Peter Winick explains why experts often undermine their own value: they jump to answers without showing the reasoning behind them. When you hide your thinking process, clients see you as a black box instead of someone who owns a teachable system they can replicate. Show your work instead.
Hi there, it's Peter Winick. I'm the founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage. And here's the idea that I want to share with you today, and that's this: do you as an expert, as an author, as a thought leader suffer from the curse of being an expert? Let me unpack this a little bit. What do I mean by that? Well, oftentimes in my experience talking with world-renowned experts and thought leaders and such, I'll ask them a question and they just so quickly get to an answer or solve a problem or, or, or, or get to the end. And I'm like, and, and they don't think anything of it. It's just the way they're wired. It just happens. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, slow that down. Like, yeah, I, I, I get the outcome. I get what your point of view is and what your perspective is. And actually it's brilliant. But let's pretend that we're in 4th grade doing math and I'm the teacher. Show your work. How did you get there? And what I mean by this is that experts, cuz they've seen so many similar patterns, so many similar situations to what you're presenting to them, they've got the answer. But part of showing the value that you create to your clients is to be able to show them how you got there, to break down the solution into sort of the Lego pieces. Well, here's one variable I considered, and here's another thought that I took into account, and here's the macroeconomic factors, and here's the impact of the culture of your organization on this situation. And I synthesized all these things because they all matter as it relates to whatever the problem is we're solving. And therefore, I came to that conclusion by actually applying my framework, my model, my methodology on it. And the point of doing it in that way is to move from positioning yourself as, wow, the person that has all the answers to that, plus the person that has a teachable framework, system, model, methodology that others inside of your organization can embrace to solve problems for themselves. So I'd love to hear your thoughts if you've ever felt yourself suffering from being Being the expert and the curse of the expert.
