From the Career Opportunities Archives…
While we all might like to be the smartest person in the room (and in some cases, we are) our knowledge can sometimes get in the way of our career. I know it can sound counter-intuitive, but there are times when our knowledge causes us to dismiss our own talent and skills as obvious and unimportant. We see our skills as inconsequential when we assume what we know is so obvious, everyone else knows it, too.
I see this in operation in my own life in a number of ways. I am often surprised when clients ask me to explain or demonstrate something that I thought everyone had learned. I can offer up a very basic tip, just to remind the client that it exists and then spend 30 minutes explaining it. Even worse, I don’t teach some concepts and resist making training products because I think the concepts are simply too basic to be worth anything to anyone. I deny the usefulness of my own knowledge and end up limiting both myself and my clients. What an odd situation, but also a very common one.
Read this entire column – It’s not obvious to them
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