What Makes an Expert an Expert?
What Makes an Expert an Expert?
The personal growth space is riddled with self-proclaimed experts in everything from relationships to careers to wellness. Who should you trust?
Expertise is dead. Long live the expert!
Open any social media or news app, and you’ll encounter plenty of people claiming expertise. It’s a natural result of the democratization of access to broadcast channels. We can literally tap into the deep training and lived experience of people who would have been shut out from the traditional media apparatus in the pre-Internet days.
The proliferation of expertise is also a natural result of growing precarity. The need to sell ourselves, establish our brands, and build audiences as safety nets leads us to perform confidence and fluency at all costs (up to and including the cost of personal integrity).
Our media environment gives us access to people with incredible insight they’ve earned in a myriad of ways. I can listen to a legal commentator explain why originalism is a farce, then follow them on Bluesky or Substack, then download a paper they wrote, and watch a lecture they gave on YouTube. I mean, what?! The levels of autodidactism we can reach today are mind-bogglingly cool—not to mention incredibly useful.
But our media environment also makes it easy for charismatic or media-savvy people to present themselves as experts, teachers, or guides without much in the way of knowledge or experience. Visit Threads or X or Substack, and you’re sure to find any number of threadbois1 peddling their pseudo-expertise wares. The levels of misinformation, disinformation, and bullshit2 make it hard to know who or what to trust.
The argument for trusting experts and rejecting armchair scientists or charismatic influencers is common in the realms of climate change, medicine, politics, and the law. But I think less attention has been given to how we think about the kinds of experts (or non-experts) that influence our daily lives—our decisions about how to plan our days, what moves to make in our careers, which foods to put in our bodies, or how to navigate our relationships. And yet, because these are questions with serious business potential, there is even more potential for bad advice or ungrounded guidance.
Not necessarily nefarious. But certainly not helpful.
Because there is just so much more to know in the 21st century, we need the guidance of experts more than ever. And more than ever, we need to stay curious, stay cautious, and keep scrutinizing the people and institutions we look to for help.
Today, we’ll use a sociological lens to explore self-help expertise—how it’s formed, how it’s leveraged, and how it creates value. This is the third installment of my series, Self-Help, LLC, which examines how the idea of self-help has come to permeate life and business, often in unexpected ways.
And to help with this, I reached out to Patrick Sheehan.
Patrick is a sociologist who “examines the relationship between technology, labor, and social inequality.” One of his ongoing research projects focuses on the “puzzling rise of self-styled life and career ‘coaches’ and the role they play in counseling unemployed workers.” In a 2022 paper for the American Journal of Sociology, he details his findings after studying career coaches and the job seekers they serve and offers an analysis of the greater self-help expertise ecosystem.
I caught up with him in 2022 to talk about his findings and analysis.
Keep reading or listen on the What Works podcast.
Curious—and a bit confused
Patrick started graduate school in 2017. “It was a time when all the headlines were ‘automation is going to put everyone out of work’,” he told me. Labor economists talked about how much we needed to invest in retraining and career transition. “I was really curious about what that would look like for people.”
Patrick started to attend job search clubs and retraining seminars. He was curious about what people were talking about, who was attending, and how job seekers were looking to the future. But he discovered something he wasn’t expecting: career coaches. “I was sort of skeptical from the beginning,” Patrick admitted, “because I was thinking of this as sort of ‘hard skills’ retraining.” One might expect a retraining seminar to focus on technology skills, the ins and outs of knowledge work, or even transitioning into the service economy. That’s not what the career coaches provided at these events, though. Instead, they were offering inspiration and motivational guidance.
“I got really stuck on this question: how can these people be experts in managing a career when it looks like they’ve struggled themselves very recently?” Patrick was a bit confused. Attendees loved these seminars. They listened intently—even as it seemed that the career coaches lacked credentials or concrete advice.
Patrick discovered that, overwhelmingly, the career coaches he met had history of “jumbled careers” and “long-term unemployment before starting their coaching practice.” They couldn’t rely on a long list of successes to substitute for formal training or credentials. “They must enter the field orthogonally, reinterpreting the world in such a way that their supposed ‘failures’ become signs of their ultimate wisdom,” Patrick wrote in his article.
“I’m not trying to adjudicate who is really an expert and who is not,” Patrick told me. Instead, he wanted to understand what was really going on—sociologically speaking.
