“I could never do what you do, Carla.”
I can’t tell you how many times I heard those words. Back then, I had no idea they would eventually teach me something about how to use life experience to help others.
At the time, I thought people were telling me I knew too much.
Looking back, I think they were telling me something entirely different.
I just didn’t understand it yet.
I thought what I knew was just…what I knew.
This was back in the 1980s.
For a while, I was involved with a network marketing company called A.L. Williams. We helped families with life insurance and investments.
Unlike some of the businesses I’ve tried over the years, I didn’t have to search hard for a reason to believe in this one.
I already had one.
In This Story
- I Knew What Happened When There Wasn’t Enough
- But There Was Another Problem
- Nobody Wanted to Do It With Me
- One Family Still Stands Out
- Something Had Happened
- How to Use Life Experience to Help Others
- Maybe You’ve Been Calling Your Experience “Nothing”
- I Think I Finally Understand What They Were Seeing
- You May Know More Than You Think
- Frequently Asked Questions
I Knew What Happened When There Wasn’t Enough
My first husband had died.
And when he did, there wasn’t enough life insurance.
Losing your husband is difficult enough.
Then there are the bills.
The debt.
The responsibilities.
All those ordinary things that don’t stop just because your life has.
I knew what it felt like to be grieving while also trying to figure out how in the world I was going to deal with the financial mess left behind.
I didn’t learn that from a book.
Nobody taught it to me in a classroom.
I lived it.
So when I found a business that let me sit down with families and talk about protecting themselves financially, I could grab hold of that mission.
This made sense to me.
If something I had been through could help another woman avoid being left in the position I’d been in…
I wanted to help her.
But There Was Another Problem
Being a woman doing this kind of work in the ’80s wasn’t always easy.
At least it wasn’t where I lived.
Financial matters were still very much a man’s world.
And here came Carla.
A woman.
Sitting across the table, talking about life insurance, money, and planning for the future.
That didn’t always go over particularly well. 😂
Even when people knew what had happened to me, there was still this tendency to think:
Well, that’s terrible.
But that won’t happen to us.
We humans are funny that way, aren’t we?
We can know something happens every day and still convince ourselves we’re somehow exempt.
I worked hard.
Really hard.
And I believed in what I was doing.
But there was one part of the business I couldn’t seem to figure out.
Nobody Wanted to Do It With Me
I wanted to find people who would partner with me.
I’d ask:
“Would you like to build a part-time income doing this?”
And I kept getting basically the same answer.
“Oh, Carla. I could never do what you do.”
Why not?
“You know so much.”
At the time, I suppose part of me believed them.
Maybe I did know a lot.
But here’s what’s funny when I look back at it now.
It wasn’t necessarily educated knowledge.
I wasn’t walking around with some giant collection of fancy letters after my name.
A lot of what I knew came from life.
I’d had to figure things out because life had put me in situations where I didn’t have much choice.
Some lessons I would’ve been perfectly happy never learning.
Losing my husband was certainly one of them.
But once you’ve lived something…
you know things you didn’t know before.
One Family Still Stands Out
One friend I was able to help stood out.
She and her husband both worked in law enforcement.
Because of their work, I think they may have been a little more aware than most people that bad things don’t always send an engraved invitation before they arrive.
We talked about their family.
Their children.
What would happen if something happened to one of them?
And they put the right amount of life insurance in place.
Then life went on.
That’s the strange thing about insurance.
You buy it hoping you’ll never need it.
Nobody wakes up excited because today’s the day they’re going to use their life insurance.
You put it in place…
and then you go live your life.
Until one day, I got a phone call.
Something Had Happened
There had been an accident.
Her husband had died.
Even now, all these years later, I remember what it meant to deliver that check to her.
It was a sizable check.
And I want to be very clear about something.
That money didn’t make anything okay.
It didn’t bring her husband home.
It didn’t give those children their dad back.
It didn’t remove the grief.
No check is big enough for that.
But it could do one thing.
It could keep an already shattered family from having their financial life shattered at the same time.
They didn’t suddenly have to change everything because the paycheck had disappeared too.
The money helped them keep living.
And I knew exactly why that mattered.
Because years earlier…
I had been the woman on the other side.
How to Use Life Experience to Help Others
I’ve thought about that family many times over the years.
But I’m looking at that experience differently now.
Especially after realizing why storytelling and blogging have become so important to me. I recently wrote about why I don’t want these stories to disappear when I’m gone, and I think I’m finally beginning to understand how all these pieces fit together.
Remember what everybody used to tell me?
“I could never do what you do, Carla. You know so much.”
I wish I’d understood then what I’m beginning to understand now.
I didn’t know everything.
Good grief, I still don’t. 😂
What I had was experience.
