#167: Own Your Expertise and Your Desire to Share It

 //Do you ever feel frustrated that others don’t seem to grasp the value of what your expertise can offer them?  Getting buy-in from others sometimes requires some self-reflection on your part first.

In this episode, Andrea discusses her own process of recognizing the things that kept her from owning her voice so that not only could she connect her gifts with the needs in the world but she could also help others use their gifts effectively.  Take some time today to clarify your purpose so that you can more effectively offer your expertise to others!

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Transcript

Hey there!  It’s Andrea, and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast.  Today, we’re going to be talking about sales.  And the thing is, is that we’re going to take a little bit of a roundabout way to get there because, quite frankly, I think a lot of us took a roundabout way to get to the idea of having to sell something.

For you, if you’re somebody who has expertise, then you have an idea or you have expertise that you need to get into the hands of the people that need it.  So, getting the actual information into somebody else’s orbit is one thing, but to have them take it in and actually apply it, to buy into what you have to say, this is a completely different thing than just putting it out there.  So that’s what we’re going to be talking about here today and in the next couple of weeks.

Next week, I interview Finka Jerkovic about her book, Sell From Love, which, I think, if you have a hard time with selling at all – selling an idea, selling a thing, or selling a service – you’re going to find that conversation very refreshing because it’s not as bad as you think, okay?

So, today, I want to start with a little story.  And you might have heard me tell this story before if you’ve been around the podcast for a long time.  You know, after about three and a half years, you start to kind of ask yourself, “Okay, haven’t I told this story before?”  But it’s so applicable so I’m going to tell it.

When I was a little girl, my family was really into basketball, and in fact, they still are.  My parents would take us to games.  We lived in a town about 6,000 people, so there’s one high school.  And you go to all the high school games, and we had this really good team this one year.  My parents would take us to these games, and we had fun.  It was so much fun!  And there were cheerleaders and, you know, they had those huge, really, really big pom-poms, and they would get the crowd riled up, and I just thought it was really cool.  This is when I was, like, six years old, maybe eight years old, I don’t know.

And there were times when the cheerleaders would be cheering or there’d be a timeout, and I would think to myself, “I could get the crowd to yell louder than they could.”  And I don’t know where that thought came from, but as a six or eight-year-old girl, I had it in me.  I had this, like, “I know that I could get them to yell louder than the cheerleaders could,” which was kind of ridiculous.  But, you know, that’s how I felt.

So, anyway, at the time, they also had these, like… every once in a while, they would have a little girl come up in front with them to cheer with the cheerleaders.  And those little girls that would go up, I would think things like, “I could do that, and I could do it better.”  I would think things like, “Oh my gosh, they don’t even know what they should be doing with their hands right now.”  And I didn’t like that idea.  I didn’t like the idea of going up there, and then looking like I didn’t know what I was doing.

But, you know, there’s this, like, tug of war inside of me about how much I would love to be a junior cheerleader sometime, to love to have somebody come invite me to come down with them and stand with the cheerleaders and do that, you know, junior cheerleader thing.  Well, one day, this actually happened.

I was in the stands with my parents, and my babysitter, who I loved, was just kind of bouncing her way over.  She picked me out in the crowd, I could see it.  She saw me and my sister; my sister was a little bit younger, so she was kind of targeting me.  And she came over, and she said, “Andrea, would you like to be a junior cheerleader with us tonight?  I was like, “No.”  And she was like, “Are you sure?  Are you sure you don’t want to be a junior cheerleader?”  And I thought to myself, “I don’t want to admit how badly I want to do this because if I admit…”  I’m serious, I was like this as a little kid. I know, it’s kind of scary.

But anyway, I was, like, seriously thinking to myself, “Okay, if she asks me to come down, if she begs me to come down, then I can go down and if I screw up, it won’t be my fault.  I won’t have to own it.”  And so anyway, she asked me the second time, and my mom’s like, “Are you sure you don’t want to, Andrea?”  And I was like, “No!”  And I thought to myself, “Okay, she just has to ask one more time.  One more time, and then it will be all on her if I screw up.  I can go down there and try, but not, like, feel like it was my idea or whatever.”  But she just looked at me, and she said, “Okay.”  And she walked down the steps of the stands and went back over with the other cheerleaders, and I never got another chance.

You know, looking back on it now, I see it and I realize so much.  One of the things I realize is there was something inside of me that really wanted to do something.  Not only wanted to do it, I really believed that I could do something about it.  And even when I was given the opportunity, it was like I didn’t want to own it.

All right, so we’re going to skip a little bit in my story.  For as long as I can remember, I have had an obsession with the concept of identity.  When I was a child, I just wanted to understand why and how I was different from other people.  Then I got into my teen years, and I wanted to know if and how I fit into different groups of people.

And then in college, I was really more concerned about questions of gender – what does it mean for me to be a woman with the gifts and interests that I have?  Is there a place for me where my voice really matters?  If I step into the fullness of who I am, will I even have any hope of getting married and having a family?  These are a lot of questions that I deeply wrestled with, and I even wrote a book about them, Unfrozen, and my experience of wrestling with these things.