Credentials versus experience
“However, when it comes to these minor self-improvement experts, they not only lack institutional affiliations but also often position themselves in contrast to official experts—health and wellness gurus present themselves as against the medical establishment, and financial coaches as against traditional investment wisdom. They compete with the official experts and often seek to undermine trust in their authority.”
Patrick Sheehan, “The Paradox of Self-Help Expertise”
Patrick divides experts into two umbrella groups: credentialed experts and experience-based experts. Credential experts rely on what trust researcher Rachel Botsman calls “institutional trust.” Their credentials and formal training lend them credibility. “Doctors, lawyers, scientists,” Patrick told me, “people trust them because of the institution” that backs them up.
Experience-based experts also engender trust and credibility. But “their credibility tends to be more unstable and less generally recognized.” Take, for instance, the wellness influencer (we’ll talk about influencers in the fifth installment of this series). A wellness influencer might have credentials like a personal trainer certification or a degree in nutrition science. But they’re just as likely to have credibility because of their story, communication style, and personable advice. That said, if someone hasn’t developed a relationship with them online, they’re not likely to recognize the influencer as an expert. The influencer’s credibility doesn’t easily cross from platform to platform or from online to offline.
Sociologically speaking, Patrick argues that there is value in both categories of expertise—even if they’re often at odds. To demonstrate, he referenced Max Weber’s work on understanding how religion impacts culture. Weber differentiated between priests and prophets. Priests are credentialed experts—people whom the church anointed and, therefore, have special access to the divine. Prophets, on the other hand, draw their credibility from personal experience with the divine. They claim to circumvent the church as an institution and go straight to the source.
For our purposes, the critical component of this example is that priests can easily lose touch with their congregations or parishes. Because they are tasked with upholding the institution’s access to the divine, they can lose sight of the lived experience of the people they serve. They lose relevance. But the prophet lives among the people:
“The prophet, in Weber’s telling, is always lying in wait among the people, ready to exploit any legitimacy gap that emerges between a too-distant priesthood and the laity. The prophet represents an alternative route toward building expert credibility. Rather than lean on credentials and institutional affiliations, what I call “experienced-based” experts approach credibility from the other direction. They forego professionalization and rely instead on their closeness to clients, their intimate understanding of clients’ needs, and perhaps a charismatic spark allowing them to translate those needs into a demand for their services. Like the prophet, experience-based experts compete with credentialed experts and seek to undermine trust in those credentials as they jockey for position.”
Patrick Sheehan, “The Paradox of Self-Help Expertise”
Today, the news cycle and social media ecosystem are often dominated by the battle between priests and prophets.
Whether we’re talking about alternative medicine, outsider politicians, or reproductive rights, there are a lot of self-professed experts railing against institutions and established bodies of knowledge. This is another area where self-help is big business. Why go to a therapist who can help you unpack your past when you can hire a coach or a healer who will help you step into the future? Why submit to mood-stabilizing drugs when you could meditate for an hour every day? Why read what experts have to say on a subject when you could “do your own research?”
These are deliberately provocative questions. And I think it’s important—as with the priest versus prophet example—to remember that both positions have value. There are institutions that need to be dramatically restructured. There are alternative forms of care that are useful. There is misinformation out there.
It’s when the priest versus prophet dynamic lurches into all-or-nothing territory that things get problematic.
Philosopher Alan Levinovitz calls this an “empowering epistemology.” Epistemology is simply the study or organization of how we know what we know. An empowering epistemology organizes knowledge to give one a sense of certainty and security.
Levinovitz offers wellness culture and gun culture—at least in their extreme forms—as two examples of empowering epistemologies. The prophets of wellness culture warn us about the priests of the medical establishment. They question peer-reviewed research while offering only anecdotal evidence of their claims. The prophets of gun culture warn us about the vulnerability and danger of everyday life. Legislator-priests don’t understand just how important it is to protect oneself from criminals.
Priests from the Labor Department might come in and teach you how to code. But the prophets of career coaching will help you envision a career you’re passionate about.
Empowering epistemologies are especially enticing in this era of extreme uncertainty and precariousness. One might wonder how a credentialed expert could really know what that person is going through when even that person doesn’t necessarily know what is happening. If distrust is the default emotion, then a system of thought or a compelling narrative can feel like Truth by affirming a particular feeling or experience one’s had. “People in these shaky times want someone to assure them, want someone to look them in the eye and understand them emotionally,” Patrick told me.
