How to Position Yourself as an Expert Without Feeling Like You Have to Big Yourself Up
Do you love helping people? Yep. Me too.
I love being useful. I love supporting people. I love being able to look at something that's causing someone a problem and help them untangle it.
But I've been thinking recently about how easily "I just want to help" can creep into the way we talk about our businesses, and whether it sometimes does us a bit of a disservice.
Because wanting to help someone doesn't necessarily tell them that you're the right person to help them.
And when somebody is deciding whether to hand over their money, business, website, health or whatever else it is you work with, they're probably not looking for somebody who simply seems nice and helpful. They're looking for somebody they trust to actually solve the problem.
That's where learning how to position yourself as an expert becomes important.
Not because you need to become louder, more impressive or start wandering around announcing that you're the world's leading authority on absolutely everything.
But because there is a difference between saying "I'd love to help" and giving somebody a reason to trust that you know what you're doing.
Why we downplay our expertise in business
I've noticed that a lot of very capable people are incredibly comfortable talking about wanting to help, but considerably less comfortable talking about why they're actually very good at the thing they're helping with.
Helping feels nice. Claiming expertise can feel... less nice. Particularly when you run your own business.
Nobody gave you a promotion into this role. There wasn't necessarily a moment where somebody sat you down, handed you a certificate and said, "Congratulations, you may now officially consider yourself an expert."
Obviously, some professions do involve qualifications and certifications, but even then, running your own business can involve taking years of skills, knowledge and experience and applying them in a slightly different context.
So we hedge.
We say we help with things rather than saying what we actually do. We talk about supporting people without mentioning the results we're creating. We soften our experience because we don't want to sound arrogant.
And gradually, the person reading our LinkedIn profile or About page ends up with a much smaller picture of our abilities than the one our existing clients would probably give them.
If you want to position yourself as an expert, give people a reason to trust you
I had a slightly ridiculous real-life example of this recently involving a horse.
I was driving through a village near where I live and saw a woman on a horse who was having trouble getting past a field containing some young horses.
I stopped and asked whether she wanted any help. She said no. Her mum was just down the hill. That’s Fair enough.
I got back into my car, drove down the hill and saw her mum. I opened the window and explained that I was on my way to see the horse I ride and asked whether they wanted a hand.
Her mum shouted up the road: "She's horsey. Let her help."
And apparently that was all the authority I needed 😂 I got out, walked through the village with the horse and everything was fine.
But I've thought about that interaction quite a lot since because there were two versions of me offering exactly the same help.
The first was essentially a random woman getting out of a car saying, "Would you like some help?" Why would she trust me? For all she knew, I'd never been near a horse in my life.
The second version had one tiny piece of additional information attached. She's horsey.
Suddenly there was an assumption that I had a certain amount of experience. There was shared knowledge. I probably understood what was happening and wasn't going to require her to explain everything to me.
The help hadn't changed. The perceived authority behind it had, and if that tiny authority marker matters when somebody is deciding whether to accept five minutes of free help from a stranger, imagine how much it matters when somebody is deciding whether to spend hundreds or thousands of pounds working with your business.
What are your authority markers?
If you're trying to position yourself as an expert in your industry, I don't think the answer is necessarily to start describing yourself as an expert.
Instead, think about what gives you authority. Where are you, to use the technical terminology, absolutely shit hot? Maybe you've got specialist technical knowledge. Perhaps you've got qualifications or certifications that matter. Maybe you've lived through the exact process you now help other people navigate.
You might have developed a particular framework because you've repeatedly seen the same problem and worked out a better way of solving it.
Or perhaps you've been doing this for years and have a considerable amount of evidence that you're very good at getting a particular result.
Those are all authority markers.
And I think they're particularly useful because they allow you to demonstrate expertise rather than simply telling everyone you're an expert.
That's a distinction I'm much more comfortable with.
Look at the results you actually create
One of the biggest things I encourage my clients to look at is results. What are you actually good at getting results in?
I think this gets lost surprisingly often in marketing because we become so focused on describing what we do. We list services, we explain processes, we tell people we're friendly and approachable and passionate about helping them. All lovely things.
But what changes because somebody worked with you?
One of my clients, Danny Prince-Brand, is a web developer who is fed up with seeing small businesses struggle with their websites. Danny genuinely loves helping people. That's part of what makes him good at what he does.
