He was reading job descriptions asking for five years of experience in a function he wanted to move into, and thinking he didn’t have it. He had 18 years of it. Same work, different title, running his own business the whole time, and not one line of his record said so.
This episode is about the space between those two things.
Why you can’t read your own record, and why that’s proximity rather than modesty. The mechanism: you describe your experience in the language of the thing you did instead of the language of the thing it required, then hold that up against a job description written in the language of a function, and of course you come up short. And the order, which most people get backwards, because the interview and the resume and the profile are surfaces, and the surfaces are where the anxiety lives.
One thing I want to be clear about. This isn’t about telling a better story. It isn’t spin, it isn’t framing, and it isn’t learning to talk about yourself more generously. It’s going back through a real record and finding what was true the whole time and never got written down.
I write one of these a week. If the podcast is useful, the essays go deeper on the same problem.
