Better Understanding Our Unique Value as Professionals, to Empower Ourselves and the Initiatives We Work On

If you’ve ever felt like your professional profile was lost in a sea of other similar profiles, with seemingly few ways to differentiate yourself, you’re not alone. We’ve certainly felt that way when looking for work opportunities in the past.

The argument can be made that professionals are the product they sell, whether through entrepreneurship, employment, or job-hunting.

But we are multi-faceted beings, with multidimensional experiences, and, consciously or not, we bring much more to the table than the kind of functional skills often listed in job descriptions.

Selling ourselves like everyone else, with cookie-cutter marketing, is precisely what makes us appear interchangeable.

But each of us has different things to offer, in a unique package—which can be marketed in a similarly unique way.

In other words, if we are the product we sell, then the clearer we are on what we bring, the better the product we can offer, and the better we can communicate on it.

In this article, we share some of our experience and recommendations about better understanding the unique value each of us can offer, in order to further empower ourselves and the initiatives we work on.

The holistic value each of us offers

So what aspects of ourselves do we bring to the work tables we sit at?

Well, we can start with typical job skills:

• Primary job skills: the kind found listed in job descriptions, often of a creative, technical, managerial, or sales-related nature, depending on the roles.

• Peripheral or secondary job skills: of the same nature as the primary job skills, but not considered as essential, and more like bonus skills.

Digging deeper, we also find:

• Transversal skills: including organizational skills, and interpersonal or social skills, both of which bleed into our collaborative skills. We can also mention networking skills, and, meta as it is, job-hunting skills.

• Entrepreneurial skills: tying into what could be considered primary skills, but which can often be found “bundled” together in entrepreneurs, and which can include accounting, admin, marketing, and selling.

That’s already quite the list. But, beyond skills, there’s also:

• Work expertise and life experience: aspects of our experience we may not label as skills, but which play a part in what we can currently offer. Including but not limited to team experience and work settings, companies and industries, projects and clients.

• Vision and outlook: how we approach life in general, as well as work, creation, and collaboration.

• Motivation and inclinations: the energy that drives us, and the attraction to what resonates with us, even more tangible for heart-led professionals like you or us.

• Goals and aspirations: what we’re aiming for, and mean to achieve with our work, and in life at large.

All these aspects—skills of many kinds, experience, vision, motivation, and goals—cumulate and intertwine, and can be declined in the contexts of different industries, work settings, and projects, making for a unique blend of intentions and capabilities for each of us.

This blend represents holistic value we hold in potential, and that we can consciously offer projects we work on, once we’ve identified it.

Some of it we already bring to the work we do, whether we’re aware of it or not. And some of it, we are able to activate more deliberately, once we realize it’s there.

Identifying and better understanding the unique holistic value we already hold

In whom we are lies the full potential of the value we can offer. And there are multiple ways of getting to know ourselves, and the potential of our holistic value, better.

Something that’s helped us both at Oryzon Studio is the approach of the unique skill and zone of genius from Gay Hendricks’s “The Big Leap”.

The book stands as a guided invitation to introspection, with examples and use cases from the writer’s career, to help us peel away some layers, get to know ourselves a little better, and adjust some of our perspectives along the way.

It touches on topics such as fear and success, as well as the unique skill and zone of genius concepts introduced by the author.

The idea of these latter two is to identify something we are uniquely good at and genuinely enjoy doing—our unique skill—so we can commit to spending as much of our time doing it as we can—thus being in our zone of genius.

Identifying what this unique skill may be for us can help gain valuable insight into both what makes us tick and where we can apply it.

On top of finding our unique skill, we can also aim to acknowledge more of what we’ve experienced, and presently aspire to, to better understand what we can offer.

This leads us:

• to identify the contexts in which we’ve used our unique skill before, and where we want to apply it moving forward;

• to consider other things that we bring, beyond skills, as we’ve mentioned before;

To these ends, we find considering the simple binaries of strengths / “weaknesses”, and likes / “dislikes” very useful:

• When it comes to strengths, i.e.,things we are proficient at doing and have experience with, identifying them allows us to make the most of them and deliberately bring more value to initiatives we work on.

• When it comes to “weaknesses”, identifying them allows us to gather experience and “fill” the ones we choose to, avoid the pitfalls of our limitations, and refocus our energies on the strengths we can lend to initiatives. On a deeper level, this can lead us to acknowledge some of our fears, pain points, and insecurities, which can act as triggers to behaviors we can then work to adjust or overcome.

• When it comes to likes and “dislikes”, gaining clearer perspective on what really resonates with us and what doesn’t helps us understand where we can best direct our focus and energies. Indeed, much like with our unique skill, we find there often is a correlation between what we like and are proficient at, and what we dislike and struggle to get done.

