Repeating Yourself as an Expert

My grandfather always wanted to live to 100, and so he did. I helped organize a “memorial service” for him—while he was still alive—because what’s the point of a memorial service when you’re dead and can’t hear your relatives apologize? The 70+ people who came made it an absolute blast. I still miss him.

My grandmother, though, was crazy in the head, but funny right through her death. She grew up a farm girl in Kentucky, was sharp as a tack, and hilarious. On one of their yearly visits, after she started losing her mind, she asked me the same question every few hours: “Hey, David. I love your new van. How long ago did you buy it?” After answering the question the same way dozens of times—“Six months, grandma!”—I finally decided to switch things up, purely out of desperation to get her to stop.

The next time she asked, I said: “One-half of a year, Grandma!” She smiled and said, “Silly! That’s six months!”

There’s that sort of repeating yourself, from an aging relative, and then there’s the sort that occurs in client relationships.

Client Repetition

There’s a selfish impatience in advising your clients, and it sounds like this: “Didn’t I talk about this same thing yesterday with a different client? Why weren’t you listening in on the phone call that you weren’t even on?” You kind of smile to yourself and chuckle inside, and that’s when it hits you that you seem to repeat yourself a lot.

Once you realize that, you have two possible reactions:

1. Further selfishness: “I’m bored and I need to reinvent this whole thing.” Or, “I’m so tired of saying the same thing. I just can’t stand to repeat myself again. I’ll let it go and skip that part.”
2. Deeper realization: “Wow, I’m seeing a pattern here. I should explore this deeper. How frequently does this happen? What typically precedes it? Are there some best practices at avoiding this situation so that they don’t need that advice?”

Our Natural Hesitation

When we find ourselves repeating the same advice, over and over, we rightly ask this question. “Am I actually earning the money that someone is paying me? Or am I just mailing it in and saying the same thing to every client?”

You’re wondering, appropriately, if you’re listening carefully enough to each client. Taking their different circumstances into account.

In other words, this fear of repeating ourselves is motivated by the right things: “am I delivering value.”

Causes of Repetition

If you’re repeating yourself because you’re lazy, that’s wrong and you deserve to go out of business.

But if you are repeating yourself because you are tightly positioned, you would naturally anticipate this very thing. Here’s how that works, in order:

1. Tightly positioned firms target prospective clients that are similar. They might be in the same industry (vertical positioning) or the same demographic or service offering application (horizontal positioning).
2. This formulation presents similar scenarios where pattern matching opportunities surface.
3. This provides the opportunity to efficiently a) notice and then b) solve similar challenges.
4. And so you’ll naturally be repeating yourself a bit.

And if you are NOT repeating yourself a bit, you’re not delivering value. But if you’re repeating yourself as a poorly positioned firm, you are probably not delivering the sort of value you could. That might sting a little and I hope it does.

Finally

Think about it this way. Say you have a very specific type of cancer and there are only a dozen doctors who specialize in treating it. The expert sees you, verifies all her assumptions, and then tells you the same thing she told the previous patient who had the same symptoms.

What she is doing is exactly what experts do, and it sounds similar from client to client because her positioning delivers similar clients, and those clients yield similar patterns.

So next time you sigh when repeating something, just try and say it a little differently to amuse yourself, but don’t rob a client from what they need to hear. And always be open to noticing new things and reexamining your assumptions.

Extra Credit

I can’t leave this topic without noting one more thing. When I ask clients to start articulating their expertise, their first response is usually something like this: “What expertise? I don’t see it! I just help clients, and in all honestly I don’t see myself as all that brilliant.”

This happens precisely because they are hearing themselves say the same thing over and over again. They get used to it and nothing sounds unique.

When that happens, I assure them that they are smarter than they think, and to do one or more of these things to prove my point:

• Have someone follow you around and write down the things that you say repeatedly, especially if the client, upon hearing it, has some realization. In other words, a light bulb goes on in the client’s mind.
• Use an AI transcript tool to have it pull out the summaries of your observations and then doublecheck them.

You’re smarter than you think. You’re discounting it because it seems repetitive. Which it should be if you are tightly positioned.