Write Your About Page

Put it all on the desk first

Before a word: go collect your stuff. It’s scattered across four modules and probably three apps, and the single most common reason this page doesn’t get written is that starting it feels like starting from nothing when it absolutely isn’t.

Open, side by side:

• Your Voice DNA — signature column and banned column (M1)
• Your swipe file (M1)
• Your Ideal-Client Profile — WHO, HOW THEY’RE WIRED, WHAT STOPS THEM (M2)
• Your ick checklist (M3)
• Your Hook File and your one-liner (M4)
• The map you marked up last lesson

That’s the desk. Look at it for a second. Four modules ago you were staring at a blank screen with nothing but a cursor and a bad feeling. There is no blank page here anymore — there’s a pile of your own material and an assembly job.

Missing one? You lost the swipe file, or the profile’s in an app you can’t find? You don’t need all seven to start. The WHO block alone gets you sections 2 and 3 — the two that do the most work anyway. Write those, rebuild the rest after. “I’m short one file” is not permission to close the tab; it’s permission to start smaller.

Own Your Voice ends by telling you to go rewrite your blurbs today, and it’s right, and most people don’t — because “rewrite it” with nothing on the desk is just the blank page again wearing a deadline. This is that same instruction with the material laid out and an order to work in.

If you don’t own the website, start with what’s yours

One thing to settle before you write a word, because it changes which page you’re building.

If your practice owns your website and you can’t touch it, do not write the page you can’t publish. Write the one that’s yours: your LinkedIn About section, your Psychology Today statement, the bio you’d hand over tomorrow if a better practice asked. Same six sections, same passes — only the length changes.

And here’s why that page is the most valuable thing you’ll make in this whole course, not a runner-up: it’s doing two jobs at once. The stranger deciding whether to email you and the practice owner deciding whether to hand you better cases — or hire you outright — are reading the exact same paragraphs. Both are looking for the same thing: evidence there’s a real clinician in there. So the page you control is simultaneously your client-facing About page and your always-live résumé. It’s the surface that leaves with you the day you walk. Write that one first. The Team-page bio the office manager wrote can wait for the day you have the leverage to change it — and this page is how you get that leverage.

Write it out of order

Here’s the move that makes this page writeable, and almost nobody does it.

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Don’t write it in the order it’s read.

The order it’s read is the order of seduction — headline, mirror, experience, story, you, the ask. That order is correct for the reader and hostile to the writer, because it asks you to open with the hardest, most compressed sentence on the whole page while you’re still cold.

So write it in the order of material — easiest to hardest, most-fed to least-fed:

First: the reader-mirror (section 2). You have the most raw material here and the least fear. It isn’t about you. Pull the hook from your file that names how this person arrives, and give it room — three or four sentences instead of twenty words. You’re not writing a new thing; you’re decompressing something you already wrote and already tested.

Second: what it’s actually like (section 3). Also not about you, technically — it’s about the room. Describe a first session. What you ask first. What you do when someone can’t answer.

Third: the ask (section 6). Small, mechanical, done in five minutes. Do it while you’re warm.

Fourth: you, translated (section 5). Now the credentials, and by now you know who you’re talking to, so translating them is easy: for each letter or line, finish the sentence “which means, for you, that…” — and if you can’t finish it, that credential doesn’t go on the page. Then put the license line where your board says. Not roughly. Exactly.

Fifth: the story (section 4). The hard one. Warm now, and everything above it has already told you what the story has to do.

Last: the headline. Your one-liner is already written — but read it again now, against the page it’s sitting on top of. Sometimes it survives untouched. Sometimes the page taught you a better version of it, because you just spent six hundred words learning what you actually do. That’s not wasted work. That’s the compression finally having something to compress.

Write in that order and every section arrives with the previous one behind it. Write in reading order and you’ll spend forty minutes on a headline for a page that doesn’t exist yet.

Watch a section get built

Mine, so you can see the seams.

Here’s a line from my Hook File — twenty words, aimed at the adult who found out late:

“You thought everyone felt like this.”

That’s a hook. It does its job in a search result: the right person stops. But it’s too small to be a first paragraph — the reader has clicked now, they’ve chosen me out of a list, and a single sentence just leaves them standing in a doorway.

So it decompresses:

You thought everyone felt like this. That everyone reread the email four times. That everyone rehearsed the phone call, and then didn’t make it. You got very good at the workarounds — so good that when you finally said something, somebody told you that you seemed fine, and you believed them, because you’d built the whole system to make sure you seemed fine.

Same hook. Same truth. Nothing added that wasn’t already in my WHO block — the rereading, the rehearsing, the workarounds are all sentences my clients have said, harvested back in Module 2. I didn’t invent a single detail. I decompressed a line I’d already earned, using material I’d already collected.

That’s the whole trick. The hook proves the sentence is true; the WHO block supplies the specifics; the paragraph gives them room. If your reader-mirror paragraph feels like it’s straining, you’re inventing instead of decompressing — go back to the block.

When the story won’t come

It usually won’t, at first, and there’s a reason that isn’t writer’s block.

You’re trying to answer “why did you become a therapist” — and that question is enormous, partly true, and mostly none of the reader’s business. No wonder nothing comes.

Ask a smaller question instead:

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What do I know about this that I could only know from the inside?

Not your worst thing. Just the thing you understand from the inside rather than from a textbook. That’s the only part of your story the reader needs, because it’s the only part that tells them what the room is like.

Then check it against the boundary from last lesson — serves the reader, no clients, no suffering-as-qualification — and if it clears, write three sentences. Three. This section is not an autobiography and the page gets worse when it becomes one.

And if the honest answer is “I don’t have a personal connection, I just turned out to be good at this and I like it” — write that. It’s true, it’s rarer than you think, and it’s a hundred times better than a manufactured wound. Nobody needs you to have been broken in the correct shape to qualify.

Now run both passes

You have a draft. It is not done — because you wrote it, which means you can’t see it. Both passes go on the page, not in your head.

Pass one — the “Sounds Like Me?” filter. All five questions, from Module 1. This page is where the costume voice makes its last stand: it’s the most personal thing you’ve written, and the reflex to sound qualified is strongest exactly where you’re talking about yourself. Question 3 does the heavy lifting here — could 10,000 other therapists have written this exact sentence? — because that’s the question that finds “warm and collaborative” and every other beige phrase that snuck back in while you weren’t looking.

Pass two — the ick checklist. All eight, from Module 3. Two bite hardest on this page:

Question 7 — Privacy. Could a real person recognize themselves anywhere on this page? Your story section is where a client sneaks in wearing a costume. If any sentence exists because of a specific person, cut it, no matter how well-disguised you think it is.

Question 8 — Credentials. Does this page state my license exactly the way my board requires — including my supervisor, if I’m pre-licensed? You wrote the credentials section warm and translated. Go check that the record survived the warmth.

Then, out loud, the whole page. The whole thing, top to bottom, in one go. Your ear will find the two or three sentences your eye approved — it always does, and the ones it finds are always the ones you were proud of.

The short version

• Put the desk together first. Voice DNA, swipe file, profile, checklist, hook file, one-liner, the map. The blank page has been a lie since Module 1.
• Write it out of order — mirror, experience, ask, credentials, story, headline last. Reading order is for the reader; material order is for the writer.
• Decompress, don’t invent. A hook plus your WHO block is already a first paragraph; you’re giving an earned line room, not making things up.
• When the story won’t come, stop asking why you became a therapist. Ask what you know from the inside — then three sentences, and check the boundary.
• Both passes go on the page, not in your head. Q3 finds the costume; Q7 and Q8 are the two that bite here.

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