Everything I see tells me people want one thing right now. A new job, immediately.
That’s what I hear at community events, I read countless posts and comments on my LinkedIn feed, and I see the same themes on Reddit. AI is coming for our jobs, and there are too many qualified people competing for whatever is left.
So that’s what I brace for when someone books time with me.
Then the conversation starts, and we end up somewhere else.
The first stretch goes where you’d expect, because that’s the version people have rehearsed. What surfaces next is usually focused on the direction of their career: what they want to be doing or what’s going to carry them through the next 20 or 30 years of working, which is a long stretch to spend on something that stopped meaning anything a while back.
The urgency is real, and it’s also sitting on top of a much deeper question.
The differentiator question
I was working through a career story with a client recently.
She has strong skills and experience in her field, but in this landscape and at her level, on paper she’s one of many.
We explored how she could bring her interests and other elements of her personality into her job search. She’s danced for years. And what she pointed to wasn’t the movement.
Learning from your passion
In dance, you are corrected constantly—posture, timing, positioning. It’s relentless, it’s specific, and none of it is personal. She shared how that experience made her open to receiving feedback, and she views that as part of the creation and learning process.
She can take feedback without flinching, act on it, and go back and ask for more.
What hiring manager wouldn’t love to hear that? She trained this skill in a studio, on her own time, at her own expense, and it isn’t something that you would glean from her resume.
The part I didn’t see coming
That conversation sent me back through my own history.
Dance has been a through line in my life since I was young. Not nearly at the same level. I took ballet/tap classes and performed in talent shows that my mom choreographed. It’s something that I enjoy, but it isn’t my strongest skill.
For several months, I’ve been taking classes where every two weeks we learn a choreographed dance. It took my client’s answer for me to realize the benefit that I’ve been receiving.
It’s the only place in my week where I’m consistently bad at something, AND I continue showing up.
I am not good at learning choreography. My memory for sequences is average on a good day, and there’s a particular feeling that comes with walking into a room knowing I’ll be a step behind or off-beat. It’s uncomfortable, but not defeating.
I pick up changes faster. When I make a mistake, I adjust instead of stopping. I respond to correction in real time without losing the thread.
Read that list back in a work context, and it’s a performance review.
Where your differentiator hides & how to use it
There’s a forum post I keep coming back to: “Does anyone else not have a ‘thing’?”
The premise is that everyone else was issued one organizing passion and you got skipped. In my experience, most people have several and count none of them because what they do on their own time doesn’t look like career material to them.
The passion/interests circle in The Power Position is tricky because it shifts and evolves. Some will be lifelong (e.g., cooking, travel), while others are meant for a phase (e.g., skateboarding, sticker collections).
Pick the thing you love doing or that you keep returning to.
Then ask: What has it trained you to do?
Something you could say to a hiring manager in one sentence and have them recognize it immediately (e.g., recovering from a visible mistake mid-performance without stopping).
You have at least one, developed over years, and filed under your hobbies.
What are you doing outside your job that’s uniquely making you better at it? And how can you put that to work in your search?