Why I Broke Up With My “Expertise”

I used to wear the title "marketing expert" like a badge of honour I'd battled for. I thought a degree, distinction and decade earned me that privilege. Maybe it did.

Do I think we live in a world where everyone calls themselves a marketer because they've read a Hormozi book and there's something wrong with that? Yes. But do I think I need to position myself as the expert, the go-to and the last investment you'll ever need to make in response to that? Honestly, for a long time I thought I did.

I thought I needed to be worthy of investment through accumulation of knowledge, a bank of psychological principles and a certificate that sealed "I'm the real deal." And the funny thing is, people told me I was. I had a client leave a testimonial once that said I was "the real deal in an industry of bullshit." And I won't lie, that went to my head a little.

But something has been circling for me for a long time now, and it finally landed. Because the more I clung to that title, the more I started to notice how uncomfortable it felt. Not because the expertise wasn't real, but because of what the positioning was actually doing, to me, and to the people I was working with.

When you position yourself as the fix, as the solution, as the one with all the answers, you unknowingly take something away from the people you're trying to help. You create a hierarchy that says "I know more than you" without ever actually saying those words. And what that does, even with the best intentions, is have people outsourcing their wisdom to you in a way that becomes disempowering for everyone involved.

I've watched it happen. People come in full of expectation, carrying the weight of wanting someone else to have the answers. And for a while, I tried to be that. I tried to carry it. And it was exhausting, not because the work was hard, but because it was never actually true. I didn't have the answers.

What I've noticed is that when people sit in front of me, they rarely need to hear from another expert.

They've consumed so much of that they can't hear themselves think anymore. They are drowning in expert opinions and fighting against the tide to hear their own again. They need someone to pull out the patterns and piece together the picture that's a little blurred in their mind. They need space held where the things they're scared to say out loud get to be heard alongside the sigh of relief that comes with them.

And here's where it gets interesting, because this isn't about dismissing expertise altogether. I've spent a decade devoted to understanding marketing at a psychological level, and I do think that matters. But there's a difference between being deeply knowledgeable and needing to perform that knowledge from a pedestal. The problem with pedestaling expertise is that it creates a hierarchy we were never actually designed to sit on.

Something Richard Rudd, the founder of Gene Keys, spoke about recently really landed for me. This idea of the collapse of these hierarchies of expertise, and what he calls interdependence. Not codependence, where you hand someone your authority and say "tell me what to do." But interdependence, where you come together and say "you're knowledgeable in this, let's think about it together. What do you see? What do I see? Where does this open up?"

That's the shift I've felt in my own work.

The more I've moved away from positioning as the expert and toward being someone who turns up the volume on your own inner authority, the more energised I feel. And the feedback I get now is different too. People walk away feeling empowered, not dependent. Not like they need to book the next session because I have something they don't, but like they've found something in themselves they maybe couldn't quite access alone.

You are the expert of your own business. You know your work better than anyone. You know your clients. You know what to say and how to say it. My role, anyone's role really, is to serve as a reflection of that. To ask the questions that help you hear yourself more clearly. To spot the blind spots we all have simply by virtue of living so close to our own stories.

That's not something I'm an expert in. It's something I've deeply embodied by walking the talk of it in more ways than I could possibly put on paper.

So no, I'm not the expert your business needs. But I am someone who can help you anchor your own authority more strongly, so you say what you want to say, attract who you were always meant to attract, and stop outsourcing the knowing that was always yours to begin with.

And of course, as deeply compassionate, supportive souls, we feel uncomfortable with that. We are supposed to. And we are also supposed to remember we don't have to stand on a pedestal to be worth investing in.

What we actually need is for our expertise to come from the deepest space of embodiment, found only by walking the talk of our work in more ways than we could possibly put on paper.

And for that, you need someone whose expertise isn't a certificate on a wall. It's everything they've lived, integrated and become in the doing of their work.

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