Your niche is too nice, and that's exactly why nobody's hiring you.
Let me guess your current niche statement:
I help high-achieving women release limiting beliefs so they can step into their full potential and create the life they deserve 🦋✨
Lovely. Inspiring. Also describes approximately 47,000 other coaches on LinkedIn right now.
You know what that statement actually communicates? “I have no idea who I serve, but I’m hoping if I cast a wide enough net, someone will accidentally swim into it.”
That’s not how fishing works. Or business.
The Comfort Trap
If your niche statement makes you feel safe and comfortable, you’ve already lost.
Your niche should make you slightly nervous. It should make you think, “Wait, am I allowed to say that?” It should make at least three people in your life suggest you “broaden your approach.”
Mine? “I help therapists who are secretly suicidal from running a business.”
Did you just feel a little uncomfortable reading that? Perfect. That’s exactly the point.
Because every therapist who’s ever sat in their car crying before a client session, wondering why their $150K education translated into a $50K income, immediately thought: “Finally. Someone gets it!”
The Mathematics of Being Forgettable
Let’s talk numbers:
Your Generic Approach:
- Target market: “High-achieving women” = roughly 47 million people
- Your marketing budget: Probably close to zero
- Your ability to meaningfully reach all of them: Non-existent
- Your conversion rate when you’re coach number 9,547, saying the same thing: 0.02% if you’re lucky
- Bottom line: Good vibes, empty bank account
The Specific Approach:
- Target market: “Therapists suicidal from running a business” = maybe 50,000 who’d relate
- Your ability to reach them with pointed content: Exponentially higher
- Your conversion rate when you’re the ONLY person naming their specific nightmare: 5-10%
- Bottom line: An actual business
The narrower the knife, the deeper it cuts. Deep cuts are memorable. Memorable gets hired.
The Diagnostic Tool
Read these niche statements and notice your gut reaction:
Version 1: “I help people achieve their goals”
Reaction: Yawn. Next.
Version 2: “I help coaches grow their business”
Reaction: Warmer, but still forgettable.
Version 3: “I help licensed therapists who spent six years in grad school and now make less than their hairdresser”
Reaction: Oh. OH. That’s… uncomfortably specific.
If reading your niche statement doesn’t create a small flutter of panic in your chest, you haven’t gone narrow enough.
The “But What If” Olympics
I already know your objections. I’ve heard them all:
“But what if I’m leaving money on the table?” You’re already leaving money on the table by being invisible to everyone. Better to be indispensable to 50 people than forgettable to 50,000.
“But what if people outside that niche want to work with me?” They still will. When you speak directly to one person’s pain, adjacent people think, “If they understand THAT specific problem, they’ll definitely understand mine.”
“But what if it pigeonholes me forever?” Then enjoy being known for nothing. You can expand later. First, you need to be known for something.
“But what if it sounds too negative?” Business isn’t built on positive affirmations and vision boards. It’s built on solving expensive, painful problems that people will pay to make disappear.
Nice vs. Effective: A Translation Guide
Too Nice: “I help women find their voice”
Actually Works: “I help female executives who’ve been the ‘team player’ for 15 years finally tell their board what they actually think”
Too Nice: “I support people through life transitions”
Actually Works: “I help newly divorced professionals who have no idea how to be a person without someone else’s schedule dictating their life”
Too Nice: “I empower entrepreneurs to scale”
Actually Works: “I help coaches who are addicted to being busy but allergic to being profitable”
Too Nice: “I guide spiritual seekers on their journey”
Actually Works: “I help burnt-out corporate escapees who meditated once and now think they need to become life coaches (they don’t)”
One makes you comfortable. The other makes your ideal client feel seen.
The Vomit Test
Here’s your assignment:
Write a niche statement so specific, so uncomfortably accurate, that it makes you slightly queasy to post it.
That nauseated feeling? That’s your people-pleaser dying. Let it go. Your people-pleaser isn’t paying your rent.
Your niche statement should:
- Make you worried you’ve been too specific
- Make your ideal client think you’ve been reading their journal
- Make everyone else scroll past without a second thought (THIS IS GOOD)
Still comfortable? Not specific enough.
Why “Nice” Keeps You Broke
The helping professionals who struggle financially share one trait: they’re addicted to universal approval.
Soft language. Inclusive language. Language that won’t make anyone uncomfortable.
Result? Crickets.
Nobody hires you because nobody remembers you existed five seconds after scrolling past your post.
Reality check for 2026: There are tens of thousands of coaches who “help high-achieving women.” There’s exactly ONE who helps “therapists who are secretly suicidal from running a business.”
Guess which one gets the midnight DMs from therapists who are secretly suicidal from running a business?
The Permission Slip You’re Waiting For
You’re waiting for someone to tell you it’s okay to be this specific. That it’s okay to potentially “exclude” people. That it’s okay to name the exact, uncomfortable truth that keeps your ideal client up at 3 AM googling “is it normal to hate running a practice.”
Consider this your permission.
Actually, scratch that.
Consider this a reality check: You’re not excluding anyone by being specific. You’re ALREADY excluding everyone by being generic.
Name The Nightmare, Not The Dream
The most successful helping professionals I work with share one trait: they’re willing to name the nightmare their clients are currently living.
Not the dream. Everyone sells the dream.
They name the 3 AM spiral. The shameful secret. The thing their client thinks makes them uniquely broken. The problem they’d pay anything to solve.
“I help therapists who love their clients and hate their business” beats “I help helping professionals thrive” every single time.
One speaks to a feeling. The other speaks to no one.
The Formula That Actually Works
“I help [SPECIFIC WHO] who [UNCOMFORTABLE TRUTH] achieve [SPECIFIC OUTCOME] without [THEIR BIGGEST FEAR]”
Examples:
- “I help licensed counsellors who are brilliant in session and broke everywhere else build $10K/month practices without becoming Instagram influencers”
- “I help social workers who went into this field to change lives and are now drowning in insurance paperwork build private practices that don’t make them hate the profession”
- “I help coaches who’ve collected certifications like Pokémon cards but still can’t explain what they do create clear offers that don’t require a decoder ring”
Uncomfortable to read? Good.
Makes your ideal client think “how did they know?”? Better.
Service Isn’t About Being Nice
Here’s what they skip in coaching certification programs:
Being of service doesn’t mean being nice to everyone. It means being brutally useful to someone specific.
You cannot serve everyone. Attempting to do so just creates a martyrdom complex and an empty calendar.
Find the people whose specific pain you understand intimately. Name it clearly. Own it completely. Build your entire business around alleviating it.
Everyone else? They’ll find their person. If your specificity offends them, they were never your client anyway.
The Fork In The Road
Two paths ahead:
Path A: Keep your comfortable, inclusive, safe niche that makes you feel like a good person but keeps you checking your bank account with dread. Keep explaining to your partner why your coaching business is “building slowly.” Keep wondering why discovery calls never convert.
Path B: Get uncomfortably specific. Name the nightmare your ideal client is living. Watch 95% of people scroll past without blinking. Watch your actual ideal clients message you saying, “I thought I was the only one.”
Path A feels safer. Path B builds practices that last.
Your choice.
P.S. If you’re thinking “but MY niche IS specific enough,” test it: Does it make you slightly nervous to say out loud? Does it make some people immediately know they’re NOT your client? If the answer to either is no, it’s still too nice.
P.P.S. Can’t figure out your brutally specific niche? That’s literally my job. But fair warning: I’m going to make you say things out loud you’ve been too afraid to even think. If you’re ready for that level of clarity, let’s talk.