What is your Unique Contribution?
Part 1 of 3 on designing a business around yourself.
At its core, I support my coaching clients to answer two big questions:
i) Figuring out what they should do with their professional lives
ii) Working out how to make this happen
Whilst that’s just two questions, neither are particularly simple to answer. ‘Clarity’ is an elusive creature.
“The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why." – this Mark Twain quote reveals how important answering this question is and always has been.
My experience of this however, is that ‘‘finding out’ is rarely a one-day occurrence. It’s more like a jigsaw puzzle set up in the spare room. The one that you come back to when you have some time to spare. You deliberately move some pieces around, figuring out the best fit, and then take stock to admire how far you’ve come before realising you’re still some way from completion.
You couldn’t possibly finish it one day.
I took a week off over Easter. During my break, I visited a spa, and ideas started whirling around my brain during my swim. Something about water and creativity I believe! Something big clicked for me – the exact phrase that summarises the work I do with people and what they most need from me. I help my clients to unlock their Unique Contribution (patent pending ;) and build a one person business that offers a type of work, an income and lifestyle designed entirely around them.
In the following two posts I’ll explain what I mean by Unique Contribution, the difference that finding yours can make, and how you can design a one-person business around yourself.
The Ask® has supported 23 individuals since the start of 2023 alone, and I’ve been taking stock of the ‘persona’ I’ve been able to best. Taking into account clients from years prior, too, the answers remain the same: someone who brings existing professional experience to the table and has gained some sort of competitive edge and set of skills, but who is figuring out how to map these to the next phase of their career…and spoiler alert, it’s likely to be their own business.
Something about where they are at right now isn’t working. Perhaps they are:
Stuck in a job that no longer serves them, dreaming of the day they finally go all in on their business
Working on other people’s ideas as a freelancer because they still have doubts around their own core methods
Or making that vital, truthful pivot in their existing business to bring it more in line with their true calling
Ready for a professional reinvention and a more committed entrepreneurial leap, the answer for these individuals is most often to go all in on building a one-person business around themselves, leveraging their Unique Contribution.
This means building a business that is entirely unique to their professional skill set, strengths, aptitudes. For many, their Unique Contribution is right under their noses already. Others have a mental barrier to identifying it – blocked by fears, too much knowledge, varying ideas and interests or an externalised view of what they should do, from years of societal pressure and conditioning.
I like to think of this as their ‘entrepreneurial calling’, should they choose to answer it.
Let’s assume that the person I am talking about here is similar to yourself.
Which begs an important question: how would you get there?
How would you realise your ‘true calling’? And, how can you bring your unique skills and abilities into the fold?
The answer is unlocking the ‘Unique Contribution’ piece, which is the truest expression of the work you were put on this earth to do. These specific pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that goes into this will be familiar if you’ve been reading this newsletter for some time, but either way, bear repeating. Until you’ve got your Unique Contribution locked and loaded, you’re still in the spare room completing that puzzle.
You’re in good company if you choose to embark on this path of self-discovery.
Back in 1976 a research paper, Protean Careers, linked globalisation, organisational re-structuring and decentralisation to people taking a much more active role in their personal career-orientation. This is the concept of the protean career (vs. the traditional career) whereby the individual is the one in charge, and the measure of success is psychological aka career fulfilment. Whilst it can seem indulgent, or perhaps even selfish, to ask yourself “What do I want to be doing?”, fulfilled and happy people have a net positive effect on the world.
Other organisational psychologists have elaborated on HOW to do this. In ‘Choosing A Path With Heart’ author Shepard described it as “the things that you can now or potentially could do with excellence, which are fulfilling in the doing of them; so fulfilling that if you also get paid to do them, it feels not like compensation, but like a gift”. Shepard describes how upon finding this, passion, energy, and focus will follow.
I know it and clients have found it, upon unlocking theirs. Especially if you are building a one person business, knowing your Unique Contribution will make all of the difference.
Enjoying this article?
Get the next one dropped straight into your inbox and access the tools you need to launch your one person business faster.
The following five parts makes up your Unique Contribution jigsaw puzzle:
1) Your Personality & Intelligence
Puzzle piece number one, your personality, happens to be one of the most ‘you’ things that exists. Rather than your skills or qualifications, your personality is your very own set of unique traits and qualities you inherently possess. It’s the unique ways of thinking and behaving that you’ve likely had ever since you were a child.
