Issue 16| The First Time Someone Paid Me for What I Knew

AUGUST THEME: THE LEADER BEHIND THE VISION 

I can still remember looking down at that $100 bill in my hand.

I hadn't asked for it.

I wasn't expecting it.

And at the time, I don't think I fully understood what had just happened.

It was around 2010.

Our church was doing a lot of community outreach work at the time, including operating food programs, and I had spent years learning what it took to position the organization for funding.

And when I say learning, I mean learning.

There were no shortcuts.

There were late nights, paperwork, research, programs to develop, mistakes to correct and plenty of figuring things out as we went.

By then, that work had become a major part of our ministry focus.

One day, an Apostle asked if she and one of her staff members could sit down with me.

She wanted to understand what we had done.

How had we positioned ourselves for funding?

What needed to be in place?

How had community outreach become a full-time focus of our ministry?

At the time, I didn't even have an office.

So we sat together in the sanctuary area of our church.

And I just talked to her.

I explained what we had done to position the organization for funding. I walked her through the steps. I talked about what needed to be in place and some of what it had taken for us to get there.

Nothing fancy.

No PowerPoint.

No workbook.

No proposal waiting at the end.

Just a conversation.

Maybe thirty minutes.

When I finished, the Apostle looked at me and said:

“Wow, that is a lot. I don't believe we are quite ready for that yet. But I value your knowledge and thank you for your time.”

That stayed with me.

But then something else happened.

As she prepared to leave, she took my hand, opened it and placed something inside.

After she and her staff member left, I finally looked down.

It was a $100 bill.

And I remember thinking...

Wait a minute.

I just got paid $100 to sit here and talk about what I know.

No preparation.

No follow-up work waiting for me.

Nothing I had to go create afterward.

Just thirty minutes of sharing what years of doing the work had taught me.

I didn't know it then, but a seed had just been planted.

I Had Been Paid for My Knowledge

Growing up in church, I understood the concept of someone giving you a love token or blessing you for your time.

But this felt different.

Because the Apostle had actually told me what she valued.

“I value your knowledge.”

Those words did something for me.

Up until then, I think I still connected much of my value to what I could physically produce.

I could develop the program.

I could write the documentation.

I could organize the work.

I could help get something done.

Those were things I understood someone paying for.

But this?

I had simply sat with someone and told her what I knew.

And here's the part I appreciate even more now:

She didn't leave our conversation ready to run out and do everything I had explained.

She left saying:

We're not ready yet.

I hadn't given her more work to do.

I had helped her understand where she actually was.

There is value in that.

I didn't have language for it then.

Today, I do.

Sometimes the most valuable thing an expert can tell you isn't what you need to do next.

Sometimes it's:

You don't need to do that yet.

That thirty-minute conversation was probably one of my earliest lessons in the value of judgment.

Then It Started Happening More Often

By 2015 and 2016, I couldn't ignore it anymore.

I would be at meetings and nonprofit leaders would stop me.

Pastors would have questions.

Someone wanted to know how we had been able to access larger funding opportunities.

Someone else was dealing with problems with their organizational status.

Some had lost exemptions and needed help understanding what had happened and what documentation would be required to begin fixing it.

Others were trying to build programs and didn't know where to start.

And somehow, I kept finding myself in these conversations.

People would bring me what they were trying to figure out, and my mind would immediately start sorting through the pieces.

This matters.

That doesn't.

Start here.

Don't worry about that yet.

Before you do this, you need this in place.

I didn't call that Business Architecture.

I didn't call it a methodology.

Honestly, I wasn't thinking about any of that.

I just knew how to help.

And after enough people kept seeking me out for the same kind of help, I started realizing:

There is something here.

By the time I began stepping more intentionally into consulting, I wasn't trying to convince myself that I had expertise.

People had already been showing me that I did.

I just finally started believing them.

Sometimes Your Expertise Feels Ordinary to You

I think that's what makes expertise hard for some people to recognize.

