Be Clear on Your Why

One of the core challenges of multihyphenate life is helping people make sense of the many things you do. Some people I've coached do things as varied as making art, developing nonprofit strategy, and teaching classes. Some of their projects are big ticket items and others less so.

This becomes more clear in the bio writing practice. How do you write a simple one-liner on LinkedIn when you do five different things? How do you talk about yourself succinctly in a 500-word bio?

In a multidisciplinary practice, it's easy to focus on who you are, what you do, and where you do it. This is important, of course. In my own practice, I list my work in mental health and well-being, in futures thinking, in leadership and creative coaching, and in media development and strategy. I talk about my affiliations, and my professional background.

Everything you do as a professional is what makes you interesting and the value you bring to the world more enriching and appreciated. But it helps to have a framework through which people can understand your work. And one of the clearest expressions for doing that is clarifying your why.

This is the initial prompt I usually share with coachees:

WHY do you do what you do? What is the story of your self and your work/creation/creative process?

To tease out your why a bit more, try a few other prompts:

• When do you feel most alive at work? What are the situations where you feel the most enriched and valued as a professional?

• If there were a few aspects of your practice that you could delegate, what would they be? What is it about these aspects of your work that you find less interesting, or even draining?

• What did you most enjoy doing when you were around 7 years old? This is not an exact age, but rather: when you were young, what types of activities were you most drawn to? What were you good at, and what topics did you like learning about? Of these, which do you continue to enjoy, or wish you were doing more of?

Clarifying your why is a key part of your telling your own professional story. As Dorie Clark writes in Harvard Business Review:

"We often assume that if we work hard, people will notice it over time, or that if we’ve made a transition, it will make intuitive sense to others. Because people are so overstretched these days, that’s unfortunately almost never true. They’re simply not paying close enough attention to us or our professional trajectory to formulate a coherent narrative of us."