Under The Surface

I have visible self-harm scars.

I think about them before job interviews.

Not because they affect my ability to do the job. They don't.

I think about whether the person across from me will notice them.

And if they do, what information will they think they have?

Because they do have information.

They know I have scars. They just don't know why.

That's the problem with incomplete information. It isn't necessarily false. It's just incomplete.

And I think I've spent a surprisingly large part of my career dealing with exactly that problem.

What You Can't See on a Resume

My scars came from a period of my life when I was dealing with severe trauma and PTSD that hadn't been correctly identified yet.

There is a much longer story underneath that. I've written about parts of it before.

I lost both of my parents young. We experienced homelessness. I worked while going to school and helped support my mother while her health deteriorated.

She died during my first semester of college.

I entered adulthood without either parent and without much of a roadmap for what adulthood was supposed to look like.

For years, I didn't even have the language to explain some of what I was experiencing.

Eventually, after a lot of treatment and evaluation, earlier psychiatric misdiagnoses were corrected. The actual picture included PTSD, ADHD, and autism.

And suddenly, a whole lot of things made considerably more sense.

That history isn't something I normally explain when somebody asks about my professional background.

But it is part of that background.

Not because trauma gave me some kind of professional superpower. I don't buy the idea that suffering automatically makes people stronger or wiser.

Sometimes shitty things are just shitty things.

But experience does give us information.

What we do with it is a different question.

My Resume Makes More Sense If You Stop Reading the Job Titles

On paper, parts of my career look pretty random.

• Music and event work.
• Sales.
• Healthcare admissions.
• Substance use treatment.
• Construction safety.

Some of it was necessity. Some was opportunity. Sometimes somebody gave me a chance, I saw something worth learning, and I took it.

But my resume makes a lot more sense when you stop reading the job titles and start reading the functions.

• Coordination.
• Communication.
• Negotiation.
• Translation.
• Pattern recognition.
• Problem-solving.
• Understanding human behavior.
• Taking a complicated situation with a lot of moving parts and figuring out how to move it toward an executable outcome.

The technical subject changed. The underlying work really didn't. Even the jobs that looked unrelated were teaching me something I eventually used somewhere else.

Working around music events taught me coordination, customer service, and how to deal with a lot of different personalities moving toward the same goal.

Sales taught me how to listen differently.

And yes, I was one of those weird people who actually paid attention during the trainings.

Challenger Sales. The 80/20 principle. Finance. ROI.

Did I adopt every model wholesale and make it my entire personality?

Absolutely not.

I kept the parts that worked.

I also learned that ROI isn't always immediately monetary.

Sometimes the return is trust.

Sometimes it's reputation.

Sometimes it's a relationship that makes the next difficult conversation easier.

Sometimes ten minutes spent understanding the actual problem saves hours spent solving the wrong one.

Then I Ended Up in Substance Use Treatment

I worked in admissions.

I had lived experience that helped me understand some of the people calling us.

But lived experience wasn't enough. Neither was technical knowledge by itself.

• Insurance mattered.
• Clinical criteria mattered.
• Transportation mattered.
• Family dynamics mattered.
• Whether someone had clothes packed mattered.
• Whether someone understood what was about to happen mattered.
• Whether someone was actually willing to walk through the door definitely mattered.

I regularly helped 40 or 50 people enter treatment in a month. One 12-hour shift still sticks with me.

I coordinated 11 admissions. None of those people started their day planning to enter residential treatment.

By the end of it, they were going. All 11 required air travel.

So now we're coordinating insurance, flights, transportation, facilities, family members, expectations, logistics, and 11 human beings making an enormous decision in real time.

Knowing the technically correct answer is very different from knowing how to help another human being act on it.

Then I entered construction safety. Completely different technical subject.

Surprisingly similar human problem.

The Regulation Isn't the Whole Answer Either

Obviously, I need to know the technical requirements.

I need to understand the regulation, the hazard, the control, the procedure, and what all of that actually looks like in the field.

But a regulation can tell me what has to happen.

It can't tell me everything about why it isn't happening.

For that, I might need the electrician. Or the superintendent. Or the laborer actually doing the task. Or production. Or the project manager. Or the person who wrote the procedure.

Different people are holding different pieces of the answer. The guy covered in dirt, sitting in his truck, drinking a Monster, might know something the person carrying the laptop doesn't.

The reverse can also be true. The laborer may see something the project manager doesn't.

The superintendent may understand a sequencing problem that isn't visible in the safety procedure.

Safety may recognize a risk production hasn't considered.

Production may know exactly why the proposed safety control won't work the way someone drew it up.

Nobody has to be stupid or incompetent for information to be missing.

