The Label on the Jar

I've spent years building communication strategies for other people: messaging plans, positioning documents, campaigns designed to move an audience from uninformed to well-informed. That's been some of my work, and I believe I'm good at it. So, when the opportunity to update my own resume arose, I didn't think twice. Surely, I could write the one about myself.

I got a few paragraphs in and told myself it was fine. It read fine. It hit the right keywords. It was, by any reasonable definition, done. But something nagged at me, a low hum of doubt I couldn't quite name. Out of curiosity more than desperation, I hired a professional resume writer and partnered with him on what I'd written.

He met with me and asked me questions, then said something I haven't stopped thinking about since I made a quick comment about "how I should be able to see myself."

"Sometimes it's hard to read the label on the jar from the inside."

That's the whole idea in one sentence. When you're standing inside the jar, when you are the experience, the career, the strategy, you lose the vantage point you'd have if you were just picking the jar up off a shelf. You can't see the label because you're behind it, not because it's poorly written.

Why the most experienced people are often the most exposed

This isn't a beginner's problem. It's an expert's problem. The professionals most likely to be too close to their own situation are often the most seasoned: deep expertise, strong instincts, and a long track record of solving exactly this kind of problem for someone else. Skill doesn't buy you distance; if anything, it can do the opposite. I could write a communication plan for a client and immediately spot the gaps and the jargon. Turn that same lens on my own resume, and I couldn't see any of it. It wasn't that I'd lost my skill. I'd lost my angle.

This is really a story about coaching and consulting, but it came up in the context of a resume. The leader who can diagnose every weak point on someone else's team but not their own. The founder who advises other founders brilliantly and misses the warning signs in their own company. None of this is a competence problem. It's a proximity problem, and proximity isn't something you can think your way out of.

The Common Consulting Thread

What the resume writer did for me in an afternoon is the same thing good consulting does for an organization over the course of an engagement. It isn't magic, and it isn't about knowing more than the client does. It's a posture, applied on purpose:

• Distance before diagnosis. The first move isn't to fix. Step outside the system far enough to see its actual shape, not the shape people inside it have gotten used to describing.
• Structure over instinct. Where the person inside the jar relies on years of accumulated gut feel, an outside partner brings a repeatable framework, one that doesn't care how long you've been doing it a certain way, only whether it's working.
• Trust in what the outside read reveals, even when it stings a little. The client's instincts got them this far. The outside eye doesn't replace those instincts. It surfaces the handful of things those same good instincts have been quietly working around for years.

Coaching works from the same posture, just aimed differently. A coach helps a person see themselves through their own reflection; a consultant helps an organization see itself through structure and analysis. Different tools, same starting truth: you cannot fully diagnose what you're standing inside of.