How understanding my Unique Ability changed my life
Unique Ability. It's pretty wild but this simple concept (and those two words) have had a profound impact on my life, work, and happiness.
In the early days of Lead Cookie, I started studying the work of Dan Sullivan, of Strategic Coach, which has been around coaching entrepreneurs since the 1980s. One of the concepts that stuck out to me from Dan's work is the idea of Unique Ability.
Dan describes Unique Ability as:
"Unique Ability, by definition, is the essence of what you love to do and do best. It’s your own set of natural talents and the passion that fuels you to contribute in the ways that most motivate you. When articulated, it describes the “you” that makes you who you are."
In this article, I am going to dive into more about the Unique Ability process, and the profound impact it has had on my entrepreneurial career.
Why Unique Ability matters
Simply put, when we understand where we can perform our best, we can design our life and work around our strengths instead of our weaknesses.
When we don't understand our unique ability, we often set ourselves up for failure without knowing it. We take on projects or roles that are not our strength, and as a result, find ourself frustrated and struggling.
On the flip side, once we understand our unique ability, we can plan accordingly. We can hire people that compliment us. We can design work that fits our strengths and delegate that which doesn't.
The result is increased production, decreased resistance, and more happiness.
How the process works:
If you want to uncover your Unique Ability, then buy the book and workbook at http://uniqueability.com/. It's like $50, but I swear it's worth it. As you go through the workbook, you will do a handful of activities to help you become more self-aware and clear on your Unique Ability. These include:
Personality profiles
The Strengths Finder Assessment
Logging all of the tasks you do on a daily basis for weeks
Asking those close to you to share what they think your strengths are
Journaling
All of these combine into a process of self-awareness and insight that allows you to see yourself in a completely new light.
What my Unique Ability is:
You can actually see the written output of the Unique Ability process for me here. But those words don't do justice to the narrative. So, let me describe what I've uncovered as my Unique Ability.
The activator in me
Futurist - I love envisioning the future, thinking ahead, and picturing a reality that doesn't yet exist, but could. I spend a lot of time envisioning what could be.
Ideation - I love coming up with ideas.
Activator - I put ideas into action quickly. That means that while others say, "Oh, that's a cool idea..." but never do anything with it, that's just not me. I have a compulsion toward rapid action.
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Those 3 traits combined together mean that I thrive from coming up with ideas about an envisioned future, and then putting them into immediate action. This is one of the most powerful traits that I have in my life.
How I put this into action: I start projects. I kick them off. I come up with an idea, I paint the vision for my team, and then get them started. Or, I come up with a vision and then put it into action and create it immediately. I don't sit around. Ideas turn into reality quickly for me.
The achiever in me
One of my other top traits is that I am an achiever. I like to win. At times, this comes at an almost unhealthy ego as I like to feel like the most powerful person in the room. This trait can both help and harm me.
On the positive side, if I set a goal, I am going to figure out a way to hit it. I love checking off lists or knocking out a target I set.
On the negative side, it can bring ego. I can want to appear like I am winning, even if I'm not. I've had to keep this in check.
How I put this into action: I am consistently setting targets and challenges for myself, and then I knock them out. If I set a goal, I'm going to figure out a way to hit it.
The relator in me
Another one of my strengths is that I am a relator. I like one-on-one conversations, not group dynamics. This means I do very well with coaching my team. During one-on-ones, I am able to connect with an individual, have a deeper conversation to coach and help them level up.
How I put this into action: My weeks consist of one-on-one time with my team members so I can coach and level each of them up. This time is crucial as it allows me to use my strength to level up the company through each individual team member.
Before Unique Ability:
While this may all sound nice, what is more impactful is to look at what my work life was like before I learned my Unique Ability. Prior to understanding these aspects about myself, I would set myself up for failure all of the time. Here are a few examples.
I would sign myself up for repetitive work, and then fail at it
Prior to Lead Cookie, I was working as a marketing consultant. I would sign customers onto monthly retainers for a set scope of work... but then I just couldn't bring myself to do the work.
I loved month one of every engagement, and then month 2 & 3 were horrible. All I had to do was execute like I said I would, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. I loved getting projects started, but I hated maintaining them once they were up and running.
This problem plagued me for YEARS and led to a lot of poor client relationships because I was selling myself into engagements that I was not suited to deliver.
My achiever leaned to the side of ego
As a marketing consultant, I had a huge ego. I was confident that I could do anything and I presented myself to clients like I could. This was helpful in confidence for sales, but when I entered an engagement and failed, it led to lots of internal conflict.
My achiever side created an almost delusional state at times about how great things were going; when the facts of reality weren't always that great.
