Sometimes the Expert Has to Think Like a Beginner

If I asked you exactly what produces your results, could you explain it?

Not generally.

Specifically.

Let's say you're in sales and you've been successful for years.

You know how to develop relationships.

You know how to recognize opportunities.

You've learned what works through experience, and a lot of what you do now happens almost instinctively.

That's valuable.

But suppose you want to double your business.

Which activities would need to increase?

Which ones would need to change?

Where are you losing opportunities?

What part of your current process would become the bottleneck if you actually started producing twice as much?

Those questions require something different from experience.

They require you to examine the work you've become accustomed to doing.

And this is where experience can become a disadvantage.

When you're learning something new, you have to pay attention to the details. You write things down. You measure your progress.

You try to understand why something worked and why something else didn't.

Then you get good at it.

And gradually, you stop having to think about those things.

That's part of the benefit of expertise, but it also means you can lose visibility into your own process.

You know how to get results, but you may not know which specific activities are responsible for producing them, or what would need to happen for those results to increase substantially.

So you tell yourself you're going to work harder.

Okay. Harder at what?

More conversations?

Better follow-up?

Different prospects?

More time spent developing the relationships that actually turn into business?

Or are you already spending so much time doing things that don't produce much that working harder would just make you busier?

Those distinctions matter.

And they aren't always comfortable to investigate, particularly when you've been successful for a long time.

Going back to tracking your activity and examining basic assumptions can feel like something you should have moved beyond.

But I don't think that's moving backward.

I think it's recognizing that the next problem may require a different level of precision.

I've had to look at my own business this way.

If I want it to grow, I can't rely exclusively on being good at coaching.

I have to understand how the business actually operates, where my time goes, which activities create opportunities, and which parts of the process can be improved.

That requires a willingness to look at things I might otherwise take for granted.

And that's what I mean by thinking like a beginner.

Not pretending you don't have experience.

Not throwing away the judgment you've spent years developing.

Just becoming curious enough to examine what you think you already understand.

Because if you can't describe the process producing your current results, it's going to be difficult to deliberately build a better one.

You might still improve.

But you'll be depending on instinct to solve a problem that may require a plan.