The Version of Your About Page That’s Holding On To The Past
By Aliya Banks
There's a version of you, your business, living on your About page right now. Chances are you don't fully recognize that write-up anymore.
Not because it was fake, but because it was accurate back then. Back when you were newer at this, leaning on credentials and bullet points to do the work. You wrote that bio carefully.
You haven't touched it since.
Your business will outgrow your words faster than you notice. The gap doesn't announce itself. It just sits there, quietly eroding the very trust you're trying to build.
The Lag Is The Actual Problem
When someone tells me their About page "just needs a refresh," they usually mean something feels off, and they've decided the fix is cosmetic. New photo. Tighter paragraph. Sometimes that's genuinely all it needs.
More often, two timelines that used to move together have split apart. One is who you've become, what you've learned, what you now refuse to do, maybe even your values. It’s what you understand about your clients that you didn't understand when you started. The other is the language describing you, written by an earlier version of yourself, untouched since.
Writing doesn't update itself. It stays exactly where you left it.
Why The Credentials Are Doing The Wrong Job
Perhaps you spent years being evaluated on precision; every phrase in a chart note or a diagnosis had to be exact, because imprecision had consequences. So when you sat down to write about yourself, you did what you were trained to do. Years of experience. Certifications. A careful, professional tone. Nothing overstated.
That instinct served you well in the room. It's quietly working against you on the page.
Here's the uncomfortable part. The more careful and "professional" a page sounds, the more distance it tends to create. Professionalism will always have its place, but it usually gets used as a shield instead of a tool, a way to sound credible without sounding like anyone in particular.
Read your own bio out loud. Notice how much of it could describe several other people in your field with minor edits. Notice how many sentences exist to prove you're qualified, versus how many show what it'sactually like to work with you.
Being qualified and being memorable aren't the same job. People don't hire you because you're qualified. Plenty of people are qualified. They hire you because something in your words made you feel like the right choice, not just a credentialed one.
What Actually Changed And Where It's Hiding
Consider these: A former nurse practitioner builds a coaching practice around chronic illness, but her page still leads with clinical credentials, as though the reader needs convincing she's medically literate. What the reader actually needs to understand is what she does differently now that she's got her own business and isn’t confined by an organization.
A former therapist builds a business helping other clinicians avoid burnout, but the bio still reads careful and neutral, when the actual selling point is that she burned out first and knows exactly what it looks like from the inside.
In both cases, the credentials aren't wrong. They're just doing the wrong job, standing in for a story that would do far more convincing work if it were told differently.
Translating, Not Rewriting
Most About pages don't need new material. They need a translation. You already know what you do differently. You already know the moment something shifted, the belief you hold that most people in your field won't say out loud, the client you're best equipped to help, and why.
What's missing isn't substance. It's pulling that substance out of the language you were trained to use and into language that sounds like a person talking to another person.
This is genuinely harder for people working in wellness spaces. You spent years using technical terms and being objective. That training doesn't shut off just because you started a business.
A Quick Way To Check
Read your About page and ask: what it would take for a stranger to understand, from this page alone, what’s actually unique about how you work. Not your title. Not your years of experience. What shifted in how you think, what you believe, or who you help, between the person who started this work and the person doing it right now.
If that's not clearly on that page, the page isn't describing you. It's describing your resume, with better formatting.
Editing won't fix that. You can tighten sentences indefinitely and still be polishing a description of someone you're not fully anymore. What fixes it is naming the actual shift plainly, and letting the page catch up to where you already are.
Everything above is the problem I get hired to solve. If you've ever felt the gap between how much you know and how flat it sounds when you try to write it down, that gap is fixable, and it's the whole point of a Voice Translation Session. 90 minutes, one deliverable, your expertise in language you can actually use.
Book a Voice Translation Session with me.
*Brand Strategist, former clinician, and the founder of Digital Drip by Aliya. She helps founders in health and wellness translate the depth of their expertise into language people can actually trust, and writes about how that language works, and sometimes fails.
