Working across countries has made me increasingly aware that businesses and consumers can have very different assumptions about where the work of reaching understanding is supposed to happen. This became particularly noticeable while I was promoting a free educational webinar to clinicians in South America.
From my perspective as a U.S. marketing strategist and former university-level educator, a free webinar is an extremely familiar form of pre-sale education. A business teaches something useful at no cost. People register if they are interested, attend if they choose, learn more about the subject, and independently decide whether they want to explore the company's paid services. I therefore hadn't anticipated how much clarification the format itself might generate across markets, with South American clinicians often asking questions that had already been answered in the messages they were responding to. Was it really free? What language would it be in? Would there be a translated version? Would it be recorded? Could the information be provided another way? None of those questions is unreasonable individually. Collectively, however, they made me notice something about the interaction itself: something I had created as scalable free education could easily turn into individualized relational interaction about how to consume the free education.
But I don't think the lesson is that U.S. businesses have stronger boundaries. After years of working with U.S. businesses, I think we have an enormous problem of our own. We often put the free labor somewhere else.
U.S. Businesses Streamline Access, Then Give Away the Conversation
In the United States, consumers often expect the administrative portion of buying professional services to be extraordinarily streamlined. They don't necessarily want a conversation just to arrange another conversation. Give them a website. Give them a scheduling link. Let them select a time. Send an automated confirmation. Put the meeting on their calendar. Send the Zoom link automatically. U.S. businesses have invested enormous amounts of money in removing interpersonal friction from this part of the buying process.
Then the discovery call begins. And sometimes all of the boundaries disappear. The U.S. professional-services market has a deeply ingrained expectation of free pre-sale education: articles, webinars, newsletters, guides, assessments, demonstrations, strategy calls, and discovery calls. Some of this is excellent marketing, since consumers need enough information to make informed decisions. But I've also watched businesses provide so much individualized education, reassurance, and problem-solving before a purchase that the prospective customer receives a meaningful part of the benefit without ever becoming a customer.
The Endurance Coach Who Was Providing Reassurance for Free
I saw an especially clear example while working with British clients who provided endurance coaching. Part of the work I had already done with the company involved making it extremely easy for prospective coaching clients to reach them. Someone didn't need to establish a relationship with the business before speaking with a coach. They could encounter the company, decide they were interested, click a scheduling link, and book a free discovery call. We had successfully reduced friction. But then we had to examine what some people were actually doing with those calls.
Some prospective customers would arrive and spend substantial portions of the conversation explaining why they did not believe they were worth spending money on. The coach would respond by reassuring them: yes, you are worth investing in, your goals matter, your health matters, you deserve support, it is okay to spend money on yourself. The prospective customer could spend the call talking about their feelings about themselves while the coach provided encouragement and reassurance. And then the person would leave, often without purchasing endurance coaching.
From a traditional sales perspective, this looks like a failed conversion. Maybe the coach didn't overcome the objection. Maybe another follow-up was necessary. But I became interested in a different question: what if the interaction successfully provided what that particular person actually came for? If someone arrived primarily seeking reassurance, the free call provided reassurance. They felt heard. They felt encouraged. Someone told them that they mattered and were worth investing in. Then they left.
The coach thought he was providing the emotional preparation necessary for the prospective customer to purchase endurance coaching. But the emotional preparation had temporarily become the product the person was consuming. This doesn't mean every person who doesn't convert from a discovery call was secretly seeking emotional support. It does mean businesses should pay attention when a free sales mechanism repeatedly satisfies needs other than the service it was designed to sell.
There was another irony here. We had made access to the coach exceptionally easy. Someone seeking reassurance could find an English-speaking coach online, click a calendar, and obtain a free conversation. We had reduced friction. The question became whether we had reduced friction to purchasing the service, or to accessing the professional's emotional labor.
