“You don’t have my experience. You don’t know this industry. It’s easy for you to say that from the outside.”
I hear some version of this often enough that it barely surprises me anymore. Someone comes to me stuck — a decision they can’t move past, a plan that isn’t working the way they expected — and I ask something slightly off the wall, a question from outside their industry entirely. And more often than not, the pushback isn’t really disagreement. It’s dismissal.
Here’s the thing: they’re usually right that I don’t have their experience. I’m not in their industry. I haven’t lived their specific version of the problem. From where they’re sitting, trusting my outside perspective over years of hard-won, in-the-weeds knowledge doesn’t just feel unnecessary — it feels borderline reckless.
And there’s real logic underneath that resistance. Deep, specific experience gives you something an outsider genuinely can’t offer: nuance, context, a feel for how things actually move in a live, changing situation. That’s not nothing. Adapting well to shifting conditions requires exactly the kind of granular, insider knowledge that no outside view can replicate.
But something else is usually running quietly underneath the resistance, and it’s rarely about the industry knowledge gap at all. It’s pride — the simple, human fact of having earned deep expertise, and not wanting to hear that expertise might be the very thing standing in the way. Add in years of having pushed through similar situations before, and you get a kind of stubborn optimism: I’ve solved this twenty times, I’ll solve it again. Admitting that this time might genuinely call for a different kind of information isn’t just uncomfortable. For a leader, it can feel like admitting a gap in their own capability.
None of this means the outside perspective should override their expertise. It was never meant to compete with it in the first place. The clients who’ve actually moved past their stuck point weren’t the ones who dropped their own knowledge in favor of mine. They were the ones who let an outside view sit alongside what they already knew — evaluated it, kept what was useful, discarded what wasn’t — instead of treating it as a threat to be defended against.
That’s the whole shift, and it’s smaller than it sounds: stop treating an outside perspective as competition for your expertise. Start treating it as something extra, optional, and occasionally useful — nothing more, nothing less.