Aspire Magazine: Inspiration for a Woman's Soul.(TM) Dec/Jan 2018 Aspire Mag Full Issue: Taking Time fo | Page 88
HERE’S THE BIGGEST PARADOX OF OUR
ENTREPRENEURIAL WORLD:
EXPERT STATUS IS SOMETHING YOU CHOOSE,
NOT SOMETHING THAT’S GIVEN TO YOU.
turn on my visibility like a light switch. Then,
once the world could finally see all I had to
offer, I would be miraculously catapulted into
stardom in my field, where I’d find happiness,
life balance, endless abundance, and
everything I ever wanted.
I just had to be good enough, for long enough,
for that Expert Fairy to notice me. Then, poof!
Success! Expert Status! Validation!
(Bet you can’t guess how THAT worked out.)
I know that many of us have been in this
place. We think we need a fancy title or
30,000 Facebook fans to be certifiably great
at what we do. We think that if we aren’t
instant New York Times best-sellers, our
book is a failure. We think that if our next
course launch doesn’t break seven figures,
we must be doing something wrong. We
have all of these outward measures of
success, and all of them depend on other
people validating the worth of our work. We
see people who have “made it” as somehow
better than we are, with a bigger purpose
and more to offer. Every time we wish for
others to make us bigger, we feel smaller.
I call this “Shark Tank culture”; a false,
cultivated need to have someone “bigger”
than you determine your worthiness to be
seen, shared, and liked. The problem is, worth
that’s bestowed by someone else is as fickle
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as a Twitter trend; it never puts down deep
roots, and can easily be usurped by the Next
Big Thing.
The trouble with this mentality isn’t that
it pushes us to do more and better work.
Constant improvement is a hallmark of
greatness in any field. No, the issue with
waiting for the Expert Fairy (or Shark Tank,
or whatever) is that, by waiting and wishing
and hoping instead of doing and planning
and learning, you’re not acting like the expert
you want to be. You’re acting like a damsel
in distress, waiting for a magical rescue.
Here’s the biggest paradox of our
entrepreneurial world: expert status is
something YOU choose, not something
that’s given to you. When I finally realized
that the Expert Fairy wasn’t going to come
along and pluck me out of my dollars-
per-hour freelancing work, it was like
a revelation. I wasn’t working in near-
invisibility because I wasn’t good enough
to be noticed, but because I CHOSE to
play small in my business―and because,
secretly, I was afraid to claim the mantle of
visibility I’d been telling myself was my due.
Once I really understood that, big things
started to happen.
It takes only two things to be an expert in
your field. Experience and know-how, so
www.AspireMAG.net | December 2017 / January 2018