Why I Built This and the Expertise That Supports It
How Two “Mismatched” Degrees and One Haunting Question Turned into a System for Untrap Your Expertise
For four years, a finished book sat on my hard drive. The same woman who could build learning systems for everyone else couldn’t cross her own finish line. The day I asked why was the day Untrap Your Expertise quietly began.
Two Degrees That Weren’t Supposed To Go Together
On one side: Industrial–Organizational Psychology.
Textbooks will tell you I‑O psychology is “the application of psychological principles and theories to the workplace”—how people think, feel, and behave inside organizations, and how systems shape performance, well-being, and power.
I learned about role expectations, performance pressure, burnout, bias, and the unspoken rules that keep certain people visible and others safely in the background.
On the other side: Instructional Design & Technology.
That world is all about adult learning: how grown, busy humans actually change, what makes a learning experience stick, and how to design experiences that don’t just inform but transform.
I learned how to build curriculum, design pathways, and create feedback loops that turn “I know what to do” into “I’m consistently doing it.”
For a long time, I treated those degrees like parallel lines:
I‑O belonged to “work stuff”: leadership development, culture, talent systems.
Instructional design belonged to “learning stuff”: courses, trainings, e‑learning.
They were useful. They paid the bills. But they didn’t yet feel like a calling.
It took that unpublished book to show me what they were really for.
What I Finally Saw In Myself
When I stopped obsessing over the manuscript and started looking at my own behavior through both lenses, things got uncomfortably clear.
The I‑O psychologist in me could suddenly see the “quiet expert” role I had stepped into without ever consciously choosing it:
The overqualified, under-seen woman who keeps the machine running.
The one people ask for “a quick favor” or “just a few ideas,” but not the one they center as the expert.
The woman who is rewarded for being reliable, agreeable, and behind-the-scenes—never too loud, never too demanding, and never too expensive.
The instructional designer in me saw something else:
I had never designed a path for my own visibility and authority. I built beautifully structured learning experiences for organizations—but when it came to my work, I relied on vibes, perfectionism, and last-minute courage.
So of course the book stalled. It wasn’t about discipline. It wasn’t about needing another productivity hack.
It was about:
A nervous system that had learned “being seen is risky.”
A lifetime of scripts that said “women like you don’t make a big deal out of what you know.”
A complete lack of structure for moving through that fear in small, repeatable, compassionate ways.
The haunting part was this:
I knew exactly how to build systems that help other people change their behavior.
I just hadn’t turned that expertise inward.
Once I realized that, I had something to work with.
Turning “Mismatched” Degrees Into a System
I started treating my state of being “stuck” like I would treat a client project.
From the I‑O psychology side, I asked:
What roles have I been rewarded for playing? Quiet. Helpful. Behind the scenes.
How have race, gender, and culture shaped my sense of what’s “safe” to do with my expertise at work?
What happens to a high-capacity woman’s career when her value is measured by how much she gives, not by what she builds?
From the instructional design side, I asked:
What sequence of experiences would help someone like me safely practice being visible?
What are the smallest, most doable actions that move me toward “author,” “paid expert,” “visible authority” without sending my nervous system into full revolt?
How do you build a learning environment where the point isn’t just to know better, but to become someone who does things differently?
I realized the “2 degrees that didn’t go together” were actually the exact combination needed to build a system for women like us:
I‑O gave the language for what’s happening around and inside us: the structures, the expectations, the biases, and the burnout.
Instructional design gave me tools to design what happens next: tiny experiments, safe practice, feedback, scaffolding, and long-term change.
Together, they answered the real question behind that delayed book:
How do we help a woman who is already brilliant, already trained, already over-prepared finally cross her own finish lines—and get paid for what she knows?
Why I Built This (For You and For Me)
Untrap Your Expertise and The Untrapped Authority Collective exist because I’m not the only one with a “finished book” sitting in a folder.
Your “book” might be:
A workshop you’ve taught for free ten times.
A talk you keep giving at work that could be a keynote.
A framework you’ve developed in your role that could be a paid offer.
A body of writing you share with friends instead of with the people who need it.
You already have more than enough knowledge.
What you don’t have is:
A system that treats your fear as something we can plan around and support, not something we have to eliminate.
A room where your patterns make sense in context, instead of being pathologized.
A path that honors your nervous system and your ambition at the same time.
That’s what my degrees—and that four-year delay—have been training me to build all along.
I built this work because I needed it first.
I will keep building it because I believe you do, too.
Where We Go From Here
In this Start Here series, “Who This Work Is For (And Not For)” names you.
“Why I Built This and the Expertise That Supports It” explains why you can trust that this isn’t just motivational talk; it sits on top of real behavioral science and real learning design.
Next, I’ll show you how this turns into a path:
A free publication and community where you can see your patterns with clarity.
A cohort where you actually design and sell an offer based on what you already know.
A way of being in your work where your degrees, certifications, and lived experience finally add up to authority—not just more responsibility.
For now, you might just sit with your own version of my question:
What’s the thing that’s “done” but not done—the book, the offer, the talk, or the course—that you still haven’t let the world see?
That’s where your version of this system will start.