Welcome to the inaugural Transformative Letter, a letter written with a single goal: help you unlock lasting impact. Thank you for being an early adopter! I hope you find the growth you want out of it.
The Transformative Letter is the only place I’ll share some of my key insights outside of 1:1 coaching sessions. Even if you have been following me on LinkedIn or were among the hundreds I have taught over the years, it’s highly unlikely I ever shared with you what I write in those letters.
And this first Letter is a perfect example of that:
Two Expertises
The Cambridge Dictionary describes expertise as “a high level of knowledge or skill”. It’s what you are good at, what you can (hopefully) build a career out of, or monetize.
This is what we all focus on throughout our careers. It’s about mastering our crafts, writing better code, performing more robust data analysis, or improving our stage presence. It’s about what we are physically capable of, and expanding the quality and the impact of our work.
Fundamentally, expertise is what allows you to excel at your job.
But - because there obviously is a but to this - expertise doesn’t land you opportunities.
No one, and I mean no one, has ever landed a job, client, or consulting project because of how good they were at what they do.
Whenever a door is opened to anyone, it’s the other type of expertise that sprung into action.
The Other Expertise: the Perceived kind
Perceived expertise is the other side of the coin. The one no one stops to think about, but is oh fundamental.
If expertise is a high level of knowledge or skill, perceived expertise is “the level of knowledge or skills someone else believes you have”.
People don’t hire you because of how good you are. They hire you based on how good they think you are.
And that difference matters tremendously. Opportunities will come to you based on someone’s belief that you can get the job done. They have no way of knowing whether you will actually succeed, they may be more or less confident in your ability to succeed, but no one knows for certain whether a bet (because those decisions are bets) will pay off.
Let’s back that claim with a very simple example. Let’s say you spent the last 10 years learning to code, spending at least 8 hours a day coding, and you’ve gotten rather good at it. But because you’re the humble type, you never let anyone know about it. Not a soul.
Then, one day, your best friend meets a startup founder who is desperate for someone with your exact skill set, a match made in Heaven, as they say. Will they recommend you? How could they, if they don’t even know you code? Opportunity: missed.
Disappointed that they didn’t put you forward, you decide you want to apply for a role as a senior developer, fully confident that your coding skills mean you can easily deliver to the expected standard. Problem is, there is no mention of coding on your CV. Not even a personal project. What are the odds of being called for the interview? Pretty slim, you haven’t given them a reason to believe you would succeed, you have failed to convey your perceived expertise.
Here’s how I often summarise to my coaching clients:
Perceived expertise gets you hired,
Expertise means you keep your job
Mastering the Dance of the Expertises
Perceived expertise is what opens the door for you. I do want to hammer that point, because of how profoundly fundamental it is:
You are never given the opportunities you deserve, you are only given the opportunities other people believe you can deliver on.
This means that for you to land a job, you need to convince other people that you can do the job - that’s literally what the hiring game is about. The only thing that matters here, the only thing that factors in the decision-making is whether or not you manage to convince them that you can do the job. Whether you can or can’t, at this precise moment, is irrelevant.
Your Perceived Expertise lands you the job. Your Expertise means you deliver (or not) on the job. Later on, your Perceived Expertise lands you the opportunity to get promoted. Your Expertise proves it was the right decision.
The best way to visualise the interplay of the two expertises is through a good old Venn Diagram.
That means that every opportunity fits into one of three categories:
Opportunities where you convince people you can deliver, and you actually do
Opportunities where you convince people you can deliver, but you don’t have the skills to come through (yet?)
Opportunities you would be absolutely brilliant at, but you simply cannot convince anyone to believe you
Scenario 1 is where every hire should ideally be. Scenario 2 could be a stretch assignment that you could grow into (the old Richard Branson “say you can and then figure it out”) or that you simply aren’t qualified for (I’ll tell you about my stint as a VP of sales one day). Finally, scenario 3 is the frustrating one: you know you can do it, but no one is giving you that opportunity, and you never fulfill your potential; typically, that’s the one that has driven a lot of my coaching clients to work with me.
Applying this to your career
In practical terms, this distinction of the two expertises means two fundamental shifts in terms of how you should approach your career. This is where the lightbulb goes off with most of my coaching clients, so hang on tight!
1. A Thriving career is one where you constantly alternate between the two
The importance of each expertise will differ based on where you are in your career, and so should your focus.
When you are looking for a new role, or a promotion, your focus should be squarely on providing evidence and proof points that give people reasons to believe you can deliver. You need to build Perceived Expertise above actual expertise.
In practical terms, this means
Creating content that highlights your point of views on your chosen channel
Attending industry conferences and finding a way to get on that stage
Doing personal projects, because outputs scream louder than words
Here, it is key to resist the temptation to build your actual expertise. This is not the time: not only is this not going to move the needle, it is rarely a productive time, as you don’t know ahead of time what expertise you will actually need when you land an opportunity (the caveat here, obviously, is that I am assuming you are going for the intersection of the Venn, or one on the edge of it).
To move the needle while you are looking for an opportunity, you need to focus on convincing people you can do it. Anything else is procrastination.
Now, let’s say you have an offer in hand. You managed to convince someone you could pull this off. The moment the ink has dried, it is time to do a complete and uncompromising switch of focus towards actual expertise. Look at what they believe you can do, and put your whole in proving them right. Relentlessly focus on proving them right, i.e., ensuring your Expertise can indeed deliver on the Perceived Expertise you cultivated. It’s that simple.
Fortunately, your expertise only start to matter when you start working on that project, so this typically means a few weeks of intense focus of getting ready to hit Homerun with the opportunity - hence the pseudo-productive nature of working on your expertise any earlier.
As you go through your career, you alternate your focus, and you keep going at it, building up and flexing the right muscle, at the right time. That is the backbone to a smart and sensible career strategy.
2. The greater the overlap in the Venn, the better the opportunities
Another very practical way of putting this concept into practice is to think about the overlap of the Venns (the size of the bubbles is another dimension, and I am sure you can extrapolate from here).
The bigger the overlap between what you can do, and what people think you can do, the better the opportunities you get. Your goal is to work towards the Perfect fit, where people are very clear on what you can do, and they actually believe it’s true. However, the Perfect Fit is purely aspirational and out of reach - you don’t know what you are capable of, how could others, who have more to think about that how awesome you are (and I am sure you are, awesome)?
Key prompt for you to reflect on:
What would add more value to me: expanding my zone of Expertise, or closing the gap between Perceived & Actual?
Closing Notes
Bear in mind that you haven’t signed up for Transformative Letter because of my expertise. You signed up because you were either curious, felt you weren’t getting enough emails, or your perception of my expertise compelled you to.
Now you’ve read this first piece you have some further evidence that will either confirm or disconfirm whether signing up was a wise choice. I have shared some of my expertise with you, but ultimately, it is what you think of it that will influence how you behave next: whether you take on that concept and apply it to your career (you should!) or discard it and unsubscribe (please tell me where you disagree instead!).
Thank you for signing-up. I hope that you feel that this first Transformative Letter lived up to the promise of delivering insights that can have a lasting impact. If you think it did, why not be a conduit to more people benefiting from it?