How self-help experts generate trust
Patrick found that the first layer of trust is built by tapping into a moral universe in which work isn’t a function of earning a living, it’s a function of passion and self-expression. Whereas the Fordist system saw work primarily as a source of income, “coaches present work in a different light.” He said, “They present it as something much more sacred and important to your identity. It should be an outlet for self-expression.”
In the moral universe created from this belief, the “best” kind of work is work you’re passionate about. “You don’t do it for the money. You do it for the love,” Patrick explained. These are phrases that I think everyone is familiar with. But the way Patrick describes it as part of a “moral universe” and “social order” is critical because these maxims are part of the winner-loser framework I discussed previously.
Further, Patrick identified that coaches often elevated entrepreneurship, particularly passion-based entrepreneurship, as the pinnacle of this social order. This bolsters the credibility of the career coaches because it puts them on top of the moral hierarchy. The story that’s told, according to Patrick, boils down to, “you could get a job—a dull, boring, alienating job—that might pay you a steady paycheck, but if you do that, you’re failing to fully live your life.” No one wants to fail at life. No one wants to settle for 42nd place. “The view that these coaches are promoting is a really seductive one. It’s really motivating and exciting,” Patrick told me.
Coaches utilize this social order as part of their “trust stack.”
The idea of being able to do work you’re passionate about is enticing. Rachel Botsman, the trust researcher I cited earlier, says that buying into an idea like this—making it feel safe—is the first layer of the “trust stack.”
Unlike truly new ideas, career coaches benefit from decades of increasing familiarity with “do what you love” ideology. So while career coaching might be a relatively new service, the idea that builds on is not. Micki McGee, our guide through the murky waters of the self-help business, writes, “The ideal that everyone ought to work purely for the intrinsic rewards of his or her work—for his or her own amusement and delight—would be an appealing notion if only the extrinsic necessities of life were assured.”
But the reality is that there’s been an evident turn in American culture over the last 40 years or so. We no longer believe that a steady job that pays you well is what we want (or need). “You do want money, and you do want stability, but you [also] want to express yourself. You want to be an artist. That’s how you’re going to reach your highest potential,” Patrick told me. Adding, “It really is a cultural vibe.”
And this cultural vibe has material ramifications. Employers hear workers asking for more creative work, and so they offer up the specter of creative work at the cost of other benefits. “Here’s your creativity, but maybe we’re going to stop paying a pension the way we used to,” as Patrick put it. This is a significant trade-off—and it’s one that impacts every era of our lives.
The second layer in Botsman’s trust stack is building trust in the platform or third-party facilitating exchange. This is present to some degree with the career coaches Patrick studied—after all, his research involved immersive experiences of seminars organized by clubs for job-seekers.
It turns out disempowerment is a pretty powerful mechanism for trust, too.
Patrick found that career coaches built on distrust of employers and traditional careers. “I'd be sitting in these seminars and they would say, ‘The system's kind of set up against you. The path you're on wasn't working, and it wasn't gonna work.’ And I'm thinking to myself, you're right!”
This is a perfect example of Levinovitz’s empowering epistemology framework. He argues that the desire for empowerment comes from a profound sense of disempowerment. And that disempowerment is amplified by sharing anecdotes that highlight the brokenness of traditional institutions.
These personal testimonies, as Patrick frames them, act as a way to connect with potential clients. The personal testimonies follow a similar pattern—one you’re no doubt familiar with and perhaps even use yourself. “People describe their own past as having some kind of traumatic event or personal crisis,” Patrick told me. Then, they describe hitting rock bottom and fearing for the future. “They didn’t know what to do—but then they had a realization: ‘I want to pursue my childhood passion, etc. I reinvented myself, decided to pursue my passion all the way, and now I’ve transformed myself to become this very successful coach entrepreneur that I am today. For that reason, I can help you.’”
And that brings us to Botsman’s third and final layer of the “trust stack”: trusting the person on the other side of the exchange. You’re sold on the idea of work as self-expression. You can clearly see how the old system is broken. And now, all you need is a guide whom you can trust to guide you through a foreign land. Similarly, Levinovitz dubs these guides “cultural ambassadors.” They’re the people who help you cross over from one cultural system to another.
