The Job Gave You a Place to Express It. It Didn't Create It.
When I ask people what makes them unique, they usually begin with the uniqueness of what they have done or experienced.
They tell me about the industries they have worked in, the countries they have lived in, the challenges they have overcome, or the unusual combination of roles they have held.
These are great things to take stock of, because our experiences are uniquely ours, and they shape the way we see and move through the world.
But there is more to your uniqueness than the events of your life.
Beneath what you have accomplished, lies the particular way you perceive, respond, connect, solve, create, lead, and affect the people around you. This shows up in what you instinctively notice, what you care about enough to protect, and the qualities that emerge when you are not trying to prove, please, perform, or adapt.
This is harder to capture in a résumé. It is even harder to access through thought alone.
A strength finder assessment might tell you that you are strategic, intuitive, empathetic, or resilient. But those words stay abstract unless you can connect them to your lived experience of those qualities. Its the difference between knowing you possess a quality and feeling yourself in contact with it. That is what I mean when I refer to accessing the felt sense of your uniqueness.
By the time someone reaches a major career transition, they may feel as though they have lost access to the qualities that once made them effective. Confidence may feel out of reach. Decisions that once felt manageable become heavy. It can seem as if something essential has disappeared.
But our resources do not necessarily leave us. We leave them.
We leave ourselves when the mind travels too far into the future, anticipating everything that might go wrong. We leave ourselves when we become absorbed in the past, replaying conversations and decisions. We leave ourselves when anxiety or the need to prove something takes over, and we focus on managing everyone else's experience while becoming disconnected from our own.
If confidence is missing, we may believe we have to build it from nothing. But when we understand that our resources are always present, the work becomes returning to the felt sense of our talents rather than reconstructing them.
Over time, we accumulate layers of ideas about who we should be. Some come from our family or our culture. Others emerge from environments where belonging or safety depended on adapting to what was required. Yet while adapting may have been an intelligent response to a real conditions, it can becomes costly when it blurs the line between what is actually an innate response and what we learned to perform.
A felt sense is the physical, internal experience of something that has not yet been fully put into words. You may recognize it as a tightening, a warmth, an opening, or a stillness somewhere in the body, a sensation that carries meaning before you can explain exactly what it means.
In classic therapeutic practices, the felt-sense (or somatic) work is often used to explore and release discomfort. But the body does not only carry fear or self-protection. It also carries the lived experience of capability and conviction. In my coaching practice I invite clients to remember a specific moment when they were doing something they knew how to do exceptionally well. Not necessarily the biggest achievement. Often the moment seems small from the outside, leading someone through uncertainty, helping a person feel understood, communicating an idea clearly. What matters is that it carries a sense of natural capability.
Then we slow it down and turn toward the body rather than the story. What changes physically as you remember it? Do you sit differently? Is there warmth, or a sense of solidity? You are not chasing an impressive insight here. You are trying to feel, again, a resource that never actually left.
Once that sensation is present, something shifts in how identity can be explored, not by analyzing who someone is from the outside, but by listening from within the experience itself. A person may initially say, "I am good at managing people." That is a capability. But when we slow down, something more particular often emerges. Perhaps they create steadiness in rooms where others would become defensive. Perhaps they recognize potential in people before those people see it in themselves. Their uniqueness isn't just that they manage well, it's the particular quality of their presence, and the effect that presence has on everyone around them.
This is where many people arrive at the same realization: I did not know this was rare.
What comes naturally to us is often the hardest thing to recognize as distinctive, because we don't feel the effort someone else might need to produce the same result. We assume it is ordinary. "That is just how I think" or "I was just doing my job". But what feels obvious to you may be the very thing others experience as rare and valuable.
I think of a client who described herself, as a “supportive” manager. She had strong relationships with her teams throughout different companies and roles. People trusted her. But she considered this secondary to the more measurable parts of her work.
When we explored a moment where she felt especially connected to her leadership style, she remembered a period of uncertainty in her organization. She couldn't take the uncertainty away from her team. What she could do was change the experience of being inside it. As she returned to the memory, she noticed the steadiness in her own body, her calm slow breath, and a sense of being grounded and attentive. She remembered how carefully she listened, and how she made space for people to speak honestly without letting fear take over the room.
Because people felt less guarded around her, they thought more openly and did stronger work. Until we slowed down enough to examine it, she had thought of this simply as being supportive. The deeper pattern was more significant: her presence changed the emotional conditions the whole team operated inside of. She hadn't just made people feel better. She had kept their intelligence and initiative accessible during a period when both are usually the first things people lose.
The role she'd held when this happened has since ended. That quality in her did not end with it.
If you want to try this yourself, think of one moment, small or large, when you were doing something that felt natural to you. Not your biggest achievement. Just a moment you felt capable and fully yourself. Notice what you were doing, and pay attention to the details of the movie you make of this. Then notice what happens in your body as you remember it, your breathing, your posture, whatever shifts.
What feels ordinary to you may be one of the most distinctive things about you.
The job gave you a place to express it. It did not create it.
If any of this sounds like where you are right now, the pattern assessment is a short, free way to see what you might be carrying forward without realizing it.
And to Continue the reflection
Recognizing what remains is the beginning. Read You Can’t Pivot in Private on why a new professional identity gains traction through conversation and connection.