Do as I say, not as I do?

Why it’s so hard to apply your own expertise to yourself

Photo by Saffu on Unsplash

This week I took a meditation class focused on compassion. As I sat in the room, filled with the energy of strangers who had given up their afternoon to practice compassion, I accessed a glimmer of what I’ve been searching for: a way to access my own expertise.

The old adage goes: do as I say, not as I do. Sharing experience is easy, taking your own advice is hard. I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. I’ve spent a decade (plus!) helping companies build great products and experiences, but when it’s come to doing it for myself everything felt so much harder. It’s a practice I’m passionate about doing, and doing well. Why was I struggling so much in how to turn it on?

Why is it so hard to apply your expertise to yourself?

Emotion. Identity. Self-criticism. The stakes feel so much higher when it’s your own work, your own name. It’s easy to guide someone else through uncertainty, but when it’s your own journey… well, it can get rocky. Rejection feels personal. Self-doubt creeps in.

I’ve been experiencing this first hand and it’s what led me here, to start writing and documenting what I was learning. But slowly, slowly, things have started crystallising, moving into place.

In our meditation we went through a visualisation exercise imagining how we meet our inner critic versus how we’d speak to a friend in the same situation. Something clicked: This. This is what it would feel like to unlock my own expertise.

I asked my teacher, Natália Bojanic, about this and she gave sage advice: compassion is a micro-practice. It is something you can practice daily, in everything you do. And it starts with yourself. When we meet ourselves with compassion we deactivate the hostile brain and activate the caring brain.

She said, “It’s a muscle you are building” and as a fellow founder herself, she called it founder muscle.

Using your work as a path to self-trust

I started noticing this inner conflict everywhere: in writing, in decisions, in how I talked about what I was doing. I’d hesitate, overthinking it.

For months, I wrestled with how to communicate what I do, how I am enjoying balancing consulting with building a startup. I didn’t know how to tell this story, these parts of me that felt so separate. But recently I’ve found a way through it. A shortcut to self-trust while I build this muscle: I would get there through my work.

As a founder, consulting is the bridge through my own uncertainty. It is the daily reminder of what I can do, the path through the weeds of building new neural pathways. I see the evidence of my own experience in action, and it provides me with the confidence to get out of my own way.

And this duality is an advantage in consulting. I know how to operate in structured, high-scale environments and how to think lean, move fast, and build from scratch. Maybe it’s not about choosing between founder or consultant, but in recognising that both sides make each other stronger.

We all struggle to access our own experience. But sometimes, the way through is to look at where you’re already thriving.

Where are you applying your skills with confidence? How can you use that as a reminder of what you already know?

Where might you be hesitating, when you wouldn’t hesitate if it were for someone else? I’d love to know.

If you’d like to learn more about meditation: My teacher, Natália, is running a meditation course at Love Supreme Projects, with the next two sessions focused on joy and equanimity. You can find her here and here.

I’m Jen, a product person who loves to think about how frameworks can be applied to life. If you’d like help or ideas designing approaches that work for you, let’s chat.