So, anyway, in my graduate school years and young adult years, I really started to wonder how other people define themselves and how they find their place in the world.  So, my thesis paper asked and attempted to answer the question: How can friends and family interact with one another to help each other find their own voice and navigate through life’s difficulties?  How can we help each other with this, and what foundational beliefs or understandings would really be most important to cultivate so that we can do that for one another?

Well, fast forward to now, we work with organizations on things like team identity, their “DNA.”  So, we dig around to kind of find their overarching purpose in the world – the big picture that really gives the organization meaning in a global context – and then we come, and we help them clearly articulate their focused mission.  So, how are they going to use their message and offerings to serve that purpose?

And then we help them create an Anthem or a set of team values that really describes the way that they want to interact with in their organization and with their customers.  So, their team Anthem is like their voice or their expression of who they are.

We go through a similar process with our individual Voice of Influence coaching and consulting clients.  And the purpose that we serve at Voice of Influence is to help connect people’s gifts with the need that is in the world.  So that’s our big, big, huge purpose, and that’s a pretty lofty goal.  But as the founder, it was really born out of my personal sense of calling, which I’ve discussed before.  And with the amount of time, energy, observation, education, analysis, and personal wrestling that I’ve done with this subject, you might say that I have some expertise in the topics of identity and expression and how our identity influences in the world, or like I like to call it, our “voice of influence”.

But here’s the catch.  Ten years ago, I’d already achieved a lot of learning that I use today, but I felt like I wasn’t using it.

I mean, sure you could say that I was using it with my friends and family and my own relationships, but with as much as I’d invested and learned about the subject… I was a stay-at-home mom, which I have no problem with, but it was hard because I felt like I had so much more to offer, and I didn’t know how I was going to do it.  Was I going to go and be a teacher?  Was I going to try to get a job in a church?  What was I going to do with what I had?  It really felt like my expertise was going to waste.  And I knew that there were people who could benefit from it, but I didn’t know how in the world to get it into their hands so that they could actually use it.

So, this is the point in my story that I realized, ten years ago, seven years ago, it started to dawn on me, I didn’t want to own my desire or my belief that I could really make a difference.  I was still acting like that eight-year-old girl in the stands of the basketball game wanting someone to come pick her, having someone come over and pick her and still not wanting to own it, not wanting to own the desire.

And around that time, I just, through a series of events, realized that if I didn’t own my own desire, if I didn’t own my expertise, if I didn’t say, “I want to do something about this.  I do want to get it into the hands of the people that need it…” if I didn’t own that, I wasn’t going to be able to make any difference that I wanted to make.  I was not going to be able to have the influence that I wanted to have.  It meant that I needed to sell my idea.  I needed to package it.  I needed to make it clear what it was that I was trying to say, get it out there in a way that people could consume it, could use it.

And that’s why eventually I wrote a book, why eventually I started blogging and started the podcast and started a business.  Because I realized that if I didn’t do something about it, if I didn’t put myself out there, if I didn’t own it, nobody else was going to do that for me.

So, I guess what I wanted to bring to you today was simply a call to action, a call to it’s okay to own the desire, to do something, to own your desire to make a difference with what you know, with what you have experienced in your life.  And that in order to get that expertise into the hands of people that need it, you’re going to have to package it up.  You’re going to have to figure out how you’re going to say it.  You have to figure out what you want to do about it.  You know, what is it that you care about?  What purpose are you serving, and how are you going to get it into people’s hands?  Because eventually, you’re going to have to get into their hands through selling.

Selling an idea, selling a service or a product; they’re all very similar, and it does come down to, “What do you believe about this situation?”  Are you just trying to make money?  Because when we think of sales, at least when I always used to think of sales, it was, “That person is trying to get money from me.”  If that’s the case, then, you know, that’s in a different world than the world that I’m talking about.  That’s in a different realm of desire and love and care than the one that I’m talking about because you, people like you, people who want to have a “voice of influence”, we don’t just want to get money from people.  We don’t want to just get compliance from people.  We don’t want them to just do what we want them to do.  We want them to want it, not because we want them to want it, but because we’re just trying to meet their need.  What is the need?  How can I help meet it?  Let’s see what this’ll do.  Will this work?  What can we do about it?

So, next week, in my conversation with Finka, we’re going to talk about her book, Sell From Love, and we get into a lot of different things that have to do with actual selling, with what does it look like to actually be loving while you’re selling?  How great would that be, right?  And then the week after that, then I’ll be back with a personal challenge.  I do hope that that you’re able to get a sense of how important it is for you to own your expertise, for you to own your own desire to get your expertise into the world.

Don’t be that little girl waiting for somebody to come pick her, who can’t even realize it when somebody comes to pick her, because you have to say yes.  You have to decide that you’re going to say yes.  You have to say yes, even to yourself.  Yes, I am going to do this.  Yes, I am going to own my desire.  I’m going to go for it.  I’m going to do something, and I’m going to make a lot of mistakes along the way.  I might fail in a lot of ways along the way, but that’s okay because the ultimate goal, my ultimate purpose, that’s what I’m here for.  And if you don’t have a sense of that, then that’s where it’s going to break down.  But if you do, if you have a sense of purpose, you believe that it’s more important than preserving your own ego, then you’re going to be able to do something really, really phenomenal.

So, thank you.  Thank you for being with me today.  Your voice matters.  Go make it matter more!