We weren’t even two hours in, and my client looked like she hadn’t slept in three days.
This woman is an Energizer Bunny. Up before dawn, never stops moving. I had to practically corner her to get her to sit down with me at 8am.
LinkedIn broke her by 10.
(I’m a little proud of that, honestly.)
Not because the work is boring. Because it’s intense.
Why is working on your own LinkedIn profile so hard?
Here’s what nobody tells you: really working on your profile is not a formatting exercise. It’s not “swap these bullets, add a banner, done.”
It’s answering the questions you’ve been quietly avoiding.
What do you actually want? Not what you’re supposed to want. What makes you different from the other forty people with your exact job title? What from your past is worth keeping, and what are you dragging around out of habit?
Those are not small questions. They’re the ones you skip when you “update your LinkedIn” in twenty minutes between meetings. They’re the reason you’ve opened your About section, stared at it, and closed the tab.
So yes. Two hours in and she was wrung out. That’s the work doing its job.
The patents she didn’t think counted
Somewhere around hour two, it came out almost as an afterthought.
She holds patents.
Plural.
PLURAL. More than one!
She hadn’t mentioned them. Didn’t think they were relevant.
They’re relevant.
And here’s how normal that is: it is almost never the obvious stuff that’s missing from a profile. It’s the thing the person waves off. The talk they gave to a room full of people who couldn’t pronounce the topic. The project they swear was unremarkable that would stop a stranger cold.
You’ve lived with your own accomplishments so long they stopped looking like accomplishments. They’re just Tuesday to you now.
To everyone else, they’re the reason to pick up the phone.
Why you can’t write your LinkedIn About section alone
So let me just say the part people don’t want to hear.
You are too close to your own story to see it clearly.
That’s not a character flaw, and it’s not a writing problem. You could be a genuinely great writer and still not pull this off for yourself, for the same reason a surgeon doesn’t operate on their own kid. You’re inside it. You can’t get the angle.
Which is exactly why you’ve been staring at your About section for six months and nothing feels right. You keep trying to summarize yourself, and the summary keeps landing flat, because the good stuff — the patents, the mess you walked into and quietly fixed, the thing you’re weirdly excellent at — is the stuff you’ve already decided doesn’t count.
It counts.
It’s not writer’s block
I know it feels like writer’s block. It isn’t.
Writer’s block is when you can’t find the words. This is when you can’t see the material. Different problem. Harder one.
So if you’ve been beating yourself up for not having “gotten around to” your profile, you can stop. You haven’t been lazy. You’ve been doing genuinely hard work without the one thing that makes it doable: someone on the outside who can see what you’ve stopped seeing.
That’s the whole job, honestly.
(And no, it’s not boring. Ask the Energizer Bunny.)