My daughter is at primary school. She’s navigating her way through the Kingdom of Rote. Learning by heart endless combinations of numbers and letters.
I feel for her. When I was that age, I never relished my 9 times table. Or my 7s or 8s, for that matter. (To see how I overcame my jittery-ness about figures, read my post ‘Bookkeeping, it’s better than surfing’.)
And then, there are the spelling lists. As languages go, English is as tricky as they come. How is it, that word endings that sound the same – puzzle, label, total, overall – have at least four different spelling options?
And is there another language on this planet that boasts five different pronunciations of the letters ‘o-u-g-h’? To wit: ‘tough’, ‘bough’, ‘cough’, ‘thorough’ and ‘through’.
So every week, my offspring and I work our way through reams of random words. As we ricochet between ‘le’ and ‘el’, I reach out to mnemonics to make life easier.
Disjointed words linked by a double-jointed child.
When she’s not wading through words,
my daughter likes dancing. She improvises a lot, twisting her limbs into eye-watering shapes.
This sentence was inspired by the sight of her pulling her leg back in on itself in a way that makes me wince:
Agile people find it simple to bend themselves into terrible angles.
Five ‘le’ words bound together by an image of a pipe-cleaner person.
Mnemonics turn a set of random words into a story. It’s only a sentence long, but it has a sense of purpose, which helps to lodge those irritating endings in my mind.
Pipe-cleaners and your online profile.
What has this tale got to do with promoting your career and your business?
If you want the contents of your ‘About’ page to stay with your target audience, then, yes, a list of your qualifications is essential.
Even better, use a story to put that list into context.
Why?
Because other people, including your competitors, will have similar qualifications to you. But the stories behind those achievements are yours alone. Unique.
They give the letters after your name a context and a sense of purpose. They make you more memorable.
What’s your story?
If you’re not sure where to start, ask yourself a few questions to get the ball rolling:
- How did you start your business?
- Why do you do what you do?
- What have you done to reach certain milestones?
- What were the challenges you overcame to reach this point?
If you’d like more ideas on how your business story can flesh out your CV and make an anonymous list of qualifications more memorable, try this article.
Or watch my story at the bottom of my home page.
PS. No pipe-cleaners were hurt in the course of writing this post.
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