The Story I Couldn't See

An article from the Understand series

For years, I asked other people to tell me their stories.

I sat with alumni, students, educators, executives, and families. I asked my five questions. I listened from there. Over time, I built an organization around a belief I had begun to see again and again: every story holds knowledge the person carrying it may not fully recognize. Then someone asked me to explain mine. And I struggled.

The Sentence I Was Telling Myself

It happened when I began preparing for interviews at Amazon.

On paper, my career looked like chapters from different books. Basketball coach. Admissions officer. Dorm head. Educator. Project manager. Belonging work. Founder of a storytelling organization. I could describe everything I had done. But describing experience and understanding experience are two different things, and I did not know that yet. I know exactly what I was telling myself in those early days of preparation, because the sentence was short and I said it more than once:

I'm an admissions guy trying to sound like a businessman.

Read that sentence again, because the damage is hiding in the middle of it. Not in "admissions guy." In "trying to sound like." I believed there was a gap between the work I had done and the world I was walking into, and that my job was to perform my way across it. Find the right vocabulary. Borrow the right language. Dress the work up in clothes that fit somewhere else.

I was wrong about the gap. But I had to zoom out to see it.

What the Work Looked Like From Inside

Here is how admissions work feels while you are doing it.

This student needs a call. This family needs a tour. This applicant needs to be reviewed. This kid is struggling with the transition into the dorm. This parent has a question. This ninth grader is homesick, and it is ten o'clock at night, and you are the adult down the hall.

I took the work 1 to 10 students at a time.

That is not a complaint. That is the craft. The work is personal because families are personal, and the reason I was any good at it is that I never experienced those families as numbers. I experienced them one conversation at a time.

But preparing to explain that work outside of education forced me to stand somewhere I had never stood: far enough away to see the whole of it.

At a day school, I was helping onboard incoming ninth grade classes of one hundred, and later one hundred twenty, students at a school where tuition ran about forty-five thousand dollars a year. At a boarding school, I recruited students into a model with substantially higher tuition, and then crossed a line most professionals never cross: I moved from recruiting families to living with the results, as the dorm head responsible for fifty ninth grade boys, including the ones I had personally welcomed in.

And every single enrollment was never really one enrollment. It was potentially four years of tuition. It was retention. It was a family's satisfaction, which became a sibling's application, which became a referral, which became reputation. It was stakeholder relationships that ran from a kitchen-table conversation with a nervous family all the way up through a Head of School's leadership team and a volunteer Board of Trustees.

The work had not changed. My understanding of the work had.

I had spent years working inside enrollment systems responsible for millions of dollars in annual tuition revenue, while carrying responsibility for relationships, judgment, retention, and residential life. And I had been summarizing all of it as "I'm an admissions guy."

Why I Couldn't See It

I have thought a lot about why the person doing the work was the last person to see its scale.

The honest answer is that we experience our lives at ground level. Teachers experience the child in front of them, not the hundreds of lives they have shaped. Coaches experience today's practice. Project managers experience today's deadline. Parents experience today's problem. Nobody experiences the accumulated architecture of their own work, because nobody lives at that altitude. We live one kid, one meeting, one Tuesday at a time.

The intimacy of the craft hides the scale of the enterprise.

And this is where I have to be honest about the strange position I was in. Over the years, I had heard versions of this minimization everywhere: people describing meaningful responsibilities as ordinary because they had been carrying them for so long. I had become skilled at hearing the significance in someone else's experience. I had simply never thought to apply the same discipline to myself.

Naming It

I eventually needed language for what had happened during that preparation.

And I want to be careful about one thing, because it matters. Amazon did not reveal the value of the work. Reflection did. Amazon simply created the situation that forced me to stop and look.

Because here is the thing: I did not gain a single new experience getting ready for those interviews. Nothing was added to my resume. No new job, no new title, no new skill. I simply learned to understand experiences I already possessed differently.

I now call that Professional Sensemaking™: the intentional practice of reflecting on our experiences to recognize the patterns, capabilities, values, judgment, and transferable lessons that can be difficult to see while we are living them.

And I want to be precise about what it is not, because the distinction matters. It is not resume inflation. It is not turning "helped with admissions" into a claim that one person generated twenty million dollars. It is the opposite of inflation. It is accuracy. It is finally describing the work at its true size, after years of describing it smaller than it was.

Reflection does not change your story. It changes how you understand it.

This Is Bigger Than My Career

My admissions story is one example, but the problem underneath it is not unique to education, and it is not unique to me.

People learn to describe their work through the tasks closest to them rather than the capabilities those tasks required. A teacher sees lesson plans, parent conferences, and the child in the third row. Step back, and the same work reveals communication, judgment, conflict management, relationship building, and leadership. A project manager sees schedules, meetings, and deadlines. Reflection reveals systems thinking, risk management, negotiation, and decision-making under pressure. A coach sees practices, games, and players. Look again and you find talent development, culture building, motivation, and accountability.

The point is not to make ordinary work sound extraordinary. The point is to understand ordinary work accurately.

And that distinction carries real consequences, because people make decisions based on the stories they believe about their own experience. They decide which jobs they are qualified to pursue. Which rooms they belong in. Which opportunities feel too large. Which chapters of their careers they dismiss as irrelevant. If we misunderstand the experiences behind us, we may also misunderstand what we are prepared to do next.

That is why reflection is not simply retrospective. It can be strategic.

Back to the Beginning

In the first article of this series, I wrote that every story holds a piece of the institutional picture that no other story can supply, because no two people ever stood in the same place. I believed that when I wrote it. I believe it more now. But this chapter taught me the harder half of the lesson:

Sometimes we cannot fully see the story from the place where we are standing, even when the story is our own. Especially when the story is our own.

Listening taught me that my position could never show me someone else's experience. Understanding taught me that my proximity could hide my own.

What I Finally Understood

There is one more layer, and it is the one that took me longest to say out loud.

I started BLAC by asking other people to tell me their stories. I believed that if I listened closely enough, I could understand something about how people moved through schools, careers, institutions, and opportunity. That is true, and it will always be true. But when I finally made sense of my own story, I understood something underneath it: BLAC was born from a search for purpose and understanding that was mine first. I built the thing I needed.

What I did not understand was that listening outward had been teaching me a discipline I would eventually need to turn inward.

And when the moment came, years later, it worked on me. I did not discover a new career. I discovered the pattern inside the career I had already lived. The discipline I had practiced with hundreds of other people was the thing that finally helped me understand my own experience.

That is how I came to understand the second pillar of the BLAC Framework.

Listen helps us hear experience. Understand helps us make meaning from it.

And that is how I know this is the work BLAC is meant to do. Not because I hoped it would work.

Because I was the case study.

Before You Go

Now listen for a sentence in your own life.

It usually starts with "just" or "only." I just teach. I just coached. I was only managing a small team. It was only ten students. I'm just a parent. I'm an admissions guy trying to sound like a businessman.

Those words feel like humility. Sometimes they are. But sometimes they are simply the view from ground level, describing decades of work at the size of a single Tuesday.

So here is the question I would hand you, the one the second pillar is built on:

What if the experience you have been minimizing is actually evidence of something you have never stopped long enough to understand?

Your story has not changed. It is sitting right there, same as it ever was.

The understanding is the part that is waiting.

Jonathan E. Lee is the founder of Bridging Legacies Across Campuses (BLAC), where he collects the stories of how people find their way through educational and professional life and studies why those journeys succeed. This article explores the second pillar of The BLAC Framework™: Understand. Next in the series: Connecting the Dots.