What Makes You Unique
what is it
that makes you unique
it’s a pretty fundamental question and
it impacts not only career growth
finding a soulmate but also
how we set ourselves up in our head
what is it that makes you unique
now ancient japanese pottery sheep in
human clothing and luke skywalker
himself all hold a series of clues as to
what we can do
to separate ourselves from the pack and
stand out
from the crowd now i’ve spent the last
25 years of my life looking at this very
question from a story perspective
working as a screenwriter in hollywood
for the likes of walt disney
and lionsgate helping to create unique
characters that jump
off the page and can entertain people
all around the world
but also in my work as i coach
entrepreneurs and those in the
entertainment industries
to build an authentic personal brand and
that’s the key right
authentic so they can attract more
opportunities to shine
doing what they do best and a number of
surprising things have come up that i’m
excited to share with you today
and i hope that you can take these and
you can use them to elevate your
own authentic personal brand now i know
some of you might say oh the idea of a
personal brand is absolutely horrible
and i get it but what i’m talking about
is yes a little bit about how you
present yourself to the outside world
but perhaps more importantly how you
present yourself
to yourself how you
deal with that inner chatter in your
head that says
who am i what am i capable of
am i worthy now before we dive into this
we have something we need to acknowledge
okay and that is
how absolutely dreadfully you were set
up to be unique
in the first place absolutely dreadfully
and this starts from the moment you were
born
right now babies
they’re cute i’ll give you that but they
are absolutely
bloody useless they’re absolutely bloody
useless
especially when you put them aside a
baby sea turtle
so a baby sea turtle are you ready for
this it’s in its egg
and it begins to crack
and it burrows its way up the sand to
the very surface
and it looks out
and then it comes back down again and it
waits until
nightfall and nightfall comes
and it pops back up it takes a quick
look and then it scurries down the beach
and out
into the ocean to live the rest of its
life all within two days
pretty amazing right but then there’s
also
the baby giraffe so the baby giraffe is
born
and after 20 to 25 minutes it’s up on
those gangly legs
and it’s able to get to the center of
the herd
in order to protect itself if there’s a
predator
it’s able to find its mother it’s able
to find food and sustenance
when it needs it all again within 25
minutes amazing especially when you
compare it to the human baby
it took you two months to just have
enough strength
to hold your own head up without the
help of someone else
absolutely bloody useless so from a very
early
early young age you’re conditioned
to adapt to the needs of the people
around you
so you can survive you learn to laugh
you learn to cry you learn to smile
all in order to elicit that reaction so
that you can
survive and this carries on right this
carries on through our childhood and we
go to school
and what happens at school we start to
form these groups
and we start wearing the same clothes
and listen to the same music
and then someone new comes in and we eye
them suspiciously hmm
do you like harry styles oh i love harry
styles
really do you really love harry styles
oh i really really love harry styles
excellent you can be in our group
because we’re the same
and this is where movies start with our
hero
our protagonist basically
going along with society nothing special
just carrying along conforming
to our protagonist’s surroundings
let’s take luke skywalker so luke
skywalker is working on the family farm
with aunt and uncle and he’s moaning and
he’s
whining my goodness he’s the biggest
monar and whiner of them all isn’t he
but that’s what makes him so good
because now he has this beautiful ark to
go on
but he’s moaning and he’s whining and
he’s talking about these big dreams that
he has
but he’s not taking any action
now does that perhaps ring a bell for
you a little bit or someone you know
big dreams but not taking any action
right i know it has done for me
and this continues on right this
continues on in our life now there was a
study done
at the university of leeds called the
sheep in human clothing you were
wondering how i was going to get sheep
and human clothing into this here we go
so sheep in human clothing what they did
was they took a hundred people
to walk randomly around a gymnasium
but unbeknownst to 90 of them 10 of them
were told beforehand a specific way to
walk around the auditorium
right they were given a plan they were
given a purpose
now they weren’t all going to start in
the same place but they were going to
have a pattern that these 10 people were
going to walk
so off they sent 100 people to walk
around the gymnasium
and what happens well very quickly
and time and time again the 90 that were
walking randomly begin to self-organize
they begin to form snake-like structures
around the ten
that were walking with purpose now again
they hadn’t said anything
but they knew where they were walking as
human beings from a young age
we are conditioned to follow
because it’s part of our survival right
we’re conditioned
to carry on and slide into others
and marketeers have known this for years
and years and years which is why we have
all these influencers and spokespeople
for every brand known to man
right but
here’s the thing they weren’t always
like that
they weren’t always leaders and i’m not
talking about the instagram influencer
who takes fantastic selfies on the beach
in their bikini
i could never look like that in a bikini
but what we’re really talking about is
