Dan Sullivan believes we all have a God-given Unique Ability: A skill, strength, or talent we are better at doing than almost anyone else, and each person’s unique ability is different from anyone else’s, just like our fingerprints. 

Dan is a well-respected coach and thinker whose books and coaching program, Strategic Coach®, help people define their Unique Ability (UA) and spend more time in activities that utilize it. His proposition is that if you fully apply the concept across three levels, you will make twice as much money working half the hours within three years. And, work will feel much less like work. I believe him! I was in the program for five years, achieved the promised results, and saw others do it, too.

While you can enroll in the Strategic Coach Program (over 20,000 people have) if you qualify — and I do recommend it — you can also do this work on your own with the books and materials they sell separately.

Discover your unique ability: Level 1

I am going to share how you can learn what your Unique Ability is (I call this Level 1), categorize all your activities to allow informal delegation of your lowest-rated activities (Level 2), and then build a Unique Ability Team at your company (Level 3). 

I recently shared this information in my Top 10 Business Secrets presentation to the Portland chapter of EO, and this particular secret garnered a lot of interest, so I was inspired to write about it. I do feel it is one of the best-kept secrets in business.

The concept of Unique Ability made an incredible impact on my business. After I took it to Level 3, our business skyrocketed, and “work” became easier, more fun, and even more profitable.

How do you discover your UA? Either join the coaching program or do it yourself by utilizing the book Unique Ability 2.0 Discovery – Define Your Best Self, and the workbook: Unique Ability 2.0 Discovery Notebook, both available on Amazon.

They will guide you to complete four exercises that help define your UA:

1. First, email a form letter to the 8-10 people who know you best from all areas of your life, asking them to answer several questions, including: What are my strengths? What am I great at? And, what am I known for? 

2. Then, take the Kolbe A Instinct Assessment (20 minutes) and Gallup’s CliftonStrengths assessment (35 minutes). 

3. Next, use the workbook to identify your 10 Best Unique Ability Habits. 

4. Once you have all the results, the workbook leads you through a synthesis that will produce the first draft of your Unique Ability Statement. Congratulations: You now have a pretty good idea of what you are hardwired to excel at!

Side note: Both personality tests have versions for teens and college students if you want to help your kids learn their natural strengths and abilities early in life.

Just knowing your Unique Ability is liberating. As you reflect on your successes and struggles in life, you will see the connections to UA. Going forward, you can move toward your UA when given choices. Strategic Coach offers a helpful and concise blog elaborating on 6 Tips To Identify your UA.

Categorize your activities: Level 2

To take it to the next level, complete the workbook’s Activity Inventory, then categorize the activities you spend time doing. This exercise helps you develop both a personal life list and a business life list by cataloging all activities during a regular 30-day period. Most people end up with 25 to 40 activities for each list. 

Next, sort each activity into one of four categories:

• Unique ability (U): If you love the activity, it matches your new UA Statement, and is something you would do all day long for free, rate it as U (Unique Ability). 

• Excellent (E): If you are known for the activity and very good at it but not passionate about it, rate it as E. 

• Competent (C): If you are average at it, it is C. 

• Incompetent (I): If you suck at it, hate it, and will procrastinate it until the end of time, it is I.

Here is the most mind-bending aspect of this concept: There are people who love doing the things you despise and would do them all day long for free because it taps into their unique ability. I hate budgeting and creating spreadsheets, but my CFO would do that activity in her spare time for fun! Nuts.

Using your new knowledge about which activities best utilize your superpower, delegate specific tasks to others who like doing them, starting with your incompetent activities and then the competent ones. Do this in your personal and business realms, slowly adding more activities that match your UA. The goal is to transform your activity sphere by minimizing your percentage of incompetent activities and maximizing your percentage of UA activities. You want to move toward your UA and away from those incompetent-level spirit killers.

By identifying your UA and restructuring your life to include more UA-related activities, you amplify the naturally occurring greatness within you.

Build your unique ability team: Level 3

Now, you’re ready to take the concept to Level 3 by building a Unique Ability Team at your company. Start by drawing a diagram featuring you and your UA Statement in the middle and eight bubbles around you. Ask yourself who you need on your team to feel fully supported and leveraged. Put those roles in the eight bubbles around your bubble, connecting lines to yours. It could be someone who makes you and the company look good. Or someone to manage and maximize technology. Or someone who follows through on your ideas.

When I started this process, I had three of the eight roles filled with my current team. Over several years, I filled the remaining five roles. I note that four are full-time team members, and four are part-timers who could even be consultants. When interviewing for the open roles, ask prospects to complete the workbook’s Activities Path and utilize the Activities Snapshot to validate that they are natural for the role.

Once all eight were in place, our company took off. With an in-house expert for every challenge that came in the door, we could accomplish everything necessary to make our vision a reality. Not only was I spending the majority of my time in my UA, but so was everyone else. We were happier and more productive all around.

I loved my Unique Ability Team so much that when I sold the company we built together, I made it part of the deal to keep every team member, and we started another company. Part of my confidence in launching another startup was knowing our amazing team would be successful no matter what we attempted. It eased the pressure on me as the leader because we all shared the load in our unique ways.

Identifying your Unique Ability is a powerful concept; I wish it were not such a secret. It clarifies what you innately do best and, therefore, which roles will bring you the most satisfaction and success. Ideally, it would be part of the high school or college curriculum so students would learn their superpower early and move toward careers that utilize their UA from Day One. It would make companies far more productive and give businesses a more positive experience for all.

Whether you take your understanding of Unique Ability to Level 1, 2, or 3, you will never regret exploring this life-changing concept; the insights you gain will benefit you for the rest of your life.