S01E13 You're Not an Entry Level Human: Embracing Your Lived Experience

In this episode, Laura reflects on the start of a new year and the sense of momentum and possibility it brings. Drawing from personal experiences, including a recent family beach trip and an ongoing career transition, our discussion centers on the concept of expertise—not just as credentials or work experience, but as the sum of lived experiences, personal growth, and the unique skills developed over a lifetime.

Through a process of self-questioning and reflection, listeners are
encouraged to recognize their own hidden layers of expertise and to move beyond self-doubt or the need for external validation. Key questions are offered to help us all uncover our natural strengths, what others seek us out for, and the roles we play when at our best. 

Transcript

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Hi everyone. Happy New Year. I hope you all are rested and feeling energized and excited to start a new year. Hopefully a very different year from last year. I, I just feel this sense of momentum this year. I feel like we are headed in an exciting direction where we are all gonna be waking up to new ways of living within our own lives. And I cannot wait to dive into all of that. I spent the last week at the beach. we do this every year. My family and I go with seven other families, maybe there's seven total families and we. rent a beach house on, right on the water, and it's a, it was 27 people that are there, and it's a combination of little kids. The youngest are, there's two twin boys that are two and all the way up to 18-year-old boys. lots of, different ages in between. They're not all boys, And then adults, right? And these adults are parents of little kids and parents of teenagers. And we all have different rhythms and routines and schedules and hobbies. And it is a big combination of people that we love so much. it's always a very, dynamic. Energizing week for me. It's so good to see everybody and it's a combination of lots of noise and activity and fun things, and also lots of downtime. My kids are finally at an age where they can kind of go off and do their own thing most of the day. And I can sit and read a book, which I did a lot, which was great, and lots of time by the ocean, which always just feeds my soul. So I'm feeling good. I'm feeling excited. And if you're entering this year feeling like something is shifting and there's a momentum and some new directions, even if you don't know exactly what those directions are yet, this episode is for you. Today I wanna talk to you about something that I've been working on for a couple of months. This comes from the fact that, as you all know, I am in the middle of a career transition a different way of thinking about how I live my life every time I think about moving in a new direction, there is a little voice that shows up in the back of my head that says. Yeah, but you're in your forties and you've never done that before and you're gonna have to start from scratch. But that never felt true. That doesn't feel accurate to me because I know that even though I haven't done exactly the thing that I'm thinking about, I have done a lot of other similar things doesn't that count. And I have been trying to reconcile the idea that I am more than just the experiences that I can list on my resume that I am many more things than just the work experience that I can prove to you that I've had. I have my resume of experience and then I have all the rest of my life and all the things that I've done, and how do I make all of those things fit together to be me? So I wanna talk today about expertise. So when I say expertise, we all think about credentials, right? Like what are the things that we can put on our resumes? What are the things that we have spent time accumulating, experience doing? What teams have we been on or groups have we led, or classes have we taken? What skills do we definitely have that we can put on our resume and say, yes, this is something you can ask me to do, and I know that I will be able to perform that. This won't be surprising to you. I hate resumes. I can't stand trying to think about my work experience in that way. I can't stand trying to represent me and what I bring to any situation on a couple pages of paper using corporate language. I also don't think when we say expertise, we should solely be talking about work experience and credentials. You have certifications or degrees or whatever. I don't think that that is as relevant to our own personal expertise as are our lived experiences. What are the things that we have all lived through that have given us many different skills that we've honed over time. Some of them come very naturally to us and always have some of them we've decided we wanted to be good at, and so we work very hard to develop and hone those skills over time. I'm talking about things that come from experiences in relationships with people, things that come from challenging experiences throughout your life. Maybe you've been through really tough experiences, even traumas. Those teach you things. Those give you skills that you then use and apply to the rest of your life. Certainly if you are a parent, you've learned some new skills and you're continuing to learn new skills and expertise. If you've done any work in therapy or even just by yourself, digging into your own emotions and the ways that you have reacted over time or the decisions that you've made and you've learned things about yourself in that way, all of these things are giving you a set of expertise. Every single one of us carries multiple layers of expertise that have been built through all of these lived experiences, pattern recognition, repetition, and care, not just your credentials. my hypothesis is that when we learn to see and trust that set of expertise, our sense of possibility expands tremendously. When you're not just thinking about, okay, I have these skills, but I gotta keep'em sharp. I gotta keep learning new things, or else I'll fall behind, or I have to find, positions or ways to apply my expertise that fit me perfectly that's exhausting and also really sells ourselves short We need to think more about how we move through the world. It's just as evidence-based as credentials and degrees and certificates, things