A Story About Handing On Experience So It Actually Reaches Someone
How do I pass on what I know? By telling people how you came to know it, rather than only what you’ve concluded — because a summary can be repeated, while judgement has to be built. What you know took you years. What you say takes ten seconds.
Let me tell you a story about a woman with thirty-eight years of experience, and an apprentice who wanted every bit of it.
Miriam is a character I created — her situation will be familiar to anyone with hard-won experience that keeps arriving as instructions.
Thirty-Eight Years, Ten Seconds
Miriam was sixty-four, a stonemason, and had been doing the work since she was twenty-six.
She restored old buildings, mainly. Churches, town halls, the occasional wall that mattered to somebody. She was very good, and everyone in the yard knew it: when something was difficult, it went to Miriam.
For the last few years she had taken on apprentices. The trade needed them, and she had wanted to do it. She had two now, and a third starting in the spring.
And she had begun to notice that what she told them arrived in pieces.
She would give them the short version of something — a sentence, an instruction, the kind of thing you can say while you’re both working. They listened. They wrote things down. They tried hard. And a fortnight later she would watch one of them do exactly the thing she had warned about, not because they had forgotten, but because they hadn’t recognised the moment when it came.
They weren’t careless. They were keen, and careful, and they liked her. But everything she gave them was the conclusion of something, and the something itself stayed with her.
She had five or six years left in her hands, if she was lucky with her shoulder. She had thirty-eight to hand over. And she had started to feel, quietly and constantly, that it wasn’t going to get across.
The Afternoon She Told Him What Happened
The change came on a wet Thursday, with an apprentice called Denny who had ruined a large and expensive piece of stone and was taking it hard.
It wasn’t a disaster. It was a wasted week and a bill, and the yard shrugged and ordered another. Denny didn’t shrug. He sat with a cup of tea he wasn’t drinking, and said he’d known something wasn’t right about it and had carried on anyway, and he couldn’t explain why he had.
Miriam had a sentence ready for that, the short version she’d given him in his first week: if it doesn’t feel right, stop. He knew it perfectly well. And there he was with a ruined block, having not stopped.
So instead she told him what had happened to her when she was twenty-nine.
She’d been given a difficult piece for a church porch, and she’d seen the problem in it almost straight away. She knew what it meant. She also knew the deadline was tight, that she was fast, and that the man who had recommended her for the job was watching to see what she could do. So she decided she could manage it.
She cut it beautifully. It looked right for the best part of a year. Then it failed, in the exact place she had seen the problem, and she had to go back and take it out with him standing there.
“The bit that stayed with me,” she said, “isn’t that it failed. It’s that I already knew. I’d seen it on the first morning. I carried on because stopping would have meant telling him I couldn’t do it, and I wanted to be someone who could do it.”
Denny put the tea down.
“That’s what happened to me,” he said. “I didn’t want to say.”
“No. Neither did I.”
They stayed in the workshop until it was dark. She told him what she does now — that when she catches herself pushing on, she puts her tools down and walks to the other end of the yard, every time, and that she has done it for thirty years and it has never once been the wrong decision. She had never taught anyone that. It had genuinely not occurred to her that it was something you could teach.
Over the months that followed, Denny didn’t ruin another piece. She watched him put his tools down twice.
Why Experience Arrives in Pieces
Here is what was happening, and it will be familiar to anyone who has tried to hand on something they know well.
When you’ve done something for a long time, you stop being able to see the road you took. All that’s left, in your own mind, is the conclusion — and so the conclusion is what you pass on. It’s accurate. It’s the truth. And it arrives with nothing underneath it, because the years that made it true are still inside you.
The person receiving it can repeat what you said. What they can’t do is recognise the moment it applies to, because they’ve never been given the moment. They’ve been given the answer to a question they haven’t been asked yet.
Miriam had spent years giving her apprentices the answers. When she told Denny what had happened to her at twenty-nine, she gave him something entirely different: a moment he could recognise. He had been in it that week. He knew the feeling from the inside before she finished the story, and the understanding arrived whole.
This is why saying it more clearly never works. A better summary is still a summary. What gets across is the experience — what you saw, what you chose, what happened, and what you do differently now.
You don’t hand on judgement by explaining it. Miriam explained it well for years. You hand it on by telling people what happened to you.
What Miriam Recognised
That evening, Miriam sat with a cup of tea and found three things she’d never named.
A failure. Not the porch — she’d made her peace with that long ago, and it had made her the mason she became. The failure was years of teaching that never once included it. She’d handed out the conclusions of her working life and kept the working life to herself, because a mistake from thirty-five years ago hadn’t felt like teaching material. Nothing had gone wrong in those years. Her apprentices were competent. That is exactly what had hidden it. She had thirty-eight years to give, and she’d been giving sentences.
