I’ve been working with clients long enough that many of the decisions I make during a consulting session feel intuitive. I listen, ask questions, notice patterns, and make recommendations as the conversation develops.
I rarely stop to explain why I asked a particular question or recommended one action over another. It’s part of how I work, developed over years of experience.
Recently, I got curious about that.
After finishing a Clarity + Action engagement with Elizabeth H. Cottrell1, creator of The Heartspoken Note, she sent me a wonderful testimonial about our work together.
She described how our 90-minute session and the action plan that followed helped her make progress she’d been wanting to make for years. Her LinkedIn, Substack, and blog were finally working together, giving visitors a clearer path to her paid membership.
She said the experience had accelerated her progress “probably by a year.”
I was delighted to hear that. And it got me thinking about something I rarely examine: What did I do during our time together that contributed to those results?
So I decided to find out. Because when I’m in the moment with a client, I’m not thinking about processes and systems and workflows and methods. And, it’s not always easy to explain to myself and others.
One way to show your expertise online is to explain the decisions you make during real client work. Share what you noticed, which questions influenced your thinking, why you recommended a particular action, and what might have led you to choose differently.
This gives prospective clients a clearer view of how you approach problems they may be facing themselves.
What a client session revealed about my expertise
I gave ChatGPT the transcript of our 90-minute session, Elizabeth’s preparation notes, the 30-day action plan I’d created, and her testimonial.
I asked it to identify where my expertise showed up, how it influenced my recommendations, and how that related to the results Elizabeth described.
The analysis identified four recurring strengths: recognizing patterns, asking strategic questions, filtering competing priorities, and putting actions in a useful order.
Reading the analysis, I recognized those behaviors immediately.
They’re things I do in almost every client conversation. I rarely think about them as separate skills, and I certainly haven’t been documenting them for future articles.
But the analysis made me curious about something else. What was guiding those decisions?
That’s where I began to see how much of my experience was expressed through the conversation itself.
You may have a similar experience in your own work. After years of coaching, consulting, or providing a specialized service, you develop ways of assessing situations that feel natural.
You know which questions to ask. You recognize when someone is getting ahead of themselves. You can tell when one decision needs to happen before another.
And much of that thinking may never appear in the content you publish.
One small question changed Elizabeth’s marketing plan
Elizabeth came to our session with plenty of ideas, research, existing content, and possible directions for her business.
She was considering LinkedIn, Substack, podcasting, AI visibility, lead magnets, new products, and ways to reach a nonprofit audience.
She wanted help deciding what deserved attention and how to put everything in a manageable order.
I know Elizabeth well. She’s committed to her business, and she wants to make good use of her time so she can spend more of it with her retired husband.
During our conversation, she mentioned wanting to work only a few hours a week.
I asked her to put a number on that.
She settled on 10 to 12 hours, roughly three hours on four days.
I asked because I wanted us to have a realistic starting point. I never want to impose a marketing plan on a client. It has to work for them, their priorities, and the time they’re willing to give it.
Now we could look at her ideas through a practical question: What would make the greatest difference in the time she had available?
We looked for opportunities to make progress quickly using what she’d already created.
At one point, Elizabeth considered developing a new checklist as a lead magnet. I suggested adapting material from her existing 12 Letters Worth Writing resource.
She had good material available. We could put it to work without adding another project to her schedule.
Other ideas could wait.
The resulting plan organized her priorities over four weeks, with actions she could complete at her own pace.
Looking back, I can see how much of my judgment was expressed through questions and decisions that felt perfectly ordinary during our conversation.
I knew Elizabeth’s circumstances. I listened to what mattered to her, helped her define a realistic limit, and used that information to decide what deserved attention first.
That was the part of my expertise I hadn’t been explaining.
And it’s the kind of professional thinking you can draw from when you’re looking for something meaningful to publish.
How to identify professional judgment worth sharing
Think about a recent conversation with a client.
Maybe someone asked you to help solve a problem, and you noticed something they hadn’t considered. Maybe you recommended holding off on an idea they were excited about. Or perhaps you recognized that the order of their planned actions needed to change.
Those moments are worth examining.
Your prospective clients may benefit from knowing how you arrived at a recommendation, especially when they’re facing similar decisions.
Here are five questions to consider:
What did I notice? Was there something in the client’s situation that affected how you assessed the problem?
What did I ask or investigate? Which information helped you decide what to recommend?
What mattered to this client? How did their circumstances, priorities, or personal goals influence your advice?
What did I recommend, and why? What made that action appropriate for this particular situation?
What would have changed my recommendation? Which circumstances might have led you in a different direction?
That third question deserves attention.
In my work with Elizabeth, knowing how she wanted to spend her time influenced the plan we created. The time limit helped us identify which activities could make a difference without taking over her week.
A different client, with different goals and more available time, might have received different recommendations.
You probably make similar judgments in your business, often without thinking much about them.
You don’t need to reveal private client information or explain every detail of an engagement.
Choose one decision that helps a prospective client see how you assess a problem and determine what to do next.
If you’re unsure which decision to share, start with a question potential clients commonly ask before hiring someone. Your experience may provide an answer they won’t find in a general list of tips.
