How Not to Move Across the Country While Writing a Speech: What a 2,600-Mile Move Taught Me About AI Visibility

I’m going to tell you how not to do this. Do not pack three years of your Maine life into a U-Haul. Do not tow your car behind it. Do not drive 2,600 miles to Houston with a speech still unfinished. And whatever you do, do not decide this is also the exact right season to get back on a stage or on camera pre-recorded.

I did all of that. At once. And the ideas in that talk are the best thing I’ve built all year. The recording of it? I’ll get to that. It’s a mess, and I’m going to show you the mess anyway.

So here’s the real version. Not the polished founder one.

Late September in Maine

I was a founder with a business to run, a house to empty, a truck to load, and a speech to write. Not one of those things was small, and none of them seemed interested in waiting for the others.

On September 21, I was still in Maine, drafting the first versions of the talk between sorting boxes. I wrote it in the cracks: around my healthcare clients, in voice notes I recorded while driving, and in 2 a.m. edits with AI. The AI visibility rules were evolving fast, every single day, and I was trying to write something useful while the subject itself kept moving.

I keep a running log of every draft. We’re at V13 now. The early ones are a mess of “keep” and “discard” piles, which, if you think about it, is exactly what I was doing to my entire life that month.

I loaded the truck on September 25, then stayed an extra day in Maine to try to get the speech recorded. To be brutally honest, I wasn’t ready. I recorded a very rough read of my script, and it was horrible. There is no inspirational way to dress that up.

I pulled out on September 27 at 4:30 a.m., with the speech unfinished and my car following behind me.

The Road

Here is what nobody tells you about moving yourself across the country: you do it with your body. Your back, your jaw, your sternum. Your heart lodged in your throat while you try to hold back tears. At the same time, part of you feels like you just took a shot of Goldschläger and wants to yell, “OH MY GOD, FINALLY!” out the window, hair flying, middle finger to the sky. Grief and “yahoooo” apparently can occupy the same body.

The first day, I drove through a nor’easter from northern Maine to Waterloo, New York, where I was staying with a girlfriend. It was the worst stretch of the whole trip: severe wind and rain, heavy traffic, and New England drivers. At one point, it felt like my Benz was going to tip over on the trailer and drag the Tetris-packed, fully loaded U-Haul sideways right along with it. There was no turning around. I just had to get through the storm. The metaphors in that statement are vast.

I was not calm. I was not “manifesting.” I was fucking scared, I was tired, and I still had a speech to record.

So I built myself a listening set. I recorded my own voice and made podcasts about my product: the questions, the answers, and the pushback I expected from buyers. I replayed them off and on for four days, trying to get the work clear enough in my own head that I could explain it to somebody else.

Most days were ten hours behind the wheel, quiet in the cab, seatbelt on. One day, I pulled fifteen hours straight. Somewhere near Cleveland, I filmed a sixty-one-second video on my phone, thanking the truckers who flashed their lights to let me over, where was that courtesy when I was driving in the Northeast?, and trying to decide whether to stay in Cleveland or keep going.

My reason for keeping going came down to one sentence: “Because I still have a speech to do.” That sentence carried me from Ohio to Texas.

Arrival

I made it to Houston on September 30, but the trip had one more little offering before it let me go.

Earlier that day, I could feel something was wrong. I could feel it in the tires and in the way the truck drove. I didn’t know until later that the tread had flown completely off one of the tires on the tow trailer, and then another tire went flat. A stranger in Corrigan stopped to help and drove me to a friend’s tire shop.

But I got here. I signed my lease paperwork, blew up my air mattress, and camped out in my new apartment until the movers showed up at 8 a.m. the next day.

Funny thing: I can haul anything. I’ll be damned if I can back up a damn trailer. So thank you to my guys at Three Men Movers in the Heights, and to the maintenance crew at the apartment complex, who moved everything around and parked that big lug for me until I was ready to return it to U-Haul. Some skills are mine. That one is not.

The 48 Hours

As soon as the movers were done, I unpacked only what I needed and rearranged my office to make one “presentable corner” I could record in. The rest of the apartment was going to have to mind its business. Then I recorded, edited, and repeated for more than 48 hours.

In one fifteen-hour sitting, I lost all of my edits five times. Five. I had to start from scratch each time. Around 2 a.m., I stopped and cried. I was ready to give up completely and not turn the damn thing in.

Then I remembered I had already been promoting it, and I was not going to give up that easily. I cared about the work. I wanted people to hear it. I just could not believe how hard it had become to get the thing out of my head and into a recording I could stand behind.

I told the women in my WEL-Systems group, and my energy work coach, how close I was to quitting. Every one of them was flabbergasted at how much I had gotten done in thirty days. They told me to give myself some damn grace, which apparently had not occurred to me as an available option.

The speech was originally due on October 2. I had already gotten an extension to October 6, and the host had emailed me that if it wasn’t in by October 7, I’d be bumped. So I recorded the best version I had left in me and sent it in at 4:30 a.m. on October 7, with nothing to spare.

I think it’s probably the most horrific recorded speech of my life. I feel traumatized by the whole thing, and as of the day I’m writing this, I haven’t even rewatched it. I’m not going to pretend I hit send and suddenly felt proud and peaceful. I was wrung out.

