Borrowed Strategies Don't Fit
- 2 days ago
- 14 min read
Updated: 24 hours ago
How to stop applying other people's approaches and build marketing that's actually your own
There's a kind of silence that happens after you implement a strategy that was supposed to work, and it doesn't.
It’s not a dramatic crash or anything you can point to. Just... silence from low engagement, calls that don't convert, or content that falls flat. It’s a growing awareness that you're doing all the things and still not moving.
And then the thought that follows, more often than we care to admit, is “Maybe I'm the problem.”
If you've been there, if you've invested in the course, the program, followed the experts, tried the tactics, and still find yourself exhausted and wondering whether you're simply not built for this, I want to offer you something different
Not a new strategy, but a different diagnosis.
What You've Been Told the Problem Is
When marketing feels hard, the reasons you're handed are usually some variation of these:
You need to be more consistent, more disciplined, more visible. You're overthinking it. You're not showing up enough. You need to post more, engage more, niche down more, be bolder, be louder, stop playing small…
The subtext is always the same: the strategy works, you just need to work harder at it.
And because the strategies are delivered by people who genuinely succeeded using them, the logic seems airtight: they got results, you haven't. The variable is you.
So you try harder. You force yourself through the resistance. You override the part of you that says this doesn't feel right, because you've been told that resistance is just fear, and fear is something to push through.
And the cycle continues:
Hope. Investment. Anticipation. Implementation. Hard work. Disappointment. Self-judgment. Discouragement. Salvaging the small pieces that worked and touting those as wins when asked.
Then a new offer arrives that promises the breakthrough the last one didn't deliver, and you find yourself wondering: "maybe this is the one."
I know this cycle because I lived it. And what I want to tell you is this: the problem is most likely not what you think it is.
What's Actually Happening
Most of the marketing strategies circulating in the online business world were created inside someone else's context: their audience, their personality, their competitive landscape, their business model, their values, their way of showing up in the world.
And when you try to implement those strategies, you're not just learning new tactics, you're trying to transplant an approach that grew out of entirely different soil into yours, and wondering why it won't take root.
You don’t plant a cactus in Ireland and expect it to thrive.
The friction you feel isn't resistance to marketing. It's resistance to performing a version of marketing that doesn't belong to you.
That's a completely different problem. And it requires a completely different solution.
The Belief That Makes This Invisible
There's a belief that has become so normalized in the entrepreneurial world that almost nobody questions it anymore.
"Marketing just sucks."
People treat the discomfort of marketing as universal and inevitable, a rite of passage, the price of building something. And because peers, coaches, and business culture all reinforce this, many stop questioning it entirely.
When marketing feels awful, the conclusion isn't this approach is wrong for me. The conclusion is of course it feels awful, it's supposed to.
Discomfort gets reinterpreted as proof the strategy is right, not as a signal worth listening to.
One of the core belief shifts I work with in my clients is this one:
Marketing does not have to feel miserable to be effective. Friction may actually be evidence that the approach is misaligned.
That shift alone changes everything.
Why You Blame Yourself Instead of the System
The marketing industry makes very specific promises: Follow this process, apply this framework, execute these tactics, and success will follow.
That messaging leaves no room for context, individual differences, or nuance. It's outcome-oriented and certain in a way that sounds trustworthy.
So when you invest your time, money, energy, and hope into one of these systems and don't get the promised results, you rarely question the system. You question yourself.
You assume you implemented incorrectly, you lacked discipline or consistency, you misunderstood the instructions, you’re missing some essential quality or skill, or you're just bad at marketing.
Because you trust what you purchased, the logic becomes: "if this worked for them and for others, I must be the problem."
Over time this accumulates. Embarrassment, discouragement, diminished self-trust, the sense that everyone else seems to be making this work except you.
But here's what I've seen in private conversations, when people feel safe enough to be honest: many more people are experiencing this than anyone realizes. They just don't say it publicly because by the time strategies have failed, shame starts to set in. People openly share the new strategy they're trying, but they keep it to themselves when it doesn't work.
What you encounter publicly are success stories, glowing testimonials, and the same small handful of exceptional client results showcased as though they represent the normal outcome of using the system.
You are one of many capable, intelligent, committed entrepreneurs who are struggling for the same reason: you've been trying to fit yourself into a system that was never designed around your specific context, values, and way of working.
What You're Missing That Changes Everything
Marketing is fundamentally communication rooted in deep understanding.
Marketing is helping people recognize their problem, understand how it affects their lives, and see a path toward a better future.
