When entering your client's reality goes wrong

I received an email recently that got me thinking about something I teach — specifically where it goes wrong when the method is there, but it hasn’t been executed very well. I won’t add it here and cast shade, because that wouldn’t be ok, so I’ll paraphrase some parts and highlight the structure to show you what I mean.

One of the things I teach is that your messaging needs to meet your client where they actually are. In the specific, lived experience of their average ordinary day. When that happens well, the reader feels seen and understood by you, can recognise that you are someone who could guide them to experience something different and it’s also where genuine trust begins.

But there's a place this goes wrong, and it looks like this: the person has learned to enter their client's reality, and in they go — at length, in accumulating detail, layer after layer of the same experience restated and reframed. The pain is piled on. One vivid, specific detail does the work of landing the reader in a recognisable moment. But it doesn't stop at one. It keeps going — “the messages, the lunches, the birthday, the tension at work, the reflection, the cart, the scrolling”. Each detail is an individually plausible set of things that might occur in a downward spiral, but together they produce heaviness and overwhelm. The reader isn't nodding in agreement — they're being catalogued. When you're writing from an extended focus on your client's pain, you are not in contact with your client. You are in contact with their wound. And those are very different places to write from. That distinction matters energetically, because it's not just the words that travel, it’s the energy behind them that comes along for the ride too. A reader who is sensitive will feel that as pressure. As someone working hard to make her feel something. And she will pull back, because that's the right response to pressure.

The same thing happens with the language itself. "You were taught to be useful." "You have become so good at being needed." "You were raised to give until there was nothing left." These are the same sentence dressed up in different clothes. In conscious marketing, each idea is said once, properly, then you’re done. Restating the same point four or five (or more..) times doesn't create depth. It creates length.

Then the email goes the other way entirely when it gets to the outcome section — what the other side of the issue looks like and here’s where it becomes vague and atmospheric: "rewire what your body believes is safe to want, to feel, and to receive." That's the kind of phrase that sounds meaningful but doesn't show a reader anything concrete about their actual life. Again, the email throws down a few paragraphs of floaty outcomes, that connect to the pain points, while still reading like a laundry list.

Over-specificity on the pain points, vagueness on the possibility. That imbalance doesn’t lead to trust.

And then the comes close. After all of that, the email deployed a conventional urgency closer — VIP is limited, the room is filling. It gave 3 full paragraphs of how much you will lose out if you don’t sign up! 3! The energy shifts from (attempted) connection to conversion, and the reader feels it. Urgency can work, but it needs to carry the same quality as everything that came before it — spacious, invitational, and honest. When it’s thrown in as pressure after a piece built on intimacy, it doesn't just feel mismatched, it makes the reader question the intimacy too.

This is what I mean when I say the technique without the discernment produces the opposite of its intention. The reader doesn't feel seen. She feels worked on. And she's perceptive enough to know the difference.

When you jump into your client’s map of the world, see their potential too, look down the path they can take to be relieved of their discomfort. When you do both elegantly and with kindness, you are sending an energetic signature of something they can look forward to rather than something they want to run from.

Sprinkle the salt of understanding on their problems, rather than rubbing the salt into the wound.