The bio that tells me nothing about you

"Dynamic leader passionate about impact." "Experienced professional driving transformative outcomes." "Strategic communications expert with a proven track record."

I read a lot of bios. These tell me almost nothing about the person who wrote them. What they do tell me — clearly, immediately — is that the person wrote the bio for an imagined evaluator rather than for someone they actually wanted to reach.

A bio written for an evaluator is optimised for credibility. It uses language the field recognises. It signals competence through category membership. It avoids anything particular, anything risky, anything that might not translate — because translation failure is a social cost, and the evaluator's approval is the goal.

A bio written for a real human being does something different. It speaks. It says something only this person would say, with the particular detail that belongs to their specific experience. It creates the possibility of actual recognition — of a reader thinking: this person sees something I see.

The founder who had two bios

I worked with a founder who had "over 15 years of cross-sector experience" in her official bio. When I asked her to set aside the polished version and just tell me what she did — not the credible version, the true one — she said, after a brief silence: "I help organisations stop saying things they don't mean."

That second thing is a bio. The first was a form she filled in. Neither was dishonest. Only one of them was real. The difference was not about credentials — she had the fifteen years. The difference was about whose judgment the writing was trying to satisfy.

The question underneath the bio

Most people who come to me with bio problems don't have a writing problem. They have spent so long writing for evaluators that they have lost confident access to their own perspective. The professional language has been used so frequently it now sounds like their own voice — but it is not. It is category language that has been borrowed and worn until it feels like skin.

It shows up most clearly when someone feels uncertain whether the person across from them understands what they do. In those moments, I have watched people who were perfectly articulate seconds earlier reach for the language their field has already approved, not because it explains better, but because it signals belonging. The words arrive as proof that they know why they are in the room. The conversation does not become clearer. It becomes more professionally shaped. And the person asking has learned the category, but not the person inside it.

The question I start with is not: what do you want to be known for? That question almost always produces more category language, because it is still oriented toward an audience's judgment.

The question is: what do you say when nobody is asking you to perform? In the conversation that happens after the meeting, or before it. In the email where you forget to be careful. In the moment when something frustrates or excites you enough that the language comes out before you have time to make it appropriate.

That is the bio. Everything else is the form you filled in.