that you can show to prove these things to people. what I have been doing is coming up with, and I've been doing this for years. I've been gathering this together to combine it all into one big exercise or, I don't know, picture of myself is coming up with questions that are not, these don't reflect any specific framework or a single idea that I'm trying to get at. These have just emerged over time from watching people and thinking about the different sets of rules and roles that I have lived and worked within, my work in therapy, and realizing that the usual questions that people ask about ourselves and about each other are not as useful as I want them to be, to really dig into who we are. They didn't tell me what I needed to know about myself. So I'm moving into this new season of exploration and I wanna talk about that with you all today. When I decided to start pulling all of these together and really digging in, I expected a lot of clarity, a lot more clarity than I'm finding what I would say are the finite, absolutely clear things that I am good at or have a lot of experience in. Instead, what I'm finding is every question that I answer is uncovering more and more curiosity, an urge to dig a little bit deeper and also increased recognition. There are some patterns that are emerging that I'm noticing about myself. There are some things that I have uncovered that have been really interesting to me. I'm trying to stay very open. I'm not trying to arrive at any specific point in this. And I'm trying to keep any judgment out. So if I start to notice that I'm really good at something that I maybe feel like is not valuable, i'm trying to keep that piece out, that value based judgment out. For example, I have noticed that I have an ability to create a sense of safety for people. That people tend to open up to me and tell me things. I'm pretty good at listening without a sense of urgency or trying to fix things, so I've noticed that that's something that has popped up in different phases of my life Even when I say things like, Hey, I think I make people feel safe around me. There is a voice in the back of my head that's like, you sound like you're bragging? don't say that about yourself. I don't know why that is. I can say something nice about myself, but that happens, right? There's a judgment that's happening in the back of my head when I say that, so I really have had to beat back those voices of judgment as I go through this, that is not the point of discovering these things about myself, or yourself as we go through this exercise. I'm not trying to find things that feel impressive to other people. I'm trying to find things that feel natural to me that I think are strengths that I can show up for, show up with in the world. I just wanna know what my set of expertise is. what I can feel already is that this is loosening how I think about what's possible in my life. It's helping me to think a little bit bigger about the ways that I could spend my time, the ways that I could make money move through the world. I don't know where this will land, but I can tell that this is really changing how I see myself in a great way. I'm feeling more confident. I'm feeling more solid, more grounded whenever I'm talking to people. I know where I come from and my own worth. And I'm not questioning or trying to perform or trying to justify my own seat at the table or my own existence in front of somebody else. For me specifically, I have a bad habit of assuming that everybody else in the room knows better than I do that I need to prove myself or quickly catch up to everybody else. It's almost like being in a big improv session. Like I have all of these different versions of myself available to me at any moment. And I have to kind of quickly gauge what are we doing here in this room? are we very serious? Are we being very professional? Are we joking?'cause I can do that too. Are we like super knowledgeable and smart and intellectually challenging each other? I can do that. Are we maternal and nurturing and kind or are we tough? Do I need to show up as like boss bitch Laura? I can do that too. But all of these versions of me, none of them represent all of me, and they all represent the fact that I am changing myself based on other people. There's something to be said for reading the room and showing up in an appropriate way, but I tend to undermine my own knowledge, my own instincts when I'm just following everybody else's cues. So this, going through this exercise has already helped me feel much more stable in the way that I show up in any room, no matter what everybody else is doing. I can produce my own gravity. I can show up and I can change the energy of the room and maybe everybody else can adjust a little bit around me. So this is feeling less like a plan and more like just an exercise of opening to new possibilities, which again is what I'm seeing for this year. So I think this is a perfect time to talk about. When I say hidden layers of expertise, let's talk through a couple of examples of what I'm talking about.'cause I'm not talking about can you code in Python or have you been an English teacher for 15 years, or, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about judgment honed over time. do you have the ability to gauge certain situations based on situations you've been in in the past, and now you have a level of wisdom within your judgment based on things you've done before. Emotional pattern recognition, decision making under pressure. Not everybody's gonna be good at all of these things. These are just examples. Knowing when not to act. I think this is something that comes with age or probably challenging experiences or mistakes. Translating between people or systems, are you really good at figuring out where one group of people is not understanding the message that they're being given and being able to translate that information in a way that they can understand it or noticing what others miss. Maybe you see the world a little bit differently. These are the kinds of things that I'm talking about. okay, let's talk about the questions themselves. These are not questions that I, or you can answer quickly. This is not a situation where it is just like, Hey, I'm gonna knock out a couple of questions'cause I have 20 minutes here. I have found, because