Why your best strength feels invisible.
Here’s something I’ve often noticed about successful business owners:
Ask them what makes them different, and watch what happens. They pause. Look uncomfortable. Then say: “I’m not sure I’m different. I just do good work.”
The irony? #
The better you are at what you do, the harder it becomes to see what makes you special.
There’s a psychological phenomenon called the “curse of knowledge.” Once we know something deeply, we assume everyone works the way we work, sees what we see, understands what we understand.
So, we dismiss our own expertise because it doesn’t feel special to us.
For years, I approached business development with relationship-building at the centre. To me, this felt obvious: how else would you do it? I didn’t realise this was genuinely unusual until clients kept telling me they’d never experienced anything like it.
I dismissed their feedback. It took far too many years to understand that what felt natural and obvious to me was my differentiation.
The truth is: your clients don’t have your perspective. #
The solution that feels obvious to you is revelatory to someone else. Your competitors don’t approach problems the way you do. The approach that feels like common sense is your competitive advantage. You just can’t see it from the inside.
This isn’t arrogance. It’s genuine expertise. You’ve spent years mastering your craft. That investment has made certain things invisible to you, not because they’re worthless, but because they’ve become so natural you’ve stopped seeing them.
Your job isn’t to create a new strength or develop some dramatic new capability.
Your job is to trust what feels obvious to you. To recognise that the way you naturally work; the approach that feels unremarkable from your perspective, might be exactly what makes you irreplaceable to the right clients.
The gift is already there. You’ve just been looking right past it.
Thank you for reading.
Author: Richard Bull-Domican, founder of New Era Financial Introductions, a B2B lead generation consultancy with over twenty years of experience. The perspectives shared here come from two decades in the field; not theory, but practice.
I create small, digestible guides on Gumroad for business owners who hate aggressive tactics and prefer relationship-led approaches. New resources are added regularly. For longer reads on lead generation and the human side of sales, follow me on Medium and join the daily conversation on LinkedIn.
Gumroad: https://richardbulldomican.gumroad.com/
Medium: https://medium.com/@richard-bulldomican
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardbulldomican/
