Financial adviser. Yoga teacher. Dog trainer. Food writer.
Fungible.
Scott Pape. Adriene Mishler. Cesar Milan. Nigella Lawson.
The opposite of fungible.
What the heck is fungible?
I had been listening to a magazine editor give tips on writing feature articles, as that’s one of my gigs.
She was explaining that if you have been commissioned to write a story and the expert you were quoting pulls out, it’s fine to replace them with a different expert.
Providing the original expert was fungible. I had to look it up.
Merriam-Webster: capable of mutual substitution: INTERCHANGEABLE…
So, if you’re a fungible expert – they just replace you.
But if you’re Nigella or Cesar, Adriene or Scott, the story is dead.
Becoming known is about more than what you know.
Thousands of people know about dog training. They may even know more than Cesar Millan.
But he is the one who stands out.
Why?
Experality. (Not a word – but stick with me).
Experality is my word for Expertise (skill or knowledge; know-how) + Personality (essential character of a person).
Exper-ality.
If you have exper-ality, people remember and return to you not solely for what you know but for what you bring. Your expertise sure but also the experience they have of you when you let your personality come through.
It warms my heart when people send me emails like this:
Thank you for your Sunday Letters. From them, I get comfort — a warm hug — and encouragement to dig deep and respond boldly.
That lovely comment came from a subscriber to my newsletter, The Sunday Letter. One of my greatest goals is to support people in their content and creativity and it’s nice to know that it works.
You can do that.
You can give people an experience of you.
We all can.
We just have to remember to bring our personality as well as our expertise. We have to bring our ‘experality’.
You don’t have to struggle on your own.
If you’d like help generating ideas for your content or messaging or any other way you want to connect better with an audience, why not get my help?
I can help with getting onto podcasts (or preparing for them), brainstorming a book outline, putting together a press release or reviewing an article you’d like to pitch to a media outlet.
We can start with a Free 30-minute Strategy Session (click here to book).
We can do this.
We can be irreplaceable – the opposite of fungible.
Photo by Mathew Schwartz on Unsplash
