Your value proposition isn't about your skills

I've been sitting in mentorship calls for years now, and the pattern is always the same. Someone comes in, and within five minutes, they're asking me to help them with their elevator pitch, their CV, their "tell me about yourself." They pull up a document or open their LinkedIn, and I see the same thing every time: a skills inventory. Years of experience. Tools they know. Companies they've worked for. Certifications they've earned.

And I stop them.

Not because there's anything wrong with those things. But because we're solving the wrong problem. The real problem isn't their communication. It's that they've been trained, by every hiring manager, every career coach, every interview prep guide, to answer a question nobody is actually asking.

I know this because I lived it. For years, I showed up to every conversation, every pitch, every new opportunity trying to prove I had my shit together. I'd lead with the résumé, the credentials, the impressive-sounding trajectory. And I was genuinely confused when the best opportunities didn't come from any of that. They came from the moments when someone understood what I could make happen for them. The difference, I eventually realised, is the whole game.

Here's the trap: when you walk into a room, and someone says, "tell me about yourself," your brain immediately goes into inventory mode. You list. You describe. You present.

What you don't do is answer the only question that actually matters: What do I get if I choose you?

Most people default to me mode. "I have ten years of experience. I've worked with enterprise clients. I'm proficient in user research, prototyping, and design systems." This is not a value proposition. This is a résumé read aloud.

A value proposition answers something completely different. It answers: Why would someone choose you over a world of alternatives?

This shift, from "what I can do" to "here's what you get," is the entire game. And almost nobody makes it.

So why does this happen? Why are so many smart, capable people stuck in this me-mode trap?

I'll tell you what I see: it's not a confidence problem at the surface. It's deeper. People have stopped trusting themselves.

A mentee, I'll call her S, came to me a few months ago asking for help with communication skills. She had an interview coming up, a big one, and she wanted to sharpen her pitch. On paper, she was flawless. She'd researched the company thoroughly. She'd prepared thoughtful answers. She'd practised her delivery. She had done everything right.

But in the mock interview, something was off. She was articulate, experienced, clearly intelligent. Yet every answer came with hedges. "I might be able to..." or "I think this could work..." She'd diminish her own insights before the interviewer had a chance to question them. When asked to describe an impact she'd had, she'd talk about "the team's success" or "what we accomplished together," always pointing outward, never owning the value she'd created.

This is what I call sweet mode. It's when you shrink to fit what you think the other person wants. It's when you become approachable at the cost of becoming invisible.

And here's the cruel part: it comes from the same place as confidence. It comes from caring so much about getting the outcome right that you stop trusting yourself to show up as you actually are.

She'd switched careers, moved countries, had her life disrupted by war, become a mother. And somewhere in all of that, she'd stopped trusting that what she had to offer was worth existing in a world of alternatives. So she was apologising for herself in advance.

If any part of that story feels familiar, if you've been through a transition that's knocked your trust in yourself, or you're navigating a new market where the rules feel opaque, or you've been in "prove mode" long enough that it's become your default. This is written for you.

The shift happened when I asked her one question: "Who is the job for?"

She looked confused.

"The job isn't yours. So when you're sitting in that interview, you're not trying to win something that is already not yours. You're there to figure out if this role, this team, this company deserves your time."

I let that sit for a moment.

"The job is yours to choose."

Everything changed in that reframe. Suddenly, she wasn't in scarcity mode, trying to convince them she was enough. She was in evaluation mode, trying to figure out if they were enough.

When you operate from that posture, the answers shift. You stop hedging. You stop diminishing. You stop performing competence and start demonstrating clarity. Because you're not trying to prove you deserve the job. You're trying to assess whether the job is worth your time.

And paradoxically, that's exactly when you become most compelling. Clarity is rare. Confidence that isn't desperate is rare. Most people show up in prove mode. The moment you show up in choose mode, you're immediately differentiated.

She walked out of that session with a different spine. And yes, she got the job. But more importantly, she got herself back.

Let me be specific about what I mean when I say value proposition.

It's not a slick statement you memorise. It's not something you put on a business card. Value proposition is the answer to this question: If you hire me, what happens in your organisation that wouldn't happen otherwise?

Not "I'm a good designer." That's describing yourself.

Not "I have eight years of experience in digital products." That's describing your history.

But: I identify the gap between what users do and what your product assumes they do, and I design the bridge. Three of my last four projects resulted in a 30% increase in task completion rate because I focus on that one thing.

See the difference? One is about you. The other is about the outcome.

Here's another example. I mentored a designer, I'll call him B, who had moved from Iran to build an innovation consulting practice. Incredibly sharp, years of experience, and he'd built an entire framework for it: a structured canvas that guided teams from raw ideas to business-validated concepts. Real rigour behind it. He was proud of it, and rightly so.

And when I asked him why someone would choose his canvas over the one McKinsey or IDEO would offer, he froze.

He didn't have an answer. Not because the canvas wasn't good. It was. But because he'd been thinking about what it does, not about what value it creates for the specific person choosing it.

When I pushed him, it came out: his framework was built for resource-constrained environments. It worked precisely when you didn't have infinite time, budget, or a team of consultants. It was designed for founders, small teams, practitioners in emerging markets who needed to move fast without losing rigour.

That's a completely different conversation than "I built an innovation framework." That's: "If you're trying to punch above your weight without the overhead of a big consultancy, this gets you to the right insights faster. And it was built specifically for that constraint."

That lands differently.

The issue isn't just about better networking or better interview results. That's one layer. But the real cost is deeper.

When you stay stuck in me mode, you're building your entire career on a shaky foundation. You're competing on credentials. On tools. On where you went to school. On how hard you work.

And guess what? There are always people with more credentials. Better tools. Fancier schools. Who work harder.

But there is nobody else in the world who can create the specific value you create, in the specific way you create it, for the specific people you create it for.

That's your only real advantage. And it's the one thing almost nobody leans into because it feels too vulnerable. It requires you to say no to some opportunities, the ones that don't align with your real value. It requires you to bet on yourself in a way that credentials never will.

So practically, how do you make this shift?

Start by asking yourself this: If I show up to meet someone tomorrow, and I can't mention my job title, my years of experience, or where I've worked, what would I say I'm good at?

Not "I'm good at design." That's still inventory.

But: I'm the person who walks into a chaotic product situation and finds the non-obvious insight that changes the whole direction. I've done this for [specific domain], and it usually saves teams three months of build time.

Or: I help senior leaders move from being the person who has all the answers to the person who creates space for others to have the answers. It changes how they lead, and it changes what their teams produce.

See the structure? I do X. In situation Y. Which creates outcome Z.

That's the formula. Not what you do. What you create.

Then stress-test it. Is it true? Can you give three examples? Do people recognise you for this, or did you just make it up? Does it matter to the people you want to work with?

If the answer to any of those is no, you're not done yet.

The goal isn't to have a perfect pitch. The goal is to have such clarity about your actual value that when you show up in a room, you show up with backbone. You're not there to convince anyone. You're there to be useful or to find out if the fit works.

And honestly? The people worth working for respond to that clarity like nothing else.

If you want to work on this, not just understand it, but actually shift how you show up, this is the kind of thing I work on in mentorship sessions. One or two conversations is usually enough to crack it open. You can find me on ADPList or reach out directly.

You probably came to this thinking about your next interview, your next promotion conversation, your next networking event. You thought this was about communication skills or positioning tactics.

It isn't. The real work is happening before you walk into any room. It's the work of trusting yourself enough to say what you actually create, without hedging or diminishing. It's the work of believing that your value isn't something you have to prove. It's something you get to stand for.

The job was never yours to win. It's yours to choose.