Because of that, effective marketing can never be universal or formulaic. It has to emerge from the specific intersection of:
your audience's beliefs, awareness, desires, and struggles
the unique way the problem shows up in their lives
the particular solution you offer
and your personality, values, communication style, and vision
Trying to copy another person's strategy is by definition unlikely to work because the surrounding conditions are never identical. What worked for someone else was shaped by their audience, positioning, timing, market landscape, offer, personality, and way of communicating. You can't transplant that into an entirely different context and expect the same result.
What I want to invite you into is the possibility of something different:
What if you stopped outsourcing authority over your marketing and started building an approach that is genuinely your own?
You CAN actually enjoy your marketing
I know that might sound naïve. Or like a promise you've heard before in different packaging.
So let me tell you how I know this isn't wishful thinking.
When I started my first business, I did what most entrepreneurs do. I immersed myself in marketing education. I took courses, joined programs, invested in coaching, downloaded the lead magnets, followed the experts. Each time, I showed up as a genuinely willing student. But it never felt right or worked as intended.
What made it stranger was that another part of my professional life had never felt that way. Long before I started my business, I'd been naturally drawn to connecting with people across the world. When LinkedIn first emerged, I used it playfully: building relationships, exchanging ideas, enjoying the process. I wasn't thinking about marketing. I was just doing what came naturally.
When I started my business and learned conventional marketing, I felt the contrast immediately. On one side: the exhausting, performative feeling of externally imposed systems. On the other: the energizing, relational experience I'd already been having through genuine connection. What I hadn't realized was that what I'd been doing all along was marketing, just marketing that had grown from who I actually was.
That contrast was the turning point. Effective marketing, I began to understand, was not about executing prescribed tactics. It was about finding a way of communicating, relating, and building trust that was personally aligned.
The borrowed strategies didn’t feel wrong because I was bad at marketing. They felt wrong because I was trying to replace something natural with something designed for someone else entirely.
There's something else I went through that shapes the work I do now. At one point in my entrepreneurial journey, I burned out. One of the root causes was that I had been building a business on top of inherited assumptions about what success should look like, what productivity should feel like, what growth was supposed to require, without ever examining whether those assumptions fit who I actually was or the life I wanted.
With my next business, the one I’m in now, I rebuilt from the foundation upward. Clarifying what kind of life I wanted, what work felt aligned, how business could support well-being rather than erode it.
That experience is now central to everything I do with clients.
So What Can You Do About It?
The first question I'd ask you to sit with is not "what marketing strategy should I try next?"
It's: What do I actually want?
Not in a vague, distant sense. In a very concrete one.
What does an ideal day look like? How do you want to spend your time? How much client interaction do you want? What pace feels sustainable? What role does freedom play in your life?
When entrepreneurs start with these questions, really start with this, it changes everything that follows.
Now there's a "North Star" through which to evaluate every strategy, tactic, and piece of advice: Does this move me toward the life and business I want? Or does it pull me away from it?
Without that foundation, you become highly vulnerable to chasing externally defined success models that may be completely incompatible with what you personally want.
I also invite you to start paying attention to what energizes you and what drains you. What ways of communicating feel natural. What forms of visibility feel sustainable. Not as information to override, but as valuable data about the kind of marketing you might actually be able to sustain.
Marketing should not be built first and life squeezed around it afterward. Life, values, and vision come first, and marketing should emerge in service of that foundation.
What Becomes Possible
I want to offer you a future state that might feel hard to believe right now, because I understand that the cultural conditioning around marketing can make the following sentence sound completely unrealistic:
It is possible to enjoy marketing.
Not tolerate it. Not white-knuckle your way through it. Actually enjoy it.
One of my clients, once she stopped forcing herself into strategies that felt misaligned and started building marketing that emerged from who she actually is, said something I haven't forgotten:
"It's not even marketing anymore."
That shift changes more than business outcomes. It transforms the emotional experience of entrepreneurship itself.
Instead of only experiencing moments of fulfillment in direct client work while resenting the rest of the business, people begin enjoying the whole ecosystem — creating content, communicating ideas, talking about their work, connecting with people, sharing insights. The business stops feeling divided between "the meaningful work" and "the draining work."
The ripple effects are real:
less procrastination
less emotional resistance
less burnout
more sustainability
more joy
more energy
and a greater ability to keep building long term
The future I help clients build is not "I can tolerate marketing." It's:
My marketing can become one of the most fulfilling parts of my business because it becomes an authentic extension of who I am and how I help people.
