Why Education Is Important

Find a Child Therapist

Being an expert doesn't mean your education should stop. In fact, it might be the reason to keep learning.

Credentials are noteworthy achievements. But without ongoing development, they can become artifacts.

Being challenged in an unexpected way can reframe your thinking in valuable ways.

Pretty recently, I completed a new coaching credential. It was a ton of work, I didn’t really want to do it, and I wasn’t convinced it would be worth my time. Now that I’m on the other side of it, I’m struck by how much I learned. Not about coaching itself—though some of that was useful—but what I discovered about myself. Most especially, why I resisted and what I learned when I stopped and actually leaned into the process.

The risk of expertise is that it starts to feel like a constant state.

Frank Lloyd Wright said, "An expert is a man who has stopped thinking. Why should he think?” But of course, most of us don’t think of ourselves as not thinking anymore. What we do is stop questioning our thinking. The cost of having expertise is that you have a lot of confidence in what you’re doing—which can erode healthy critical evaluation of why you’re doing it.

I’ve spent about three decades advising companies on leadership, team development, and corporate culture. When I first got my Ph.D. in psychology, it was like getting drafted to the NFL. (OK, fine, not really—but you had........

© Psychology Today