So I did what seemed sensible. I earned two master’s degrees because I believed education would make me more capable and credible. I pursued professional certifications because I thought expertise was something you could point to on paper.

I don’t regret any of it. Those years opened doors, taught me how to think differently, and shaped my career. While I was collecting credentials, I was also developing a way of seeing the world that no diploma could capture. I just didn’t recognize it yet.

Before I knew what I was looking for

The first entrepreneur I ever knew was my dad. He owned a small painting and carpentry business called Quality General Contracting. As a little girl, I didn’t understand contracts or invoices or what it meant to run a business.

What I remember is watching him work. I remember the care he put into what he built, the long days, the uncertainty that came with working for yourself. Looking back, what stayed with me wasn’t the business itself. It was the idea that your work could be yours.

Somewhere in those years I started imagining that I would build something too. I didn’t dream about entrepreneurship itself. I had a deep desire to create something that reflected how I saw the world.

Life had other plans.

Survival became the plan

Marriage at twenty-one and divorce ten years later was not on my bingo card. After my divorce, I became the sole provider for four children with no safety net.

Circumstances like that change the questions you ask. I wasn’t wondering what my life’s work might be. I was wondering how I was going to keep the lights on, pay the bills, and make sure my kids had what they needed.

People say follow your passion. That advice assumes you have room to think about passion. Survival doesn’t leave much room for that.

So I made practical decisions instead. I worked. I went back to school. I earned degrees because they created opportunities, and I accepted jobs because they offered stability.

For a long time I believed I had simply taken the responsible path while other people found their purpose. Looking back, I see something different.

I wasn’t avoiding my life’s work. I was growing into it without realizing it.

The question that refused to leave me alone

No matter what job I had, one part of the work never changed. I always found myself sitting across from an expert, asking them to explain what they did. As an instructional designer, that was the job. I conducted interviews, ran training needs analyses, and documented how work got done so staff could be trained.

I asked experienced professionals why they made a particular decision or how they knew what to do next. The answers were consistently familiar: “it depends”, “I’ve never really thought about it”, or “I just know”.

At first those responses frustrated me. Eventually they fascinated me.

These weren’t people who lacked expertise. They had so much expertise that parts of it had become invisible to them. They could perform the work effortlessly. Explaining it was another matter entirely.

Learning to excavate instead of interview

Those conversations changed how I approached my work. I stopped thinking of interviews as information gathering. They became something closer to excavation, because the first answer was almost never the interesting one.

If I kept asking questions, another layer appeared. Then another. Eventually we uncovered a judgment, an assumption, or a decision the expert hadn’t realized they were making.

Those moments became my favorite part of the job. It wasn’t about finding the answer. It was the experience of uncovering something the expert didn’t know they knew.

I didn’t have language for it then, but I was developing a philosophy about expertise long before I developed a method.

The irony took me years to see

Over the years I helped organizations preserve institutional knowledge before it disappeared through retirements, resignations, and reorganizations. I got good at helping other people see what had become invisible in their own expertise.

What never occurred to me was that the same thing had happened to me. Whenever someone asked what I did, I answered with a job title: instructional designer, learning consultant, staff development trainer. Those titles described my roles. They didn’t describe my thinking.

Looking backward changed everything

The breakthrough came when I stopped reviewing my résumé and started reviewing my patterns. I asked what questions had followed me from job to job, what kind of problems kept pulling me in, what work energized me even when it was difficult.

The answers had been remarkably consistent for more than a decade. I wasn’t simply designing training. I was studying expertise. I wasn’t just documenting knowledge. I was uncovering the thinking that experts could no longer see themselves.

That realization changed everything. Those observations eventually became the foundation of what I now call the Expertise Translation Method™. The method wasn’t created in a single moment. It emerged from years of paying attention to the same problem from different angles.

What I believe now

I no longer think our life’s work arrives all at once. Most of the time it develops quietly while we’re busy doing our jobs, raising children, solving problems, and trying to get through an ordinary life.

Only later, looking back, do we recognize the pattern. Credentials matter. Experience matters. Titles matter. None of it is the whole story.

The deeper clues are usually hidden in the questions we keep asking, the problems we return to, and the things we notice that other people seem to miss.

I’ve spent more than a decade helping experts uncover the knowledge they can no longer see, and helping organizations document that knowledge for onboarding, upskilling, and performance improvement. The surprising part is that my own expertise worked the same way.

It was hiding in plain sight. Maybe that’s true for more people than we realize. Sometimes the thing that makes us most valuable doesn’t feel remarkable, because we’ve carried it for so long.

We don’t need to become someone new. We simply need to recognize who we’ve already become.

Before you go

If you take one thing from this story, take this: don’t assume your most valuable expertise is the thing hanging on your wall.

It may be hidden in the questions you can’t stop asking, the problems people naturally bring to you, or the patterns you’ve grown so used to seeing that you no longer recognize they’re unusual. Take an hour this week and look backward instead of forward. Open an old notebook. Scroll through years of notes.

Think about the conversations you’ve had over and over again. Ask yourself what problem you’ve been trying to solve for years, what people consistently ask you to help with, and what way of thinking has quietly followed you from one role to the next.

Your expertise may not be waiting for you in your next certification, promotion, or job title. It may already be there, hidden in plain sight, waiting for you to finally give it a name.

Share

Share Untrap Your Expertise™

When you’re ready, here are three ways I can help.

1. Learn the concepts.
Subscribe to Untrap Your Expertise for practical insights on making expertise visible, useful, and transferable.

2. Build the capability.
Upgrade to the paid tier for implementation guides, toolkits, prompts, and practical frameworks you can apply immediately.

3. Solve the problem together.
If your organization or expert-led business is struggling with inconsistent results because critical expertise stays trapped inside people’s heads, explore the Expertise Translation Sprint or Advisory. Schedule a consultation here.

"It's a very different skill to go from doing to documenting." — Melody Lacey

That sentence has been sitting with me ever since my first interview. When I began the Invisible Expertise Field Study, I carried a working theory going into it.

Experts leave out important information because expertise changes how they see their own work. Years of experience compress thousands of decisions into intuition. Eventually, they stop noticing many of the judgments they make because those judgments have become part of how they naturally think.

I expected this first interview to either strengthen my theory or expose its weaknesses.

It did both.

Before We Begin

The Invisible Expertise Field Study isn’t about collecting success stories.
It’s about uncovering hidden mechanisms. Every interview helps answer a larger question:

What do experts stop seeing once they’ve become experts?

As the study grows, paid subscribers will receive downloadable interview breakdowns, research briefs, emerging patterns across interviews, and the complete field study report when the project concludes.

You’re not just reading the findings.
You’re watching the research unfold in real time.

Subscribe now

Meet the Contributor

My first research conversation was with —a founder and creator whose work centers on helping people understand themselves through structured frameworks and pattern recognition.

As we talked, I realized something interesting.

No matter which example she used—project management, homeschooling, course creation, or client facilitation—she always returned to the same underlying principle.

People don’t succeed because information exists.

They succeed because someone has translated that information into a process they can actually follow. Initially, I recognized it as important. By the end of the interview, I realized it had become a central finding.

Why I’m Sharing These Conversations

The Invisible Expertise Field Study isn’t a collection of success stories.

It’s an investigation.

I’m interviewing experts across industries to understand what happens when knowledge becomes so familiar that the people who possess it can no longer see all of its parts.

Initial Observation

Before we ever discussed invisible expertise directly, Melody kept describing something else.

• Process.

• Clear expectations.

• Documentation.

• Feedback loops.

• Success criteria.

• Adoption periods.

• Inspection.

At first, those ideas felt separate. Eventually, I realized they were all expressions of the same mental model. She wasn’t describing communication.

She was describing the invisible architecture that allows communication to work.

That distinction changed how I heard the rest of the conversation.

Mechanism Identified

Halfway through the interview, Melody said something I’ve continued thinking about long after we ended the call.

“It’s a very different skill to go from doing to documenting.”

That single sentence introduced a possibility I hadn’t considered.

• What if expertise itself isn’t the problem?

• What if the real challenge is that we’ve assumed two different capabilities are the same?

One capability allows someone to perform exceptional work. The other allows them to reconstruct that work so someone else can learn it and repeat it.

Execution.

Translation.

Organizations often expect experts to possess both.

Interview #1 suggests they may be entirely different forms of expertise.

If that’s true, it changes the nature of the question I’ve been asking. Perhaps experts struggle to teach because translating knowledge is its own discipline.

Evidence From the Conversation

When Melody described why some clients achieved better results than others, she didn’t point to intelligence or motivation. She pointed to participation.

• The people who benefited most from her work weren’t the ones who moved through the process fastest.

• They were the ones willing to slow down, reflect, and engage deeply enough for patterns to emerge.

When I asked why she thought experts leave important things out, she agreed that automaticity plays a role. But then she expanded my point of view.

• Sometimes knowledge is intentionally withheld as a means of gatekeeping.

• Sometimes organizational politics discourage knowledge sharing.

• Sometimes experts haven’t learned how to deconstruct their thinking into a sequence another person can follow.

Doing the work and documenting the work require different muscles.

