The Curse of Knowledge Is Costing You Customers

I just learned something about my own offer that every business builder needs to hear before we launch anything, and I'm bringing it to you today. This show is powered by Others Over Self. Hit that subscribe button to keep training your brain. From Others Over Self, it's Hardcore and At Ease, a show about people who are keeping their edge without going over Over the Edge. I'm host Shelly Rood, and today I'm sharing a lesson I learned the hard way. What happens when you're so close to your own work that you stop seeing what a stranger sees when she walks in? I brought in a customer service expert to walk through my offer as a complete stranger, and what she found in 1 hour changed how I talk about my work, how I organize my content, and how I'm building toward the biggest opportunity of the season. If you're building anything right now, this one is for you. This is Hardcore and At Ease. Thank you for choosing to spend time with me today. Genuinely, I just got back from a week in Florida, so I have a lot of sunshine going on, but I am glad to be back in Michigan where the colors are much cooler and my spring flowers are starting to come up. Now I know that you could be anywhere today and you're choosing to spend time with me. So thank you. Now let's make your time worthwhile, because there is something I want to talk about with you today. Something recently happened that shifted how I'm thinking about my own offer, and I've been sitting with it for a couple of weeks now, turning it over, because I think that it applies to anyone who's building something and wants the right people to find it. This is about what happens when you're so close to your own work that you stop seeing it the way that a stranger does. And I'm not talking about a not a small blind spot. I'm talking about the kind of gap that costs you conversations, it costs you trust, and it costs you the attention that you've been working so hard to earn. All before you ever get the chance to show someone what you've actually built. I want to share that with you today, all of it, because you've been building, you know the work, and you believe in it, and you've made 100 decisions about how to organize it, how to name it, present it, sequence it, And somewhere in all of that building, you stopped being the person who was walking in for the first time. You became the house, and the house cannot see what a stranger sees standing outside it. 40 days from now, I am the keynote speaker at the Women Veterans Engage Conference 2026. There will be 2,000 women veterans, and I'm bringing them the solutions that we have built to serve them. I knew that this was an opportunity too big to leave anything on the table, so I brought in outside eyes before stepping on that stage. So I sat down with Allie Guy. She's the founder of The Shared Co. and someone who has a gift that most people in marketing never develop. She can walk into any business, any offer, any message, and immediately see the gap between what the builder thinks they're saying and what the customer hears. So I asked her to walk through my offer the way the stranger would. There's no context, no tour, no explaining the why behind all my decisions. I wanted her to just walk in and tell me what she sees. And so she did. About 20 minutes in, she said something that I need you, my friend, to be able to hear before we go any further. She said, "One of these is not like the others." She was right, and the fact that I could not see it, well, that's what I wanted to bring to you today. It's not the gap in the work itself, but the gap in my own perspective. You see, that gap forms when you know something so well that you forget what it is not to know it, and it's also a gap that closes the minute that you let someone in who doesn't already love what you've built. Now, by the end of today's episode, my friend, I want you to walk away with one question that you can take to your own offer. Who in your life will walk through your front door as a stranger and tell you exactly what they see? But before we get to that question, let's talk about why it's so hard to ask that question in the first place. Let's get into it. Now, I promise this is going to connect directly to whatever you're building right now. Here's the thing that no one warns us when we're in deep building mode: the more you know about your own work, the less you can see it. This is not a discipline problem, and it's not a preparation problem. This is something that you cannot fix just by working harder or thinking more carefully. This is a cognitive bias that economists have named way back since 1989. It's the curse of knowledge. Researchers Caramar, Lowenstein, and Weber identified it in the Journal of Political Economy. The idea is this: once you gain expertise in something, you lose the ability to accurately reconstruct what it felt like not to have that expertise. Your knowledge rewires how you see the thing, and you cannot unsee it. Chip and Dan Heath brought this into the mainstream with their book Made to Stick. They describe a study that I find myself thinking about constantly. Participants tapped out the rhythm of a well-known song on a table, just with their knuckles on a hard surface, drummin' along like my uncle, and they asked someone sitting across from them to guess what song it was. The tappers could hear the full melody playing in their heads as they were tapping. They felt the rise and the fall. They could practically hum it. They estimated that the listener would get it right about 50% of the time. But the real success rate was only 2.5%. The listener heard nothing but a series of dull knocks, bum bum. They couldn't hear the harmony, they couldn't hear the melody, they just heard the sound of the tapping. But the tapper had the whole song living in her body and