Master Your Craft. Then Champion Someone Else’s.

How expertise becomes professional security—and professional security becomes leadership.

This one is a little different from our usual PPHC content. No pelvic floors. No neuroanatomy. No clinical algorithms. Just some thoughts I’ve been having about expertise, professional security, and leadership as I’ve grown from clinician to educator to business owner. These are my thoughts and my experiences that—like most things I believe—are probably still evolving. Welcome to my brain.

xoxo

Kelly

I spend a lot of time thinking about what makes someone good at what they do.

Maybe that's inevitable when your career has evolved from clinician to educator to business owner—and, somewhere along the way, to leading and learning alongside a team of incredibly talented people.

Recently, I was having a conversation with my husband about expertise, professional growth, and what it actually means to become a leader. It wasn't a conversation about PPHC or pelvic health specifically, but about his upcoming job change and how his relationship with leadership was showing up.

Regardless, at some point, I sent him this:

*edited the first message because I removed my more candid colorful language...if you've met me, this will come as no surprise.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized how much my perspective on expertise has changed throughout my career. Early on, I thought being really good at what you do meant knowing a little bit about everything.

Now, I think it might mean almost the opposite.

The Pressure to Know Everything

There is an interesting pressure that comes with becoming a healthcare professional.

We spend years learning how to evaluate problems, answer questions, and help people. We are rewarded for knowing things. And when we don't know something, it can feel uncomfortable.

So early in our careers, many of us start collecting knowledge. Another course. Another certification. Another technique. Another area of practice. Another handful of letters to add to the alphabet soup in our email signature...

We want to understand orthopedics and neurology and pain science and strength and conditioning and pelvic health and hormones and nutrition and psychology—and everything else that could possibly influence the person sitting in front of us. And to some extent, that's a good thing.

Curiosity makes us better clinicians. Understanding how systems interact makes us better problem solvers, because healthcare certainly doesn't happen in isolated silos. But somewhere along the way, I think we can confuse being well-rounded with needing to be the expert in everything.

They're not the same. And trying to become everything to everyone may actually keep us from becoming exceptional at the thing we're meant to do.

Mastery Requires Depth

There is something incredibly satisfying about finding your craft. The thing that makes you want to keep reading. The thing you want to talk about long after everyone else has moved on. The clinical problem that makes you ask another question instead of settling for the easy answer.

And then you work at it...for years.

You study it. Practice it. Question it. Teach it. Get things wrong. Change your mind. Learn from patients. Learn from colleagues. Learn from research. Realize that some of the things you confidently believed five years ago need to evolve.

That's mastery. Not arriving at a point where there is nothing left to learn, but becoming so deeply invested in your craft that learning becomes part of the craft itself. And eventually, something interesting happens...the more secure you become in what you know, the more comfortable you become with acknowledging what you don't.

Experience Isn't the Same as Expertise

We often assume expertise is something that happens automatically with time. Work long enough. See enough patients. Teach enough courses. Eventually, you'll become an expert.

But the literature on expertise suggests something more nuanced.

Psychologist K. Anders Ericsson spent decades studying expert performance and introduced the concept of deliberate practice—the idea that expertise develops not simply through repetition, but through intentional, effortful practice designed to improve performance.

In other words, doing something 1,000 times, or even accumulating 10,000 hours, doesn't automatically make you an expert. But doing something repeatedly while questioning your decisions, seeking feedback, identifying weaknesses, refining your technique, studying the evidence, and changing your approach when something doesn't work? That's how you begin to master a craft.

Years of experience tell us how long someone has been doing something, but expertise tells us what they've done with those years.

Expertise Includes Knowing Where Your Expertise Ends

This may be one of the most important lessons I've learned professionally: you do not have to be the expert in everything to be an expert.

In fact, I think true expertise requires understanding the boundaries of your own knowledge. We should understand enough about the systems surrounding our own work to recognize when they matter. We should know enough to ask better questions. But then we should also know when to say, “This isn't my area of expertise. But I know someone who is exceptional at it.”

Earlier in my career, I might have interpreted that sentence as admitting a limitation. Now I see it completely differently. That's not weakness, that's good clinical care. And I think it's also a sign of professional security.

Someone Else's Excellence Doesn't Diminish Yours

This is where expertise starts to become something bigger. When you're uncertain about your own value, someone else's expertise can feel threatening.

They know something you don't. They have a skill you don't have. They're getting recognition in an area adjacent to yours. They're doing something exceptionally well. Professional insecurity can make us feel like we need to compete with that. Meanwhile, professional security lets us respond differently.

That's their craft. And they're absolutely crushing it.

How cool is that? You can refer to them, learn from them, collaborate with them, hire them, put them in front of your students, ask them to teach you, give them credit, tell other people how good they are. Let them be better than you at something...because someone else's excellence doesn't take anything away from yours. And perhaps that's one of the biggest transitions from expert to leader.

Leadership Isn't Being the Smartest Person in the Room

We sometimes picture leadership as reaching the top of some imaginary knowledge hierarchy. You become the person with the answers, the so-called expert. The authority and the one that everyone looks to.

But I'm increasingly convinced that great leadership looks different. Maybe leadership isn't becoming the person in the room who knows the most about everything. Maybe leadership is becoming exceptionally good at your own craft—and then using the security that comes from that mastery to create space for other people to become exceptional at theirs.

A leader doesn't need to dominate every conversation. They know when to teach and when to listen. They know when to say, “I don't know” and they know when someone else should have the microphone.

That's especially important when you're building a team. Building PPHC has made this increasingly clear to me. At some point, leadership requires intentionally surrounding yourself with people who know things you don't. People who think differently. People with different experiences. People whose strengths fill your gaps. People who may eventually become better than you at something you once taught them.

That's not a failure of leadership. That's the evidence of it.

From Expertise to Leadership

I believe deeply in mastering your craft and studying the thing that lights you up. I believe in becoming exceptionally good at it while staying curious enough to keep changing. I believe in teaching what you know generously, but not mistaking mastery for omniscience.

You don't have to know everything. You don't have to do everything. And you certainly don't have to be the best at everything.

Become secure enough to know where your expertise begins—and where it ends. Then find the people who have dedicated themselves to mastering the things you haven't. Refer to them, learn from them, hire them, give them the microphone, say their names in rooms they're not in and celebrate when they know something you don't.

Because expertise isn't threatened by someone else's excellence, it's secure enough to champion it.

And maybe that's the point where being really good at what you do becomes something bigger. Maybe that's where expertise becomes leadership.

References

1. Ericsson KA, Krampe RT, Tesch-Römer C. The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychol Rev. 1993;100(3):363-406. doi:10.1037/0033-295X.100.3.363

2. Macnamara BN, Hambrick DZ, Oswald FL. Deliberate practice and performance in music, games, sports, education, and professions: a meta-analysis. Psychol Sci. 2014;25(8):1608-1618. doi:10.1177/0956797614535810