How to tell people what you do when you’re weird AF

When you’re weird AF it can be difficult to tell people what you do without confusing them, giving way too much irrelevant information, or overcompensating.

It can be even harder to simplify what you do on platforms where people just take a quick glance at your profile. But in that quick glance you want people to capture the essence of who you are, what you do, and who you do it for.

If you don’t know how to describe yourself in one sentence for your bio, then here are some of the things that you can do to make it a streamlined, simple, and elegant process.

The first thing you need to do is to acknowledge that you do not belong in a one sentence bio. You simply cannot fit there. You have too many capacities, too much history, too many possibilities, too many things that you are great at to fit in this one area.

Once you know that you can never write one sentence that encompasses everything you are, then you simply get to create a calling card for people that are looking for exactly what you have to offer.

Your bio should be there for other people to go “Yeah, that’s what I’m looking for” and for them to be able to recognize that’s what they need right now. This is not only about describing who you are, but more importantly who you are for and how you can help them.

For me, the description I use the most is “Business Coach for scatterbrained Creatives with too many ideas”.  Business coach is a pretty simple run of the mill job description, but people know what that is and what that may involve. Who it’s for, on the other hand, is a different story. It becomes very obvious that I’m not a business coach for hustlers, accountants, or someone that is very organized and has all their shit together. If you are someone who is a creative and you are all over the map, then you are like “Ah, this is for me”.

When you are telling people what you do, ask this question: “What is the one thing I would like people to receive from this?”

Here is my template for creating a short and simple one liner. It’s so simple, it’s almost boring.

Template: [JOB DESCRIPTION] for [PEOPLE DESCRIPTION].

The first thing you want to do is brainstorm all the different job descriptions that you could give yourself. Maybe it is Business Coach, Performer, Facilitator or Energy Worker.

Then brainstorm a list of all the things that the people you work with call themselves.

At this stage it is important to check in with your people to see what descriptions they resonate with. Your bio doesn’t only need to make you happy, it needs to make your people connect. We can create this gorgeous and fancy bio, but if it uses words that your people don’t connect with, then it’s useless. That is why you want to ask your people questions about how they would describe themselves through questions, polls and interactive conversations.

The next step is to marry your job description and the defining factors of your people into a sentence.

You can change up your bio whenever it is required, or you can have multiple ones for different platforms or the different pathways you want to lead people through.

So to recap, for all you weird AF Creatives – you can’t fit your entire being into one sentence, this is a calling card for your people (not you!), and keep it simple by describing your job and who you work with.

Now, go create that magical one-liner ;)