The word Julie had to delete
Hello Friend!
She had the cursor blinking in an empty box.
I picture her at a kitchen table somewhere, laptop open, coffee going cold at her elbow. Nothing dramatic about it.
Just a woman and a small white rectangle on a LinkedIn screen, 220 characters, and a question she’d never once had to answer in her entire professional life:
Who are you?
For decades, the box had filled itself in. The institution answered for her. Say the title and the whole room recalibrates. Faculty. Board members. Donors. Parents at commencement. Nobody at a dinner party ever asked a college president what she did.
And now here’s this rectangle, and it’s empty, and it doesn’t care what she used to be.
I daydream about that moment more than I probably should. Because I’ve watched dozens of people sit in front of that exact blinking cursor, and I know what almost all of them type first.
They type the word “former.”
Dr. Julie Basler had been a college president. Decades in higher education. She’d led people through the kind of change that makes or breaks an institution, sat with budgets that would make your stomach drop, and taken the 2 am calls. All of it real. All of it earned.
When she came into the Studio in May, she put her situation in plain language: decades of leadership experience, and no idea how to package it.
Read that again. Not no experience. Not no confidence. Julie is not short on confidence. She had the goods and no container to put them in.
I know that feeling in my bones because I did the same thing after Red Robin. “Former CIO.” I said it in every introduction, every coffee, every awkward networking thing I dragged myself to. I thought I was establishing credibility. What I was actually doing was pointing backward and hoping the person across the table would know what that meant for the future.
They never did. That’s not their job.
Here’s what took me eighteen unglamorous months to understand, and what the blinking cursor is trying to tell you if you’ll sit still long enough to hear it:
“Former” is a monument. It tells people what you used to be.
You’ve introduced yourself with a headstone. Here lies the career, it was a good one, please admire it. And people do admire it. They admire it, and then they go hire somebody whose sentence tells them what happens next.
The market has never once bought a résumé. It buys a problem, solved.
So for ten weeks, Julie did the least glamorous work there is. Not more polish. Not another credential. Just the slow, uncomfortable job of saying out loud what she actually does for people, over and over, until it made sense to somebody outside her own head. That last part is the whole game, by the way.
Your offer isn’t real when you understand it. It’s real when a stranger does.
Ten weeks later, she had a name for it, an offer, and language a buyer could hear.
Go look her up today. Her LinkedIn headline doesn’t say former college president.
It says Building Strong Teams.
Same woman. Same decades. Same hard-earned pattern recognition from rooms most people will never sit in. She didn’t throw away a single day of it. She just stopped pointing at the monument and started pointing at the help she provides.
That’s the whole move. The experience never expires. Only the framing does.
Try this: Open your LinkedIn headline. Delete every “former,” “ex-,” and “retired.” Now, before you type anything, say this out loud: “[Your target audience] shouldn’t have to [specific pain or obstacle] so they can [specific outcome].”
If you can’t finish that sentence in ten seconds, you’ve just found your real work. And it isn’t another certification.
Julie’s positioning? Leaders shouldn’t have to watch talented people disengage or underperform because there’s no playbook for working together.
Your coach,
Chris
P.S. Patricia and I open the next Unignorable Business Studio cohort in August. Ten weeks, and it’s built around exactly what Julie went through: someone staying with you until the offer makes sense to someone outside your own head. If you’ve been staring at that blinking cursor, come learn more about how we can specifically help you.
Here’s what Julie said about her experience in the Studio:
“I left a career as a college president to build Strong Teams, and I had the expertise but not the packaging. Chris and Patricia gave me both: a real offer, a name for it, and sales language I could actually use. Ten weeks in, and I have something concrete to put in front of buyers instead of a vague idea in my head. If you’re an experienced leader trying to turn what you know into a real business, this is the fastest way to get there. These two are a powerhouse and a wealth of knowledge. I am so thankful I learned from the best of the best.”