But if all Danny tells people is that he loves helping small businesses with their websites, he's leaving out quite a significant part of the picture.
He's a web developer. He has technical expertise. He understands websites in a way that the person struggling with theirs doesn't. He can solve problems they can't solve themselves.
That's why they need him.
The desire to help makes the experience of working with him better, but the expertise is what gives people a reason to trust him with the problem in the first place.
And I think many of us could do with checking whether our marketing is communicating both.
Building authority in business doesn't mean becoming less human
I think this is one of the reasons people resist the idea of authority.
We imagine that building authority in business means becoming terribly polished and professional and pretending we know absolutely everything.
It doesn't.
You can be an authority and still be a person. You can know a huge amount about your specialist area and still have gaps in your knowledge. You can have an impressive track record and still make mistakes. You can be highly skilled and still occasionally Google something incredibly basic.
The two things aren't mutually exclusive.
Being an authority simply means that for a particular problem, you have knowledge, experience or skill that makes you somebody people can reasonably trust to help them solve it.
I think that's a much less uncomfortable way of thinking about expertise. You're not claiming superiority over everyone else, you're acknowledging what you know.
Sometimes you need to remind yourself of your own expertise
I have a note stuck to my computer.
It says:
"My client relationships have evolved from excitement and inspiration-driven based on testing and novelty to strategic and transformational based on my proven track record."
It's there because I need the reminder. I'm really comfortable with the testing stage. I'm good at saying, "I've got an idea, do you want to try this?"
That feels fun.
Stepping into being a strategic partner and owning the transformational change I can create for a business owner has taken considerably more work.
And the funniest thing is that while recording a recent podcast episode, I caught myself doing exactly what I was talking about.
I started saying that I was a strategic partner helping with transformational change. Then I realised what I'd done.
No.
I'm a strategic partner making sure that transformational change can happen within the businesses I work with.
It's tiny. But listen to the difference. One makes me sound like I'm standing beside somebody being encouraging while they do the work.
The other acknowledges my role in creating the result, and I literally had my reminder sitting in front of me while I was doing it.
This stuff is reflexive.
Where are you making yourself sound smaller than you are?
This is the bit I'd encourage you to look at in your own marketing.
Go and read your LinkedIn profile, read your About page, look at how you introduce yourself when somebody asks what you do at a networking event.
How much of the language is about helping and supporting? And how much tells me why I should trust you to do it?
You don't necessarily need to rewrite everything. Sometimes it's one qualifier. It's "I'm horsey" rather than "Would you like some help?"
It's mentioning the qualification, it's explaining the experience, it's sharing the result, it's owning the framework you've developed, it's saying that you do something rather than tentatively saying you help people with it.
These are small changes, but they can completely change how somebody perceives your business.
They also affect referrals.
If your clients understand precisely where your expertise lies, they're much better equipped to tell somebody else why they should work with you.
Position yourself as an expert without pretending to be somebody else
I don't want this to become another piece of business advice telling you to be louder. I don't think everybody needs to become a thought leader.
You don't have to start posting controversial opinions on LinkedIn because somebody told you that's how you build authority, and you definitely don't need to create an inflated version of yourself that feels completely ridiculous to maintain.
For me, learning to position yourself as an expert is much simpler than that. It's about making sure the way you talk about yourself reflects what is already true.
You've developed knowledge, you've gained experience, you've solved problems, you've created results.
You've probably got clients who can describe your strengths far more enthusiastically than you currently describe them yourself.
So perhaps the question isn't whether you're allowed to call yourself an authority.
Perhaps it's: What are you already an authority on that you aren't quite owning yet? And what would happen if you allowed that to take up a little more space in the way you talk about your business?
You can still love helping people. You can still be warm, approachable and thoroughly human. Just don't let being helpful become the thing that hides how bloody good you are at the helping.
Want some help untangling how you're positioning your business?
If this has made you wonder whether you're downplaying what you do, you can book a free Solutions Session with me and we can look at what's currently getting lost in your messaging and where you might need to own your expertise a little more.
If you’d like to explore this a little further, I talk more about owning your expertise, building authority and the way we communicate what we’re actually good at in this episode of Start With Seonaidh. Have a listen here.
