She Knew Exactly What She Wanted to Say. She Just Couldn’t Say It.
Why templates keep failing practitioners who do real work
Here’s something nobody talks about in the conscious business space:
The coaches, service providers, and healers who struggle most with messaging aren’t confused about what they do. They’re disconnected from it.
I’ve sat across from practitioners who’ve changed hundreds of lives. They can articulate sharp observations in real-time with clients. They’ve been told repeatedly that they have something real. And they can’t write a single paragraph about their work without deleting it twelve times.
The industry solution? Another copywriting template. Another “find your ideal client avatar” worksheet. Another messaging course that promises clarity in five easy steps.
It doesn’t work. I want to tell you why.
Let me tell you a story about a woman we’ll call “Mara” for the purposes of this exercise. She had been a healer for seven years. She could see exactly what her clients needed and name it with precision. In conversation, words showed up easily. On paper, nothing.
“I’ve hired two copywriters,” she told me. “Both produced technically accurate descriptions that sounded like someone else’s business. I’ve bought four courses on messaging. I’ve downloaded every template. None of it lands.”
She wasn’t exaggerating. I’ve seen her drafts folder. Seventeen versions of the same bio, each one more hollow than the last.
The conventional diagnosis: she hasn’t done enough market research. She doesn’t understand her ideal client. She needs to study successful competitors and reverse-engineer their positioning.
The actual problem: she was trying to describe her work from her head while the work itself comes from somewhere else entirely.
I spent years in product development and marketing before starting this business. I’ve helped companies translate complex offerings into clear messages that move people to action. I understand frameworks, positioning, value propositions.
When I started my own business, I couldn’t write a single sentence about what I did.
The irony was painful. I knew every messaging framework that existed. I could diagnose positioning problems in other people’s businesses in minutes. And I sat staring at a blinking cursor, feeling like a fraud.
So I hired a marketing consultant I’d worked with for years. Not because I didn’t know marketing. Because I couldn’t see through my own material.
His observations cost me $12,000. Worth ten times that.
Here’s what I’ve learned since, working with so many coaches, creators, healers, and service providers who struggle to articulate their value:
The messaging problem isn’t a messaging problem.
When you can speak brilliantly to clients but freeze when writing about your work, that’s not a skills gap. You’ve lost the thread between how you experience your gift and how you’ve been taught to talk about it.
Templates assume your work fits in a template. Frameworks assume the thing you’re trying to capture can be reverse-engineered from logic. For practitioners whose work is hard to explain in a sentence, this approach doesn’t just fail. It makes things worse.
Every failed attempt reinforces the belief that you can’t do this. Every borrowed framework that doesn’t fit makes you feel more broken. The gap between your real competence and your visible presence keeps growing.
The real issue shows up in three ways most messaging advice ignores completely:
You’ve split yourself in two. You learned to code-switch into “professional mode” when talking about your work, and that professional voice sounds nothing like the voice that actually changes people. Your marketing sounds hollow because your business self and your real self aren’t in the same room.
Your body flinches. Clear messaging requires you to be seen. Actually seen. For people whose nervous system has logged “being visible” as dangerous, writing clear copy triggers something that looks like perfectionism, procrastination, and editing until you hate everything.
You won’t claim what you do. You describe your modalities instead of naming what actually changes. Because claiming that feels presumptuous, even when you’ve witnessed it hundreds of times.
Template-based messaging advice addresses none of this. Which is why you can complete the worksheet perfectly and still feel like your copy was written by a stranger.
I’m going to share an actual process we can use to resolve this. Not a template. A different way of approaching the problem that works on all three at once.
This includes the specific questions that help you find words that actually sound like you, the framework we use to structure offers around what changes instead of what you do, and the reason most “ideal client” exercises backfire for practitioners like you.
I’ll also walk through exactly what we did with Mara, including the parts that felt uncomfortable and what finally broke the pattern.
Here’s how to think about it, and a three-part framework you can try this week.
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