There's a saying that was stalking me while I played dumb: "The cobbler's children go barefoot."
This is what I do. I help brands say clearly who they are. I restructure identities, order the message, decide what comes first, what comes next, and what has to go. When a client shows up lost in a thousand things they want to communicate, my job is to sit with that tangle and come out with something you understand fast, and that connects. It's what I do, and I can say I do it well.
A few days ago I sat down to update my own profile. "Something simple", I thought... Half an hour... And what I found gave me a healthy kind of embarrassment: for years I'd been doing the exact opposite, with myself, of what I advise everyone else to do.
My headline was "Art Director and Graphic Designer". Technically correct. Not a lie. But flat. Without intention. The kind of description that could belong to anyone and, for that very reason, belongs to no one...
None of what I'd built over the last few years lived there. Nothing about product. Nothing about the fact that today I don't just design the brand, I take it all the way to the code and leave it running on the screen. Nothing about the digital ecosystem I built with my own hands, that ended up with people in countries I've never been to. My own brand was on autopilot, while I charged, literally, to pull other brands out of autopilot.
I sat there looking at the screen for a while. Because it wasn't carelessness. I know how to do this. So, why?
I think the answer is uncomfortable, but simple.
When you design for a client, you have distance. You see the brand from the outside, with judgment, without your ego in the way. You can say "this doesn't represent you", "this is too much", "this needs to be said louder", and your hand doesn't shake, because you're not talking about yourself. It's easy to be brave with someone else's story.
But when the client is you, you're both judge and party. Every word about yourself feels different. "Senior." "Director." "Builder." All of them true, and still they all sound, in your head, like you're showing off a little too much. So you dial the volume down. You pick the lukewarm version, the one that makes no one uncomfortable, starting with you.
They call it impostor syndrome, and there's some of that. But for those of us who have been at this a while, it's often almost the reverse. It's not that I feel I can't. It's that claiming out loud what I clearly can makes me a little sheepish. As if naming what I am were bad manners.
And there's something cultural in there too. A lot of us were raised on "let your results speak", "don't toot your own horn". Good advice for humility. Bad for a bio that has three seconds to say who you are before the person keeps scrolling.
The ironic part, and this is what gave me the "healthy embarrassment", is that staying lukewarm is exactly the mistake I charge a client to fix.
I tell brands all the time: a brand that doesn't name itself well doesn't get found. One that stays generic out of fear of sounding like too much disappears among a thousand others. Clarity isn't arrogance; it's a service you do for the person on the other side, so they quickly understand whether you're what they're looking for. I say it with total conviction... When the project isn't mine.
With myself, I wasn't doing it.
So I did the only honest thing I could think of: I treated myself like a client.
I sat down with my own brand as if I had hired myself. I asked myself the same questions I ask them, the ones that sometimes sting: what did you actually build, not just what shows? what do you do that anyone with your same title doesn't? what do you want the person landing on your profile to think in the first five seconds, before reading a single line more?
And there, forcing myself to look from the outside, what autopilot had been covering for years showed up. That I'm not just "the one who makes things look pretty" anymore. That I think through the brand, the product and its digital presence end to end. That the same brain that decides the identity carries it all the way to the screen, working, in code. That I built things of my own and put them out into the world, not in theory, for real.
None of it was new. It was all there, done, with dates on it. The only thing missing was the permission, mine, to say it without apologizing.
I'm not telling you this as one of those LinkedIn-coach "before and after" posts, with the little arrow and all. I'm telling you because it surprised me how hard it was.
Sorting out a client's brand takes me hours. Sorting out mine took me years of avoiding it and one afternoon of finally sitting down to do it. The distance I hand to anyone who pays me was so hard to give myself.
And I don't think it's just me. The accountant who never keeps their own books up to date. The photographer without a single decent portrait of themselves. The one who writes for half the internet but not for their own page. The cobbler's children go barefoot: the saying exists because it happens to too many people who are good at what they do.
If you do something for a living and you haven't taken your own medicine in a while (your portfolio, your bio, the way you introduce yourself), maybe it's not that you don't know how. It's that it makes you uneasy. I get it. But that clean, fearless gaze you give a client, you can give it to yourself too. Treat yourself like you hired yourself. Charge yourself the same honesty.
The cobbler's children don't have to go barefoot. Sometimes you just have to sit down and make your own shoes. 🤍