When knowing too much gets in the way
Have you ever tried to explain something you know really well - and found that the words just wouldn't come? Not because you didn't know enough, but because you knew too much.
That's where I've been with Strengthscope.
I've used this strengths-based psychometric tool with leaders, teams, and organisations for over a decade - and on myself several times. I've watched it shift things for people: the quiet "oh" when someone sees their Significant Seven strengths for the first time, the relief when a leader realises the thing their team finds exhausting about them is actually a strength they're overplaying under pressure.
I find all of it genuinely fascinating. Which, it turns out, is part of the problem.
The Curse of Knowledge
There's a concept in psychology called the Curse of Knowledge. Once you know something, it becomes almost impossible to imagine not knowing it. The knowledge doesn't just sit in your head - it rewires how you see everything. It changes the questions you ask, the things you notice, the way you hear a conversation. You can't unknow what you know.
And it's sneaky. It doesn't feel like arrogance or assumption - it just feels like normal. You stop noticing the gap between what you know and what someone else might be encountering for the first time, because that gap has quietly closed over for you.
I've written about the Curse of Knowledge before on this blog - through the lens of leadership and what happens when expertise stops being visible to the people around you. But it kept coming back to me in a different context: my own. Specifically, the way I talk - or fail to talk - about Strengthscope.
The cognitive kind of egocentricity
Alongside that sits something I think about a lot: egocentricity. Not the self-absorbed kind - the cognitive kind. We each live entirely inside our own heads. We have no direct access to anyone else's inner world, only our best guess at it. And our best guess is always, always filtered through our own experience. We assume others see what we see. We forget to ask what they might be seeing instead.
Put these two things together, and you get a particular kind of blind spot. I've been so immersed in Strengthscope for so long that I've quietly lost sight of what it's like to encounter it fresh - to hear words like risk factors or energisers without already knowing what they mean, to wonder whether a questionnaire about strengths could actually tell you something you don't already know about yourself.
The moment I caught myself
I noticed it recently in a conversation with someone I'd just met. I mentioned Strengthscope in passing - the way you mention something you assume everyone knows - and they looked at me with polite blankness. Not disinterest. Just genuine unfamiliarity. And I realised I had no idea where to start.
That moment stayed with me. Because if I can't explain something I care about deeply to someone who's curious and open, that's not their gap - that's mine.
What's coming next
So this is me catching myself. And deciding to do something about it.
Over the next few posts, I'm going to write about Strengthscope as if you've never heard of it - because you may not have. What it is, why I love it, what I've learned about myself through using it over the last ten years, and what I've seen it do for the people I work with. No jargon. No assumed familiarity. Just an honest account of a tool I think is genuinely worth knowing about.
If any of this lands somewhere familiar - if you've ever caught yourself in the same trap, knowing something so well you couldn't find the beginning of it anymore - I'd be curious what helped you find your way back.
(For more on the Curse of Knowledge, I love Dave Stachowiak's conversation with Roger Kneebone on Coaching for Leaders - https://coachingforleaders.com/podcast/teach-your-expertise-roger-kneebone/)