I’ve written more about choosing those questions in Which Buyer Questions Should You Answer First?.
How to turn client experience into content that demonstrates expertise
Once you’ve identified a decision worth sharing, think about the question it could answer for someone considering your services.
Take my recommendation to reuse Elizabeth’s existing lead magnet.
That experience could become an article about deciding when to create a new lead magnet and when to improve something you already have.
I’d explain what I look for in existing resources, which questions I ask before recommending new content, and the circumstances that might lead me to recommend creating something from scratch.
A prospective client could learn something useful from that explanation. They’d get a better sense of how I approach decisions about their marketing.
You could do something similar with an experience from your business.
A business coach might explain why she recommended improving an existing offer before creating another. A website consultant might describe why he suggested changing a site’s message before investing in more traffic.
Start with the question your prospective client is likely to ask. Describe the situation, what influenced your recommendation, and the conditions that might change your advice.
The result could be a blog article, a LinkedIn post, a case observation, or a new section in an article you’ve already published.
You may already have content that explains what someone should do. Adding an example of how you made a related decision could make that content more useful and more personal.
And when someone can see how you assess situations similar to theirs, they have more information to decide whether your services are a good fit.
That’s a connection I explored in Create Content That Moves People Toward Hiring You.
Why showing your professional judgment matters for online visibility
When someone is considering hiring a coach or consultant, they want to know whether that person can help with their particular situation.
General advice can demonstrate knowledge. Explaining how you assess a problem and make recommendations gives prospective clients more information about what it might be like to work with you.
There’s a connection to search visibility, too.
Google’s guidance on creating helpful, reliable, people-first content asks creators to consider whether their content provides original information or analysis, goes beyond obvious advice, and shows evidence of the author’s expertise.
Your observations from real client work can contribute to that kind of content.
In Elizabeth’s case, explaining why I asked about her available time and how that influenced her plan provides firsthand evidence of my approach. Those details would be missing from a general article about creating a marketing plan.
And when you connect related articles, FAQ pages, and service descriptions through useful internal links, readers can explore more of your approach. Google’s link guidance explains how links help its systems discover pages and interpret their relevance.
This can give readers and search systems more context than a collection of disconnected posts. It doesn’t guarantee that an AI system will cite your content or that someone will hire you.
I’ve written more about this in How AI Recognizes Expertise in Your Content.
For now, the opportunity is to make the professional thinking behind your recommendations easier to find.
Use AI to help you see what you’ve overlooked
One of the more interesting parts of this exercise was discovering how AI could help me examine work I’d already completed.
I had the transcript, notes, testimonial, and action plan. ChatGPT helped identify patterns across those materials and describe decisions I hadn’t thought to document.
But I still needed to reflect on why I’d made those decisions.
For example, the analysis identified my question about Elizabeth’s available time as a useful planning decision. It took my own reflection to explain why I asked it and how her personal priorities influenced my thinking.
That distinction matters.
AI can help you examine your work and ask useful questions. Your experience provides the reasoning.
You can try this even if you don’t record client sessions.
Start with notes from a recent project, a client testimonial, or your recollections of an important conversation.
Remove private information first, and follow your client agreements before sharing material with an AI tool.
Then try this prompt.
AI prompt: Find the professional judgment in my client work
Act as an experienced interviewer helping me identify the professional judgment I demonstrated during a recent client engagement.
I’ll describe the engagement or share notes with private details removed.
Ask me one question at a time to explore:
What the client wanted to accomplish.
What I noticed about their situation.
Which questions I asked and why.
What I knew about their circumstances, priorities, or personal goals that influenced my recommendations.
Which options I considered and why I chose a particular approach.
What I decided could wait.
What might have changed my recommendation.
Pay attention to decisions that may feel routine to me but could help prospective clients see how I work.
Don’t invent details, motivations, decisions, or results. Ask me to clarify anything that’s missing.
After the interview, identify up to three decisions that could become useful content.
For each decision, explain what it reveals about my experience and identify a question a prospective client might ask that my experience can help answer.
Recommend the strongest content idea and explain why it would help a reader evaluate my professional approach.
Review the responses carefully. AI may identify patterns, but you’re the one who knows whether its interpretation reflects how you approached the work.
Choose one decision that feels worth explaining.
Your next article may be sitting in your last client conversation
Working through Elizabeth’s session reminded me how much professional experience can become part of the way we naturally work.
I could see the decisions I’d made, the questions that influenced them, and how those decisions affected the plan Elizabeth implemented.
And I was reminded that the principles guiding my work, including respecting a client’s time and personal priorities, deserve a place in how I communicate my expertise.
You may discover something similar when you examine your own work.
Look back at one recent engagement. Find a decision that made a difference. Consider what guided that decision and what someone else could learn from your reasoning.
Then share what you’ve learned in a way that helps a prospective client make a decision of their own.
Your next useful article may already exist in the work you’ve done.
Do you have trouble articulating where your professional judgment shows up in your work with clients?
Comment in the thread below or message me directly.
Elizabeth Cottrell gave me permission to share her story and comments in this article.