JINO INSIGHTS

Expertise refers to a special kind of skill or knowledge that an individual can acquire through training, study, or practice in a particular field such as music and arts, sports, medicine, business, leadership, technology, food, etc.

Most often people love to think of it as something that is inborn and can never be learnt, and yet sometimes, as a skill or knowledge that can be obtained in an overnight. Nevertheless, true expertise is neither inborn nor can it be obtained in an overnight.

Building a genuine expertise require years of consistent practice, sacrifice, patience, discipline, and motivation. It’s a journey for the strong hearted, and dedicated ones.

Great experts like the late Kobe Bryant, Serena williams, Christiano Ronaldo, Oprah Winfrey, Ben Carson, steve jobs, and more others did not build expertise in their unique domains out of the blue. They invested time, money, and made sacrifices that other people were never willing to make.

Here are 4 tips adapted from Harvard Business Review to help you in building expertise in any field of your choice.

Practice deliberately. Although building expertise require practice, not every practice is destined to build expertise.

“Living in a cave does not make you a geologist” but rather a specific study and practice in the subject of geology, and so is the development of expertise.

According to the HBR’s “The making of an expert”, a lot of people who practice mainly focus on what they already know. However, there is more to just practicing what is already known. To build real expertise, one should be mindful to flexibly stretch beyond the current set of skills and tap into building those that are lacking or requiring more development.

Take the time you need to become an expert. As mentioned earlier, expertise is never built in an overnight. According to researchers, even the most exceptional performers take over 10 years to begin producing great results, so should you invest more time into into consistent practice, and remain patient as you navigate the journey into expertise.

Find coaches and mentors.

Behind every exceptional performance you see, there are always great coaches and mentors who dedicated their time to nurturing the knowledge and skills in these individuals.

This means we can not completely rely on ourselves to navigate the journey of building expertise in a particular field, but rather need the guidance and support of excellent coaches and mentors at different levels.

Excellent coaches help you accelerate your learning process, give constructive, and even painful feedback. They help to identify aspects of your performance that will need to be improved at every stage of your skills development.

Therefore, to build expertise you should be motivated to seek great coaches and mentors.

Always seek feedback.

Building real expertise also calls for the willingness to be okay with constructive and even painful feedback from coaches, mentors and people around you. It helps to identify what skills need to be developed and improved to propel you further in building you into an expert.