If you’re a business owner in the online space — or really, any space — I can almost guarantee that at one point in your brand’s existence, you downloaded a workbook titled something like “Find Your Brand Voice in Five Easy Steps” or “Brand Voice Clarity Workbook” or “The Ultimate Guide to Sounding Like Yourself™.”
You made yourself a coffee. You took a digital detox like the instructions said, so other people’s vibes wouldn’t mess with your magic. You sat down. You followed the steps.
You spilled your little heart out. You spilled your little brain out. You journaled and journales.
You highlighted your favorite sentences like a star student.
You picked your five voice adjectives.
Jotted down your values.
Wrote a paragraph about what you stand for and who your ideal client is.
And for a second, you even thought, maybe this time…
Maybe this one’s actually gonna work.
And then?
…crickets.
No wave of clarity. No “aha” moment.
Just you, staring at your screen like, Cool. So now what?
Great. Another PDF destined for a slow death by digital dust — sitting somewhere between your abandoned Notion templates and that online course you swore you were gonna finish.
Dude. We’ve all been there.
I’ve been there.
And I’ve been guilty of creating this kind of thing early in my brand voice builder and creative copywriter career.
I meant well. I swear. Don’t come for me.
But, after getting obsessed with brand voice, personality, and just overall identity, I just don’t think it’s enough anymore.
So I want to be crystal clear and its really important to me that you know that…
If it didn’t work for you, you did absolutely nothing wrong.
You could have filled out that workbook with complete and total determination, devotion…A+ desperation, even. Demonstrating full main character energy.
And you still wouldn’t have gotten what you really needed — which is a fully embodied understanding of how you want to show up, how you’re already showing up, and how the hell to put that all into action.
Now, I don’t think most business owners selling voice workbooks are out here trying to scam you. I think they mean well.
I’m not knocking every voice workbook out there. I’m sure some of them, somewhere are great.
But I am saying that workbooking your way to a brand voice? Rarely works.
Especially not when you’re a service provider — and your brain is trained to analyze, self-edit, overthink, and spiral like it’s a competitive sport.
Because even if the workbook was well-designed, and even if the prompts were good…
What ends up happening is this:
You start answering the questions, and you’re already self-editing.
You’re second-guessing what you’re writing.
You’re trying to reverse-engineer the “right” answer.
You start sounding like what you think you’re supposed to sound like.
And what you’re left with is a beautifully written paragraph of absolute nothingness.
Looks good. Sounds good.
Means nada.
Stuff that sounds like it should work… but doesn’t actually help.
It’s just another pretty paragraph that makes you feel like you did something, but now you’re still staring at the blinking cursor, wondering why it’s still so hard.
But the thing is — and this is important — the problem isn’t that the questions themselves are inherently bad.
The problem is you’re trying to do this work in a vacuum — alone, with no feedback, no reflection, no actual back-and-forth.
Trying to find your brand voice solo is like trying to read the label from inside the bottle.
You’re swimming in your own ideas. Your patterns. Your preferences. Your spirals. Your comparison traps.
The stuff you think you’re supposed to say.
The people you’re low-key measuring yourself against.
The aesthetic you’re trying to keep up with.
The client you’re secretly trying to impress.
All of it is living rent-free in your head. You can’t help it.
So of course it’s hard to see what actually makes your voice distinct.
Of course it’s hard to know what to write or how to write it.
You’re in it. You’re too close to it.
But if I asked you to describe your best client?
You’d be off to the races, wouldn’t you?
You could probably rattle off exactly what makes them awesome.
Where they’re stuck. Why they’re stuck.
What makes their work different from everyone else in their space.
Why people keep coming back to work with them.
Why?
Because you’ve got distance. You’ve got perspective.
Brand voice work? It needs that same perspective.
And that’s the thing no workbook can give you:
Distance.
Perspective.
A mirror.
It can be really hard to self-diagnose your tone, your energy, your vibe…
Especially if you’re not confident in it yet.
It’s even harder to reverse-engineer your own charisma when you’ve been low-key convincing yourself you don’t have any.
What you need is someone on the other side of the metaphorical bar listening, scribbling notes on a napkin while you talk, and saying:
“Hey, did you hear what you just said? That. That’s the good shit. Let’s build on that.”
The kind of person who says:
“I love the way you talk about this.”
“Your POV on that? No one else is saying it like that.”
“Also, your GIF usage? Top tier. Never change.”
“Omg, I love how much you use that word.”
Voice doesn’t live in the workbook.
It lives in your rambles.
It lives in the “wait, go back to that thing you said earlier.”
It lives in the moments where you get fired up.
Or bored. Or curious, so on and so forth.
You catch my drift.
If you’re listening to this, I’m guessing the workbook didn’t quite do what you hoped it would.
But, I’m oh so glad you’re here.
Because it means you’re still curious.
Still poking at it.
Still willing to figure out this whole brand voice thing for yourself.
And I love that for us.
Buying the workbook wasn’t a bad move.
It got you thinking.
It got you trying.
It just didn’t give you the reflection you really needed.
Because voice doesn’t come from circling adjectives alone.
It comes from the messy chats. The part where you say something out loud and someone goes, “Wait — that. That thing you just said? I love that.”
Maybeeee with a dry-humoured little podcast host in a hoodie who knows how to pull it out of you.
Just saying.
Or maybe it’s a friend you trust.
Either way. Let it riff my beautiful friend.
K, cool. That’s enough from me for today.
Next time on It’s Just Words on the Internet, we’re going to take aim at those sweet, sweet, supposedly helpful brand voice adjectives.
See you next time.
Lovveee youuuu byeee.
