There is a reason fish don’t speak about water.
Not because water is unimportant — because water is everything. It surrounds them so completely that it never occurs to them to name it.
You might have the same problem. And you may not have realised it yet.
I know this because I’ve made the same mistake — not in coaching, but in writing. I spent months writing what I thought was speaking directly to the people I wanted to reach. It wasn’t. The content was shaped by my world, not theirs, and they do not quite get it when they read it.
You’re good at what you do. Your clients know it. But that’s not the problem, is it?
The problem is the gap between being a good coach and being one people can actually find and connect with. Most coaches assume that the gap is about visibility. Post more. Show up on LinkedIn. Get a website. But visibility without the right words that connect you with your clients is just noise.
Al Ries and Jack Trout spent decades studying how people make decisions. What they found is deceptively simple: the human mind doesn’t evaluate options — it files them. People carry a short mental ladder for every category they care about, and they only hold a few names on each ladder. The battle isn’t to be better. It’s to be on a ladder at all.
When you write “I help high-achievers unlock their full potential,” you’re describing your work accurately. Clean. Professional. Accurate. But you’re describing it in language that belongs to your world — not theirs.
When you write “I help high-achievers unlock their full potential,” you’ve described your work accurately. But now read this instead: “You got the promotion eighteen months ago, and you thought it would feel different. You’re delivering — but you’ve lost the confidence you used to have, and you don’t know why.”
The first version names what you do. The second names what your client is living through — and they recognise themselves in it. That’s the difference. When you do that, the right person pays attention. When you don’t, you’re in a room they’ll never walk into.
Think about this word: translate. Every time you take a client’s raw experience and render it into coaching language, you’re translating. You’re taking something that belongs to them and making it yours. And a person can’t see themselves in someone else’s version of their story.
The coach who writes “I help high-achievers unlock their full potential” isn’t lying. But those who succeed in connecting with the right clients write the way their clients talk. To write in that language, you need to resist the urge to make it sound more professional using insider language.
This restraint is harder than it sounds. Because your training pulls you the other way.
This is the frustration of many good coaches. Not because they lack credibility, but because the gap between how they describe their work and how their clients experience their problem is simply too wide.
Leadership is influence. And influence starts with making someone feel understood — before you’ve asked for anything.
1. Go find the words. Before you write anything about your practice, research how your audience talks about their problems. You’re looking for their words that help you understand the world they are in. Those sentences are your copy — not a starting point, the actual copy.
2. Name the gap, not the fix. No one wakes up wanting coaching. They wake up wanting something to change. Your message should describe the gap between where your client is and where they want to be — specifically enough that the right person thinks “that’s me.”
3. Give attention to the end result, and not your framework. Sessions, frameworks, tools, modules — that’s your process. But your client cares about what changes they can expect. Instead of describing your process — “a twelve-week journey to clarity and confidence” — describe what the new reality can be using those key words you have researched, but frame them to express what their heart desires.
We can’t see our own water. None of us can. That’s not a flaw — it’s what deep expertise does. But the work that earns trust before someone actually knows you is simple and hard at the same time: stop describing your world and start describing theirs.
That’s where it starts.
If you’ve read this far and felt something shift, that’s worth paying attention to.
This is the work we do inside Turn Your One Day Into Day 1 — where you can stop guessing what to say and start attracting your ideal clients who know You’re the one for them.
