What kind of expert are you? Have you come to the place where you are qualified to teach other people? If you are not there, perhaps you would like to know how to come to this place.

This is what I would like to speak a little bit about today. It is very important these days to be qualified to teach and to train others. This is especially true in the realm of business and if you are an entrepreneur and a leader of a business.

How do you come to a place of being qualified to teach others?

Learn Continually

Well this comes firstly as a result of a lot of learning. You need to be learning all the time; something new every day. At the end of every day, you should be able to sit down and write at least one new thing that you learned today that you didn't know before.

If you can make this a daily habit, after a year you will have 365 new things that you learned that you didn't know before. That gives you 365 new things that you can teach to other people who probably don't know it either.

How do you learn new things?

There are two simple ways: by study and through experience. The key is to combine both study and experience together. Then you will have fullness of knowledge and a far greater ability to teach others.

What are some of the sources that we can tap into in order to gain knowledge?

Receive from People

Well since the knowledge you are going to receive is likely going to come from somebody else, probably most of the time your source of knowledge is going to be other people. So the first thing you must learn to do is how to receive knowledge from other people.

Although a lot of this happens automatically, do you know there are people who will go through life for years and years and never learn anything new? Make up your mind to learn something new today.

How do you do it? Firstly, by looking around you and seeing the people that you are making contact with all the time. The first way to learn something from somebody else is to listen to them speaking.

Do you find that at times you are doing too much talking yourself instead of listening to other people? Or do you just let peoples' conversations kind of pass you by?

You don't even listen to what they say. As the old expression goes, you let it go in one ear and out the other.

If you will take the time to just listen to what other people are saying, sooner or later somebody is going to come out with a little gem; a little something you never heard before or that you didn't know before.

As you receive that little piece of knowledge, it will go into you and make you more of an expert.

Read Something

A lot of people have put all their knowledge into writing. And so the other way to gain knowledge from other people is to read their writings.

If you are like me you should be reading something every day. There are not many nights that I go to sleep without reading something.

It can be reading the Scriptures. Or it can be reading a new book that I have either purchased in printed or electronic form, or downloaded from the Internet.

It could be some study or something that I got from somewhere. There must be something that I have to read to just put some extra knowledge into my mind. That extra knowledge day by day makes me more of an expert and makes me more qualified to teach others.

Learn From Others

The other way of gaining knowledge from other people is simply through association with them. If you are going to stick all by yourself, be a loner and not be associated with other people, then you are not going to learn from anybody except yourself.

Now you can learn a tremendous amount by listening to your spirit and by listening to the voice of God. But you also have to tap into some source that comes from other people.

Even when you read the Scriptures, although they were inspired by God, they were written by many different writers and you are reading what they poured out.

It is absolutely essential that you are continually reading if you desire to come to a place of having enough knowledge to teach others.

Then if you really want intensive training and knowledge, it is going to come by impartation from another person. And to receive an impartation of knowledge means you must enter into a mentorship relationship with that person.

All of these are different ways of learning from others and gaining knowledge from them.

Learn From Your Experiences

Now knowledge from experience also has a varied number of sources that we can consider.

Firstly you need to learn from your own experiences. Every one of us has different experiences in life, but usually living in the same world and having the same kind of pressures of life, most of us eventually have very similar experiences.

So when you have gone through an experience don't get all bitter and twisted. Don't throw in the towel and get disgruntled and say,

“Why does everything go wrong with me?”

Every single time you have an experience, whether it be good or bad, learn from that experience. The knowledge that you gain will be with you forever, and you will then be able to share it with other people.

Later on when you see somebody else going through that same experience you can say,

“I've been where you are. I've lived through that. Let me show you what I learned from this experience.”

Then you can teach and instruct others.

You can also just sit and watch other people going through their experiences. Sometimes it is easier to learn through the experiences of others.

It is easier to watch somebody else make mistakes and bump their head, than to go and do it yourself and suffer the pain and embarrassment.

It is much easier to watch somebody else make a fool of themselves, than for you to make a fool of yourself all the time and to have to face the embarrassment and humiliation of it. So learn from the experiences of others.

