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Your own story is the most difficult one.
We have so much information, so many stories, so many credentials and expectations.
How do we tell the story of who we are and what we do? Which stories do we need to tell, and which should we leave out?
Most of the time we struggle to look both professional and knowledgeable and vulnerable and human at the same time.
We struggle to share our story, not because we don’t know what to tell but because we aren’t certain which are the right parts to tell.
We’re scared of being vulnerable in a way that make us feel weak instead of closer to the listener, scared of revealing who we are in case it isn’t enough, scared of talking about the layers and intersections in our work in case it doesn’t look professional.
Katy Payne defines herself as a self-trained acoustic biologist. She’s the woman who discovered that humpback whales sing versions of the same song and that their songs evolve and change over time.
Check Katy Payne’s bio and you will see that she presents herself as an American zoologist, as a writer and producer, and as a bioacoustic researcher.
She initially worked with whales and later expanded her interest to elephants. She is a musician who also studied biology and she’s made groundbreaking discoveries in the intersection of both fields.
As a mother of three and a woman with a degree in music and biology who could spend hours listening to whales, I wonder how she talked about her work when she started.
Some of the most interesting “about me” stories come from the intersection of areas that seem almost impossible to reconcile.
Our beginnings look hesitant, a bit crazy and uncertain to us all. Your story is in permanent evolution. Only one thing is certain: if you don’t dare to say who you are right now, you aren’t opening the door to who you will be in the future.