Knowing and Not-Knowing
Becoming: more comfortable with the unknown
Before you read this newsletter, I invite you to consider two questions.
1. What don’t you know yet?
Maybe it’s to do with a situation in your life where you feel stuck or uncertain. Perhaps it’s about your future and figuring out what you want that to look like.
2. How you do you feel about not knowing the answer?
I have always been someone who likes to be prepared in making significant choices. In amongst my pile of old journals is a sheaf of papers, full of various lists of the pros and cons of leaving my former employment, one of the hardest choices I have ever had to make.
When I look at those curling pages with the increasingly frantic handwriting, I can see (and feel) the desperation of my younger self not knowing what to do.
Well-meaning people kept saying, ‘Listen to your gut’ or ‘Deep down, you know the right thing to do’. But my gut was silent and I really, genuinely felt lost. One of my greatest gifts is my strong intuition – but for this decision, it just wasn’t speaking up. This sense of not having an answer was the scariest thing of all.
As a former secondary school teacher, I have been very used to hearing the answer ‘I don’t know’. Those words are usually spoken immediately after a question and they tend to be delivered with a faint sense of embarrassment or discomfort.
Now, whilst I don’t hear this line as often as I did in a classroom, I find that they come up at least once in a coaching session. They’re often delivered in the same way, with an almost unspoken apology for the not-knowing.
We generally expect to know what we think, want, and feel – and we can feel incredibly uncomfortable when we don’t.
Something that I have come to realise is that there isn’t much space for the not-knowing in a typically capitalist, Western society. Our educational systems, our business practices and a never-ending stream of informative media all encourage us to move speedily from a place of not-knowing to knowing. We’re not often given the time or the space to explore what is undiscovered.
Underpinning this is the fact that biologically, our brains are primed to find the unknown a place of danger. Humans like certainty; certainty feels safe.
So it’s no wonder that when we don’t have an answer, we feel discomfort, frustration or even fear.
In the past, I have given so much energy to wrestling with decisions, with feelings that I cannot explain and with uncertain futures. To be honest, I have found myself grappling with what lies ahead in recent weeks and writing this piece has helped me to recognise it, to view my thinking with compassion and to learn more about my own unknowns.
Those lists of pros and cons that I wrote about my employment situation years ago didn’t help me to make a decision. If anything, they reinforced the confusion as I circled around and around the options like a leaf caught in a whirlpool. I think that the only reason that I have kept those desperate notes is to remind myself of how much that discomfort took from me.
In the end, what moved me from not-knowing to knowing was listening to the only voice I could truly rely on: my own. It took hearing from a younger, braver me through the pages of a previous journal, that brought me to my choice. And the choice that I made was the most terrifying of the two: to leave a place that I loved in search of new learning. That voice, once I gave it room to speak, was small and brave.
What could happen if we were all a little more comfortable in the place where there are no answers yet? If, instead of feeling as though we should always have the answer, we were able to get curious? If we were able to access that inner voice when we needed it the most?
In the section below, you’ll find some resources to support you in becoming, as you are. Take what you want to or need to - and feel free to share what you have found here.
Notes on Knowing and Not-Knowing:
During a teacher training day a few years back, a senior colleague shared a way of breaking the stuck thinking of students who utter the phrase, ‘I don’t know’ – and it’s a phrase that I sometimes use with clients to this day:
‘If you did know, what would you say?’
Most of the time, that second question enables us to position ourselves as someone who does have an answer and so our thinking is freed up.
In the gloriously confronting book that is Untamed, Glennon Doyle writes of listening out for the words or the feelings of discontent in your thinking, in your body and in your intuition. She writes,
‘(We) are stalking the periphery of (our) lives, feeling discontent…Discontent is evidence that your imagination has not given up on you. It is still pressing, swelling, trying to get your attention by whispering, “Not this”.’
If you need a little more thinking around moving to a place of action, Doyle also writes of moving from ‘Not this’ towards ‘Knowing’.
Prompts for thinking and journalling:
What are your unknowns?
What are you curious about?
What have you wondered about?
What makes you think, feel or say, ‘Not this’?
And finally, one of the most powerful journalling prompts that I have ever used:
What do you know?
This came from a prompt shared by Writers HQ, an online writing community, during an exercise I took part in. This sparked all kinds of realisations for me.
I’d suggest beginning with the phrase, ‘I know’… and write a list of all the things that you do know. You may be surprised at what surfaces.
I know that…
I know who…
I know when…
I know why…
I know what…
I know my…
I know how…
Once your thoughts have percolated and settled, let me know what you got from today’s newsletter: I’d really love to hear from you. You can connect with me here on Substack or via www.katiepoolecoaching.com
Wow Katie this is really useful, I could have used it when I was struggling with difficult decisions in the past. I don’t think people often realise that there are strategies to help and just struggle along on their own. 💕