had no idea that none of it was transferring. This is the curse of knowledge. You, my friend, are playing the full orchestra. Your audience is hearing just that knock on the door. When applied to business, your business, it sounds like this: you write a headline that feels obvious to you, you name a category that perfectly describes what you mean, you sequence your offer in a way that flows naturally because you can feel the logic of it in your chest, and your audience, who has none of your context, hits a wall and they can't name it, and they can never even tell you why. Here's the part that is making this particularly hard. The higher the stakes, the less likely you are to stop and ask someone what they see. When you're 40 days out from a keynote like me, when the pressure is sitting really heavy on your shoulders, and when the momentum is finally building and you're like, yes, this is what we're doing, you tell yourself, I don't have time to let somebody poke holes in the things that I'm building. So you keep moving because you have to. But in this moment where it feels like you can't slow down, this is the moment that you most need those outside eyes. And so this is me. I invited Allie in and she found gaps in just 20 minutes. So let me tell you exactly what she found. Allie has a gift that most people in marketing never develop. She can walk into any business, any offer, any message, and immediately see the gap between what people think that they're saying and what the customer hears. That is her superpower, and that's exactly why I called her. She did not come into our session knowing my content. She's not even military. She had not taken my assessment for women veterans, and she had not listened to my podcast episodes or read any of our newsletter posts. That was the entire point. I didn't want someone who had already loved what I had built. I wanted someone experienced who could land on it cold, the way that a woman sitting in her parked car during a 30-minute lunch break, can feel something when she finds it for the first time. So Ali secret shopped my offer from the beginning. She went through the Wildflower Personality Assessment for Women Veterans. She did the purchase flow from her desktop. It's the same path that my audience takes, and she narrated out loud exactly what she saw as she moved through it. There was no filtering. She wasn't being courteous. She's very straightforward, which is what I love about her. She just told me exactly what was happening in front of her and side of her, the first thing she hit was a moment that felt like a paywall. You see, she had already purchased access to the assessment and she was following the next steps, but then the Substack appeared on her screen, which is great, but the way Substack does it, there's 3 subscription tiers that are lined up across the page, and she scanned all the way one way and all the way the other before she was able to find the free option that I wanted her to choose. She had a hard time finding it, and she said that her stomach dropped a little. She nearly stopped shopping right there because there was an unexpected friction in a purchase flow that felt like a warning. It feels like fine print that we missed, and most people don't push through that feeling when they're not sure what's on the other side. They just close the tab. So Allie, my secret shopper, almost closed the tab on an assessment that she had already paid for, and then she got to the results page. And she didn't even scroll all the way down. The page looked like it was finished when she first got to it. It was a beautiful landing spot. It was clean and contained and done. And she took it at face value. She had no idea that she was supposed to actually scroll down to see more below the fold. The next thing she did was look at our content navigation on our Substack newsletter. There are 3 categories, and she said it plainly: one of these is not like the others. Wilderness, wildflowers, wellness. I knew it the second that she said it, that tight feeling in your chest when someone names something that you kind of already know, but you just keep moving past it. That's the most uncomfortable kind of feedback, the kind where you hear it and you go, "Yeah, I know, I already knew that." Well, I felt that way every time I looked at our navigation, but I kept moving away from it because it just felt safer than stopping. So wilderness is language that we built. It's very specific and it's coined and it's ours. Wildflowers is the same. It's a framework. It's a personality system. It's a lens that belongs to this work. And then there's wellness. Wellness is a word that the entire internet already owns. It's on every supplement label, every spa package, every morning routine video, every lifestyle brand that has nothing to do with the work that we are actually doing. And so here's why this matters to me personally. I come from a fitness background, and so the fitness and wellness content that we create in this category is not filler. It's not AI-generated crap. It's built specifically for women who have served in the military, whose bodies have carried the weight of military service. Our knees have absorbed the impact of ruck marches, and our sleep has been interrupted for years by mission requirements. Our relationship with physical fitness is not casual. It's not optional. It's not just about how we look. And so my wellness content is deep and it's specific and it deserves language that signals exactly that. When we say wellness, wellness drops it into the same bucket as everything else and it makes it disappear. Now, Allie also pushed back on something bigger than just the label itself. She challenged the sequence. So after she and I spent an hour together, she couldn't wait to take the personality assessment. But before that hour, taking that assessment