You're An Expert. So What?

Many speakers, particularly early on in their career, start from the same place.

Their expertise.

They know the subject. They’ve spent years building their knowledge, and they’ve got more case studies than Harvard Business School.

Of course, they will start with that.

Because it makes sense.

Go to any academic conference, and I’ve been to a few, and you will get a line of academics who do just this.

And don’t get me wrong, the stuff they speak about is really bloody good.

There is no doubting their detail and expertise and commitment to their subject.

But often it’s as dry as fuck.

When you walk out of the room, you probably know more than you did before, but there’s no feeling.

No soul.

Expertise alone is purely academic.

Experience alone is one person’s story.

Stick the two together. Then it becomes really cool.

I suspect we’re led down the path of speaking from expertise before anything else because credibility and authority are important.

In fact, if you even go back and look at Aristotle’s rhetorical triangle, it’s one of the key components.

But also, in society, we are very much geared to talk about what we do rather than who we are.

It’s reinforced in networking events.

It’s always a field on questionnaires.

And perhaps it’s a way in which we decide our relative status, worth and value in a capitalist environment.

It’s no wonder that people leave from a place of expertise.

And if you go to conferences, this is what you see.

It’s all about the achievements that people have had, whether they are financial or otherwise.

It’s never about who they are.

And it’s who you are, which exists when you strip away everything else.

The way I approach my work (and I totally get the irony of using the word “work” in this, but it is also LinkedIn. Isn’t this what this platform is really about?) is that it all begins with you.

Your values, your character, your personality.

Then we take your expertise and technique and we build on top of that.

If you want a really useful analogy, it’s like cooking.

You take your raw ingredients (your expertise and your experience).

You prepare them well.

You cook and season them in the most appropriate manner.

When it comes to speaking, there are times when your expertise needs to lead above anything else.

The kind of technical presentations where you need to have really precise details, where the context and content matter, and the person steps back a little bit.

And that’s okay.

When we do the work of finding out who you are, even if you don’t bring that forward in a delivery, it still influences how you show up.

The presence, the confidence, the rapport.

All of those things come from knowing who you are.

If we think about your speaking, how much of you do you actually bring to it?

I don’t mean your MSc, PhD, BSc stuff.

I mean, you.

The person.

The human.

If the answer is not a lot, then that might be a good place for us to start.

And if you want to chat about that, let me know.