Why your lived experience matters (but feels impossible to articulate)

We’re told all the time that the thing that really sets us apart is our lived experience.

Our stories are the parts of us no one else can replicate.

Which is true. It’s also completely useless advice until you actually do the work of figuring out what that means.

Because knowing that your lived experience matters is very different from knowing which parts of it actually shape your work, your perspective, or the value you bring.

Here’s the thing: the experiences that matter most almost never feel significant when they’re happening.

They don’t feel profound or transformative, which is exactly why most of us miss them entirely, or worse, discount them because they don’t fit the narrative we think we’re supposed to have.

That’s what I want to unpack here.

The three parts of strong positioning (and why one is harder than the others)

I talk about positioning constantly. And when I do, I usually focus on two things: deeply understanding your audience and deeply understanding your competitors.

If you don’t understand who you’re for, what they care about, or how they make decisions, your messaging will miss. Every time.

And if you don’t understand who else is in the market and what they’re saying, you’ll almost always end up sounding like everyone else, no matter how good you think your offer is.

But there’s a third part of positioning that matters just as much, and I don’t talk about it nearly enough.

You.

Think of it like a three-legged stool.

You need a deep understanding of your audience.

You need a clear view of your competitors.

And you need to understand yourself: your purpose, your values, your point of view. The patterns in how you approach problems. The instincts you’ve built over time that you don’t even realize are instincts anymore.

Competitor research helps you see what others are saying and where there’s room to differentiate. But one of the most powerful ways to set yourself apart has nothing to do with them at all.

It comes from your lived experience.

The experiences that shaped how you notice things, how you decide what matters, and how you show up in the work. Even when you’re not consciously thinking about it.

Why it’s harder than it sounds

This is the part where it feels like it should be easy.

If your lived experience matters this much, shouldn’t you be able to just name it on demand? In a sentence or two that makes you sound impressively self-aware?

Yeah, that’s not how it works.

Before I ever worked in marketing, I spent years in education working with kids and adults across a wide range of settings. The core challenge was always the same.

You have an audience who’d rather be doing literally anything else. And it’s your job to get their attention, keep it, and guide them toward a specific outcome without them realizing you’re doing it.

In education, we call this backward design.

You don’t start with the lesson. You start with the outcome. What do you want them to understand? What do you want them to be able to do?

Only then do you work backward. You decide what matters, you cut what doesn’t, and you sequence it intentionally so the path forward feels inevitable.

That way of thinking was trained into me long before I ever wrote a headline or mapped a customer journey. I didn’t think of it as “marketing strategy.” I thought of it as how you get people from point A to point B without losing them halfway through.

Instructional coaching shaped me just as much.

When I coached teachers, the work wasn’t about fixing them. It was about asking better questions and listening for what was underneath the first answer. It was about slowing their thinking down enough to help them see the real issue, not the symptom they came in complaining about.

That’s where I learned how to spot the actual gap.

Not the problem people think they have, but the one that’s really driving their decisions.

And if I trace that back even further, there’s another thread I didn’t see for a long time (and it’s a strange one, so stay with me).

I’ve always been fascinated by how people make decisions, like in an “I need to understand this or I won’t be able to sleep” way.

In fifth grade, I was obsessed with books about serial killers, like Inside the Criminal Mind. I couldn’t wrap my head around how people justified the choices they made. I wanted to understand what influenced them, what they believed, and how they got from point A to point B in their own heads.

At the time, I wasn’t thinking, Ah yes, this will one day inform my work in messaging and buyer psychology. I was just trying to understand how people make the decisions they make and what they tell themselves to make it make sense.

I also compulsively read memoirs. I love hearing people make sense of their own story, figure out what shaped them, and understand why they became who they became. I read them because I’m fascinated by how people construct meaning from their own lived experience.

It took me years to realize that thread never went away. It just started showing up in different contexts.

Questions that reveal your unique perspective

This is where I want you to pause.

I’m going to ask you a few questions. Answer them quickly. Don’t overthink them. And don’t try to make them sound good.

• What were you deeply interested in long before it was useful, impressive, or tied to a career?
• What kinds of questions have you always been trying to answer, even if you didn’t have language for them yet?
• What problems do you instinctively want to understand before you jump to solutions?
• What do people consistently come to you for help with, even when it’s not your role or responsibility?
• When something isn’t working, what’s the first thing you want to diagnose?

Now, instead of asking, How do I use this? ask: What does this reveal about how I naturally see problems and make decisions?

Differentiation doesn’t come from what you’ve done. It comes from how you interpret those experiences and what you notice that others overlook.

And that lens? It’s already showing up in your work, whether you’ve named it yet or not.

What does this look like in practice?

Sometimes the connection is obvious.

You spent years working in a specific industry. You understand the pressure, the politics, the unspoken rules, and the reality of what that work is actually like. Now you coach or consult executives in that same space because you’ve lived it. That throughline is easy to trace.

Other times, it’s not.

Sometimes you were the kid reading disturbing books about criminal psychology, fascinated by how people think, what they believe, and how they justify their choices. And years later, you find yourself talking about empathy, trust, and buyer psychology in marketing—and wondering how the hell you got here.

That connection isn’t obvious unless you stop long enough to look for it.

And that’s exactly why this work takes more intention than people expect. It’s about seeing the pattern that’s already there before you try to craft a narrative.

Why articulating your unique value is so uncomfortable

And the part no one really tells you? Articulating your unique value is uncomfortable.

Not because it’s hard to do the actual work, though it is. That’s because the things that make you different often feel too small, too personal, or too disconnected from what you think “counts.”

You discount them because they don’t fit the origin story you think you’re supposed to have. Or because they feel too niche. Or because everyone else seems to have a cleaner, more impressive version of their expertise, and yours feels messy by comparison.

But that messiness is where the differentiation lives.

The throughlines that don’t make sense at first. The weird fascinations that shaped how you see problems. The skills you built in one context that now show up everywhere, even though you never meant to carry them forward.

Those are the things that make your work yours.

Seeing the pattern is step one. Translating it into positioning that actually resonates with your audience? That’s another conversation entirely.

And in a market where everyone has access to the same tools, the same tactics, and the same information, that matters more than people think.

What this actually means for your positioning

Strong positioning doesn’t come from pulling one lever.

It comes from understanding how all three parts work together: your audience, the market, and the strengths and perspectives you bring to the work.

When trust is earned slowly and attention is scarce, this isn’t optional work.

If you don’t know what you uniquely bring to the table, the market decides for you.

And I promise you—the market is not nearly as generous or as perceptive as you’d hope.

So here’s what I’d suggest: stop waiting for it to feel profound.

The experiences that shaped you don’t need to sound impressive. They just need to be true. And the sooner you stop discounting the things that feel too small or too weird or too disconnected, the sooner you’ll see the throughline that’s been there all along.

Until next time,

Stacy