I have been having a dabble on LinkedIn and am more than a little surprised at the plethora of coaching, self-development schema and other things which sound too good to be true. People have to make a buck and the platform is used to tout and sell services. My logic suggests that either there are a lot of insecure and incapable people who need someone to help them and therefore there is a market or there are lot of “experts” surplus to demand. It has always seemed a bit of swizz to me. Someone develops some schema, some training, then demands payment from others to be certified by them. This kind of business model is in Aikido, NLP, Reiki etc. Someone must issue the certificates.

But exactly who was the source certificate, who passed them as competent?

I’ll postulate that many imagine their knowledge and wisdom to be more extensive and comprehensive than it actually is. This group of people includes really smart people at universities.

We might call them the self-diagnosed omniscient or the know-it-all gang. There are a lot of people who think they are “experts” who are unaware of the extent and breadth of their ignorance. But because they deem themselves clever and smart they are closed minded and negating of anything outside the limited church of their knowledge. They profess from their soap boxes in real life and on-line.

There is a related phenomenon, “the not invented here syndrome”. This is when group mind develops a norm, an explanation, a brand or a product. Anything which is not sourced from within that set or peer group is suspect. The brand must be evangelised and cannot tolerate any new ideas which might threaten market share. Ideas from outside of group mind are repelled with boiling oil from the parapets or Winchester rifle rapid fire from within the circled wagons. Nothing foreign and “Apache” can be tolerated and allowed to live. “They” and “we” do not like nor trust “them”.

On an off for over a decade I have had dreams in which I am not believed or listened to. There is not much I can do about that, nor do I feel hard done by. I know enough about human nature to understand that I am a bit of a non sequitur in the minds of many. I don’t make sense in the world of should and ought. For too many the step to “as it actually is” can be tricky.

We have the robes or Levis joke. I say that because of my background and my penchant for black Levis 501 I am not believed. If, however, I wore Buddhist monk’s robes the incredulity would mostly be washed away in a flash of saffron or magenta. It is that simple, people do judge a book by its cover even when they are self-diagnosed omniscient.

Which suggests that said diagnosis is at best premature.

Hmnn…