This one is about a gap I see in almost every creative I work with. The gap between how alive and compelling you are when you talk about your work in person, and how little of that survives by the time it reaches your website, your Instagram, or your emails. It’s about why that happens, and, more hopefully, about how to bring the real you back onto the page.
Let me start with the part I love most, because it’s where the good news is hiding.
There’s a moment I see again and again, and it’s one of my favourites. We’ll be talking, and I’ll ask about a piece of work, or a project they’ve just finished, and something shifts. They lean in. Their voice changes. Out it all comes… why this particular detail mattered, the thing they noticed that nobody else would have, the bit they were quietly proud of, the small problem they solved so elegantly you’d never know it had been a problem at all. They light up. And you can feel, just listening, exactly how much they love what they do.
It’s the most natural, most compelling thing in the world. And the loveliest part is that they have no idea they’re doing it. They think they’re just chatting about their work. They don’t realise that, without trying at all, they’ve just done the warmest, truest kind of selling there is. Simply by being themselves.
And then someone looks them up
The trouble comes a little later.
Because that same person, so alive and warm in conversation, will often have a website, or an Instagram, or a set of emails, where almost none of that aliveness has survived. The words are perfectly nice. Nothing is wrong, exactly. But the passion has gone quiet. The enthusiasm that’s so infectious in person has been smoothed into something more careful, more measured, more… professional. And whoever’s reading it can’t quite feel what the person across the table felt.
I think this happens to nearly all of us, and I think I understand why. Something comes over us when we sit down to write about ourselves. We decide we ought to sound like a proper business. We worry that being excited, or personal, or a little bit much, isn’t quite the done thing. So we tuck the personality away and reach for the tidy, sensible version instead. And the tidy, sensible version is precisely the one that leaves the you out.
If you recognise yourself in this, I’d gently point out that it’s one of the loveliest problems you could possibly have. Because it means the very best thing your marketing could ever have already exists. You don’t need to find it, or build it, or become someone louder to get hold of it. It’s you. Your passion, your particular way of caring, the things you can’t help getting excited about. It pours out of you the moment you start talking about the work you love. The only thing missing is a way of letting it through onto the page.
The most distinctive thing you have
There’s something worth sitting with here, too.
We spend so long worrying about how to stand out. How to be different from everyone else doing what we do. And the answer has been quietly sitting inside us the whole time. Because the single most distinctive thing you have is simply you. Your personality. The specific things you love and notice and care about, in the particular way only you do. No one else has those. They can’t be copied, or borrowed, or matched.
Which means the warmth that comes pouring out when you talk isn’t a nice extra, sitting on top of the “real” marketing. It’s very close to the heart of it. And it’s the very thing we tend to leave behind when we tidy ourselves up for the page.
Letting it through doesn’t take a grand strategy. It mostly takes noticing. Noticing how you sound when you’re talking to someone who’s really interested. The words you reach for. The bits you get animated about. The details you can’t help mentioning. And then letting a little more of that find its way into the places people meet you, so that the person who finds you online recognises the same warm, real you they’d meet if they were lucky enough to catch you in a conversation.
There’s a quiet relief in this, as well. Sounding like yourself is so much easier than the careful, buttoned-up writing we make ourselves do. You don’t have to strain to be clever. You only have to sound the way you do when you’re excited about your work. Which is the most natural thing in the world for you.
I think we spend a great deal of energy trying to become more impressive, when the thing that actually draws people to us is something we already do without thinking. We light up. We care, visibly. We can’t quite help ourselves.
Perhaps the work was never to add anything at all. Perhaps it was only ever to let a little more of that through.
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