Nick Williams Weblog

I never set out to become an expert

I never set out to become an expert. I knew I could never be an expert because to me an expert was someone who was world renowned, with at least one Ph.D, the most successful in the world in their subject, and that was never going to be me. But I had struggled with being unhappy in my own work and found ways to became a lot happier and fulfilled in what I did, and found a lot more meaning and purpose in my own life.

So I started to share ideas with other people who weren’t happy in their work. I started giving talks, then some workshops, then I started coaching people individually. I found that I could write so started writing some articles. I found myself being invited on the radio and TV, and invited to give comments and ideas to journalists. Then a publisher offered me a contract to write a book, and that went well and then I wrote another four books.

But I still didn’t consider myself to be an expert, but saw myself an author, coach and speaker. Today I seem to have helped enough people to have become regarded by some as an expert. By focusing on serving and contributing in the ways that I am passionate about, raising my profile and getting known for my contribution, people have start calling me an expert and I am getting comfortable in thinking of myself as one. I have now given hundreds of talks in dozens of cities in 14 different countries because of my perceived expert status, have an international coaching practice and have contributed to over 1,000 media features. And I love my life as an expert!

Why have I become known as an expert? Simply because I learned to solve a problem in my own life and then wondered how I could help people who had a similar problem in their lives. It has nothing to do with having a PhD – I have no qualifications to do what I do, but it has a lot to with my passion for my own life and work, and I want wholeheartedly to contribute to the lives of others. Today, most experts gain their credibility through their own life experience, not through credentials.

I have become good at inspiring and teaching other people. I have a thirst for improving and increasing my knowledge. I love being asked to share my knowledge and give tips and am asked to do so often. I have found a middle ground between thinking I know it all and I believing either I know nothing or not enough. I feel honoured and blessed to be considered an expert as it has opened so many doors for me that wouldn’t have opened otherwise.

Here are seven major benefits I have found from being regarded as an expert, and these are reasons why you should seriously consider thinking developing your own expert niche:

1. People know me and are attracted to me and are already willing to listen to me – I don’t need to cold call to get business
2. I positively differentiate myself from other people
3. As an expert I get paid to talk about what I think, what I know and share my experience
4. I receive a constant stream of enquiries to write, speak, broadcast and share my expertise
5. I get to experience fulfilment as I help hundreds and even thousands of people and get a regular flow of appreciative e mails for me and my work
6. I constantly recognise and create new ways of sharing my knowledge and expertise
7. I make a lot more money by sharing my expertise in many different ways with different groups of people

Today, no-one, not even major organisations, really serves a mass market. We all create and serve niche markets. You may become the expert in your town or community on a particular subject. Just think for a minute - if 200 people found your information, ideas and experience helpful to them and were willing to pay you £100 a year for the benefit of your expertise, you would create £20,000 ($39,000, €30,000) of income from just that. Then the idea of becoming an expert becomes exciting and appealing.

Now if you are reading this and wondering how you can get going with your own expert journey, I can help. I teamed up with Barbara Winter, author of the hugely successful book Making A Living Without A Job to create a simple but immensely powerful seven-week on line learning programme entitled Establish Yourself As An Expert. In it you’ll be guided through some of the core ways that all experts think and approach what they do. We don’t claim that this programme will make you an expert in seven weeks, but it will quickly and clearly start you on your own expert journey of sharing what you know and finding the people who need what you know. Click here to look at the programme or buy it now.

And in case you are thinking, "But that's OK for you. Having have written books so you can be expert." Let me suggets you think about it the other way around. You get to write books and be published because you have created a niche of expertise already.

What am I up to in my life today?

I wrote five books between 1999 and 2005, travelled around UK, Europe and went to USA five times to work, to South Africa five times to present and had a wonderful time. My father Harold died in August 2005 and since then I have been in a time of being rather withdrawn and working on a level where I have done what I needed to but not much else. They say grieving is a two year journey to complete and it seems to be heading that way for me.

As 2007 starts I am pleased to say that my energy is returning and I am beginning to feel inspired and creative again. I don’t think I will be writing a book for another year or two, but am investing my energy in two specific areas:

1. Inspiring more people to the possibility of finding work they love and being more fulfilled in their work
2. Teaching them how they can make those possibilities happen in their life.

I am sorry to say that Rick Thorn, who some of you know, is seriously ill with cancer now, so please keep him in your prayers. I am working with my brilliant friend and colleague Niki Hignett to create more information products – ways of inspiring and teaching people that are available on line and as live events. As I delve deeper into this area that I am passionate I find I have so may more insights and understandings than I did even when my first book came out. And I am looking forward to travelling more again.

My journey with bereavement

The most significant journeys in my life recently has been the loss of my father Harold in August 2005. He was 85 and we knew he was dying from kidney failure. 

