Your body of work is an organizational framework for your intellectual property. It ensures that everything you create — from the services you offer to the articles you write, the presentations you give, and the insights you share on LinkedIn — works together to tell the story of who you are, what you do, and how you think.
To build a reputation as an authoritative expert, every element of your body of work must be aligned. If it’s not, you risk confusing your audience, diluting your message, and diminishing your reputation.
Defining the parameters of your body of work requires you to identify the central anchor of your expertise — the one thing for which you want to be known. To build your authority, you must focus on that one thing and eliminate anything that doesn’t enhance the reputation you seek to build.
Visualizing your authority ecosystem.
Your body of work is not simply a collection of assets; it is an interconnected and cohesive system. Think of it as a forest — a living ecosystem defined by the canopy, which must be sufficiently dense and cover a sufficient number of acres, and the mycorrhizal network, the underground fungal network that connects all the trees and shrubs in the forest.
When you look at your consulting practice through this lens, your intellectual property naturally maps to each of the four main parts of a forest:
- The Canopy. Just like the parameters of a forest are defined by the canopy, the parameters of your body of work are defined by your BIG idea, the bold, insightful, and galvanizing idea upon which you are building your business and reputation. Your BIG idea is the idea for which you want to be known. It is also a powerful organizing principle that ensures that everything you write, present, or offer operates within a single, cohesive ecosystem.
- The Mother Trees. The canopy is supported by mother trees, the oldest and largest trees in the forest. Think of the mother trees as the core themes of your body of work; they lend structure and support to your BIG idea.
- The Understory. Each mother tree is surrounded by hundreds of the smaller trees and shrubs. These are the topics that give form and substance to each of your core themes.
- The Mycorrhizal Network. Finally, hidden beneath the surface is the mycorrhizal network, the thread-like structures of fungi that connect the trees and shrubs in a forest to one another. In your business, your experience-based expertise ties your themes and topics together.
Mapping your intellectual property.
Organizing your intellectual property into a body of work requires two related cognitive processes. Top-down processing looks at the big picture and breaks down each element in logical, sequential order. Bottom-up processing starts with the details and allows the big picture to reveal itself over time.
Understanding these mechanics is important because most advice about accomplishing complex goals assumes you will start with the end in mind and work backwards from a clearly defined goal.
But that doesn’t work for everyone.
According to Paul Main, a metacognition researcher, “[t]he interplay between these two processes occurs in a continuous loop. As new sensory information is processed bottom-up, it can influence and update the top-down understanding of the task, and vice versa.”
How you start organizing your intellectual property depends on which of these two processes is more aligned with your natural processing style.
If you’re a natural top-down processor, you will adopt a linear, step-by-step approach to defining your body of work. You might start by defining your canopy and clarifying your BIG idea — the bold, insightful, and galvanizing idea that anchors your practice. From there, you might use a mind map or brainstorm a list of themes that support your BIG idea. The topics you explore flow logically from those themes.
If you are a natural bottom-up processor, the top-down approach will feel too restrictive. Though you probably have a good idea of the reputation you wish to build, you may not have fleshed out your BIG idea. Instead of imposing a structure on your body of work, reverse the sequence and start by inventorying your intellectual property. Document every offer, article, resource document, LinkedIn post, and presentation. Only after you’ve catalogued these individual fragments do meaning and structure emerge as you identify the topics covered in each piece and use top-down processing to group your topics into core themes.
Structuring your framework.
Regardless of where you begin, your goal is to distill your thinking into a structured architecture of three to 10 themes (mother trees), each of which will host an unlimited number of topics. Because themes and topics often feel interchangeable, distinguishing between them will likely require you to toggle between top-down and bottom-up processing. If after you complete this process the first time you find you have more than 10 themes, you will need to rely on bottom-up processing to find new patterns and ways to group your topics. If, on the other hand, you have clearly identified your themes, perhaps because you have a signature method, you might rely on top-down processing to come up with a list of topics residing under each of those core themes.
As your framework takes shape, audit your existing intellectual property against it. Make sure you incorporate everything you’ve already created into your body of work. If an article, offer, or presentation doesn’t align with a core theme, you must either refine your themes or remove that piece from your body of work so you don’t confuse your audience.
Think of each individual piece within your body of work as a trail marker. These markers orient prospective clients and partners to your body of work, letting them know where they are and that they are in the right forest. That orientation creates the psychological safety required to build trust. And that trust turns every element of your body of work into a powerful business development asset.
Anchoring your expertise.
The final element of your body of work — the thing that ties it all together — is your experience-based expertise. This is the collection of insights drawn from your personal history that functions as the connective tissue of your body of work. When you share your lived experience through stories, illustrative examples, or scripts, it gives your audience the tools they need to apply your ideas to their current situations and positions you as an authoritative expert.
To unearth these insights, ask yourself which client experiences illustrate each theme. What personal anecdotes help you make your point? What scripts can you share that will make it easier for your audience to take action?
As you start putting parameters around your body of work and defining each of the elements, you’ll find that there are several ways to organize your intellectual property. The key is to discover something that works for you and to test and refine it over time.
Start with whichever process feels most natural to you, and give yourself permission to let the process be messy. When I first sat down to define my body of work, the walls of my office were papered in color-coded Post-it notes. (It looked like John Nash’s office in A Beautiful Mind.) Some of my clients adopt this analog approach to discovering the patterns in their thinking. Others prefer to use digital tools like Miro or Notion.
There are countless right ways to organize your body of work. Try not to get stuck chasing perfection. Instead, take the time to find the process that works best for you.
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Erica Holthausen is an authority development strategist and the founder of Catchline Communications. A veteran writer and editor, she equips consultants with the tools to share their perspective through original, high-quality articles that build authority and serve as powerful business development assets. In addition to writing for their blogs, her clients have been featured in Inc., TD Magazine, and Harvard Business Review. To learn how to turn your expertise into recognized authority, join The Authority Lab, a free monthly Q+A for consultants. Register here.
