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Ask Pip

Your expertise has more than one place to go.

With Shannon D. Smith · Speaker and author

Shannon D. Smith's Expertise Translation Method™, with Pip as your brainstorming partner: see what you already know how to do, where else it could help, and one small way to find out.

Use your email instead

It works once and lasts fifteen minutes.

Start here

The Quick Pass

Bring one real example from your work. Pip takes it through all three phases, and you leave with a short action plan you can copy.

Go further, one phase at a time

Make It Visible™

Find the know-how inside one real example, and name it as something you do, with the evidence behind it.

Make It Useful™

Connect what you know to someone with a similar problem in a new setting, and choose one direction to explore.

Make It Work™

Test the biggest unknown about your direction with the smallest action you can take, before you build anything.

Bring Back What Happened

Tell Pip what people actually said and did. Work out what it shows, and whether to continue, revise, or try a different direction.

The idea

Your job doesn't have to be the only place they pay you.

You know things, learned over decades. And right now, all of it probably lives in one place: one job or one kind of client. When that one place changes, everything you know goes with it.

Asking "What am I good at?" rarely gets you far. It asks us to summarize ourselves before we have examined the evidence.

Instead of asking yourself to declare what you are good at, bring the evidence. Start with an actual project. A difficult conversation. A decision. A mistake you prevented.

You don't need a business idea or a big plan.

How it works

Look at the evidence first.

Ask Pip puts Shannon D. Smith's Expertise Translation Method™ inside the ChatGPT or Claude you already use. Start by seeing what you have to work with, then choose one direction to explore.

  1. 1

    The Expertise Translation Method™

    Shannon's three phases, Make It Visible™, Make It Useful™ and Make It Work™, decide what Pip asks about and what counts as evidence. The method is hers. The example is yours.

  2. 2

    Pip, in your own ChatGPT or Claude

    Pip is Shannon's AI brainstorming partner. It asks about what actually happened, one question at a time, and tells you plainly what you reported, what is a guess, and what nobody knows yet.

  3. 3

    Your Expertise Record

    Magpie saves what you work out as you go, in a record you can open any time. On your next visit Pip reads it first, so you pick up where you left off instead of explaining yourself again.

You don't have to decide on a new career or business idea today.

Pip is not Shannon and doesn't speak as her. It won't promise income or tell you what the market wants. You choose the direction, you have the conversations, and you decide what the answers mean. Keep client and employer details out. A general description in your own words is enough.

Claude or ChatGPT.

Use whichever one you're used to, and switch at any point without losing your progress.

Example

Inside Ask Pip: "I'm just good with details."

  1. 1

    The example

    Marcia is made up. She is 48 and has spent nineteen years in accounts payable at a manufacturing company. She has nothing to sell and no business idea. She wonders whether what she knows could pay her anywhere other than this one job.

  2. 2

    Make It Visible™

    Pip asks about the last time someone needed her. A vendor emailed new bank details in the same week as a rushed payment request. "I just had a feeling." That sentence deserves another question. What told you? The timing, and a tone that vendor never used. She called the number already on file and held the payment. The vendor had not changed banks.

  3. 3

    Make It Useful™

    Who else runs into that problem? Marcia thinks of people who pay invoices with no finance team behind them: a bookkeeper for a small business, an office manager at a dental practice. That is a hypothesis. She has never asked one of them. Pip says so, and suggests starting with the bookkeeper, because Marcia already knows one.

  4. 4

    Make It Work™

    The biggest unknown is whether this happens to them at all. So the test is one conversation. Pip offers the wording: "The last time a vendor changed their payment details, what did you do?" A recent instance, and what it cost, would justify a next step. A shrug is information too.

  5. 5

    Marcia's action plan

    What you know how to do: spot a payment request that doesn't fit how a vendor normally behaves, and check it somewhere you already trust before money moves. Where else it could help: small-business bookkeepers (untested). One direction to test: the bookkeeper you know. Your next action: one 15-minute conversation this week. Test planned. What you still need to learn: how often this happens, and whether anyone would pay. Unknown is different from no.

  6. 6

    Don't build the course yet

    Don't name a price. Don't count "I'd love that" from a friend as demand. And don't bring real invoices from the job: a general description in her own words is enough. One conversation first.

What you keep

One story gives you an interesting lesson. Several stories give you something you can compare.

Pip saves what you work out as you go, so nothing depends on you remembering to copy it. The record sits with your own ChatGPT or Claude. The next time you want help with a résumé, a pitch or a new idea, you can ask it to start from your real examples instead of a job title.

The work on your résumé tells us what you did. The evidence underneath it begins to show us how you learned to think.

Your

Expertise Record

  1. What you know how to do: Each capability, named as something you do and why it matters, with the real example behind it.
  2. Where else it could help: The people or teams who may have a similar problem. Untested ideas stay marked as untested.
  3. One direction to test: The one you chose to start with, and why it fits your time and your life.
  4. Your next action: What you'll do, with whom, by when, and what to look for. Planned or done.
  5. What you still need to learn: The open questions, kept open until evidence answers them.
  6. Your plans and what happened: Every action plan, and what people actually said and did when you tried it.

Curiosity is enough to get started.

Ask Pip
What Shannon can see

What Shannon can see

She sees

Your name and emailSteps you start and finishWhen you come backWhich of her materials you openedOne word for how a step went, such as flowing or confusedHow a practice round ended, as one choice from a short listThe exchanges your assistant sends when it opens or saves a step

She does not

Work you edit only in the web workspaceYour other assistant conversationsAnything your assistant does not send when it saves

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