Learn From Biographies

You can often learn from other people by listening to or reading their biographies. You know most people are really keen to tell you their story.

Do you want to hold a good long conversation with a complete stranger? From the moment you meet them just do one thing. Ask them a question about themselves. Say to them,

“So tell me, how did you get into the business that you are in? How did you succeed in life? Please tell me what happened. Share with me about yourself.”

Do that and people will talk about themselves for hours.

Now don't do it just to impress people, but be ready to learn. If the person sits talking on and on, don't sit and nod your head and think,

“I wish they would shut up. I made a big mistake asking that question.”

No, learn from it. Listen and learn, even if what you learn is,

“With the help of the Lord I will never ever make the kind of mistakes that this person has made.”

Learn From Your Mistakes

And of course talking about mistakes, there is no better way to learn than to make mistakes. Don't beat yourself up when you mess up; when you do things that are wrong.

Sometimes you just feel so ashamed of yourself because you made such a mess. That is a learning experience.

Other people out there will be going through those same experiences. And how could you identify with them in their problems? How could you be a teacher and instructor of others if you haven't been through that same experience and made the same mistakes?

Once you have got all this knowledge through study and through experience, you want to grow it and intensify it and make it more powerful and strong.

Specialize in Something

The first way you can do that is by specializing. In other words you don't just gather bits and pieces of knowledge about everything.

It is great to know a little bit about everything, but you know we have an expression that says you can be a jack of all trades and master of none.

You may be able to hold a good conversation and make people think you are very clever. You know a lot about many things, but you actually don't know very much about one thing. So you must learn to specialize.

Make a decision and say,

“This is an area of knowledge that I am going to become an expert in. I'm going to learn as much about this subject as I can.”

When you do that you intensify your knowledge and you will be known as an expert.

You say, “If you need to discuss such-and-such a subject, go and speak to John. He knows all about that.”

That is great. If people need knowledge on that one special area, you are the expert because you took the time to intensify your knowledge.

Repetition and Practice

Of course the other way is through repetition. We don't learn things the first time do we? We sometimes need to bump our heads a couple of times before we get it and say,

“Hang on I am doing something wrong here.”

Sometimes you have to make the same mistakes over and over again. And sometimes you have to hear a person saying the same thing to you 10 times, before the penny finally drops and you say,

“Oh I get it. I never saw that before.”

And then you must practice. Practice makes perfect even in learning and in knowledge.

If you think that you have a bad memory, practice your memory. Develop it, exercise it and increase your knowledge. It is something you have to do by a choice of your will.

Teach Others

Now here is the most wonderful and powerful way of gaining knowledge. Try teaching others. The moment you are in a position to teach somebody else something, you come to realize that you actually don't know very much.

So find somebody who wants to be taught and offer to teach them. It will give you the incentive to get out there and find things out.

Whether you have to go and nag people or go and find experts and bombard them with questions, buy books and read them, listen to tapes and CDs or to buy training courses, do whatever it takes to increase your knowledge until you become that expert. Then as you increase your knowledge you will become an expert.

A Guru Or a Maven

What is an expert? A big word they are trying to use these days out there is the word guru. I have no idea why they chose guru, because a guru is a Hindu teacher and I don't know why we should be subject to eastern culture.

If you were living in the east, yes I could understand that guru means something, but we are living in the west.

There is a much better word. It is a nice English word and the word is 'maven'. It means the same thing. It means an expert; somebody who specializes in something and really knows it well.

Go and look it up at dictionary.com and you will see the definition of a maven.

If you want to succeed in business you must learn to be an influencer and an educator. Then you can bring people in.

You can train them up and you can impart to them the knowledge that they need and that you want them to have, in order to assist you in building this business together.

Then you can organize them together and make them into a solid group that can work as one and go forward and succeed.

We are going to be looking at organization next and it is the last of the four things that I have been looking at this week.

In the meantime your project for today is to learn something new. Tomorrow if I were to ask you what you learned yesterday, you should immediately be able to come out with at least one new thing and say,

“This is what I learned.”

Go and learn something today and we will share again tomorrow.