GNT #169: Your unique knowing

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read time: 4 minutes

A couple of years ago, I was on a coaching call with a client who'd been working with me for about three months.

We were halfway through a session and she stopped mid-sentence. "Colleen, hang on. What are you doing right now? Like, what's actually happening in this conversation? I keep having these breakthroughs and I want to understand the mechanism."

I didn't have a good answer. So I gave her some non-answer about questions and listening. We moved on, but I made a mental note.

The question kept circling back in my mind over the next few weeks. Not because I didn't know what I was doing. Because I'd been doing it for years and had never actually had to write it down.

So what did I do? I tried to write it down.

When I finally sat down one afternoon to try, two things happened at the same time:

1) I realized I knew way more than I thought I did.

2) Every sentence I tried to write felt obvious. Too obvious to put on a page. Too obvious to say out loud.

That afternoon was when something really shifted in how I understood my own work.

Last week, I asked you to start collecting observations: the moves you make on autopilot, the problems people hand you because you're the person for that kind of thing, the work that gives you energy back. If you've been paying attention, you've got a pile by now.

The pattern in the pile is what you do. But underneath it is something else. Something you can actually see, name, and stop underselling. And most people with expertise go their whole careers without naming it.

Let's dig in. 
 

The pattern is the what. The knowing is the why.

Last week we talked about your Raw Signal. The pattern of excellence that keeps showing up in your work. The move you make on autopilot, year after year, across different rooms.

Your Raw Signal is observable. It's what someone sitting in the room with you would see.

Your Unique Knowing is something different. Your Unique Knowing is what you'd say if someone stopped you mid-move and asked you to explain why it works.

It's the specific expertise and perspective that only you carry. Not a skill set. Skill sets are interchangeable. A body of earned understanding about a specific thing, built one project, one client conversation, one decision, one course-correction at a time, that you arrived at because of the exact path you walked.

Raw Signal is what you do. Unique Knowing is what you've figured out.

My Raw Signal is the questioning. The thread-pulling I told you about last week. My Unique Knowing is the why underneath: I can hear the difference between a founder talking about the business they actually want to build and the business they think they're supposed to build.

Most founders are quietly contorting themselves to fit into a box someone else drew. The revenue target inherited from their industry. The growth shape borrowed from someone they admired. The version of themselves they're trying to grow into instead of the one already there. The questions go after the gap between the two, because once a founder gets honest about it, profit and lived experience stop competing. They start pointing in the same direction. This took me years to figure out. And the first time I wrote it down it felt obvious.

Why most of us never name the why

You don't name your Unique Knowing because you've never had to.

The pattern runs on its own. Your work keeps moving, or clients keep coming, and the calendar fills up. Nothing in your daily work forces you to stop and put words to what you're actually doing.

So the why stays in your head. Available to you in the moment but invisible to everyone else, including future you when you sit down to update your LinkedIn profile, write a sales page, or describe what you do at a dinner party.

And here's the part that traps almost everyone I work with. The first time you do try to write it down, every sentence feels obvious. Boring. Not worth saying. Something everyone in your field already knows.

That feeling lies every time.

What feels obvious to you is obvious because you spent years figuring it out. The clarity you have at minute one of a conversation took you years and a long road to earn. The fact that it costs you nothing to access doesn't mean it's worth nothing. It means you're efficient at something most people aren't efficient at.

The "too obvious" feeling is the signal you're getting close. Not a reason to stop.

That's how most people with expertise end up underselling the specific thing only they can do. Not because they don't have it. Because it never felt obvious enough to mention.

When you finally do name it, things start to move. Work you'd been circling takes a clearer shape. Possibilities you hadn't seen come into focus. I'm building something right now that wouldn't exist if I hadn't sat down that afternoon and put my Unique Knowing on a page.
 

The teaching test

Here's the prompt for this week.

Take the move you wrote down most often last week. The thing you do on autopilot.

Now imagine someone hands you a junior person on your team. Smart, willing, but new to the work. You have one paragraph to explain to them how you decide to make that move, and why you trust it works. What you're watching for. What you're weighing. What you're choosing between.

Write the paragraph (or talk it out with your favorite AI friend). Give it a shot and see what comes out.

It will be harder than you expect. That's the point. The hardness is the body of understanding leaving your head and getting onto the page.

When you finish, you'll have a rough draft of a piece of your Unique Knowing.

Takeaway

Your Raw Signal is what you do.

Your Unique Knowing is what you'd write down if someone made you teach it.

Most experts go a whole career without naming theirs. The strongest ones do, and they build their work around the answer.

Naming your Knowing is one thing. Where you point it once it's named, what problem you decide it's actually built for, is another. More on that soon.

I'm always rooting for you. See you next week.

-Colleen

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