I make my living teaching courses on the internet and coaching people 1–1.

I would love to help you:

1. Make more money (and with it, more freedom)
2. Build more competence in your career (and with it, more freedom)

Over the past 4 years, I’ve coached over 300 people — solopreneurs, startup employees, 6-figure copywriters, VC-backed founders, sales professionals, writers, podcasters, and YouTubers.

I’ve helped them set (and crush) professional goals, successfully navigate career transitions, win major promotions, double (or triple, or quadruple) their income, and obliterate the mental and emotional blocks standing in their way. (Let’s be honest, even the best of us have a lot of that last thing).

I’ve also taught courses helping people improve their writing, level up their career skills, and learn to become opportunity-identifying masters.

This fall, I have two different ways you can work with me:

1. A live course for solopreneurs and content creators
2. 1–1 coaching (I have 3 seats opening up this fall, if you’d like dibs)

How to Find and Own a Niche on the Internet: Live Course

Over the past four years of coaching and teaching, my favorite topic has always been leveraging the internet.

How do you find a niche? How do you attract an audience in that niche and build credibility? How do you use that credibility to land opportunities?

In this course (run as a series of Zoom workshops), I’ll be distilling everything I know into a 4-week intensive program.

Cohort 1 launches this fall. Since it’s the pilot version, I’ll be running it at a discounted price and capping it at 15 seats.

There will be a heavy emphasis on live coaching, workshopping, discussion, peer feedback, and accountability —everything you need to launch your niche brand at the end of the 4 weeks.

If you’re interested, you can read the full description and join the waitlist here.

(Don’t take my word for it. My past clients are excited about it too):

1–1 Coaching: Packages and Standing Relationships

I also have three 1–1 coaching slots opening up this fall.

The bulk of my 1–1 coaching happens in package form — meaning you come to me with a stated goal, and we set up a custom package (number of sessions and intended outcome) to help you attain that goal.

I also work with select clients on a more fluid basis — you’re looking for a more general 1–1 performance coach, and we work together to tackle a number of smaller challenges or objectives.

The goal is always to help you level up your performance, get out of your own way, and systematically work through and address all of the challenges impeding you from hitting your goals.

1–1 coaching is some of my favorite work, and I’m excited to have the availability to take on new clients.

All of my coaching relationships start with a free introductory call. If you’re interested in working with me, please send me a Twitter DM.

What some of my past clients have said:

Hannah’s coaching is truly one of a kind. Change can be scary to say the very least. Hannah has a special gift that allows her to hold others accountable while being empathetic of the difficulties or roadblocks that are quite common on the road to success. Her coaching has allowed me to breakthrough limiting beliefs, tackle my goals headfirst, but more importantly, gave me the confidence to invest and go all in on myself and my personal development. — Ljupco Stojanovski, Account Executive and Podcast Host

And this:

“I’ve worked with Hannah off and on for almost four years now, and I’m consistently blown away by her ability to ask you out-of-the-box questions to help lead to and create breakthroughs! She brings energy, curiosity, and passion to your interactions and isn’t afraid to call your crap and hold you accountable! Working with Hannah was the exact kick in the butt I needed to leave my full-time job and start a marketing company. Honestly, I haven’t looked back since.” — Randalyn Hill, founder of Cre8tives.co

And always — if you have any additional questions, feel free to send me a Twitter DM. I’m always happy to hear from you!

“No two minds ever come together without thereby creating a third, invisible intangible force, which may be likened to a third mind.” — Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich

One of the most beneficial things you can do for your professional development is form a mastermind.

A mastermind is a group of people in a similar place in life who are all striving for similar goals. It’s a group dedicated to self-betterment, personal growth, and the pursuit of individual goals. Four to five members is ideal — less, and you lose the dynamic range of insight and perspective; more, and you lose the powerful bonds of personal connection. A mastermind meets regularly — ideally, weekly — and each member takes a turn sharing their failures and victories for the week, requests help with their struggles, and sets goals for moving forward.