Consumer Expectations Can Become Extremely Strong
The problem becomes more complicated when free access is no longer perceived as generosity but as an expectation. I've encountered situations in which someone decided that my expertise had value to them and then reacted surprisingly negatively when I placed a boundary around how they could access it.
A short free discovery call might be sufficient to establish whether a project exists, whether the project is approximately what was advertised, whether the economics are plausible, and whether both parties want to continue. For me, approximately fifteen minutes can often answer those questions. After that point, if we need to untangle the person's business, diagnose a marketing problem, evaluate alternatives, organize competing priorities, or determine what they should actually do, we may no longer be discovering whether consulting is appropriate. We may have discovered the consulting.
Not everyone likes that distinction. I've had people push against boundaries around access, try to continue conversations through other channels, or repeatedly attempt to obtain calls simply because they had decided talking with me was valuable to them. There have been situations where the persistence became sufficiently intrusive that I eventually blocked the person. That experience changed the way I think about accessibility. A professional can make it extremely easy to understand what they do without making it equally easy to consume unlimited amounts of their individualized attention.
Sometimes the Consultant Is Treated Like an Employee Before Being Hired
Another version of this problem appears when prospective clients approach an independent consultant using the power assumptions of an employer interviewing an employee. The implied structure can become: we're evaluating you, so demonstrate what you can do for us. That can sound reasonable until "demonstrate" quietly becomes actual work.
This problem isn't unique to consulting. It has become genuinely controversial within U.S. employment culture as well, and the data on it is striking. A 2024 Forbes analysis found that 85 percent of respondents to a LinkedIn poll had encountered requests for unpaid work during job interviews, with 44 percent reporting three to five hours of that work and nearly a fifth reporting more than six hours. A more recent March 2025 poll found that 88 percent of job seekers believe companies should compensate candidates for required work completed during the interview process. Employment attorneys have noted that under the Fair Labor Standards Act, compensation can become legally required once a candidate's task actually benefits the company, rather than simply demonstrating a skill, a line that gets crossed more often than most employers seem to realize.
That issue is particularly personal for me because it contributed to why I started my own business. Before becoming a consultant, I repeatedly found myself in interviews where people were extremely interested in extracting my ideas and expertise during the interview process and then did not hire me. Eventually I began thinking differently about what was happening. If my thinking was valuable enough that organizations repeatedly want to obtain it, perhaps the thinking itself was something I should sell. Consulting gave me a different economic structure for doing that.
But becoming a consultant doesn't automatically make the old dynamic disappear. Sometimes a prospective client still approaches the interaction as though I am an applicant attempting to earn a position inside their hierarchy, rather than an independent business deciding whether I want to sell them professional services. That distinction matters. A consultant is evaluating the buyer too.
A Discovery Call Is Not an Audition for Unlimited Access
This is one reason I'm interested in the increasing pushback I see among professionals against sprawling free discovery processes. Some people shorten discovery calls. Some require potential clients to complete applications. Some require deposits. Some offer paid consultations instead.
The underlying question is not simply whether somebody can afford to give away thirty minutes. It's what the consumer believes that thirty minutes entitles them to obtain. A fifteen-minute conversation can be perfectly adequate for questions such as: What is the project? What are you actually looking for? Is this within my expertise? Is the budget remotely compatible? Would I want to work with you? Do you want to continue? If the next question is, "Okay, but what do you think I should actually do?", we've potentially crossed a commercial boundary. That's not necessarily discovery anymore. That's why the boundary isn't arbitrary. The discovery call identifies the work. The consultation performs the work.
The Fantasy-Business Version of the Same Problem
There's an even stranger phenomenon I've encountered in English-speaking entrepreneurial environments. People working around fractional executives have long traded stories about individuals, often young aspiring entrepreneurs, who seem more interested in performing the identity of being a founder than in taking the financial and operational risks required to build an actual company.
