About Untrap Your Expertise
A weekly excavation of expertise, work, and human potential. Each post is a find: a pattern, a blind spot, or a mechanism pulled from the sediment of expert work, and named so you can use it.
Expertise buries itself. The longer you do something well, the less you notice yourself doing it. Judgment calls become automatic. Pattern recognition goes invisible. The very things that make you good at your work disappear from your own view.
That’s the site I dig.
Every week, I pull one thing up. A pattern nobody named. A blind spot experts don’t know they have. A mechanism that explains why training fails, why courses underperform, and why the best person in the room is often the worst at explaining what they do.
I study this using instructional design and industrial-organizational psychology, the two disciplines built to answer one question. How does expertise work, and why is it so hard to hand off.
What you’ll find here
Field notes from real excavations: patterns, blind spots, and mechanisms pulled straight from expert work
Research-backed essays on knowledge transfer, learning, and performance
Practical ways to surface what you already know but haven’t yet said
Who this is for
You’re the expertise in your business. Not a department buying training for someone else.
You’ve been told to write a book, build a course, or “just share what you know,” and stalled every time. Getting it out of your head in an order that makes sense is the actual problem nobody named for you.
If you disappeared for six months, your business would struggle, because what makes it work has never fully left your head.
If you lead learning or talent at an organization, you’re welcome here too. The thinking is the same whether the expertise walking out the door is yours or someone on your team’s.
Who this is not for
If you want a content calendar or a posting schedule, this isn’t that. This is the mechanism underneath the content, not the tactics on top of it.
If you want a six-figure shortcut to selling what you know, this isn’t it. Digging takes longer than a launch.
If you want AI to write the thought leadership so you don’t have to, this isn’t for you. The part AI can’t do for you is the whole point of what I write about.
How to Get Started
Everything you need to orient yourself is free.
Read the Start Here post to understand who this publication is for and where to begin.
Subscribe for free to receive weekly essays and practical resources that help you build language for what you know.
Upgrade to paid when you are ready to move from reading about expertise translation to practicing it.
You’ve explained something twice and still got blank looks.
You’ve built a course full of good content that didn’t work for students.
You already know the problem. You just didn’t have a name for it yet.
Subscribe, and start digging with me.
About Shannon D. Smith
Expertise Archaeologist. Expertise is the site I dig. Writing is how I preserve what surfaces.
Shannon studies the buried layers of what experts know but can’t explain, using instructional design and industrial-organizational psychology as her tools.
She holds an M.S. in Instructional Design and Technology, an M.S. in Industrial-Organizational Psychology, and is a Certified Professional in Talent Development.
To learn how to work with her, visit shannondsmith.com.