The most scientifically verified form of personality testing is the Five-Factor Model of Personality which includes:
Extraversion – The degree to which a person is outgoing, assertive, and sociable
Agreeableness – The degree to which a person is kind, cooperative, and considerate towards others
Conscientiousness – The degree to which a person is organised, responsible, and dependable
Neuroticism – The degree to which a person experiences negative emotions such as anxiety, moodiness, and irritability
Openness to experience – The degree to which a person is open to new ideas, creative, and adventurous
How much of each of these five traits someone has, makes up a ‘type’ of person. Here are some types you might recognise:
A deep thinker, able to see patterns that others can’t
Energetic, easily brings groups of people together
Compassionate and intuitive towards others’ emotions and needs
Choosing to work in line with your natural traits and personality, and not against it, is paramount.
I know from having worked in executive search and talent management before training as a coach, how essential it is to get to the core ‘essence’ of a person, not just listing off hard skills on a CV in order to identify whether they can both do a job but also be happy in it. One of the world's most prestigious executive search firms in the world, Korn Ferry, publishes its research around how they assess talent for the most important leadership roles in the world. Korn Ferry’s description of ‘Traits’, is ‘Inclinations, aptitudes and natural tendencies a person leans toward, including personality traits and intellectual capacity’ and weight this as one of four dimensions of talent to assess. So, pretty important.
Related to this is ‘types of intelligence’.
You know those people who instantly ‘get’ something? Whether it's complicated directions, how to assemble furniture, explaining an abstract concept into simple language, a TikTok dance routine, or creating powerful prose for an ad campaign… What's at play when this happens is that someone has tapped into one of their unique sources of natural intelligence.
"Frames of Mind", written by Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner explores the concept of multiple intelligences. He argues that traditional measures of intelligence like IQ tests, don’t fully capture the different ways in which people are intelligent.
He brings eight different types of intelligence to the table:
Linguistic — the ability to use language effectively, both verbally and in writing
Logical-mathematical — the ability to think logically, solve mathematical problems, and analyse information
Musical — the ability to understand and create music
Spatial intelligence — the ability to visualise and manipulate objects in one's mind
Bodily-kinesthetic — the ability to control one's body movements and handle objects skillfully
Interpersonal — the ability to understand and interact effectively with others
Intrapersonal — the ability to understand oneself, one's emotions, and one's thoughts
Naturalist — the ability to recognize and understand living things and the natural world
You’ll likely gravitate towards some of these, and not others.
Knowing the importance of traits and intelligence mapping to careers, I made my first career pivot five years into my working life and chose to pursue a new career with greater autonomy and opportunities to be creative, problem solve, and come up with new ideas. None of these traits were being put to use in my existing path. If I’d just looked at my interests, I might have gone down the route of interior design, something I loved. However, great interior designers have a lot of ‘spatial intelligence’ – something I severely lack. My ability to imagine sizes, shapes, and know my left from my right are limited!
Ideas, words, concepts however, have always come naturally to me. Business building allows me to solve problems, and writing allows me to be creative. I’m also strong on ‘interpersonal’ intelligence, too. Essential for coaching!
How about you? How clear are you on your personality and intelligence types – and how much are you using those in your current work situation?
Spend a few moments highlighting those which ring true for you – and how these might match to your top traits.
2) Your Skills & Work History
If you’re paying attention, you’ll know that finding your Unique Contribution requires digging a little deeper than your CV or services page alone.
It’s understandable to start here, since in our culture it’s normal to grill people for their prior experience in order to qualify their ability to do something new – and lazy employers are largely to blame.
But if you choose to look beyond your existing experience you can stand to gain a lot more in this world.
This part requires reviewing the skills and capabilities you’ve been taught, perhaps through education or employment, and the context in which you’ve applied them. Think of this like rifling through your brain’s filing cabinet – what’s in there? What professional experiences have you had that have taught you about certain disciplines, industries or ways of thinking? By reviewing this, you can connect the dots between your disparate abilities and also analyse to what extent you enjoyed learning or doing this type of work.
When it comes to your professional history, many people wrongly assume that having a negative time in a certain context means that work isn’t a fit for them. Whereas instead you want to separate out the factors that were specific to this context: such as the team, working conditions, market factors or your own frame of mind. And then separate out the things which would be true if you did it again: the skills you used, the type of work involved and the knowledge and experience required.
This is true in your own business too.
My love of coaching has increased exponentially since I started working with a certain type of client and a particular type f goal (yep, to build a one-person business!).
For you, your work history provides you clues about where you come to life. Is it analysing data, recalling facts, improvising on camera, presenting a point of view, designing images? Drill down into the skills you’ve gained across your various work experiences and assign them as a ‘fit’ or ‘not a fit’ and try to identify themes around your optimum type of work.
Therein your Unique Contribution emerges further.
3) Your Values & Drivers
With your personality and your skills in check, comes part 3 of building your Unique Contribution puzzle. Your career values and drivers.
This is knowing what is important to you in a work context.
It’s why certain people are driven to more altruistic careers than others, why some have a huge drive for freedom and autonomy, others for financial security and others for going deep into a particular subject matter and knowing absolutely everything there is to know about it.