A successful mastermind demands the honesty and respect of all its members. It raises the bar for achievement and realized potential. A mastermind challenges you to grow bigger, reach farther, achieve better. It holds you accountable when you set goals, helps you see your strengths, workshops your weaknesses, supports you when you struggle, and celebrates with you when you are victorious.

With the combined power and energy of multiple people all striving for similar goals, a mastermind can achieve wonders.

The benefits of having a mastermind:

1. Support. When you’re weak and you’re struggling, your mastermind will hold you up. When you’re operating from a place of strength, your mastermind will keep you on track and moving towards your goals. There’s a deep sense of power that comes with the knowledge that you aren’t doing this thing alone. There are others journeying with you every step of the way.

2. Critique. A large part of a mastermind’s purpose is offering feedback. What are you doing well? What could you be doing better? What are specific places you can be taking steps to improve? The group as a whole does a deep-dive analysis into all of these questions. Because the group is built on a deep-seated sense of respect and honesty, this feedback will always be of high quality and intended to catalyze growth.

3. Accountability. Part of your meetings will entail setting goals. Setting goals is easy, but maintaining them alone is hard— there’s a lot of effort expended just in keeping yourself on track. External accountability is key, and a mastermind offers that — along with check-ins, updates, and fine-tuning at every meeting.

4. Insight. One of the beauties of a mastermind is the deep level of knowledge and understanding each member has of the others. Each member knows exactly where you’re at and where you’re going, and can offer insight and feedback accordingly. Other people often see things about ourselves that we miss. Having that steady stream of feedback is invaluable.

5. Energy. The combined energy of a group of people all actively striving towards goals is infectious. It builds off of itself — and with that building energy comes building momentum, which carries all participants forward.

In Practice: My mastermind is one of the most important parts of my week. The group has helped hone my focus and recenter my energy. They’ve pushed me to set more ambitious goals, critiqued my work, helped me through difficult conversations with employers and clients, pointed out strengths and weaknesses I was too close to myself to see — and I’ve gained equal value by watching each of the other members go through the same process. Each time we meet there’s a rush of energy and excitement, and a bringing of our lives back into focus. Our meetings are like whetting our blades at the onset of every week before going back into battle.

What makes a strong mastermind?

1. Each member must be equally driven and committed. Goals are personal and there is no right and wrong, but each member of a mastermind must have relatable goals — not in specifics, but in magnitude. If I’m trying to build a company and you’re trying to do fifty pushups every day, those are probably incompatible goals. But if I’m trying to build a company and you’re trying to become a top-grossing sales rep at your startup, those goals, while different in specifics, are of equal magnitude.

2. Each member must have something to offer and something to gain. As stated above, specific pursuits need not be the same, but each member must have insight and value to offer to every other member in the group.

3. Each member must be committed and reliable — committed to attending every meeting they can, committed to personal growth, committed to providing as much value as possible, committed to fight relentlessly for their fellow members. Each individual must know without a doubt that they can rely on every other member to give everything they’ve got.

4. There must be rapport. If the members don’t connect, deep bonds will not form, people won’t understand each other at a deep level, and the full potential of a mastermind cannot be reached.

In Practice: My mastermind has a diverse range of members: a YouTuber, a startup sales rep, an entrepreneur/CEO building a media company, and myself, focusing on writing, videography, and coaching. At surface level our goals seem very different, but in terms of magnitude our ambitions are at a similar level — we’re all growing at the same rate and expecting the same caliber of work from ourselves. And even though our specific fields are different, our knowledge (and therefore insights) are complementary. We all gain a deep level of value — and with that comes a deep level of commitment to what we’re building, both independently and within our collective mastermind.

So how does it work?

A key element in a mastermind is the regularity of meetings. Meeting frequency and length can vary — weekly hour-long meetings are common. Longer biweekly or monthly meetings are also an option. My mastermind meets weekly for 2–3 hours (on the long side, but we usually have a lot to talk about).

In the meeting, each member takes a turn giving an update of their week, and then breaks that update down in an analysis — what went well, what went wrong, where they succeeded and where they failed, what they could’ve done better, what they struggled with. The group then discusses that information — workshops problems, gives advice, offers insights. The length of this session varies — if someone has a routine update, it can be covered in 10–15 minutes; if someone has something they’re struggling with and want to workshop, the conversation can last for a more indefinite period of time — sometimes upwards of 45 minutes or an hour. When everything has been resolved, each member closes their turn by setting goals for the week to come.