What Changed My Thinking

Before this interview, I believed invisible expertise was primarily about automaticity. Now I’m wondering if that’s only one mechanism.

Interview #1 surfaced at least three possibilities.

• Expertise becomes automatic, causing important steps to disappear from conscious awareness.

• Experts may never have developed the separate skill of translating their thinking into teachable processes.

• In some environments, knowledge is intentionally withheld for strategic or political reasons.

Those mechanisms produce similar outcomes. But they don’t share the same cause. If the causes differ, the solutions may possibly differ, too.

Why This Matters

Organizations invest enormous resources in training.

• Courses become longer.

• Videos become more polished.

• Learning platforms become more sophisticated.

But training can only transfer what someone has first learned to make visible.
If an expert can’t externalize how they think, instructional design has nothing meaningful to translate.

Perhaps the bottleneck isn’t learning.

Perhaps it’s translation.

Research Ledger

Interviews Completed: 1 of 100

Mechanism Identified: Execution expertise and translation expertise may be separate capabilities.

Questions Carrying Into Interview #2

• Is translation expertise something people naturally develop, or does it have to be intentionally learned?

• What other mechanisms cause expertise to become invisible?

• How often are organizations mistaking performance expertise for teaching expertise?

One interview doesn’t establish a theory. It does something just as valuable.
It gives you a better question than the one you started with.

Become a Research Contributor

The Invisible Expertise Field Study is just getting started. One conversation has already challenged one of my core assumptions.

I’m curious what the next ninety-nine will reveal. If you’re an expert, consultant, leader, educator, creator, or practitioner who’s spent years developing your craft, I’d love to include your perspective.

• I’m not looking for polished success stories.

• I’m looking for the thinking behind your work.

• The decisions that have become instinct.

• The judgment calls you no longer realize you’re making.

• The steps that have quietly disappeared because you’ve done them thousands of times.

Every interview helps uncover another hidden mechanism that shapes how expertise develops and how it can be transferred to someone else.

You won’t just be sharing your experience. You’ll be helping to build a body of research that could change how organizations think about expertise, learning, and knowledge transfer. I hope to feature your story in a future Field Note.

Share

Share Untrap Your Expertise™

I’d watch other creators on various platforms and they seemed effortlessly charismatic. They were funny. Quirky. Outspoken.

They could turn everyday moments into entertaining stories.

People seemed drawn to their personalities as much as their ideas. Then I’d look at myself. I’m a bookworm and insatiably curious.

I’d rather spend an evening reading than going out. I enjoy tinkering with ideas and tech more than being the center of attention.

Solitude restores me.

Crowds drain me.

My happiest days are usually the ones where I’ve spent hours reading, thinking, writing, and trying to understand why something works.

Somewhere along the way, I translated those differences into a conclusion:

Maybe I’m just too boring to make it online.

That thought stayed with me until I looked at my own work more honestly. I realized I wasn’t actually wishing I had someone else’s personality.

I was assuming someone else’s personality was a requirement.

Those aren’t the same thing.

The more I paid attention, the more I noticed something else. I don’t read certain writers because they’re the loudest. I read them because they consistently help me see something I hadn’t noticed before.

(lately I’ve been binge reading work by , and )

That’s what keeps me coming back.

Not performance.

Perspective.

And maybe that’s been true of my own work all along. I’ve spent years studying something most people don’t even realize exists: invisible expertise.

The knowledge experts use every day but can no longer see or explain because it has become automatic.

When I interview subject matter experts for work, I’m rarely looking for the flashy answer. I’m listening for:

• the sentence they almost skipped over.

• the process they forgot they were doing.

• the assumption they didn’t realize they were making.

Those small observations often explain why one person consistently gets great results while everyone else struggles to copy them.

Then it hit me.

Maybe that’s also applicable to how I write.

I’m not naturally drawn to being the loudest voice in the room.

I’m drawn to noticing patterns other people walk past.

Here’s the principle I’m taking with me.

We spend so much time trying to sound like successful creators that we forget people don’t subscribe to personalities. They subscribe to ways of seeing the world.

• Some writers make you laugh.

• Some make you feel understood.

• Some challenge your assumptions.

• Some simplify complicated ideas.

Your job isn’t to become someone else’s version of interesting. It’s to become unmistakably yourself. For me, that probably means fewer hot takes and more field notes.

• Less performing.

• More observing.

• Less trying to be memorable.

• More trying to notice what everyone else missed.

Because maybe the thing that makes your work valuable isn’t your ability to command attention. Maybe it’s your ability to pay attention.

And those are very different skills.

Now I’m curious about you.

Have you ever mistaken one of your personality traits for a limitation, only to realize later it was actually one of your strengths?

I’d love to hear your story in the comments.

One of my first assignments as a Senior Instructional Designer years ago was to develop a training program on labor relations.

To say that was intimidating would be an understatement. I wasn’t a labor relations expert. Before my first meeting with the Subject Matter Expert (SME), I knew I was walking into a difficult situation.

In addition to not being a labor relations expert, there was something else working against me:

I was an outside hire.

If you’ve ever worked in an organization with a strong legacy culture, you know exactly what I’m talking about. There were employees who believed specialized positions belonged to people who had spent years…sometimes decades in the organization.

Before I ever opened my mouth, I already represented an outsider taking something that another employee was entitled to; whether they had the skills or not.

The Collision

I scheduled our introductory meeting, logged into Microsoft Teams, smiled, and introduced myself.

“Good morning. My name is Shannon. I’m the Senior Instructional Designer assigned to your labor relations course, and I’m looking forward to working with you.”

He didn’t smile back. He didn’t ease into the conversation. He came out swinging.

“Why do I need to work with you? You don’t know anything about labor relations. How are you supposed to develop a training when you’re not even an expert?”

I’m not going to lie—my heart started racing. But instead of becoming defensive, I took a deep breath and I agreed with him.

“You’re absolutely right. I’m not a labor relations expert.”

I paused, letting that sink in.

“But I am an expert in adult learning. I have a master’s degree in instructional design. My job isn’t to replace you.

My expertise is in translating your expertise into something the non-expert staff can understand, remember, and apply.”

Something interesting happened right there on the screen. He got quiet.
He leaned back in his chair. After a few seconds, he simply asked:

“Okay... what do you need?”

From that moment forward, everything changed. We collaborated, we built the training, and after it successfully launched, he came back to thank me and apologized for how our first meeting had gone.

Why Am I Telling You This?

I’m not sharing this story to vent about a rude encounter. I’m sharing it because the dynamic that played out in my career happens in yours, too.

Here is what that meeting taught me about human behavior, professional friction, and true leadership:

• Confidence doesn’t require pretending to know everything: Confidence begins by knowing what your expertise is—and what it isn’t. I didn’t need to fake being a labor relations expert because I was rooted in my identity as an instructional design expert.

• Agreement defuses defensiveness: Sometimes the fastest way to lower someone’s guard isn’t to argue; it’s to acknowledge the truth in what they’ve said. When someone feels unheard, they fight. When someone feels understood, they collaborate.

• Every organization has two cultures: There’s the culture they teach you in orientation, and there’s the culture people actually live every day. Because I understood the lived legacy culture before I walked into that meeting, I didn’t take his resistance personally. If you ignore the lived culture, you’ll misunderstand everything.

• No experience is ever wasted: At the time, I thought my previous career in customer service were something I had to survive. I didn’t realize it was a masterclass teaching me essentials to be successful in my new career such as, emotional regulation, conflict management, empathy, and active listening.

The Art of Expertise Translation

That meeting was one of many experiences that contributed the passion I have for decoding the inner workings and application of expertise.

Experts don’t need someone who knows what they know. They need someone who can help other people understand what they know.

Those are two completely different skill sets.

When organizations confuse the two, training fails, knowledge gets trapped in silos, and leaders wonder why their teams aren’t getting results.

There is no learning without translation.
There is no collaboration without mutual respect.
And there is no great training until someone bridges the gap between simply knowing and actually understanding how to apply knowledge.

Sometimes, the most valuable person in the room isn’t the one with all the answers. It’s the one who knows how to make those answers transferable.

About Shannon

Shannon D. Smith, CPTD is the founder of the publication Untrap Your Expertise and Expertise Untrapped™ is a research and design studio dedicated to understanding how expertise develops, why it becomes invisible, and how it can be translated into systems that help other people learn, perform, and succeed.

She is committed to helping experts and organizations uncover the invisible expertise that gets left out of training, courses, and knowledge transfer so learning sticks, performance improves, and results become repeatable.

For more information on her work visit: www.shannondsmith.com

It is everything you know that has never left your head.

The cost has a number, and it is bigger than you think

U.S. companies spend close to 90 billion dollars a year on training, and researchers estimate a significant share of it produces no real change in behavior.1 Globally, employers lose close to a hundred billion dollars annually on training that never transfers into actual skill.2

Only twelve percent of learners say they apply what they were taught to their real work. 3That statistic is not about training. It is about translation.

Knowledge was delivered, but it was never converted into something a person could use, and the same failure happens inside a business of one.

