You sit down to write and the first thing that arrives is something you already know.
You’ve said it in meetings. You’ve said it to clients so often the words have worn smooth.
So you skip past it and go looking for something better.
Everyone knows that.
That’s too simple.
I don’t really have anything original to say.
And the thing you paid years to learn sits there, unwritten.
The invoice
A colleague asked me to review a recorded call and give her my perspective. We had agreed my consultancy rate. I listened twice, picked out the details I thought mattered, and recorded around twenty minutes of feedback.
Twenty minutes of talking. Two hours on the invoice. £500.
I felt awful about it.
She had already messaged to say she was delighted — what I’d shared had helped her move forward. Even then, I was looking for ways to charge her less.
So I took the discomfort into a session with my coach.
“I just listened to something and gave a bit of advice.”
That was how I described the work.
Looking back, the word that catches my attention is just.
I had reduced listening, recognising what mattered and offering useful direction to “a bit of advice”.
Because I could do it, I struggled to see why anyone should pay for it.
Expertise hides itself from the expert
There’s a strange thing that happens with expertise.
The better you know something, the less remarkable it feels.
You see the pattern faster. You know which detail matters. You notice the mistake before it becomes expensive. You ask the question that changes the direction of the conversation.
What once took effort becomes instinct.
And fluency hides the distance travelled.
In another session that summer I described how much I enjoyed those consulting conversations. I knew the problems. I could see ways to help. The work felt easy enough that I’d have been happy doing it unpaid.
There was pleasure in being useful.
There was also a blind spot.
I was using the effort the work required from me as a measure of the value it created for someone else.
Those are not the same thing.
Originality is the wrong test
A lot of experienced people quietly believe an idea has to be new before it deserves to be expressed.
Originality asks whether anyone has said it before.
Earned judgement asks whether experience has given you a reason to say it.
Useful professional judgement often reveals itself in distinctions.
Separating two things other people keep collapsing together.
Knowing when the usual advice no longer fits.
Recognising which part of a problem needs attention first.
Those judgements may draw on ideas other people taught you. Experience is what shows you where they hold, where they need adapting, and where you’d misunderstood them.
Over time you develop something worth explaining.
That doesn’t make every instinct correct. Feeling certain is no guarantee of seeing clearly.
But dismissing a judgement because it comes easily stops you examining it at all.
Experience earns explanation
I try not to turn every experience into a lesson.
Some things happen once. Some observations are interesting but unproven. Some need distance.
When something keeps returning, I pay attention.
I notice it in my own life. Then in the work. Then in someone else’s situation.
Eventually there’s enough of a pattern to name and enough evidence to explain why I think it matters.
Experience earns explanation.
Repeated observation gives you better ground to speak from.
Not certainty.
Something better:
A judgement other people can question, test and recognise in their own experience.
Finding the judgement inside the story
Take the invoice.
On the surface: I listened to a call and gave some advice.
Look closer.
What did I notice?
Why did I think it mattered?
What experience allowed me to notice it?
What did I choose to ignore?
What did my colleague find useful?
Those questions start to reveal the judgement hiding inside something I’d dismissed as easy.
They also stop me turning one successful interaction into a claim larger than the evidence supports.
You can do the same with a decision you helped someone make, a mistake you spotted, or a question people keep bringing to you.
Before you go looking for a new idea, examine what you already do.
Especially the things you describe with the word just.
Give people something to recognise
Becoming conscious of your judgement is a beginning.
You still have to give it language. Show where it applies. Test whether it helps. Return to it across different situations, with enough consistency that people begin to recognise how you see.
That’s how individual pieces of work start to form a coherent body of thought.
My discomfort about that invoice told me very little about the usefulness of what I’d contributed.
My colleague’s response told me more.
I had found the work straightforward. She had found it helpful.
Both were true.
What do people ask you for help with that you tend to dismiss as “just” something you know how to do?
Sometimes another article isn’t what you need.
Sometimes you need another person to help you hear yourself again.
Signal Fire is a one-to-one conversation for quietly capable people carrying responsibility, decisions or identities that no longer feel like their own.
“I was using the effort the work required from me as a measure of the value it created for someone else” really struck me. Sometimes the things we dismiss as obvious are only obvious because we spent years learning how to see them.