September 22, 2024   |   Tagged Skills,

Are you a volleyball expert?

Are you a volleyball expert?

Experts understand important ways to develop talent that others overlook. Experts understand they never arrive, but they are on a continual journey of learning and growth. As soon as an expert thinks they have achieved expert status, they fail to be an expert. Expertise is both a mastery of skills but also the curiosity to never stop learning.

What is expertise?
Consider what an expert is. Are you one? How do you know?
Expertise is defined as, “elite, peak, or exceptionally high levels of performance in a given task or domain.” An expert performs at the highest level in their field.

Why is expertise important?
Flying with a pilot, going under the knife of a surgeon, studying something of great importance requires a level of expertise that leads to trust. Expertise gives us confidence that those who are performing a task or skill can successfully and dutifully execute it at the highest level. Expertise is about trust.

What makes expertise challenging?
One of the biggest challenges of expertise is that people often want to claim this status for themselves before they are ready. Serious mistakes happen when novices believe they are more competent on the volleyball court than they really are. The same happens when an expert becomes too assured of their expertise, and they do not receive feedback and insight from those they perceive as inferior. Pride (hubris) and ego cause the biggest challenges.

Confidence vs Ego
Building volleyball expertise requires inner confidence. Believing you can achieve something requires the work ethic to validate the confidence. Belief in yourself to achieve something without the application, dedication, and total commitment to the work is delusion. Ego blinds us. Confidence gives courage to do the work we must do to be excellent.

How to develop expertise?
Strategic foresight is an absolute requirement for developing a level of expertise.

Framing/Vision: Framing distills your vision and mission into a central focus. Framing brings into focus what you want and then outlines the goals you want to achieve. Framing with a mentor is one of the most important first steps to becoming an expert. One powerful study showed those who set goals before learning a skill improved the time it took to learn the skill by 400% over those who did not set goals. Wow!

Planning: Here is one of the stages where expertise goes awry. For example, a young man wants to be a serious college volleyball player, yet he spends more time on TikTok watching volleyball than practicing. He wants the shoes of the great volleyball players but not the hours spent building skill. He wants the benefits of volleyball without the work. Planning lays out the work to do and the mental toughness necessary to face the future. Any development of expertise will have a certain amount of pain and difficulty. Many people plan the work, but they don’t have a plan for when life gets tough. Those who become experts plan to be gutsy and gritty when something they are pursuing gets challenging. Expertise will not come without pain and struggle.

Acting: Not all actions are alike, but long-term dedication changes us. The biggest roadblock for expertise is the plateau. Everyone hits it. We rush forward trying to become an expert which makes our talent development shallow and faulty. Just like a long road trip, we start questioning, “Are we there yet?” way too early. We get out at a rest stop and call it the destination. Acting toward expertise is day-in and day-out perseverance to becoming excellent. It is the discipline to allow others to call us experts while continuing to strive for deeper or better understanding.

About NBC Volleyball
NBC stands for Nothing Beats Commitment and the philosophy that our daily habits reveal our future. NBC Volleyball began in 1979 and focuses on the development of the whole player: mind, body and spirit. Emphasis are on the intrinsic values of commitment, courage, character, compassion, confidence, grit, leadership, resiliency, and personal faith. For more information, visit www.nbcvolleyball.com