Why the First Translation Is Always the Hardest
What Elizabeth Zott teaches us about taking your expertise where the institution never prepared you to go.
The problem is not that you do not know what you know. The problem is what you know has always lived inside a building that supplied the language for it.
You have a title. A department. A set of acronyms that mean something to the people who issued them. Inside the agency, inside the bank, inside the regulatory body, you know exactly what you bring to the table and so does everyone around you.
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.
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….now back to the remainder of this post
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.
Elizabeth Zott had to find a new language for chemistry. She found it in the kitchen. The knowledge was the same. The container was new.
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.
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’m Shannon D. Smith, Certified Professional in Talent Development. I help women experts turn trapped knowledge and expertise into visible, profitable work. Become a paid member to build your body of work with weekly guidance and priority access to training and support.