Patrick relates it to the hero’s journey. “Someone goes through a dark period, they fight demons, they overcome it, and then they’re the wiser for it. And that’s the pitch that coaches are often giving—having been through this failure and having worked out of it.” He told me that building trust often requires foregrounding their failure but in a way that provides motivation to the person hearing the story.
My guess is that this pattern feels super familiar to you. You see it online every single day. Maybe you work that pattern every single day. And it can be easy to question it. Is it manipulative? Is it nefarious? Is it creating real value at all? Or at least, those are the questions I ask myself! And it was something Patrick started thinking about, too.
“This is not just fake expertise, which is something I definitely started thinking about. These are real services that coaches are providing, [even if those services] aren’t what they say they are providing,” he told me. Patrick saw firsthand just how disorienting getting laid off in midlife can be. “There is a real existential moment for a lot of people.” He said that the emotional support and reflection that coaches provide can create results that are productive for clients. “That’s not fake expertise or anything like that. That’s just solidarity.”
So maybe the expertise–the trust–being forged here isn’t so much an expertise about navigating a career (or life, or a career, or a marriage, or anything else you might hire a coach for). It’s an expertise in listening, empathizing, and motivating people to get back out there.
At this point, all the coaches are out there rolling their eyes, I’m sure! Of course, that’s our expertise, I bet they’re thinking.
As Patrick said, that is a truly valuable service to provide. I think it leads to a few final questions: Why do we outsource that kind of emotional labor to a paid third party? What structural problems create the need for all that listening, empathizing, and motivating? Finally, what is all that emotional labor doing to the people who practice it?
It takes a toll
Today, the job market is increasingly divided—and starkly so—between service industry jobs that pay very little and offer few benefits and knowledge industry jobs that pay better and might still offer benefits. And there simply aren’t enough of those knowledge industry jobs for everyone who is qualified for one. This contributes to both the need for career coaches and the growing number of career coaches.
In a February post, Patrick wrote, “Career coaches thus occupy a unique position in the economy: themselves evicted from stable, salaried work by fraying employment contracts, they assume the role of street preacher, evangelizing for the ideological infrastructure of the new labor regime.”
There is an increasing fear among the middle and upper-middle classes about downward mobility. If a tech or media worker gets laid off, they need to find a similar job as soon as possible to avoid long-term financial consequences. And the longer someone is out of a job, the more likely they are to be subsumed by the gig economy or service industry. Since coaching represents a type of knowledge work, it can easily be seen as a way to stay on track if you’ve been squeezed out of your job. For some, that’s true. For others, it’s not so true. For almost everyone, it takes a toll.
Manual labor or service work is difficult. But so is the kind of emotional labor that coaches do on a daily basis. I asked Patrick if he noticed this with the coaches he talked to, and the first thing he said was:
I noticed it in myself! I spent a lot of time at these job search seminars, just listening and getting to know people who are listening to coaches. It’s an emotional load just to hear people’s stories about that layoff from IBM… I heard so many stories of deep psychological pain and identity collapse. And I gotta say, I would be exhausted from fieldwork.
Patrick had a deeply human experience hearing about the pain others were going through. And coaches not only share in that emotional experience but are personally and professionally invested in turning those stories around. That is incredibly hard work. “Coaches are soaking in all that anxiety and trying to push out something positive, something motivational… That’s something that often goes unrecognized, but it is such a difficult thing… In the kind of economy we’re running right now if we don’t have that sort of emotional outlet if there are not people there to do that job, I think there will be a lot more crises that spill over” from individuals to families to communities.
All that said, Patrick told me there were plenty of times when he wanted to take the stage and tell the unemployed to “join the barricades.” No one acknowledged the structural challenges and need for reform. That said, “even if you recognize the structural barriers, the economy’s totally screwed up. There are not enough jobs. You still have to make a decision when you’re laid off as to what you’re going to do.”
Acknowledging the many ways the system is broken and developing a conscious analysis of how systems are stacked against us has a lot of value. At the same time, we need to create the emotional and motivational scaffolding we need to survive—and maybe even thrive. It’s not exactly self-help, but I think it might be the expertise we really need.
Not all “threadbois” are boys.
Philosopher Harry Frankfurt defined “bullshit” as communication unconcerned with the truth. It’s not there to convince, simply to confuse.