Where it shows up in your business

Researchers at Panopto found that the average new hire takes six and a half months to reach full productivity, largely because so much of what they need to know only exists in someone else’s head.4 In a business built around your expertise, that someone is you.

Every new hire, every contractor, every assistant spends their first months guessing at decisions you make instantly and could never fully explain.

A separate industry analysis found that companies lose an average of thirteen and a half million dollars per thousand employees each year to training that fails to transfer.5 Scale that mechanism down to your business and the number changes, but the pattern does not.

• Onboarding takes longer than it should.

• Delivery becomes inconsistent whenever you are not the one doing the work.

• Growth hits a ceiling, because growth requires more of you than you have hours in a day to give.

Industry data on training and retention also consistently shows that a large share of employees who receive inadequate training leave within their first year, and replacing them costs roughly a third of their salary.6

In an expert-led business, that shows up as a talented contractor who never got fully trained, decided the confusion was not worth it, and left. Now you are back to square one, teaching the next person the same things you never wrote down the first time.

The gap between what you know and what you can name is the whole problem.

This is not a discipline problem

Nonaka and Takeuchi’s research on knowledge conversion found that most of what an expert knows is understood without being directly expressed, never written down because it never had to be.7 That is not a personal failing.

It is what happens to knowledge once it becomes automatic enough to stop needing words. That is not a talent problem. That is a translation problem.

Your business will only grow as far as your expertise can travel without you in the room. Every hour spent re-explaining the same decision is proof that the knowledge is still trapped where only you can reach it.

When you are ready for the next level, here is what is waiting inside the paid Substack.

Free issues name the pattern. Paid issues teach you the practice of closing it.

• Inside the Expert Member Vault, you get frameworks and field notes built to help you diagnose exactly where your own translation is breaking down. Private chat means you are not doing that diagnosis alone.

• The premium how-to guides and AI-assisted prompts (like this one) do the same work at the sentence level. They help you find the missing step, the buried assumption, or the decision you make automatically and have never written down, without asking you to rebuild your business from scratch.

• The Untrapped Expert Briefings go further still. These are private audio trainings that walk through my signature method behind expertise translation, so you can uncover invisible expertise that gets left out of training, courses, and knowledge transfer so learning can stick, performance can improve, and results can become repeatable.

Now is the best time to upgrade! Annual membership is discounted to 67/year during my First 100 Campaign. Once the publication hits 100 paid members, this $67/year link expires forever, and goes back to the standard public rate.

Subscribe now

Share Untrap Your Expertise™

About Shannon D. Smith

Shannon D. Smith helps experts and organizations uncover invisible expertise so learning sticks, performance improves, and results become repeatable.

Her work sits at the intersection of instructional design, organizational psychology, facilitation, and knowledge management, with a focus on the judgments and decision-making that often go undocumented.

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.

• A manager trains a new employee three times and still says, “I don’t understand why they aren’t getting it.”

• A course creator gives students every template and framework and wonders why so few people get results.

• A high performer documents a process, leaves the company, and six months later nobody can reproduce the same outcomes.

These don’t look like the same problem. But they are. The missing piece is usually invisible expertise.

• The judgment calls.

• The pattern recognition.

• The contextual reads.

The things experts do automatically because they have been doing them for so long they no longer notice they are doing them.

That hidden layer of knowledge is what makes expertise work. It is often the very thing that gets left out of training, courses, onboarding, documentation, and knowledge transfer.

Why I Dig Here

I have spent my entire career helping people learn and perform better. Over the years, I kept seeing the same frustrating pattern.

• Organizations would identify a top performer and ask them to train everyone else.

• Entrepreneurs would build courses filled with good information and still struggle to get students results.

• Leaders would ask employees to document what they knew before they left the organization.

Despite everyone’s best efforts, the results often fell short. The assumption was always the same:

• If people have the information, they should be able to do the work.

But information and expertise are not the same thing. The longer I work in learning, instructional design, and organizational psychology, the more I realize that experts leave out critical knowledge not because they are selfish or bad teachers, but because expertise changes the way we see our own work.

The things that once required conscious thought become automatic.

• We stop noticing the decisions we make.

• We stop seeing the assumptions we carry.

• We forget what it was like not to know.

Expertise buries itself the same way sediment does. Layer after layer, until the surface looks solid and the layers underneath disappear from view.

I became fascinated with that gap between what experts know and what they can explain.

That gap is where this publication lives.

I believe it is one of the biggest reasons learning doesn’t stick, performance doesn’t improve, and results fail to repeat.

Who This Publication Is For

This publication is for two groups of people.

1. Experts and Professionals

• You know more than you can easily explain. People come to you for advice.

• You solve problems that seem obvious to you and difficult to everyone else.

• You have knowledge trapped in your experience that deserves to be understood, shared, and perhaps even turned into assets you own outside your job title.

2. Organizations and Leaders

• You are trying to transfer knowledge before it walks out the door.

• You want training that changes performance, not just attendance.

• You want expertise to scale beyond a single high performer.

• You need systems that make critical knowledge visible and repeatable.

Different audiences. Same underlying problem.

What You’ll Find Here

Every week, I bring back a find. Some weeks it’s a pattern. Some weeks it’s a blind spot. Some weeks it’s a mechanism nobody named before.

• Expertise translation

• Knowledge transfer

• Learning and performance

• Instructional design and organizational psychology

• AI readiness and the human expertise that makes AI useful

• Practical ways to surface and transfer hidden knowledge

Some essays are research-driven.

Some are practical frameworks.

Some are field notes from my own work and observations.

All of them return to one central idea:

The problem is not documentation. The problem is translation.

Where to Start Digging

If you’re new here, start with these questions:

• Have you ever explained something to a student, employee, or client, only to have them ask a question that made you think, “But I already explained that?”

• Have you ever gone through a course or program where the expert seemed to skip over something important, leaving you wondering where to begin or how to actually apply what you learned?

• Have you ever watched a training program fail to change behavior, with people returning to their old habits a few weeks later?

• Have you ever created a course or program filled with valuable information and still struggled with low completion rates, weak testimonials, or a lack of referrals?

Those experiences may look different on the surface, but they often point to the same underlying problem:

The knowledge that makes experts effective is frequently the very knowledge they don’t realize they’re leaving out.

I call that invisible expertise.

The knowledge you’re looking for is already there. It’s just buried under years of doing it well enough that you stopped noticing you were doing it.

I dig it up so you can see it, name it, and use it.

Welcome to Untrap Your Expertise.

About Shannon D. Smith

Shannon D. Smith helps experts and organizations uncover invisible expertise so learning sticks, performance improves, and results become repeatable.

Her work sits at the intersection of instructional design, organizational psychology, facilitation, and knowledge management, with a focus on the judgments and decision-making that often go undocumented.

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: visit www.shannondsmith.com

They have real results. The paralysis comes from not knowing which results to document, in what form, and what to actu…

Read more

“Can you walk me through how you do that?”

You have done it a hundred and fifty times. Your jaw tightens because the question should be easy and it is not. What comes out of your mouth is a description of your job, not a description of your process.

That freeze has a name. I call it Invisible Flu…

Read more

A final lesson from Elizabeth Zott in this first series of Lesson in Expertise

By the time Elizabeth Zott walks back into a classroom at the end of the show, you understand that she was always going to end up there. The world did not finally catch up to her, and luck had nothing to do with it.

She was always going to end up there because she never let anyone convince her she was something other than what she defined.

That is what this series has been building toward.

Let me recap her journey one more time, because the closing post deserves it. (sorry if it is a spoiler for those who haven’t seen it. It’s still work watching)

Elizabeth was a research chemist. The academic institution she worked at treated her as support staff instead. Her brilliance, credentials and expertise were evident, yet ignored. The people around her decide repeatedly, that her role is to support the work of men who are doing exactly what she was trained to do. The only difference between them was they had the institutional permission she had been denied.

She does not disappear.

She does not agree with their assessment.

She keeps doing the work until she was unfairly fired.

Even then, she still claimed her expertise and called herself a Chemist.

Then she ends up hosting a cooking show. She does not end up there because she wanted to, or because she decided that television was the right next move for a research chemist.

She ends up there because circumstances put her there, and she makes a calculation that she can work with the medium she has been given in order to make ends meet. The show is called Supper at Six. The audience tunes in for recipes.

What they get is chemistry, taught by someone who knows what she is doing and refuses to pretend otherwise. She does not become a cooking show host. She teaches chemistry on a cooking show.

The audience does not always know the difference. She always does.

The medium changed. Her expertise did not.

What makes Elizabeth’s story useful for this series is not the ending. It is the consistency of her self-definition across every context she is dropped into.

• She is a chemist when she is being paid as one.

• She is a chemist when she is being treated as a secretary.

• She is a chemist when she is standing in front of a camera explaining why proteins denature in heat.

She does not wait for the context to validate what she already knows about herself. The reclaiming of the classroom at the end is not a plot reversal. It is a return to her preferred context for delivering expertise she never stopped naming and claiming.

I have spent years doing professionally what Elizabeth did instinctively.

As an instructional designer, my job was to extract expertise out of its native environment and make it accessible to someone who has no experience in its domain.

