At a recent college job fair one of the career counselors was talking about how to differentiate in this crowded and highly selective market. She exhorted, among many things, that each graduate must find what is unique about them and to put that on their résumé. To find this out, she urged her audience to ask their family members, neighbors, and professors to tell them what made them unique and to put that response on their résumés.
I have a different approach!
What makes you unique should be something so central to your value proposition that you MUST know what that is. This concept does not just apply to fresh graduates, but to everyone who is managing their career or life, in this job market or not! If you do not know (and this is the norm) what your uniqueness is, then you must discover what that is, own it, and learn how to verbalize it in a compelling way on your résumé with supreme confidence. So, how do you find out your unique gifts and how do you build a credible value proposition that is the centerpiece of your résumé?
Our uniqueness stems from our innate gifts that allow us to do things in ways that clearly differentiate us from others. I call those gifts our genius. The dictionary definition of genius is, the tutelary or attendant spirit in classical pagan belief allotted to every person at birth, or to a place, institution, etc. that gives it special powers and protection. So, there is both, good genius (A Picasso) and evil genius (A Charles Manson) as either of the two mutually opposed spirits or angels supposed to attend each person. Hence, genius is a person or thing that powerfully influences another with the power of this spirit. Talent, on the other hand, is something that evolves from applying efforts to grow in a particular way (musical talent, artistic talent, etc.).
In this blog we are going to explore how to discover your genius and how to verbalize it in your message to differentiate yourself in a crowded market. I call it your verbal brand. Since your genius is a tutelary spirit that is always present to protect you, it allows you to create outcomes that have an immediate Aha! to it. It is this Aha! that gives us the window to discover our own genius.
So, how do we uncover our genius, given this genius and its Aha! connection?
One way is to reflect back in your various past efforts that have resulted in outcomes that created those Aha!s. You do not need to ask others what they were, but you know within yourself that when you worked on something and created an outcome that there was that inescapable Aha! Once you are able to see these episodes clearly, then you can classify them in different categories and find a way to verbalize them. This is how you verbalize your genius. Your genius is thus a cluster of a few unique skills that are crisply verbalized to appeal to the reader.
When these unique skills are showcased on your résumé, they must be packaged to align with your intended job pursuits. So, having a way to artfully verbalize these unique skills, torqued in the direction of the job’s needs is the important first step in building a strongly branded résumé. The reader of your résumé can now relate to how you create value in the context that they are looking for, because now it becomes manifestly obvious to this reader. All of this can sound simple, but it is not easy!
Why?
We live with our genius every day. So, to step back and to look at how we create those Aha!s in our everyday pursuits is something that needs special effort to objectify it in ways that becomes easily owned and communicated. One way is to write stories of our accomplishments in a detailed format. In one of my previous blogs I talked about your leadership narrative (So, What is Your Leadership Narrative, blog of July 18). We must learn how to narrate our story of a leadership success. Once that story is verbalized it is much easier to extract your genius from that story so that you can own it. This is the hard part of the entire process. Because we live with our genius every day it is hard for us to see it. It is these stories or leadership narratives that allow us to peek into that window to give us the insights we need about verbalizing our genius.
Most spend a few hours crafting their résumé to look pretty and to capture their stints, sometimes even their accomplishments. Many often seek the help of a professional résumé writer to make their résumé more presentable. No amount of money you can pay to such a writer will get you that insight about your own genius unless you do your own story telling and go through this trouble to extracting your genius as we discussed here. Writing a genius-based résumé is much harder and takes much longer. But, once this process is conquered your verbal branding will be much stronger and highly differentiated. Once you own this outcome you do not have to rely on others, including your mother, to tell you what your genius is!
Good luck!
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