Change Your Audience
When Your Voice Has Grown but Your Room Hasn’t
Change Your Audience
When Your Voice Has Grown but Your Room Hasn’t
September feels different.
Maybe it is because September sits at the intersection of what has been and what is about to become. Summer is fading. Fall is approaching. Temperatures shift. Daylight changes. Leaves prepare to release what they have carried all season.
September whispers: Change is coming.
Perhaps the greater question is not whether the season is changing, but whether we are willing to change with it.
For the last nine months, we have spent intentional time debating, discovering, disrupting, and developing ourselves. We have wrestled with Leaving Empty Cathedrals. We have challenged ourselves around Creating Safe Spaces. We have confronted the necessity of Breaking Frames. And we have explored The Other Side of Love.
Nine months.
That number is significant.
Nine months represents development before delivery.
Something conceived must eventually be born.
After nine months of gatherings, webinars, podcasts, blogs, conversations, reading, reflection, leadership, ministry, successes, failures, breakthroughs, and lessons, I find myself wrestling with a deeply personal question:
Am I ready to deliver the better version of myself?
Not simply a busier version.
Not merely a more successful version.
Not a more visible version.
A better version.
Because there is a difference between productivity and transformation.
I Have Receipts
I can point to personal, professional, and ministerial milestones. I have receipts of purposeful productivity. There is evidence that I have been moving.
Doors have opened. Relationships have expanded. Ideas have matured. Opportunities have emerged. Territory has increased.
I have found myself managing multiple mantles in diverse environments—pastor, leader, strategist, mentor, communicator, entrepreneur, father, friend, and lifelong student.
I am birthing new things while expanding my knowledge and territory.
Yet somewhere beneath the accomplishments, activity, and applause, there is a tug coming from a driven space inside me.
It keeps saying:
Change your audience.
That realization has forced me to confront something uncomfortable.
What happens when you have changed, but your audience hasn’t?
What happens when you spend seasons saying things that once challenged people but now merely entertain them?
What happens when you continue conversing with environments that have become comfortable with complacency?
What happens when the room has memorized your vocabulary but stopped responding to your vision?
Maybe you need to change your audience.
When Dry Bones Become Your Audience
I am reminded of one of Scripture’s most compelling conversations between God and a prophet.
Ezekiel is transported into a valley filled with dry bones.
Not a few bones.
A valley.
And the text makes their condition painfully clear: the bones were very dry.
God asks Ezekiel:
“Son of man, can these bones live?”
— Ezekiel 37:3
What fascinates me is what happens next.
God commands Ezekiel to speak.
“Prophesy to these bones.”
Imagine the absurdity.
Ezekiel is preaching to something that cannot applaud. Teaching something that cannot take notes. Casting vision to something that cannot respond. Talking to an audience that appears incapable of listening.
Yet Ezekiel speaks because God assigned him to that audience.
And the bones begin moving.
There is a lesson here.
Sometimes God will assign you to difficult audiences because your voice carries what that environment needs.
But there is another lesson we cannot ignore:
Not every valley is a permanent assignment.
Ezekiel was sent into the valley. He was not instructed to build his house there.
Some of us have confused an assignment with an address.
We keep speaking to the same bones because they once responded to our voice. We keep returning to rooms where our contribution was once revolutionary but has now become routine. We keep trying to resurrect environments that may have completed their role in our development.
Discernment means knowing when God is telling you to speak again—and when God is telling you to move again.
Who Are You Still Talking To?
This September, I am asking myself some difficult questions.
Maybe you should ask them too.
Who am I talking to who is no longer listening?
Which rooms am I trying to impress that no longer require the version of me I have become?
Which conversations keep repeating themselves without producing transformation?
Which environments tolerate my presence but resist my possibilities?
And perhaps the hardest question:
Have I outgrown some of my audiences—or have some of my audiences simply grown tired of me?
Both are possible.
Maturity requires enough humility to acknowledge that every transition is not because others failed to recognize our greatness.
Sometimes people have heard enough from us.
Sometimes organizations need another voice.
Sometimes relationships evolve.
Sometimes audiences change.
Sometimes the season simply ends.
There is no villain.
There is just transition.
Life is cyclical. People enter. People exit. Doors open. Doors close. Audiences gather. Audiences disperse.
The wisdom is recognizing when yesterday’s audience has become today’s limitation.
Marshall Goldsmith famously captured it this way:
“What got you here won’t get you there.”
I would add:
Who heard you here may not be who needs to hear you there.
Your Voice May Have Outgrown the Room
Growth creates a strange tension.