I once sat across from a labor relations manager who told me, before I had finished a sentence, that he did not need me to develop their training because I was not a labor relations expert.

I froze for a moment because I was caught off guard. My heart started racing. I took a deep breath and said, you’re right, I am not a labor relations expert. I am however, an expert in designing learning experience and adult learning which makes me skilled at making complex information accessible to people who were not trained inside your field. He went quiet and then began to cooperate. That clarity was not arrogance. I knew what I was there to offer, and I said it.

Both Elizabeth and I were doing the same thing: naming our lane before someone else could define it for us. The expertise stayed clear even when the setting was inconvenient. Here is what that may look like for you in practice.

Where you deliver your expertise is not what your expertise is.

Elizabeth stood in a kitchen and taught chemistry. The kitchen was the delivery vehicle. The chemistry knowledge was hers.

The moment an unfamiliar setting starts to feel like evidence that you do not belong, you have confused the container for the credential.

What you know travels with you into every room you enter.

Being willing to translate is not the same as being willing to disappear.

Elizabeth taught chemistry to an audience that had not signed up for chemistry lessons. She did not soften the science. She made it easy to understand in their context.

Translation does not mean reduction. It means finding the entry point that allows a different audience to receive what you know how to do.

The expertise stays intact. The language around it shifts.

The return to your preferred context is not the goal. It is the reward.

She got back to the classroom because she never stopped being a teacher, even while on television. She was not waiting for permission to be herself. She was being herself in an unexpected environment, until her preferred room became available.

The expertise she built and translated in the difficult season of her life was what earned her the options that came after. The cooking show was not a detour.

It was a demonstration.

If you read this series and recognized yourself somewhere in it, joining Untrap Your Expertise is the best next move.

Free subscribers get essays and the Expertise Translation Checklist.

Paid members get the mechanics.

• The Full Expertise Translation Audit names your specific gap and maps your exact next move.

• The private audio feed is pre-recorded guidance you can return to when you are ready.

• The paid chat threads are where your questions get addressed in real time.

Subscribe now

Elizabeth Zott did not wait to feel ready. She walked into the room she was given and did the work she knew how to do. As a result a preferred opportunity presented itself.

Series-closing reflection

What was your biggest takeaway from this series? What do you now have language for that you did not have before?

Share in the comments if you’re comfortable. I read each one.

Leave a comment

Share Untrap Your Expertise™

Missed posts 1-3 in this series? Here they are:

The framework holds you.
The framework also defines you, whether you asked it to or not.

Post 2 of this series named the structural double bind: your expertise feels like common sense to you because you built it from the inside out, and the institution only ever measured how it benefits them.

What comes next is the part nobody warns you about. When you finally take what you know somewhere the institution did not build, the words go flat. The context falls away. You reach for your title like a life preserver and the other person nods, smiles, and says absolutely nothing meaningful back.

That is not a you problem. That is a translation problem.

What Does It Mean to Translate Expertise and Why Does It Feel Like Losing Something?

Elizabeth Zott did not set out to host a cooking show. She was a master's-level chemist at Hastings Research Institute, working in a lab that treated her as support staff while using her methods and publishing her research without her name on the work.

When Calvin Evans died and left her unmarried, pregnant, and eventually fired, she needed income. She took the "Supper at Six" job because she had no other option in that moment.

Here is what she did not do: simplify.

She did not sand down the complexity of what she knew to make it palatable for an audience the network executives had assumed was unsophisticated. She called ingredients by their chemical names, treated the kitchen as a laboratory, and addressed the people watching as people who deserved to understand why the work worked.

The institution said her expertise had no place in the kitchen. She proved the expertise was the kitchen all along. She took her knowledge out of the frame that had been holding it and put it inside a new one: accessible, yes, but not because she removed the rigor. It was accessible because she removed the jargon that had only ever served the institution. She kept the substance and changed the container.

That is the distinction that matters. Translating your expertise is not a simplification problem. It is a reframing problem. The question is not how to make this easier.

The question is what new container can hold what you actually know.

What Happened the First Time I Tried to Explain What I Do

I remember my first networking event after graduate school. I had just earned my first master’s degree in Instructional Design, and an idea was beginning to take shape: I wanted to build a course development company. I knew the field well. I had spent years working as an instructional designer, studying how adults learn, how skills transfer, how organizations build capacity. The language of it was precise and familiar to me.

Someone turned to me and asked what I did. I started talking about adult learning principles. I said I used them to create learning experiences that help people avoid skill obsolescence. I meant every word. The words were accurate.

The person across from me went blank, said “Oh, okay,” and walked away. I stood there with my breath caught somewhere high in my chest, not embarrassed, but unsettled in a way I did not have language for yet.

I knew in that moment that they had not understood what I was trying to say. What I did not know yet was that the failure did not belong to my expertise. It belonged to the container I was still using to carry it. I had the knowledge. I had not yet found the language that could travel outside the institution that taught it to me.

It is the predictable consequence of building expertise inside a single container for a long time. The institution gave you the frame and supplied the vocabulary for it. When you stay inside that language long enough, you stop noticing it is a language at all.

When you step outside that building, the frame does not travel with you, but the knowledge does. As long as your expertise can only be explained in institutional language, it can only be paid for by an institution.

That is not a credential problem.

That is a portability problem.

You have the same task ahead of you.

The knowledge does not need to become something different. The container does.

The next post in this series goes into the mechanics: how you actually begin to locate the new container when you cannot yet see what it looks like.

Reflection prompt:

Think about the last time you tried to explain your expertise to someone outside your field, your agency, or your immediate professional circle.

• Where were you?

• What happened in your body when the explanation didn't land?

• What did you reach for, and did it work?

Share in the comments if you’re comfortable. I read each one.

Leave a comment

Share Untrap Your Expertise™

P.S. I am putting together a small group program for corporate women who are ready to translate what they have built on the job into income they own off the clock. The women who fill out the form first will be the first considered for founding member spots. The link below takes you there.

I want to be considered →

When you’re ready, here are three ways I can help.

1. Learn the concepts.
Subscribe to Untrap Your Expertise for practical insights on making expertise visible, transferable, and repeatable.

2. Build the capability.
Upgrade to the paid tier for implementation guides, toolkits, prompts, and practical frameworks you can apply immediately.

3. Solve the problem together.
If your organization or expert-led business is struggling with inconsistent results because critical expertise stays trapped inside people’s heads, explore the Expertise Translation Sprint or Advisory. Schedule a consultation here.

Subscribe now

You have solved problems that were never technically in your job description, yet you did it anyway because that is what you do.

Then someone asks you what you would do if you left your job tomorrow, and your stomach goes uneasy because everything you know requires an org chart to explain.

Everything you know is described in job-centered language:

• your title,

• your department,

• the acronyms that only make sense inside that company or agency.

Strip all of that away and the answer gets harder to form than it should be.
That silence is not evidence of a gap in your intelligence or your ambition.
It is evidence of a structural design problem, and this post is here to name it.

The institution was built for its own purposes, not yours

Institutions are designed to absorb expertise and make it useful to the organization. They give your skills a title, assign them a scope, and measure their value in terms of what they produce for the institution.

Performance reviews confirm that your expertise belongs there. Promotions prove it is worth keeping there. The entire architecture of professional credentialing inside an organization is designed to answer one question:

That is the only question the institution is built to answer. It was never designed to ask what you actually own, or what your expertise would be worth if it had your name on it instead of theirs.

Researchers at Harvard’s Carr Center have documented how the suppression of women’s epistemic standing has shaped whose knowledge gets created, recorded, and treated as authoritative in the public record.1 The institution did not invent this problem, but it carries the design.

Why your expertise gets harder to see the deeper it goes

There is a well-documented pattern in expertise research: the more skilled you are at something, the more invisible your own skill becomes to you.

What you know well starts to feel automatic. The judgment call you made at 9am that kept the project from falling apart stops feeling like expertise. It starts to feel like common sense. It starts to feel like what any reasonable person would have done. It was not.

It was the result of years of pattern recognition that you have never once been asked to name or document. Then the institution confirms the invisibility. If your title understates your contribution, if the credit moves sideways to someone else at the debrief, if nobody has ever put the full scope of what you do in writing, your nervous system absorbs a lesson it was never supposed to learn: maybe I am not that good.

According to AAUW research on women in STEM2, women hold roughly a quarter of STEM jobs despite academic performance that matches or exceeds their male peers.

The Double Bind

This is the part that is hardest to sit inside. You are not being paranoid. You are not catastrophizing. You are caught between two forces that are each, independently, suppressing the same thing.

Your expertise feels like common sense to you because you built it from the inside out. The judgment call you made before anyone else saw the problem, the standard you held that no one wrote down — these do not feel like expertise. They feel like what you were supposed to do. So you discount them.

At the same time, the institution is measuring your expertise only in terms of what it produces for itself. Your value is tracked in deliverables, performance ratings, and budget justifications. What you carry that does not serve the organization’s immediate purposes is simply not counted. So the institution discounts it too.

The evidence you would need to see yourself clearly is being suppressed from both directions at once. That is not a feeling. That is the structure.

