Introducing Check Your Messages

Exploring how we amplify our best ideas and align words with action

Over the past eight years of working in writing, journalism, and communications, I’ve been fortunate to work with organizations who have meaningful missions and leaders who take seriously the ways that they share their expertise and resources. Through the celebrations and challenges, what I came to value most is those who are willing to check their messaging against their operations and who value accountability, knowing good intentions and a worthy mission are not enough. With the necessity and joy of that work in mind, today I am launching Check Your Messages—part communications client services and part digital community. I’m looking to work with organizations who want to lead not only conversation but action around the issues they are passionate about—through writing, speaking, media, and digital platforms. I’m grateful for the partners who have already joined me on this new path and look forward to the work I will do with others.

In my professional life, dozens of organizations, campaigns, and people have entrusted me to help tell their stories. Indeed, narratives can be very powerful in helping others understand our experiences. However, after hearing my profession referred to as storytelling hundreds of times, I started to question what we imply and elide when we do so. Creating a narrative requires editorial choices; we choose what we emphasize and deemphasize. It says nothing of how closely our actions correspond with the words we use; it makes things neat and often erases the specificity that leads to new insight. In my experience, these choices are not malicious, they are aspirational. We all want to live up to the best stories we tell about ourselves. 

So, in choosing the next step in my career, I found myself wanting to create a neat narrative about the past and my future plans. But I think the messy specificity of my experience is a crucial part of what I have to offer—the way I fell into my career in communications haphazardly and even reluctantly but discovered its power to clarify and comfort and even to avert disaster, the times I wrestled with matching my words to my actions, the times my strategy was effective but had an outcome I didn’t envision. So, in envisioning a new path, I wanted not only to share the expertise I have honed but also create a space for exploring what it means to communicate more broadly and how we might do it better.

Whatever our experiences, many of us are interested and could benefit from deeper discussions about how to know when to speak and when to amplify others, how to better align our narratives with our values, and even how we might rethink common practices. In addition to client partnerships, my hope is that through conversations, workshops, and shared resources, CYM will also provide digital spaces for us all to explore those questions together. You can follow along at @check.your.messages_ on Instagram to join me or subscribe to this Substack. If you’re interested in working together, contact me at dylan@check-your-messages.com.