The Seduction of Expertise

What I find fascinating is that when people envision themselves as experts, they often predict that they will be more closed-minded (Ottati et al. 2015; Calin-Jageman 2018). On the other hand, we seem to allow for people who are seen as experts to be more dogmatic in their opinions than people we see as novices (Ottati et al. 2015; Calin-Jageman 2018). This shows up when people come to an “expert” for help. When we see a doctor, lawyer, therapist, or coach, we may walk in with a willingness to defer to their expertise. And this seems to hold true for most of us. Apparently, experts have an earned right to tell us what we should do, whether or not their wisdom is useful.

And this particular bias impacts how we show up as coaches and therapists specifically, because our job really isn’t to solve problems for people — it’s to support them to move forward in their lives. For therapists it’s in supporting people to heal the wounds of the past and to manage the dysfunction that impacts their daily lives, so they can heal. In coaching it is to move forward in a useful and productive manner toward what’s important for us to accomplish.

As coaches and therapists, our roles can lead us to a slippery slope of interjecting our own expertise. I solved this situation for myself, or I read the book, so this is how you need to do it too. I once had someone who had gotten sober say, “If you want what I have, you have to do what I have done.” Maybe if it’s “stop drinking,” and I will agree, to be sober, then “stop drinking” is the one thing we have to do. But “do what I do to get what I have,” that’s a big statement, a huge assumption, and literally easier said than done. We probably shouldn’t assume that what worked for us will work for someone else.

If I am going to assume something, my expertise says, “Maybe each person knows their life better than I know their life.”

Mille viae ducunt homines per saecula Romam, or in English, a thousand roads lead men forever to Rome. Basically, there are probably as many ways to do the thing as there are people to do it. So, we need to be mindful of why people come to see us in the first place. They may think they want us to “help” them by fixing their lives, being the expert for their relationships, resolving their problems, but what if, in fact, the need is to “help” them learn to help themselves. Then your expertise is about being a useful thought partner, not a fixer.

Why People Come to Coaching and Therapy

The reason people often come to coaching or therapy is because there is a problem or issue of some sort that is impacting their life. It’s that gap between knowledge and execution.

In coaching, the problem isn’t a mental illness that is devastating and stops them from moving forward in their life, which is often what is going on with therapy. In coaching, the problem is that there is an abundance of information. Again, they have the blueprint. The bigger issue is that there’s a  gap between having all the information and actually taking action toward what it is they say is important to them. They’re stuck.

“I have read all the leadership books, but when my team messes up, I lose my s#*t. I know what I need to do; I just can’t put it into practice effectively.” This is when they need a coach.

The Library of Knowing

Most people become coaches and therapists because they love helping people, they may have already survived their own dramas and feel like they have wisdom to share to support others to survive their dramas. But, it’s super easy to slip into the expert role. As mentioned, you may feel like an expert, and those you work with may also see you as an expert. This is where we need to pay attention to the indicators that we may be slipping into the expert role.

One of the first indicators happens when we stop being curious and asking questions.

We may discover in conversations that we are so busy thinking of solutions that we aren’t actually present with what the client/thinker is sharing with us. Our minds have run off into solving problems and we cease to listen.

I recently had a coaching session in which the client/thinker discussed what happens when they are trying too hard in a conversation to “help” the person they are talking with, that they exit from curiosity about what is emerging in the conversation and go straight into the Library of Knowing, and start riffling through all the stuff they know, so that they can give the right information. But this steers the conversation into the coach’s expertise versus their client/thinker getting to insights or owned awareness. At a fundamental level, when our expertise gets engaged, it steals the client/thinker’s learning.

And, I haven’t found that there are blueprints we can follow for imposter syndrome, anger management, unrealistic expectations, complicated difficult conversations, or any of the deeper issues that require us to do work for ourselves, to understand the why, the what, the where to now, and then how to support ourselves to practice with new ways of being. No experts exist who can do this work for us, only we can resolve these problems for ourselves. Fundamentally it’s an inside job.

To Wrap Up

And so, from this perspective, as a coach specifically, but also as a therapist, we need to become very clear about what our role is in the process of developing insight between information and execution. There is a really seductive quality to having people come to us as the expert, for us to be the sensei or wise one on the mountaintop. And yet, for most of us, our insights, agency, learning, and ultimately our growth are what matters most. Expertise should inform our curiosity, not our answers.

So, as a coach or therapist, what do you notice when you’ve slipped out of presence and curiosity with those you work with? And, how do you bring yourself back into a more useful role?

References

Calin-Jageman, Robert J. 2018. “Direct Replications of Ottati et al. (2015): The Earned Dogmatism Effect Occurs Only with Some Manipulations of Expertise.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 78: 240–49.

Ottati, Victor, Erika D. Price, Chase Wilson, and Nathanael Sumaktoyo. 2015. “When Self-Perceptions of Expertise Increase Closed-Minded Cognition: The Earned Dogmatism Effect.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 61: 131–38.

AI Disclosure:

I developed my ideas, thoughts, and wrote every sentence in my article. I used AI (Claude) as a developmental and copy editor, for structure, grammar, and the Chicago Manual of Style. I also used AI as a research assistant, and to write the citations.

Credits

Photos: All shared via images on Unsplash.com. These are the featured artists: Woman with rolling hills – Uran Wang, Sphere – Yeshi Kangrang, and Blue Sky  – Sam Moghadam. Thank you for sharing your art!

All Photo copyright retained by photo owners, everything else ©2014 - to present Lyssa deHart