that is what I tried to do initially. I probably tried to do that a couple of times. I have found that these questions are demanding a lot of focus and presence and time Let me give you a couple of examples of questions so I don't just keep saying these questions so that you know what I'm talking about. As I'm going through this gathering of questions and trying to bucket them, I have divided them into several different sections to keep like questions with, like questions and maybe try to uncover information in specific areas as we go. For example, I have a section about following invisible rules. these are the time that we have spent in situations where there are unspoken rules that are governing ours and everybody else's behavior, the way that they make decisions, the way that they show up. That might be childhood. Where it's, you lived in a house where there were certain things you did and certain things you did not do, and not all of that was spoken out loud. Some of that is based on what you observed or when you noticed that you received positive versus negative feedback on your behavior or what you said or your decisions. That's all data that gave you a sense of, okay, these are the rules that I'm operating within, because that colors the way that you live for the rest of your life. the next section is what the cost is of living by other people's rules and how it undermines your own sense of self and your sense of the way that you want your own reality to play out when you're so focused on other people's rules, which you have to be as a child, right? But if you stop listening to your inner voice and your own wants and desires and just what feels good and bad to you in the way that you're moving through the world, that carries a cost, and I think it's important to dig into that and figure out what does that cost and how do you feel about that? The next section is unlearning, which is at what points in my life did I realize that there were things that I was doing that didn't reflect me or, belong to me even. Ideas that weren't my own, that were different from what my own would be, and how did I start to unlearn those patterns of behavior, those patterns of thinking. I have found that section to be stressful because I would love to say that I've unlearned all these things and now I'm moving differently. But I think the more I dig into these, the more I realize I have a lot of work to do, to unlearn some of these things. And so I find myself getting a little anxious talking about these questions'cause I don't love all of the answers that I'm giving. I will say that there are questions that cause me to have to really dig deeply back in my memory to think about childhood or even think about the last 10 or 20 years. But think of like really specific scenarios or specific decisions that I made that don't readily come to the surface. That's why I'm saying that these are taking a lot of time and presence for me to really sit down and dig deep. And I will also say I am resisting some of these, which has been very interesting to me. I sit down with this list of questions, my intention is to just go right through. top to bottom. And there are some questions that I come across that I'm either like, oh, that's boring. I don't wanna talk about that. Or I'm like, Ugh. My brain just gets so tired before I even start thinking about it, because I know it's gonna be a big, long, heavy answer to whatever the question is, or this has happened a couple of times. There are questions that require me to step back into an older mindset for myself from a past version of myself, a past time for me, usually in my twenties'cause they were terrible. That makes me anxious to even think about having to put myself back in that mindset to figure out what decisions I made and why I made those decisions and how I felt about it at the time. that has been very interesting to realize that there is still some friction there for me. for me specifically, I receive that as like, Hey, there's some digging that needs to happen here and maybe some, reflection and processing that needs to go on before I can really put a pin in that chapter and call it the past and it's done. that's part of the value of this whole exercise. and then there are some that I sit down and I write out a whole answer and then. by the end of it, I feel like it's unfinished, and then a few days later I'm in a different mood and my answer is completely different. The whole point of this is not to create a set of answers I'm gonna share with anybody, so it's fine to do that. I don't know when I will finish all of these, but it has brought me so much interesting, valuable information about myself and I. Again, I've just noticed that it is shoring up my own foundation in a way that is making me show up in the world differently and think about my role in my own life differently. And the possibilities for the future. I'm no longer just thinking about okay, well I spent 20 years doing technical work. I'm a data scientist. I'm an AI leader, I am not gonna just box myself into those roles because I also have all of this other expertise that I can apply to anything that I'm doing. I would love to be a children's book author. I've never written a children's book before. I don't know any children's book authors. I don't know any, agents or publishers and how in the world do you make that become a reality? Does it fit anything I've ever done before? Or how cool would it be if someday these primas that I'm designing could actually turn into some sort of animated story that could be like a visual story about how they are guiding and protecting these different emotional realms? No idea how I would ever make that possible. I don't know, animation, I don't know people who do that, there's something inside me that sits up and feels very awake and alive when I talk about things like that. And so I wanna give myself permission to move in these new directions without feeling like a total noob.'cause I'm not a noob. I have 20 years of work experience and that experience has given me a ton of skills that are useful. I have 44 years of life experience, and those experiences have given me even more things that I can show up with in any situation and not be just a fresh, new, clueless person. But I think sometimes I need this permission to do