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I was the client

Hard-won expertise I had filed as personal turned out to be work I could name and offer.

A lot of my hardest-won expertise was filed under personal, which made it unusable: coordinating complex legal work across several states, handling a legal matter for myself, and twenty-five years of self-designed training protocols.

I decided to treat every one of those as an engagement in which I was the client. I put it this way: doing something for myself did not mean I was not the client.

You build expertise by working a problem all the way through, and the identity of whoever pays does not change what you learned. Someone who has personally carried a multi-state legal process from contract to completion knows the terrain better than a consultant who only read about it. Filing it as private threw the knowledge out to protect the privacy, when only the privacy needed protection.

I named these capabilities and made them sellable, while keeping every person involved out of the telling. The coordination expertise goes to market and the personal details stay behind. The exercise also named a capability that ran through my whole record without ever being claimed: working with counsel on construction, entity, offering and service agreements.

Keep the capability apart from the biography. The skill is mine to sell, and the people who stood next to me are not. I drew that line myself, and that is the reason the expertise can be used at all.

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