Things to keep in mind when starting a mastermind:

1. Identify exactly what it is you’re looking for. What do you want to gain from a mastermind? What specific value do you want to have? What sort of people do you want to be surrounding yourself with? Remember the adage that you are the sum of the five people you’re closest to — what do you want to be growing towards?

2. Set a purpose for your mastermind. The original purpose of mine was for people interested in entrepreneurship and sales. It’s a very broad criteria, and yet even that level of focus helps to attract people who have similar and complementary objectives.

3. When it comes to rapport, trust your gut. Some people hit it off immediately, and others don’t mesh. It’s important in a mastermind to have people who complement each other and will become close, so in this sense also choose your members wisely.

4. Pay attention to people’s strengths. Soft skills are just as important as the hard skills in forming a mastermind group. What strengths will people bring to the group as an entity itself, and what insights will they be able to offer into other member’s lives?

5. Diversity is a good thing. Strive for similarity in goals, but complement in skills. Part of my mastermind’s strength is in the fact that we all have different skillsets. The business owner’s employee management skills are valuable when the rest of us want to hire employees; my coaching skills are good for drawing out the deeper levels in people’s issues. When we have something we need to sell our sales rep can help us workshop a strategy, and when we need audio gear for a project our YouTuber can walk us through the whole process.

A mastermind is a powerful catalyst for growth, and one of the most beneficial things you can add into your life.

“No mind is complete by itself. It needs contact and association with other minds to grow and expand.” — Napoleon Hill

How to Start a Mastermind (and why it’s valuable to do so) was originally published in Mission.org on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When I drove into Atlanta the first time it was pouring rain.

I’d been on the interstate all day and I’d never been to the south before. Hot summer day with humidity so thick it made your clothes and your hair stick to you — the kind of weather that breeds bad smells and rain. West Virginia had been too long — ugly mountain after ugly mountain — and Virginia had been a short but welcome swath of beauty. North and South Carolina were dull, rather flat — they felt distinctive, but in an apathetic way.

When I hit Georgia, everything shifted. Driving south on I-85 you simultaneously hit a lake and a state line, and the shores of the lake are swaths of red mud, and you realize you’re seeing southern dirt. And almost as soon as you’ve taken that in, you’re over the lake, and the water’s stretching out around you, and then on the other side there’s the Georgia line, and you realize in a visceral way you can taste in your mouth that you’re in the south. It just feels different.

Off the highway a few miles into Georgia there’s a gas station in the middle of nowhere, off the exit for Carnesville, Georgia — a tiny little town with one empty state road and a lot of overgrown weeds. The gas station was built for an era long gone — an exaggeratedly tall sign but no flashy advertisements, peeling paint, a gas pump that clicks and thunks. Standing on that faded pavement and smelling gasoline — the first time my feet touched Georgia — I found something I’d been looking for but hadn’t known I’d lacked. That place felt like every southern song I’d ever loved. Words jotted down between capping the gas tank and heading back for the interstate — “I’ve found the south and it’s glorious.”

That was where the love affair started.

Soon after it started to rain — dark clouds that opened up and dumped on the highway; lightning flickering across the sky. The thunder’s louder in the south, and the raindrops are bigger. It stopped raining in the interim of highway heading into the city, when suddenly the road split into more and more lanes but the skyline wasn’t yet in sight — a good fifteen miles of pre-urban sprawl — but it started again right before we hit the city limits. When I pulled off the highway and onto the streets I cracked my window, just enough so I could slip my fingers out and curl them around the top of my car, hold them outstretched, feel the southern rain on my skin, let it run down my arm. The streets were flooding. Windshield wipers clicked and clicked and the leaves hung heavy on the trees, laden with water. There are lots of trees in Atlanta. It’s a city filled with green.