A success. The afternoon with Denny. Not her best teaching — there was no plan, and she’d have said at the time that she wasn’t teaching at all. What made it work was that she told him what had actually happened, including the part where she was twenty-nine and wanted to look capable, and let him find himself inside it. He got there before she’d finished: that’s what happened to me.
A passion. When she looked at what had kept her at this for thirty-eight years, it wasn’t the stone, though she loved it. It was that the buildings outlast everybody. She had worked on a church where she could see the marks of a mason from five hundred years ago, and had thought about him nearly every week since. Someone will look at her work in three hundred years. What she wanted, under everything, was for that person to find good work — done by someone she taught, or by someone they taught.
Three things. None of them a technique. All of them the difference between telling people what to do and giving them what she knew.
The Mason She Became
Miriam didn’t stop giving instructions. She stopped handing them over bare.
With her apprentices, she told her failure story — the porch, the problem she saw on the first morning, the year it took to fail. She stopped giving them the conclusion and started giving them the week she got it wrong. They started asking her different questions. Not how do I do this, but what were you weighing up when you chose that — and she started answering with the whole of it: the two ways it could have gone, the one she’d nearly picked, why she didn’t. One of them began keeping a notebook of the choices rather than the methods. She’d never seen an apprentice do that before.
With a mason of thirty years who had come in from another yard and was struggling to settle, she told her success story: the afternoon with Denny, and what it had shown her. He said he’d never talked about his own working life that way, and had assumed nobody would want to hear it. He started, in the small ways available to him: what he’d been thinking on a difficult job, why he’d changed his mind halfway through one. Two of the apprentices began going to him with questions they’d have brought to Miriam. The following year he took one on himself.
With the client who was paying for a restoration and wanted to know why it was costing what it was costing, she told her passion story: the mason from five hundred years ago, and the person who will be looking in three hundred more. She said she wasn’t repairing a building, she was adding to something that had been going on since long before either of them. He stopped asking about the cost and started asking about the work.
And Denny, a year on, was showing the new apprentice how to set out a job. Miriam heard him say if it doesn’t feel right, stop — and then, without being asked, tell her what had happened to him one wet Thursday.
She wasn’t a better mason that year than she’d been the year before. She was exactly as good as she’d always been.
She’d simply stopped handing over the conclusions and started handing over how she got to them.
Within two years, the yard had something it had never had: masons who taught the way she taught, and apprentices who asked why rather than how. Miriam has a few years left in her hands. What she knows is no longer going to leave with them.
How to Pass On What You Know: What Miriam’s Story Shows
The conclusion is all that’s left in your own head. When you’ve done something for years, the road disappears and only the answer remains, so the answer is what you pass on. It’s true, and it arrives with nothing underneath it.
Saying it more clearly won’t fix it. A better summary is still a summary. Miriam explained well for years. Clarity was never the missing thing.
Tell them what happened to you. What you saw, what you chose, what happened, what you do differently now. That’s what lets a person recognise the moment when they’re in it.
Include the part where you got it wrong. Denny understood in an hour what months of instruction hadn’t reached, because Miriam told him about the time she carried on when she knew she shouldn’t.
Tell them what you actually do. Miriam walks to the other end of the yard. She’d done it for thirty years and never thought to mention it. Those small habits are worth more than any principle.
Your three stories hold the whole of it. A failure that shows where your judgement came from, a success that shows what happens when you hand it over whole, a passion that shows why it matters that it outlasts you.
You Already Have More Than the Answer
Everything Miriam needed had been there since she was twenty-nine. She’d been giving thirty-eight years of judgement in single sentences, and single sentences is what kept it from landing. The failure that made her. The success of one wet Thursday and one honest hour. The passion, and the mason from five hundred years ago she thinks about nearly every week.
Yours are there in the same way — in everything you know that you’ve only ever handed on as an instruction.
Continue the Learning
And if you want to go deeper — recognising your three stories and the journey inside each; telling them so people enter your thinking rather than receive your conclusions; and turning the same questions outward, to draw out what the people around you already know — that is what my new Professional Self-Coaching resource is for. The thinking, the sequence, the questions and the frameworks a coach would bring to hours of one-to-one work, placed in your hands, to work through in your own space and time.
Get the Partnership — Professional Self-Coaching for Turning Your Expertise Into Genuine Working Relationships Tell the Three Stories That Make Your Insight Land, So People Engage With It, Not Just Receive It
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