Everyone tells you to “let your personality shine through” in your content, and sure, that’s part of it. But that’s not actually what makes people choose you over the twelve other people doing the exact same thing you do.
In this episode, I’m breaking down what I call your “you-ness” or your “isms,” which are the exact thing your content is missing if you want to attract best-fit clients!
🎧 Listen on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify
The Stuff You Do Without Thinking Is the Stuff Worth Talking About
Ever tried to hire someone and train them to think the way you think? It’s brutal because so much of what you do is instinct built from years of trial and error. You know something is a “yes” or a “no” for your brand without being able to fully explain why. It just feels right, or it feels off.
I ran into this myself over the last nine months working with my assistant on the behind-the-scenes side of my business. I kept hitting moments where something felt like the obvious next step to me, but she needed the “why” behind it to make the same call I would. And that process of having to explain my own brain to someone else is exactly the work I’m asking you to do with your content.
The things you just innately do are the reasons your clients trust you and want to work with you in the first place. So the better you get at articulating those things, the stronger your content becomes.
The Wedding Photographer With Marketing That Spoke To My Soul
Let me give you a real example, because I love a good real example.
When I was wedding planning, I knew who I wanted as my photographer before I even had a venue locked in. That’s how sure I was!
His whole style was “I’m here to capture moments as they happen,” real ones, not staged or posed or wrapped in that stylized cinematic “you’re a princess today” vibe. I didn’t want someone stopping me mid-laugh to get a better angle. I wanted to be with my husband, my friends, my family, and just live the day.
That’s exactly what Mike Wakefield does. (Shout out, Mike!) Paraphrasing here, but his website says something like: for couples who really f*cking love each other and who care more about being fully present than spending the day trying to look flawless.
That’s exactly what I knew I wanted, and turns out that’s his “ism,” and it made me feel completely seen when I landed on his site. Soooo obviously, hiring him was a total no-brainer.
From “I Feel Disconnected From My Marketing” to a New Business Strategy
I recently jumped on a call with a client who told me, essentially, “My marketing is working. I don’t hate it. I just feel disconnected from it.” She’d outgrown the lessons she was sharing and couldn’t quite put her finger on why it felt off.
So we pulled back a layer. The marketing was doing its job, reaching the right people, and staying on brand. It just didn’t feel like her anymore. When we dug into what her brand’s biggest “ism” was, it came down to community and support: people who could rely on each other instead of feeling like they were on an island building their business alone.
That gave us the idea: instead of every piece of content coming from the founder’s mouth, why not source it from the community she’d already built? Real conversations with the founder curating and amplifying instead of always being the one talking.
By the end of the call, she was lit up again. “Why have we never thought of this sooner?” And it wasn’t just a content refresh. Her customers are now more embedded in the brand than ever, with opportunities to be featured and collaborate. We didn’t just find a new content angle. We built an entirely new leg of the business off one conversation about what makes this brand different.
The Sourdough Client Who Stopped Competing on Recipes
Recipes are not hard to come by on the internet. My client who teaches sourdough felt that pressure hard. There’s always more content today than there was yesterday, always more competing for attention, and that’s never going to slow down.
But the thing that helps your people choose you isn’t the recipe itself. It’s the why behind how you teach it. So when we dug into her “ism,” it turned out to be baked right into the name of her book: Easy Sourdough on any Schedule. She wants sourdough to be accessible, not something reserved for people with all day to babysit a starter. Life doesn’t need to be perfectly calm for you to fit sourdough into it.
So instead of just posting “here’s this recipe,” her content shifted to “here’s why this recipe is easy, how it fits into a busy life, how you can tweak it and pivot it because nothing is set in stone.” Meanwhile, there’s a whole camp of sourdough purists insisting you break one rule and the whole loaf, and possibly the world, will crumble.
‘That’s not her. She’s not teaching what everyone else is teaching, and that’s exactly why people choose her over and over again for the same basic recipe they could find anywhere else.
So What’s Your “Ism”?
Look at the things you do every single day that feel like “just the way it is.” The decisions that feel obvious to you but that you’ve never explained out loud. Ask yourself what’s leading those decisions. What makes something a clear yes or a clear no for you? Why you approach problems the way you do instead of the way everyone else in your industry does.
Once you can articulate that, put it into words. Pair it with your personality if you’re a founder-led brand. Pair it with your portfolio if you’re client-facing and results-driven. Because once people can see how your brain works behind the scenes, and not just the front-facing result, they get the full picture of what it’s like to work with you.
And that full picture is what makes someone go, “yeah, sign me up for this. I get it. I want it.”
That’s your you-ness, doing exactly what it’s supposed to do, not personality, not “just be yourself.”
🎧 Listen on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify
