How to Become an Expert - Episode: 125
Every skill worth having comes with a bill, and the currency is looking bad at it for a while.
We open with a coaching story: someone blocks time to learn a new skill, gets derailed by a small interruption, and calls it a distraction when it's really an excuse. Underneath is a thought that sounds ambitious but functions as a threat: "I want to be an expert." That thought doesn't motivate; it triggers comparison, a sense of being behind, and makes starting feel unsafe.
Listen on your preferred platform:
In this episode:
- Why the goal of "mastery now" turns a one-hour learning block into ten minutes of effort and fifty minutes of email and snacks
- The real obstacle: it's not the interruption, it's the belief you should already be good.
- Why high performers specifically get stuck here when competence is wired to identity
- What "the tax of not knowing" actually costs, and why avoiding it freezes growth instead of protecting you
- Why the same student mindset applies to delegation and scaling a business
- The identity-language swap that separates who you are from what you're still learning
Takeaways:
- Drop "I'm behind" and "I'm not an expert"; replace with "this is a process" and "one rep at a time"
- Discomfort in learning isn't a signal to stop. It's the signal it's working.
- A visible growth mindset reads as confidence; pretending to know everything doesn't
If this episode helped you think differently, share it with another guy who’d benefit from the conversation.
SPEAKER_00
This is the Durable Dad Podcast. I'm your host, Tommy Geary. This show is gonna give you the skills and tools you need to be a rock solid man for your work, your community, and most importantly, your family. Alright, what's happening? Episode 126. I was working with a client who wants to be an expert using AI. He is an EVP and he wants to incorporate AI into efficiencies at work. He wants to incorporate it into his personal life. And we coached on this a few weeks ago because he had brought it up, something he wanted to make progress on. And we talked about it. I was like, okay, so what do we do? We want to learn about AI. So we put time on the calendar. We talk about what the prompt is going to look like to start the brainstorming session with how AI can help in his business. We also talk about distractions. What's going to distract him? Put away the phone, and he wants to work on this for an hour. And then when we talked the following week, we checked in on this goal and he said, uh totally messed it up. I worked on it for 10 minutes, and then someone came into my office, and I used it as an excuse to get distracted, and I didn't get back to work on it. And he was on to himself. He knows that this interruption was just an excuse. He could have said, No, I'll get back to you later, but he didn't. And he says, this kind of bleeds into whenever he's trying to learn something new or doing that strategic thinking. This is something we all do. When I started recording these podcasts, I'd say for the first hundred episodes, I would procrastinate putting my outline together, getting my talking points together because I wanted it to be easy. I wanted it to just work out and move quickly. The resistance to creating would have me going to the cabinet and having a snack when I wasn't really hungry, or checking my emails over and over.
SPEAKER_00
So what was happening with this client, the reason he didn't execute his plan that week wasn't because of the interruption. It was because of his thought, I want to be an expert. And that thought, I want to be an expert, it sounds like it would be motivating, but when I checked in with him on it, he said that it actually felt overwhelming. And overwhelming for him in this moment with this AI stuff was that his brain was spinning on how long it was going to take to become an expert, comparing himself to other people that are further along. And he felt behind on his work. He started spinning about job security into the future and thinking that I'm not keeping up with this. If we're letting our thoughts run away and overwhelm ourselves, we're not going to get further along. And what we started to talk about was in order to become an expert or efficient at anything, you have to prepare to suck at it for a while. And I'm not saying that you don't want to strive to be an expert. You want high standards, but if we set unrealistic timetables for learning that new skill, we stop ourselves from moving any closer to becoming that expert. We just move closer to quitting that new skill. Every thing that we have learned in life, at one point we weren't as good at it. We probably sucked at it. Think about walking, think about reading, learning how to ride a bike. But as we get older, we kind of forget how progression takes a while, that the next small steps are how we get to efficiency. I have a cousin, his wife, in 2025, she made this goal to study French for 15 minutes a day. And she did it. I think she might have missed one or two days throughout the year, but for the whole year, she spent 15 minutes on learning French, and by the end of the year, she could hold a seven-minute conversation very cleanly, very comfortably. She had only had high school French before that. She just chopped away at it one day at a time. So we want to catch ourselves when we want to be
SPEAKER_00
an expert, when we want a new skill to become easy, when we want to already have everything figured out without having to pay that tax of not knowing, without having to move through the resistance of not being an expert. This
SPEAKER_00
