Empathy and listening are usually filed under soft skills. In a conversation-based role, she argues, they are the technical ones.
The objection Holly Essington hears most often arrives before she has finished describing the work. I am not a salesperson.
Her answer is that the job does not call for the kind of person that sentence imagines. “The exact traits that make this work are traits that most women already have,” she says. “Skills that you are already using.”
She lists them without hedging. “Empathy, active listening, reading a room, being the friend that people come to for advice. These aren’t soft throwaway skills. These are the whole game.”
Where those skills were built
Essington, a former teacher and a mother of four, tends to argue this through examples rather than theory.
A teacher, she points out, writes tactful emails to parents about difficult subjects, and finds a way to get an eight-year-old interested in mathematics while keeping that child’s trust intact. Anyone who has worked in hospitality has built rapport with a stranger across a counter in the space of a minute. A parent has talked a reluctant toddler into shoes, or into a few more bites of dinner before the energy runs out.
Each of those, in her reading, is the same underlying competency: reading a person quickly, adjusting the approach, and asking for something without damaging the relationship.
That is also a fair description of a conversation with someone who has just enquired about a programme and is not sure whether it is right for them.
Where she draws the line
Essington is careful not to turn this into a claim that aptitude alone qualifies anyone. The traits are the raw material, not the credential.
Businesses hiring for these roles are handing over conversations with prospective clients, and they hire on evidence. That gap between having the instincts and being able to demonstrate them is, in her account, exactly where training belongs: structured practice, recorded role plays, and feedback from someone who can say precisely what to fix.
“Information is not power,” she says. “Applied information is power.”
The other assumption
The second objection Essington hears concerns visibility. Many women assume that working online means becoming an influencer, building a following and putting their family on camera. The setter role asks for close to the opposite. The work happens inside somebody else’s audience, in a private inbox, and nobody outside the business ever sees it.
What the conversations do demand is candour. Someone arrives uncertain and often sceptical, and the task is to find out what they are actually dealing with and to say plainly when the programme is not right for them. Essington treats that as a skill in its own right rather than a failed sale, and it is the part she says the strongest candidates tend to understand instinctively.
Her own starting point
Part of the reason the argument lands is that Essington does not present herself as a natural at any of this.
“I’ve never been huge on social media or considered myself an entrepreneur,” she says. Before she learned the role she had sworn off selling of any kind, having tried and disliked several versions of it. She had no audience, no brand and no intention of building either.
What she had was a decade of talking to children, parents and colleagues for a living, and five years of running a household with four young children in it.
Her position now is that the women who assume they have nothing transferable are usually the ones who have been using the relevant skills longest without anyone ever calling them professional. What is missing is not the capability but the vocabulary to describe it and the evidence to prove it, and both of those can be built.
It is, in her framing, less a matter of becoming someone else than of using deliberately what is already there.
“When you build your skill set, you set yourself free,” she says.