You're an expert. You just need to work out what you're an expert in.

Expertise sometimes creeps up on us.

I like to remind new coaches, starting out on their journey in a new profession, that by the time they have completed a coaching training they have thought about (and know more about) coaching than, at a conservative estimate, 99.9% of people in the world. Often riddled with self doubt at starting a new profession, let alone one where they are charging for something as intangible as their presence, let alone one where they have to charge for their time, I hope this provides some solace. And also empowers them to trust what they know.

One of the reasons it doesn't feel like we know more than almost everyone is that after a thorough coaching training there is almost always a sense of knowing just how much there is to learn.

But even if people only know 5% more about something than we do, that's 5% that they can teach us.

A part of what we might think about as expertise is relative. To be the country's foremost expert in something, you just need to know more than everyone else.

That thought occurred to me a few weeks ago, delivering one of 64 Million Artists’ leadership programmes for academic researchers. Created in response to a request from King's College London, based on the responses of potential participants, and aimed at helping the university's most exciting researchers take their work to the next level, the programme has now been adapted and rolled out at two more universities (and the company has designed a further bespoke programme for a fourth).

I have worked on the company's programmes for academic researchers since their first year in 2017, coaching and facilitating these experiences for over 140 researchers in that time. Aware that ours is one of the few interventions aimed specifically at research leaders in the UK, and that other than Jo, the company's founder, I have been involved in delivering more of these intervebtions than anyone else, I suddenly became aware that I had accidentally become an expert in research leadership. That, in fact, along with Jo and our colleague Laura, the core team at 64 Million Artists are likely among at least the 100 people who have spent the longest in the UK thinking about cross-disciplinary research leadership for people at the new professor level of their career. Maybe the top 10, given our experience across several universities.

And this bears thinking about. As Alta Star (and maybe Aristotle, too) said, we become what we practise. And it is worth remembering and noticing when our expertise emerges.

Seth Godin teaches, in his book This Is Marketing, a positioning exercise - choose two axes, each for a quality that your customers might look for. Choose them so that when you plot your competitors and yourself on the axes, you emerge out at the extremes of the graph and your competition fall away. Normally we need to get more and more specific when we are trying to compete with people similar to us (I can’t complete with all other coaches on experience and price, but if I draw my axes for ‘test-driven ordinary success’ and ‘deeply committed to understanding and mastering the craft’ things start to look different). But it also bears thinking about for the whole population. What are the things that you have thought about more than anyone else? What are you in the top 10%, top 5%, even top 100 experts in the country for?

If you get specific enough, you'll find something.

And then you can use that to create change and impact.

You can use it to let go, even just a little, of the fears, doubts and the sense that you don't belong.

You have something to say, and people will want to hear it.

Because you're an expert.

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This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online. 

The first 12-Minute Method Book - How to Start When You're Stuck - is out now!