Would you know how to clarify your values and drivers? Many don’t.
That’s something I provide support with in client conversations, where I give out a list of values for people to choose from and inevitably the list comes back: Love, Happiness, Family, Growth, or something very close to this.
I am not saying these things aren’t important, far from it, just that they aren’t very helpful when it comes to figuring out your professional path. More helpful would be to identify the factors that have led you to feel aligned to certain work contexts, and misaligned to others.
What traits do you admire in others?
How do you measure your own version of success?
What do you consider makes a job well done?
How do you want people to remember your contribution?
What are you always striving to find more of?
Answers to these questions will elicit more useful information about your Unique Contribution.
For example, you could be running a company where you are making good money, and you are really good at it, too. But if you’ve created an environment where you HAVE to work certain hours, meet a hefty payroll, and stick to offering only one type of product… you’ll be miserable if you value ‘freedom’ above all else.
I worked with someone who’d already made the entrepreneurial leap, out of a corporate career. But they were working with a co-founder, essentially following their co-founders' vision. This created a misalignment because their values were ‘independence’ and being ‘significant’ – aka the one with the spotlight on them.
Owning this fact (not ignoring it, pretending everything was ok) changed the game. They had to go through a difficult co-founder breakup but came out the other side with a social media driven business model where they are the ‘face’ of the business, and creating a huge buzz and sales as a result of sharing their purpose. They found their entrepreneurial calling.
I like to offer this list of eight career drivers below (adapted from MIT psychologist Edgar Schein’s Career Anchors) and ask clients to choose just two. Their most important two give answers to work and business opportunities which will or won’t make for the right fit.
Expertise — Functional or domain knowledge around a subject
Leadership — Developing and leading others
Independence — Freedom of choice and autonomous decision making
Security — Reliable income or safety net
Ideation — Creating or building something, likely entrepreneurial or artistic
Service — Being able to positively influence and be of service to others
Challenge — Being pushed outside of your comfort zone to acquire new skills
Lifestyle — How your life looks outside of work, or what your work enables you to do with your spare time
Try it for size – can you pick yours?
4) Your Interests, Play & Curiosities
If you’ve ever been on a dating app you’ll know that you can intuitively judge if someone could be a good partner for you based on their profile.
How they spend their time as illustrated by their six chosen photos can tell you a lot. To generalise… Outdoorsy types will show you their ski-slope snaps, quieter types perhaps a selfie with their cat, bookshelf in full view, and social bunnies out painting the town red.
Much like our personal lives can dictate our dating lives, when it comes to your Unique Contribution, their analysis can prove helpful, too.
Assuming that you’re a grown adult and can make choices about how you choose your spare time, you are telling yourself a lot in these moments about what your priorities are, and as a result, what your professional life could be too.
Alex Hormozi, in this interview with Steven Barlett, proudly stated he has NO hobbies. Work is his hobby. This tracks… his net worth and social media following are in the millions. So, being an entrepreneur makes sense for someone like this who doesn’t want to follow rules and wait patiently for their next promotion or pay rise to reap the rewards. For Hormozi, outsized efforts = outsized rewards.
What about you? Your interests, habits, routines, and ways that you play or spend your downtime can be very tellingPerhaps you are ALWAYS with other people. Rarely alone, you are on the phone or with your crew more than you’re not. In your work, you’d probably do well to run a community, or be point-person at a company. You are clearly energised by other people’s presence and you can capitalise on these things to do work you are uniquely able to do.
Perhaps you love playing with words, ideas, and illustrations, to create new types of meaning. Whether that’s reading, writing, playing word games, or daydreaming, you might be a better creative writer or playwright than most. A client right now is bringing together all of her creative interests in and outside of work, to design her business model, and it’s something highly unique in the design and poetry space.
Or perhaps you love gadgets, gaming, and reading tech reviews. You care about how things work, and you care about high quality and craftsmanship. You are more likely to build tech than most, design something innovative, or dive into the future of entertainment, should you wish, than someone who has no interest in these things.
You’ll likely be familiar with the Japanese concept of Ikigai – image below if not.
As you can see, ‘what you love to do’ is a quarter of this equation.
Found at the centre of these concentric circles is the ‘work you are meant to do’ in the world.
Your Unique Contribution is very much aligned to this idea, I’ve just elaborated on it as a result of my real world experiences, and will in another post explain how it maps to building a one-person business.
In the early days of working with a new 1-1 client, I often hear things like “well I love yoga, so could be a yoga teacher” or “I love watching sports, but I’m no good at it”’, and then give up – like the Ikigai has failed them.
The work I encourage them, and you, to do is to look deeper. What is it about yoga, or sports, or [insert anything else you do for fun] that you enjoy?