Someone can have conversations with a fractional CMO, then a fractional CTO, then an operations person, then an advisor. They can discuss strategy, assemble hypothetical teams, talk about what "we" are going to build, and spend hours inhabiting the social role of a founder. But there may be no funded business underneath it. No meaningful revenue. No commitment. Sometimes not even a product. The conversations themselves provide something: for a few hours, the person gets to experience themselves as the CEO of a company important enough to have executives advising them.
Again, I would be cautious about assuming motives in any individual case. A poorly developed business can still be a sincere business, and every legitimate company begins in an incomplete state. But the pattern raises the same question as the endurance-coaching example: what is this person actually consuming from the interaction? If the psychological reward comes from talking with senior professionals about an imagined company, then the conversations themselves can satisfy part of the need. The fractional executive thinks they're participating in a sales process that will eventually produce paid work. The aspiring founder may already be receiving something valuable from the sales process itself.
The Homeschool Consultant Whose Buyers Wanted Reassurance, Not Coaching
I saw a close variation of this while developing the personal brand for a licensed schoolteacher in the U.S. who also had experience founding schools. She had homeschooled her own children from kindergarten through high school, prepared them successfully for college, and held a substantial stack of additional credentials on top of her teaching license. She was offering educational preparation coaching for homeschooling parents, essentially helping other parents design and evaluate a homeschool curriculum with confidence.
Her actual expertise was real and considerable. But the audience she primarily attracted was stressed mothers who, more than curriculum design help, wanted reassurance that they already had their child on the right path. Much of the inbound interest wasn't a request for a service. It was a request for someone credentialed to tell them they were doing fine. That's a legitimate emotional need. It is also not, on its own, a paid coaching engagement, and it created the same pattern as the endurance coach: real expertise, easy access, and an audience whose actual need was often satisfied before any purchase occurred.
The College Admissions Consultant Whose Comments Section Became a Confessional
A more extreme version of this showed up with a venture capitalist and investor I worked with, someone who had led large international EdTech projects, served as the admissions director at an Ivy League school, and later started his own college admissions consulting company. His actual buyer persona was parents lying awake at night, anxious that their child might not get into the right university to set them on a path to success.
Those emotions ended up burdening his entire social media strategy. People used his comments section to post their own problems in detail, and if he didn't personally respond with education or reassurance, some of them took it as an offense, as though his presence online obligated him to function as an on-demand counselor. His counseling business was, by his own framing, a passion project layered on top of an already-established career. But the market didn't treat it that way. People weren't moving to the next step of paying for anything. They were staying at the educational, reassurance-seeking layer indefinitely and expected it for free, including trying to extract emotional support through private messages on what was, on its face, a professional platform.
The takeaway I keep coming back to from that project is that visibility and accessibility, on their own, invite this dynamic. He hadn't done anything wrong. He had simply built a public, credible, warm presence, which is exactly what most personal-brand strategy tells people to do. But a warm, visible, credentialed person is also the person a stressed stranger will instinctively reach for at 1 a.m., whether or not that person ever offered themselves as available for that. What I ultimately did on the marketing side was shift the emphasis back toward his investor background and build a content strategy focused on excitement and expertise rather than open-ended access, and centered the offer on an AI tool that packaged his specific knowledge and approach into something scalable. That gave people a real way to get value from his expertise without needing him personally to absorb the emotional weight of every parent's fear in real time.
My Colombian Psychologist and I Were Looking at the Same Problem Differently
These issues became especially interesting while I was discussing professional boundaries with a Colombian psychologist. She noticed something real: I could remain in prospective-client conversations for too long. One interpretation she offered involved validation, that perhaps I was receiving validation from continuing these interactions.
But that didn't adequately describe what I experienced myself doing. I wasn't usually thinking, "I need this person to think I'm smart or valuable." I was thinking, "They still don't understand." That distinction matters. I come from a U.S. marketing culture in which extensive pre-sale education is completely normal. I'm also a former educator. Someone doesn't understand. I know how to explain it. So I explain it. They still don't understand. I explain it differently. They tell me more about their particular circumstances. I use that information to make the explanation more relevant. Eventually they understand.