What This Actually Looks Like
When entrepreneurs struggle with marketing, they generally move in one of several directions:
Giving up
Some give up. The exhaustion and accumulated disappointment become too heavy, and they conclude that entrepreneurship just isn’t for them. Some return to employment. Some pivot into different business models hoping a different type of work will somehow avoid the same struggle. This outcome breaks my heart because all that hard earned expertise gets lost.
Staying stuck
Those who keep going often stay trapped in the same cycle of buying more courses, joining new programs, trying new frameworks, searching for the strategy that will finally solve it. But because the foundational assumption stays unchanged — that success comes from implementing someone else's formula — they recreate the same experience. And their cash reserve gets depleted.
Trying harder
Some try to force themselves into stricter habits and more consistent execution of strategies that already feel unnatural. But adding self-pressure on top of misalignment doesn't resolve the misalignment, it intensifies the drain.
Outsourcing
Another common response is outsourcing. I hate marketing. I'll hire someone to do it for me. But in my experience, many done-for-you marketers operate from the same flawed premise as the courses and programs: they apply standardized approaches without deeply adapting them to the specific business, audience, values, and communication style of the person they're working with. Outsourcing often reproduces the same misalignment, just at a much higher financial cost.
Hiring a coach
This is an excellent solution, but with a big caveat.
Many coaches unconsciously reproduce the same problem that created your struggle in the first place. They teach from their own experience and their own successes. They guide you toward implementing variations of what worked for them, or for their clients, without deeply exploring whether that approach truly fits your unique context.
In those situations, the coach isn't actually helping you build your marketing system. They're coaching you to better execute someone else's.
All of these responses share one thing: they're trying to solve the symptoms without addressing the root cause.
What's Different About Building from the Inside Out
What I'm offering is different: helping you discover and build your own.
The work I do with clients begins much deeper than content calendars or funnels. It begins with questions like:
What kind of life does this person actually want?
Why are they building this business?
What are their values?
What are their natural strengths?
What kind of work do they enjoy?
What kind of relationships do they want with clients?
What does success actually mean to them personally?
Without clarity around these foundational elements, marketing decisions stay disconnected and reactive. Every new piece of advice becomes confusing because there's no internal compass to evaluate whether it aligns with the business and life you actually want to build.
But when that foundation exists, strategy can emerge from it, not be imposed on top of confusion.
Hiring the right coach for you
If you're evaluating professionals to work with on this, whether that's me or someone else, here's what I'd encourage you to look for:
Start with referrals from people who've actually worked with this coach. And don't just ask whether they got results. Ask how the professional worked with them. Did they spend meaningful time understanding who the client is? Did they explore what the client wants from their life and business? Did the strategy evolve from the client's specific context?
Pay attention to rigidity versus flexibility. When you talk to the coach, if they quickly jump into describing "the strategies that work best" without first understanding you deeply, that can signal formula-based thinking. Ask them what happens when a client says this doesn't feel aligned or this doesn't feel sustainable. Pay attention to how they respond: a professional who listens to that and adapts is very different from one who responds with "you just need more discipline and consistency."
Trust your body and your emotional responses. Once you start working with them, if their recommendations repeatedly create tension, contraction, or dread, that's information, not something to override.
The right professional should deepen your clarity, alignment, and self-understanding, not pressure you to disconnect from yourself in order to fit a system.
What My Clients Have Experienced
I want to share a few specific examples of what the kind of shift I’ve talked about actually looks like in practice.
Avital came to this work not seeing herself as "someone who does marketing." Marketing felt foreign to her identity, separate from who she was and how she worked. We built from the foundation upward: her mission, her vision, her audience, her right-fit clients, her offers, her communications. Not as a one-time strategy session, but as an ongoing process of developing communications month after month in alignment with who she is and the kind of business she wants to build.
Her marketing began producing clients. But the deeper transformation was psychological: she no longer experiences marketing as something separate from herself. She now sees herself as someone who does marketing, but in a way that feels aligned with her values, her beliefs, her way of helping, and the identity of her business.
Her monthly workshop, which started with 2 people, grew to 20+ attendees with 50–60 registrations overall.
Andy initially experienced visibility and marketing as deeply uncomfortable. He is highly introverted so he initially hesitated to post publicly, and couldn't imagine himself reaching out or engaging in marketing activities. Rather than pushing him into a high-visibility strategy, I met him exactly where he was. We started with very small, manageable forms of communication: short posts, gentle visibility, gradual experimentation, messaging rooted in genuine understanding of the people he wanted to help.
