You’re more than your Instagram bio

There’s this weird thing that happens when you’re self employed. People meet you in the business you’re in right now and they assume that’s the whole story. Like you were born in this identity fully formed. Like the entirety of your skills and wisdom suddenly popped into existence the minute you opened your business bank account. Oh you’re a virtual assistant? Cool. So let me explain something to you as if you’ve never seen a spreadsheet or a business strategy before. It is wild.

And the thing is most of us are not first job founders. Most of us didn’t wake up at 22 and say I’m going to become a Pilates teacher and run a membership. Or I’m going to coach people through burnout. Or I’m going to support small businesses with their websites. Most of us are in our 40s with twenty years of careers, training, weird jobs, brilliant jobs, trauma jobs, learning curves, promotions, former identities, side quests and pivots behind us.

But once you’re self employed your past experience becomes invisible to the outside world. People see the micro slice of who you are today. The offer you’re selling today. The website you have today. And they forget or they never even realised that you have literally decades of professional development behind you. You are not just the title on your Instagram bio.

You might be someone who once managed a team of 12. Someone who built SOPs before SOPs were trendy (okay, so that’s pushing it but I’m sure it was a kind of buzzwordy thing a few years back!? No?). You may have worked in HR, ops, finance, compliance, onboarding, training or quality control. You’re probably someone who can read people and hold space because you’ve lived so many lives already. Someone who has collected skills like a magpie collects shiny things because you are genuinely curious and like learning.

Self employment compresses your identity into a neat category which is brilliant for marketing but terrible for being witnessed as a whole human. And the unsolicited advice piece happens because people assume new business equals new skills. But the reality is a lot of the time we know exactly what we’re doing. We’ve been doing parts of this work in different contexts for years.

The version of you that people see now is not the whole story. You are not starting from zero. You are not new to this. You are in a new shape of work built on foundations that were laid a very long time ago.

So next time someone tries to tell you that you need systems or boundaries or strategy or confidence maybe remember that you’re not clueless, you’re not a beginner, you’re not winging it. You are a multi skilled, multi qualified, multi lived human who has done a lot more than the little rectangle bio on your website could ever communicate. And honestly one of the biggest gifts we can give ourselves in self employment is remembering our own back catalogue. Proving we are competent isn’t the job. Owning that we already are is.