MamaWritesSpells

What we miss when we only listen to credentials.

We tend to trust expertise when it arrives wearing the right outfit.

A title.
A credential.
A bio that starts with “over 15 years of experience” and ends with a neatly aligned headshot.

And look — that kind of expertise matters. Training matters. Study matters. Context matters.

But it’s not the whole story.
Not even close.

Some knowledge doesn’t come from classrooms or certifications. It comes from repetition. From proximity. From being inside something long enough that you stop theorizing and start recognizing patterns before they fully form.

Lived experience teaches you things before you have language for them.

You know when a system is about to break — not because you ran a report, but because you’ve felt the warning signs in your body.
You know when advice won’t land — not because it’s wrong, but because you’ve watched it fail people who tried it earnestly.
You know which solutions sound good in theory and collapse on contact with real life.

That’s not anecdotal fluff.
That’s applied intelligence.

And yet, we often treat lived experience as “less than.” As biased. As informal. As something that needs to be validated by someone with a louder credential before it’s allowed in the room.

Here’s the thing we don’t say out loud enough:
All expertise is shaped by perspective.

The difference is that lived experience is honest about its location.

It doesn’t pretend to be neutral. It doesn’t universalize itself. It says, This is what I know because this is what I’ve lived. And that clarity? That’s a strength, not a weakness.

Some of the most dangerous gaps I’ve seen — in workplaces, systems, strategy — come from ignoring the people closest to the impact. The ones who can tell you exactly where the friction is, where the policy falls apart, where the language doesn’t match reality.

They might not have the title.
But they have the map.

And often, they’ve been handing it over quietly for years.

Valuing lived experience doesn’t mean rejecting formal expertise. It means expanding the definition of who gets to be considered knowledgeable. It means recognizing that insight earned through survival, care, repetition, or constraint carries a different — but equally critical — kind of authority.

The best decisions I’ve seen happen when these forms of expertise talk to each other. When theory listens. When experience is invited in early, not retroactively.

Because people who’ve lived it aren’t guessing.
They’re remembering.

And that kind of knowledge doesn’t need to shout.
It just needs to be taken seriously.

(Which, honestly, would solve more problems than we admit.)