You can become grateful for a room while simultaneously recognizing you have outgrown it.
You can love people and still recognize that your assignment among them has changed.
You can honor your history without becoming imprisoned by it.
There are rooms that introduced you, developed you, corrected you, celebrated you, tolerated you, wounded you, and helped you discover who you were.
Honor them.
But don’t assume that every room that participated in your development deserves permanent authority over your destiny.
Howard Thurman offered this enduring wisdom:
“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive.”
I would extend Thurman’s question:
Where does your voice come alive now?
Where does your thinking create curiosity?
Where do your experiences create value?
Where are people asking questions you have spent years learning how to answer?
Where does your presence generate possibility rather than merely familiarity?
Perhaps the issue is not that you have nothing else to say.
Maybe you are saying new things to an old audience.
Jesus understood the challenge of familiarity. In Mark 6:4, He observes that a prophet can be without honor among those most familiar with him.
People who knew you when sometimes struggle to recognize who you are now.
They remember the earlier version.
Meanwhile, strangers sometimes encounter you without the burden of your history. They simply experience your value.
Changing your audience doesn’t necessarily mean abandoning people. It means refusing to allow familiarity to determine the boundaries of your future.
So, How Do You Change Your Audience?
Changing your audience requires more than gaining new followers. It requires intentional expansion.
1. Audit your rooms.
Identify where you spend your intellectual, emotional, spiritual, and relational energy. Ask: Is this room stretching me or simply recognizing me? Recognition feels good. Stretching produces growth.
2. Stop over-explaining yourself to committed misunderstanders.
Every conversation does not deserve another conversation. If you constantly have to prove your value, defend your growth, or shrink your thinking so others remain comfortable, reconsider the audience.
3. Enter rooms where you are not the expert.
Become a student again. Sit with people who know things you don’t. Read outside your discipline. Attend gatherings where nobody recognizes your name. Growth accelerates when anonymity gives you permission to learn.
4. Translate your message for new communities.
Changing your audience does not mean changing your authenticity. Your core message can remain while your language evolves. Learn how different generations, professions, cultures, and communities communicate.
5. Build bridges beyond your ecosystem.
If you are a pastor, spend time with entrepreneurs. If you are an executive, engage artists. If you are an academic, talk with practitioners. Innovation frequently happens at intersections.
6. Create instead of waiting for invitations.
Start the podcast. Write the article. Convene the dinner. Host the webinar. Develop the course. Build the network. Create the table you keep waiting for someone else to invite you to.
7. Accept being unknown again.
Changing audiences can mean leaving spaces where everyone knows your résumé and entering spaces where nobody cares. That’s healthy. New rooms require fresh credibility.
8. Listen before you speak.
A new audience is not simply another group waiting to hear your brilliance. Learn them. Understand their questions. Effective communication begins with curiosity.
September Is an Invitation
Nine months have passed.
Something has been developing.
Now comes the question:
What are you going to deliver?
Maybe the next version of you cannot be born into the same environment that conceived the previous version.
Maybe your next opportunity exists among people you haven’t met yet.
Maybe your next collaboration is outside your denomination, industry, generation, geography, or normal circle.
Maybe there are people waiting for a conversation you have been rehearsing in rooms that stopped listening years ago.
September signals another season is imminent.
Leaves are preparing to fall. Temperatures are preparing to shift. Nature is demonstrating
what wisdom has always taught us:
Transition is not betrayal.
Changing does not mean what came before was meaningless.
Moving forward does not require dishonoring where you have been.
Changing your audience does not mean abandoning the people who helped you become who you are.
It means recognizing that purpose has movement.
There are valleys where you must speak.
There are mountains you must climb.
There are tables where you must sit.
There are rooms where you must listen.
There are people you must teach.
And there are people you haven’t met yet who carry something necessary for the person you are becoming.
So after nine months of intentional development, I am challenging myself—and challenging you:
Stop measuring your future exclusively by the response of your current audience.
Their silence does not necessarily mean your voice has lost its power.
Their lack of enthusiasm does not mean your vision lacks value.
Their familiarity with you does not define your capacity.
Sometimes you don’t need a new message.
You need a new room.
Sometimes you don’t need to speak louder.
You need to speak somewhere else.
Sometimes the next level of growth is not about changing what you say.
It is about having the courage to—
CHANGE YOUR AUDIENCE!
The season is changing.
Maybe it’s time you did too.
Stay Distinct. Stay Driven. Keep Moving into Blue Water.
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-Matthew L. Brown
TThis is so true and alive in a time such as this.