When you've been doing something long enough, you forget what it feels like not to know it.

You can hear someone explain a problem and know almost immediately where the real issue is.

They've been wrestling with it for three months.

You hear it in ten minutes.

And because it came easily to you, you can make the mistake of thinking:

Well, anybody could see that.

No.

Everybody couldn't see that.

You could see it because you've been looking at versions of that problem for years.

That's different.

The ease isn't evidence that it has little value.

Sometimes the ease is evidence of how deeply you've learned it.

That took me some time to understand.

That $100 Was a Seed

When I look back now, I can see that moment in the sanctuary very differently.

The Apostle wasn't simply paying me for thirty minutes.

She was placing value on all the years that had gone into those thirty minutes.

The late nights.

The mistakes.

The research.

The programs.

The documentation.

The things that worked.

The things that didn't.

The funding we eventually learned how to access.

The decisions I had made over and over until some of them had become almost instinctive.

All of that was sitting at the table with me.

I just didn't know how to account for it yet.

That $100 told me something:

What you know has value.

And I think it gave me permission to trust myself a little more.

To speak with a little more confidence.

To recognize that perhaps my value wasn't only in my ability to do the work.

There was value in my ability to help someone else understand which work actually mattered.

That's a very different thing.

I Can See It Now

This is one of the things I love about reaching this season of my life.

I can look backward and recognize things I couldn't name while I was living them.

I can see the beginnings of my consulting work.

I can see why frameworks became such a natural part of how I teach.

I can see why I've always been drawn to taking complicated things and making them easier to see.

And I can see Business Architecture developing years before I had language for it.

Every time I solved a similar problem, I got better at recognizing the pattern.

Every time I explained something, I became clearer about how I understood it.

Every time someone brought me a collection of pieces and I helped them find the order, something was being developed in me.

My intellectual property was developing long before I knew to call it intellectual property.

That's how expertise can grow.

Quietly.

While you're busy doing the work.

And that's why I think there are so many experienced leaders carrying far more value than they realize.

You may have spent years leading.

Building.

Solving.

Teaching.

Advising.

Making decisions.

Helping other people get unstuck.

And because you've been doing it for so long, you've started treating what you know as ordinary.

Meanwhile, other people keep showing you that it isn't.

I Wonder If You've Had Your Own $100 Moment

It probably didn't look exactly like mine.

Maybe nobody opened your hand and placed money inside.

Maybe somebody called you because they trusted your judgment.

Maybe you were invited to teach something you assumed everybody knew.

Maybe someone asked what you would charge to help them.

Maybe people keep bringing you the same kind of problem.

Or maybe you said something in passing one day and someone looked at you and said:

“I never thought about it that way.”

Don't dismiss those moments too quickly.

Sometimes other people begin recognizing the expert before the expert has language for what they carry.

That Apostle may never know what her $100 did for me.

But I do.

It was more than a love token.

It was a seed.

A seed that told me all those late nights, all that dedication, all the losses, all the figuring it out and all the hard work had produced something.

Something that could help another visionary determine the difference between what mattered...

and what didn't matter at all.

I couldn't see the whole thing yet.

But the oil had been dripped onto the wheels in my mind.

And slowly, they had begun to turn.

Years later, I can see the extraordinary machine they were beginning to build.

The Architect's Question

This week, I want you to go back before the business.

Before the offer.

Before the website.

Before the title you put after your name.

And ask yourself:

When did someone first show me that what I know has value?

Don't rush past the memory.

Sit with it for a little while.

Think about what people have consistently asked you to help them understand, solve, decide or see.

There may be evidence of your expertise sitting inside a story you've never thought to call business.

Sometimes the beginning isn't when you finally call yourself an expert.

Sometimes it begins when someone else sees what's in you...

and places something in your hand to make sure you see it too.

Grace and peace,

Angela Myles
Founder, The Myles Factor