Everyone was selling certainty

Why the conference that made me want to leave also changed how I think about speaking, consulting, and transformation

I finally figured out why I’ve had such a complicated relationship with conferences, consulting, and “speaking.” This realization hit me recently at a professional learning conference—right around the time I knew the pink slip was coming.

It was the opening plenary. My literal nightmare. Hundreds of educators are buzzing around, trying to find their “team,” balancing coffee, tote bags, and the hope that maybe this conference would finally give them what would make the work feel manageable again.

Meanwhile, a couple of people from my own group had already decided the keynote wasn’t worth recovering from the hangover.

I was bitter.

Not at educators. Never at educators. At the machine.

The polished frameworks, the sponsorships, the certainty…everyone selling “the answer.” All I could think, there is absolutely no way human growth is this clean. No fucking way.

What made conferences meaningful to me in the past was never really the sessions anyway. It was the collisions.

The accidental hotel bar conversations.
The “Can I be honest with you?” moments at midnight.
The realization that the polished person standing on stage was also secretly overwhelmed, confused, exhausted, or grieving something.

That’s where the real learning happened.

Maybe that’s why I felt so unsettled sitting there. Somewhere between the manuscript coursework, the looming financial reality of losing my role, and launching this book… I had started realizing something terrifying: I might have to become one of these people.

And I hated that realization more than I wanted to admit.

I think what scared me most wasn’t becoming a consultant. It was becoming disconnected…from classrooms, from reality (again), or from the actual texture of people’s lives.

I was terrified of becoming someone who spoke about struggle instead of staying close enough to still be disrupted by it.

So there I sat spiraling in the opening plenary when I turned to the woman next to me and introduced myself the only honest way I could in that moment: “Hi, I’m Jo. I hate this. All of it.”

She looked slightly stunned, smiled, and said, “Great. I hate this, too.” We both let out a loud sigh, laughed, and started into our standard conference exchange.

“What do you do?” I told her my title.

She smiled politely and said, “I’m a consultant.”

And without even thinking, I blurted out: “Oh, thank God. I need help unpacking something. I think consultants are bloodsuckers taking resources away from children… but I may be forced into becoming one, and I need to figure out how to live with myself.”

This was probably not the networking strategy they recommend in the cute little books stacked in the lobby.

But instead of getting offended… she laughed. As the speaker droned on in the background, we exchanged information and agreed to connect later. A week later, she walked me through her model.

And I remember sitting there thinking: Holy shit. That’s actually good. This could work.

Here’s the kicker. The model didn’t even promise certainty as I had assumed. She simply created conditions in which people could think differently together.

She wasn’t selling expertise as salvation. She was creating collisions.

Disruption.
Reflection.
Practice.
Honest conversation.

Suddenly, I realized something. Maybe the problem isn’t speaking. Maybe it’s speaking without proximity to reality. Maybe it’s expertise that becomes so insulated from actual human struggle that it stops being useful.

Because my issue isn’t really with consulting. It’s with certainty masquerading as transformation. It’s with pretending human beings are machines that you can optimize with the right framework and enough bullet points. It’s with the lie that growth happens cleanly.

Because real growth is contradictory. It’s messy, emotional, and identity-threatening. It requires grief, practice, humility, and a healthy dose of good-old-fashioned unlearning.

I think that’s why I keep coming back to social media, even though I genuinely think a lot of it is kind of stupid. Because these strange little internet disruptions—including the one you’re reading right now—create collisions too.

Sometimes one honest sentence interrupts a script someone has been obeying for years.

I don’t think people need more experts anymore. I think they need people willing to stay close enough to reality to still be disrupted by it.

Let’s connect!

I still don’t think keynotes suddenly save people. But I do know that practice matters.

The book can’t just sit there beautifully highlighted on someone’s nightstand while we all nod in agreement about unlearning and then return to the exact same scripts by Monday morning. We have to practice with it. Together.

So if your team, organization, district, or company is looking for someone willing to create that kind of disruption and conversation…Send me a message.

Week 6 of Burn the Script Live happen Sunday, May 24 at 7 pm central on TikTok. See you then!