Some of the most capable people are terrible at explaining why they are valuable.
Ask them what they do and they will give you their job title. Ask what they are particularly good at and they may shrug, mention a few responsibilities, then wander straight past the interesting part. Ten minutes later, they will casually describe how they rescued a multimillion-dollar project, built a team from scratch, solved a problem nobody else could untangle or developed a process that everyone in the business now uses.
Then they will say something like, “Oh, anyone could have done that.”
Usually, anyone could not.
Expertise becomes normal when you live with it every day
Spend long enough doing something and your own ability starts to feel ordinary.
A senior accountant may look at a set of numbers and spot something unusual within minutes. An experienced salesperson can hear hesitation in a client’s voice and know which question to ask next. A brilliant facilitator can sense when a room is stuck and change the conversation before anybody else has even identified the problem.
To the person doing it, the response can feel almost automatic. Years of experience have compressed dozens of tiny observations and decisions into instinct.
That can make expertise difficult to recognise from the inside.
You remember the final answer. You may barely notice the hundreds of pieces of knowledge that allowed you to reach it.
The things you find easy may be the things other people would happily pay for
One of the most useful questions you can ask yourself is surprisingly simple: what do other people find difficult that you find easy?
Perhaps people regularly ask you to review something before it goes out. Maybe you are always the person asked to deal with the difficult client, organise the messy project, present to the board or make sense of an idea that has become hopelessly tangled.
Pay attention to those patterns.
People often treat these requests as random extras around their “real job”. Over a career, they can reveal some of the most valuable parts of your professional capability.
If five different workplaces have somehow ended up asking you to solve the same kind of problem, there may be something worth investigating there.
Smart people know how much they don’t know
Deep expertise can also give people an unusually good view of the size of the subject.
The more you know about strategy, law, technology, marketing, finance or almost any complicated field, the more nuance you can see. You know where the exceptions live. You can see the unanswered questions. You have met people whose knowledge goes much deeper than yours in particular corners of the field.
That can make broad declarations of expertise feel uncomfortable.
Meanwhile, somebody with considerably less experience may have no such hesitation. They have learnt twelve things about a subject, feel rather pleased about all twelve of them, and are already halfway through updating their LinkedIn headline.
There is something quite endearing about that level of enthusiasm.
There is also a lesson in it.
You can acknowledge the edges of your knowledge and still communicate the depth you have already earned.
High standards can distort your internal measuring system
Capable people often compare their work against an unusually high benchmark.
They remember the presentation that could have been sharper, the project that ran over budget, the client they could have handled differently, or the tiny detail they would change if they did it again. Their internal review panel is permanently in session.
Everyone else may be looking at the overall result and thinking, That was bloody impressive.
This matters because your internal benchmark influences how you describe your work. When excellent feels normal and exceptional feels like the minimum acceptable standard, you can start talking about major achievements as though you merely popped down to the dairy for milk.
A useful exercise is to remove yourself from the story for a moment. Imagine somebody else had achieved exactly what you achieved. How would you describe their contribution?
You may find your language changes considerably.
Kiwi modesty can turn the volume down even further
New Zealand has its own interesting relationship with self-promotion.
We tend to appreciate people who are capable and reasonably down to earth. Plenty of us were raised with some version of “don’t get too big for your boots”, and most New Zealanders can detect a skerrick of bullshit from several suburbs away.
That instinct has some excellent qualities. It can also make talented people extraordinarily cautious about talking about themselves.
There is a huge amount of room between keeping completely quiet and becoming old mate on LinkedIn who has apparently revolutionised an entire industry before smoko.
You can talk accurately about what you have done. You can explain what you are excellent at. You can tell people where your experience is unusually strong. You can take credit for work you genuinely contributed to.
Accuracy is a very good place to start.
Job titles can hide enormous amounts of ability
Sometimes people undersell themselves because they have become accustomed to describing their career through roles rather than capabilities.
“I’m an operations manager.”
“I work in HR.”
“I’m an executive assistant.”
“I’m in marketing.”
Those descriptions give us a rough location on the map. They tell us very little about what actually happens when that person gets to work.
Two people with the same title can have completely different levels of judgement, influence, technical ability, commercial understanding, leadership, creativity and experience. One may perform the expected duties competently. Another may quietly become the person holding half the organisation together.
This becomes especially important when somebody is changing careers, considering consultancy or starting a business. The old title may provide only a small clue to what they could take into their next orbit.
Look for the things people trust you with
Trust leaves clues.
Who gets asked to handle the important client? Who is asked to present when senior leaders are in the room? Who gets brought into a project once it becomes complicated? Who is given the awkward conversation, the ambiguous brief or the problem nobody quite knows how to solve?
Those decisions tell you something about how other people perceive your abilities.
The same applies outside your formal responsibilities. Perhaps colleagues constantly come to you for advice. Perhaps clients call you before they have even decided what they need. Maybe people ask you to introduce them to others because they trust your judgement.
These are pieces of professional evidence.
Add enough of them together and a picture starts appearing on the radar.
Learn to describe the difference you make
A job description tells people what you were responsible for. Your professional story becomes far more interesting when you can explain what changed because you were there.
Perhaps a project started moving again. A team became more capable. A client relationship recovered. Revenue grew. A process became simpler. An idea became a business. A complicated decision finally got made.
Sometimes the difference is measurable. Sometimes it appears in the way people worked, decided, communicated or responded.
Either way, look beyond the list of tasks.
Ask yourself: What became possible because I knew how to do what I do?
That question can uncover far more useful language than another afternoon rearranging bullet points on your CV.
Other people can help you discover what you have stopped seeing
If you struggle to identify your strongest capabilities, borrow somebody else’s perspective.
Ask former colleagues, clients, managers or people who know your work well what they think you are particularly good at. Ask when they would recommend you to somebody. Ask what they have seen you do that they believe is unusual.
Then listen carefully.
There is a decent chance you will want to dismiss some of the answers. Resist that reflex for a moment. If several people independently describe the same capability, there is useful information sitting in front of you.
Sometimes the people around us can see our professional gravity long before we recognise it ourselves.
Stop treating your expertise as background scenery
Years of experience have a strange way of disappearing into the wallpaper.
You know what you know because you spent years learning it, practising it, getting things wrong, watching other people, solving problems and gradually building judgement. The finished capability can feel effortless because all that work happened over such a long period.
Someone standing at the beginning of that path would see it very differently.
So look again at the things you have started taking for granted. Pay attention to what people ask you for. Notice what feels unusually easy. Read the recommendations people have written about you. Think about the situations where others trust you to take the controls.
There may be a lot more sitting in your professional toolkit than you have been giving yourself credit for.
And if you are preparing for your next career move, starting a consultancy or thinking about what you could offer the market, that discovery could change your entire flight plan.
