Finding the golden thread of your career

Today I want to address a question I get all the time from self-employed creatives. It goes something like this:

“Jenni, I just do so many things and I’m not sure how to express that in my branding. I’m not sure how to explain that to people.”

Being creative — literally defined as being a person who has a deep imagination and constantly comes up with new ideas — often means you will have many different wings of your career and your life. We are prolific. We love newness and we feel most on fire when we’re leaning into our next idea.

The client who asked me this question most recently had retired from working in media and was moving into another career. But she still loved many different things and struggled to put herself in a distinct “career” box. While this felt absolutely authentic, she admitted that she had trouble figuring out how to explain her work. What should she write on her LinkedIn bio? What should she tell her extended family over the holiday break?

First, I gave her permission to accept all the winding pieces of her career, each of which was absolutely necessary in getting her to where she is today. While it used to be expected that you would stay in a career path for decades, it’s much more normal now to have several careers. (In fact, a recent report I read said millennials and Gen…