that. I'm trying to restore for myself internal authority so that I feel confident that I can show up and say what I want, say what I know and what I don't know, and move through a situation with confidence and authority, whether I've done it before or not. I will give you a couple of examples of expertise that I'm uncovering about myself. These are things that I've noticed, some patterns that I'm noticing, things that I've just picked up on as I'm going through these answers. So for example, I have noticed that I have a familiarity with transition that has served me well throughout my life. And by that I mean helping other people and myself orient themselves or orient myself during a time of turmoil or change. An instinct for connecting ideas and emotions and experiences across multiple parts of my life. So. I am really good at taking lessons that I've learned from relationships and applying them to parenting or work, or taking lessons that I learned in parenting and bringing them to the boardroom, or taking information that is seemingly disparate and connecting that in a way that becomes valuable for me or for the people, hopefully for the people around me. I've also noticed I have a sensitivity to power dynamics. I am very sensitive to everybody else in the room, and power dynamics is something that's really interesting to me. Cause I think it goes deeper than just who's got what title or what role in a situation. I have a way of noticing when different people at any level are feeling diminished or unsure, and I'm comfortable kind of stepping in and trying to balance those scales and make sure that everybody's on even footing in terms of how they are feeling or what they're getting out of a situation. so those are a couple of things that I have started to notice about my answers to these questions. It's been very, very interesting to me. I would say none of those are terribly surprising when I write them out. I think these are things that I already know about myself. But this list is starting to feel very personal and things that I really value about myself and that I'm excited to show up with in the world and I'm also excited to figure out what other people have in terms of their strengths and expertise so that we can pair up and figure out, you know, okay, well I'm really good at synthesis and figuring out how to connect these ideas, and maybe you're really good at taking that information and executing on something new. So maybe we should pair up and really build something cool. I think some really interesting conversations or developments could come out of that combining of information. None of these things, again, none of these things are things that I decided I wanted to be true about myself. Here's why this matters to me. this creates permission to move toward where your energy is already pushing you or where you feel yourself responding. That's what I hope it's doing for me, right? My energy moves in many directions, but there are times when I feel it moving in an area where I'm like, I would love to be able to do that, but I can't. I've never done that before. this reminds me that none of us are entry level humans. We've learned so many things. Those have value. A lot of value, and we've all learned different things. No two people could go through this list and come up with the same set of responses. Everybody comes to the table with their own perspective, their own set of experiences, and their own specific custom personal value. Which is why we all have a place at the table at all times. That's why it's so important to use your voice in any situation. So with that, before we wrap, I would like to leave you with a couple of questions that Maybe can get your mind started in this direction. If you wanna begin thinking this way, and again, please move very slowly through this, go easy on yourself. No judgment in this. Okay, here's a couple of questions that you can start to noodle on. Feel free to write out responses now or much later, or never if you don't want to. Let's start with what do you gravitate toward naturally? if there was no expectation on you or your time or your attention, what are things that you would naturally want to do or even be thinking about doing? What drains you more than it drains other people and what drains you less than it drains other people? What do people consistently come to you for? Even when you don't think it is anything special, people just keep coming back to you for what? What feels obvious to you, but impressive to others? And finally, when you're at your best, what role are you actually playing? I'm not talking about the task that you're doing, whatever specific activity, but the way that you are showing up the role that you're playing. Are you being, for example, a helper or a translator like we talked about earlier? Are you the stabilizer of the situation or the challenger, or are you just witnessing? When you feel like you're at your best what role are you playing? This is just a taste. I'm working with a much larger set of questions and I will be sharing those very soon with all of you if you are interested in diving a little bit deeper into this. I just wanna leave you with this. I wanna remind you that expertise is not something that you've earned based on classes or whatever. That's not solely what expertise is, and it's not something that you'll earn later. You have so much expertise that is already present within you that you maybe just haven't acknowledged or thought about In that way. None of this exercise or this podcast episode is about becoming something new or someone new. It's just about being steady and sure of yourself exactly as you are, and knowing exactly what you bring to any situation. As always, if you have questions or you wanna write out responses to those questions that I shared, please send me an email at Laura at a life in color.co. I love reading your emails and I might even anonymously share some of your tidbits sometimes. And if this work resonates with you, this and other episodes that we've done, this is the work that we do at a life in color. Please visit us at a life in color.co I hope you'll join us in all of our future endeavors. Thank you so much for taking the time to stay with me through this episode. Happy New Year and I will talk to y'all next time. Bye now.