If you have read some of my other articles, you know that I started my career in Central and Eastern Europe in the mid-1990s. The Cold War was over, the Soviet Union was collapsing, and I was coming out of America with a new PhD in organisational psychology. I was the barely adult from Chicago standing in front of a room full of senior executives who had built entire careers inside Soviet institutions and communism. Now they were being asked to learn capitalism. In English. By an American half their age.
I’ve used that story more in recent years, to reassure senior leaders that Snapchat isn’t Cyrillic (and even that line has aged because Snapchat…). I wanted those who were mastering new social media algorithms, or Gen Z communication expectations, or whatever is the latest crisis (or not) to know the learning curve could be a lot worse. Those men were navigating an entire seismic shift in geopolitics. (Seriously — the Clintons sat in on one of my classes in Moscow.) They were dealing with a near existential change in how they did things.
Expertise is earned. That doesn’t mean that it’s static.
So it remains true that those leaders were undergoing a shift in how they made business decisions and understood the marketplace for decades. But it is also true that it’s one thing to offer that perspective when you’re on the expert side of the conversation. I’ve been coaching and developing senior leaders my whole career. For most of it the clients were far more experienced. They recognised my value was helping them learn to keep thinking differently.
Now, I’ve spent about three decades advising organisations on leadership and corporate culture, working with CEOs and boards and senior teams. And now I’m still the one advising — but also aware it was time to learn again. And that was tough. Somewhere along the way you stop thinking of your methodology as even capable of waning. Experience is real, and it compounds, and it’s the reason we gain (deserved) confidence. And yet, it doesn’t mean that our own ability to further evolve can or should stop. Recently I challenged that, and the lessons were bigger than the subject matter.
A group of colleagues suggested that we earn a new coaching credential together. And my first instinct was no. Not for the most professionally respectful reasons, either. Psychologists and coaches have historically regarded each other with a certain wariness. Different training, different frameworks. I had managed to build a career without an International Coaching Federation credential, and something about getting one now felt more like conceding to new optics, rather than substance. (I know, I know…we’re getting to the I learned my lesson part quickly.)
So we committed as a group to the Professional Certified Coach (PCC) level, which requires 500+ hours of coaching experience. For reasons I won’t bore you with, I eventually found myself on track for the Master Certified Coach (MCC), which requires more than 2,500 hours. I had the hours of experience – and that was part the problem.
I had by that time accepted it was something worth doing and I had the experience to do the highest level. What I didn’t anticipate was that the experience was going to make the process harder, not easier.
When experience becomes the obstacle. Part of the MCC process involves recording your coaching sessions and submitting them for evaluation. By yourself first, then most people reach out to peers. Finally, blind assessors actually evaluate your performance, and whether you pass. So, step one: I sat and listened to myself.
First, I don’t know anyone who likes listening to their own voice. (Ok — I don’t know anyone I like, who likes listening to their own voice.) So, there’s that immediate discomfort. And what I heard was not a disaster. But I heard places where the process was not as thoughtful as I believed. I could tell where my brain was moving faster past questions worth examining simply because I was confident based on prior outcomes. Small things. Things that, a more generous version of me would say — only an expert would notice. In fact, it’s what I would say to a client: your ability to evaluate yourself this critically is itself a strong sign of how much expertise you really have.
Turns out, Robert-as-Student didn’t care if Robert-as-Expert thought I was competent. Knowing I sounded worse than I expected — even with a very well-articulated self-assessment — wasn’t comforting at all.
I went to a colleague, who graciously listened and said with convincing certainty that there were places for improvement but a lot of strong process and communication. The process of speaking about my recordings with another peer was the very level of review that indicated I had to be performing at a certain level. Yes, it is just as ego-driven as it sounds. But it’s also true. The discomfort of learning in an area where you are very fluent is a distorted sense that expertise means unable to develop. There’s a weird threat to being an expert if you also say you learned something new.
Expertise makes you raise the bar and increase scrutiny…and self-criticism.
Being an expert actually makes you raise the bar much higher. My recordings were ultimately accepted by the assessors and I earned the credential. I am really confident that no one was listening with an ear as harsh as my own. And yet the lesson is not that I heard places to improve, but that the ability to recognise it is its own level of expertise. I used to advise Olympic athletes and their coaches. The person who is looking for help to shave half a second off their speed is already an expert. And has room for improvement.
Both things are true, but hard to hold at the same time. Jung wrote that we spend the first half of our lives building the ego and the second half managing it. I’ve known that quote since graduate school. Intellectually. It lands pretty differently in the managing half than it did in the building half.
That’s absolutely been a lesson worth learning for me. On a personal level it expands my openness to scrutiny that doesn’t collapse into indictment. To allow my expertise to be intact, even if it needs to update my experience. And it turns out it’s harder than I realized, even though I help people do it every day, ever since those executives in Budapest.
I was asking them, from a position of considerable confidence in their own expertise, to sit with the discomfort of having their professional identities examined and revised. I thought I understood what that asked of them. I understood the theory as a psychologist. Now I have the psychological experience. What I finally understand now, is not the expectations of the teacher in front for you but the harsh challenges of what you expect of yourself. Different lessons, new expertise.
