Years ago, while I was working at a growing consumer-products company, one of my coworkers said something about me that I have never forgotten:
“Erich makes everyone 10% better.”
At the time, I received it as a generous compliment. I did not yet recognize it as evidence.
Recently, while thinking about identity, personal development, and the kind of work I want to do in the future, I remembered that statement differently. I began looking back over my life for patterns—not just things I hope are true about me, but things demonstrated through real events, repeated behavior, measurable results, and the testimony of other people.
A sentence emerged:
People are more able after working with me than they were before.
That does not mean I am responsible for their success. I do not perform their work for them, make their decisions, or possess some magical ability to transform anyone who comes near me.
It means I often help people see something in themselves that they could not previously see, translate their existing experience into a new possibility, and build enough structure for them to act.
Recovering a Lost Professional Identity
One woman I knew had previously been a nurse, but addiction had cost her nursing license.
The professional loss was not the only loss. She had also lost her belief that she could ever be a nurse again. Her past failure had become the defining evidence she used to understand herself.
I could not restore her license. I could not study for her, take an examination for her, or rebuild her life on her behalf.
What I could do was help her see that losing the ability to practice nursing did not erase the person who had become a nurse. The training, intelligence, care, experience, and calling had not disappeared. They had been buried under addiction, consequences, and shame.
I helped her see herself as a nurse again.
She did the work.
When she was given permission to retake the examination, I was the first person she told. When she passed, I was also the first person she told.
Her restoration was hers. But I had helped her believe that restoration was possible before she could fully believe it herself.
Turning an Ambition Into a Plan
Another person wanted to become a full-time YouTube creator.
He had the desire, but he did not have a plan. More precisely, he did not know how to make a plan.
A dream such as “I want to become a full-time creator” can feel clear while remaining almost useless as an operating instruction. There is no obvious task called “become successful on YouTube” that someone can complete on Tuesday afternoon.
I helped him add structure to his thinking.
We broke the ambition into stages, translated those stages into tasks, and created review cycles through which he could evaluate what was working and decide what to do next.
I did not make his videos. I did not develop his talent, attract his viewers, or endure the repetition required to become successful.
He did the work.
He followed the plan, created the videos, and eventually became a full-time YouTuber. Later, he told me that the systems we developed had made a major difference in his life.
I did not give him the dream. I helped him build a bridge between the dream and his daily behavior.
Translating Experience Into a New Career
A third person had once worked as a programmer but had been let go and no longer wanted to continue in software development. When I knew her, she was living with her mother and trying to support herself through part-time photography work.
Her résumé did not obviously say “marketer.”
But her experience did.
Running a photography business required her to understand visual communication, customer needs, technology, branding, and social media. I helped her frame that experience in language a business could understand, and she was hired into a marketing role.
Later, I helped her make another transition.
Much of the work she had been performing in marketing was also business-analysis work: understanding needs, organizing information, navigating systems, and helping people turn business requirements into action. We reframed what she had already done so that she could accurately present herself as a business analyst.
That transition required more than my recommendation. She had to believe the interpretation herself. She then had to communicate it credibly through multiple interviews until other people believed it too.
She got the job.
More than a year later, she wanted to move again, this time into the Salesforce ecosystem. I helped her think through the interview questions and position her prior experience. She got that job as well.
She later referred her husband to me.
He was a middle-school mathematics teacher who wanted a sales position at Shopify. He had no formal sales title and assumed that meant he had no sales experience.
I helped him understand that much of teaching is persuasion.
Every day, he was already trying to gain attention, explain value, overcome resistance, adapt a message to an audience, and persuade children that mathematics was worth learning. He had been selling. The product was mathematics, and the customers were reluctant middle-school students.
The underlying capability was already present. The title was missing.
He learned how to describe that capability, Shopify recognized it, and he was hired.
In both cases, the work was not inventing a false identity. It was finding truthful evidence that the desired identity was already emerging.
Reasoning Up From Existing Assets
Another woman came to me while feeling fragmented across several different roles.
She was consulting for a local clothing retailer, working for a construction manager who operated a wedding venue, doing wedding planning on the side, and carrying the history of a clothing company she had previously started.
She did not know how the pieces fit together.
We began by looking at her assets rather than her confusion.
She understood clothing, branding, events, business operations, communication, and public presentation. Instead of beginning with the question, “What completely new person should you become?” we asked, “What could be built from what is already here?”
Over time, she decided to relaunch her clothing brand with a larger purpose: helping young women learn about business. She became a real estate agent. She briefly served as a spokesperson for a national beverage brand. She then started a podcast connected to her business vision.
I did not choose her final direction for her. I helped her reason upward from the evidence of what she had already built, learned, and demonstrated.
Helping My Wife Think Bigger
The original inspiration for much of this work was my former wife.
When we started building businesses together, she was a stay-at-home mother. Over the years, I helped her begin and operate several ventures, including affiliate businesses, a knitting company, a photography business, and eventually a property-management company.