Oliver Wyman’s research on women in the workplace3 names this plainly:

Qualified women are unintentionally left on the sidelines, and strong contributions do not automatically convert into recognized authority.

You are not misreading your environment.
Your environment is misreading you.

The problem is not your confidence, your self-awareness, or your failure to advocate loudly enough in the right rooms.

Not being able to see your expertise clearly from inside the institution is not a character flaw. It is the expected result of spending years inside a system that was built for its own purposes, not yours.

The institution does not actively hide what you own. It just never had any reason to show it to you in terms you could take with you.

Seeing your expertise clearly requires a frame that does not belong to the institution — someone outside the container who can reflect back what you have built, what it is actually worth, and what it would look like if it had your name on it instead of your employer’s.

The next post in this series looks at what happens when you try to take your expertise into that outside frame for the first time, and why the translation is harder than it should be.

Subscribe now

Share

References

• AAUW. “The STEM Gap: Women and Girls in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.” https://www.aauw.org/resources/research/the-stem-gap/

• Harvard Kennedy School Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. Research on women’s epistemic rights and whose knowledge counts in the public record. https://carrcenter.hks.harvard.edu

• Oliver Wyman. “Women in Financial Services 2020.” https://www.oliverwyman.com/our-expertise/insights/2019/jun/women-in-financial-services-2020.html

Yet, she is only viewed as good enough to brew coffee because the environment she walked into every day had already decided what the limits of her capability and potential were.

Elizabeth Zott is brilliant. She is trained. She is precise in the way that only someone who has spent years genuinely devoted to a discipline could be.

She is also completely invisible inside the institution she works for, treated as support staff by colleagues who do not carry her credentials and do not seem troubled by that gap at all. She is handing out coffee in a room where she should be running experiments.

I want you to sit with what that actually feels like from the inside.

You know what you know. You have done the work to know it, earned the credentials that confirm it, only to show up every day to an environment that has no structural place for what you are capable of contributing.

You are not failing.
You are not underperforming.

You are simply in a container that was not built with your capability in mind, and every day inside it requires you to make yourself smaller than you actually are.

The stagnation is not coming from you. It is coming from the room. That is the specific kind of stuck that nobody warns you about, because it does not look like being stuck from the outside.

From the outside, you have a job.
You are showing up and doing the work.

What nobody can see is that the work you are doing is maybe thirty percent of what you are actually capable of, and the other seventy percent is sitting behind your sternum every single day with nowhere to go.

What I appreciated about the Elizabeth Zott character is that she did not quietly accept the ceiling. She pushed back in the ways that were available to her, persistently and without apology, even when the institution met every push with another wall.

She did not abandon what she knew simply because the room refused to make space for it. That part of her story matters as much as the injustice of the container, because it is the part that contains the actual lesson.

Your expertise does not disappear because the environment cannot hold it. It waits for an opening to be expressed.

Here is the question I have been sitting with since I finished watching this series.

How many women are in their own version of that lab right now?

Professionally occupying a container that was never designed to hold the full weight of what they know.

Women who are credentialed, capable, and quietly stalled inside organizations that use a fraction of what they bring and call it a full role.

Women who have started to measure themselves by what the institution sees, which is not the same thing as what they actually have.

That is what trapped expertise looks like in its earliest form. It is not dramatic.
It is not a single moment of recognition. It is a slow, accumulating awareness that the room you are in cannot hold what you came with, and you have been adjusting yourself to fit it for longer than you want to admit.

This series is about what to do after the awareness kicks in.

Over the next four weeks, I am pulling four lessons from Lessons in Chemistry that speak directly to this.

Next week, I will address why you cannot see your own expertise clearly from inside the institution that contains it, and why that is not a personal failure.

If you recognized yourself somewhere in this post, I want to hear about it in the comments. Tell me what questions you want me to address in this series as well!

Leave a comment

When you’re ready, here are three ways I can help.

1. Learn the concepts.
Subscribe to Untrap Your Expertise for practical insights on making expertise visible, transferable, and repeatable.

2. Build the capability.
Upgrade to the paid tier for implementation guides, toolkits, prompts, and practical frameworks you can apply immediately.

3. Solve the problem together.
If your organization or expert-led business is struggling with inconsistent results because critical expertise stays trapped inside people’s heads, explore the Expertise Translation Sprint or Advisory. Schedule a consultation here.

I don’t know.

Three words. Twelve letters. And for the first three years I worked as a trainer, I could not say them out loud. I would rather stumble through a half-answer, redirect to something vaguely related, or say “Let me come back to that” and hope they forgot—anything to avoid admitting I didn’t have the answer on the spot.

It was because, in my mind, one question I couldn’t answer would expose the my deepest fear:

Maybe I wasn’t really an expert.

Maybe I was a fraud who got lucky and the entire room would see it.

If the fear of being asked something you don’t know keeps you from presenting, facilitating, or speaking up in meetings, you’re not alone and you’re not paranoid.

You’re responding to a real pattern: women’s credibility is questioned more often and more harshly than men’s. One gap in knowledge feels like proof you don’t belong.

But here’s what I learned after years of presenting, training, and facilitating:

saying “I don’t know” doesn’t disqualify your expertise. Faking it does.

Why “I Don’t Know” Feels Like Failure

Not knowing an answer feels like it threatens your status in the room. This fear is especially acute for women, who already face credibility challenges and impostor syndrome in professional settings.

When someone asks a question you can’t answer, your brain doesn’t register it as “a gap in knowledge.” It registers it as rejection from the group—a threat to your belonging.

So you panic. You talk longer than necessary, hoping you’ll stumble into something that sounds right. You hedge with “I think...” or “It’s possible that...” You redirect to something you do know, even if it’s not what they asked.

The worst response is a rambling attempt to fill the silence. Because while you’re fumbling, the person who asked the question is watching you avoid admitting the obvious: you don’t know.

And now they’re wondering what else you don’t know—and whether you’ll be honest about it.

Admitting You Don’t Know Actually Builds Credibility

Here’s the counterintuitive truth: admitting what you don’t know increases people’s trust in you.

When people know you’re willing to be clear when you don’t have knowledge, they’re better able to rely on you for the knowledge you claim. Your honesty about gaps makes your expertise more credible, not less.

Saying you don’t know doesn’t make you look incompetent. It makes you seem self-aware and like someone who actually wants to do good work.

Think about the last time someone gave you a rambling non-answer to a direct question. Did you walk away thinking “Wow, they really know their stuff”? Or did you think “They just wasted two minutes avoiding saying they don’t know”?

Your audience can tell when you’re faking. And they respect honesty more than performance.

The Three-Part Response Framework

Read more

The problem is who it is working for.

This is the cost that does not announce itself. It does not arrive as a crisis or a setback or a moment you can point to later and say: that is when I fell behind.

It accumulates in the space between what you know and what you own, and it compounds every year you let it sit.

What the Portability Seeker is losing

There is a particular kind of clarity that comes from trying to explain your expertise to someone who does not know you. You leave your organization, or consider leaving it, and someone outside asks what you do. You reach for the answer that always felt solid inside your institution, and you can feel it get thin before it reaches them.

The job title does not capture it.

The credentials name what you studied.

The résumé lists where your labor has been assigned, not what you have built from it.

That is the moment the cost surfaces. But it did not start there.

Gary Becker’s foundational work in human capital theory identified a distinction that is directly relevant here: the difference between general human capital, which transfers across employers, and firm-specific human capital, which has maximum value inside the organization where it was developed (Becker, 1964).

Most people who have spent years inside an institution have built a combination of both.

The firm-specific portion (the institutional knowledge, internal shorthand, and expertise shaped around a particular organization’s problems) produces no independent leverage when the institutional context changes.

• It cannot travel to a consulting engagement because it was never extracted into language that exists outside the role.

• It cannot anchor a speaking practice or a training program because it was never organized into a framework someone else could follow.

The general expertise (the transferable knowledge, analytical patterns, and capabilities that cross industries and contexts) is buried underneath it.

It is invisible to the person who holds it because it was never separated from the role long enough to be named.

This is what the Portability Seeker is losing while she produces value: the compounding opportunity cost of expertise that could be generating independent options and is not. The knowledge is valuable enough, but the translation layer was never built.

What the Permanence Builder is accumulating

The organizational version of this cost is a liability that does not appear on any balance sheet. It builds while everything is running well, while the systems work and the knowledge flows through the people who hold it.

It stays invisible until a departure makes it impossible to ignore. A senior leader announces her retirement, a principal engineer accepts another offer, or a department head moves to a competitor.

Suddenly the organization is attempting to reconstruct through exit interviews and frantic knowledge capture sessions in the final weeks to try to save expertise that took fifteen years to accumulate. What gets documented is a shadow of what was there. The steps and procedures make it in. The judgment, pattern recognition, and decision logic that made the expert different from everyone else does not.

Longitudinal research on knowledge loss has documented what follows:

• decreased organizational productivity,

• strategic misalignment of the remaining workforce, and

• a prolonged, costly gap between the expertise that left and the competence of whoever comes next (Massingham, 2018).

