Sounding like yourself in your marketing is way harder than the advice makes it seem. It’s not because you’re bad at it, or because you don’t know yourself, or because you haven’t tried. It’s because actually observing how you naturally show up — the specific words, the pacing, the way you land things — is a skill that doesn’t come naturally to anyone, even people who are otherwise deeply self-aware.
When someone tells you to “just write in your voice,” they’re skipping over the actual hard part. You can’t write in a voice you’ve never named. And most coaches have never taken the time to step outside themselves and study what their voice even is. That’s not a personal failing. It’s a normal blind spot, and it’s the one thing sitting underneath every piece of content that comes out flat or off or not-quite-you.
The good news is that once you’ve done the observation work, you have it forever. Your voice stops being a guess every time you sit down to write, and starts being a set of specific patterns you can actually use.
The advice assumes you can hear your voice AND translate it to the page in real time. Most coaches can hear it in casual conversation but can’t translate it to writing, because writing your voice is a completely different skill than speaking it. One happens automatically. The other requires you to observe yourself.
That’s why every attempt to “sound more like yourself” ends up either sounding corporate (because your default writing mode is the professional mask) or oversharing (because when you try to be “authentic” without a framework, you overcompensate into vulnerability that doesn’t fit). The dial has two settings, and neither of them is actually you.
The version of you your best clients love — the one they quote back to you in referrals — sits in the specific middle. Warm, direct, expert. A little irreverent maybe, or dry, or ridiculously specific about the things you care about. That’s the register you use when you’re comfortable and unmonitored. And nobody has ever asked you to sit down and name what that register actually sounds like.
You’ve never sat down and watched how you naturally show up.
That’s the actual missing piece. Not talent, not consistency, not confidence. Observation. Every coach with a strong recognizable voice has done this work at some point, formally or accidentally. She’s watched herself talk, noticed what she does and doesn’t say, and built up a mental (or written) map of her own patterns. Without that map, every piece of content is a from-scratch guess at what “sounding like you” means today. Most days, the guess is wrong.
Three moves, and they have to happen in this order.
Move 1: Do the observation work first. Record three voice memos to yourself about your work, five minutes each. Pretend you’re leaving a message for a friend who asked what you’ve been up to. Then transcribe them (Otter, MacWhisper, or ChatGPT can do this). Highlight every phrase or cadence you’d never write on your website but you naturally say out loud. Those highlights are the raw material of your voice, and they’ve been living in you the whole time.
Move 2: Build the working document. Not a corporate brand-voice PDF. A working doc you actually reference. Four sections: what you say (the specific words and phrases from your memos), what you don’t say (words that feel fake in your mouth), what you talk about (topics and angles you naturally bring in), what you avoid (topics that feel off-brand for you). Keep it messy and specific. It grows as you notice more.
Move 3: Run every piece through the doc before publishing. Or better, feed the doc to AI as the voice filter, so the drafts you’re starting from already sound like you instead of like ChatGPT default. This is the move that makes writing stop feeling like a costume.
The problem with AI isn’t the fact that you’re using it. It’s that you’re starting from scratch every single time you open ChatGPT. Every new prompt, every new document, every new session — AI has zero memory of who you are, so it generates flat filler by default.
The move is to use AI strategically, in a way that trains it on your voice a little more with every interaction. You feed it your voice document. You correct its drafts when they don’t sound like you. You save the ones that DO sound like you as reference examples inside a Claude project or a custom GPT. Over time, the tool learns your specific patterns, and the drafts it hands back start needing only minor tweaks instead of full rewrites.
That’s when AI becomes genuinely powerful in your business. You’re not fighting it. You’re not letting it turn your marketing into ChatGPT filler. You’ve trained it as a partner that already knows how you show up, which means content stops taking 3 hours and starts taking 20 minutes. And you still sound like the actual specific human running the business, because the AI is now producing YOUR voice instead of its default one.
