By Nettie Owens, CPO-CD · The Sappari Group

Originally explored on Wake Up Women Leaders — Episode 13

There is a version of “being professional” that gets handed to every leader at some point. The right headshot. The right tonee right language for your industry. The carefully managed personal brand that checks every box on the list of what a credible, serious, trustworthy expert is supposed to look like.

And for a lot of leaders, following that list produces results that feel exactly like what they are: generic. Forgettable. Off.

In Episode 13 of Wake Up Women Leaders, Victoria Whitfield and I talked about why being yourself is your market differentiator, not a philosophical stance, a practical strategy. The leaders who build the most loyal audiences, the most engaged communities, and the most consistent revenue are not the ones who fit the mold. They are the ones who stopped trying to.

The Problem With Checking All the Boxes

Every industry has a uniform. In coaching and leadership development, it tends to involve a certain kind of polish, a certain vocabulary, a certain aesthetic that signals credibility. And there is nothing inherently wrong with any of those signals — until they replace who you actually are.

“Trying to fit into the cookie cutter actually makes you invisible.”

Victoria learned this at a Click Funnels event — a room of roughly 7,500 people, heavily male, mostly in baseball caps and hoodies and jeans. She showed up in the same. Black hoodie, black baseball cap, completely blending in. She came to the mic and was mistaken for someone else.

The next time she came back dressed as herself. Floor-length caftan, bright colors, shoulder-duster earrings, deep red lipstick. “All of a sudden, I have plenty of people — men, women, children, dogs — coming up to me. Suddenly it was as if I was a flame in the middle of a dark night, and everything drifting towards my radiance.”

Same room. Same people. Completely different result — not because she had done anything differently strategically, but because people could finally see her.

Being yourself as your market differentiator is not about being bold or dramatic or unconventional for its own sake. It is about being recognizable. The people who need you are looking for someone specific. When you blur yourself into the background by checking all the boxes, you make yourself harder to find.

What Showing Up as Yourself Actually Looks Like

This is where the conversation gets practical. Because being yourself as your market differentiator is not just a mindset — it shows up in specific, visible, tangible ways before you ever say a word.

How you look.

Victoria and I talked about this at length in the episode, and I want to be clear about what we are and are not saying. We are not telling you to dress like Victoria in a floor-length caftan. Nor are we telling you to dress like me — floral, tailored, nature-adjacent, what my branding team consistently calls “the girl next door.” Instead, we are saying: dress like yourself.

“You can be quiet in your appearance and still be recognizable for who you are and how you show up.”

What you wear, the colors you gravitate toward, the jewelry you reach for, the overall aesthetic of how you present yourself — these are data points. Your audience reads them before you open your mouth. They are signals about who you are, what you value, and who you are for. When those signals are authentic, they attract the right people. When they are borrowed from someone else’s playbook, they attract confusion — or nothing at all.

Victoria worked with a client who was a heavily tattooed realtor with a background as a graphic artist. When he started, he covered everything — full suit, nothing showing, as conventional as possible. People liked him but did not remember him. When he started showing the sleeve tattoos, talking about his hometown, bringing his graphic art sensibility into his marketing — contacts increased, clients came in, connections multiplied. He did not change his expertise. He stopped hiding himself.

How you sound.

Being yourself as your market differentiator extends to your voice — not just literally, but also the language you use, the phrases that are distinctly yours, the way you explain things that nobody else explains quite that way. Think about the people whose voices you recognize instantly — it is the sound, it is the words, the rhythm, the particular way they frame an idea.

“The words you speak are part of this identity that you have and how you show up.”

This is also about accent, background, and the specific texture of your experience. Victoria’s client did not just show his tattoos — he started using his accent, referencing where he came from, and leading with what made him him. Not a generic realtor. Him.

What you are willing to talk about.

This is the layer that most leaders resist longest. The specific experiences, perspectives, and stands that feel too personal, too niche, or too risky to include in professional content.

For Victoria, it was sharing the story of the window that fell on her fingers — the moment of working herself into the hospital that became the catalyst for everything that followed. Before she told that story, talks were fine. People politely took the free materials and left. After she started sharing it — the line of people waiting to hug her, to share their own version of that story, to ask for her information — was consistent and immediate.

