What’s your super power?
I recently attended a thought leadership webinar where they talked about finding your ‘essence’ as a way of creating content that people want. I wrote it down and then felt a bit stuck. What is ‘that’ if I had to write it down? How is my essence different to yours? What is essence anyway? It resonates with the ‘uncodable’ aspect of AI teaching that I wrote about recently when I wondered if we could write a personal algorithm. (See my previous blog on AI in teaching). So I dug deep and this is what I came up with.
Your ‘essence’ or ‘me-code’ can be hard to unpack and elusive to nail down even though it might be in plain sight. Our primary audience doesn’t always have the words to describe ‘the thing that is wonderful about learning with you’ even if they feel it or experience it. This year my ‘me-code’ seems to be distilling itself to a more essential formula. So maybe a challenge is to start asking people who work with you or learn with you, what is it about this experience that makes it fizz? What’s the uncodable element here? Why do you want more? You could keep a reflection log too and see what common elements pop up when reviewing your metrics of success. What made it successful? What made it memorable? What made it original? What made it shareable?
It’s no secret that I like reading and thrive on geeky texts. Theory is my brain food. Philosophy is my first love. (Discovered in Germany when I was an exchange student and had to take a compulsory philosophy class in German – why isn’t philosophy compulsory for everyone?). So, when a teacher recently said to me as a form of rounding off our work together, ‘I love how you make the theory practical. You take it out of theory-land and make it tangible and actionable. It’s geeky but fun.’ I felt something pop inside. Like a mini ‘squee’ or eureka moment. I think she revealed the me-code to me in the shortest possible form. “Geeky but fun”. There it is. Two words that start to capture my essence. My essence is that I love transforming boring (theory) into fun stuff. Writing or teaching, speaking or drawing – I just don’t believe in boring.
What about you? If you are always reading, listening, experiencing, playing, writing, thinking and tinkering (just living!) How do you bring it all together in your head? The me-code could be like a special combination of ingredients, herbs and spices that only you have the recipe for. It’s your own special sauce sourced from your essence, experience and expertise. You are the special sauce source sorceror! Ha!
There are three established ‘e’ words to look at when defining your original lens on the world. Essence, experience and expertise. I want to make the ‘squeee’ of meaningful me-code though. I’m going to add to the three E’s because ‘squee’ is the excited noise I make in my head when I see something click. It has an extra e because it has to have the essence. Plus a longer squeee is surely more exciting? And it is a bit of fun too.
SQUEEE! The acronym:
S – Specialist (known for it)
Q – Quest (aligns with purpose)
U – Unique to you/Unlike others (original)
E – Expertise (good at it)
E – Based on experience (has clout)
E – Essence – (harnesses your ‘special sauce source’)
There are some crossovers in this but I like that they are there. Unique and essence could be paired together for example just like specialist and expertise might cross over in some ways. Yet I think each word still holds its own place to prompt a slightly different way of thinking.
So what’s your superpower now?
Writing helps me to figure things out. This blog post may not yet be a complete thought but it has ignited some excitement in response to ‘what is your essence’ and ‘how can you make content people want to experience or read’ for now. I’d love to know what you think. Leave a comment below and let me know.
Squeee!
the teaching tree 