How to Make the Value of Your Work Obvious as a Coach or Practitioner
Communicating the value of our work to people who don’t know us is probably the number one challenge that self-employed coaches, consultants and practitioners share. And it’s not just a sales page where our messaging needs to land well. It’s in the written content, videos and emails we release into the world.
In this article, I’ll explore how to recognise your messaging gaps, how to move from talking about your tools to speaking to your clients’ real desires, and how to begin shaping a message that both honours what you want to say and resonates with the people it’s meant to reach.
— In this article —
What you see vs what they see
“The outcome is not important to me. I just want to do the work with them.”
A client said this to me in frustration recently, and I understood it completely. It’s exhausting trying to shape language around the value of what you do, especially when you’ve been trying to do that for years.
So I asked her to pause and think back to her own decision to buy from me. Did the outcome matter then?
Of course it did. Her decision to work with me was anchored in the desire for change. She was tired of doing business the conventional way, and because I articulated the outcome clearly, the benefit of buying felt obvious.
That’s the contradiction most practitioners miss.
As buyers, we care deeply about outcomes. We’re always trying to solve something, a challenge, a desire, a question. Yet when we step into the role of service provider, we default to describing our tools, our lineage, our process, and assume the right people will connect the dots.
When you’ve invested years studying a modality, it becomes central to how you understand your work. So you describe yourself as a somatic practitioner, say that you use Akashic Records, or explain that you guide inner child healing.
From your perspective, that feels accurate. From the perspective of someone who hasn’t studied what you’ve studied, it’s abstract. They’re not evaluating the elegance of your process. They’re quietly asking, “Will this help me resolve what I’m struggling with?”
Most modalities can help with almost anything. That’s part of their beauty. But when there’s no specificity, no clear bridge to a lived tension, nothing feels urgent.
If the connection between what you do and what they’re experiencing isn’t immediate, they move on.
Your clients are searching for relief, not a method
Communicating the benefit of your work requires a shift in orientation. Instead of explaining how you work once someone is inside the container, you need to articulate why someone would want to step into it in the first place.
Your clients aren’t searching for a modality. They’re searching for relief.
That relief might sound like: “I need to figure out how to say ‘no’ without guilt,” or “Why am I putting on weight when I’m doing all the right things?” or “How do I stop second-guessing myself in business?”
Your work may offer deep healing or powerful tools, but your message is the bridge between that depth and the moment your client finds themselves in. It allows them to recognise that what you offer is for them — not someday, but now.
When that bridge is clear, marketing feels less like explaining and more like resonance.
When it comes to naming the outcome, you might hesitate because it feels like you’re promising a result. You’re not. You’re articulating the direction of change your work supports. Every buyer is already trying to move from one state to another, from clarity instead of confusion, confidence instead of second-guessing, flow instead of misalignment. If you don’t name that movement, they can’t see why they need to work with you.
Connecting your modality to your lived experience
Your modality can support countless shifts. The key is choosing which one you are here to speak to.
There is usually a reason you were drawn to the work you now practise. A lived experience. A frustration you navigated. A turning point that prepared you to guide others along a similar path.
In an earlier iteration of my business, I used to lead with “Akashic Records Readings.” It was accurate and reflected my training, and it also felt spiritual and expansive.
When I spoke about it, I would often hear, “That sounds fascinating. I’d love to do that one day.”
One day.
Not today. Not this month. Someday.
People were intrigued, but there was no clear link between what I was offering and a specific tension they were navigating. The work was interesting, but it was not anchored to anything urgent in their lives.
As I began to see that pattern, I realised I was leading with the modality rather than the shift it supported. So I stepped back and asked myself a different question.
What have I actually done that I could help someone else do?
At the time, I was only in my first year of business. I did not have decades of client transformations to reference. But I had made a significant move in my own life. I had left a corporate career and carved out a new professional path that felt more aligned and more like me.
I had been a professional woman in a structured corporate environment, and I had navigated the discomfort of realigning my work with who I was becoming. That was lived experience, not theory.
When I reframed my work as “Career Realignment for Conscious Professional Women,” the depth inside the sessions did not change. The conversations did not change. What changed was the entry point.
Now someone could recognise herself. A professional woman feeling misaligned in her career could see her own story reflected back at her and understand why this work might matter to her now.
That is what it means to make the value of your work obvious. Not by simplifying it, but by grounding it in a transformation that is specific and lived.
Filling your messaging gaps with market research
Because we are so close to our own work, we often have blind spots. That’s why market research is so foundational to getting your messaging right.
Market research captures the language your ideal buyer uses to describe their own challenges and goals. When your content uses those same words, it resonates in a way that feels almost uncanny to the reader — like you’ve read their mind.
My business has been built on a steady flow of this kind of data. I gather it through a simple Google Form, woven into my onboarding process. When someone buys from me or goes through my application process, they’re invited to share where they are right now. Two questions I always include are:
“What is your most important business goal for the next six months?”
“What challenges have you had with achieving this goal?”
The answers to those two questions alone will show you exactly what language to use. You don’t need to guess what your clients care about. They’ll tell you, in their own words, if you create a simple space for them to do so.
You can gather this data through interviews too, but a form has one significant advantage: it gives you a consistent, ongoing stream of language coming into your business every time someone new joins. Over time, patterns emerge, and those patterns become the backbone of your messaging.
When the offer feels obvious
If people appreciate your work, yet hesitate to take the next step, consider whether you’re leading with the mechanism rather than the shift. Refine that, and everything downstream becomes easier.
When your language reflects a real, recognisable tension that your ideal client is experiencing, everything shifts. Your work stops sounding like an optional curiosity and starts to feel relevant and timely. The benefit of buying becomes easier to justify because they can see what they’re moving towards.
And if you would like support with this, messaging is one of the central pillars I teach inside How to Market Quietly and Still Be Successful.
I’d love to know what’s been most useful for you here. Let me know in the comments. ⤵
Danielle Gardner
The Quiet Marketer
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