I had categorized much of this internally as helping a prospective customer understand what they might purchase. But I eventually had to ask a much more uncomfortable question: what if helping someone reach that individualized understanding is what they should have been purchasing?
Sometimes Understanding Is the Product
This is particularly easy to miss in consulting because consulting frequently produces cognitive rather than physical outputs. Someone brings me a messy business problem. I listen. I notice patterns. I identify contradictions. I separate problems they've combined. I identify what information is relevant and what isn't. I connect something they've told me with something they haven't considered. I reduce the number of decisions they are trying to make simultaneously. They become calmer. They understand what's happening. They know what to do next.
It would be very easy for me to call all of that "explaining how I can help." There's another name for it: consulting. If the person leaves substantially clearer, more organized, reassured, or better able to make decisions because of the thinking I contributed, I have to consider whether I demonstrated the product or delivered it.
"I'm Basically My Client's Therapist"
There's another reason the endurance-coaching story interests me. My psychologist has reminded me, when we've discussed professional boundaries, that I'm not a psychologist. I don't need to function as one merely because somebody brings emotional material into a professional conversation. That makes sense. But it immediately reminds me of a joke I've heard repeatedly among women in U.S. marketing and business communities: "Apparently I'm also my client's therapist." These women marketing professionals are usually not therapists, and they usually aren't volunteering for the role. The joke exists because the experience is recognizable.
People bring anxiety into marketing relationships. They bring fear. They bring self-worth. They bring relationship problems. They bring uncertainty about their identities. They want reassurance. They want someone to tell them that their idea isn't stupid. They want someone to tell them they're capable. And sometimes they bring those needs into a sales call before they have even become clients.
When the Patients Are the Ones Crossing the Line
I want to be direct about a version of this problem that has nothing to do with clients or consulting at all, because it's shaped how seriously I take these boundaries now.
As a patient myself, I've published my own work in patient journals and been a paid presenter on what I've learned navigating complex, poorly understood health conditions. That work is strictly educational: what I've learned about how healthcare systems function, what I've learned testing my own body, what worked and didn't. I did not build it, and have never framed it, as a peer support space or an invitation into a personal relationship.
That hasn't stopped people from treating it as one. Some patients who encounter that material seem to place me into a peer category, "she's a patient like me," and from there, expect a level of access and reciprocity that has nothing to do with what I actually offered. I've had other patients assert to me that they are researchers too when what they actually have is a folder of accumulated ideas and links, not the kind of published, peer-reviewed, or presented work I'm describing. I've had patients approach me to ask me to help them organize their thoughts, meet unspecified emotional needs, get them in contact with specific medical help, and assist them in starting a business, sometimes all in the same message, because they can't access disability benefits or find effective medical care and see me as someone who might solve all of that for them. All of this arrives with the expectation that it will be free, delivered through a free educational layer, from someone they've decided is a peer rather than a professional. Some of this is best understood as a parasocial relationship: people incorrectly identifying me as a friend, despite not actually knowing me, and expecting me to complete these tasks as part of an imagined friendship that exists only in their own minds, while I maintain my actual friendships with actual people, in person.
This behavior has escalated well beyond ordinary boundary-testing. I eventually had to set my TikTok account to private after being cyberstalked by patients who were outsourcing emotional needs onto me and trying to get those needs met through my strictly educational content about healthcare systems and my own testing, including through inappropriate direct messages where other women treated our shared gender as grounds for emotional disclosure they hadn't earned and men expressed romantic feelings toward me, blurring a fantasy of a relationship together with a very real and separate need for effective medical treatment and a genuine, professional relationship with their own psychologist. I've had people sign up through different channels on my website, first as a patient, then again as a physician, trying to find a version of the intake process that would grant them access to me personally. I've had people talk into certain intake channels as though I were a lifelong friend, with no idea who was actually going to read the message on the other end. At one point, someone encountered a stock photo used in one of my Facebook ads and proceeded to have an extended conversation with an automated response bot, believing they were talking directly to the woman in the photo. I eventually had to block that person.