felt like homework. When really that homework is such a gift. But you see, that gift lands harder when the relationship comes first. And she's right. So that has shifted how I'm building my keynote. The assessment is not the opening move anymore. It's what you earn after our hour together, because this is how trust really works between people. Now, she also went deeper into the email experience. We talked about the purchase confirmation, the welcome sequence, the from name that was even up there on the inbox, all of it. She pointed out that when a series of emails arrives from different sender names or without a consistent visual identity in the header, The reader starts to feel like she signed up for one thing but landed somewhere else entirely. That slight disorientation is enough. It's not enough to make her feel angry, but it's just enough to make her less sure. And less sure is the enemy of conversion. She described what she called the gotcha feeling. You follow the steps, you think you know where you are, and then something appears on the screen that you weren't expecting. A different page, a different name, a different ask, and Just for a second, you feel like you missed something, like there was fine print, like maybe you weren't paying close enough attention. And that feeling, it doesn't last very long, but it does its damage really quickly. It puts a small amount of distance between the person and the offer. And distance, once it opens, it's really hard to close. So what Ali was describing underneath all of this was coherence. The feeling that a customer gets when every touchpoint and experience speaks the same language, it carries the same visual weight, and when it's delivered exactly as it was promised without surprises. Coherence is invisible when it works. You only notice it when it breaks. And when it does break, the person on the other side can't always tell you what went wrong. She just knows that something did. Now that is a harder problem to solve than just a bad headline, because you can rewrite a headline, but building coherence across a purchase flow, across a results page, a welcome sequence, and a content navigation, well, that takes a lot longer. So Ali made it clear that the labels, the language that sits at the very top of the system, That is the right place to start. We get the outside language right first, and then everything underneath it will have something to orient to. Next up, Allie asked me something that I want to put directly in front of you because I think that a lot of us do this without realizing it. She asked me who this offer was for, and I gave her the answer that I always give. It's for mission-driven people who are doing great work and they want to go farther. She listened to what I said and then repeated, "Make sure that your language says that. Make sure that a stranger landing here for the first time can feel who it is for without you having to be in the room to explain it." That's beautiful. Without me having to be in the room to explain it. So now that you know what Ellie found, I wanna share with you what I did about it, because that's where it gets really interesting. So here's what came out of that hour together. I'm gonna walk you through this slowly because I think there's something in it for the way that you're thinking about your own offer. The working categories for the content, the book, and the keynote, these categories used to be Wilderness, wildflowers, wellness. They made complete sense to me, three W's, and they made sense to my team as well. They organized how we thought about the work, and that's exactly the problem. The labels were doing a job for us. They were not doing a job for the person standing on the outside looking in. A category that organizes your thinking is useful. But a category that makes a promise to your audience, that's essential. And those two things are often very different words. The principle is not complicated, and the best marketing thinkers have been saying it for years. If you confuse, you lose. If you confuse, you lose. Your audience should be able to read your labels and feel the journey without anyone explaining it to them. She should not have to know your internal story. She shouldn't have to work to understand your work sequence. She should just land on your offer and the path should open up in front of her the way that a well-marked trail feels so different than a field that has no signs in it. Both of them get you somewhere, but only one feels safe enough when you take that first step. Now, what came out of the conversation with Allie is language that earns its place on the outside of the offer. It's now the book outline. It's my Keynote architecture. It's my Substack navigation. All three at once are now the same. Instead of Wilderness, Wildflowers, Wellness, we're using Frame the Terrain, Name Your Flower, Nourish Your Flourish. Those three phases— say them out loud right now with me if you can— Frame the Terrain, Name your flower, nourish your flourish. Feel whether they move and whether each one sets up the next. Frame the terrain. This is the wilderness that we're teaching. Before you move through something, you have to name what kind of situation you're in, and you can't name terrain that you haven't identified. So that heavy, disorienting feeling of being in a hard season without language for it, that's what the wilderness work addresses. Every episode, every soundbite, every piece of content that exists in this category exists to give you the words before you try to find the way. Frame it and then move. And we move to Name Your Flower. Name Your Flower is the wildflower personality assessment for women veterans. It's your movement pattern. It's your operating system. It's the specific language for who you already are and how you naturally move through hard terrain. When we