Let’s clear this up: being consistent isn’t bad. But consider this…
What if your content keeps showing people the same part of your expertise?
For many service-led businesses, content is one of the first places your audience starts working out who you are, what you understand and, most importantly, whether they see you as somebody who can help them.
Showing up regularly therefore matters, yes. But what if they’re still only seeing a piece of the whole picture? Consistency stops looking like the main goal, right?
I’ve been thinking about this over the past week after an audit of my last six weeks of content exposed a flaw in my current process. I have a weekly rhythm I’m happy with. Monday to Wednesday, I get my idea together. Thursday morning, I use my content process to assist the writing of this newsletter, and Friday I repurpose it into the emails and social content I need for the following week.
It works. I’m consistent. But the audit told another side of the story I hadn’t considered.
It showed I was very good at explaining what I believe about AI, how I use it and what I think people need to protect when they bring it into their content process. I was happy about that.
But it showed much less of how I understand somebody’s problem, what I notice when they explain what is going wrong and how I work out what actually needs fixing. Not so good.
So essentially, people could understand my position on AI, but they had less opportunity to see the judgement behind the work they might actually come to me for. I had unknowingly developed the writing part of the process, but I hadn’t zoomed out enough to give the same attention to what the content was collectively helping people understand.
That was the gap.
And that’s not to say I’m not satisfied with the individual pieces. I am. But when I stopped looking at them one by one, I could see that I was consistently showing the same part of my expertise.
Because it is so easy to keep returning to the parts of our work that feel most natural to talk about and just use a different story or put a different spin on it. That might be our beliefs, the advice we repeat or the tools we use. All of those things can be useful, while important parts of how we actually help remain inside client conversations and the work itself.
So, you may be publishing regularly and saying worthwhile things, but, like me, you have to consider whether it’s the full picture or only part of it.
When was the last time you wrote a post showing how you recognise that the problem somebody has described is not the real issue? Or what you pay attention to during a difficult conversation? Or why you choose one approach instead of another?
Because those moments show more than what you know. And, on reflection, I’ve realised they are the bits that reveal the care, judgement and experience behind how you and I work.
That doesn’t mean publishing your whole methodology or turning private client situations into content. It might mean taking a small part of a familiar problem and explaining what you notice, what you question or how you help somebody see it differently.
The question I keep coming back to is this: What do people need to know about what I do as a service so they can decide, before they even speak to me, whether I may be somebody who can help them?
I don’t want to convince people that they should work with me. I want them to have enough information to understand what I do, how I help, what matters to me and what they may experience if we work together.
Then they can make their own decision.
The audit made me realise that I have some work to do. Not by replacing the weekly process, but by changing what informs it.
I still want to let the idea percolate and develop during the week. I want the freedom to draw from current work, problems I’m noticing, networking conversations and the things that are actually happening now.
What I don’t want is to keep reaching the end of the week and thinking, “What shall I talk about next week?” with no wider view of what the content needs to be doing.
The answer, for me, is not another weekly plan. I’ve tried that and it doesn’t work for me. It feels too restrictive and limiting, like it changes or forces certain pieces of content in a direction that might not naturally be the best one.
I’m now putting time into working out what planning means to me and what that plan should contain across a month, with the focus on building trust. Enough structure to notice where I have kept returning to a familiar part of my work and where something important has barely appeared.
But I still want the ideas to grow out of what is actually happening around me, rather than being invented to fill a plan.
I see this approach as freedom within a structure, with the aim of creating relief, not more pressure or another set of boxes to tick.
And because I’m now thinking more carefully about what happens before I write, it has naturally made me curious about what could support that planning layer without taking over the thinking.
I’ve also found it interesting hearing how other people use AI. Some only use it for planning and structuring their thoughts. It hasn’t made me want to follow suit and abandon the writing process I already trust, but it has sparked curiosity about a part of my own process I haven’t explored deeply enough.
Could AI help me make sense of all that before I sit down to write, without starting to tell me what I should think or say?
This is where my thinking around a Trust Map is beginning to develop: a way of looking across the content and noticing what people have had the opportunity to understand, and what is still largely hidden.
I don’t have a finished framework for that yet, but the audit has already changed the question I’m asking.
I’m no longer looking only at whether I’ve shown up consistently. I’m looking at what that consistency is helping people understand.
It may be worth looking across your own recent content with the same question.
What part of your expertise has had plenty of opportunity to be seen? And what important part of how you think, work or help is still staying inside the work itself?
Press reply and tell me: did these questions expose a gap for you too?
