Step five
Your first draft
By now you have your Working Genius readout, your CV walkthrough themes, your values, and your 5 Ps summary. The raw material is all there. This is where you turn it into something you can say out loud.
You write it
I will not write this for you and I will not give you a polished paragraph to approve. You would read it, nod, and feel nothing.
The wrestling is the mechanism. It is what makes the thing hold up when a stranger asks you a hard question about it.
How to approach it
- I send you a template with the three sections, a short explanation of each, and space to write. Plus a few sample narratives from other people, so you can see the range rather than a format to copy.
- Write honestly before you write well. Rough is fine. Bullets are fine.
- A paragraph or two per section. It should land on one page when we are finished.
- Pull from the documents you already have. Each section of the template tells you which one feeds it.
- Do not polish it. Send it to me messy. If you polish it first you will defend it instead of working on it.
Then we work on it
I read it and mark it up before we meet, so the session is spent on the parts that need thinking rather than on me reading in silence.
Two things I am listening for. The places where you hedge, which usually means you do not quite believe the claim yet. And the places where you sound like someone else, which usually means you borrowed a phrase because your own felt too plain. Your own is almost always better.
Then we practice. You say it to me as an elevator pitch, as an interview answer, as the thing you say when someone at an event asks what you do. The spoken version is a different animal from the written one, and you need both.
It usually changes once you hear yourself say it. That is the point of saying it.
What you walk away with
Your narrative on a single page, in your words, dated. Yours to keep and to revise. Come back to it in two years and you will see how much has moved.