The Things I Almost Didn't Say (Turned Out to Be the Whole Point)

I was helping a client design a workbook. She had sent me a previous one she had done so I had a sense of her style, which looked polished and clean. I was sending her my first drafts to make sure I was headed in the right direction for her vision.

At some point I explained that I had intentionally kept the writing spaces white rather than shaded, and why. Shaded looks great, but if someone prints it, writing over ink is annoying. And not everyone prints anymore. If you are working on an iPad or laptop you want to be able to type directly into the space without having to add text boxes over a finished design.

I almost left that explanation out. It felt like a small thing, maybe even overly fussy. But that kind of attention to detail is actually what makes me good at what I do. So I said it.

She wrote back: "I totally agree with your assessment about white boxes." Then she immediately started thinking through solutions. She took the thing I almost didn't say and ran with it.

That's the thing about expertise. The longer you have it, the more invisible it becomes to you.

I help people articulate what they know and turn it into an online course worth taking. And the hardest thing I have ever had to articulate is what I know.

I spent twenty years in education. I planned lessons, ran departments, managed the gap between what looks great on paper and what actually works when real humans show up to learn it.

As a music teacher, I often taught the same lesson multiple times in a row. After the first class I'd find out what landed and what didn't. For the next class I'd adjust, small things, little tweaks. By lesson three I usually had it figured out. That rhythm of - teach, observe, adjust, repeat - became second nature. I stopped noticing I was doing it.

I know how people absorb information. I know where they get lost. I know the difference between content that teaches and content that just exists. And I know how to collect and apply feedback so your course gets better without having to throw everything you built out the window.

And for a long time, I couldn't figure out how to say any of that.

Not because it wasn't real. Because it was too familiar. When you have known something for decades, it stops feeling like knowledge and starts feeling like air. You forget that other people don't breathe it too.

My husband had been bugging me for a while to read Stephen King's book on writing. I'm not a writer, but I am a big reader, and he insisted I would enjoy it. He was right. I was also surprised by how much of it stuck with me when it came to my work. Anyway, I'm getting off track, and that defeats the point I’m trying to reference! 😅

In his book, he writes about the necessity of cutting in order to move a story forward: "kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler's heart, kill your darlings."

He's talking about pacing. About the words and sentences you love so much you can't see that they're slowing everything down.

It's always easier to cut someone else's darlings. It's always easier to see what someone else is too close to see.

That's true of writing. It's also true of expertise.

When I was trying to figure out what I had to offer in the online business world, I kept running into the same wall. I knew I had experience. I knew I understood things that mattered. But because I had never done it in this specific context, online courses, course creators, the consulting world, I kept disqualifying myself.

I didn't have the right titles. I hadn't done it for paying clients yet. So the knowledge I had accumulated over two decades somehow felt like it didn't count.

That's what imposter syndrome sounds like for me. Not "I don't know enough." More like: "I know plenty, but not in the right container."

What finally shifted things was having someone ask me to just talk. Explain things. Think out loud. And realizing, through their reaction, that I was describing things they genuinely had not considered. Not because they weren't smart. Because it wasn't their world.

Yes, AI can help with some of this. It's a useful starting point for organizing thoughts and finding language for things you've been circling around. But AI works from book knowledge. It doesn't know what actually happens when a real student hits a confusing slide and quietly gives up. It doesn't know what gets skipped when instructions are unclear. That part only comes from experience. And experience is what I bring.

The white boxes. The typing without text boxes. Little things. Obvious things.

That turned out to be the whole point.

If you're building a course and you feel like what you know is too basic, too obvious, or too simple to be worth saying, that feeling is usually the signal, not the problem.

Maybe you're holding back, assuming everyone already knows this. They don't. What feels like common sense to you is someone else's missing piece.

Or maybe you go the other direction. You include everything, layer in all the context, cover every angle, because you want to be thorough. But your students end up confused, wondering where to start or what actually matters.

Both directions come from the same place. You're too close to what you know to see it clearly.

That's where I come in. I can see what you're almost not saying. And I can see where you've buried the good stuff under too much of everything else.

Ready to figure out what you're almost not saying? Let's talk. Or if you'd rather start by sharing the details of your course, tell me about it here.