happens with a lot of high-performing guys because we equate our competency to who we are. And if we're connecting that to who we are when we don't know something, it feels like a threat. It feels like a threat to our identity instead of just a phase that we go through on the learning process. One guy I was coaching with, he was looking to make a career change, kind of align what he did with who he was. And in order to do that, he was going to have to learn some new skills, take on a different role. And his thoughts that were preventing him from taking a few small steps, not making a leap, were I don't want to be the low man on the totem pole. I don't want to be the guy that's asking all the questions. We want to be the guy that has all the answers, that gives advice. When we're talking about associating our identity to our competency, wanting to be right all the time, that's an ego problem. And you might lead people, your employees, your clients, and you don't want them to see you fumbling, trying to learn a new thing, not being an expert. But we usually learn not too much in a public way. Usually it's a private way, but we still have this self-judgment inside. But even if you are learning in front of other people and you're not the expert, you exemplify a person with a growth mindset. And that actually to other people looks like confidence. The guy that walks around like he knows everything already. Nobody respects that. Nobody trusts that. People trust when someone has competence, is good at stuff, but can also admit when they need to learn, when they don't know it all. So
SPEAKER_00
this with my client, after he notices his distractions, making excuses, I ask him how has he been using AI? And he gave me some concrete examples. He uses it to help him clarify, rephrase emails. And when he has an idea for clients, he uses AI as a brainstorming partner to get through the thought process and poke holes at the different theories that he has. Those two things are probably more than a lot of people are using AI. We point this out because we can be motivated by our past wins. This kind of goes back to episode 119 when I talked about the gap in the gain. If we're only looking at what we haven't done, the gap ahead of time, I want to be an expert when we're not even close to becoming an expert and we're looking at how far we have to go still, it's demotivating. We can stay stuck that way. But when we turn and look back at the gain, what he's already learned, the path that he's already traveled on becoming an expert, that can be motivating. But when I point that out to him in this session, he's like, Yeah, but it doesn't feel like enough. I have a hard time putting value on, I did a few good things, but I'm still not an expert. So since the gap in the gain shift wasn't working for him, we looked at separating who we are from the competency in this skill.
SPEAKER_00
We want to cultivate a mindset that removes self-judgment when we're learning something. So for this example, the skill of learning AI has nothing to do with who he is. We want to remove the I statements. I'm not far enough along, I'm behind, I'm not an expert. We want to shift to more of a student mindset. Let's focus on the skill actually and think about some thoughts about learning the skill. And in this case, the thoughts he wanted to bring in were learning is a process, one small step at a time. Those mindsets are about the skill, it's not about the person anymore. I run into this a lot with guys that are trying to scale their business. One of the things we have to learn is how to delegate, how to offload tasks that are usually on our plate. So we have to remember that it's not about us. Remove I statements like I have a hard time letting go. I've always done it this way. Those I statements don't help you learn, don't let you become a student. We got to think about the skill of delegation. The student mindset there is delegation takes failures. Trying something new isn't supposed to feel good. That's a really helpful thought when we're learning a new skill. Because when we are learning AI, when we're trying to delegate in our business and become a different leader, that's growth. And with growth is discomfort. So this is the mindset shift we want to learn the new skill. Become a student. And when you decide to become a student, it's not the opposite of being really good at something, it's actually the investment that you make. When we went to college, we didn't go into college thinking that we should already be fluent in business or in whatever our specialty was going to be. We were investing time to get better, to become the expert. And if you think back to you being a baby, before we had all these layers of needing to be good at things, feeling the pressure of getting things done right now, before we were all of that, we were learning how to walk.
SPEAKER_00
And when you stood up as a baby and you took a couple steps and then you fell down, you didn't think I should be further along. I can't believe I can't walk yet. Oh, look at that other baby over there. They're walking and I can't yet. That's all self-judgment ego talk. And when we were a baby, we didn't have that big ego yet. You as a baby stood up, you took a half step, you fell, you got up, and you tried it again. Because the fall, the fail, the hard part doesn't mean that there's something wrong. It means that we're learning, that we're moving ahead. So we gotta give ourselves some grace, some patience to be a student again. What we want to take away from this podcast is that when you are making a change, learning something new, there is gonna be resistance. And that resistance is gonna make you want to distract yourself, run away, but not feeling good, feeling resistance means that I just have to stick around and work through it. If you learn how to stay with that resistance, have the patience to work through it, you can learn, develop, grow in any area that you want. So that's what I got for you guys today. I hope you have an awesome one, and I'll catch you next time.
If this episode hit, don’t keep it to yourself.
Subscribe to The Durable Dad Podcast and leave a quick review. It helps more men find the show and raises the level of conversations happening at home and at work.
Want to take this work further?
Tommy G Coaching is built for high-achieving men who want to show up steady, clear, and connected in their marriage and their life.
