Moments ago, I spilled tea all over my desk. Fortunately, the only thing that got ruined was my certificate of completion for “Leading Virtual and Remote Teams”.  Frankly, it’s a bit of a relief that it got ruined, because now I can give myself permission to throw it in the recycling bin.

It’s been sitting on the corner of my desk since March when I took the course.  Normally I would have filed it in my portfolio where I put all of the course certificates, published articles, and reference letters that mark the learning and growing journey of my life’s work.  

There’s a good reason this one never made it to the portfolio, though.  It’s because I spent the three days of the course doing little more productive than doodling on scrap paper (hence the artwork at the side of this post).  I didn’t really deserve the certificate of completion, because I didn’t really feel like I’d completed anything.  

It was one of those expensive courses in a high-end training centre in a fancy high-rise building in a city I had to fly to.  Trust me – I felt huge amounts of guilt over all the doodling I did, considering the non-profit organization I work for had paid boat loads of money to send me there.  

I signed up for the course because I’d been having lots of challenges managing staff spread across the country.  It’s the one part of the job I never believe I’m doing right.  Building good team relationships with people you see only twice a year and speak to on the phone two or three times a month is tough soul-grinding - and usually disappointing - work. I thought maybe the instructor of this course would have the magic bullet that would propel me to success in an area I’d been floundering in for 5 years. 

It turns out, he didn’t have the magic bullet.  Truth is, there IS no magic bullet. (I guess I knew that going in, but a person can still hope, right?) The other truth is, I knew as much or even more than the instructor did.  I could have taught the course.  In fact… you know what? I think I might have done a better job.  Okay… can we be brutally honest here? It’s not that the instructor sucked, but… I’m almost POSITIVE I would have done a better job because I think I have a more natural presence in front of people, I have more relevant stories related to the course material, and I’d be more honest about my failures as well as my successes. (Yikes! That feels so close to bragging I want to hit the “delete” key, but I’ll leave it in there just to illustrate my point.) He did a fair enough job, but he was mostly regurgitating material written by someone else (one of the risks of taking a course at a high-end training centre where they pump out courses like an assembly line) which made him less genuine and less inspiring. 

I’m not about to start teaching workshops on leading virtual teams any time soon (I’m still feeling a little too tender about my many weaknesses and disappointments in this area), but I learned an important lesson during those three days of doodling.  Sometimes, we know more than we think we know.  

It’s not easy to begin to think of ourselves as “experts”. If you’re like me, you tend to assume someone else knows way more than you do, regardless of what the subject matter is. Why would anyone listen to you with your limited knowledge, plus a track record that includes failure in the journey toward that knowledge? What if you write something or teach a course and someone who’s a REAL expert shows you up as an impostor? What if someone asks a question you don’t know the answer for and you look like a fool? 

The truth is, an expert isn’t necessarily someone who knows more than you do – an expert is usually just the person who’s worked up the confidence to talk about what knowledge they’ve gained.  Chances are, you ARE an expert already (or at least close enough to teach someone else) and you just don’t know it.  Chances are, there’s a skill that you have WAY more experience in than I do, and you could enlighten me and/or others who may be interested in it.  You don’t have to be a PhD to start teaching workshops or writing articles – you just have to find an area where you’ve been passionate enough to put in the practice, do the research, and gain slightly more than an average amount of knowledge, understanding, and ability.  

There’s a good chance that someone who’s new to the skill and knows less than you do will be receptive to learning from someone who’s passionate enough to be interesting, honest enough to admit their failures and areas of weakness, and authentic enough to invite people to come alongside them in the learning journey rather than flaunt their “know-it-all” status.

What things do you already know that you don’t give yourself credit for?

Note: To give them credit, the training centre refunded my tuition fee when they found out I wasn’t getting much out of the course and I told them their marketing material falsely promoted it as being for more experienced managers than what the course actually targeted. That eased my guilt at least a little.

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