Two people came to me at work this week wanting to learn how I do my job.
First, someone just starting out writing blogs for one of our products, asking if he could borrow some of what I’ve figured out. Then someone else, newly moved over to head up marketing for another, pointed in my direction as someone worth learning from.
Two lovely messages. Two, if I’m honest, that quietly terrified me.
Because my first instinct with both was exactly the same: not now. I told the first I’d put something together on Monday. I asked the second to email her questions over so I could think them through properly instead of giving her my usual rambling on a call. I dressed it up as being helpful, and I did genuinely want to help — but underneath it I was buying time.
I can’t do this on the spot. I never have been able to. Put me on a call and ask me how I work and I’ll tie myself in knots.
So Monday morning I sat down to write it out for him. It took me an hour. A whole hour to explain something I do every single day without thinking about it.
I got there, and it came out looking like a proper process — steps in an order, a reason behind each one, each part leading sensibly into the next. Read it back and you’d think I had it all worked out.
What I didn’t tell him is that most of the time it doesn’t feel like that at all. I go on gut. I feel my way to whether something’s worth writing, whether a draft’s landed, whether a headline’s right — and I often couldn’t tell you why. It just feels finished, or it doesn’t.
When someone asks me to lay the steps out, I’m half convinced I’m inventing them after the fact, tidying something up out of what’s really just instinct and a lot of trying things until one of them sticks.
It’s not the work that makes me feel like a fraud. I can clearly do the work — I’ve done it for years, across many products. It’s that I can’t hand over the how. People come expecting a map, and what I’ve actually got is a feeling in my gut and a long run of it turning out right.
I’ve been turning it over since, and I think I’ve been unfair to myself about one word — guessing.
Maybe it isn’t guessing. Maybe I’ve just done this so many times that the steps have worn smooth and I can’t feel them under my feet anymore. Beginners can see every step because they’re still counting them out. I stopped counting years ago. That’s not the same as there being no steps — it’s that I’ve packed them away somewhere I can’t easily get to, which is a very different thing from never having had them at all.
And that hour on Monday, the one that made me feel like a fraud? That was me digging them back out. Not making a process up — remembering one, in a shape someone else could actually use. Which, now I think about it, is more or less what teaching is.
I’d love to tell you the impostor feeling’s gone now I’ve written all this down. It hasn’t. I’ll probably feel it all over again the next time someone catches me on the spot. But I’m starting to wonder whether the not-quite-knowing-how was ever the problem I took it for. Maybe going on instinct, and being right often enough that people start coming to you to learn, is just what being good at something feels like from the inside.
I’m not sure I believe that yet. Ask me again when her email lands.