A systematic review of 91 empirical studies confirmed that organizations consistently lack formal procedures for capturing the tacit knowledge of departing employees, not from indifference, but from the structural assumption that the knowledge is accessible right up until the moment it is not (Durst et al., 2023).

Michael Polanyi put the mechanism plainly in 1966: we always know more than we can tell (Polanyi, 1966). For organizations, what cannot be told is often the most strategically valuable part of what they have.

The cost underneath both costs

The Portability Seeker and the Permanence Builder are experiencing different symptoms of the same condition.

Expertise is producing value. It is not producing ownership.

• For the individual, ownership means a named, structured body of work she can carry: frameworks, methods, and intellectual property that exist independently of her current employer and create leverage she can take anywhere.

• For the organization, ownership means embedded, transferable systems — the expert’s knowledge extracted, structured, and embedded in processes that do not require the expert to be present to function.

In both cases, the gap is the same. The expertise has been doing its job. The translation layer was never built. Every year it goes untranslated is a year of compounding cost that shows up nowhere on the ledger, until the day it shows up all at once.

If this named something real for you, the work continues in every post.

Free subscribers receive weekly insights.

Paid members go further. The paid tier is built for those who want active, step-by-step guidance to apply the translation methodology through diagnostics, a private audio feed, and community chat. Subscribe or become a paid member below.

Subscribe now

Share Untrap Your Expertise™

References

Becker, G. S. (1964). Human capital: A theoretical and empirical analysis, with special reference to education. National Bureau of Economic Research.

Durst, S., Hinteregger, C., & Zieba, M. (2023). Knowledge loss induced by organizational member turnover: A review of empirical literature, synthesis and future research directions. The Learning Organization, 30(2), 117–136.

Massingham, P. (2018). Measuring the impact of knowledge loss: A longitudinal study. Journal of Knowledge Management, 22(4), 721–758.

Polanyi, M. (1966). The Tacit Dimension. Doubleday.

That’s where this story starts.

Not on the stage.

Not at the podium.

In a hotel room, alone, across the country from my kids, fighting back tears I didn’t even see coming — because that’s what extreme stress does to me. Always has. My dad used to say, you cry for everything. He wasn’t wrong. I was a highly sensitive kid who felt everything at full volume. I just didn’t have a name for it.

That name, I’d learn years later, was ADHD and with it, something called Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria — which means for me, the fear of being watched, evaluated, or rejected doesn’t just feel uncomfortable. It feels like physical pain.

I share that so you’ll understand what it meant for me to be standing in that hotel room.

I Said Yes Before I Could Think

I’d been a Senior Technical Trainer with this company for three years. For the first two, I was exactly where I wanted to be — in the background. Internal trainings.

Smaller settings. Nothing member-facing. I liked it there. It was safe.

Then year three came, and I got tapped on the shoulder to speak at the annual national conference…on an actual stage.

The pleaser in me said yes before I could think.

The rest of me had a complete meltdown.

The Fear Beneath the Fear

Agreeing to speaking at the conference wasn’t just a matter of being on stage. It was everything that went along with it.

I live on the East Coast. The conference was in Arizona. I hadn’t packed a bag and left my kids for a week since they were young. We’d been joined at the hip for years — homeschool, virtual school, me working from home…always together.

I was just as attached to them as they were attached to me.

So on the plane to Phoenix, I was carrying two kinds of fear. The stage fright and the quiet, constant worry of what if something happens at home and I’m not there.

I over-prepared the way I always do when I’m terrified. As if hundreds of slides could drown out an activated nervous system.

They couldn’t.

The Hotel Room Breakdown

By the time I got to Arizona, my session wasn’t until the afternoon of the first day. Which meant I had hours to sit in the general sessions, surrounded by people I didn’t know, reading every face, every expression, every shift in body language. Trying to assess whether I was safe. Whether they’d accept me. Whether I belonged there.

That’s what RSD does. It turns a room full of strangers into a threat assessment.

I was so overstimulated I could feel the tears trying to come. I excused myself and went back to my room.

And then I let them come.

I cried it all out. The fear, the loneliness, the noise, all of it. Then I picked up the phone and called my sister — she’s a mental health professional — because I thought, she can talk me down.

She didn’t answer.

One Question That Calmed My Speaking Fear

In that silence, I asked myself a question I hadn’t thought to ask before.

What do I need right now?

Not “how do I fix this.” Not “how do I push through.” Not “how do I look like I’m okay when I’m not.”

What do I need.

The answer came in pieces.

Breathing first. I did box breathing — four counts in, hold four, out four, hold four — until my eyes dried up and my chest relaxed a little.

Then I asked again. “What do I need?” Go get something familiar came to mind. There was a grocery store a few blocks away. So I walked there in the Arizona heat and got my favorite drinks, some snacks — things I keep at home.

On the way back, the sun hit my skin and I stopped walking for a second.

I am a sun-bug. Always have been. And something about that heat just — soothed me. It was like medicine. So, I stood there and let it do its work.

Then I happen to see a Starbucks across the street.

Listen. My coffee taste has evolved since then. But I have been drinking coffee since I was nine years old. I found Starbucks freshman year of college and never looked back. My drink was the white chocolate mocha. It was ritual. It was comfort. It was mine.

I walked in and the smell of the coffee beans hit me before I even got to the line.

I closed my eyes and thought, "Yes. Whatever is happening right now is working.”

I got my drink. I got a lemon cake. I walked back to the hotel in the sun, warm cup in my hand, and by the time I got on the elevator, the fear was still there — but it no longer had a hold on me the way it did an hour before.

I sat down in the chair in my room. I took a deep breath, then took a sip of my drink.

Then suddenly, phone rang. It was my sister.

She Called After. That’s the Lesson.

Here’s what I need you to catch about that timing.

My sister called after I did the work. I believe that’s how it’s supposed to go. If she had answered when I was mid-meltdown, I would have lacked the ability to describe what was wrong clearly, which would’ve made it difficult for her to support me in a way I need.

You can’t receive help you haven’t prepared yourself to use.

When I told her what I’d done — the breathing, the walk, the sun, the Starbucks — she said: you did everything right.

And then she started naming my receipts.

You were the quiet girl. The introvert. The hermit. You hid under the pews when Daddy called you up to sing. You were the girl who didn’t want to stand in front of anyone because being watched felt like it might break you. And now here you are. Across the country. About to get on a stage. You don’t see how far you’ve come?

My sister is my hype woman in that moment and she sent my confidence through the roof. After I hung up, I rehearsed that presentation like my life depended on it.

The Girl Under the Pew Transformed

I want to go back to that image I mentioned earlier for a second.

My father was a preacher. He used to call me and my sisters up to sing before he preached. Every time, I’d feel it — this wave of something that wasn’t just nerves. It was pain. Physical, real, full-body pain at the thought of people watching me… judging me.

I’d hide under the pew until it was over.

That little girl grew up and stood in front of bank regulators in Arizona.

Not because the fear went away. Because she asked herself what she needed and she did that instead.

The Moment I Walked on Stage

When I finally walked out, my heart was racing.

I started talking.

And then something shifted.

The tension eased. The room blurred. I couldn’t really see anyone anymore — I was just in the content, in the material, in the thing I actually knew how to do. Forty-five minutes passed like a breath.

I felt alive.

Afterward, people came up to me: Is this really your first time? You seemed so polished. Like a pro.

And yes, I had done Toastmasters. I had taken public speaking classes over the years. I had always known I wanted to train, even when I didn’t have the opportunity yet.

I had planted seeds for years that I couldn’t see growing.

That’s the thing about seeds.

They don’t announce themselves.

They’re underground — being cultivated, being nurtured — and then one day, they break through. And you think it happened suddenly. But it didn’t.

The tree was always coming.

This Is What Untrapped Authority Looks Like

It doesn’t show up before the stage.

It doesn’t arrive when you feel ready, calm, or certain. It doesn’t come because you prepared enough, prayed enough, or finally convinced yourself you belonged.

It shows up when you stop asking how do I get through this — and start asking what do I need right now.

That question is not a stalling tactic. It is not avoidance dressed up in self-care language. It is the move.

It’s what gave my authority the window and the opportunity to step forward — so that the trapped archetypes, the pleaser, the anxious one, the girl who hid under the pew — no longer could run the show.

And here’s what I want you to understand about that conference. It wasn’t the first time I had put anything into my speaking. I had done Toastmasters. I had taken classes. I had always known I wanted to be a trainer and speaker, even in the years when no one gave me the opportunity.

I kept building my skills anyway…in the background…quietly... with no stage, applause or proof it was working.

Those type of seeds sown don’t germinate instantly.

They develop underground and over time — on a timeline you don’t control — they break through the ground.

You see the sprouts.

Then you see the tree.

Then you see the fruit.

Me getting on that stage and delivering the way I delivered was a byproduct of seeds sown years and years before Arizona.

I went back to that conference every year for the remaining years I was with that organization. And I kept getting better. I never had that same mopey, woe-is-me, I’m-falling-apart moment again. Not like that first time.

Why, you ask? I believe it’s because once your authority introduces itself — once you feel what you’re actually capable of — you can’t unfeel it, nor can you unsee it. It has to be embodied from that point forward.

