You're underselling yourself
The most powerful story about you is the one you haven't articulated yet.
Here’s what I’m seeing this week that will help you see and think differently about your business, brand, and/or decisions:
You’re Underselling Yourself
Most founders and leaders I work with are almost never telling the most powerful story about themselves.
The story exists, every time. Your story exists.
Most of the time, they just can’t see it. They’re too close.
And the gap between the story they could be telling and the one they are telling is costing them clients, roles, and deals they don’t even know they lost.
But it’s mostly frustrating bc once we uncover the more powerful story, it’s more visceral, electric, and has the tentacles to inspire.
The Lens
The Different Way To Look At It
I have two scenarios from just this week:
I was recently in a room with a senior VP at a major sports league. She said something that stopped me: “Internally, we’re known as the league that stands up for the underdog.”
I looked at everything they put out externally. None of it said that. Not a word. Not a frame. Not a feeling.
The most compelling thing about them was locked inside the building.
So what if you’re not a major sports league?
Well, I was helping a senior leader reposition her resume. She had 15+ years of experience in an adjacent industry, easily transferable, and sure to get any executive team’s attention.
But the way she was describing it? Flat. Functional. A list of what she did, not what it meant.
We rewrote the entire thing - not the facts, but the frame around the facts. She’s now in her second round of interviews at Coca-Cola.
I felt like I was yelling the whole session. But that’s how amped I get when I see the frame come to life.
This happens constantly. This is an articulation problem.
Most people aren’t telling the wrong story badly. They’re telling the wrong story entirely.
They jump straight to wordsmithing → tweaking the bio, polishing the pitch deck, rewriting the homepage for the fourth time.
But the problem was never the phrasing. The problem is they haven’t found the real story yet.
The real story almost always lives in the moments that changed something. The inflection point that shaped the product.
The decision that redirected the whole company. The thing a founder says casually in conversation that makes you go wait - tell me more about that.
Those moments are where the magic is. But people walk past them because they don’t look like “marketing.” They look like personal history. They feel too specific, too small, too obvious to the person living them.
They’re not. They’re the raw material. And once you find them, then you can build a story that actually lands - one that signals the right person, makes the value legible, and pulls them in further.
Most people nail maybe one of those. Almost no one nails all three. And the difference between one and three is the difference between being considered and being chosen.
Put It To Work
Apply The Lens To Your Work
Part 1: Find the Right Story