the people
who stand up and have something to say
who are willing to step up to the plate
be unique and let their voice be heard
these are the influences
and these people something has happened
something has happened that has enabled
them to transform
from an ordinary person to an
extraordinary person
right for luke skywalker
this was the moment where his aunt and
uncle got killed after he found a little
hidden message
in a droid and if you look at any of
your favorite movies there’s always a
moment like this
where the protagonist moves from the
cage
of conformity to owning their unique
destiny
but how do we do that in our own lives
how do we step forth so that we can get
that recognition that we deserve
as being unique and valuable so we can
get that job so we can get that
promotion
right how do we
step forth in our own mind so that
instead of playing a bit part in
everyone else’s life
we can become the hero in our own story
well the japanese art of kinsuji is a
fantastic
metaphor so the philosophy of konsuji
is they treat breakage and repair as the
history of an object that needs to be
celebrated because that object is unique
so here’s how it works
there’s a factory right and it’s
producing all these bowls
and all these bowls they’re beautiful
they’re fantastic
they’re perfect and they all look the
same we go and buy one of these bowls
and we’re very proud of it look at my
bowl isn’t this bowl great
oh yeah and then one day we have it on
the kitchen counter
and we accidentally knock this bowl off
and what happens
it breaks on the ground now what will we
do in our western consumer-led culture
we’d chuck it right we get rid of it
because it’s broken
it’s imperfect it’s not as it was meant
to be when it was created
but the japanese art of kinsuji will go
down
and they will pick up those broken
pieces
and they will put them back together
with gold leaf
making that bowl whole again only this
time
it has gold cracks running all the way
through it
my goodness these are beautiful pieces
and they take that bowl and they put it
on the center of the shelf
for everyone to see
because no two bowls break a like
just the same as we do not break a like
just the same as any movie hero
character
has its own story and own path where
they’ve broken to become
the hero for me
one of my breaks was three months ago
when i was rushed into hospital and i
had an emergency surgery to move
remove my my large intestine
and install take my small intestine and
pull it through my stomach so that now i
i
poop into a bag on my stomach
now we’ve all had cracks in our life
we’ve all had breakages we’ve all had
those moments where we’ve sat there and
said
why is this happening to me
that the world has let me down or
in some cases i’ve let the world down
and i know in that hospital bed
i felt both of those right i’d let the
world down i’d let my family down and
the world had let me down
it was unfair
but if we look at the japanese art of
kinsuji what they say
is that these breaks
rather than hiding them
we need to fill them with gold right
we need to fill them with gold for
everyone to see because it is in those
moments that we become
absolutely unique and here’s the thing
counter to popular belief and and where
we think
we should be unique which is perhaps the
school that we went to
the job title we have the clients that
we’ve won
and all these other wonderful things
well the truth is someone else can
always beat you at that
but they can’t beat you on your own
story
and the cracks in your story that have
enabled you
to become the hero
so we’re in this situation where if
these cracks
in our life need to be filled with gold
and we need to embrace them because
amazingly enough these cracks have
taught us what it means to be human and
how to connect with other people
because of our conditioning as a child
we’re scared to death of letting people
see it because we want to be the perfect
bowl
we want to be the person who can do
everything who’s the hero
but we forget that the hero has all the
cracks
and so there are these moments in our
life where we can step
forth into the light into the spotlight
and have that opportunity to be seen as
completely and utterly unique
but for many of us we step back and we
step back for fear of
people seeing the cracks and believing
us as weak and that fear that fear is
our shadow
and what happens when you step into the
light to your shadow
right what happens when you step into
the light
your shadow becomes more pronounced so
the more that we are given these
opportunities to step into the light
the more there is an opportunity for
people to see our shadow
that where we hold guilt remorse
where we feel as if we’re broken but we
try to hide it
well my challenge to you is that if you
really want to be unique if you really
want to stand into your greatness
instead of being scared about the shadow
we need to embrace it and we need to
fill it with gold so that everyone can
see it
because that is what makes us human and
he’s going to enable us to really shine
connecting with others that’s the thing
so what i what i really implore you to
do
if you want to look at what makes you
unique
is no longer be afraid of the shadow to
embrace the shadow to hold it up high
because when you do that
when you hold the cracks in your life up
you’ll be in a position where you can
mitigate any self-doubt
and you can truly step up to the plate
being wonderfully
beautifully and uniquely
you now there’s so much going on in the
news at the moment
about how we need much so much more
truth and so much more
honesty which is great
but truth and honesty it starts with you
remember the hero has cracks embrace
the cracks so ask you again
what makes you unique
thank you very much thank you