A few weeks ago, I wrote about ditching my title. Here’s what happened after I released that opinion piece.

Four people read that piece and told me I’d just described their secret sauce. I know all four of them personally. Not one of them had ever crossed my mind as someone I might hire.

Here’s why that bothers me.

Their marketing material says Executive Business Coach, Transformation Expert, Consultant Messaging Master, and Digital Growth Diva. The woman I actually hired calls herself a Personal Branding Specialist. I had to look that up while writing this, because it’s not what made me say yes.

What made me say yes was her message. “Noticed you’re sharing thoughtful posts here. Many practitioners struggle with visibility despite posting consistently. I help with content and networking strategy on LinkedIn. Happy to share how I can help if you’re open to it.”

She named the problem I already knew I had. Not her title. Not her business. The problem.

I get that most of us don’t actually know what our real problem is. That not-knowing sends entrepreneurs into a soul-sucking, money-wasting spiral of hiring whoever sounds confident and hoping it sticks. It’s a real trip, and it’s mostly hit and miss.

Part of that is on us. But part of it is that the words themselves have gone soft. Executive Business Coach, Transformation Expert, Digital Growth Diva. Poll a hundred people, and you’ll get a hundred different guesses at what any of those actually do. Titles used to mean something. Now they’re mostly noise dressed up as credibility.

This isn’t new.

I wrote a memo at twenty-one arguing that better inter-departmental processes would improve communication and efficiency. I spent more time defending what I meant by communication and efficiency than convincing anyone to stop hoarding information. We’ve been burying plain meaning under impressive-sounding words for a long time. Marketing made it worse. Digital platforms made it worse again.

So here’s my odd little theory.

If you’re relying on your title to tell people what you do, you’re doing it wrong. Whether you work for a company or for yourself, a title is just a label. And nobody reads a label for the summary. We check the wash instructions, not the country of origin. We search for a recipe called Bolognese, but we don’t care about the name. We care about the ingredients, the quantities, and the time it takes.

Which means you’re allowed to stop borrowing someone else’s language. You can make up your own title to fit the lane you’re actually standing in. There are a million directors, gurus, VPs, founders, divas, influencers, and experts, all swimming in the same river of sameness. You don’t have to swim with them.

Here’s where that shows up in real life. I see two versions of it constantly. Someone builds a beautiful website and a can’t-miss offer before they’ve figured out what actually makes them different or what problem they solve. Or someone writes a book, finds out they have to market it themselves, and comes to me wanting a plan handed to them, because they’re an author, not a strategist. Both times, the real work, figuring out what makes them different, what problem they actually solve, and the best path to get there, gets skipped in favour of a quick fix.

Try this instead.

Lead with the problem, in plain language, the way the person living it would describe it. Then offer part of your solution.

So, what problem do you actually solve, in language an eight-year-old could follow, and does your current title say any of it?