I have taken this seriously enough to build an actual referral network. I've connected with therapists specifically so that when this happens, I have somewhere real to redirect people, rather than either absorbing the need myself or ignoring it. And I've talked with South American psychologists repeatedly about exactly this boundary. Their consistent, direct feedback has been that I am not a psychologist and am not responsible for meeting anyone's emotional needs, which I agree with completely. I have had to say the same thing back just as directly, many times over: I do not in any way claim to be a mental health professional, and what's happening when someone treats my educational content as an entry point to a personal relationship is inappropriate, regardless of how much distress is underneath it.
Why This Keeps Happening: Loneliness, Isolation, and Where the Need Goes
I don't think this is really about me, or about health content specifically. I think it's downstream of something much larger happening in the U.S. right now, and it connects directly to everything else in this piece about where unmet needs travel when there's nowhere structured for them to go.
In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General formally declared loneliness and isolation a public health epidemic, on the same footing as the advisories previously issued for tobacco use. The numbers behind that declaration are stark as roughly half of U.S. adults report experiencing loneliness, and since 2003, the average American has gained about 24 hours a month spent alone while losing roughly 20 hours a month of in-person time with friends. An October 2023 Pew Research poll found that 8 percent of Americans report having no close friends at all. Poor social connection carries measurable physical consequences too, associated with meaningfully higher risk of heart disease, stroke, and premature death, comparable in scale to some of the risks associated with smoking.
Several things sit underneath that epidemic, and I think all of them leech into how people relate to strangers online who happen to be sharing something real. U.S. culture carries a strong current of hyperindividualism, the expectation that people solve their problems alone, present as self-sufficient, and often lack the dense, obligatory family and community networks that exist by default in many other cultures. Remote work has compounded this specifically; employees working from home are frequently praised for their productivity while quietly reporting some of the lowest measures of workplace connection and mental wellness, isolated from the incidental daily contact an office used to provide. Add to that a culture that is, relative to many others, more transactional than relational by default, where relationships often need an explicit reason or exchange to exist, and it becomes easier to understand why so much unmet need for genuine connection ends up redirected toward whomever happens to be visible, present, and speaking honestly about something real, whether or not that person ever offered a relationship at all.
That's the context I think this actually belongs in. When a whole population is starved for connection, some portion of that need doesn't stay contained to friendships and family. It travels. It shows up in free discovery calls with endurance coaches. It shows up in fractional-executive relationships with no real company behind them. And it shows up, sometimes at an intrusive and even frightening scale, directed at anyone who publishes something honest and personal, whether that person ever asked to be anyone's peer, friend, or therapist at all.
What If This Need Had Somewhere Else to Go?
I keep returning to the same question, the same one running underneath the college admissions consultant and the homeschool coach: what would happen to all of this need if the culture around it normalized therapy the way Argentina does?
Argentines have told me, repeatedly and without prompting, that they see a psychologist not necessarily for a diagnosed disorder, but simply to improve a relationship, manage ordinary stress, or think through a decision. That framing has made its way into popular culture directly. Multiple Argentine television series have built entire storylines around a main character regularly attending therapy for exactly this kind of everyday reason, Envidiosa being a recent, well-known example, where going to therapy is treated as an unremarkable, normal part of a woman's routine and a key part of growth for her character arch rather than a sign that something is seriously wrong.
Now hold that up against the admissions consultant's actual audience: parents awake at night with anxiety, likely carrying real perfectionism, quite possibly placing some of that same pressure onto their own children's expectations to succeed, all of it eventually funneled into a college admissions consulting business because that was the visible, accessible door in front of them. In a culture where seeing a psychologist for exactly that kind of stress was normal and unremarkable, would that same parent have worked through the perfectionism and the 1 a.m. anxiety with a therapist first, using real psychological techniques to manage it? Or would some of that need still find its way to a visible founder anyway, simply because U.S. culture puts such a premium on founder accessibility and personal-brand intimacy that the founder becomes an easier, more immediately present target than making and keeping a therapy appointment?
