A client booked a therapy appointment before our first session together.
Not after. BEFORE.
She’d done a curiosity call with me and figured out pretty quickly that I was going to make her claim her expertise. Unapologetically. Own her accomplishments. Stop the quiet, persistent underselling she’d been doing for years.
(Like most women, honestly.)
She didn’t know me well enough yet to know that while I don’t pull punches, I’m never deliberately cruel. I’m not there to tear anyone down. I’m there to build them up: loudly, strategically, and with receipts.
But the work can be emotionally draining. And she wasn’t taking chances.
Honestly? Good for her. It was a smart move. So:
Therapy first. Then me.
She booked a second therapy session between our first and second meetings. To recover and process, presumably.
Which she cancelled. And didn’t reschedule.
When I asked how her second therapy session was, she said: “Oh, I cancelled it. Had something come up. Plus I realized I didn’t need it.”
She didn’t need it because she’d done the work. She’d looked at what she’d actually accomplished — and it was legendary, BTW — and decided it was worth claiming out loud.
And claim it she did. And felt awesome doing it.
That’s not a LinkedIn win. That’s a whole thing.
Your profile is just where it shows up first.
Why is it so hard to claim your own accomplishments on LinkedIn?
It’s not laziness and it’s not modesty. It’s that you’re too close to your own story to see it clearly.
The accomplishments that would make a stranger’s jaw drop read as “just my job” to you.
And here’s the part that gets me: the better someone is at what they do, the more surprised they are that I’m impressed. The higher up they are, the worse it gets.
(It’s almost always women. But not only. I’ll let you sit with that.)
And it shows up all over a LinkedIn profile.
- In headlines that hedge.
- In job descriptions that list tasks instead of impact.
- In About sections that trail off right before they make the case for you.
Fixing your LinkedIn profile is the easy part
The harder part is the belief underneath it: that what you did is worth saying out loud, with your name on it, where people can see it.
That’s the part that sends people to therapy first.
When you work with me 1-on-1, you’ll work through that because I’ll see what you don’t: that you’re more of a rock star than you realize. And then I’ll make sure you own it. Therapy optional.
But even if we don’t work together, starting from the bottom of your profile will help you identify all the amazing things you’ve done.
If you’re ready to own it, start with the free Profile Cheat Sheets. They cover which sections of your profile matter most and what goes in each. And if you want the full framework, Optimize ($397) covers every section of your profile across 50+ self-paced lessons. It’s the same approach used in fully private engagements.
You’ve earned the accomplishments. Your profile should say so.