The girl who hid under the pew was always a speaker.

She just needed to learn how to ask herself the right question first.

So do you.

You don’t have to feel fearless to walk out there. You don’t have to have it together. You just have to stop negotiating with fear at the finish line — and start asking what you actually need to move.

If you’re in the middle of negotiating with fear at your own finish line — whether it’s a stage, a pitch, or a page — the work we do together inside Untrap Your Expertise™ is built for exactly this.

You can start here.

Subscribe now

Before You Go

What do you need right now — not to feel fearless, but to take the next step anyway?

Leave a comment

Share Untrap Your Expertise™

A survey published in The Book of Lists found that Americans ranked public speaking as their number one fear, above death, above heights, above financial ruin.

Jerry Seinfeld turned it into a punchline: at a funeral, the average person would rather be in the casket than delivering the eulogy.

We laugh because we recognize it.

We recognize it because for a lot of us, standing in front of a room and being looked at by people who are waiting for us to say something worth hearing feels, in the body, exactly like danger.

Not metaphorically. Physiologically.

Your body is not being dramatic.

It is being precise.

It Is Not the Speaking. It Has Never Been the Speaking.

Here is what I want you to sit with, because this distinction changes everything.

You are not afraid of public speaking. You talk all day.

You explain things, you teach, you hold conversations, and you tell stories to people you love.

You are articulate, warm and clear.

The speaking is not the problem.

You have been doing that your whole life.

What you are afraid of is a specific condition that public speaking creates:

the condition of being evaluated…visibly…by multiple people. Simultaneously.

Not having the ability to monitor every face and adjust in real time as you can in a conversation.

That is a different fear entirely. It has a different name. It has a different mechanism.

The thing is, almost every piece of advice you have ever received about public speaking assumes the problem is the speaking, so it hands you tips about eye contact and vocal variety and where to put your hands.

Meanwhile your nervous system is running a completely different program underneath all of it, one that has nothing to do with your hands.

Until you address the actual fear, the tips do not stick. They cannot.

You are solving for the wrong thing.

What the Research Actually Says About Why We Freeze

Psychologist Mark Leary at Duke University has spent decades researching what he terms social evaluation threat, the specific fear of being negatively judged by others in a public context.

His research consistently shows that the physiological and psychological response to social evaluation threat is distinct from generalized performance anxiety.

It is not simply nerves about doing something difficult.

It is the activation of a deeply wired social survival system.

Neuroscientist Naomi Eisenberger at UCLA has demonstrated through brain imaging research that social rejection and exclusion activate the same neural regions as physical pain, specifically the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex.

In plain language: your brain processes the threat of being seen and found lacking in the same territory where it processes being hurt.

Your body is not overreacting when you grip the podium.

It is responding to something it has classified as a threat to your social belonging.

For women in particular, researcher Sarah Brosnan’s work on social hierarchy and threat response, shows that the stakes of public evaluation are compounded by context, by rooms that were not historically built for our authority, and by audiences conditioned to scrutinize women who claim expertise out loud.

This is not a confidence problem. This is a survival system responding to real historical data.

You Were Never Bad at Speaking

If the room has ever felt like too much, I want you to hear this clearly. You were not failing at public speaking. You were succeeding at self-protection.

Those are not the same problem, and only one of them is worth fixing.

That is exactly what we are doing below.

Read more

Eckhart Tolle’s concepts, and terminology made sense to me because I’ve been practicing mindfulness and spirituality for years now. But I raised my daughter in a traditional Christian context, which is more familiar to her than what I was sharing.

As I watched her eyes glaze over mid-sentence, I realized something:

I wasn’t being unclear. I was being inaccessible.

She didn’t check out because the idea was too complex. She checked out because I had piled unfamiliar language on top of an unfamiliar concept, and her brain couldn’t hold both at once.

So I stopped. I said things differently. No jargon. No layers. Just the core idea in language that made sense to her life.

“Oh, okay,” she said. “Now I see what you mean.”

The conversation moved forward. But the real lesson stuck with me.

You know your field so well that the language feels neutral to you.

But to someone outside that space, every unfamiliar term is friction. It’s asking their brain to decode the language and understand the idea at the same time.

Most people don’t have the energy for that translation work. So they stop listening.

This isn’t about dumbing anything down. It’s about recognizing that your audience is working with different context than you are.

• They don’t have years of practice.

• They don’t live in your framework

And the moment you assume they do, you’ve lost them.

What’s actually happening in that moment when someone’s eyes are glazed over

Cognitive load theory says your brain can only hold a limited amount of information at a time. Picture your working memory as shelf.

• Every unfamiliar term takes up space on that shelf.

• Every new concept takes up space.

• Every layer of context takes up space.

When you pile them all on, you’ve maxed out the shelf before the actual idea ever lands.

My daughter’s brain was spending energy decoding “mindfulness”, “presence” and “ego” instead of understanding what those words actually meant in her life.

By the time she caught up to the definition, I had already moved three ideas forward. She was lost not because she’s not smart. She was lost because I overwhelmed her working memory.

The fix isn’t to repeat yourself louder or slower. The fix is to give your audience’s brain less to decode so it has space to actually think. This matters more than you realize, especially if you’re an expert. Here are 3 things subject matter experts do this constantly (yes, I’m guilty, too) :

• We use terminology because it’s precise.

• We layer concepts because we see how they connect.

• We assume our audience has the same reference points we do.

Newsflash: they don’t and every time we forget that gap, we are building a wall between our expertise and the people who actually need it.

So how do you know if you’re falling into the jargon trap?

Pay attention to three things this week.

1. First, notice when you’re explaining something and the person’s face goes blank. Not confused — blank. Confusion means they’re still tracking. Blankness means they’ve given up trying to decode what you’re saying. That’s your signal that the language needs to shift, not the idea.

2. Second, listen to yourself. Are you using terms that only make sense inside your field? Words like “cognitive load” or “mindfulness” or “nervous system regulation”? Those words are precise to you. To someone outside your world, they’re just... words. There’s nothing wrong with precision. But precision without translation is just gatekeeping.

3. Third, try this: explain an idea to someone who knows nothing about your field. Your kid. Your partner. Someone at the coffee shop. If you have to backtrack and explain every other sentence, you’ve got jargon. If they nod and ask follow-up questions, you’re translating.

The thing is, you already know how to do this.

You do it at work. You do it with your kids at different ages. You code-switch without thinking about it because survival requires it.

But when you’re writing, teaching or speaking about something you care about, something you’ve spent years studying, you forget to translate.

You get caught up in how you think about it and assume everyone else thinks the same way. They don’t.

Your expertise is only as powerful as it is accessible.

I learned that by watching my daughter shift when I stopped using spiritual jargon and started using language she understood.

The idea didn’t change. The bridge did and that bridge is everything.

When you’re writing, teaching or speaking, the goal shouldn’t be to sound smart.

You want to be understood. Start there. Watch for the blank faces.

Translate without apology. Notice what happens when you do — how people lean in, how your expertise actually lands. That’s when you know you’re speaking to the person in front of you.

Let’s Discuss!

What's a term or phrase you use all the time in your work that you've watched someone completely glaze over? And what did you say instead when you caught it?

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

As I’m reading, I can feel it impacting my body the way great writing does. It stirred up something in me that hadn’t been touched in a while. It hit me right in the gut just as truth does — the kind of truth that exposes what you’ve learned to avoid so you can keep functioning.

Emotions started rising.
Old thoughts came back right along with them.

I didn’t want to overthink it. I definitely didn’t want to dismiss the moment. So I did what I typically do when I need to get my thoughts out — I recorded a voice memo.

What surprised me was how much came up once I started talking.

Tears.
Gut-wrenching feelings.
A heaviness I hadn’t let myself feel in years.

And the thing is, once it started pouring out, I realized I wasn’t just reacting to the post. I was reacting to a pattern.

Here’s what I mean:

When I read the work of brilliant writers and thought leaders — people writing about social justice, or the history of Black people in America — I am both in awe and in shame.

In awe of the depth.
In awe of the courage.
In awe of the way they can hold the weight of this truth and still stand.

In shame because I haven’t been able to the same.
I grew up in a religious household where the world’s suffering wasn’t something you sat with. Instead, you were encouraged to:

Just pray.
Read the bible.
Keep your mind on jesus.
Focus on your reward in heaven.

And honestly, it helped.
The avoidance insulated me from the grief of what was really happening in this country…what was really happening to us. Just to be clear:

I’m not indicting faith. I’m naming the way I learned to use it to avoid the grief of social injustice. This isn’t the kind of programming you switch off. My body learned it as a coping mechanism and it runs because it worked. What works gets wired in.

There’s a threshold in my body. I call it the lid—my internal exit sign.
When the weight of awareness gets too heavy, it kicks in without asking permission.

This is too much.
Go back to happy thoughts.
Go back to what you can handle.

And I do.
I close the book.
I go check my email.
I go back to work.
I survive to live another day.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped using faith as my shield and started using busyness.

Work.
Responsibility.
Being a provider, a parent, a professional.

Different object, same mechanism: Don’t look. Don’t feel. Don’t let it in.

