To Know You is to love you: How To Attract The Right People

She was thirteen years old in a house full of smoke.

Her whole family smoked. Her parents, her siblings, the whole ecosystem of people she had grown up inside. She was the only one who didn't. So she retreated to her room, kept the door closed, made good grades, and quietly, without announcing it, lived differently from everyone around her.

She didn't call it courage. She probably didn't call it anything. She just knew what she was and what she wasn't, and she acted accordingly.

Years later, pregnant with her first child, she stood in front of her father and said no. He was an alcoholic, in the thick of it, and he wanted to play his recorder near the recording of her baby's heartbeat. His mouth had been drinking. She said, “No”.

He pushed. She held.

Three years later, she still hadn't let him back in. Not out of bitterness, not as punishment.

Because she knew what she was protecting, and the knowing was more solid than the pressure.

When he finally proved he could be trusted, she brought her children to meet him. Her oldest was three. Her youngest was nine months old.

She had been right about herself. She had been right the whole time.

Choose Your Own “Knowing”

I want to talk about that quality. The one she had from the beginning.

It's not stubbornness, though it can look like that from the outside. It's not perfectionism or rigidity or fear of being wrong.

It is a knowing.

A specific, personal, deep-down knowing about who you are and what you value, so particular to you that it can't be borrowed or performed. 

It's the thing that makes you reach for the same kind of book every time, choose the same table at your favourite restaurant, feel the same pull toward the same kind of work, over and over, even when you try to talk yourself out of it.

It is the thread that runs through every decision you've ever made that felt right.

And in business, it’s the most important thing you will ever develop.

Here's what I see, over and over, in the women I work with: They study their competitors.

They model their content on what's performing. They follow the trends, adjust their voice, soften an edge here, add an angle there, until what they're putting out into the world is professional and polished and sounds like everyone else doing the same work.

It exhausts them. It doesn't work the way they thought it would. And they can't figure out why.

The reason is this: you cannot sustain something that isn't you.

To Know You Is To Love You

The women who find deep satisfaction in their work, who build something that genuinely reflects them, who attract the clients that are actually right for them, are the ones who stopped trying to fit the template. 

They stopped looking at everyone else and looked inward instead. They started building from the inside out, from the knowing.

That knowing, when you follow it, becomes your brand. 

Not your logo or your colour palette. 

…Your particular way of seeing the problem. 

…Your specific angle on the solution. 

…Your voice, your language, the thing you say that no one else says quite the way you say it.

When you stop diluting it to fit in, it becomes the most distinctive thing about you.

Imagine being a bright orange in a sea of grey. The woman I described earlier lives like this. It’s not a metaphor she borrowed. That's what she actually is. 

She knows it because she spent years watching herself choose differently from the people around her, noticing what she reached for, learning what she wouldn't compromise on.

She wrote it down eventually.

This is who I am. These are the things I stand for. I am a woman who stands in her life, fully, honestly, and without apology.

She didn't arrive at that sentence only because she was part of our Tiny Brave Way group and the exercise was called, "This Is Me On The Rock".

She had been living it since she was thirteen years old in a room with the door closed.

The Knowing Starts Small

Your favourite colour. 

Your actual opinion when multiple people are talking around you. 

The movie you'd choose, if it were up to you. 

The project that pulls at you, even though it's not the most strategic move. 

The thing you say to a client that you know is true, even though you've been editing it out because it's a little too direct or a little too specific or a little too yours.

Those small knowings are the beginning.

They accumulate. They teach you who you are. And eventually, if you pay attention and stop overriding them, they become the foundation you build everything else on.

Your clients will feel it. The ones who are right for you will recognize themselves in your work. 

Your content will stop sounding like a strategy and start sounding like a person. 

And the frustration of trying to be like everyone else, of producing words that technically say the right things but feel hollow when you read them back, will start to lift.

Because you were never supposed to blend in.

You were supposed to bring exactly what you bring, in exactly the way you bring it.

Tiny Brave Step, 90 seconds: Ask yourself one small question: what did I want today, and did I say so? A restaurant, a preference, a point of view. Practice the knowing in low-stakes moments. That's where it gets stronger.

Tiny Brave Step, 5 minutes: Take this to the Tiny Brave Steps Generator and type: "I want to stop trying to sound like everyone else. Help me find my own voice in my work." Let it open a conversation.

If this is work you want to do alongside other women, Creative Spaces is where that happens. Come as you are.