I had a brilliant relationship with him, a real heart-to-heart connection and there were many things we shared. He spent three weeks in a hospice before he died, and my mother and I were with him as he died. It was a very powerful and moving experience.

I thought I would handle his loss more easily than I have. I found the grieving process quite profound and much more painful than I anticipated. I lost a lot of my motivation, and even my sense of purpose – something that I had always been able to rely on – seemed to disappear. I felt quite lost for a while. I didn’t want to travel so much, I just wanted to be at home more, and simply be, feel my feelings and go through what I needed to go through. I felt quite uninspired, and didn’t feel very creative. I found that very uncomfortable. I am so used to innovating and creating new projects that I felt like I had lost a large part of myself. I functioned – I carried on coaching, giving talks and running events, but it felt like mere functioning, and my joy had gone.

My Dad was the person who I felt most loved and affirmed by, and I knew in some respects he loved me than I loved myself. I knew that my challenge after his death would be to learn to love myself as much as he did. I felt acutely the loss of that mirror – the man who was always proud of me and kind towards me. His face always lit up when he saw me. I was left with a lot of my own feelings of not being good enough and not being loveable. It has been very tough.

I am now seventeen months down the line and I feel like I have grown a lot as a man. About six months ago I started to get some bereavement counselling from the hospice where dad died, and that has been incredibly helpful. It has helped me understand that loss can be so painful, but that there is nothing wrong with me, that is simply the process. My counsellors name is Sara Lindsay and she works independently too - contact her at Sara Lindsay sara@banksway.co.uk, http://www.counsellinginguildford.co.uk 

I feel like I am beginning to come out the other side now, and even feeling stronger for it. My energy is coming back, my ideas are coming back along with the desire to be proactive and creative again. That’s a relief. As 2007 begins I feel like my spirit is coming back again which is lovely.

Can I help you?

I love to help if you want to:

* Discover the work you were born to do

* Find greater fulfilment in your work

*Transition from employment into inspired self employment

* Succeed in your own inspired business

Is there a specific question you have? Please post your question and I’ll do my best to give you an answer and post it so that everyone can benefit from the answer.

Nick

Inspiration in rural Ireland

One of the greatest passions of my life is liberating the potential and talent within people – both for myself and helping other do the same. I believe all human beings are capable of wonderful things when we are educated well, taught how our own mind works, get inspired and learn how to get out of our own way.  So imagine my joy at being invited to give a keynote speech to celebrate the launch of the Centre for Developing Human Potential at the Tipperary Institute in County Tipperary in Ireland at the end of November 2006.

An hour and a half by train outside Dublin, right in the middle of rural Ireland, is a world-class college that supports both the personal growth of its students and their academic achievement.
I was also personally inspired by what they have created there. It has a great reputation and also attracted several other nationally known Irish speakers to celebrate its launch. The Centre for the Development of Human Potential is under the auspices of the Sustainable Rural Development department. Click here to see the college and department. For years they have incorporate personal development modules into each of their other courses and this has been so successful that they have now created a dedicated centre running specific courses in personal development, coaching and counselling. Other than some work I know is happening in South Africa to incorporate personal development modules into the school and give every child the chance to learn and grow, this is the only college of it’s kind I know of.

I loved the talk I gave – it felt really me at my authentic best and I received some wonderful feedback. I asked for permission and have made the talk I gave their into an audio download and you can listen to it yourself by clicking here.

Re-imagine what it means to be an entrepreneur

Like the majority of people, I grew up in a household where people worked in jobs - they were employed by other people. I hardly knew anyone self employed or entrepreneurial when I was growing up. I always believed entrepreneurs to be slightly dodgy and unethical people, like Gordon Gekko In The 80's film Wall Street or if you live in the UK, Del Boy in Only Fools and Horses or Arthur Daley in Minder spring to mind - loveable rogues! I certainly didn't fancy being one of them. I had very few great role models I could look up to and say, "I want to be like that."

A few years I read a tribute to Bernard Goldhirsh, the founder of Inc magazine for entrepreneurs. He was quoted as saying, "Anyone who writes for me has to understand that I believe that a true entrepreneur has the soul of an artist, and their business is the canvass of their expression." I suddenly felt like someone had articulated what I was and had always wanted to be - I have the soul of an artist, by business is my canvass and my work is the way I express myself in the world and make my contribution - and I get paid for it! That is my vision of being an entrepreneur - someone whose business is the way they share their gifts and talents with the world, are always curious and looking for new ways to serve their fellow human beings, and are willing and able to profit by doing so.

