You need a better bio! Part 1: Uncover your business backstory
“Every work begins as an intimation and discovery. Like the first time as a child we walk to the edge of a Yorkshire field, glimpse a new horizon, and immediately want to go there. We do not know where the horizon will take us. We have a glimmering, an inclination, a notion that somehow we will find something beyond our present knowledge.”
—David Whyte, Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity
Welcome to the Writing an Incredible Bio series! I don’t need to tell you how important it is to have a great bio if you’re building any kind of business online. For service-based businesses like coaching, for creators and artists, founders and solopreneurs, your bio or ‘About Me’ page provides two really important things:
Connection: A great bio connects you to the people who are most inspired by your voice, who will trust your perspective, and who share the values and interests that will make them great partners, clients, teammates, investors, or loyal customers.
Clarity: Writing this bio can help you answer crucial questions for your business, helping you define the mission and purpose of your work, how you are positioned to achieve or contribute to this mission, and who you’re driven to serve.
Instead of just throwing some brief lines up on your site that show off your most impressive achievements and a couple of awkward ‘fun facts,’ slow down and dive in to what the bio could be. I’ve seen this process define and transform the businesses of my writing clients, helping coaches clarify their niche, creators understand their mission, and founders determine the depth of their own positioning.
In this post, you’ll prepare key elements that inform the bio—the basics and the background—and uncover your true work backstory, so you don’t waste time laboring over a version of your own life you think people would be attracted to. Do you have a really diverse work background and you don’t know how to explain why you’re starting this new company now? Are you unsure of who you want to serve? Do you have a lot of stories you think could work and don’t know how to pick the right one or bring them together? Are you unsure exactly what you want to do next? This post is for you.
Next week, we’ll analyze and organize the story you mined based on your priorities, and cover four remaining considerations to help you tie it all up and craft a great bio: beliefs, balance, journey, and mood. And stay tuned in the following weeks to improve your skills as a self-editor, so you can bring your bio and all your writing to the place of style, voice, and polish it deserves ❤️
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Step 1: Basics
Before we mine your mind for your big work backstory, it helps to lay out the basics. Some of you can rattle off your mission and purpose and market in a trip up the elevator, others aren’t so sure yet. Write down what you know, and return to these questions later on—what you don’t yet know may be revealed in your step 3 explorations.
What are you doing / building / making with your business? Why are you doing this?
Who are you serving and why?
What is your mission (the impact you want to have)?
What are you trying to change? Why?
What is your purpose (the reason that impact matters)?
What do you most want to see in the world or in the people you serve?
What are your goals for the people you serve? Or for transforming your industry or space?
Why are you building this / working toward this now?
Why you?
Do not rush this! If you write down that you’re serving ‘future leaders’ and you can’t articulate why, you need to go deeper, you need to get more specific about who those future leaders really might be and what your relationship is to them. (Another post in my drafts for coaches who can use writing to learn more about their potential niche and clientele!)
Step 2: Background
Your background includes your official qualifications to do the work you’re doing—basically, what you have done to prepare for the mission you just articulated.
You don’t want to include a CV of all of the work you’ve ever done, just the most relevant work experience. Some people don’t always believe this, but it’s true. If you run your own thing, you’re telling a story, period full stop. Your internship and GPA just are not important details in that story—edit them out when you make this list of qualifications.
We’ll come back to the background next week when we put the elements together. For now, it helps to differentiate your background from your backstory, to avoid being distracted by the limited narrative of your background when searching for the broader narrative that will contextualize your work.
Step 3: Backstory
Ok, here’s the big one! In contrast to your background, your backstory isn’t about where you went to college or how you leveraged one FAANG position for greater TC at another. Instead, your backstory answers the Big Why: “why am I doing this?” It gives the context for your step 1 answers—where you are and where you are going—based on where you’ve been.
Specifically, your backstory might cover: Where did I come from, how did I get here, what am I interested in, what am I trying to do and what I am doing now, what it is for, who it is for, and with what attitude and values do I do it? It might cover more or less than all of this. But broadly we are looking for the answer to the question, “How did it come to be this way?”
Toward this answer there are many directions, many threads you may be pulling on, depending on what your work is and what you want to emphasize—is it the people you work with? Is is the container you’ve created? Is it the reason you got into this? Is it what you want to accomplish, the change you want to be part of creating? Is it the journeys you want to support, the stories you want to tell?