That first night I didn’t see the skyline — just city neighborhoods with southern houses and sodden roads. The house where I was staying — a neatly trimmed southern affair — had a rooftop balcony, and when I stood there and looked out, I could see the tops of one of the skyscrapers between the treetops, and I stood there and stared at it. I saw the skyline the next day, in pieces, and saw the full thing the day after that. It was broken to me slowly, and I took my time with each piece — just stood and drank it in.

I’ve seen the skyline many times since, but it’s never lost that magic. If anything, I think it’s gained more. Moving towards it through the grid of streets, or flying towards it on the interstate. Every time I see it something within me rises.

Atlanta’s this big sprawling hub of tall buildings. When you drive through it on I-85, it feels like it goes on forever — your vision is tunneled by the highway, but the buildings just keep coming. You see them on the horizon, coming up fast, and then you’re almost on them, but they keep coming and coming and coming. Downtown, Midtown, Buckhead. The highway runs alongside them, then curves into the city, and suddenly there are buildings on both sides, and still they’re coming. So much gray and silver rising up towards the sky. It’s stunning in both the day and the night.

In rush hour, there’s traffic everywhere. So many cars. So many people. If you hate being stuck you can hardly bear the standing still. At night, though, in the dark, the streets are almost entirely empty — whole highways for you to fly down, with the buildings all lit up and rising on either side.

But go a few blocks from the center of the city and suddenly you’re in quiet southern neighborhoods, with gentle streets and tall trees and lovely Southern houses. Atlanta’s a city of contrast — it doesn’t feel like a jungle of steel and concrete, but instead like the best of both worlds. I stayed in Reynoldstown — a neighborhood that used to be bad, apparently, but is getting expensive now. It’s east of Cabbagetown and north of Grant Park, and bordered at the top by railroad tracks. There’s a railroad yard on the edge of the neighborhood with more shipping containers than one can count and graffiti all over its concrete fences. So much graffiti.

The first Atlanta night I slept like a baby in a top-floor bed, underneath a roof that was wet from the rain. The first Atlanta morning was hot as hell, and humid — humidity so thick you could almost hear it dripping; the kind that hits you like an oppressive wave when you venture outside, fills up your lungs with soup. I loved it anyway — sitting under the locust trees on the back porch playing all those southern songs I knew and loved on a borrowed guitar, because what does one do when one meets the south besides this? Good food, wood floors, bare feet, dry mouth from trying to avoid the city water. I slept for three nights in that house and I mourned with I had to leave.

That was June. Since then I’ve been two more times — made that drive into the city twice since that first entrance in the pouring rain. The second time I came in it was almost 9pm on a Sunday night, after fourteen hours of driving straight through seven states. I was exhausted and restless all at the same time, but the city gave me life. I drove again to Reynoldstown — same neighborhood, but staying in a different house — came in on Moreland, one of the eastern thoroughways, a street that changes from rough to gentrified and back again, and which probably crosses the place where Sherman’s army marched out of Atlanta after they burned the city in 1864 (I suspect, but can’t currently confirm). So many ragged, sweaty, dirty soldiers.

Sleeping softly in the gentle southern night; so tired my body melted into the mattress, tangled itself in the sheets and then lay perfectly still.

Little Five Points, the rough bohemian neighborhood where five roads converge and people who look like they’re on drugs and long-haired hipsters (who haven’t gotten the memo about Asheville) hang out outside of bars and edgy record shops. So much hip and angst all in one place. I drove through it on my way into the city, went down a couple nights later to check it out. Everything non-flesh in that neighborhood was painted, and everything flesh was tattooed. I sat in a coffee shop with my camera on the table, took pictures in the dusk. Some long-haired boy and messy-haired girl made out in a parking lot just past a street light, seemed to stay there forever with his hands on her back, and some dude walked through the dark in a pair of mirror shades.

Most of the culture I encountered was lest edgy. Indoor markets, with their echoing rafters and the smell of good food cooking — the hard choice of smoothies or a fried catfish sandwich. Greasy fingers, feeling southern. Good southern diner food — more pancakes than a body can eat in two meals for less than ten dollars, and all the syrup you want, and art on the walls. Farmers markets in the sticky Georgia morning, the humidity becoming more and more oppressive as you walk through it, leaving your skin covered in a thin film of sweat, and the trees above you so deeply, richly green. Buy a bottle of lemonade, fresh pressed while you watched, poured into a cup filled with ice. Makes your insides feel alert and alive, makes your taste buds sharp. Hold the cup against your damp face and feel the coolness and breathe. Keep walking through the market because you don’t want to leave.

