Discovering Your Unique Ability

Just like it’s hard to figure out your own positioning because you can’t read the label from inside the jar, it can also be difficult to understand your unique strengths as an individual.

I participated in a year-long coaching program a while ago, and they had each of us go through a particular exercise that really did change a lot about how I saw myself.

Your Unique Ability

The exercise was called the Unique Ability Exercise. They didn’t say this, but I understood that a particular expertise was different than how you delivered that expertise as an individual. In an ideal world, you have more opportunity than capacity, and so you should be a little choosier about your engagements to ensure that each one is a good fit, and thus more likely to deliver value for the client…and satisfaction for you.

This doesn’t just apply to an individual, either. Every firm has a unique way of applying their expertise, delivered through carefully curated service offering design and process framed case studies. I talk about this extensively in Secret Tradecraft of Elite Advisors.

Getting a Reliable Perspective on Yourself

If you aren’t sure you’re reading that external label well, from inside your own jar, you could always ask colleagues or family members or bosses or family or whatever, but I’ve come to believe that you need to ask all those groups, and then find the commonalities that surface. So assemble a group of about 40 people, by email, and send them something like this:

Folks, we are working with an advisor and he has suggested that we undertake an exercise that he did, once, that changed his life. It's called the Unique Ability exercise, and it goes like this. Send about 40 emails to a mix of people who know you pretty well, from different angles. So that might include clients, family members, co-workers, bosses, neighbors, etc. The idea is to get a well-rounded perspective from people who know you from different settings.

 And then ask them all the same question: what do you see as my unique ability? What unique strength(s) do you see in how I approach life and the world?

 I'm looking for just one or two sentences of how you would answer that question, and then I'll go through the answers and see what those themes are. And then let you know what people say!

If you could help me with this, I'd love to get your response by [two weeks]. Thank you so much.

Once the results come back, put them in a single document and then find the common threads. Incidentally, this is an excellent use case for AI: to surface those commonalities.

What to Do with the Information

Okay, so now what? Here’s what I’d do:

• Look back over the meetings you’ve had on your calendar for the last few weeks. Chances are good that one-third of them are a total trucking waste of your time. Eliminate them. This should be especially true of any standing meetings you have, particularly if some of the participants are invited because it’s awkward to not invite them.
• What part of client engagements is your firm consistently under-delivering on? That shines a light on where you might need to rethink your service offering design, provide more staff training, or even do some deeper pattern matching to find the answers.
• Who are the people close to you that you find most frustrating? Maybe it’s because what they need is not what you are good at providing? Talk about it with them.

For this particular exercise, you really want to forget what you’ve learned at other firms, what your team feels comfortable with, and so on. Just like most industries, we are a copycat industry and how you deliver expertise should be as tailored as the expertise itself.

Figure out a way to match your strengths (as an individual and as a firm) to deliver the highest value in a way that maximizes impact.

Shoot me an email when you get the results and I’ll report on some of your realizations!