What’s Working Wednesday: The Thing I Couldn’t See

I’ve been sitting with some questions for a while now.

Not new questions, but ones I keep coming back to every few months, turn over in my head for a while, and then quietly set back down because I can’t quite figure out the answers. Basically it’s this: I know a lot of things about online business and using creativity to earn money. Could I turn that into something bigger than what I’m already doing? And who else can I help with this knowledge?

Last night I was wrestling with it all again, and with a little help from Claude (my AI friend who helps me ask the tough questions), I think I finally got somewhere with it. My big lightbulb moment? I often can’t see my own expertise.

Even after almost 30 years of doing this entrepreneur thing – building websites, creating party favors and physical products, running multiple online shops on Etsy, Amazon and my own websites, opening a brick and mortar, crafting and designing, starting and stopping with blogging, helping countless creative business owners figure out their online presence, and pivoting approximately a thousand times — I genuinely could not tell you what I had to offer that anyone would pay for in a workshop or class or membership. I go round and round about the idea of a “teach it to a group” concept, and I have felt totally blind to what I could offer. It all just feels like… stuff I know. Stuff I do. Stuff I’ve done for 30 years.

Turns out there’s a name for that. It’s called the curse of knowledge. When you’ve done something long enough, it stops feeling like expertise and starts feeling like air. You forget that other people can’t breathe it.

I remember very vividly sitting in my surgeons office three years ago and listening to her describe the three options she had on the table for my open heart surgery. She said she always had a Plan A, a Plan B, and a Plan C because she wouldn’t know exactly what to do until she was in there looking at my actual beating heart. My husband and I kept looking at each other, wide-eyed, as she described the different plans and what she was going to do to my heart to correct the birth defect. After she had explained the plans for about 20 minutes, we were both VERY overwhelmed, and I just shook my head at her. I said, “I don’t understand half of what you said, but I trust you. I can tell this is like breathing for you – you don’t even have to think about it. And I know I’m in good hands”.

I am in NO way comparing the knowledge my open-heart surgeon has to my knowledge of online business, but I am comparing the concept. When you know a lot about what you do, and you’ve just done it for so long, you often don’t realize how much you know. (Or maybe that’s just me).

I’ll be honest here and say that I also have a healthy dose of imposter syndrome sitting on top of that. Which, if you’ve never experienced imposter syndrome after almost three decades in your field — good for you, genuinely. But also, are you sure you’re human?

Anyway, the thing that finally cracked it open for me was this question: what do people actually ask you about?

Not “what do you offer”. Not “what’s on your services page”. But, what do people show up in your inbox asking about? What do they pull you aside after business meetings to talk about? What do they hire you for and then end up getting way more than they bargained for because you just can’t help yourself?

THAT thing. That’s the expertise I couldn’t see because I was swimming in it.

And because I cracked this wide open, I have some new ideas and new plans. It is all still very much in the early stages and I’ve learned my lesson about announcing things before they exist. But something is brewing, and last night was the first time in a long time that I went to bed thinking I might have a long-term plan that could work for building something larger than what currently exists.

In the meantime, I want to ask you something:

What’s the thing YOU know so well you can’t even see it anymore?

What is THE thing people ask you about all the time that feels so obvious to you it barely registers? Send me an email and tell me all about it – I’d love to know!