For me it is a constant journey of unlearning much of the unhelpful thinking I grew up as well as learning how to speak the new language of being an inspired entrepreneur. Being an entrepreneur is a different way of neing the world and seeing the world in a new way, more as a world full of opportunity and possibility rather than a world full of problems and obstacles. My motivation as an inspired entrepreneur is "How can I reach and teach more people about how they can be happy ad fulfilled in their work?" The more ways I find to inspire and educate, the more people I help and the more I prosper.

Have Nick's ideas enabled you to be happier in your work?

Nick has just begun collecting stories of people who have changed their working lives to be more fulfilling and successful. If reading Nick’s books, going to any of his live events or coaching with him have enabled you to change your life significantly, then let him know how you've done it and what contribution his ideas made. Your story will inspire other people to new possibilities too. If you are willing, they could appear on his web site too.

E mail Nick at nick@nick-williams.com with an outline of what you’ve done.

How I found the work I was born to do

Growing up I did many of the things I was supposed to do and were socially acceptable – I studied hard and got good qualifications, I worked hard, did well, became fairly successful selling computers to Japanese Banks in the City of London. I was fairly happy to start with, but increasingly found it didn’t hold much meaning for me. My heart wasn’t in it.

I had begun to ask myself some of those bigger questions, like, “Well, if I am not here to sell computers to banks, why am I here to do?” Answers began to come to me like, “You are here to help people live inspired work lives, to teach, to be creative and even write books.” That sounded wonderful, but I kept thinking, “But I am a computer salesman from Essex, people like me don’t do things like that. Anyway, I can’t even inspire myself at the moment, let alone inspire anyone else!” But those inner voices would not go away, and indeed got louder.

By my late 20’s, the disparity between my inner desires, dreams and longings and outer sense of self and my acquired personality became so great that I could no longer contain that conflict. I could no longer suppress the conflict or compensate by pretending I was happy when  I wasn’t. I suppose I had an early mid life crisis and out of that I made a decision to head in anew direction and I made a break for authenticity rather than doing what I thought I was supposed to. I crossed an invisible threshold and listened to the calling of my deeper self. I said to myself, “I am going to follow my heart, my sense of joy and inspiration and see where it takes me. I am curious about what I can become.”

Has it been easy? Yes and no. At times it is gloriously easy, and at other times it is seems difficult, and sometimes impossible. I don’t consider myself to be a rebel who goes against convention and social conditioning. Rather I consider myself to be a warrior of the heart – living as truly and authentically as I can, with a deep desire to keep learning, keep growing, shedding my conditioning and becoming more of authentic self. I am curious about what I can become, what I can achieve, who I can help and how many people I can inspire, teach and positively influence. I want to live as full and authentic a life as I can and to grow keep growing bigger than my fears and not be a prisoner to them.

Today, I am living my destiny for sure. I continue to be astonished at how far one idea has taken me, and continues to take me. I have come a long way and covered a lot of territory. A quote that has guided my life is from Joseph Campbell who taught us, "If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track, which has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life you ought to be living is the one you are living."

My work feels like my ministry. I am not Christian, but feel like my work is my way of helping, making a contribution and having meaning. It feels like one of the major ways I share my talents, love and caring with the world. I and my work never stay in one place for long, and I constantly evolve my ideas, thinking and awareness.

My sense of purpose

I believe that work holds the potential of being a great experience in our lives, even a blessing a source of meaning and purpose as well as the way we earn a living. Your work can be about giving something good of yourself, a way you express your innate talents which results in a better sense of connectedness with yourself, others and life. Work can be both good for you and that it produces happiness and enables you to fulfilment yourself. Work is such an important part of your life and not to find your own unique talents and abilities is a waste of your precious energy. Great work can even be a spiritual experience and a great blessing.

Unfortunately many of us didn’t grow up with that idea about work, but I love helping you re-imagine what your work could be. 

I love helping people find the work they were born for. I want to live in a world where people love what they do for their living and I am doing my bit to help that happen. I spent many years doing work that I didn't enjoy and that wasn't really me. I didn't follow my calling and vocation when I was younger, and only did in my late twenties when I had become successful but unhappy selling computers to Japanese banks in the City of London. I started to listen to and follow my own heart and after much soul searching I got the courage to quit. Gradually I built a business helping other people follow their hearts and be true to themselves. I started to write and got a publishing deal and my first book The Work We Were Born To Do came out in 1999 and has become a best seller.
Today I have written five books and love running my own successful business as a writer, coach, speaker and broadcaster, all on the importance of finding your work. I have been blessed to be invited to many countries to speak and run workshops.

For me a large part of the journey has been about facing my own fears and gradually liberating myself from many of the limiting ideas and attitudes I grew up with. I am a man on a mission - but I am not a missionary. I simply love helping you discover the work that would make you happy, and then succeed in it - whether you want to be employed or create your own business and becoming more entrepreneurial.