name our flower, we're not just picking one. This isn't a box that somebody puts you into. This is a mirror that shows you your full blend. You're never just one flower, and it helps show you something that you have recognized all along, but you couldn't quite name. And where Wellness lived, we now have Nourish Your Flourish, and it earns that slot in a way that Wellness never could. Because nourish— nourish is active. It reaches forward. It connects directly back to the plant metaphor with the whole ecosystem that it's built on. You plant something, you water it, you protect it from the conditions, and eventually it blooms in a way that is beautiful and specific to what it is. A wildflower does not bloom the same way that a houseplant does, and neither do you. Nourish Your Flourish says, "What follows here is intentional care that understands who you who you are, what your body's been through, and what this season truly requires. So read them one more time: Frame the Terrain, Name Your Flower, Nourish Your Flourish. They move in sequence. Each one carries the weight of the one before it. A stranger who's landing on that navigation for the first time understands the journey before she even gets into a single word of the content. So that's the difference between a label that organizes your thinking, and a label that makes a promise. And I wanted to bring that conversation to you today because I don't think that I'm the only one building something where that gap exists. I want to give you an example outside of this work entirely. So something happened to me recently that has kept me up at night, seriously. I walked into a county office. I was looking for some information about a state program. It was just something that I needed to understand better, so I thought that I could walk in and sit down with someone and ask some questions. When I went up to the window, there was plexiglass between the lady and I. A well-dressed woman was on the other side. She was very comfortable. She was well put together. She was the kind of person who clearly felt at home in that office. And I explained to her that I just wanted to sit down and talk to somebody about this program. She listened, but then she did a lot of talking and she slid a piece of paper under the plexiglass and it had a phone number on it. And she said to me, "This office is for the poorest of the poor. You should just call this number and talk to someone on the phone." I stood there for a second, told her that I thought I was doing that, and that I could come in here in person and accomplish the same thing, but not over the phone. And she looked at me again and said, "Start with the phone." So I did an about-face and walked right out of that office. That was a horrible feeling. Her voice in my head kept saying, "This office is for the poorest of the poor." Now think about that language for a minute. Think about who walks through that door of the county service offer. And hears that phrase, either from this woman or from the culture that's being built inside that office, maybe even the label on the program itself. Nobody, nobody wants to walk through a door that announces their deficit before they even get to ask a question. Nobody wants to wear the title of the poorest of the poor. And nobody who needs that resource but has any other option will choose to identify themselves that way to a stranger behind the plexiglass. The language is the gate, and in this case, the gate was keeping out the very people that the program existed to serve. That woman wasn't confused about her audience, she had decided who deserved to be there. And she communicated that decision very clearly and very efficiently without even realizing it. Just a few words: "This office is for the poorest of the poor." That is not a welcome. That is a sorting mechanism, and it was doing its job extremely well. Your labels are doing the same thing for your offer right now, whether you designed them to or not. Every category name, every section header, every phrase that sits at the front of your work is making a decision about who feels welcome enough to come in. Now the question is whether it's making the decision that you intended. I am not in the business of building walls around who I serve. I am in the business of great people doing great things, and I want every word at the front of this work to hold that door as far and wide open as it'll go. For anyone who's obsessed with excellence, for anyone who wants to go further alongside people who match that standard. That is the audience, and the language has to say so before I'm even in the room to be able to explain it. So now that you've seen how this played out for me, it's time to run this same process on your own work. So I'm going to walk you through how to do it. This is the part that I really was excited to get to today, because everything I just shared is only useful if you can do something with it. So here's the process, the same one that Allie walked me through so that you can run it on your own offer this week. You don't need Allie in the room, though I do highly recommend it. What you do need is about 30 minutes, an honest eye, and the willingness to discover something that you thought you had right is actually still a work in progress. Now bear down here because this is not failure. This is how things go from good to better. So start by writing down every label that your audience sees before they buy. Every category name, every section header on your website, every subject line in your welcome sequence, every phrase on your results page or your landing page or your navigation bar. Write them all down in a list and then read them as if you've never heard them before. This is hard because when you do this, you are not the builder. You're not the builder right now. You're the woman who found this thing 5 minutes