Finding the Center of Your Message

You don’t need a hundred ways to say what you do—or to memorize one perfect one. You just need to say what’s true.

This is about finding the handful of value points you always come back to—the ones that matter, the ones that land.

You’re looking for the few things you can say again and again—because they hold up under pressure.

Not slogans. Not scripts. Just the core solutions your work consistently delivers.

We call these Key Values. They’re not lines to memorize.

They’re anchors—functional, flexible points of clarity you can return to in any context. So put the idea of rehearsal, or getting it right, out of your mind. We’re taking a different approach.

This is the exercise that helps you find the center of your message.

A Key Value is the core solution your work delivers – the satisfaction of resolving a problem.

To land on a key value, it helps to think of your offering as a talent or skill.
If you’re doing this on your own, that skill lives inside you—how you think, how you solve problems, what you care about. If you’re building a product or program, the value is in the function: what it simplifies, speeds up, clarifies, or improves.

So we’ll get into that – but I want to stress something right at the top here: You don’t have to figure out your target audience to know your value. It doesn’t require a marketing persona or a perfect audience avatar.
You don’t need to chase what other people want – in fact, that is one of the biggest mistakes people make in crafting any kind of marketing: they give more value to the imagined opinions and needs of others than the ones inside themselves. We often say something like “Oh, well it doesn’t make sense to me, but I think people will like this, or I think people care about such and such.” And that’s just the wrong approach. You for a long time have been your most avid customer. So don’t discount that. Don’t devalue what you’ve already figured out about the problem you’re trying to solve.

Example: Physical Therapy Practice

Let’s say you’re a physical therapist. You offer one-on-one sessions to help clients recover from pain or injury.

That’s the service. But the key value is the takeaway, the result of the service. 

Maybe what you do differently in this space is helping people find ways to heal amidst their current lifestyle.

You’re not just “healing pain.”
You’re helping people integrate recovery into their everyday lives—and that’s the valuable center of your service.

So “build healing into everyday life”  ← That’s a key value that you would keep in mind. 

That’s the message you return to when you write your site, introduce yourself, or create a new offer. It’s a cause your audience can believe in – and it’s not a false one, it’s one you believe in , too. 

So what we’re up to is tying your business value to truth, not some sort of facade. 

The Role of Skill or Talent

In every business, something is being done with particular skill.
That’s where you find your center—not in the job title, but in the manner of delivery.

Ask:

• What do I do unusually well?

• What about this is handled with care, precision, or creativity?

• What result am I proud to make easier, faster, clearer, or more lasting?

A key value is the moment when your skill does its job. You don’t need to inflate it. You just need to recognize and center it.

How to Find Yours

1. Define the Lock

So we have a key in the key value, therefore, we may have a lock that it opens. The lock is the situation your work is designed to address. Most of the time, it shows up as a complaint. So you can just look at the complaints you have about the current, unsolved situation:

• “I can’t do what I want to do.”

• “I’ve tried everything and still feel stuck.”

• “I don’t have time to… etc.”

If you’ve built something, you’ve likely experienced the same complaint firsthand. Start there.

2. Identify the Mechanism

This is the way your product works to change that situation. Don’t worry about being unique—worry about being effective.

What do you do that resolves that complaint?

“I can’t open this jar of peanut butter” 

And so you create a mechanism that opens the jar.

3. Articulate the Outcome

Now you want to Articulate the Outcome. What changes for the client? This is your Brand Promise—the result that shows your solution works.

Think less about the big vision and more about what the customer says after it works: “I don’t ever worry about opening jars of peanut butter anymore.” I’m sure there’s a shorter version:

“opening jars is not a problem anymore.”

If you hear a version of that again and again, you’ve found the brand promise of that mechanism. So if the mechanism really works - if the key does open the lock, then you have truth all the way through, from the brand promise, which they will experience first, to the product, which they will buy to unlock its value. 

The Point

The center of your message isn’t out there, with someone else, who comes up with a great multi-channel marketing strategy.
It’s not something you trick people or convince people into believing. It’s something you define based on what you’ve already created—and what it reliably does.

You are the first person who noticed the problem and then did something about it. You are the one who designed a way through it.

So the center of your value, the center of your message is already inside you. You’re not guessing what they need. You’re recognizing what you’ve already built to work.

You Don’t Have To Do This Alone

If this resonated, but you’d rather not do it alone, I’m available for one-on-one sessions.

We’ll take your message and shape it into something that feels clear, grounded, and ready to use.