core offering
what's left when all is stripped away?
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When most people think about core offerings, they immediately start asking themselves transactional questions:
What am I selling?
What can I learn how to do that will pay my bills?
But core offerings are so much more interesting when they’re approached less as products and more as a part of who we are—gifts we are each born with that are accessible without any time spent nurturing them for profit.
Although external factors like technological advancements, training, and market trends can help shape how your core offering manifests under the systems you live in, we define them as “core” offerings because they’re still there when everything else is stripped way. Even a business’ core offering usually isn’t literally their tagline or brand identity, it’s the actual solution they offer to a problem that exists behind their cool typography.
The age-old question is still used today for a reason: if money were no object, what would you do every day? This speaks directly something you do naturally—and could happily engage with for hours on end whether not you’re compensated or someone else consumes it.
A core offering could be spiritual or practical: it could be that you're naturally gifted at storytelling, or that you can easily read the energy of others, or both—in which case each would be its own core offering.
Core offerings haven’t always been equated with market value—that connection was imposed by our economic systems and social structures. Consider storytelling as a way for cultures to preserve their history versus storytelling as revenue generation for the publishing industry.
What’s troubling is when these systems and structures convince us that we have no core offering, or force us to suppress or commodify it. In professional settings, we can end up getting promoted for spending 40 hours a week doing something we learned to be good at, rather than engaging in our true core offering, leading to a disconnection from our authentic selves. Young artists get scolded for doodling while they should be "paying attention," or they're pushed to develop their talent specifically to become "successful" in conventional terms.
(Ironically, true art is the freedom to express our core offering in whatever container speaks to our highest self, whether we choose try to make a living out of it or not).
Fortunately, even after decades of suppression, our authentic abilities will always continue to reveal themselves to us—emerging in fleeting moments even between bouts of imposter syndrome and the exhausting cycle of comparison culture. We can pay attention to signals, observe our flow state, connect with our parallel selves, or revisit our childhood interests in order to catch glimmers.
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But it doesn’t have to be that way. We can co-create a more abundant future, where our talents are appreciated for their inherent value, where the act of sharing them brings fulfillment, and where monetization becomes a choice rather than an expectation. When our gifts become detached from the expectation of receiving anything in return, they truly embody the definition of an offering.
If you do choose to monetize your core offering while we still exist under capitalism, one good idea is to find an approach that is aligned to your personal mission, vision, and values. You might even consider creating a separate mission-vision-values system for your business.
Maybe your business’ core offering or profit distribution solves a problem that could empower others to more freely share their core offering authentically. For example, even if your personal core offering is storytelling and you never sell a single story, your business’ core offering could be a way to help others tell their story.
Identifying what it is that you could naturally contribute to our collective evolution is itself part of that contribution. Because even if that story you wrote never reaches another set of eyeballs aside from your own, the purposefulness you poured into doing something you enjoy is an elevation of our collective vibration.