My ego made me think only I could do the work
Another downside of the achiever is that I thought that I was "the shit." As a result, I felt that if I gave work to anyone else, they couldn't do it as well as I could. This was a huge mental barrier that took me time to get over. I had to eventually realize that there were many people better at doing the work than myself. And that is ok.
I worked in isolation
After having my first business partnership crumble (largely due to my own ego), I entered into a period of life where I worked alone. I was committed to figuring out everything for myself and to need no one else. This was shunning the relator in me for years which held me back.
It wasn't until I joined forces with my ops director, Jeff Markle, that I really started making progress and building something real. And ironically, this worked because Jeff was an implementor. He could take all of the projects and ideas I came up with, and put them into action.
How I use my Unique Ability to build and run Lead Cookie
As soon as I discovered my Unique Ability, it became clear to me how I could use it to build the company. Instead of doing the client work, I would focus my time and energy on building systems.
Every week, I would envision a new system and then create it. This fueled the creator in me and I had a blast doing it. Each system I built meant I was freed up from more repetitive work. This meant more time to build, and less time doing work I hated.
Lead Cookie was built with me running from system to system. Week after week. This was me doing what I do best.
If I don't get something off my plate, I eventually fail at it
All of this understanding of myself helps me realize this fundamental truth about myself. If I don't get a task off my plate, I will eventually fail as it becomes repetitive.
For example, running client accounts at Lead Cookie... Jeff literally fired me from the roles we have our VAs do because I couldn't sit there and send 100 connection requests in a day. I would make more typos and mistakes than our team.
Then, eventually, I had to fire myself from account strategy. It was becoming overwhelming and repetitive to me so I started caring less, missing details, and quality went down. Handing off strategy actually led to better results for our clients than with me doing it myself.
The same was true with sales... It became such a repetitive process that I hated it. I wasn't following up with anyone. I wasn't really caring. It was just monotonous. Whenever I finally got out of the sales seat, we saw that bottleneck remove and our new sales person, Isaac, took the company to almost a 30% increase in the next 4 months.
I recognize that this is true for any role with me... If I do it for too long, I will fail.
While it's early and I'm building the role, I have fun with it. But repetition quickly turns to failure for me if I don't get it it off my plate.
My team compliments my Unique Ability
One of the other amazing aspects of Unique Ability is that it enables you to build a team that compliments you. For me, this means I need implementors. If I had a team full of other creative idea people... well, I think I would go nuts and nothing would ever get done.
Instead, I need people who I can reliably send projects to and know it will get done. I need implementors.
And I've managed to build a team of those. At Lead Cookie, I've had several team members say something along the lines of, "I want to wake up and predictably know what I need to do each day."
That's not the case for me. I love the thrill of the new, and the daily predictability drives me insane. This difference in team members is so important though.
While not all of my team members have been through the Unique Ability process, the ones that have often show up with traits along the lines of dependability, practicality, execution, and predictability.
While I have my Unique Ability, they also have theirs. The goal is to get each person working in their own Unique Ability and maximizing this as much as you possibly can. That is where value creation is at its max.
My current week is built around my Unique Ability
It took almost 2.5 years from reading that book to get to this point. But now, at this point I am almost 80-90% working in my Unique Ability.
Every day I wake up and create things (like this article).
I envision projects and get my team started down the path of implementation.
I set targets and drive our team toward them.
I meet with my team and coach them through challenges.
These days, my week is the kind of work that I absolutely love to do. And the work that I am best at. I can't explain to you how great of a feeling that is. It took time and energy to get it to this point, but it's absolutely incredible.
Unique Ability on the personal side
Unique Ability has impacted more than just my work life though. It has also impacted my personal life. By understanding these aspects about myself as a creator, I've gone down the route of building up my career as an artist.
While I always knew that I loved the arts, it wasn't until I really dove into Unique Ability that I realized that this was where I felt most alive. For me, creating music, art, and anything creative is where I feel the most alive.
Exploring this hobby has led to a whole new level of personal fulfillment and happiness that I never felt before.
Step one was understanding my Unique Ability
While my week, at this moment, is exactly what I love, I wouldn't be here today if I hadn't took the time to learn and understand these details about myself two years ago.
It may seem like a fluffy process, but the insight it gives you on yourself is extremely valuable.
Who knows how things would have turned out without it. Sure, I probably still would have done things decently. But, no doubt, I would have had more hardships over the years without this self-awareness.
So if you are interested, check out UniqueAbility.com. Seriously. This is not an affiliate link. I just freaking loved this process so much that I felt compelled to write and share this article.