Recently, someone in my fractional community asked how they could differentiate themselves from hundreds of others selling similar services. There were many great suggestions about how to package services uniquely based on specific tangible deliverables, but I’m not sure those answers addressed the question appropriately. If you are competing as a commodity with similarly defined deliverables, you either differentiate on brand, price, and/or service experience. It’s important to know what you functionally deliver based on your expertise, but just as important is how you uniquely deliver it. This should go without saying, but having a clear understanding of yourself is required before you can understand your unique differentiators.

One of the tools I have found very helpful in this process is Human Design. Human Design is a modality that combines Astrology, the iChing, Chakras, and the Kabbalah as a tool for self-discovery. Human Design isn’t that hard to start using. All you need to know is the date, time, and location of your birth and it delivers a blueprint or map of how you naturally operate. This blog post is not meant to explain how any of this works. That’s for another blog post. But what you find out shouldn’t be a glaring surprise. If you are in touch with yourself, you’ll certainly recognize yourself in the blueprint. But often we are redirected from our authentic self by thinking we need to be more like “xyz”. It’s this redirection that keeps us from discovering and delivering upon the promise of our uniqueness.

Take me, for instance. My strengths lie in my heretical nature to question the status quo, to continually build foundational knowledge, and to adapt this knowledge to new situations to deliver something practical. I’m a person who builds a solid program and hands it off for other people to scale. This has been my path whether I intended it to be or not… It’s how I’m naturally built. I thrive on learning and building new systems.

I’ve learned that I function best as something of an outsider in many business settings. It took a while to learn, but in truth, I have never fit into a bureaucratic environment. I bristle at conformity and detest office politics. This is why I was attracted to the start-up ecosystem and work best as a consultant. I am happiest when recognized to contribute my unique perspective and thrive in places where individuality is encouraged. Yet, I have continually squashed parts of myself in an attempt to fit into some generic version of what other people define as success. If I had not discovered this about myself, I might still be trying to miserably fit into some generic box, parroting the same phrases everyone else seems intent on parroting and attracting the wrong clients in the process.

So many people try to sell you this idea that you need to conform to somebody else’s formula to be successful. I say, why follow other people’s formulas? How do you define success? Is it simply an artificial numbers game you are after? Do you wish to be yet another cog in the wheel hiding behind some bro slogan, advertising snake oil? I for one couldn’t keep trying to convince myself to play that game. As an individual who favors honesty, I had to find another way even if that meant being considered less successful in the eyes of the consensus.

I am personally energized when I’m invited to critique a process that leads to a transformative breakthrough. My heart sings with joy every time a client recognizes the foundational programs I’ve built that sets them up for success. I am especially grateful for those who share with me — sometimes long after — how a few words of advice from me changed their life trajectory for the better. Because these tools have helped me so much, I’m now integrating them into the services that I offer. By helping my clients and their team members identify their core strengths and how to more effectively communicate with other team members, the foundations I leave behind are that much stronger.