6 ways to give yourself more permission to own your expertise

If you’ve worked in Change Management for at least two years, and especially if you’ve worked in Change for more than five, you absolutely have experience and know how to add value to your leaders, projects and stakeholders. However, you might still struggle to call yourself an “expert”, feeling like that term is only used for people who have been in the industry for 20 years or more. Spoiler alert: I haven’t! In fact, I was only five years into my Change Management career when I swapped out of day rate contracting to start my own independent Change Management consultancy and it was at that time I started calling myself a “Change Leadership and Confidence expert”. 

If you have been wanting to give yourself permission to own your expertise and maybe even step up in your Change Management career, here’s 6 ideas to help you do just this:

#1 Count your transferable skills

One of the most important things about Change Management is that almost EVERYONE came to Change Management from some other industry or profession. Whether that is Project Management, Human Resources, Psychology, Recruitment, Psychology, Business Analysis, Communications,Training, Operations, or Marketing like me. As far as I know, there isn’t an Undergraduate degree in Organisational Change Management anywhere in the world - it might be a subject in a Management or Project Management undergraduate degree, or a post-graduate subject or course, so almost everyone started in some other field and transitioned across to Organisational Change. This means that before you even began your Change career, you already had a career, and changing careers doesn’t negate your previous experience and expertise. For me, I’d worked in Advertising and Marketing, plus had trained and practised in Neuro-Linguistic Programming and Coaching, before I even made the move to Change Management so by the time I was two years in Change, I was 5 years into my career. Now I bring all this AND my skills from Online Business into my Change Management consulting and leadership. Because I was more than just a Change Manager and the value I offered was more than just Change Management. 

#2 Consider scale and impact, not just length

My very first Change Management role was a brand new product development in the Insurance industry that touched several teams across a division and involved a complete multidisciplinary project team including Product, Marketing, Customer Experience, User Experience, Technology Development, Business Analysis, Process Analysis, Testing, Legal and Compliance. My next change was rolling out an organisation-wide system upgrade across multiple sites, followed by a multi-solution technology change for operational teams, and then I started work on an organisation-wide Digital Transformation Strategy. This was followed by a change that impacted the pay and benefits of 100,000 people, which was then followed by an operating model change that impacted over 10,000 roles across 1,000 sites nationwide. In my next role, I worked on a global cultural transformation for a major Insurance company with change networks in almost every continent for a Board-mandated change. So by the time I’d worked in Change Management for just 5 years I’d already worked with some of Australia’s biggest companies on some of their biggest changes, making me an expert based on the scale and impact of the changes, not just the length of time I’d been in Change Management. If you’ve worked on:

• Organisation-wide changes
• High volume changes
• Business critical or high impact changes
• National or global changes
• Large budget projects

then these all contribute to your expertise in the field.

#3 Take the title others use for you

There’s also an element of stepping into the light of your expertise rather than letting imposter syndrome keep you in the shadows. In my very first Change Management role, I thought I was going into a more junior Change position of Senior Change Analyst. Yet in my very first meeting with the Project Team, the Program Manager introduced me as their “Change Manager”. I had a choice in that moment: I could correct her and say, “No, no, I’m just a Change Analyst!” Or I could just own the title that she introduced me with and accept it. It always reminds me of that scene from Runaway Bride where they think Julia Roberts is going to run and she smiles and steps through the discomfort. I smiled and stepped through it and was like, “YES! I AM SHE!” (nah, I just said hi to everyone and that it was great to be there). I never told anyone in the project I was brand new to Change Management (the experienced Change Leader who hired me knew, of course) and just wore the hat and took on the persona of a Change Manager, learning along the way with support from my Change Leader. So if you’re being introduced as someone more senior or more expert than you think you are, take the compliment and own the title and their belief in you!

#4 Check your convincer

It seems like a no brainer, but I see too many incredibly experienced women feel in themselves that they are not experts. Sometimes even when they have 20 years in the field! In these instances, I question their “convincer”, a Neuro-Linguistic Programming term for the proof they feel they need in order to reach a particular point. For example, for me to go out on my own and start my own independent Change Management consultancy, my convincer consisted of time in Change Management (5 years), scale / impact / variety of projects (see above), and a certain amount of cash savings as a buffer. For me to start TEACHING OTHERS how to become a Change Management Consultant, my convincer was 3 clients and a six-figure year. The first time I ran my Instant Change Consultant Retreat in 2023, I had had a six-figure revenue year in business the year prior, and had worked with 3 consulting clients in a variety of service offerings. Sometimes your gap isn’t a confidence one, it’s not understanding your convincers and therefore spinning your wheels even though you may have hit those convincers years ago…

#5 Surround yourself with others at your level

This is one of the reasons why it’s so important to surround yourself with others at your level. In Coaching, we say you are the average of the five people closest to you. So in career, if you want to own your expertise, you need to surround yourself with others who are doing just that. It’s one of the reasons women love coming along to my retreat - they get the chance to be in the room with other like-minded women who are experienced in Change Management and owning their expertise, myself included. 

#6 Play in the right market

And finally, I see a lot of experienced Changies who are struggling in the current job market. Rates have right-sized, salaries are slightly lower, and super seasoned Change practitioners may unfortunately find it difficult to land the types of roles and contracts they’ve become accustomed to. Often this has absolutely nothing to do with their value and worth - they are just playing in the paddling pool instead of graduating to the Olympic-sized 50m that is independent consulting. Often, your highest rate as a contractor is the lowest rate of a consultant and in fact, when I moved to my own consultancy I tripled my rates overnight. 

I share more about how to step up and own your expertise in my free Change Advisor Bootcamp. 

> Get instant access to my free Change Advisor Bootcamp here now <

In the workshop, I’ll show you how to shift from delivery-focused tactical work to higher-level strategy, planning, and coaching value. And I'll step through the approaches, mindset and tools I’ve mastered to become a thought leader in Change, grow my impact, and position myself as someone whose expertise is valued and respected.

> Get instant access to my free Change Advisor Bootcamp here now <

Lata xx