Swelling with satisfaction and gratitude at your record of career-fueling metrics, you are now ready to weave that emotion into an articulate executive resume story.
However, proficiency in selling ideas, tamping down inefficiencies or building a new marketplace does not always translate well into powerful career storytelling. Your ocean of achievements washes over you with overwhelm when attempting to pour your stories onto a blank resume canvas.
Challenge yourself to emote soul-satiating stories
Rather than beautifully crafted career chapters, your early efforts at building a resume, biography or LinkedIn profile result in mundaneness. Your inability to emote vivid, soul-satiating and relatable stories drains your energy.
You are not alone in this struggle.
For one, you are too close to your own greatness to emote your full value. Additionally, building meaningful career stories enriched by decades of meaty experience is a daunting task that requires more than a night of ‘dashing off a few bulleted metrics.’ And unfortunately, that is often the tack that careerists take when breathlessly seeking to perform a ‘quick’ resume update.
To further underscore the how and why you can–and should–build more meaningful and illustrative career stories, let me share a recent aha moment.
Pour your soul onto the the blank resume canvas
Recently, a podcast helped me extend the metaphor around how a career story is akin to a custom-painted masterpiece.
A popular podcaster referenced an artist whose work he proudly displayed in his home. What was particularly interesting was that the original inspiration for the artist’s paintings was (to the naked eye) a mundane scene. The artist was able to imbue the artwork with the richer depth and breadth the scene deserved through 40+ hours contemplative thinking and design artistry.
An amateur may view the scene with an ill-equipped eye to translate its ethereal nature into a beautiful masterpiece. The professional artist, committed to the time and energy and thought-work, however, is able to translate vision into artful beauty.
While I’m no artist in the literal sense, I’ve been told by clients that their newly written and articulately designed story evokes similarly visceral feelings of beauty.
Strong beauty, amazing grace – those are the overwhelming feelings that I discovered reading through your work.
This is because I commit to invest about 40+ hours with each story, contemplating and really digging deep into the below-the-surface images. While the naked eye may not be able to see the executive career in all its brilliance and power, my process of unearthing and introspection enables a plethora of detail and depth that otherwise might be left undiscovered.
This includes weaving in nuances and details that emote deeper, richer and more evocative feelings versus the flat and often to-the-point accomplishments that clients initially and (to their disappointment) have penned on their own.
The bottom line is this: your career story is not meant to be a humdrum listing of accountabilities with a few interspersed metrics. Instead, it should be designed to connect the intellectual dots for the reader who seeks a solution for the problems that keep them awake at night. It should also spark the hiring decision-maker’s emotional engine, inspiring them to contact you for an interview.
Below are a few samples
These real-client resume samples exude how an articulate executive resume story is created.
They illustrate the type of storytelling rigor and romance that an artfully, but professionally designed and written resume delivers:
Sample 1
Sample 2
Sample 3
Dip your toes in the water of the calming executive resume process with my low-cost and recently enhanced Exec Resume Starter Kit. Email me for more information at jacqui@careertrend.net.
I am Jacqui Barrett-Poindexter, one of only 50 certified master resume writers and have crafted more than 1,500 career stories that put ‘your value into words.’ My bachelor’s in writing/journalism allows me to apply a journalist’s eye to your career.
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