• On top of strengths / weaknesses and likes / dislikes, the binary of experience / intentions, i.e., what we have done / what we want to do, is also worth considering as part of this introspective process. Because, as we’ve discussed before, there’s value in our motivation and our intentions too.

Third party perspective can be a big help with this overall introspective process. Discussing the previous points with someone who knows us or our work is a great way to gain hindsight and shed new light on the value we hold.

There are numerous ways of getting to know ourselves, and the value we hold, better. We’ve discussed some here that we’ve used at Oryzon Studio—and still do today.

Holistic value is multi-layered and ever-evolving, so the idea isn’t to identify all of it all at once.

Understanding it is more of a progressive process. An ongoing attitude of detecting and peeling away these layers, and continuously discovering more of who we are and what we have to offer.

Deliberately sharing more of the unique holistic value we hold for greater empowerment

At any given time, each of us already is enough and has tremendous value to offer.

From this premise, sharing more value isn’t going to be about ceaselessly attempting to garner new skills or certificates. But about a change of mindset.

This isn’t anti-growth, it’s about making the most of what we already have, rather than constantly chasing pre-conceived ideas of growth fuelled by fear of not being enough.

And, actually, getting to know ourselves and the value we can share better, is growth. Growth in the direction of the internal.

So how can we make the most of the results from the introspective process we’ve discussed?

We’ve seen that this process allows us to:

• understand there is a uniqueness to the value we can offer through a mix of skills, experience, vision, motivation, and goals.

• gain clarity on our unique skill, along with our strengths, weaknesses, likes, and dislikes.

• acknowledge that, on top of our experience, our intentions also have value.

As entrepreneurs, job-hunters, or company members, we can therefore leverage all of this acquired hindsight and insight to adjust:

• the projects, clients, or companies we can aim to empower: based on how we understand our unique holistic value at any given point, which projects can we best serve and want to participate in? What profile of clients do we aim to support and collaborate with? What kind of company do we want to be part of?

• the formalization of our offerings: how can we format the value we hold in potential in order to share it? As a main trade or a side occupation? As an entrepreneur, a volunteer, or a company member? As a suite of services, a single product, or a holistic array of skills, experience, and intentions?

• our communication: once we’ve found answers to the questions from the two previous points, we’re free to adopt a communication that reflects all the holistic value we mean to offer. Genuine and in line with our vision and intentions. Whether through a website, a holistic résumé, or something else entirely.

• our confidence: we’re not big on ego at Oryzon Studio, but we do believe in standing for the value one can offer. For anyone doubting what they can bring to other people or initiatives, discovering our holistic value is a way to counter doubt and a potential deficit in self-confidence, in order to adequately posture ourselves, and support our offerings.

Given the many aspects of what it means to be a heart-led professional, the opportunities to infuse greater intent and confidence into our actions, based on what we’ve learned of our unique value, are just as plentiful.

Availing ourselves of our unique holistic value in such ways can allow us to access work settings where we are more likely to thrive, thus empowering us and the projects we work on.

In a nutshell

It bears repeating: there’s more to what any of us bring to the work we do than a list of skills from a job description.

Whether we acknowledge it or not is, however, another matter—and down to each of us personally.

In our experience, identifying the unique holistic value we can offer opens up a new approach to how we can work as heart-led professionals.

Indeed, whatever the sum of experiences and intentions that we are individually, we are it anyway, and acknowledging it enables us to play to our strengths, avoid the pitfalls of our limitations, and follow the call of our aspirations.

By taking responsibility for a greater part of the unique package that we already are, we leverage more of the value we hold, and step deeper into our Renaissance selves, as it were.

Thus are we able to infuse what we do professionally with more intent and confidence: identifying the kind of projects we can serve best and want to work on, formalizing our offerings, and adopting a communication reflecting our unique value and intentions.

In doing so, we further empower ourselves and the initiatives we work on.

Given the multi-layered and ever-evolving nature of our holistic value, understanding it is a progressive process, paired with the ongoing attitude of getting to know ourselves.

And yes, this mindset of making the most of what we already have, by understanding ourselves more deeply, in order to provide greater value to the initiatives we are most suited to support, can also be associated with a readiness to grow and learn.

Seeing the value in ourselves as we already are and being ready to expand when new experiences present themselves. Now, that’s as Renaissance as it gets.

Work with us

If you’re interested in better understanding the unique value you have to offer, but you’re not sure where to start, or you’d like someone with an external perspective to help you make sense of things, we can help you out!

Oryzon Studio offers consulting services to help and empower heart-led entrepreneurs and professionals like yourself. Drop us an email with a few details about your journey and goals, and we’ll get back to you shortly.