The first thing that comes to mind when I think about what makes me different is the interdisciplinary life — how I’ve studied and absorbed so many different things over the years. It’s not a tidy story, but it’s mine. You are the unique thing you can offer is something I keep coming back to, because I think that’s literally true for me — the combination is the thing, not any single skill or credential. Most people trying to differentiate themselves are looking for one clean answer, but I think mine lives in the overlap.
Honestly, the confidence piece is still hard. I don’t have a clear moment where I felt my uniqueness land with a client in a way I could point to and say — there, that was it. What I do have is my friends. They tell me they love hanging out because of how I think, the way I connect things, the angles I come at problems from. That’s something. It’s not nothing. But translating that into how I talk about my work — that’s where Writing About My Point of View becomes the actual practice, not just a nice idea.
I think the common advice on differentiation gets it wrong. “Just be yourself” sounds right but it’s incomplete. The real question is: how do you love to help? That’s the thing that makes differentiation more than a branding exercise. Richard Bull-Domican makes a similar point — there’s a difference between being genuinely different and just sounding different. What you offer has to be rooted in something you actually care about giving.
If I got clearer on this, I’d double down on the behaviors that already show up naturally — the cross-domain thinking, the connections I make that other people don’t. Micro Education Businesses: Crafting a Product Rooted in Your Journey is where this could actually become something structural, not just a personality trait. Defining and communicating that value is the work I haven’t fully done yet. But I think the raw material is already there.