The email arrived at 11:43 on a Tuesday, subject line in all caps: EXCITING OPPORTUNITY YOU WON’T WANT TO MISS. I deleted it before the preview pane finished loading. Not because the offer was bad, but because the sender had already told me everything I needed to know about their confidence, their desperation, and the fact that they had no idea what either word looked like from the outside.
Forty years of sitting across tables from founders, executives, and shop owners has taught me this: every piece of communication you send carries two messages. The first is what you think you said. The second is what your audience actually heard. And the gap between those two messages is where most businesses accidentally destroy themselves.
I have seen this pattern so many times I could sketch it in my sleep. A consultant writes “we leverage best-in-class solutions to drive synergistic outcomes,” believing they sound professional. What the client hears is “I have no idea what I actually do, so I’m hiding behind jargon.” A shop owner posts “please support small business” on Instagram, thinking it sounds humble. What the customer hears is “I am one bad month away from closing, and you owe me your money out of pity.”
The mechanics are simple. Words do not exist in a vacuum. They arrive wrapped in context, tone, and a thousand barely visible signals that your audience reads faster than you can write them. This is not linguistics. This is psychology. And if you treat messaging as a word problem instead of a human problem, you will lose every time.
Let me show you how this works in practice.
- The language of uncertainty telegraphs weakness. When a founder writes “we hope to serve you” or “we try our best,” they believe they are being modest. What they are actually doing is inviting doubt. Hope and try are apology words. They mean “I am not sure this will work, but maybe you’ll give me a pass.” Compare that to “we serve” or “we deliver.” Same function, opposite message. One invites trust. The other invites a refund request before the sale even happens.
- Overexplaining is a confession. I once worked with a consultant who opened every proposal with three paragraphs explaining why they were qualified to do the work. Their credentials were impeccable. Their copy screamed insecurity. Why? Because confident people do not spend half a page convincing you they belong in the room. They assume you already know. Overexplaining does not build credibility. It raises the question you were trying to avoid: “Wait, should I be worried about this?”
- Urgency without reason feels like manipulation. “Act now.” “Limited time.” “Don’t miss out.” These phrases have been beaten to death by every desperate marketer with a countdown timer plugin. When you deploy urgency without giving a legitimate reason for it, your audience does not feel motivated. They feel cornered. And cornered people do not buy. They leave. Real urgency does not need exclamation points. It needs clarity. “We close enrollment Friday because the cohort starts Monday” works because it is true. “Only three spots left” works when it is actually true. Everything else is noise, and your audience knows it.
- Apologizing in advance is an invitation to dismiss you. “Sorry to bother you, but…” “I know you’re busy, but…” “Just following up…” Every one of these openings tells the recipient that you do not believe your message is worth their time. And if you do not believe it, why should they? I have watched founders sabotage their own pitches with preemptive apologies, then wonder why no one takes them seriously. You cannot ask someone to value your work while simultaneously apologizing for its existence.
The fix is not complicated. It is just uncomfortable. You have to stop writing what feels safe and start writing what is true. You have to strip out the hedging, the throat-clearing, the performative humility that you think makes you sound reasonable. You have to look at every sentence and ask: what is the unintended message here? What am I accidentally confessing? What fear am I telegraphing without meaning to?
This is not about sounding confident when you are not. This is about recognizing that your fear does not belong in your copy. Your uncertainty does not belong in your copy. Your internal doubts do not belong in your copy. Those are real, and they are yours to manage. But the moment you let them leak into your messaging, you hand your audience a reason to walk away.
Messaging is not the art of choosing pretty words. It is the discipline of controlling what you communicate, intentionally, every single time. It is the difference between a founder who says “we hope you’ll consider us” and one who says “here is what we do.” One is begging. One is standing still.
You already know how to write. The question is whether you know what you are actually saying. If you want to find out what unintended messages are leaking into your copy right now, book a fifteen-minute call. I will show you what your audience hears, and we will decide if it is worth fixing. Not with better adjectives. With intentional meaning.
