How can you help your mentee find their unique perspective for Thought Leadership?

Identifying your niche is like finding your own unique position in a vast playing field. It's about discovering that sweet spot where your passion and expertise intersect, and where you can truly make an impact. For anyone looking to carve out their space, it starts with a deep dive into what drives you. What's that one topic, problem, or solution that you can talk about for hours without losing steam? That's your passion talking, and it's a powerful guide. But passion alone isn't enough. You need to pair it with deep knowledge and expertise. This is where you ask yourself: What do I know better than anyone else? What unique experiences or insights do I bring to the table?

I love Justin Welsh's advice on this. Find an area you can talk about uninterrupted for 30 minutes. It's important to find their passion and expertise but also not to dictate this and instead guide them through a discovery journey. Some of the areas you can help them with after this are analysing the competition and trends, helping them simplify their message to reach a wider audience and looking for ways to challenge the status quo. This provides the basis for identifying a niche for the mentee.

As a mentor, you can help guide your mentee in strategising this and look at areas such as: - Defining the target audience they wish to reach and influence - Identify the channels and platforms most suited to the audience, or they spend most of their time - Deeply analyse the audience's needs and identify gaps and opportunities - Evaluate how your audience perceives you and your competitors. The combination of the above can help laser-focus this activity and provide a good basis for the next steps.

To help my mentee find a unique thought leadership perspective, I’d guide them in developing their voice. This involves choosing the right medium, matching tone and style with their personality, balancing credibility and authenticity, infusing creativity, expressing opinions and emotions genuinely, and maintaining consistency. This alignment of personality, values, and creativity with their communication style creates a strong, lasting connection with their audience.

By now, you have helped the mentee identify their passion and expertise, find their niche, and research their audience. Based on the results of the exercise, the next step would be to: - Help them communicate clearly and effectively - Challenge them to be remain innovative and original and avoid falling into the complacency and echo chamber trap - Support them to be authentic as this isn't a popularity contest This will help establish their authority and uniqueness.

This is the technical aspect of your work where you can leverage technology and frameworks (SMART, OKRs and KPIs) to set goals and objectives. It's important to research and fact-check the sources and criteria used here and create methods and processes to increase effectiveness and efficiency when searching for relevant and reliable content. Adding the mentee's perspective is essential here as it's easy to fall into the copying trap whereas the whole point of becoming a thought leader should be to add a unique look and storytell exclusively.

Other areas to consider not covered by the article are: - Help them find and join relevant communities - Leverage existing networks and find new ones - Guide them to collaborate with other thought leaders - Instill the process of constantly evaluating, monitoring and looking for was to improve The combination of the above can ensure their idea are fresh, they challenge themselves, and constantly seek optimisation.

To help a mentee find a unique thought leadership perspective, I’d suggest they explore their own life experiences and interests. Encourage them to combine different parts of their life and experiences, even if they seem unrelated. This blend of their unique background can make their perspective stand out and engage their audience in a fresh way.