This essay is available in audio above and video, below as well. Enjoy!
You've edited your story. You probably don't even know you've done it. And the part you cut? That's likely the part people most need to hear.
Let me elaborate.
James came to me cold after hearing me speak on a podcast interview. We hopped on a call. He was cheerful, a tad nervous, and by all accounts delighted to be talking to me. He shared a vision of the business he was building and painted a clear picture, which included a tested methodology, a core offer neatly laid out, early client testimonials. An expert in his field, passionate, insightful, and design-savvy, he was both in a good place and he also knew something was missing for this business to come to life.
James (totally my kind of client) wanted to jump into the work asap, despite being in the middle of moving house. The man wanted traction. I drew up a scope of work and we started working together 10 days later, for an intensive stretch, twice a week on Zoom, for two months. He entrusted me to move him from the foundations all the way through to launch strategy, including digging into customer vision, core values, social strategy, etc. Comprehensive, to say the least.
But here's what happened in our first deep dive into his story (our second or third session) he mentioned out of the blue that he used to lecture at university. I almost fell off my chair. Not the kind of stuff you want to keep out of your bio, even when you have pivoted in your career.
Seems awfully logical, right?
Yet many of us, especially experts building new businesses, shifting in our career or how we present to the world, have this surprising tendency to bury gold nuggets of our past. Even though these elements scream the word expertise. Even though they hold the key to faster trust and authority, two markers supporting business growth.
This is especially true if you're building something where you are the brand. Founders, coaches, consultants, change makers, people whose authority lives in their story, not a logo. In a world where we increasingly buy from people rather than companies, what you choose to include (or leave out) of your narrative has never mattered more.
At the end of our work together, James spontaneously emailed to thank me, including this line, which resonates with me still:
"Working with you has changed my life. You have given me my story — how precious is that?"
The email came on my late father's birthday last August. I shared it with my brother, who I was enjoying an alfresco lunch with, at the terrace of the Auberge de Gy, where I grew up. Aww. Good work, Nanie, he said to me (Nanie's my nickname).
Now if you think James was simply forgetful, too humble, or unique in making this kind of edit to his career narrative, you'd be very wrong.
And it's not about forgetfulness or humility at all. It goes far deeper than that.
Identity, as authors Dan Sullivan and Dr Benjamin Hardy define it in their book 10x is Easier than 2x, is fundamentally two things: the story and narrative you hold for yourself, and the standards and commitments you hold for yourself.
When we evolve, grow, and set new standards for who we are, the old story can become psychologically incompatible with the person we now believe ourselves to be. The unconscious isn't being careless. It's being protective of the new construct. It's doing exactly what it's supposed to do.
Which means this matter of career editing cannot be solved by simply trying harder to remember. Our psychology is actively working against the retrieval. The old identity feels like it belongs to someone we've left behind. We may even have a clear sense of wanting to separate ourselves from that old identity. And bringing it back — understanding that it's not the old you, but the foundation of the new you — often requires someone outside of us to hold up the mirror.
Research supports this. Major life transitions — career shifts, loss, rupture of any kind — can call existing identities into question and require individuals to reconfigure their sense of self entirely. The bigger the pivot, the more complete that reconfiguration tends to be. And the greater the perceived discontinuity between past and present self, the stronger the psychological resistance — because self-discontinuity is experienced as a threat to a core identity principle: the need to maintain a coherent self-narrative.
In other words: the more profound the transformation, the harder it becomes to reach back across the divide and claim what came before.
Proof point 1:
Hey, I'm Anne, and yep, I've made the same mistake.
A couple of years ago, I had to pay a speaking coach a lot of money for her to turn around and say: "Anne, you HAVE to tell people you used to work for Christian Louboutin."
This did not amuse me one bit.
By that point, eight years after leaving my famed former employer, I'd put a lot of work — A LOT — into creating myself anew. Strong credentials, multiple certifications, lots of good work, client testimonials (which I've since stopped keeping to myself). I felt VERY proud of the new career just as I did about the new narrative I'd crafted for this particular event, the one this coach was helping me with.
Her feedback landed in my inbox on the morning of my presentation.
FUN!
I could have ignored it, but didn't. I scrambled together another outline for my introduction, pulled new slides together. Frazzled yet purposeful, I showed up, delivered, and the event went brilliantly. But the incident disturbed me.
Why was I so intent to leave the past behind in that way? Was I not proud of what I had accomplished? Just as these questions came up, I felt a weariness. Ugh, I thought I'd left that world behind.
I told myself there was nothing wrong with the old me, it's just that I was more excited to talk about new me.
Well. That's what I was telling myself.
James and I (and maybe you too) have this in common: we went through tough times in the past and emerged changed on the other side. Maybe that's why the connection to the old identity — the lecturer for him — feels harder to make. Keeping it at a safe distance protects the new construct, even when the old chapter would confer more authority onto the new.
For me, seventeen years at Christian Louboutin, rising from the shop floor to general manager to SVP of Global Communications, taught me invaluable lessons about building brands, navigating complex stakeholder relationships, and creating communication strategies that resonate. Before the global comms, for years I was general manager, doing it all: operations, HR, legal, recruitment, sales. My identity shifted time and time again.
For 17 years, I was identified as Anne from Louboutin. And one day, I was no longer that. It wasn't an easy switch. It felt like a rupture in more ways than one.
Fast forward to that presentation, me failing to place my Louboutin identity into my narrative was not forgetful. There was this sense of deep incompatibility between me then and me now.
And sometimes it takes someone who knows you well to state the obvious.
