Why do my strengths sound like everyone else’s?
“I am strategic.”
“I am collaborative.”
“I am a good problem solver.”
If I had a nickel for every time a career coaching client or an interviewee echoed those… whew I’d have a lot of nickels!
Those things might all be true. But if someone else in your profession could say the same three things, what have you actually helped another person understand about how you work?
This is something I talk about when helping people turn their career into a craft. Your craft includes the way you approach the work, the problems you gravitate toward, and the parts of yourself that shape your thinking.
A list of strengths can leave all of that out.
The way to make it more specific is to explain what those strengths look like when you use them.
What kinds of problems do I help solve?
Start with a recent situation at work or maybe a type of situation you find yourself in often.
When do people turn to you? What problems interest you? Where do you tend to notice something that helps other people move forward?
“Problem solving” could mean making sense of conflicting customer feedback. It could mean finding why a process keeps breaking. It could mean helping two teams understand why they cannot agree on a direction.
Those are all very different kinds of work.
For me, I enjoy situations with a lot of ambiguity and complexity. Part of my approach is looking at the system around a problem and the human behavior within it. When two teams cannot move forward, I want to understand what each is trying to accomplish and where the tension is coming from.
That tells you more about my approach than “I am collaborative.”
Start with one kind of problem you understand well and enjoy working through.
How do I explain my particular approach?
Once you have named the problem, describe how you work through it and why.
What do you look for first? What questions do you ask? What experience, interest, or personal value influences your decisions?
For an illustrative before-and-after, compare these descriptions:
“I am a collaborative problem solver.”
“I help teams move stalled projects forward by uncovering where they are working toward different goals and helping them agree on the next step.”
The second gives you something to picture. You can imagine the situation, the approach, and when that person might be helpful.
Then add a real example from your own work. What was happening? What did you do? What changed afterward?
You do need to be able to explain how the example supports what you are saying about your work.
Do the conditions I work in belong in the description?
Absolutely, when they help explain where you do your best work.
You might enjoy solving an ambiguous problem with room to investigate independently. Someone else might thrive when the goal is already clear and they can coordinate a large group through a structured process.
Both can be strengths that show up in different conditions.
In my own work, autonomy matters. I like having the room to investigate a problem, while keeping people informed and knowing when I need support or a decision from someone else.
That is part of understanding my craft too. It tells me something about the environment where I can do the work well and enjoy doing it. And it’s the type of environments I will seek out in the future.
Being specific helps you describe the conditions where your approach is particularly useful.
Do I actually want more of this work?
This is the part I would be careful not to skip.
What people rely on you for is not always what you want at the center of your career.
You can be highly skilled at something and absolutely hate doing it. If that becomes the main thing you emphasize, you may keep attracting more of the very work you want to move away from.
So look at the strength you are describing and ask whether it points toward work you want more of.
You can acknowledge a capability without making it the defining feature of your craft.
How can I write a clearer description today?
Pick one strength label you currently use and write short answers to these questions:
- What specific problem do I help with?
- How do I approach it, and why?
- What conditions help me do this well?
- What example shows that approach in practice?
- Do I want more of this work?
Use those answers to write two or three simple sentences. Keep the example nearby so you can expand on the description when someone asks.
Then let it sit and come back to it. If it still sounds like almost anyone in your profession, look for a more specific choice, observation, or reason you can include.
You are giving someone a clearer understanding of how you work, while giving yourself a clearer direction for the craft you want to keep developing.