As I was pouring out in my memo, the incident of George Floyd’s murder came to mind. That horrific incident rocked me to my core, and I was undone for a very long time — internally, privately — while still showing up to work, answering emails, and making sure the bills got paid.

But I thought: I don’t want to be ignorant. I don’t want to stay numb to this.

So I bought the books. 1619. Slavery by Another Name. White Fragility. The New Jim Crow and many others.

I even listened to Joy DeGruy’s lectures on post-traumatic slave syndrome.
Every single time I tried to go deeper, the lid kicked in.

Here’s what the lid cost me:

I feel like I don’t belong anywhere.
Sure, through my skin and gender, I can be categorized.

But not through my experience.
Not through my participation.
Not through my courage.

If I were in a room full of people doing the work — activists, scholars, organizers — I would feel completely out of place and utterly alone.

Because I’ve emotionally disconnected from the experience of what it’s like to be Black in America.

What it’s like to be a Black woman in America.

I can’t bear it.
It’s too heavy.
It’s too painful.
It’s too exhausting.
It’s too disappointing.
And so I stay in the gray. Neutral. Safe and alone.

I remember reading Dancing in the Darkness by Otis Moss III, and I kept thinking: could I have done what his father did? Could I have trusted love enough to stand up to evil, ten toes down, unflinching?

I don’t know.
I don’t know that I trust love that much.
I don’t know that I trust good that much.
The thing about not trusting love is that it doesn’t come from nowhere.

My mom left when I was young. My father stayed — sure, he was physically present. But was also emotionally unavailable.

And through that I formed my definition of love:
Love is unstable.
Love doesn’t fight for you.
Love is not something you lean on, because it will leave you.

And if I can’t trust love, how am I supposed to stand beside people who do?
How am I supposed to fight from something I don’t even believe will hold me?

I recently came across a line from bell hooks in All About Love that stopped me:

“The practice of love offers no place of safety.
We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control.”

And I realized — maybe the people I admire aren’t trusting love to keep them safe. Maybe they’ve just accepted that it won’t.

And they choose it anyway.

That’s a different kind of trust than the one I’ve been looking for.

For a long time, I thought this made me a coward. I thought I was absent from the fight. Sitting on the sidelines while others carried the weight I couldn’t bear.
But I’m beginning to see things differently.

Here’s my untrapped perspective.

I’m not absent from the fight. I’m wounded in it.
The lid isn’t cowardice. It’s a trauma response.
It’s my nervous system’s way of saying:
we cannot metabolize this yet.
Not alone. Not without breaking.

I still vote with my conscience and have a strong view on right vs. wrong.
I know what side of history I want to be on. I feel the grief — deeply enough to cry through my voice memo, deeply enough to write this essay you’re reading right now.

I’m not on the sidelines. I’m injured on the field.

Therein lies the difference.

The Revelation of my Contribution

When I was an undergrad, I remember studying drama and Black Theatre. I fell in love with how playwrights took the issues of the day and turned them into story. It inspired me to become a be a playwright. I wrote a couple of plays for church based on the culture I observed and was told to soften it. So I lost interest.

Then I came across Shonda Rhimes work through my obsession with Grey’s Anatomy and she inspired me to want to be a screenwriter. I wanted to make people feel the way she made me feel, but divorce, single parenting and survival mode put those dreams on the back burner for years.

In 2020, I revisited my love for writing and decided becoming an author was in my reach and in 2022, I self-published my first book. I can see now that these experience were seeds for my life’s work. Thankfully, in spite of everything I’ve overcome the seed didn’t die.

I’m now convinced that writing is my contribution.
Not the marching.
Not the organizing.
Not the scholarly deep dives my nervous system can’t yet hold.

But this — the raw, honest, trembling truth of a woman who was taught to look away and is now intentionally looking back.

Who doesn’t trust love but still wants to live fully.
Who feels like a fraud and is saying so out loud.
Maybe that voice can reach people who would never pick up a history book.
Who have the same lid as I do when trying to connect with what is happening collectively.
Who need someone to say: me too. I’m afraid and I’m still here.

If you write, teach, or speak — and you’ve been holding back…
waiting until you’re ready,
waiting until you’re healed,
waiting until you’ve earned the right to take up space — I want you to hear this:

You don’t have to carry the full weight to matter.
You don’t have to be unafraid to contribute.
Your don’t have to heal your wound to qualify.
Your experience and point of view are connection points.

The people who need your voice aren’t waiting for you to be whole.
They’re waiting for you to be open and honest.

Yes, I still have the books on my bookshelf.
And I still hit the lid from time to time
But I’m not waiting to contribute anymore.

I felt it as a child when I was overlooked and forgotten.

I felt it as a young woman when comparison filled my mind with evidence that everyone else was prettier, more talented, and more worthy of attention.

Each comparison gave me something new to feel smaller about—until the thought eventually surfaced:

What’s the use of doing anything at all?

And over time, insignificance taught me to disappear before anyone else could make me feel invisible.

I notice its familiar presence when people talk around me instead of to me at work.

Or when my posts or notes are met with silence.

My body experiences it as confirmation.

See? You don’t matter.

Today, that old friend showed up again.

She wasn’t dramatic.
She was subtle and persuasive:

Maybe writing on Substack isn’t for you.
You don’t have the “it” factor to make it.
You should probably quit.

In defiance of Insignificance’s input, I made a different decision today.

I choose to keep writing.
Not because the pain went away.
Not because I suddenly feel confident or visible.
But because I tallied up the cost of not writing.
It’s a price I am not willing to pay.

Quitting wouldn’t be self-protection.
It would be self-sabotage.

Quitting wouldn’t be humility.
It would be denying my destiny—and the identity I know is inevitable.

Believing I was insignificant once helped me make sense of being forgotten.
Making myself small once felt safer than hoping to be acknowledged.
But I no longer want to live from a script written by a history of neglect.

So this is my documented declaration:

I will not abandon myself just because rooms get quiet.
I will continue to write even when insignificance tries to chime in.
I will keep leaving evidence of my voice, even when it isn’t echoed back.
I will not doubt my brilliance simply because someone hasn’t seen the light yet.

This isn’t about visibility right now.
It’s about continuity.
It’s about conscious choice
It’s about reclaiming authorship over my own life.

Today, I chose to stay.

What 46-Year-Old Me Wants to Say to the Younger Me

You were never insignificant.
You just weren’t mirrored properly.
There was nothing missing in you—no lack of talent, beauty, or presence.

What was missing was consistent reflection. You learned to shrink not because you were small, but because no one taught you how to take up space safely.

I see now how much you carried in silence.
How often you questioned the point of trying.
How early you learned to make yourself easy to overlook.

You didn’t imagine that pain.
And you didn’t fail because of it.

I’m still here because you didn’t disappear completely.

Every time you wanted to give up but didn’t, you left something for me to build on.

I’m writing now so you don’t have to keep wondering if you mattered.

You did. You do. And I’ve got you from here.

Reflection (optional, no pressure)

If you’re reading this and recognizing yourself in any part of it, you don’t have to explain or respond.

Just notice this:

Where in your life are you choosing to stay instead of shrink?

That’s enough for today.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Share Untrap Your Expertise™

I’d measure myself against invisible scoreboards—what I should have by now, who I should be by now, where I should already be standing.

Each candle felt less like a celebration and more like proof of what I lacked.

But I see birthdays differently now.

A birthday isn’t a deadline.

It’s a mirror.

And when you pause to look, you don’t just see what you’ve gained—you see what you’ve released.

The Truth About Time

Research shows we overestimate what we can do in a single year and underestimate what we can do in five. That’s why most of us carry this quiet panic about “running out of time.” We think life is a race against the clock.

But the real race isn’t with time—it’s with misalignment.

• Every year I stayed in places that drained me, I aged faster.

• Every year I silenced myself, I felt older than I was.

• And every time I honored my own truth, I felt years lighter.

What I’ve Learned

Here’s the wisdom this year has pressed into me:

• Pausing isn’t losing. Every time I’ve given myself space to breathe before deciding, I’ve avoided choices I’d regret.

• Gratitude isn’t the same as settling. I can be thankful for the present while still reaching for more.

• Boundaries are gifts. Saying no hasn’t cost me love—it’s revealed who can love me without conditions.

• Self-trust is the milestone that matters. The more I trust myself, the less I need the scoreboard.

The Gift of Alignment

What I want more than anything this year is simple:

clarity.

Not the kind that comes from forcing timelines or chasing other people’s approval—but the clarity that comes from being fully present, fully honest, and fully aligned with what I want.

Because clarity saves me from wasted years.

Energy restores when I stop fighting myself.

And self-trust—the best gift—makes me free at any age.

So this birthday, I’m not counting years.

I’m counting lessons unlearned, traps untangled, and choices I can finally make with peace.

The best gift of age isn’t experience—it’s the wisdom to stop abandoning yourself.

Reflection for you:

What belief about time, age, or “being behind” are you ready to untrap for yourself?

And if you’re ready to start living from clarity instead of fear, that’s what Untrap Your Expertise™ is here for. We do this work every week together.