Not everything can or should be monetised nor can it create a business, but clues will still exist.
For example, the clue that you love competition and entertainment and watch a lot of quiz shows, could lend you to doing something in that field. Or you love wellness and mind/body/spirit topics and actually, underneath it all, you are able to find calm in a busy world and bring that energy into your coaching practice, for example.
I recall very vividly creating little ‘exercises’ and ‘homework’ for friends aged six. Unbeknownst to them, after coming around for a play date, I’d play ‘Teacher / Student’ role play, create lessons and then give them tasks! If you’ve ever been a 1-1 client of mine, you’ll know I readily give out ‘Homework’ assignments between sessions.
I promise I know how to have fun too.
Whatever your interests, loves and curiosities are I encourage you to explore them fully. If you can do them for free and not get bored, it's a sign you could build a business where you’d use that trait, interest or skill, and be able to persevere through the hard times more. Make a list of those.
5) Your Why, Mission and Causes
If you took note of the Ikigai, and have heard any good career advice out there, you’ll have detected the last piece of this puzzle.
That is identifying what is important to you and what you care about, so that you can motivate yourself to make an impact. People early in their careers are not always afforded the opportunity to seek out work with deep meaning to them – they are thrust into graduate career ladders or in my case, the post-08 recession and whatever work was available.
But for your Unique Contribution to be complete, you must unearth this piece.
You are not looking for ‘any job that pays the bills’ – if you are, you might want to come back to building a one-person business at another point in time! But, if you are ready to build something designed around yourself that maps to your Unique Contribution then keep reading.
You have an internal ‘why’ that drives you to care about doing the sort of work that you do. A ‘why’ can come from a few different places.
From an experience, usually negative, that happened to you or someone you care about
Awareness and understanding of an injustice in the world that angers you
Association or belonging to a particular group, community or cause
There are more, but these are the ones I see most commonly.
By being privy to a ‘problem’ most people are able to see that there is no immediate solution and that if no one else is going to fix the problem, they might as well.
Some problems are bigger than others: climate change, gender inequality, financial inclusion or world peace, for example. Don’t let that preclude you from trying: the more people working towards solving hard problems the better. I love the missions of 8,000 Hours and Entrepreneur First, for this reason. The former helps its community to identify the world's biggest issues and find careers on the front line of change, and the latter invests in exceptional people to help them build companies with global impact.
But some problems are smaller scale and specific, with less people in the world qualified to work on them (or even aware of them).
That’s where you can step in.
My coach the other day remarked at how much I seem to CARE about my client’s career choices and business decisions. I care because I know how hard it is, and the pain of it being wrong – from personal experience. I also care because it’s my job to (!) but The Ask’s mission to guide people to find their entrepreneurial calling and design their work-fit, is no coincidence.
I have clients solving an educational gap in SaaS companies for non tech folk, a knitwear designer teaching people how to knit, and building a community as a cure for loneliness, advancing women’s leadership potential, informing workers of their rights through content, and providing better intimacy tools for couples.
You can bet these ideas didn’t come from thin air – but their own experiences and journeys in these specific contexts.
Mine your experiences, and the things that are close to your heart, to consider what missions might energise you with your work?
Completing the puzzle, to build your masterpiece
Now you’ve read these five core components of your Unique Contribution, congrats! That’s a LOT of words to read and reflect upon, and you deserve a big pat on the back and probably some water to rehydrate.
As you’ve read, your Unique Contribution is not as simple as asking ‘what is my passion’. That’s why most football fans remain fans, not star players, because skill plays a role too.
For now, review your responses to the questions listed so far (in bold) and see what conclusions you are able to make. Often it’s right in front of our noses, and someone else can help to draw it out and show the mirror to our thinking. So share your thinking with someone else, or reach out for a consultation about coaching, if you need a hand. I’m here to help. This is what coaching with The Ask is designed to do.
Once you have this information clear, your Unique Contribution puzzle is finished.
Now, you’ll notice I haven’t mentioned money yet.
Money is what flows to you when you can set up your offers: something you can offer the world that other people will pay for. Choosing what to offer, and how to position it, is the second part to this and it’s where your 2D puzzle goes from being words on a page, to a living, breathing piece of art that is real. And brings in money.
Your business model and methods must match your Unique Contribution, but bring a completely different set of questions and associated answers.
It’s what I call having ‘founder-model fit’. Much startup advice says your product needs to fit the market need (true) but I make a different point, about you as a founder, needing to fit the business model and approach that you create.
This is what I’ve built my latest coaching programme based on, and what designing a one person business is all about, and so if you’re ready to learn that, keep an eye on your inbox or subscribe if you're new, for part 2 in 2 week's time!
