We have a strange relationship with expertise. We tend to admire it at a distance while secretly fearing that our own version of it is somehow insufficient.
I had a conversation recently with a good friend, Stanley, that has stayed with me. We were comparing notes on the particular anxiety of teaching alongside people we consider more experienced than ourselves. Stanley, like me, finds himself soon in a room with practitioners whose competence he perceives to exceed his own, and has not quite sat with it enough for it to become something grounding or giving him strength.
I offered a metaphor I’d been carrying for some time. The belt system in martial arts.
In that world, the hierarchy is visible, worn around the waist. But what strikes me, and what Stanley helped me see, is that the hierarchy doesn’t exist to diminish those in the middle. It exists because every level of it is needed. The white belt may not learn from the black belt alone. The gap might be too wide. What the white belt might actually need, in many moments, is the green belt, someone close enough to their own confusion that the path forward feels navigable rather than impossibly far.
I’ve been sitting with this as I prepare to co-teach an Gestalt in Organizations next week, alongside practitioners whose experience seems, to me at least, to considerably exceed my own. What makes this harder is that I admire them. And the participants are, many of them, practitioners whose work I have long followed and respected.
There is a part of me that would prefer to wait until I know more, until I have something closer to mastery, something that justifies the act of standing up and speaking. But this impulse, on examination, is less about quality than about a familar voice I have never fully managed to silence. The one that says I am not yet enough.
What if, instead, I brought exactly the green belt? Not a performance of competence, but the genuine offer of what I actually have. Enough to know where it gets difficult, and some sense of how to continue. Or, honesty about uncertainty that only someone still inside the learning can provide.
Stanley reached for a word I hadn’t expected. Perhaps this is Gestalt, he said. Being more whole. Not the sum of the most advanced parts, but the whole including what is still becoming.
I like to imagine Stanley and I are, in this sense, each other’s green belts. Although he likes to think I am a brown belt, and vice versa. We arrived at this insight together, and I am grateful for it.
This is the gift I would like to bring into the room next week. Not the black belt’s mastery, but what someone who finds themselves in the middle of the system can offer to everyone around them: the piece of the whole that only each part can provide.
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