There are good people who live in Atlanta. Smart people, ambitious people, kind people. Your average southern man goes out of his way to hold doors. The startup scene is strong, and filled with people who like intellectual stimulation. You’re nearly guaranteed good conversation if you’re there long enough. Late-night meetup talking philosophy in a tavern with naked brick walls and vintage posters hanging. Long drinks of water with condensation on the glass, lots of feeling alive.

That second time I hated leaving even more than the first. When you fall in love separation is painful, and I’d fallen hard.

The third time I wasn’t even supposed to go down, decided to take a trip at the last minute, was endlessly glad I did — I don’t need much convincing to go to Atlanta, only an excuse. I stayed in Buckhead, woke up every morning and looked out at the edge of the skyline, slept at night in the harsh glow of streetlights. On that third trip I flew down I-85 in the middle of the night, walked through Midtown in the dark and took pictures, filmed video on the edge of the train yard, ate dinner at the top of a tall building with a view across the entire city, just to celebrate being alive. I stayed for eight days and it was glorious.

There’s a strange mix in the city of cool metro and pure southern. The houses are southern, the food’s southern, there are southern gas stations on the corners, and there’s usually a southern man to hold the door. But the city itself is made largely of implants, non-natives, and it’s built physically of cold steel, and it feels like any city — charming, but modern and cool. It isn’t overwhelmingly one or the other, just hovers somehow as part of both. Somehow this makes it even better.

Driving out of Atlanta, at the end of every visit, you head north on I-85, through those 15 miles or more of exit lanes and traffic, and then the road opens up and becomes again a normal interstate — four lanes and 70-mile-an-hour speedlimits that nobody follows. Atlanta’s out of sight behind you and you miss it, but you’re still in Georgia, can still feel the south around you and taste it on your breath. The trees are lush and green and the topography’s distinct and the dirt when you can see it is red with clay.

An hour and a half north you get to Carnesville, with its lonely gas station and its weeds and its run-down buildings and its state roads and its southernness. And just beyond that you hit the lake, and the state line, and you see that red Georgia dirt again, but instead of filling you up with joy it makes you sad, because you’re leaving it. And then in the space of just a breath you’re in South Carolina — and the state feels different; a distinct shift — and that distinct feeling of the south is still borne within you, but outside of you it’s gone.

. . .

Photo by Ian Schneider on Unsplash

Actually, to be precise, eleven months. I started this daily-writing thing at the end of January 2017, after talking about it for months and throwing around the word “someday” and never actually doing anything about it. I’d watched my friend do it — he’d started writing every day in the fall of 2016, and he went from shitty to good in a matter of months. I’d watched, and I was impressed, and I wanted some of that too.

As for the structure, that came from Kerouac. Kerouac spent years recording the world around him in the form of sketches in a notebook he carried on him at all times — sketches in words the way an painter draws sketches. Not finished, just rough and capturing things. Those notebooks full of word sketches were compiled into a little book called The Book of Sketches, which I got my hands on a year or two back when I was on a Kerouac kick and ordering everything he’d ever written out of the library to see what struck my fancy.

I’m not even into Kerouac’s sketches — the first taste is nice, but they quickly disintegrate into something I have trouble connecting with. But the inside cover of the dust jacket of that little book . . . it’s one of the most influential things I’ve ever read.

So I said, hell. I’m writing sketches too.

And then in January I said, hell, I’m going to write these sketches every single day.Originally I said I was going to do a month. Thirty days. I knew from the beginning I wasn’t going to stop after thirty days, but I also wanted to set a small goal — bite-sized, manageable. You vocally set small goals and know inside that you’re going to far surpass them.

The thirty days came and went and I kept writing.

