The reason usually isn’t that you haven’t found the right niche yet. It’s that niching down is the wrong layer to be working at.
I was on a podcast a while back, answering a question I’d answered maybe a hundred times before, and halfway through my own answer I realized I was bored. Not of the host. Of the answer. Of the topic I’d built a whole business around and taught for years.
I didn’t say that out loud. I finished the answer, and it was a good one. I’d polished it over a decade. That was sort of the problem. I could give it in my sleep, and some part of me had quietly moved on from it without telling the rest of me.
For a while I assumed that was a messaging problem. I kept trying to find a fresher way to say the same stuff. New words, same work. It never quite landed, and I couldn’t figure out why.
I see the same pattern in a lot of the people I work with, except they call it a niching problem. They come to me trying to niche down. Their messaging feels scattered, or their leads have slowed, and somewhere along the way they read that hyper-specific niches convert better. So they do the exercise. They land on something that sounds right on paper. And a few weeks later, they feel scattered all over again.
If that’s been your loop, I want to offer you a different way of looking at what’s happening. Because the reason niching down isn’t sticking probably isn’t that you haven’t found the right niche yet. It’s that niching is the wrong layer to be working on.
Has your business caught up to who you’re becoming?
The Reinvention Reflection helps you name what’s actually shifted in you, not just in the business, and what you want the next chapter to look like.
The work has started to feel stale
This is the first signal, and most people don’t read it for what it is.
You used to have energy around your topic. Now you don’t really want to be asked about it on one more podcast. You sit down to write an email or a post about your work and it comes out dry, and you can’t tell why, because you know this material better than anyone.
Here’s what’s usually going on underneath. You’ve been doing this for years, and somewhere in there you already started evolving past the original framing of your work. You just haven’t given yourself permission to say so. So you keep hunting for a new way to say the same thing, and you file the whole thing under “I need to niche better.”
Boredom in your own work is rarely a content problem. It’s information. It’s usually telling you that you’ve outgrown the angle, or the audience, or the exact version of the problem you set out to solve.
The niching exercise keeps sliding off
So you try to fix the staleness by niching. Most people reach for this first, so you’ve probably already been here.
You do the exercise. You land on something clean. You can even say your niche out loud when someone asks, and it sounds great. But it doesn’t match what you actually want to be doing. And within a few weeks you’re scattered again.
That’s the tell. When a niching exercise keeps not sticking, it’s not because the right answer is still out there somewhere. Niching is a question about where to focus within your work. If the work itself has shifted underneath you, focusing harder on the old version doesn’t fix anything. You’re answering a question you’ve already outgrown.
The question niching lets you avoid
This is the signal most people don’t want to look at, so I’ll just say it plainly. Sometimes niching is the thing we reach for because we’re not ready to ask a harder question.
Niching feels productive. You can spend weeks on it. You can pay someone to help you with it. It gives you an output, something to point at, and that feels like progress.
The harder questions don’t come with clean tactical answers. Do I still believe in this work? Is this still who I want to be in my business? Has my work actually changed because I’ve changed?
When something feels off and you immediately reach for a niching fix, it’s worth asking whether you’re solving the question you actually have, or the one you’re letting yourself think about because it’s the safer one.
The question I ask instead
When someone comes to me with niching as the problem, this is what I ask them.
Imagine doing more of your current work, with a tighter niche, for the next five years. Picture it properly. What happens in your body?
If something in you flinches, the niche isn’t the issue.
I had a client come to me wanting to niche further into the systems and operations work she does for small business owners. She’s very good at it. But the more we talked, the clearer it got that the systems work wasn’t where she lit up. What lit her up was the conversation she had with clients before any of the systems stuff, the one where she’d dig into where all the overworking and perfectionism actually came from. She treated that part like an afterthought. It was the real work, and she’d never given herself permission to build around it.
Niching narrower would have doubled down on the wrong thing. It would have tightened her positioning around the version of her work she was already done with. The actual work wasn’t focusing harder. It was admitting what had changed, so she could design around who she is now instead of who she was when she started.
So if niching has been the thing you keep trying to solve and it keeps not solving, that’s worth paying attention to. The question underneath it is usually something closer to: who am I now, and is this business still built for that person. That one doesn’t have a clean tactical answer. It’s an identity question, and it’s worth sitting with rather than rushing past.
If you’re at the point where you want to think this through with someone, I run something called a Walk and Talk. It’s a short session for getting clear on what’s actually going on underneath the surface question, the one you keep trying to solve with tactics. If that’s where you are, that’s what it’s for.