If you want a starting point for the observation work, the free Brand Voice Workbook is the exact document I use with clients — it’s the first step to sounding like you in your own marketing, and the base you’d feed AI to train it on you.
Take a common coaching homepage sentence — the kind every coach ends up writing at some point. Something like: “I help ambitious women create businesses aligned with their values so they can live a life they love.”
Read it out loud. It’s fine. It’s also completely interchangeable with what 400 other coaches have on their homepages right now.
Here’s how it typically evolves.
Version 1 — The corporate default. “I help ambitious women create businesses aligned with their values so they can live a life they love.” Safe, credential-adjacent, competent. And utterly forgettable, because it sounds like a stranger wrote it about someone she doesn’t know.
Version 2 — The oversharing panic version. “After my burnout in 2021 and a lot of therapy, I realized I couldn’t keep hustling for other people’s approval. So now I help women in the same season create businesses that actually align with who they are underneath all the pressure and expectations.” This is what she writes when someone tells her to “get vulnerable.” All setup, no landing, and it hands her clients the emotional load of her healing journey before they’ve even met her.
The private/public line is a whole conversation on its own. There’s a real difference between oversharing (dumping your unprocessed pain on your audience) and honest specificity (sharing the parts of your experience that make your reader feel less alone in hers). I’m unpacking the specific test for where that line lives in a follow-up post landing September 16 — for now, know that if the panic version above is your default, the fix isn’t “share less.” It’s “share deliberately, from the specific parts of your story that create connection instead of emotional load.”
Version 3 — The 80/20 you-in-it version. “I work with women who’ve built successful businesses on external metrics and are quietly wondering when it’s going to feel like theirs. That’s the specific move I’m good at — helping you stop optimizing your business for who you thought you needed to be, and rebuild it around who you actually are now.” Same coach, same offer, same target client. The difference is that version 3 has a specific point of view, uses direct language, and doesn’t hide behind either credentials or trauma.
The same three-version shift works on an Instagram caption opener. A relationship coach for high-achieving women dating after 40 might open version 1 with “5 signs he’s the right one for you” (generic), version 2 with “After my divorce broke me, I finally learned…” (oversharing), and version 3 with “The specific thing that keeps high-achieving women in situationships longer than they’d stay in a real job — and how to spot it in the first three dates.” Version 3 is the one that gets saved, screenshotted, and DM’d around.
Your voice is already there. Your friends recognize it in a text. Your best clients quote it back to you when they refer someone. What most coaches have never done is the excavation work of writing it down into a document that runs UNDER every piece of content, including the AI-written pieces.
That’s Week 5 of From the Brand Up — the observation work, the voice document, AND the setup guide for turning it into a Claude project that keeps writing like you every future session.
The obvious win is that your content stops sounding generic. That’s the smallest thing that changes.
The bigger shift is that content stops feeling like a costume. You stop switching modes between “IG voice” and “website voice” and “email voice.” You’re just writing in the voice you’ve already named. Copywriters give you back copy that sounds like you. AI produces drafts that sound like you. Your best clients tell you the site feels like reading you.
The other shift, which people don’t see coming until it happens, is that content stops taking three hours to produce. When AI is trained on your voice, the drafts it hands back need small tweaks instead of full rewrites. When you sit down to write from scratch, you’re not reinventing your register every time — you’re just applying it. Twenty-minute posts start replacing three-hour posts, and the posts sound more like you, not less.
That’s the real transformation. Not more posting. Not louder posting. Content that finally sounds like the actual specific human running the business, produced in a fraction of the time it used to take.
From the Brand Up is a 6-week live group program for building the words, stories, and voice that attract the clients you actually want. Built for coaches and consultants ready to do the observation work once and walk out with a voice document, a story bank, and a trained AI setup that carries them for years. Waitlist gets first access, beta pricing, and the 10 seats before anyone else. If this post is your work, get on the list at fromthebrandup.com