Are You an Expert in Your Field?
When I first considered starting Primrose Ponderings, one of the hurdles I had to get over was the thought that I’m not an “expert” in the material that I write about. I don’t have a degree in psychology or philosophy. I don’t work for a famous university. I hadn’t established a name for myself in anything, let alone in a relatively new (to me) endeavor.
“How will anyone buy what I have to say?” was the frequent pushback of the Little Voice in My Head.
Long before I decided to write about it, I had already begun speaking about happiness and well-being in my Toastmasters clubs. I’d even given a couple of hour-long presentations to a room full of job seekers, trying to convince them that “happy people get hired first.” But these were one-offs in my mind and I hadn’t yet begun to think of myself as an expert on my chosen topic.
Have you ever felt that way about something you really wanted to do? Have you doubted your own expertise? Have you ever given up on yourself and your goals before even trying?
I decided to move forward with Primrose Ponderings, even though I still had doubts about my own expertise. I wasn’t sure that anyone would read what I had to say. I wondered whether people would laugh derisively at my clumsy attempts to teach folks how to be happier. But I decided to move forward, anyway.
One day, in a flash of insight, I began asking myself this question:
“What makes someone an expert?”
My answers were varied:
Education
Experience
Research
Unending curiosity
Openness to learning
Changing one’s views in the face of new information
Personal experience
Your answers to that question may be different from mine and other factors are likely to be involved. But the important point for this exercise was that I made a reasonable assessment of how *I* decide who is an expert and what compels me to listen to one person’s advice versus another.
The point of asking myself the question was to determine whether in my own mind I was an expert on happiness and well-being. I already knew that, no matter what I wrote in my blog, there would be lovers and there would be haters. What I wanted to discover was whether I was being frank with myself about my expertise (or lack thereof).
When I explored my list, I was stunned to realize that I’d been invalidating my own expertise using a rationale that was different from what I used to assess others’ expertise. While for others I made assessments based on whether their advice seemed valid and valuable to me, not on their “credentials,” in my own case, I fixated too much on that “missing” degree in psychology or philosophy.
Upon further inspection of my list, I realized that I had all of the components that I use to judge expertise in others. My happiness and well-being education hadn’t followed a traditional path of getting a college degree but, I realized, in the decade in which I had studied happiness, I did more research and gave more thought to the subject than I did in my chosen field of software engineering.
I never tire of reading and pondering about happiness and well-being. I love the topic about as much as any other subject I’ve been exposed to (music perhaps being the only close second). I realized that I was more of an expert in my “hobby” than I was in the field in which I made my living.
Curiosity, I also noted, is a critical factor in obtaining expertise in anything. Being able to hold one’s views lightly enough to let go of them in the face of new evidence was also something that I did better than average (IMO).1 Given that my own goal was to become happier and healthier, I was highly motivated to listen to anyone who might have ideas about the subject.
Finally, I considered the factor of experience. To me, this is one of the most important factors for assessing expertise. Within myself, I had to frankly ask which of my life’s experiences have led me to be an “expert” on happiness and well-being?
I haven’t had a difficult life,2 but I have experienced the feeling of NOT being happy a lot. Not being happy seems to be the default way we are wired (Dr. Rick Hanson would agree). My wake-up call came when I had finally constructed the life that I thought I wanted and I still wasn’t happy. That’s when I began searching in earnest for the answers to my own happiness puzzle.
From a place of not being happy and not understanding why that was the case when I had done everything “right,” I learned how to increase my happiness. I began by trusting the science of happiness, but I soon found that I had a wealth of wisdom within myself also. I used my creativity to design personal “experiments” to see if a certain activity (e.g., keeping a Gratitude Calendar) would increase my happiness.
I kept what worked for me and discarded what didn’t. In some ways, I still feel like I’m in the baby stages of my happiness journey, but when I compare how I feel most days now to how I often felt in the past, I can see that I’ve made significant progress already.
I’m happy and healthy most days and, when I’m not, I usually know what to do to remedy the situation. What defines an expert more than knowing how to handle a situation that the “average” (i.e., uninitiated) person doesn’t?
It took awhile for me to accept my own expertise, but just as with most things in life, I accepted the truth when I frankly and honestly assessed how I’d become an expert.3 This deep dive into my own expertise also helped me to understand how I could achieve expertise in other areas, too.
Remember that being an “expert” doesn’t mean that you know everything about a particular topic. It just means that you have a substantial base of knowledge and/or wisdom that you didn’t have before you began exploring the topic.
Being an expert isn’t relative to others’ knowledge and experience. If we had the motivation and studied the subjects enough, we could all be experts in medicine or computer science or gardening.
Some folks would have you believe that it’s not possible for you to be an expert as they are, but that attitude is one of arrogance and overestimating one’s own value. You can be an expert in almost anything that you put enough time and energy into learning about. It might take you longer than someone else to get to the same level, but most of us are fully capable of learning whatever we focus our attention fully on.
What do you want to become an expert in? What knowledge, wisdom, and/or skills do you already possess? What gaps currently exist in your expertise? How might you close those gaps to become an even greater expert in your field?
Whatever you desire to pursue, keep learning, keep experimenting, and keep teaching what you already know. Experts aren’t born, they are made through intelligent work and focused attention. You can be the expert that you dream of, but you must begin by believing that it is possible.
At least with happiness… there are a few subjects which I’m more stubborn about, but I don’t often write about those anymore. ;)
That’s my assessment, though some would argue that having a parent die when I was a teenager, losing my mom when I was thirty, and going through two divorces might be considered “difficult” to many.
What? You think honest assessments are only for finding out where we’re not doing well? Some of us would be well-served to do more exploration of what we do well as much as what we do poorly. :)