His introversion wasn't treated as a problem to overcome. We built communication strategies around his personality. As his content resonated and received appreciation, his confidence grew naturally. His marketing evolved into something broader and more relational: meaningful conversations, collaborations, partnerships. He began attracting more clients while discovering that marketing didn't have to feel unnatural or draining.
The transformation wasn't that he became someone else, but that he found a version of marketing compatible with who he already was.
Debbie grew from zero coaching clients to approximately 20 active coaching clients within about a year. She now receives roughly 4–5 calls per week from people interested in working with her. She is booked for paid workshops for the next nine months.
Ricki achieved the highest workshop attendance she'd ever had after implementing the communication process I teach in her messaging.
What stands out across all of these stories is not just the business metrics. It's the integrated nature of what changed: visibility, relationships, trust, aligned communication, confidence, business sustainability, and meaningful client acquisition all reinforcing each other.
The real fear that might be stopping you
By the time many of the people I work with find me, they're not merely frustrated with marketing. They're carrying the emotional aftermath of repeated disappointment.
They've invested financially, emotionally, mentally, and energetically into programs, strategies, and experts that promised certainty and transformation, and ultimately left them feeling even more disconnected from themselves.
Even when what I say resonates, another part of them stays guarded:
"Why would this work for me when nothing else has?"
The fear isn't about marketing failure anymore. It's about enduring another emotional disappointment, another investment, another surge of hope, another collapse into self-doubt.
I understand that fear, and I want to say directly: your skepticism is reasonable. Your hesitation makes sense, it was earned through real experience.
What I can tell you is this: the work I do is not built on another formula for you to execute. It's built on this:
You already contain everything you need to market effectively.
The curiosity, empathy, expertise, insight, care, and desire to help that make you good at serving clients: those are also the foundation of marketing that works.
The problem has never been that you lack these qualities. The problem is that you've been taught to see marketing as something separate from yourself and separate from the work you naturally do.
You don't need to become a different person.
You need guidance in organizing and expressing what's already there.
The Even Deeper Thing I Want You to Know
Many of my clients tell me at some point: "This is about much more than marketing."
They're right. Because what we're really working on is rebuilding self-trust after years of outsourcing authority to external experts, of ignoring bodily resistance, emotional exhaustion, lack of resonance, dread, and inner knowing, all in order to follow "proven" strategies from people positioned as authorities.
And every time they overrode themselves and the strategy still failed, the internal conclusion became: "Not only can I not trust myself, I can't even trust myself to know what's right for me."
That's a deep rupture, and healing it is not about blindly rejecting expertise. It's about learning how to integrate external guidance without abandoning yourself in the process.
True self-trust isn't certainty. It's the ability to stay connected to yourself while learning, adapting, and adjusting.
And I believe, I've seen this again and again, that you are allowed to build success in ways that do not require constant self-abandonment.
Marketing simply becomes the doorway through which you rediscover that.
What I'm Inviting You Into
The mindset shift at the center of all of this is one I come back to over and over in my work:
Marketing is not separate from helping people. Marketing is helping people earlier in their journey.
Every one of your clients starts somewhere: confused, stuck, unaware of the real problem, trapped in limiting beliefs, uncertain about what kind of help they need.
The point at which someone signs up to work with you is not the beginning of their transformation. It's one point along a much longer path. Your marketing is part of that path.
Through your content, your messaging, your stories, your insights, and your conversations, you're already helping future clients recognize their struggles, understand their beliefs, see their patterns, imagine new possibilities. That's not separate from client work. That is client work.
It's helping people before you know their names, before they book a call, before they pay you.
Once that shift takes hold, marketing stops feeling manipulative or disconnected. It becomes an extension of the same care, insight, expertise, and transformation you already bring to your direct client relationships.
Instead of sitting down at your desk thinking I have to market myself, you begin thinking: "There are people out there struggling right now. What do they need to hear from me today?"
That's a completely different energy. And it produces completely different results.
Ready to Start?
If this resonates, if you've been sitting with that nagging sense that the problem might not be what you've been told it is, I'd love to continue this conversation with you.
If you'd like to explore what this work looks like in a conversation, book a call with me and let's talk about where you are and what might be possible.
Or if you prefer, you can sign up to receive my emails. Each week I go deeper into the ideas in this post, the beliefs that keep entrepreneurs stuck, the shifts that change everything, and the practical work of building marketing that actually feels like you.
And if you'd like a more structured starting point, download The Roadmap to Fun & Profitable Client Attraction, a guide to understanding how aligned marketing actually works, and where to begin.
Comments