I helped name the businesses. I funded them. I provided ideas, guidance, marketing support, technology, and encouragement.
But she operated them.
Years later, she acknowledged that I had helped her start the property-management company and had encouraged her to think bigger about what it could become.
That matters to me.
Long before I had language for identity development, coaching, evidence reviews, or business systems, I was already trying to help someone I loved see that her current role did not exhaust her potential.
When Someone Does Not Change
Not every story ended with a career transition.
I once met a woman who had spent her entire working life in restaurants. At the time, she was working in the kitchen of a gourmet coffee shop. We became acquainted when she advertised that she was beginning to clean houses for additional income.
I hired her.
During our conversation, she admitted that she did not understand the business side of what she was trying to start. I told her that I loved talking about business and offered to help her.
She agreed, then hesitated. I pursued the idea, and she eventually accepted.
When we began meeting, I discovered that she did not truly want a house-cleaning business. She wanted more money and had a partial desire to enter the business world outside of restaurant work.
I offered to help her over a series of weeks in exchange for her helping me develop a personal-growth program I was building. I paid her for that work partly because I wanted her to experience evidence that she already could perform business work.
She learned a great deal and made meaningful contributions.
But she did not change careers. She continued working at the same coffee shop, and our relationship eventually ended.
For a long time, I could have interpreted that story as a failure—hers, mine, or both.
I now see something more precise.
I helped her encounter and practice a different possibility. But I was more committed to her transformation than she was. Her initial hesitation was information I should have taken more seriously.
A person must not only want the result. They must want the change and accept ownership of the work required to produce it.
I can recognize potential. I can translate experience. I can create an opportunity, build a structure, and offer encouragement. I cannot provide another person’s desire, consent, perseverance, or agency.
That story does not disprove my ability to help people. It puts a necessary boundary around it.
Development Is Not the Same as Rejection
This realization also helped me understand why I have sometimes felt frustrated with people who wanted support but did not want to change.
Growth is one of my deepest values. I instinctively look at people, businesses, and systems and see unrealized capacity. When someone tells me about a problem, I begin imagining what could be clarified, repaired, practiced, or built.
But not everyone who wants support is asking for transformation.
Some people want to be understood. Some need companionship while they grieve. Some are exhausted. Some are afraid. Some are not ready. Others genuinely do want the discomfort of their situation relieved without accepting the cost of changing it.
Those are not all the same condition.
My gift becomes unhealthy when I assume every person wants the future I can see for them. It becomes controlling when I treat another person’s reluctance as a problem for me to overcome.
An invitation to grow must remain an invitation.
A Biblical Pattern of Development
The Bible does not present human beings as static.
Paul writes in Romans 5 that suffering produces perseverance, perseverance produces character, and character produces hope. Character is not merely declared. It is formed through repeated responses to reality.
Luke writes that Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and people. Jesus was not morally defective, yet his human life still included development. Identity and growth are not opposites. A person can truly be who they are while still growing into a fuller expression of it.
Jesus’ parable of the talents also describes people receiving something of value and being held responsible for how they steward it. The faithful servants do not bury what they have been given. They put it to work.
Many people bury their abilities without realizing it.
Their gifts are hidden beneath shame, an inadequate job title, a lack of structure, a painful failure, or a belief that their experience does not count. Sometimes all they need is for someone to help them examine the evidence differently.
Jesus also taught that what comes from within a person is what ultimately comes out into the world. Elsewhere, he said that trees are recognized by their fruit.
That suggests that identity should not be built only from desire.
It should also be examined through evidence:
What do I repeatedly produce?
What kinds of problems do I instinctively solve?
What do other people consistently experience around me?
What has remained true across different jobs, relationships, businesses, and seasons?
What evidence challenges the story I would prefer to tell?
Planting, Watering, and Letting Go
Paul gave perhaps the clearest boundary when he wrote that he planted, another person watered, but God gave the growth.
Planting matters.
Watering matters.
Neither is the same as creating life.
I can help someone recover a professional identity, but I cannot study for her.
I can help someone construct a plan, but I cannot create his videos.
I can help someone translate her experience, but I cannot interview on her behalf.
I can help someone see that teaching contains the foundations of selling, but I cannot make a company hire him.
I can help someone see a possible future, but I cannot make her want it.
My contribution is real, but it is limited.
That is not a disappointment. It is freedom.
The Identity I Can Honestly Claim
After looking at these stories, I can say something more grounded than “I want to help people.”
I can say:
I help people recognize capabilities they already possess and build structures through which they can act on them.
I can also say:
People are more able after working with me than they were before.
Not every person. Not in every circumstance. Not because I possess the power to change them.
The pattern appears when a person has real capacity, wants a different future, is willing to examine the evidence, and accepts responsibility for doing the work.
My role is to see, translate, structure, equip, encourage, and sometimes provide an initial opportunity.
Their role is to choose and act.
God gives the growth.
That is the kind of work I have been doing for much of my life.
It is also the work I want to become more deliberate about doing next. And it’s the work I’m doing at 4-Year U.
