do pushed me to find the soul in an idea before reaching for a format. Domenic Ashburn gave me an actual system for producing content at a steady clip instead of one post at a time. Sabrina Stocker's LinkedIn work transformed how I use my biggest platform. LinkedIn is where my largest audience already is, and for the first time I have a real method for showing up there instead of guessing. The program gave me more than a content system. It gave me a framework for how I want to operate, in my work and in my life. I stopped waiting to feel ready and started publishing. My accounts are active now and growing slowly. A few months into the program, I was invited to join the advisory board of a leading hereditary-cancer patient advocacy organization, and asked to be the face of their talking-head content. That invitation is my biggest and most exciting signal so far, and it is not the kind that arrives if you stay in the background. I feel ready and empowered to contribute to what I believe is the next wave after AI: the shift from living with disease to living with information and the power to act on it. A pre-diagnosis world, where the question is no longer what happened to me, but what can I do now, while I still can. That is the movement I want to help build, and for the first time I have the voice to do it. Thank you to Vishen, Ileana, Hazel, and the Mindvalley team for the tools, and for the push to finally show up. Lauren Berkowitz is a founder and strategist. Her work and writing are at laurenberkowitz.co. New York, United States.