Here’s How to Create Your Own Intellectual Property and Add Huge Credibility to Your Ideas and Products
“How well we communicate is determined not by how well we say things, but how well we are understood.”
–Andrew Grove
One of the most important factors to remember is that whilst you may be superb at what you do and you are rigorous in your pursuit of excellence in your chosen field, doing it isn’t the same as teaching it!
It’s the same scenario in most walks of life.
Here’s a little case study: –
Neil is a senior executive and an important client of mine.
It didn’t start out that way however. Maths was Neil’s nemesis as a schoolboy. After keeping up with the others during the basics of adding, subtracting, multiplying and division, something missed its mark for him in maths lessons and he was seemingly one of the few boys in his class who just didn’t get it! If you were to ask him about fractions or equations, you would be waiting an awfully long time for an answer!
And what made this worse was that it was clearly all his fault, not the maths teachers’. ‘Pathetic’ the master would say, as he handed out Neil’s pitiful test results. It even got to the stage when at a parent/teacher evening, Neil’s maths teacher told his father that ‘hell would freeze over’ before Neil passed his maths O Level.
Maths was deemed essential, especially back then, so after his first attempt at the exam ended in the miserable failure everyone expected, his parents sent him to a private tutor, who gave him four one hour sessions, covering the main elements of non-comprehension (most of the syllabus for Neil)
Neil didn’t know how it happened quite so quickly, but his tutor ‘opened his eyes’. In no time at all, he was asking with disbelief ‘Is that IT?! I mean, is it really that simple?!’
Neil passed his O Level with a ‘C’, after just four hours of tutoring.
The critical factor here was the teaching methodology, which turned 9 years of struggle into a 90-minute breeze. It was not a matter of intellect. His wires were just tangled that’s all. The key here was that his tutor understood how to package the key factors in as simple a format as possible, so that even he, a much-ridiculed maths dunce, saw and understood.
This case study of a highly successful professional holds 2 very valuable lessons.
- Firstly, that if there’s something that isn’t working, don’t just keep doing it, change your approach until it does work. A new methodology may be all you need.
- Try and take the phrases ‘I can’t’ and ‘it’s impossible’ out of your vocabulary.
Stories like this episode can also change our beliefs about what was possible for us in our lives.
People learn in different ways and at different speeds.
Therefore, one of the most effective tools available to anyone looking to pass on their expertise, is the creation of bulletproof content that is robust enough, simple enough and packaged intuitively enough to market and to teach your products and services to anyone.
The key is to have a methodology that is repeatable and also flexible enough to be used in multiple ways; for example, face-to-face, on audio as well as video.
This is where most professional communicators go wrong. They may be entertaining, stimulating, even inspiring, but without a structured approach, it is all too easy to overwhelm your audience and leave them confused – and critically – disinclined to engage further.
Solution Structure –
There are highly successful precedents for having a simple and a highly effective formula. Daniel Goleman for example has used a 2 x 2 matrix to explain the fundamental components of Emotional Intelligence and how each quadrant interacts with each other. The key here is for highly practical – yet potentially complex – material to be made simple and practical through the use of the system. These systems can be hierarchical in design, such as the well know iceberg model or the logical levels made so accessible by Robert Dilts.
A solution structure should also be a map – an easy-to-read direction finder that can navigate you from the start of the process to the end.
As mentioned, most professionals in the mentoring industry are not systematic enough in their approach, leaving their content to be taught very much on an ‘ad hoc’ basis. This leaves their expertise in their heads, rather than laid out in a structured approach. The crazy thing is that these same professionals re-think the same material again and again before stepping onto a stage. As a result, they represent great value in the moment, but they are not maximising what they know.
A structured, packaged and branded system of your products and services, if applicable, will enable you to teach each part of your content in a consistent way, without going off track or wondering what comes next.
In addition, it also allows your audience to follow each step of the process effortlessly.
Why not become a front runner in this information age by creating your own branded products and services?
The modern subject matter expert lets him or her – self down when it comes to Intellectual Property – or IP. They tend to teach their content over and over again until they know it backwards, but they don’t make it their own, by means of tweaking and adapting it in a simple to understand, simple to teach methodology that they can brand.
If you want a proven Process to generate your own Intellectual Property around your area of expertise, then grab The IP template below — this process will help you assemble and streamline your own expertise into content that you can customize, brand and use as your own from now on.
