A twenty one year old told me about an NIL workshop he sat in on at the sports camp he's interning for this summer. High school athletes, sixteen and seventeen years old, some of them nationally ranked. The first half was about brands. They crushed it. Everybody could name the same three or four companies and explain exactly what those companies stood for.

Then the questions turned personal. What challenges have you been through? If a friend had to describe you, what would they say?

The room went quiet in a way he wasn't expecting.

The answers, when they came, were three words wide. Athletic. Funny. Hard working. He said what any honest person in that room would have said. You are all athletic. You are at a sports camp.

His read, and I think it's the right one, is that this wasn't shyness. They didn't know. Sixteen, seventeen years old, and the hardest question in the room was the one about themselves.

If you're a parent or a teacher, you've watched a version of this. You ask a kid what they're into and get a shrug that reads as attitude. It usually isn't attitude at all. There's a real blank where an answer should be, and the blank has a cause.

Somewhere around fifteen, most kids run an experiment. They have a thought that doesn't match the room. An opinion, a taste, an interest, an angle on a problem that came at it sideways. They consider saying it. Sometimes they do. And then they clock what it costs, which is never a dramatic cost, never the thing you would notice from across a kitchen, just a pause, a look, a subject change, the sense of being briefly outside the group, and they learn from that, correctly, that the sideways thought is expensive. So they stop offering it. And because we mostly become the version of ourselves we practice out loud, the sideways thought stops arriving as often, until some well meaning adult asks what makes them different and they reach for the answer and find nothing there, because the thing that made them different hasn't been used in three years.

That's why the second book in The Unmistakably You Series, Different on Purpose, treats originality as a set of moves instead of a personality trait.

The distinction matters more for adults than it does for kids. If originality is a trait, your kid either has it or doesn't, and your job is to reassure them. If it's a set of moves, it can be practiced, and your job is completely different.

Six moves, in the book's language. There's something in everything, including the boring thing. See the plot twist coming, which is just paying attention to where a situation is heading before everyone else does. Chase what you actually care about rather than what performs well. If it doesn't exist, build it. Give first. Build stuff that outlasts you.

Underneath those sits a smaller tool, four questions that let a young person get a fast read on what actually sets them apart. It's the tool those camp kids needed and didn't have.

Now the uncomfortable part, and it's aimed at the adults.

Notice how you respond to the sideways answer. Your teenager says something a little off, a little too enthusiastic, a little not what the family does. The temptation is to gently steer it. Not to crush it. Nobody reading this crushes anything. Just to steer. To add the practical consideration. To ask if they've thought about how that plays.

That steering is the edit.

It doesn't feel like one. It feels like parenting, and it usually is well earned. But run four hundred small steers over four years and you've quietly taught a kid that the different thought is a draft that needs an adult's approval before it can be spoken.

A college counselor who has spent years helping students get in puts the parent version in one line. Stop asking your teenager what they want to be. Ask them what they are like, and then do not correct the answer.

The second half of that sentence is the whole difficulty.

For educators the classroom version is a small discipline. When a student offers the strange answer, resist the urge to route it back toward the expected one. Ask a follow up instead. Where did that come from. Say more. What made you see it that way. Two extra questions is all it takes to teach a room that the unusual thought is worth having, which is the opposite of what most of their day teaches them.

There's a version of your kid who already thinks at a slant. They've just learned it's cheaper not to say so. The fix isn't confidence. It's a room where the weird answer gets a follow up question instead of a pause.