First and foremost, I’m not one to humblebrag. If I’m going to brag, I’m going to do it with my whole (rather substantial) chest. And not apologize for it.
Here it is:
Damn, I’m good. Like, REALLY good.
Seriously. I just finished building the before-and-after page on our website where I featured some of the transformations we’ve done: headlines, About sections, Experience entries, banners, Featured, Publications. Lined up side by side. Real clients, real profiles, shared with their permission.
And my first reaction, looking at all of them together for the first time?
Damn, I’m good.
Not because I’m trying to flex. Because these people look incredible. They look like the professionals they actually are. And every single one of them walked in thinking their profile was either fine or hopeless.
In short, my system WORKS.
What a LinkedIn before-and-after actually reveals
It’s not dramatic. That’s what surprises people.
Nobody changed careers. Nobody went back to school. Nobody suddenly became more impressive between the before and the after.
Patricia’s headline used to say “Independent Business Owner @ The North Shore Laser Center | Masters Degree.” Now it says “Serial Entrepreneur | Results-Driven | Proven Resilience (82 Days in the Wild).” Same person. Same businesses. Same 82 days. She just stopped hiding the interesting parts behind a title that sounded like an MLM scheme.
Michelle’s headline was “Global Marketing and Communications Consultant | Digital Marketing | Content Creation | Copywriting | Nonprofits | Fundraising.” Every uninspired keyword she could think of, no personality. Now it reads “Small Nonprofits, Powerful Stories | I will absolutely over-research your mission | My jokes are hilarious (according to me) 🤣.” A stranger DM’d her within days just to tell her they loved it.
Habib had a blank About section. Literally empty. Now it opens with a story about making homemade smoke grenades in fourth grade and ends with a PS about being certified in safety protocols (just in case anyone was concerned he didn’t learn his lesson). He got an engineering job through his network within weeks.
None of this is magic. It’s excavation. We dug out what was already there and put it where a human eye and an AI crawler could actually find it.
Why can’t I fix my own LinkedIn headline?
That’s a fair question.
The short answer? Probably because I have circus monkeys wreaking havoc in my brain, running seventeen headline frameworks simultaneously. I know too much about what needs to happen. Every option cancels out every other option, and nothing feels right.
And I know it.
I built that page, looked at all those transformations, felt proud of the work we did together. And then I looked at my own profile.
And my heart just sank.
My headline is painfully pedestrian. I know it’s bad. I know exactly what’s wrong with it. I teach this. I wrote the book. I have a whole course about it.
And I still can’t fix it.
(But I promise you, it’s been on my daily to-do list for MONTHS.)
Michelle and I spent two hours on her headline. Two brains, back and forth, bouncing ideas, using AI for additional inspiration. Two hours for one line. And it’s perfect. So perfect that a stranger told her so.
I can do that for her. I can do that for every client who’s ever sat across from me on Zoom.
I apparently cannot do it for myself.
(The cobbler’s kids have no shoes. And this cobbler knows it.)
Your LinkedIn profile doesn’t need more work. It needs a different set of eyes.
Here’s what I know about every person on that before-and-after page: they’re smart. Really smart. Obvious-the-second-you-meet-them smart. They’re excellent at what they do.
And they could not, for the life of them, put it into words on a LinkedIn profile.
Not because they’re bad at writing. Not because they don’t understand LinkedIn. Because they were afraid to take risks on a professional platform. Because they didn’t appreciate what actually made them worth hiring. And because every template and formula they tried made them sound exactly like everyone else.
Formulaic is boring. And boring doesn’t stop a scroll.
You could watch every video in my course, read every blog post on our site, memorize the entire book, and maybe you’d still struggle with your own headline. Or maybe you’ll nail it right away because you don’t have the aforementioned brain-based circus monkeys like I do.
But the point is, you need to find the parts that make a stranger stop scrolling and make sure they stand out.
The 82 days in the wild. The smoke grenades in fourth grade. The rare-disease presentations you thought nobody cared about.
Those are the parts that matter. And you will almost always need someone else to point at them and say, “THAT. Why isn’t that on your profile?”
Every person on that page was sitting on something extraordinary and didn’t know it. Or they did know it, but didn’t think it was relevant or appropriate.
Excuse me while I excavate my own brain for potentially inappropriate (but incredibly interesting) things to put on my own profile.