I had one more problem, and I only fully recognized it after I hit send: I was talking too much about too much. I always do. A dear friend and partner told me a long time ago to stop getting so techy and dumb it down, and I had somehow forgotten that feedback until the speech was already in. My cleanest dry run is dated October 5, and even that was a draft I didn’t love, made against a deadline that did not care.

But somewhere in that mess, I figured out what the talk was actually about.

Where the Whole Program Came From

I did not set out to build a workbook. Early this summer, I did something I had put off for sixteen years: I sat down and excavated my own business.

I went through everything. Every client I’d served, every campaign, every result, every thing I’d built for other people and never once written down for myself. What I found was a little embarrassing, a lot humbling, and extremely useful.

I had sixteen years of case studies, ad results, marketing proof, and client wins, and none of it was publicly listed. Not one piece. I was too busy taking on clients and doing their work. I had been successful for years on referrals alone, which is a lovely way to run an agency and a terrible way to be found by a machine.

On top of that, I had rebranded more than once over roughly the last three years. I kept shifting direction. My website said one thing, my old data said another, and neither reflected the sixteen years of work sitting in my files. So when I asked AI to tell me who I was, it couldn’t give me a coherent answer.

That was my moment. I wasn’t invisible. I was fragmented.

Rank is not retrieval. Retrieval is not citation. Citation is not traffic. Traffic is not trust. And none of it matters if there’s no evidence for the machine to find. I had all this work behind me, but I hadn’t made it legible. Activity is not legibility, no matter how busy you are.

So I started digging. Inspect what’s already built. Document what’s true. Find the gap. Prioritize. Four moves, starting with what I already had instead of inventing something else to pile on top.

Then I put them on paper. So much of what I’ve built has come from improving how my own agency runs, and I figured that if I needed this, so did every other business owner I know. That’s the workbook. It started as my own notes to myself.

I Was Already Doing the Work. Just Not on Myself.

This is the part I want you to hear: the workbook didn’t come first. The work did.

For over a year before it had a name or a price, I was watching AI visibility change in real time, the updates, the shifts, the AI fear-mongering, and putting what I was learning into practice with my clients and with people I was building things for in a different coaching environment.

I was doing the work of the workbook before it became the workbook: updating canonicals, bringing SEO, AEO, and GEO considerations into social content, creating FAQs that answered real questions, and writing searchable blogs for my clients. Meanwhile, my own business was sitting there waiting for me to give it the same attention.

The client I can talk about by name is JVP Jewelers, in the Greater Houston Heights area, where I moved. JVP Jewelers has been in the Houston Heights since 1986. Jack Van Pelt is a mentor and a client, and he’s one of the reasons I can say with a straight face that this work applies to real, old-school, independent businesses, not just tech companies.

When we started tracking JVP’s visibility in ChatGPT, it was about 4%. Under a year later, it was 20%. I’m careful with how I say that. That’s a measured movement we watched, not a promise that one particular change caused it. We did the excavation work first, before adding anything new.

As of October 2026, Jack’s customers have reported being recommended by ChatGPT, Claude, and Google. There’s a really funny story about Claude, ask Jack if you go into the shop.

That’s the thing about an old shop. The evidence was already there. We started by making it easier to find and understand.

Why I’m Telling You All This at a Summit

Because the Summit is called AI In Motion, and I was literally in motion. Apparently, I took the theme as a personal assignment.

I’m not going to pretend I floated through it all with unicorns, rainbows, and pixie dust in the air. I miss my mother. I’m finding myself lonely and a bit wandering, if I’m honest, in a city I love. Both things are true.

During these first two weeks here, I was putting deadlines on myself that didn’t exist, trying to launch, re-establish, and speak at a speed I’m not sure is sustainable for most people, yet I did it. I felt behind, like I should have had all of this done years ago. And now there’s AI in the room, too, giving everybody one more thing to feel behind about.

But here’s what I know after thirty years of working, sixteen of them running my own agency: nobody gets to wait for a perfect season. You do the best you can with what you have. You excavate before you add. You tell the truth about the mess, and you get back on the stage anyway.

I used to speak publicly in Houston all the time. Getting back up there is scary, even when you know you’re good at the work. Knowing your subject does not magically make you immune to nerves, loneliness, exhaustion, or a recording process that makes you want to throw the whole computer off a cliff into the ocean.

I’m not telling you this so you’ll feel sorry for me. I’m telling you so you can see the good, the bad, and the ugly that get us through the days we think we can’t get through. Nothing is really perfect. Anything presenting itself that way is probably a damn lie, or it had enough budget behind it to make it look that way. Perfection is all about perspective. 

If You Only Take One Thing From My Talk

Evidence before invention. Excavate before you add.

Before you buy another tool, write another post, or rebrand again, I know, I know, ask yourself: what have I already built that I haven’t shown anyone?

That question is the whole speech. It’s also the first page of the workbook. I had to ask it of my own business before I could stand in front of anybody else and tell them to do the same.

Where to Go From Here

The AI Visibility Excavation Workbook is a paid offer on my website. For a limited time, you can get it free by joining the AI In Motion Summit here. It’s free through October 24 and goes back to a paid offer at 11:59 p.m. CT that night.

Anyone who gets it, free or paid, keeps lifetime access and gets updated versions as AI visibility changes. If you have questions, Momentum Lab is free. If you want me to dig with you, that’s the AI Visibility Intensive.

Thank you for letting me be a mess in public.

Christina Rae Blackmon
Founder, Momentive Media

Alive & Well from the Greater Houston Heights!