Last week at CMEE, I sat in a session next to a woman from the Collective. Someone I trust completely.

The speaker asked us to turn to the person beside us and say what we do. Out loud. Thirty seconds.

We looked at each other. And neither of us could do it.

Two women with over fifty years of experience between us, in a room full of our own industry, with complete trust across the table. And we sat there like we had been asked to explain quantum physics.

Then we started laughing, because what else do you do.

I want to tell you the giggling was the story. It wasn’t. What came after was.

We stayed with it. We stumbled through some bad versions. We asked each other the annoying questions. Who is that for. What happens to them if they don’t fix it. Say that last part again, but shorter.

And by the end of that session, we both had something. Not perfect. But something we could say out loud without wanting to leave the building.

That, by the way, is the whole reason that room exists. Not the lessons. The person who will ask you the annoying question and then sit there while you work it out.

I have thought about it all week, and the part that keeps landing is this.

The thing that made us good at our jobs came easy. Twenty years of pattern recognition. Knowing what a room needs before anyone says it. Solving the problem everyone else was still describing. Nobody had to teach us that part.

This is different. Finding the words for it, down to the punctuation, is the hardest work I do. It is also the work that decides whether anyone ever finds out about the rest.

And I love helping other people with theirs. That part is genuinely fun. Which is exactly why I keep doing it instead of sitting with my own.

You have probably felt some version of this.

For twenty years you were rewarded for being the person who solved it. Nobody ever handed you a bonus for explaining it. The work came through referrals, or reputation, or an organization that already knew what you were good at. Someone else did the describing, and they did it well.

So when the describing becomes your job, it feels like a personal failing.

It is a skill you were never asked to build, showing up late and asking to be learned in public.

And because it feels unfamiliar, it gets filed under marketing and pushed to the bottom of the list, behind the real work. But personal branding for professionals with your kind of experience is the gate in front of the expertise, not decoration on top of it.

The fastest way through is not more thinking. It is saying it out loud to someone who will ask you the annoying question and then wait.

You did not spend twenty years becoming this good in order to stay a secret. The words are the last mile. They are hard because they matter, and they decide whether the right people find you, or whether they scroll past you toward someone with half your experience and twice your clarity.

If someone turned to you right now, thirty seconds, no warning, what would you say?

P.S. The woman sitting beside me at CMEE has her sentence now. Mine took a lot longer than I would like to admit. If you want the shortcut we both wish we’d had, it’s here.

Cheers,
Leanne