As my friend Merve has pointed out to me one day: people don't just come to me because I'm a good coach or a good consultant, although I believe I am both. They come because they understand there is a sound business foundation and a proven track record underpinning it all. That and the mindfulness piece, a lens I believe is rather uncommon.
Annoying as it is to hear, she's right. So that bit about me spending 17 years at Christian Louboutin, it's kind of necessary, especially when I want to build trust and credibility, fast.
The bits we're leaving out? Those are often the ones that make us credible.
Proof point 2:
In November, I enrolled in an extraordinary two-day course called Writing to Change the World by the OpEd Project. It's a life-changing programme, designed with remarkable thoughtfulness and clearly built for transformation. As someone who nerds out on teaching, curriculum design, and facilitation, I was instantly wowed.
Day one, to my absolute surprise, was entirely about reframing expertise. When asked to speedily write and present my expertise, what do you think I did?
Yes. I left my prior credentials to the side. I could see them, in the Google doc, right in front of my nose. I set them aside anyway.
I didn't have to beat myself up about it for long, because within moments we were back in the main room to hear the most remarkable stories of how many people had left extraordinary parts of their expertise out of their new narratives. The facilitators quoted multiple examples of smart, competent individuals who had attended this very workshop with the goal of writing to change the world and who forgot to name their expertise, just as I did.
One participant even chose not to mention they had received a Nobel Prize (for what we weren't told, but still)!
Let that sink in.
So James isn't a special snowflake. Neither am I. Particularly when we're charting a new course, our minds play tricks on us, saying things like: "People won't get it, you don't need to bring this up, it'll just confuse them." We amputate parts of our narrative before sharing it. A protection mechanism, keeping the goods out just in case this would make us harder to be understood. Understanding the psychology of self-narrative is part of what makes my clients go 'oh, this feels like therapy.'
For founders and change makers, this work is especially important. With audiences (like you, like me) wanting to buy from people instead of companies, the founder-as-influencer is an important new model, one that carries authenticity through personal storytelling. Recently I was quoting Sari Azout, of Sublime App, who wrote in her Substack about the frustrating truth of how much pull her own voice has, in the scope of her company's growth.
We're living through a particular moment in how trust gets built. The person behind a business (the founder, the practitioner, the change maker) has become one of its most powerful assets. Not because of social media specifically, though that's one channel among many. Because audiences have made their preference unmistakable: they want to engage with people, not logos.
The numbers are hard to ignore. Research shows that 77% of buyers are more likely to do business with a company whose leadership is personally, visibly present. Not famous. Not viral. Simply present, and human. Writing in Forbes, Cherie Brooke Luo quotes Eric Wei, co-founder of Karat: “people want to know the real story and see the faces behind the brands they support. Founder-led content works,” Wei argues, “because it's coming from a genuine place.”
I'd put it more simply, and connect it to my earlier career: it's very good PR.
The strategy isn't new, it's as old as reputation itself. You know when it's working not just because of the metrics, but because something lands in you when you read or hear it. The story feels human, specific, real. You find yourself rooting for the person. Trust forms before a single product has been described.
Which is exactly why what you leave out matters so much. If your voice and your story are the vehicle for that trust (and they increasingly are) quietly removing the most credibility-conferring parts isn't modesty. It's self-sabotage.
There are some simple tricks however to help us bypass this psychological mechanism, so easy to use, it's almost annoying. It starts with shifting into an empathetic perspective.
Hold on Anne, you may say. Didn't you know you had to make it about the audience first?
Yes. Yes I did. And that's how I designed my presentation, to create a transformation. But in approaching my own introduction and writing what I thought was a thoughtful narrative, I also willingly chose to exclude a prominent part of me, one that is glaringly obvious if you Google me, or check my LinkedIn profile.
In my Story of You Workshop, one of my talking points is this:
What do they need to hear? (The they in this case being the participants in the event)
Over the months and now years of honing my methodology, I've come to offer a sub question. And that's what I would have needed to answer, perhaps while holding a copy of my bio for good measure. That essential question:
What do they need to hear about me, in order to understand my expert status?
Your story, when it's excavated carefully and the threads are pulled together, is you or your brand's most powerful asset. Not the polished version. Not the safe, edited-down version. The full one, with the chapters you thought no longer fit.
Your story is also a filter. It's not going to resonate with everyone and that's just as it should be. It will require patience, and generally guidance, before you feel the thrill of expressing who you are in a way that illuminates others with the fullness of your story.
So it's not easy. It requires introspection. Contemplation. Examining yourself and what matters. But it's deep and beautiful work, particularly when you feel imbued with a mission (like I am, perhaps you too). Suddenly the work of excavation, dealing with the inner critic, reframing who we are in view of what matters to us, no longer feels like an exercise in personal branding. Instead, it becomes one of building resonance with the people you care about.
If you recognise yourself in any of this, the edited-out parts, the credentials quietly set aside, the identity that doesn't quite cohere yet, this is exactly where we begin.
Whether through consulting (brand foundations, communications strategy, launch) or one-on-one coaching (story development, navigating transitions, finding the thread), the starting point is always the same: excavating what's actually there. Seeing clearly what you've been carrying all along.
I have a handful of spots available this month. If any of the above resonates, I'd love to speak.
The Story of You Workshop Fundamentals returns on March 17th. 2h. The pre-work. Where we talk about stories, empathy ancld what matters to you.
Anne V Mühlethaler is a brand strategist, story coach, and founder of Le Trente, a social learning studio in Geneva. She spent seventeen years at Christian Louboutin, rising from the shop floor to SVP of Global Communications.