ago and she's trying to figure whether this is for her. Now ask yourself 3 questions about each one. First of all, does this label make a promise or does it describe my internal process? Because a promise tells the reader what she's going to receive, but an internal process label, it tells the reader how you stay organized with your thinking. Your audience doesn't need to understand how you stay organized with your thinking. She needs to know what's in it for her. So if your label is describing your process, I want you to rewrite it as a promise. Second, I want you to ask the question, does this label open the door wider or bring it in even more narrow. Who does this language include and who does it leave out? Maybe not by accident, but by the weight of the words themselves. A woman behind the plexiglass didn't set out to exclude anybody, but the language that she had used had been doing that work very quietly for a long time before I walked into that office. Your language is doing work right now also. So make sure that it's the work that you want it to do. Third question for you to ask: could a stranger read this and feel the sequence? This one is the hardest because you're going to want to say yes, because you're the one that has built that sequence. You built it, you know it in your body, you could, you can probably walk through it in your sleep, but that's exactly the problem. You need to ask someone who can't feel it. Print out your labels, hand them to someone who's never seen your work, ask them to put the categories in order of which you think they belong. And if they get it right without any help from you, then your labels are doing their job. But if they look at you, maybe tilt their head like a dog and say, "Wait, what does this one mean?" Then you've clearly found the gap. So that tilt of the head is data. Don't ignore it. When somebody pauses before they answer, that's data. The moment that somebody reaches for a word to describe what they think you do, but the word that they pick is not the word that you would use, that's data too. Don't ignore these things. It doesn't mean that your work is wrong, but it does mean that your labels are not yet carrying the full weight of what you've built. And so here's the thing that I want to leave you with before we move on and finish up today. The work of getting your language right is not a one-time project. It's not something that you do at launch and then you walk away from it. Ailey walked through my offer after months of work and she found things that I couldn't see. That's not failure of work. That's how building works. You get closer, you bring in someone who's further away, you adjust, you get closer again. The builders who grow are not the ones who got the language right the first time. There's lots of inspectors. They're the ones who keep asking and they force you to keep doing it the right way. Now, before I close today, I want to hand you just one more thing to carry out with you. It's something that Allie said, and it keeps going around in my mind. She said, "Clarity wins. Every time. Bonus points if it's memorable, but clarity over everything." I want you to hold that, not just for navigation or your labels, but for every single place that your audience encounters your work and then decides about it in 3 seconds whether to stay or keep scrolling. Clarity is not dumbing it down. Clarity is respecting the person on the other side of your work so that they make it easy for her to say yes. Nourish Your Flourish. Super clear. You know exactly what that is. Now I want to leave you with something personal before we finish up today. After my conversation with Allie, it would have been so easy to just keep moving. I had a deadline. I have momentum. I've already built a ton of products around my languaging. I have a keynote that has to be built out, and I've got some teammates that are counting on me for this content. All of those things together are exactly what made me stop. To ask the question that matters most: What does a stranger see when she walks in? I'm so glad that I asked before my keynote and not after. Here's what I want you to try this week, my friend. I want you to find one person who does not already love your work and ask them to walk through your offer from the very beginning. Give them no context, no tour, just the real path, and then sit quietly and watch. You're gonna feel awkward. Watch where they slow down. Watch where their shoulders tighten a little bit because something feels uncertain. Watch what they miss entirely. You don't have to fix everything at once. You just have to let yourself see it first. Yes, the conversation is going to be uncomfortable, and do it anyway. That discomfort is the information that you're not get any other way. So if you want to see how your own marketing is landing before a stranger has to show you, there is a free marketing report in our episode show notes today. This is a fast outside look at what is working and where the gaps are, and you can find that link down in the show notes. So thank you very much for spending time with me today. I know that you could be anywhere, but if this this episode gave you something, I want you to please share it with one person who is building something right now because they need this conversation too. And if you have not subscribed yet, please do. This podcast is one of the most direct ways to help other mission-driven leaders find their place in the work that they're doing. I'm host Shelly Rood. I'm here every Tuesday. I want you to keep the conversation going at join.othersoverself.com. That's where you can connect with me between now and next week. So I'll see you Tuesday. And until then, stay hardcore, be at ease, and trust the process. You're listening to Hardcore and At Ease. Keep the conversation going at join.othersoverself.com.