Fauxpert

What we've lost in the age of instant expertise

The Cheat with The Ace of Clubs by Georges de La Tour

Expertise has taken on a new meaning.

Everywhere, especially online, I see people who do something once, post about it, and suddenly become an “expert”. A single yoga class, a weekend in Paris, a week of intermittent fasting, and then a course, a workshop, a list of recommendations follows. It leaves me uneasy, the way imitation often does. Maybe you took a trip to Greece, but how does one trip make you a reliable source on Greek travel? What can you really know after one encounter, one glimpse, one try?

It’s not that sharing is wrong. I love that people want to talk about what moves them. But there’s a difference between enthusiasm and expertise. One belongs to the spark of discovery. The other to the long devotion of practice.

When I lead retreats, yes, they are to Italy, but Italy is not a place I visited once. It is a place I lived for twelve years. I speak the language. I know the rhythm of the days, the changes of the light, the sounds of the market at noon. I have friends there who are like family, and connections that took years to build. I’ve also led retreats in Spain, where I once lived, though for less time (and my Spanish, I’ll admit, is pretty terrible). Still, I know enough to guide others there with honesty and care, and without pretending to know more than I do.

That’s part of it too. Real expertise includes the humility to say, “I don’t know.” To keep learning, to stay curious, to remain a student. The moment you believe you know everything is the moment your expertise begins to erode.

Mastery is in the mess!

I miss the days when people really knew their craft. When you could trust that a teacher had spent years inside their own discipline. That a traveler had lived on the road long enough to lose and find themselves again. That a practitioner understood the body through time, through touch, through years of listening. We’ve lost reverence for the slow climb, for the long apprenticeship.

Pilates, at its heart, is about repetition. The magic of classical Pilates lies not in novelty but in return. You repeat the same sequence over and over, because it reveals something new each time. That repetition becomes your mirror, your measure, your map. You can track your progress through it, see how the body has changed, where the breath expands, where the effort softens.

When you do something different each time, or follow something being marketed as Pilates but isn’t really, you may get a kind of quick thrill, a surface-level wow factor. But that’s not the work. That’s performance. Real transformation happens in the repetition, in the devotion to precision and form. The repetition is not a limitation. It’s the point.

You wouldn’t hire a contractor to build your house if they’d only built one house before. You wouldn’t trust a dentist who’d only ever worked on one tooth. So why would you trust someone with your health, your body, your nervous system, if they have barely begun to understand their own?

Expertise is not about perfection. It’s about relationship. It’s the willingness to keep learning. The courage to admit what you don’t know. The patience to return to the same work, again and again, until it becomes not something you do, but something you live.

The body knows this. It learns through repetition, through humility, through time. Each movement is an act of remembering. Each breath, an invitation to begin again.

Sometimes I think about that scene in The Wizard of Oz when the curtain is pulled back and the great and powerful voice is revealed to be just a man, small, anxious, working the levers. It’s funny, and it’s humbling, because I’ve been that man. I’ve hidden behind the curtain before, trying to seem certain, trying to hold it all together and seem powerful.

But the older I get, the more I realize that real expertise isn’t about keeping the illusion alive. It’s about letting the curtain fall and standing there anyway. It’s knowing what you know, and being honest about what you don’t.

After all these years of teaching movement, I’m still learning. Every class reminds me how much I don’t know yet, about the body, about care, about how people carry themselves through the world. The work keeps teaching me, and I keep listening.

Mastery is born of repetition

Where in your life are you still learning? Let me know in the comments. I’m listening!