The Bubble
Early in my career, fresh out of grad school, I had a job I loved.
Good company. Good work. And a boss I genuinely respected — which, if you’ve had one, you know is not something you take for granted.
Then my role got moved.
New department, new boss, new direction.
The fit was wrong in a way that’s hard to articulate but impossible to ignore — I was wired for the market side of things, what customers value, what moves them to buy. My new boss was focused on product features and functionality. We were speaking different languages and neither of us was wrong, we just weren’t right together.
Eventually the role was moving again, this time to finance.
I’d already had enough.
I left.
And here’s the part I’ve thought about many times since.
When I handed in my notice, they asked if there was anything that could have changed my mind.
By then I was so mentally done that the honest answer was no.
But the question cracked something open in me later, in quiet moments, in the kind of reflection that only comes with distance.
Had I ever considered walking down the hall to the marketing department and pushing for a larger role there?
The answer was no.
And the reason wasn’t that I lacked the capability.
It wasn’t that the opportunity didn’t exist.
It was something smaller and more honest than that.
I was afraid of hearing:
I just don’t think you’re a good fit.
I had built a confidence in my lane — in my bubble — and I wasn’t willing to risk puncturing it by asking for something I wasn’t certain I’d get.
So instead of knocking on a door, I walked out of the building.
That was the first time the expertise trap caught me.
It wouldn’t be the last.
The Trade Show
Years later I was running a chocolate business.
I loved this chapter.
The product was good — genuinely good — and I knew it. I was bootstrapping, doing it myself, building it the way you build things when you believe in them and don’t have anyone handing you shortcuts.
Then one year at a trade show I ran into a guy I’d seen the year before, just starting out.
Decent product.
Confident energy.
Not doing anything I wasn’t doing, maybe less.
Twelve months later he had exploded.
He’d figured out funding.
Not because his product was better — it wasn’t.
But because he understood how to walk into a room and ask for money without first needing to prove he deserved to be there.
Within a year he had the means to market properly, build distributor relationships, and scale to meet demand that I was still trying to generate on my own.
I stood there at that trade show and felt something complicated.
Not quite envy.
More like recognition.
He hadn’t out-capabled me.
He had out-believed me.
The expertise trap doesn’t only show up as waiting for another degree or another certification.
Sometimes it shows up as bootstrapping when you should be fundraising.
As doing it all yourself because asking for resources feels like admitting you’re not enough on your own.
As watching someone with less polish and more confidence take up space you quietly decided wasn’t yours to claim.
Capability, I was learning, was not the currency the room was trading in.
The Mirror Moment
The clearest version of this lesson came later, in my coaching career.
I had been coaching for years — as a formal part of my work, woven into leadership roles, embedded in how I showed up for teams and individuals — long before I ever pursued a credential.
When I finally did go after certification, I joined a group of seasoned professionals from different industries who were interested in a different pathway, one that recognized prior experience rather than requiring training hours to be completed within a specific timeframe.
Most of them were men.
And what struck me, sitting in those conversations, was how differently they held the question of credentials.
The certification was, for them, a nice to have.
A formality.
Something that would look good on paper but had absolutely no bearing on whether they advertised themselves as coaches, took clients, or stated their capabilities with complete confidence.
They were right, by the way.
They were seasoned.
They had been doing the work.
The piece of paper wasn’t going to make them more of what they already were.
I was sitting across from one of them one afternoon — a slightly older author and speaker who focused on executive coaching in medical administration — and something shifted.
We were talking as equals, which we were.
And it hit me.
We are peers. Why am I so concerned about this piece of paper and he is not?
It was one of those moments where you forget how old you actually are.
Where you’re still operating from the identity of the fresh grad with everything to prove, and then you look in the mirror and a sage face is staring back at you.
Lived experience.
Real results.
Years of doing exactly this work.
The credential wasn’t going to give me something I didn’t already have.
I had been waiting for permission that was mine to give myself.
What the Expertise Trap Actually Costs
Here’s what I’ve come to understand, both through my own life and through the women I work with:
Overvaluing expertise is one of the most socially acceptable ways we hold ourselves back.
Because it looks like diligence.
It looks like humility.
It looks like being thoughtful and responsible and not getting ahead of yourself.
But underneath it is often something less flattering — the same fear that kept me from knocking on that marketing department door.
The fear that if we reach before we’re certain, someone will confirm the thing we secretly suspect:
That we were never quite enough to begin with.
And here’s the part that took me a long time to see clearly:
We didn’t arrive at this fear on our own.
In many cultures, girls are raised with a specific set of instructions, rarely spoken out loud but absorbed nonetheless.
Be ornamental.
Look the part.
Say the right things.
Be perfect before you are seen.
Boys receive an entirely different message:
Be bold.
Take action.
Fall down, dust yourself off, and go again.
Failure is just data.
Confidence is assumed.
Two completely different operating systems, installed before we were old enough to question either one.
So when the men in that certification group looked at their experience and said this is what I bring — full stop, no asterisk, no waiting — they weren’t being arrogant.
They were running the program they’d been given since childhood.
And when I was still circling the credential, still quietly asking for permission, I was running mine.
That’s not a character flaw.
It’s a cultural download.
But here’s what matters:
Downloads can be updated.
That’s not arrogance.
That’s just an accurate accounting of what’s already there.
Your One Question
Think about something you’ve been waiting to do — a role you haven’t applied for, a service you haven’t offered, a room you haven’t walked into — because you’ve told yourself you’re not quite ready yet.
Now ask yourself this:
If a trusted peer looked at my experience objectively, would they agree that I need more — or would they tell me I already have what it takes?
Because the expertise trap isn’t really about expertise.
It’s about who gets to decide when you’re enough.
And that has always been you.
I found How Women Rise early in my coaching career and recognized myself on too many pages. I’ve pressed it into the hands of more women than I can count since then. Now, with some real miles behind me, I’m revisiting a few of those habits — this time with receipts.