You know your business inside out. You can recite your origin story in your sleep. You’ve lived every pivot, survived every near-death moment, and you can explain your methodology with the kind of detail that makes people’s eyes glaze over at networking events.
That’s exactly the problem.
The thing you know best is the thing you explain worst. It’s not a character flaw. It’s basic human wiring. The more intimately you understand something, the harder it becomes to communicate it clearly to anyone who hasn’t been living inside your head for the past three years.
I call this the Founder’s Blindspot, and it’s quietly strangling your growth.
Here’s what’s happening. You’ve spent months or years building something genuinely valuable. You’ve done the work. You’ve figured out a process, a system, a way of seeing the world that actually helps people. But when you try to explain it, one of three things happens:
- You either oversimplify and sound generic,
- You over-explain and lose people in the weeds,
- Or you use language so personal and idiosyncratic that nobody outside your immediate circle understands what you’re talking about.
None of these outcomes are acceptable if you want to scale.
The psychological mechanics are straightforward. First, there’s familiarity bias. You’ve said the same things so many times that you’ve stopped hearing them. The phrases that once felt fresh now roll off your tongue automatically, and you have no idea whether they still land with impact or whether they’ve become meaningless filler. You’re running on autopilot, and autopilot is the enemy of clarity.
Second, there’s the expert’s curse. You know too much. You’ve internalized a thousand small distinctions that seem obvious to you but are completely invisible to your audience. When you say “strategic positioning,” you’re thinking of a specific three-part framework you’ve developed over a decade. Your listener is thinking of a vague corporate buzzword. You’re speaking different languages, and you don’t even know it.
Third, there’s emotional attachment. This business is your baby. You’re proud of it. You’re defensive about it. You’re deeply invested in every piece of it, which means you can’t see it clearly anymore. You can’t tell which parts are brilliant and which parts are just boring. You can’t distinguish between what actually matters and what you happen to care about because you’ve been staring at it for too long.
The result is a tangled mess of messaging that confuses people instead of converting them. You’re working harder than you need to, explaining more than you should, and still not getting through. It’s exhausting, and it’s unnecessary.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: you cannot solve this problem alone. You need an outside perspective. Not a cheerleader, not a yes-person, not someone who’s going to tell you your idea is amazing and send you on your way. You need someone who can look at your work with fresh eyes, strip away the emotional baggage and the insider jargon, and tell you what you’re actually saying versus what you think you’re saying.
That’s where external thinking comes in. External thinking isn’t about adding something new. It’s about excavating what’s already there and restructuring it so other people can actually access it. It’s extraction, reduction, and architecture. It’s taking the knowledge that’s currently locked inside your head and turning it into a system that someone else can understand, remember, and act on.
This is not a cosmetic exercise. This is not about making your website copy sound prettier. This is about fundamentally rethinking how you present your expertise so that it does the work you need it to do. And you can’t do that work yourself because you’re standing too close to see the whole picture.
I’ve spent over forty years building systems in wildly different fields. Egyptology, engineering, narrative design, business operations. The common thread isn’t the subject matter. It’s the process. I’ve gotten very good at looking at someone’s work and seeing what they can’t see—the structure underneath the chaos, the signal buried in the noise, the thing they’ve been trying to say but haven’t quite figured out how to articulate yet.
I don’t invent new frameworks for people. I don’t hand you a generic template and tell you to fill in the blanks. I pull out what’s already in your work, reduce it to its essential form, and build a stable architecture around it so you can finally communicate it with precision and power.
This is not therapy. This is not coaching. This is clarity work, and it’s designed for people who already know what they’re doing but can’t quite explain it in a way that makes other people want to pay for it.
If you’ve been struggling to articulate your value, if your messaging feels muddy or generic, if you’re exhausted from explaining yourself over and over without getting the results you want, the problem isn’t your expertise. The problem is your proximity. You’re too close to your own work to see it clearly, and no amount of effort is going to fix that until you bring in someone who can look at it from the outside.
That’s what I do. I’m the antidote to self-distortion.
If this sounds like the kind of thinking you need, book a fifteen-minute call. We’ll figure out quickly whether I’m the right person to help you cut through the noise and finally say what you mean.