In this step you have five angles to consider that will help you find the through-line that ties together your experience with your values, mission, and purpose. I’m not expecting you to answer all of these questions, no. Rather, read through them for the spark I know is there and then get writing. Or, get out a tape recorder and speak responses as you read through the prompts to see what comes out.
For some of you it’ll take just one of my prompts and you’ll have the backstory clear. Others will need to think more deeply through these options and consider them over time. Trust that within all the many storylines and confusions and turns of your life, there is a throughline, and finding it will help you understand yourself and your business a lot better.
Let’s see if we can find capture the through-line and find your backstory!
And Just Like That…:
Think about moments of inspiration—the first spark of interest or passion for what would become my work, or moments of deeper understanding that inspired me in this particular direction.
Think about moments of confirmation—when I became sure what the path ahead was going to be.
Think about moments of affirmation—when I knew that path was my own, or what I am doing was affirmed or assured by an experience I had.
Shift / Change:
Could it have been otherwise? Was there a turning point in my story? What was life like before and after?
This narrative could be character-driven: Did I have a mentor or teacher who changed my path?
Or action-driven: An experience or event that changed my story?
What I’ve Learned
What is the big lesson I’ve learned that helps me in my mission or to express my purpose? How did I learn it?
What I’ve Done
Is there a special path I’ve taken that exemplifies the values, shape, or content of my work? Broken through the odds, achieved unexpected things, followed a different path, discovered a surprise, got wise on some important truth, pushed back against oppression, lifted others up, was lifted up, escaped, embraced?
What Matters
When I think about what I’m doing / building / creating now, what is the biggest influence on how I’m doing it? Is my family background important? Where I grew up or how I was raised? My lineage or ancestry, the place or way I live now, my community, my identity/ies or expression of myself, my wisdom or achievement, who is in my life?
What memories or stories come to mind that inform the why or how of what I’m doing now?
What emerged from this exploration? What’s the backstory you’ve uncovered? Or have you narrowed down to a few options you might want to focus on? This week, outline your story options or move right into fleshing your story out.
Tips!
If you’re thinking, “I don’t want to say that much about me in my About Me, these leads are too personal,” that’s ok! Next week we’ll talk about how to decide how much to share, and how to achieve balance. The balance between the background and backstory and how you represent them on your site can be unique to you, and we’ll discuss that next week.
But, do it anyway. Right now, don’t think about what you’re going to share, just do this backstory mining for you. Regardless of whether you decide you want it on your site, you gotta know why you’re really doing all this and how you actually got into it. And if you don’t think you need or deserve to know that, know this: at some point, somebody’s gonna ask.
Don’t worry too much before you begin that you have nowhere to go. Start with one memory, it will lead to another. You must operate on the understanding that there is a story in what unfolds because it’s what happened to you. Remember, you are the expert in your life! There really is a story there, because here you are!
So what memories come up when you think about what led you to your work or what drives your work now? You probably have that starting memory. Write it down. More will come once you start, that’s my 100% guarantee because it’s how it works. Start with one memory related to this work, which you definitely have, and more will come as you write, so keep writing from there. Therein waits your story.
I’ve interviewed lots of people to help them find these stories, and it’s most often really easy despite how specific I’m being with these prompts. If you’re thinking about what led you to where you are now, your brain probably has something to say about it right away—unless you’re trying to build something that has nothing to do with you or your life, in which case, reconsider doing that!
If you get stuck, just remember our golden rule: all you have to do is tell the truth. If your truth begins, “I’ve worked twelve jobs in fifteen years and no one expected me to be here now,” then START WITH THAT. Don’t start with the assumption that you have to change the truth, you don’t. When they say ‘the truth will set you free,’ they also mean ‘telling the truth makes writing easier, better, and more beneficial for you.’
Write as much as you can of this backstory before you decide what to leave out and before you judge whether it’s “good” or “interesting.” Give yourself the opportunity for articulation and discovery. Next week you’ll analyze and organize your story into a coherent narrative and polish it into your personal style.
You might encounter strange and surprising things in this process. Don’t be afraid! This is where it can be great to go through the process with a trusted partner or friend. If you want 1:1 support or if you’re interested in a Writing for Coaches group workshop, shoot me an email rachel@racheljepsen.com.
See you Friday for our next creative writing prompt, and next Monday for more in this series. Grateful to be blowing up your inbox this fall!
