What it takes to be an expert
If you truly are an expert in your field, you should have seen almost everything there is to see in that particular branch. That means you have gone through years of research, learnt by trial and error, and you have also worked for a longer period of time in the field.
Yet no matter how many years experience you have, there is always more to learn, as the addicted2success.com website reminds us.
Are you an expert? Then be careful
The relationship between power (being an expert) and the ability to see other people's perspectives is delicate. During research in which the impact of feeling powerful was examined, participants who had a sense of power were less able to perceive someone else’s point of view.
The relationship between how much powerful you feel and how open you are is inverse. If you are convinced you are a great expert, you may miss many signals and and perceive messages in a distorted way.
This can be dangerous especially for business owners who begin to think of themselves as experts already. Once they start believing they are so great, this reduces their ability to be good listeners or view the world from a different perspective.
And the same applies to the rest of us: it is not good to move from listening to and collaborating with customers to merely stating our opinions and stubbornly insisting on our ideas.
If you believe you are an expert, such behaviour may be tempting. But if you allow yourself to follow that path, you are finished: you will reject criticism and lose the ability to admit mistakes. Then, sooner or later, the consequences will come.
-jk-