I don't have a confident answer. But I don't think the honest answer is that normalized therapy would fully absorb this. Visibility itself seems to be part of what invites it, the same dynamic that shaped the endurance coach, the fractional executives, and the admissions consultant, independent of whether a culture has good infrastructure for ordinary emotional support elsewhere. What changes, I suspect, isn't whether the impulse exists. It's how much of it a founder is expected to personally absorb before someone considers going anywhere else with it.
Emotional Needs Don't Disappear. They Move.
This makes me interested in a larger question about the U.S. wellness economy. In my own experiences with U.S. healthcare and psychotherapy, I've encountered systems that can be heavily structured around diagnosis, documentation, and defined clinical services. Meanwhile, an enormous adjacent economy exists around coaching, wellness, self-development, accountability, and other forms of support, and that economy is growing quickly. The U.S. life coaching market alone was estimated at nearly $2 billion in 2024, with multiple industry forecasts projecting it to roughly double by the early 2030s, and the broader life coaching services category, which includes health and business coaching, is projected to nearly triple over the next decade. Adjacent categories tell a similar story: health coaching alone is already a $7 billion industry in the U.S., and business coaching accounts for another $12 billion. Virtual and digital coaching platforms have been the fastest-growing segment of that market, which fits neatly with what I've observed: accessibility, not just demand, is driving where people go looking for support.
Even the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has led to AI coaching which can cross over often into emotional support as people feel that they must keep up with knowledge of AI to remain competitive in the workplace while also harboring strong feelings about AI. There’s no billing code for “anxiety about AI” in any health insurance plan I know, so off to the AI coaches go the stressed people, giving the psychotherapists who are largely social workers in the U.S. a wide berth when people already struggle just to encounter competent therapeutic support for basic needs in the current healthcare system.
People have needs that they don't necessarily experience as psychiatric diagnoses. They need reassurance. They need direction. They need accountability. They need practical life skills. They need help making decisions. They need someone to help them organize experiences that feel overwhelming. If people don't experience those needs as being met within one system, the needs don't disappear. They go somewhere else. Sometimes they go into coaching. Sometimes wellness. Sometimes professional communities. Sometimes consulting relationships. And sometimes they walk straight into a free discovery call.
That's one reason comparisons with places such as Argentina, where psychotherapy occupies a particularly prominent cultural position, interest me. I wouldn't assume that Argentinians have a uniform relationship with psychotherapy, or that this explains any particular business behavior. But it raises an interesting cross-cultural question: if ordinary emotional processing has a different cultural home, does that affect the other places where people try to obtain it?
Different Cultures Can Put the Free Labor in Different Places
This is ultimately why I don't think the useful conclusion is that one culture has good professional boundaries and another has bad ones. Different expectations can produce different forms of unpaid labor. One pattern I've encountered in international outreach looks something like: "I received the information. Now let's interact while I reach understanding." A familiar U.S. professional-services pattern looks more like: "You need to understand before purchasing, so I'll keep teaching until you're ready." And U.S. employment culture can add yet another: "You're asking us for an opportunity, so show us what you can do before we'll decide whether you're worth paying."
All three can place substantial cognitive labor on the professional before a transaction exists. And when these expectations meet each other, they can fit together almost perfectly. "I'm confused." "Let me explain." "But what does this mean for me?" "Tell me about your situation." The person explains. The professional analyzes. The person becomes clearer. The professional provides reassurance. The person feels better. Then the person leaves. Everyone still calls it pre-sale education. But somewhere during that conversation, the sale may have disappeared because the thing that could have been sold was already being consumed.
