Blog Your Passion

By: Lorelle VanFossen

Nov 08 2012

Tags: about, about page, bio, biography, character, personal blog, personality, resume, style, voice, who are you

Category: Passion, Writing

4 Comments

In Prove It: Kym Huynh Exposed as part of my Prove It Campaign in 2012, Kym Huynh gave me permission to rip apart is personal and professional promotional site. I held back not.

Kym’s family were refugee survivors from Vietnam, victims of a political regime that saw intelligence as a threat. They left their world and generations of “belonging” behind to start over in Australia, rebuilding their lives and family in a strange land and making it their own. The story of their escape and survival is part of the foundation of his personality. He knows first hand that having your say involves risks and consequences, to the point of death.

In a world filled still with immigration stories, I believe he would find sympathy, empathy, and generate a sense of pride and honor associated with “knowing him” if he shared a small bit of his back story.

As it stands, his welcoming paragraph is too clinical, too distant. Adding a touch of his personal story would make it highly personal and draw us in. It would have to be in Kym’s words, so I’ll not try here. I want a sentence or two to sum up the reason behind his tremendous sensitivity and capacity for listening and asking the right questions, and why he works so hard to help others inspire and change the world.

It would have to be handled delicately so the conversation doesn’t go off track. His work and projects are not about being part of the boat people escape from Vietnam but because of it. He rarely shares his story but it permeates everything he does. To keep the introduction personal while sharing the story, I’d include something that alludes to his past and answers the question, “Where does his passion come from?”

In “Prove it! Kym Huynh Bio Reloaded,” Kym took my recommendations to heart and totally revised the content on his site, putting it more in line with who he really is and does.

Ask yourself where your passion comes from and look at your own site. Do you see it? If you can’t see your passion on your site, how can others see it?