Stop Writing Your Professional Obituary

Here’s something nobody says out loud at industry events, mastermind groups, or even in the networking spaces you attend.

Your bio is a turnoff.

Not because you’re not accomplished. You absolutely are. But you’ve written your bio the way we all learned to – like a LinkedIn profile review, a résumé cover sheet, or a Wikipedia entry that nobody asked for. You’ve listed credentials, named dropped companies, stacked up degrees and certifications and board positions, even keynote appearances, and at the end of it, the reader feels like they’ve just skimmed a tax return.

Impressive? Sure. Compelling? Not even close.

There’s a word for a well-formatted list of someone’s life accomplishments in chronological order with their biggest titles highlighted.

It’s called an obituary.

And if that’s what you’re handing people – from your website, your social profiles, your conference program listing, your networking introduction – you are actively working against yourself. Every single time.

Here’s the dirty secret the personal branding industry doesn’t want you to notice: most of the advice out there is focused on ‘you’. Your story. Your accolades. Your journey. Your voice.

But your prospective client or even your audience? They didn’t show up to hear about you. They showed up because they have a ‘problem’ – and they’re quietly wondering if you might be the person to solve it.

The real villain in this story isn’t a competitor or a bad economy or the branding experts. It’s the gap. The gap between where your prospective client or audience is right now and where they desperately want to be. That gap is the enemy. That gap is keeping them up at night. That gap is why they Googled their way to you, clicked on your session, or landed on your website at 11pm wondering if maybe this time, somebody actually gets it.

Your bio should walk into that gap like it owns the place.

Instead, most professionals are doing the equivalent of handing someone a pill they can’t swallow that tastes bad, burns on the way down, and doesn’t sole the issue.

Any dog owner knows the trick. You can’t hand a dog a pill. They’ll eat around it, spit it out, give you that look. But wrap it in a piece of cheese? Gone in three seconds.

Your credentials are the pill. Nobody actually wants to swallow them raw. But the outcome you create, the relief you bring, the transformation your client gets to brag about to their own people? That’s the cheese.

The job of your bio is not to tell people what you’ve done. It’s to make them feel something – specifically, the feeling that you understand what they’re going through and that “there’s a way out”, and that you might just be the guide they’ve been looking for.

That feeling is what earns trust. Trust is what earns the conversation. The conversation is what earns the business.

Your CV doesn’t close deals. You do.

Most professionals have been taught that credibility = accomplishments.

So they list them. Aggressively. Exhaustively. Because they were told that’s how you build trust. And yes, social proof matters. But there’s a massive difference between proof and performance.

When every consultant, coach, speaker, and executive on the circuit leads with “I’ve worked with Fortune 500 companies and been featured in Forbes,” what you’ve actually created is a sea of sameness where nobody stands out and everybody sounds like a bot wrote their intro at 2am.

The real credibility play isn’t the logos you’ve been associated with. It’s whether you can demonstrate, in the first three sentences, that you understand the problem your client lives inside every day better than they can articulate it themselves.

That’s what stops the scroll. That’s what makes someone forward your bio to a colleague with a “you need to read this”.

When you can name the problem so precisely that your reader/listener feels seen – you don’t need a list of credential. You’ve already proven the only thing that matters: you get it.

Because a compelling Bio isn’t about you. It’s for someone.

It’s written for the exhausted entrepreneur who’s brilliant at what they do but invisible in their market. It’s for the executive who’s been passed over for the third time and can’t understand why. It’s for the team that keeps losing deals they should win and has run out of explanations.

A great bio puts them in the frame and positions you as the person who has walked alongside people exactly like them and helped them get where they actually want to go.

This shift alone – from “here’s what I’ve done” to “here’s who I show up for and what changes when I do” – will make your bio three times more effective overnight.

Here’s what I have done = Obituary

Dead before you start.

Practical Things You Can Do Right Now

These aren’t tips. They’re rewrites. Try them.

1. Open with their problem, not your title.

Instead of: Sarah is a 20-year veteran of the financial services industry and holds an MBA from Wharton…”

Try: “Most financial advisors are great at making money grow. What they’re terrible at is helping clients stop losing sleep over it. Sarah built her practice around the second part.”

Which one makes you want to keep reading?

2. Name the enemy explicitly.

What is the thing – the system, the assumption, the broken industry norm – that you exist to fix? Name it. Take a position. Generic people have no enemies. Interesting, trustworthy people are fighting something specific.

If you’re a leadership coach, maybe you’re fighting the “results at all costs” culture that burns out the best people. If you’re a brand strategist, maybe you’re fighting the “look how busy we look” marketing that confuses activity with traction. Name the fight. People want to join something.

3. Shrink yourself. Expand your client.

Look at your current bio and count how many times the word “I” or your name appears in the first paragraph. Now look at how many times the reader, your client, your customer appears.

Flip the ratio.

Instead of listing what you’ve done, describe who you serve and what their world looks like after working with you. Give them the vision of the outcome. That’s what they’re actually buying.

4. Use the “so that” test.

After every credential you want to include, add “so that.” If you can’t complete the sentence in a way that benefits the reader, cut the credential.

“I have 15 years in corporate HR… so that I can spot in five minutes what most organizations take five quarters to admit is broken.” That earns its place.

“I’m a certified [credential you paid $4,000 for]…” so that… you can live a better life (this is undifferentiated, undefined and a generic statement). Cut it.

5. Write your bio in the third person, but with a first-person voice.

The third person is necessary for most professional contexts – event programs, website About pages, media kits. But it doesn’t have to sound like it was written by a corporate communications committee in 1997.

Read it out loud. Would a real human being say this to another human being at a dinner party? If not, rewrite it until they would.

6. End with a lean-in, not a bow.

Most bios end with something like “John lives in Austin with his wife and two golden retrievers.” That’s a cocktail party footnote, not a call to care.

End with something that opens a door. A philosophy. A provocation. A question that your ideal client is already asking themselves. Make the last line the thing that makes someone want to have a conversation with you.

“She doesn’t believe the best ideas are the loudest ones. She believes they’re usually still in the room, waiting for someone to ask the right question.”

That makes you want to meet her.

It is a Conversation, Not a Performance

Whether you’re speaking at a conference, guesting on a podcast, walking into a networking event, or being introduced by someone who just read your bio cold – you have about 45 seconds before people decide if you’re worth their full attention.

The professionals who win that 45 seconds aren’t the ones with the longest credential list. They’re the ones who made the listener or reader feel, in some small but real way, that they were the reason the person showed up.

That’s not a trick. That’s not manipulation. That’s just understanding that people connect to people who see them – not to people who are too busy being seen.

Your accomplishments may have got you the seat. But how you show up – how you talk about what you do, who you do it for, and why it matters – that’s what gets you remembered, referred, and re-invited.

So burn the obituary.

Write the thing that makes someone put their phone down.

The best bio you’ll ever write is the one that makes your ideal client think, “How did they know exactly what I’m going through?” — and then show you can do something about it.