I have a new coaching client who asked me to review her website to make sure it’s an effective marketing tool. I spent some time looking at the site with “the eyes of a stranger”. If I didn’t know her, what would her new site tell me about her and the services she has to offer? In my written review, I noted what was effective and what needed to be modified to best represent her skills and experience. These suggestions were of great value to her, she thanked me profusely and, until I pointed them out, she was blind to glaring omissions and grammatical errors that were on her site.

This was an eye-opening experience for me. I found typos, presumed knowledge, lack of clarity and lack of focus. After visiting each page, I didn’t know any more about her than I did before I began reviewing the site. For her, the site said it all very clearly and for me it was a message that needed to be decoded. She knew what she was trying to say and I didn’t have a clue. She saw a finished site and I saw a site that was still under construction.

My sense is that she was just relieved to have created a website and really didn’t want to be bothered revising it so it better reflected her talents. She just wanted to check another item off her many-paged to do list so she didn’t want to look at her site more closely. Guess that’s why she hired me. Duh! I saw what was actually on each page, not what she wanted to appear on the pages.

Been there, done that, so I could relate! I often have the same feeling when I write my blog entries. I’m so anxious to get them published that I don’t see typos, parts of sentences that weren’t completely deleted, missing words or subjects and predicates that don’t match. I want to see the blog as finished so that’s just what I do. I press enter and later “see” my errors. There’s a price to pay for being impatient and it involves having to backtrack, make changes and risk having the reader see you in less than optimal light.   

Similarly, earlier this week another client, who wants to land a new job, asked me to review his resume because I’m a former HR manager and have had extensive experience writing and critiquing effective resumes. As written, it’s highly unlikely that my client's resume will get him an interview with a hiring manager. His resume wasn’t very effective because it wasn’t specific enough, did not paint a clear picture of what he’s accomplished in his current and former jobs and was neither aesthetically pleasing nor easy to read. From his viewpoint, all the necessary information was shown on the resume. The readers might have to dig for it a bit and intuit the skills he possesses, but, from his point of view, that was their job as interviewers and/or hiring managers. From my point of view as an HR pro, I wanted to see specific skill sets and experiences showcased on the resume. I didn’t want to have to dig for information especially if were a pile of other resumes to review for the same position.  My client and I were looking at the same document and seeing it from different perspectives.

The lesson I learned this week is that, if I want to get ideas across whether they’re in the form of a website, a resume, a blog entry or other form of communication, I have to see things from a broader point of view. I have to take time and see the ideas from my perspective as well as from the point of view of the reader or I need to hire an impartial third-party to tell me what they see. Whether I do it myself or hire somebody to do it for me,  there's great value in seeing what actually appears instead of what I want to see. It may take a little longer to do that, but it will be more effective in the long run and will produce better results. I'm all about getting outstanding results!