Stop Waiting to Be Picked

Start Selling Your Expertise!

Mar 16, 2026

I know a teacher…

She has fifteen years of experience, speaks three languages, and has this uncanny ability to get B1 Italian professionals unstuck at exactly the point where most teachers just assign more grammar exercises and hope for the best.

Her students adore her. They come back term after term, not because of the platform she teaches on, but because of her.

Last month, she told me she was “struggling to find work.”

I nearly choked on my coffee.

She’s not struggling because she lacks skills.

She is not struggling because the market has dried up, or because AI is replacing her, or because some twenty-three-year-old with a TEFL weekend certificate is undercutting her rates.

She is struggling because she is sitting at home, refreshing her inbox, waiting for a platform to send her students.

Fifteen years of expertise. And she is still waiting to be picked.

Now, I am sure you are thinking: That is not me!

And maybe it is not. But before you scroll past, let me ask you:

If the platform you work through disappeared tomorrow… poof, gone, servers switched off… would your students know how to find you?
Would the thing you have spent years building still be working for you the following Monday morning?

Or would you be doing exactly what that teacher in our story is doing?

How we got here

We did not arrive at this by accident. We were trained into it.

Most of us came up through institutions of one kind or another: Language schools, training centres, universities, corporate contracts, etc.

Somebody else found the students.

Somebody else set the timetable, decided the rate, and determined whether we were good enough to stay on the books next September.

Our job was to teach, train, or coach well and be grateful for the opportunity.

And honestly? That arrangement worked for a while. It gave us a place to learn, a structure to lean on, and enough steady income that we did not have to think about where the next student was coming from.

The institution handled the business. We handled the teaching. Fair enough.

But then we went freelance.

And here is where it gets interesting, because most of us did not actually change anything except the paperwork.

We swapped a director of studies for a platform algorithm.

We traded a staffroom for a home office.

We stopped being employed… but we never stopped thinking like employees.

Nobody sat us down and said: the rules are different now.

Nobody explained that going freelance was not just a change in employment status, but it was supposed to be a change in identity.

You are not a teacher, trainer or coach waiting for a timetable any more. You are the entire operation: the product, the marketing department, the strategy, the brand, all of it… You.

And because nobody said it, most of us never made the shift. We carried the employee mindset into self-employment like a suitcase we forgot to unpack.

The thing you built and forgot was yours

Here is what keeps nagging at me, and it is the reason I wanted to write this piece.

Every single one of us has built something over the years.

Not a business, but something more fundamental than that.

You have built a way of doing things that works. Your way.

The particular manner in which you handle the first ten minutes with a new student.
The shortcut you stumbled across for explaining the present perfect to someone whose first language has no equivalent.
The instinct (and it is instinct now, not technique) that tells you when to correct and when to let it go because the student is already teetering.

You did not get that from a coursebook. You did not download it. You earned it. Lesson by lesson, mistake by mistake, awkward silence by awkward silence, over years that nobody else can shortcut.

That is not “experience.” That is expertise. Yours. It lives in you, not in any organisation’s filing cabinet or platform’s database.

And here is the bit that should bother you: most of us are treating that expertise like it belongs to someone else.

We package it up, hand it to a platform, let them put a price on it, and accept whatever comes back.

We behave as though the thing we spent years building only has value when an institution decides to rent it.

It does not.

It has value because you built it and because there are people out there right now who need exactly what you know.

The question is whether you are going to keep handing the keys to someone else or start using them yourself.

A different question

When the bookings slow down, there is a question most of us reach for instinctively: Who is hiring?

It feels like the sensible question. The grown-up question. The one that leads to a solution.

But it is not a solution.

It is a reflex, and it is the wrong one, because it is still the employee question.

You are still positioning yourself as someone who needs to be chosen.

There is a different question, and it changes everything: Who is stuck without what I know?

Read that again, because it is not the same thing dressed up differently.

The first question puts your future in the hands of whoever controls the job board, the algorithm, and the next round of bookings. You wait. You compete. You accept the going rate.
The second question puts you back in the room with the people who actually need you, and lets you decide the terms.

Think about it…

Right now, somewhere in Milan, there is a marketing director who freezes every time she has to present to the London office.

There is an engineer in Munich whose technical language is flawless on paper but who cannot get through a conference call without his colleagues finishing his sentences for him.

There is a startup founder in Lisbon who knows her pitch is brilliant in her head but mediocre in reality, and it is costing her investment.

These people do not need “a teacher,” “a trainer, " or “a coach”

They need someone who understands their specific problem and knows how to fix it.

They need the thing you have spent fifteen years learning how to do.

They are not on a platform waiting to book you. They are out in the world, getting on with their jobs, tolerating a problem they do not even know has a precise solution, because nobody has told them yet.

That is not a hiring gap.
That is an opportunity you have not picked up.

What this actually looks like

I am not going to give you a five-step framework, a blueprint, or a “proven system.” This time, you have to put the hard work in yourself!

What I will do is tell you what I have seen.

I have seen another educator in my community who spent years teaching on a platform, averaging about fifteen euros an hour after the platform took its cut. She was good, really good, at helping professionals prepare for high-stakes presentations. When she stopped advertising “English lessons” and started telling people, “I help you nail your next board presentation in English,” her diary filled up.

Same skill. Same person. Different question.

I have seen yet another who realised that the thing she did best was not teaching grammar at all, but it was helping people hear their own mistakes. She had developed this method over the years, almost without noticing, of recording students, playing it back, and coaching them through their own errors in real time.

She thought everybody did this. They do not.

She now runs pronunciation intensives for corporate teams and charges more for a half-day session than she used to earn in a week.

Neither of them reinvented themselves.

They did not “pivot.”

They did not build a massive following or become internet famous.

They just stopped describing what they do in terms that made them interchangeable and started describing the problem they actually solve.

That is the shift.

It is not dramatic. It is not glamorous. But it changes everything about where you sit in the conversation.

The honest look

I am not going to tell you to quit your platform, burn your CV, and launch a consulting practice by Friday.

That is not how this works, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

What I am going to suggest is much smaller and much harder: Sit down for twenty minutes and answer one question properly.

Not “what do I teach, train, coach?” That is your subject, not your value.

The question is: What do I fix?

Because the person who books you is not buying lessons. They never were.

They are buying the thing that happens because of the lessons: the promotion they can finally go for, the confidence to speak up in the meeting instead of nodding along, the ability to stop being the person in the room who stays quiet.

When you know what you fix, you know who needs you. And when you know who needs you, you stop waiting to be picked.

Over to you

You built this. All of it… the skill, the instinct, the way you can read a student’s face through a screen and know they are lost before they have said a word. That is yours. It always was. The schools and the platforms were the vehicle, not the destination.

So stop handing the keys to someone else and wondering why you are locked out.

You know what you are good at. You know who needs it. The only question left is whether you are going to keep renting out your expertise on someone else’s terms or start building with it on your own.

I know which one I chose. But then, I am just here to start the conversation.

Your turn…