Do you believe that you’re an expert or are you waiting for your expertise to be validated by the people that you think have more knowledge or experience than you do? The real experts. With book writing, you can’t wait until publication to act like you know what you’re talking about. You have to show up as the expert while you’re writing so that you can communicate that authority to your reader. In today’s episode, I’m going to teach you how to claim your expert energy, even if you don’t feel like an expert. Writing an academic book is challenging, but it doesn’t have to feel like torture. Join me, Jane Joanne Jones, writing coach and developmental editor to women and non-binary scholars in academia, as I teach you how to write your academic book with ease, clarity, and purpose. Let’s bend the rules, expose the hidden curriculum, and write your book the right way, your way.

Now, why is it so important for you to show up in your expert energy? As I always tell my clients, people read a book with your name on it to learn what you have to say. If they wanted to know what everyone else had to say about your topic, they would go read the books that everyone else has written, and you can’t wait until the book is published to believe that you’re an expert because by then it’s too late. It’s your responsibility as an author to impart your knowledge and insights to the reader, and you can do that most effectively when you actually believe in your knowledge and insights. What I hear from a lot of writers is, I’m not an expert yet, as if there’s some date on the calendar or milestone they’ll reach when they can objectively be considered an expert. Now, it would be amazing if someone came to your door, put a crown on your head and declared you an expert.

But as we know, unfortunately that’s not how it works. And if you’re a black woman in academia, like many of the writers I coach, you especially cannot wait for someone to tell you that you’re an expert. You have to claim that mantle for yourself. And I know that it isn’t easy when people are constantly challenging your expertise, whether it’s students, colleagues, or random jerks on the internet, but it’s the possibility of facing such challenges that makes it even more important that you believe in yourself and build up your resilience to criticism. Now, claiming expertise doesn’t mean that you need to be bombastic or arrogant or that you need to run around screaming “I’m the expert on this topic”. Here’s how you can claim your expert energy without feeling like you’re pretending or you’re being disingenuous. First, look at the evidence that already exists.

It can be publications, the dissertation you successfully defended the mountain of data you’ve collected, or the extensive literature that you have read and annotated and probably written countless words about. All of this is proof that you have done the work to know what you’re talking about. Additionally, think about the presentations you’ve given, the classes you’ve taught, the feedback you’ve received from peers and mentors, the feedback that you’ve given to peers and mentees. Every positive review you’ve gotten, every time someone’s been like, that’s a great point. Every aha moment from your students. Those are all recognition of your expertise. So when you’re feeling in doubt, create a little file. You can call it a brag file, a kind words file, whatever works for you, but this is a place where you’re going to store all those pieces of evidence. It could be positive reviews, it could be a note from a conference, it could be an actual copy of a publication.

And when you begin to doubt your expertise, go to that file. Look at all of that stuff. Remind yourself of what you’ve accomplished. Second, imagine what your writing would look like if you believed you were an expert. Then write like that. Thanks to my 10 years of working as an editor and a coach, I can identify confident writing. So here are some signs of it. When you write, instead of paraphrasing the secondary literature or including long quotes in your work, you’re analyzing it through your own unique perspective. You’re also using active verbs instead of hedging hesitant language. Start writing like this in an early draft where it feels less consequential so that you can become accustomed to writing in the style. Think of it as acting as if by embodying the confidence of an expert in your writing, you will eventually internalize that confidence. So here’s how to start.

Set a timer for about 10 or 15 minutes and free write on your topic as if you were giving a lecture to a room full of students. Don’t censor yourself. Just write, or you can do this through voice memoing because for some reason when we talk about our topic out loud, we tend to do it with more confidence than when we write about it, perhaps because we’re not looking at our words on the page, but try voice memoing that way and then transcribing it. You will see that the tone likely has more confidence than if you just started with writing. And third, seek support from your peers or a coach. Now, this might sound contradictory to my point, that you shouldn’t wait for other people to validate your expertise, but here I’m talking about your community of people who care about you and who will be supportive and honest, not gatekeepers, or people who are above you in hierarchy.

These are the people who are going to help you build your confidence and remind you of all that you’ve already achieved. They’re also going to support you when your expertise is challenged in bad faith. Surround yourself with a community that uplifts you. Join writing groups. Go to conferences, talk to other women in academia who understand your journey and make this a habit. That writing group I just talked about. Make it a weekly occurrence. Use these sessions to discuss your progress, share your doubts, get constructive feedback. Anything that helps you move forward with more confidence and a feeling of preparedness. And remember that your expertise is evolving. Expertise isn’t just something you achieve, and then you’re an expert forever, and you never have to learn anything else again, it’s dynamic. So everything you do, whether it’s reading a book, writing an article, delivering another presentation that is adding to your knowledge, it’s honing your skills. Every time you revise something, you are honing your skills.

So recognize that being an expert doesn’t mean you have reached some pinnacle where you’re done. It means that you are continuously learning and refining and achieving more and learning more. And think about how this has happened for you. Think about where you are now versus five years ago. Maybe five years ago, you hadn’t even defended your dissertation yet. Maybe you had no publications under your belt. You’ve probably achieved a lot in that time. Celebrate it, acknowledge it. Put it in that brag file I talked to you about earlier on in this episode, and recognize every day you are becoming more of an expert. So remember, claiming your expert energy is about recognizing that you are qualified to write your book and that you should be able to share it with the world, that you have a perspective that is worth sharing once you believe that you’ll be able to communicate it, not just to your readers, but also to yourself. I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode and I’ll see you in the next episode. Thank you so much for listening to today’s episode. If you like what you heard, please share the podcast with a friend. Or if you’re an Apple listener, leave a review. It helps other folks find the podcast so we can continue the conversation and make sure that when it’s time to write your book, you could do it on your terms, your way.