For me, it was being willing to talk about perimenopause in the context of productivity and leadership. In the middle of a presentation on productivity, I mentioned it once, and the chat blew up. Because women in leadership are navigating this every day, and almost nobody in the productivity and leadership space connects this dot to all the others that women are navigating.

“The more I started opening up conversations about experiences that women have, the more people were like, oh my gosh, I want to talk about this. This happened to me too. And my work increased because of it.”

I had a fear that naming something so specific would pigeonhole me — that I would become known only for that. It did not happen. What happened instead was that people felt seen. And people who feel seen become loyal. They refer others who need to feel the same way.

Why This Works — and Why Most Leaders Avoid It

Being yourself as your market differentiator works because people do not build loyalty to a category. They build loyalty to a person. Specifically, to a person they recognize, trust, and feel genuinely seen by.

“The more we have talked about what makes us unique and followed the things that feel good to us, the way we like to show up, the more people have come consistently to us that say — I feel like you’re speaking to me. I feel like you wrote that just for me.”

That is not an accident. It is the direct result of showing up as yourself consistently over time. The right people self-select in. The wrong people self-select out. Both of those things are good.

Most leaders avoid this because it feels like risk. What if the thing that is most distinctly me is also the thing that alienates people? What if my accent, my background, my specific perspective, my unconventional aesthetic — what if those things cost me credibility or clients?

The answer, consistently, is the opposite. Victoria was invisible in the hoodie and recognizable in the caftan. My client base grew when I stopped trying to serve everyone and started speaking directly to women in leadership. The tattooed realtor booked more clients when he showed his sleeves.

Being yourself as your market differentiator is not a risk. Erasing yourself is.

Don’t Make This Mistake

“You spend all of your time looking at others, comparing, pointing the finger and trying to find value outside of yourselves,” said Victoria.

This is the core of the problem. Leaders who are not yet showing up as themselves are almost always looking outward — at who is performing well on LinkedIn, at what kind of content is getting shares, at the aesthetic and language of the coaches and leaders they admire. And they are building a version of themselves that is essentially a composite of other people’s approaches.

That composite has no specific gravity. It does not pull anyone toward it because there is no distinct center to pull from.

“This is not based off of what’s trending on TikTok or what the news is talking about. This is coming from within. So you talk your walk.“

Talking your walk means your content, your positioning, your appearance, and your language all come from the same source — which is you. Not the you that has been edited for palatability, but the actual you. The one with the specific background, the particular perspective, the experiences that nobody else has had in quite the same combination.

That combination is not a liability. It is what makes being yourself your most effective market differentiator.

Three Things to Do This Week

Here is the practical exercise Victoria and I offered in the episode:

1. One physical differentiator. What is one element of how you show up physically — a color, an article of clothing, a piece of jewelry, a signature look — that is distinctly yours? Not borrowed, not conventional, not what you thought you were supposed to wear. Yours. Start showing up in it consistently.
   
   
2. One sensory differentiator. What is one thing about your voice, your movement, your phrasing, or your energy that people recognize as distinctly you? A word you use, the way you explain a concept, the particular warmth or directness in how you speak. Lean into it instead of sanding it down.
   
   
3. One experience or perspective you have been holding back. What is the thing you have been editing out of your content, your introductions, or your conversations because you were not sure it was professional enough or relevant enough or safe enough to include? That is worth looking at carefully — because it is almost always the thing that makes the strongest connection.
   
   

These three elements — how you look, how you sound, and what you’re willing to share — form the foundation of being yourself as your market differentiator. They work together to create a presence that’s immediately recognizable and genuinely magnetic to the right people.



“There’s a part of yourself that you may have been holding back because you think it doesn’t check the box. Let this episode be your permission slip.”

What’s Coming Next

In Episode 14, Victoria and I are taking this directly into the social media conversation — because once you start showing up as yourself, something interesting happens. You might get a lot of likes. And likes are not sales. The relationship between social engagement and actual revenue is the conversation we are having next. Join us Wednesday at 3:30pm ET.

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Nettie Owens, CPO-CD · The Sappari Group · sapparigroup.com · © 2026