And now it’s almost the end of the year, and while it hasn’t been a calendar year since I started, this feels like a fitting time to reflect. I’ve been writing every day for almost a year. I haven’t been doing it publicly. That’s not the point.

I don’t pretend it was all good. There’s a piece I wrote while falling asleep in an AirBNB in Atlanta in June at four in the morning — sentences disintegrating into complete nonsense and then into things that weren’t even words. I woke up two hours after that and drove north to Pittsburgh (ten hours, slowly processing the whole way. The writing the next night was much better).

I also don’t pretend it was all bad. Doing this has been glorious. Every day. More words.

I almost missed once — a night in February, driving from D.C. back home to PA, along the straight empty highway of peninsular Delaware and Maryland — flat land with big open farms reminiscent of the Midwest, except it’s caught between the Chesapeake Bay and the ocean. To get there going I drove through the hellhole that is Newark Delaware — fratty college town a body can’t wait to get out of. To get there coming I drove across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge — a wide expanse of concrete and steel stretching over the bay, three miles of it, with the signal lights glowing and the water stretching out and out below.

I was so tired that night that I fell asleep once I got home, almost as soon as I hit the bed — coming off another one of those two-hour traveling nights — and I didn’t even think of writing. I was new enough to the routine that I’d been scared of forgetting while I was on the road, and I’d written the two nights prior while under the covers in a hotel room in D.C. late at night. But for a while when I was driving there’d been an old truck in front of me, and there was something about the way its tail lights looked in the dark in that flat expanse that got me captivated, and I left myself a voice memo in poetry of the way it looked, the way it felt — quick words, but with a lot of meaning. That was the only time I’ve had to do that. Every other day’s first iteration has been on paper.

I’ve been through a lot of travel since then, and have written in a lot of strange places. In an AirBNB in DC again, again at four in the morning. That night in Atlanta before driving north to Pittsburgh — and then in the City of Steel, with the blinds closed but the street lights still casting a glow across the ceiling, slipping in through the crack between the shade and the top window frame. The carpet under my feet there was soft as I paced in the dark, too restless with thoughts of the things I wanted to say to lay down and sleep. The feeling of the tunnels I’d driven through in the mountains to get there hung with me, and I wanted desperately to figure out how to articulate them. And then Atlanta again, every night on a couch for eight days straight. I’ve written in a hotel room filled with sleeping friends, under the blankets so as not to wake anyone. Two nights in Richmond, with another bright streetlight just outside — this one much more orange than the first — and a hard borrowed mattress, trying to capture everything somehow into words that is the feeling of the highway between Richmond and the real south.

Sometimes I wrote whole stories. God, sometimes I wrote two full stories. There were a few weeks where I went all-in and wrote finished pieces of fiction, back to back to back. The muses had me in their grasp and squeezed tight and I just wanted to write and write.

Other times I’d go for days on end feeling like I was writing something new, and then go back and look and realize the were all almost exactly the same.

In the fall I decided to cram writing a novel, operating on the theory that writing fast and intense would eliminate the issue of losing the plot before I finished. I wrote 30,000 words in six days, but I still wrote sketches as the last thing I did before I fell asleep. At that point it was just ingrained habit. I couldn’t not.

Some of it was trash. Actually, lots of it was trash. I set loose guidelines for myself, because I know what works and what doesn’t. Some nights I hardly wrote anything at all — a few lines and then called it quits.

Other nights I wrote stuff I was proud of, stuff that had something, stuff that made something deep inside of me stir.

The rigid guidelines weren’t the point. The point was the habits, the words; the forcing myself to think in terms of literature for at least a few minutes every single day; the ideas, normally fleeting, that I forced myself to crystalize into words, to capture on the page.

And what did I get out of it?I got better. As my friend got better in his writing, so too did I — messily and unglamorously and still far from stellar every time, and yet better. Descriptions came easier. Syntax moved lighter. And, by exploring, I came to understand things differently — people, psychology, incentives, the world around me.

And I have nearly a year’s worth of writing. Which is a treasure trove for future short stories, essays, and novels. It’s an idea bank I’ll carry with me for the rest of my lifetime.

. . .

Photo by Noah Silliman on Unsplash