I Know What I Bring. I Just Cannot Say it Without Sounding Like Everyone Else.
Last week I wrote about the gap between hitting your number and being read as the leader. This week, the first place that gap forms, and the sentence I hear more than almost any other, nearly word for word.
“I know what I bring. I just cannot say it without sounding like everyone else.”
If you have ever sat down to write your headline, or answer “walk me through your background,” or make your case in a calibration, and watched your own description come out sounding like every other strong person in your function, this one is for you.
The bake-off you won, and could not describe
You win the technical evaluation. The customer picks your solution, your demo, the way you handled the hard objection in the room. You did something specific in there that the other vendor’s SE did not. And if I asked you, the week after, to name that specific thing in a sentence, you would probably reach for the same words every SE reaches for. Consultative. Customer-obsessed. Technical but business-minded. Trusted advisor.
Those words are true. They are also what everyone says. Which means they describe the category, not you.
Why you cannot see your own edge
Here is the part that makes this hard to fix alone. The thing that actually distinguishes you is usually the thing that comes easiest to you. You do it without effort, so you do not register it as valuable. You assume everyone can do it, because for you it barely counts as work. The judgment call you made in that eval that the other SE would not have made, the read on the room, the instinct for which technical detail to drop and which to chase. That is the edge, and it is invisible to you precisely because it is effortless.
So when you go to describe yourself, you skip past the real distinction, too obvious, too easy, surely everyone does this, and reach for the impressive category words instead. You end up sounding like everyone else, while the actual thing that sets you apart goes unnamed.
This is how the ceiling gets reinforced in your own voice
Remember the category problem from last week, the way the organization files you under your function and that filing becomes a ceiling. This is how the filing gets reinforced from your side. When your own description of yourself is category language, you are handing the people who read you the exact words that keep you in the box. You confirm the ceiling in your own voice.
The first version is never the sharp one
One more thing worth knowing. The first version of your edge is never the sharp one. People sit down once, write something that sounds reasonable, decide it is good enough, and stop. The sharp version lives one layer past the obvious answer, the one that sounds like everyone, in the specific one underneath it. Getting there is real work, and it is the work most people skip.
Where this sits in the series
This is the second piece on the gap between what you do and how you are read. Last week, the two systems. This week, the first place the gap forms: you cannot break out of the category if your own language keeps putting you back in it.
One question worth asking this week. What is the thing you do at work that you assume everyone can do, that your peers actually cannot? That is usually where your edge is hiding.
The Read is the free sequence on the gap between what you do and how you are seen.
Onward,
Laurie