Life had taught me something.
Unfortunately, it taught me the hard way.
But because I’d lived through it, I could sit across from another woman and talk about it differently.
I wasn’t simply saying:
You need life insurance.
I knew what happened when you didn’t have enough.
There’s a difference.
Your Life Experience May Be Worth More Than You Think
And that’s where I started thinking about you.
Because maybe you’ve said something similar about yourself.
I’m not an expert.
I don’t have a degree in that.
Who am I to tell anybody anything?
Many people know way more than I do.
Maybe there are.
But they haven’t lived your life.
And that’s what I’m beginning to understand about using life experience to help others. You don’t have to know everything. Sometimes you simply know something because you’ve already lived through it.
They haven’t raised your children.
They haven’t survived your marriage struggles.
They haven’t built your business.
They haven’t lost what you’ve lost.
They haven’t made your mistakes.
They haven’t had to figure out the things you’ve had to figure out.
And because you’ve lived through those things for so long, they may not feel particularly remarkable anymore.
You call it:
“Just life.”
Someone else might call it:
“How did you get through that?”
I Think I Finally Understand What They Were Seeing
All those years ago, people looked at me and saw somebody who knew things.
I looked at myself and saw somebody who was simply doing what needed to be done.
That’s a pretty big difference.
And I wonder how many women are doing the same thing right now.
You’ve accumulated decades of experience.
Yet because nobody handed you a certificate for surviving it, learning from it, or figuring it out…
you don’t count it.
I’ve done that too.
I’ve spent years looking at the things I didn’t know instead of recognizing what life had already taught me. I’ve even written about one of my biggest blogging mistakes, because sometimes it takes looking backward to recognize what an experience was trying to teach you.
I’m starting to see that differently.
I don’t have to know everything before something I’ve learned can help someone.
I don’t have to stand at the front of the room and call myself an expert.
And I certainly don’t have to pretend I have all the answers.
I’d rather pull up a chair.
Tell you what happened.
Tell you what I learned.
And then say:
“Maybe this will help you.”
You May Know More Than You Think
That’s what I wish I could tell those people from all those years ago.
When they said:
“I could never do what you do, Carla. You know so much.”
I wish I’d said:
“You know things too.”
Different things.
Things your life taught you.
Things you’ve probably forgotten you once didn’t know.
Things you learned because you made mistakes.
Things you learned because something hurt.
Things you learned because somebody needed you and you figured it out.
Things you learned simply because you’ve been around long enough to live a little.
Maybe that’s one of the gifts of getting older.
I’m beginning to think that how to use life experience to help others sometimes starts by recognizing how much life has already taught us.
We accumulate stories.
But underneath those stories…
we accumulate wisdom.
And maybe the question isn’t:
“What could I possibly know that would help somebody else?”
Maybe it’s:
“What has my life already taught me that someone else still needs to hear?”
Because you might call it ordinary life experience.
Someone else might call it the answer she’s been looking for.
Maybe You Already Have Something to Write About
If you’ve been thinking about starting a blog but keep wondering what you could possibly write about, maybe you don’t need to look quite so far.
Your experiences, mistakes, lessons, and stories may already be giving you a place to begin.
That’s the kind of conversation we’re having inside The Blog Growth Society.
I’m not there to stand at the front of the room and tell you I have all the answers.
I’d rather walk beside you while we figure out what you already know—and how you might use it to help someone else.
Come walk beside us.
Join me inside The Blog Growth Society →
Frequently Asked Questions
How can I use my life experience to help others?
I start by thinking about something I’ve lived through and what it taught me. I don’t have to be an expert in everything. I can simply share what happened, what I learned and what I might do differently now. Sometimes that experience is exactly what another person needs to hear.
Does my life experience really have value?
I used to overlook much of what I knew because it came from living, not formal education. I’ve learned that experience has value too. Things you’ve figured out through work, family, loss, mistakes, and starting over may feel ordinary to you because you’ve lived with them for years.
Do I need to be an expert before I can help someone?
I don’t believe I need to know everything before something I’ve learned can help another person. I try to be honest about what I know, what I’ve experienced and what I’m still learning. I’m much more comfortable being a guide than pretending I have all the answers.
How do I know which life experiences are worth writing about?
I look for moments that changed something in me. Maybe I learned a lesson, made a mistake, solved a problem, or went through something difficult. If the experience changed how I think or what I do now, there’s probably a story hiding in it.
Can I turn my life experiences into blog posts?
That’s exactly what I’ve started doing with The Carla Chronicles. I start with something that happened in my life, tell the story honestly, and then look at what I learned. The lesson doesn’t have to be huge. Sometimes an ordinary experience contains the most useful story.
Write Your Story. Build Your Future.