The last time I was on the Best Buy campus, I had a laptop and approximately zero authority over anyone in the room.
Still at Accenture. My job was to get project executives to use a scheduling tool. Live demo. Real questions. Their actual problems, worked through in real time.
When I didn't know the answer - which happened - I said so. Out loud. In front of people who significantly outranked me.
"Does anyone here know?"
Sometimes someone did. Sometimes we all stared at the screen like it had personally betrayed us, and I promised to find out.
(This was apparently called training.)
I didn't know I was practicing for something.
A few weeks from now, I might go back to that campus to speak at Minnebar. Tech conference. Never heard of it until someone dropped a link in a group I'm in. I'm not a developer. I submitted a talk anyway.
Nobody asked to see my hall pass. I filled out the form, wrote what I know, hit send.
Then sat there thinking: who was supposed to approve that?
Nobody.
What I was doing at Best Buy wasn't a junior version of expertise. It wasn't "just facilitating." It was the actual job - show up, use the thing, walk people through it, say "I don't know" when you don't, ask the room, come back with the answer.
I've been doing some version of that my whole career.
So have you.
You've been the person people come to when something new rolls in and nobody wants to admit they're confused. The one who figured out the clunky system and quietly walked three people through it at the coffee machine. Didn't make a big deal. Just helped.
You gave that expertise away. The translation, the "let me just show you" - handed out like it cost nothing. Like it wasn't worth naming.
You've been doing the expert's job without the expert's title for years.
So when AI shows up and everyone seems to suddenly know exactly what they're doing except you - that feeling isn't stupidity. It isn't falling behind.
You are not starting from scratch. You're exhausted. There's a difference.
AI doesn't know the difference between a confident answer and a correct one. You do. You've been in rooms where the confident wrong answer got approved and cost someone six figures. That calibration took years.
Bring it with you.
Try this. Fill it in specifically - not vaguely, not humbly.
Role: You're an expert at helping experienced professionals identify the unique value they've built over a long career.
Objective: Help me see what I know that I might be undervaluing or taking for granted.
Context: I've spent [X] years working in [your field]. My work has involved [specific things you actually do]. People come to me when [specific situation].
Output: Give me a list of at least five things I know or can do that someone earlier in their career would likely get wrong, overlook, or not even think to ask about.
Read what comes back. Scroll past the obvious stuff.
Find the one that makes you go: oh. Yeah. I do know that.
That's the one.
If you want to practice this in a room full of women doing exactly the same thing, that's what Joy Prompt Club is for: joypromptclub.com