Sqoosh Your Inner Critic!

Limiting Belief

But I’m not an expert!

Positive Affirmation

Even though I’m not an expert at anything, I deeply and completely accept myself anyway…And I’m willing to instead, focus on the personal experiences I can share with others so that we can all learn from each other.

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“At what point will I become an expert?!”

I came across this 2-part article on “Becoming an Expert” (part one and part two).

Here’s a snippet that I feel hit a cord with me:

“To become a self-publishing expert, I joined the Self-Publishing Yahoo group, and asked a bunch of questions. The people there were very helpful and informative. I also bought and read a couple of books on self-publishing. But by the time I read one of the books, I already knew two-thirds of the material from my web research. I could have practically written that book! The bar to being an expert is far lower than we’re led to believe.”

Kyeli and Pace (authors of The Usual Error) make some insights that I can definitely relate to, and I wish I had come across these articles when I first started to go public with my writing!

Reading these two articles have also inspired me to muse about my own journey to claiming expert status.

During the first few weeks of starting this blog I would say to myself, “But I’m not an expert!  All I know is I’ve tried a lot of things; some things worked and some things haven’t.  I just want to share what I know…is this enough?!”

For days I would go on and on about this, firmly believing that I needed to answer this question and feel like an expert before I could go on and publicize my Blog and write the ebooks I had planned.

I asked friends and mentors what they thought:  “Am I an expert? What defines an expert?  What am I an expert of?  How can I feel more like an expert?  Am I even qualified to write on a Blog about recovering from Inner Criticisms?  I know some things but my journey isn’t over yet…I still battle with my Inner Critic demon in some areas of my life…Does this mean I’m unqualified to write and teach about it?”

The tipping point…

The interesting thing I discovered about focusing on whether or not I was an expert is that in doing so, I was no longer connected to the reason why I wanted to start SqooshYourCritic.  And that reason was to share my personal journey and tips, insights, resources that have helped me succeed at gaining emotional freedom from my Inner Critic.

Focusing on “Am I an expert?” seemed like a dead-end.

Ask yourself a different question…

I didn’t receive any beneficial answers from that and so I decided to try something else, asking myself a new question:  “What do I have to share with my readers that could help them recover from their Inner Critics?”

This question prompted me to write an on-going  list of things I felt were valuable in my own recovery that could be shared on this Blog. The result was a lot more freeing and allowed me to follow through on launching this Blog and sticking to it.

So maybe, the QBQ (Question Behind the Question) is this:

What can you share with others so that they can learn from your experiences?

What defines experience?

What I’ve had to remind myself is that there are many ways to draw upon “experience”:

• Books I’ve read that helped me
• Books I’ve read that I could have done without
• Words people have said to me that upon hearing I found deep healing, or had an “ah-Ha!” moment
• Projects that didn’t work out, and Why (formerly known as “failures” )
• Projects that did work out, and Why
• Incidences in my life where I did something the hard way and now wish for others to learn the “easy” way–From me

The answer is…

So to answer the question, “At what point will I become an expert?” I believe the answer is:  When I decided to see myself as someone whose knowledge and experience could help some ONE out there in the World.  It doesn’t mean that I think I have all the answers, nor does it mean that I think I’m done learning.  I simply have some knowledge and some successes that I can start helping others who find themselves in similar situations I had been in.

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What is your experience with the word “Expert”?

Please tell us your story or insights by dropping a comment below!

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