Free Education Does Not Require Free Access to the Educator
I still strongly believe in free education. Businesses shouldn't deliberately keep consumers confused so they'll purchase something. People need enough information to understand what a professional does and make informed decisions. But I've stopped assuming that every remaining piece of uncertainty is the professional's responsibility to eliminate individually before asking someone to pay.
In one call recently with a potential client who owned a healthcare-adjacent AI solutions company, he asked for the contact information of my past clients so he could reach out to them directly for reassurance. I already have reviews from those clients on the professional platform I use, which displays their last name as an initial (John Smith appears as John S.) alongside case studies. People are not entitled to privacy violations of my past and current clientele simply because they cannot manage their own uncertainty. This request came after an extended free discovery call in which the same potential client had already remarked positively on my demonstrated competence. At a certain point, a potential client has enough information, and no amount of additional reassurance will ever be enough if what they actually want is to eliminate risk entirely. Life comes with some level of risk built in.
I see this same tendency showing up increasingly in U.S. social settings, not just business ones, which suggests it isn't really a sales-process problem at all. I recently created a Facebook page to start a crafting community that would meet at my house, and I was met with transactional-style requests asking that I perform labor to guarantee there would be no risk involved: that I would supply all the materials needed, that I could guarantee attendees would feel comfortable meeting new people, and so on. These people seemed unable to tolerate the smallest risk, that they might spend five dollars on yarn and discover they don't enjoy knitting, that they might meet a group of new people and feel briefly uncomfortable because one attendee is overbearing, and so on down the list. I've encountered a version of the same thing on dating apps, where men have messaged to say they find me attractive and then asked that I provide some kind of guarantee that I fully align with their expectations before they'll invest any effort into getting to know me. I do not owe anyone a get-to-know-me guide. At a certain point, people need to learn how to manage uncertainty on their own.
There's a name in psychological research for this broader pattern, and it helps explain why no amount of individual reassurance ever seems to close the gap. Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, in The Coddling of the American Mind, describe a cultural shift they call safetyism: a mindset in which the total avoidance of risk, harm, or even discomfort becomes treated as a sacred, non-negotiable value rather than one consideration to be weighed against others. They trace its roots partly to a shift in parenting that began decades ago, sometimes referred to as paranoid or snowplow parenting, in which children were increasingly protected from small, manageable risks, physical at first, and later emotional and social as well, a pattern they describe as "concept creep," where the definition of what counts as unsafe keeps expanding. A later empirical study testing their thesis found that people who endorse more safetyism-style beliefs also tend to score higher on measures of specific cognitive distortions, including catastrophizing, treating a mildly negative outcome as a disaster, and all-or-nothing thinking, treating any risk as unacceptable rather than weighing it proportionally.
That research helps explain something I kept observing directly: reassurance doesn't fail because I'm bad at giving it. It fails because the actual request isn't for information. It's for someone else to absorb a risk that was never really theirs to eliminate in the first place, whether that's the risk of hiring a consultant, the risk of an unfamiliar hobby costing five dollars and an evening, or the ordinary risk of getting to know another person before knowing how things will turn out.
One thing I learned through psychotherapy with my Colombian psychologist is that Spanish has a concise, single verb for holding someone responsible for what should be their own responsibility: responsabilizar. When I get a midnight message from a fellow Atlanta resident wanting me to reassure a total stranger that they'll love knitting as much as I do, I can responsabilizar them right back: that's your responsibility to discover, not mine; you should be the one determining whether you'll enjoy this hobby more than some other option. That kind of boundary-setting response is typically met with the person lashing out and blocking me because I've apparently violated what has become an unfortunate social norm in the U.S. In talking to other American women, we have frequently noted that this pattern seems to persist largely because so many of us are exhausted from being lashed out at for exactly this, especially when our boundaries get questioned by other Americans and relabeled, in language that skews notably gendered as unkind, unhelpful, or even aggressive.
