Establishing Your Expertise — By Becoming an Expert

Having expertise and being an expert are really two different things. One is holding a distinct set of skills in a defined ares. The other is complete mastery of an area of knowledge or skill.

There’s no question that to be an expert, you have to be knowledgeable, authentic, and hardworking at what you do. Everyone pays dues to get to the top, but knowing what to work at helps a lot too.

In a post called, How to be an Expert, at Creating Passionate Users, Kathy Sierra explains how experts get to be that way.

Maybe the “naturally talented artist” was simply the one who practiced a hell of a lot more. Or rather, a hell of a lot more deliberately. Dr. K. Anders Ericsson, professor of psychology at Florida State University, has spent most of his 20+ year career on the study of genuises, prodigies, and superior performers. In the book The New Brain (it was on my coffee table) Richard Restak quotes Ericsson as concluding:

“For the superior performer the goal isn’t just repeating the same thing again and again but achieving higher levels of control over every aspect of their performance. That’s why they don’t find practice boring. Each practice session they are working on doing something better than they did the last time.”

So it’s not just how long they practice, it’s how they practice. Basically, it comes down to something like this:

Most of us want to practice the things we’re already good at, and avoid the things we suck at. We stay average or intermediate amateurs forever.

Yet the research says that if we were willing to put in more hours, and to use those hours to practice the things that aren’t so fun, we could become good. Great. Potentially brilliant. We need, as Restak refers to it, “a rage to master.” That dedication to mastery drives the potential expert to focus on the most subtle aspects of performance, and to never be satisfied. There is always more to improve on, and they’re willing to work on the less fun stuff.

Unfortunately, human nature draws us to the things that we love and away from the things that we don’t find ourselves excelling at. So, to follow Kathy’s point further we develop expertise, but don’t really become an expert in our field.

To be recognized as a expert, someone has to see your work and know its quality, see its value, find all parts of it relevant and worth coming back to. Working on building your expertise in all areas to become an expert is critical. Once you’re headed in that direction, you’ll need others to recognize that you’re going there.

These are the 7 Steps to being recognizedas an expert that I outlined in more detail a few months back on Successful-Blog.

• Be the expert you are, not the expert someone else is. Know your strengths and play to them.
• Be an expert in ONE thing. Constantly refine and improve the details of your expertise.
• Write expert content. Research to add to your expert opinion, analysis, evaluation, synthesis, or predictions.
• Be an expert at knowing the changing tides of your niche. Be a thought leader.
• Be an expert at specialized searches. Follow thoughts and ideas around the Internet to see how they change.
• Be an expert at getting the word out and getting to know the other experts in your niche.
• Be an expert at finding the freshest insights and ideas. Offer your readers the highest quality and most relevant information and analysis.

Love your subject. Share the joy of your niche with the folks who come to see you. They’ll want to know more about what it is that you do.

Never stop striving. To be an expert in your niche, keep working on those places where readers need you most. Let readers know who you are and the key of your brand — quality, knowledge, and credibility — and share your sincere drive to tackle the subject as an expert.

Just keep counting to seven — seven key steps to being an expert. What better way to promote your brand and your business than to have everyone see you as the expert, the thought leader for an industry?

Liz Strauss