In this day and age when everyone has access to information at their fingertips, it’s very easy for people to fool themselves into believing that they know all there is to know about a particular topic.
Just take the Covid-19 example where self-declared experts questioned or dismissed the scientific facts and recommendations made by epidemiologists. These are health professionals who have spent years studying, researching and investigating patterns and causes of disease in humans. Yet, as we saw, there were people who thought they knew better than all the experts combined, based on something they ‘researched’ on the internet.
Sadly, these days we see this happen across all professional disciplines. People who develop their expertise through study, research, and then go on to further develop their expertise through practical application in their careers, well, they can find themselves facing these self-proclaimed ‘experts’ who can cause serious harm to individuals or organisations.
I certainly come across this from time to time in my organisational change management work and in fact, I’ll bet that anyone who is an accredited and experienced change manager has come across someone who will boldly state “I’ve done change management before” and then go on to tell you how you will have to run some roadshows and create a newsletter for them.
Take any discipline – law, accounting, science, medicine – any professional field, and you will inevitably come across someone who wants to tell you how to do your job.
The thing is, if they knew how to do your job – they’d be doing it. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have come to you.
So, what does it come down to?
Credentials and experience.
When you’re looking for professional support in an area that you aren’t an expert in, the right credentials and experience are something you need to verify. There is a lot at stake. Particularly for organisations. Regulatory compliance breaches have bitten many organisations on the butt.
When it comes to getting life coaching support, it’s no different. You don’t want to risk achieving your goals by engaging the wrong person. You need to ensure that your prospective coach has the qualifications, skills and experience that they need in order to give you the guidance and support that you need.
But once that’s been established, your job is to be supported – not to dictate how the coach, or whichever expert, is supporting you.
An analogy I use both in my corporate and coaching work is that of getting a personal trainer.
Imagine if you have a goal of getting fitter so you engage a personal trainer because the things you’ve tried in the past haven’t worked. Then, rather than allowing the trainer to assess your current level of fitness and design a program that will get you to your goal, you agree to meet with them each week but then you just get them to stand next to you and hold your towel and water bottle while you do the same exercises that you’ve always done.
That’s just not going to work.
If doing what you’ve always done didn’t work, then getting someone else to do what you have always done won’t work either.
If trying to create change in your organisation by doing the same things that you’ve always done hasn’t worked, then bringing on a change manager to do things the way you’ve always done them, that’s not going to work either.
If your solo gym workout didn’t make you any fitter, then hiring a personal trainer to stand by while you do the same gym workout won’t work either. If it had worked, you wouldn’t need the personal trainer.
If trying to create change in your life by simply reading the latest self-help books or blogs hasn’t worked in getting you to take any action, then engaging a life coach so you can talk about coaching won’t work either. The coach will keep you accountable for taking action, not for reading about what actions you should be taking.
An expert telling you what you want to hear is not going to give you the results you want to create. The reason you engage experts is because of what they bring – all that knowledge and experience.
Simply reading up on something on the internet or in a book is not the same as years of study, research and experience. That’s what the people who have invested all that time, money and energy into their field have done to develop their expertise.
That’s why they’re the experts. That’s why you engage them.
Your part is to allow yourself to be guided and supported.