Sometimes people are simply standing in different places.

The solution usually gets better when we get those pieces into the same conversation.

That's One Reason Structure Matters

I've worked for small businesses.

I've worked around large organizations. I've had good experiences and bad ones in both.

I've also developed a real appreciation for good organizational structure.

Good systems don't eliminate bias, misunderstanding, personality conflicts, or bad decisions.

Nothing does.

But they can reduce how much those things control an outcome.

• Clear expectations matter.
• Documented processes matter.
• Training matters.
• Consistent accountability matters.
• A process for accommodations matters.

Structure gives people something to return to when individual interpretation gets noisy.

And one of the places I notice an organization's investment in that structure is training.

Which brings me to something I do that I don't normally tell people I do.

Sometimes I Ask Questions I Already Know the Answer To

Recently, I attended a Lunch and Learn about mental health.

The speaker talked about what mental health is, what it isn't, how stereotypes influence the way we interpret people, and how to approach some of those situations differently.

He also used his own very personal experience.

He was excellent.

The technical information gave the presentation structure.

His lived experience gave it dimension.

Then we reached that inevitable part of almost every training.

"Does anyone have any questions?"

Silence.

It was on Teams.

Anything in the chat? Nothing.

And I'm sitting there thinking, come on. We can't waste this.

This isn't a conversation every workplace is willing to have. We had somebody openly discussing a subject people regularly avoid, and the company had actually created the time and space for us to talk about it.

So I put a question in the chat.

Here's the part nobody there knew.

I already knew the answer.

I wasn't really asking because I needed the information.

I was changing the room.

Someone has to be first.

Once one person asks a question, being the second person doesn't feel quite as exposed.

And sure enough, somebody else asked something.

Then that opened another part of the conversation.

Now we weren't just listening to a presentation.

We were talking.

I've done this throughout most of my professional career.

Sometimes I ask a question. Sometimes I make a comment. Sometimes I just give the room somewhere to go.

Not because I need to demonstrate that I know something.

Quite the opposite.

I'm trying to make it easier for somebody else to contribute what they know.

Because that's usually when I learn something too.

Prepared material can teach me a lot.

But sometimes the most useful part of a training is the question somebody else asks that never even entered my mind.

That's the information I didn't know I was missing.

Curiosity Is Useful

I used to think asking questions was mostly about getting answers.

I don't anymore.

Questions do a lot more than that.

• They expose missing information.
• They test assumptions.
• They reveal barriers.
• They help translate technical information into something usable.
• They give another person an opportunity to tell you what the situation looks like from where they're standing.
• And sometimes they change the conditions enough that somebody else feels comfortable speaking.

That's useful in a training room.

It's useful in healthcare.

It's useful in education.

It's useful in crisis intervention.

It's useful in management.

It's useful in construction.

It's useful anywhere human beings are attempting to accomplish something together, which unfortunately appears to be most workplaces.

There's a time and place for questions.

There's also a way to ask them.

But I have become increasingly comfortable being the person who asks.

Sometimes I genuinely don't know.

Sometimes I think I know and want to make sure.

Sometimes I want to understand how somebody else arrived at a completely different answer.

And sometimes I already know the answer, but somebody has to ask the first question.

Which Brings Me Back to the Scars

For years, people could see them.

People formed opinions about them.

People formed opinions about me.

Very few people ever asked what happened.

That's interesting to me now because asking questions has become one of the most useful things I do professionally.

I ask the electrician because I don't know electrical work like an electrician does.

I ask the superintendent because I want to understand the sequence.

I ask the worker because I want to know what the task actually requires.

I ask the person seeking treatment what is keeping them from saying yes.

I ask questions during training because sometimes somebody has to break the silence.

None of those questions make me less knowledgeable.

They give me information I didn't have before.

And maybe that's the connection underneath a career that doesn't always look particularly connected on paper.

• A scar is information.
• A diagnosis is information.
• A resume is information.
• A job title is information.
• A first impression is information.
• A mistake is information.
• So is a success.

None of them are useless.

They're just incomplete.

Our lived experiences can be useful too.

They don't automatically make us experts. They don't replace education, technical knowledge, evidence, or professional standards.

But they can help us notice something.

They can help us recognize a gap. They can help us ask a better question.

And sometimes they can give somebody else information they didn't know they needed.

I don't think my scars tell you what kind of worker I am.

I don't think a diagnosis does either.

I don't think the worst decision somebody ever made tells you everything about who they are. And I don't think a polished resume tells you everything either.

People are more complicated than that.

So are workplaces.

So are systems.

Sometimes the answer we need isn't missing.

Sometimes nobody has created the conditions for it to come out yet.

Maybe we should ask more.