Could Your Sourdough Become A Workshop? You Do Not Need to Be an Expert

I have made well over two thousand loaves of sourdough.

I would also happily run a soap workshop tomorrow, and I have made soap about five times.

Both of those are true, and the gap between them is the whole point of this post. Because if you think the bar for teaching something is two thousand of anything, you will never start.

The expert myth

Somewhere along the way we decided that teaching requires mastery. That you need a certificate, or ten years, or to be the best in your district before you are allowed to show another woman how to do something.

That is not how skills have ever actually moved between people. Your grandmother did not have a qualification. She had a kitchen and someone standing next to her in it.

The women who taught most of what you know taught it because they knew it and you did not. That is the entire mechanism.

So where is the bar?

Here is my honest version, and it has nothing to do with a number.

You have made it enough times that you are confident teaching it.

That is it. For sourdough, for me, that took a long time, because sourdough is fiddly and temperamental and I had to learn a whole extra layer about heat. For soap, five goes was plenty, because soap does what it is told. Same person, wildly different numbers, both fine.

So the question is not “how many times have I done this.” It is “could I do this in front of people, talking, while someone interrupts me, and not lose my place.”

If the answer is yes, you are ready. If it is no, do it a few more times.

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But what if someone asks something I cannot answer?

This is the fear underneath all of it, and it deserves a straight answer.

It will happen. Someone will ask something you have not thought about.

Here is what I do. I take a breath. I actually think about it, rather than filling the silence. And then I either give them my best answer, or I say plainly that I am not sure, and tell them how I would go about finding out. Usually that is that I would look it up, and I say so.

Nobody has ever minded. Not once.

What women want from a workshop is not an oracle. They want someone a bit further along who will be straight with them. Saying “I do not know, but here is how I would find out” is more useful than a confident wrong answer, and everybody in the room can tell the difference.

Honesty is not a gap in your expertise. It is most of it.

Is your skill actually workshop-ready?

Some things teach well in a couple of hours and some do not. This is worth thinking about before you plan anything.

Can people see it? Big movements are easy. Fine detail needs planning, and sometimes it needs you to carry things around the room.

Can they get a result on the day, or take one home? People want to leave with something. A loaf, a jar, a bar of soap, notes, a starter. Skills where they leave empty-handed feel unfinished.

Can you teach one thing rather than five? This is where I got my first workshop wrong. I taught pickles and jams together, which is two different skills, and it was more complicated than it needed to be. One thing, done properly, beats a survey of everything you know.

Do people already ask you about it? If they do, the demand is proven before you have spent a cent.

The bit nobody says out loud

You are probably not underqualified. You are probably just scared, and those two feel identical from the inside.

The way you tell them apart is to look at the actual evidence. Can you do the thing reliably? Do people ask you about it? Could you explain it to your sister without notes?

If yes to all three, this is nerves, not a skills gap. And nerves are fixed by doing it once with eight people, not by waiting until you feel ready, because that feeling does not arrive on its own.

What to do next

Say you have decided you could actually do this. The next question is almost always about money: what do you charge, and how do you say the number out loud without apologising for it.

That one deserves its own post.

Read: What I charge for a sourdough workshop and why