What Actually Removes the Burden: Building the Hands-Free Front Door
My Colombian psychologist has emphasized, repeatedly, that I should use automatic, pre-set responses for these situations: choosing in advance how much of a potentially lengthy request I'll actually review, offering some minimal validation so the sender doesn't feel dismissed for having shared something real, directing them toward the right channel, and then responsabilizing them to take the next step in what is now their journey, not mine. That's good advice for the moment a boundary needs to be drawn in real time. But it's still a script a person has to execute, over and over, message by message.
What I find genuinely interesting, comparing the two markets I work across daily, is how differently each one is trying to solve this at the infrastructure level. I do see some automation in Colombian businesses. It's nowhere close, though, to what's now considered standard practice in U.S. marketing strategy, where a large share of the requests I get these days are specifically about building a hands-free business from the front door onward.
In practice, that structure usually looks something like this. A potential customer searches for and encounters the business through Google, arriving with real intent rather than being cold-approached. Whatever information they submit from that point on, an inquiry, a booking request, a question, gets captured automatically into a customer relationship management (CRM) platform, so nothing depends on a person remembering the conversation later. Increasingly, that potential customer may not even reach a human being on the first contact at all. Voice-based AI agents are now common enough to function as a genuine 24/7 digital receptionist, handling inbound and outbound calls, answering routine questions, and logging everything that happens, without needing a person available at that exact moment to do it.
The effect of that structure isn't just efficiency. It's a form of built-in boundary-setting that doesn't require a professional to personally absorb the emotional cost of saying no, over and over, to the same handful of predictable requests, or even having to deal with emotional bids hidden in service requests. A pre-set automated response can say, warmly and consistently, exactly what a tired professional might struggle to say for the fifteenth time that week without sounding short or defensive. The system holds the boundary so the person doesn't have to keep rebuilding it from scratch in every single conversation.
This is also, I think, part of why the gap between these two markets is widening rather than closing. In a relationship-based business culture, the professional is the interface, by design, and every inquiry is inherently personal. In a search-first, infrastructure-heavy market like the U.S., the interface can be almost entirely automated up until the moment a real transaction is actually ready to happen, and the professional only steps in once there's something genuinely worth their direct attention. That's not a small tooling difference. It's a completely different answer to the question this whole piece has been asking: who is actually supposed to do the work of reaching understanding, and at what point does that work stop being free.
There are at least three different things that can easily be confused. Scalable education provides information that many people can explore independently. Brief discovery establishes whether a real project and mutual fit exist. Individualized interpretation, reassurance, and problem-solving help someone understand what the information means for their particular circumstances. The first can be excellent free marketing. The second can make purchasing easier. The third may already be the professional service.
Sometimes the strongest reaction to a boundary comes precisely because the other person already recognizes the value of crossing it. That doesn't make every objection malicious. It doesn't mean everyone seeking more conversation is intentionally exploiting someone. And it doesn't require determining another person's motives before establishing terms. It simply means that someone else's desire for more access does not determine the price of that access.
Working internationally has made these distinctions more visible to me, because cultural differences expose assumptions that can remain invisible when everyone around us shares them. My conclusion isn't that professionals should educate less or become inaccessible. It's almost the opposite. Make the information easy to find. Make the website easy to navigate. Make the service easy to understand. Make legitimate opportunities easy to approach. But don't confuse low friction to approach a professional with unlimited permission to consume the professional.
A prospective customer can have excellent information and still be confused. They can want reassurance. They can want another conversation. They can want someone to organize their thoughts. They can want a professional to tell them what to do. Those can all be completely legitimate needs. But legitimate needs can also be paid needs. Free access to education does not necessarily include free access to the educator.
If You're Trying to Figure Out Where Your Own Line Is
If you recognize any of this in your own practice, free consultations that quietly become the service, discovery calls that never quite convert, or a growing sense that you're doing the work before anyone's decided to pay for it, that's a solvable structural problem, not a personal failing.
👉 Contact us to talk through where your own free-to-paid boundary should sit, and how to build a client journey that protects your time while still giving people the information they genuinely need to decide.