Do you know enough?
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“Being at ease with not knowing is crucial for answers to come to you”
Eckhart Tolle
Over the years, we’ve been provided with an ever-increasing amount of knowledge. It starts as a baby, as our parents and caregivers provide us with the know-how to help us understand the world and most importantly, stay safe. Nobody tests us on this knowledge, but we are provided with regular feedback from our loved ones on whether we’re getting things right or wrong so we can be kept on the right track.
As we head towards our school, and maybe even university, years knowledge takes on a whole other level as our minds are pumped full of facts and figures of an incredibly diverse nature. It’s our ability to understand, remember and apply this knowledge that creates the standards upon which we are graded through exams and assessments and, to some extent, determines the future pathways open to us.
Heads brimming with knowledge, we are now deemed ready to enter into the working world.
Yet what happens when we find ourselves in a situation where we don’t have the knowledge and we don’t have the plan? In a culture where knowledge is worshipped and deemed essential, we can feel out of our depth, unable to cope and increasingly insecure. Thoughts like ‘I should know this’, ‘I’m not good enough’ and ‘I might as well give up’ might circle around our heads adding to an increasing pressure cooker of negativity. Yet, when we give up on how tight we cling to the idea of having to always ‘know’, we empty ourselves up to a deeper knowing that reveals itself in the moment.
The pandemic has been a great example of this. Nobody knew how it was going to develop, how best to cope with it or what to do and that remains the case to this day. There’s been a lot of doubts, a lot of questions and a lot of trial and error. We can see that with different countries and organisations taking hugely divergent approaches to the pandemic with nobody having the complete knowledge.
And yet, despite this, we have all had to take one step at a time to find our way through the pandemic rollercoaster and continue to do so. We could even argue that this is going to happen more and more in this increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) world in which we live. We simply won’t know and it will be an extreme superpower to be able to get increasingly comfortable in our ability to navigate the unknown that will gift us creative and relevant solutions and plans.
We are designed to navigate the unknown and discover the next step. This would have been a very normal state for our hunter gatherer ancestors who would be constantly navigating unknown lands and situations. How they navigated the uncertainty was relying on being deeply present to what was occurring around them, tuning both outwards to what was happening but also having a highly developed intuition, or inner GPS, which constantly had their back.
And we have this too and can access it at any time yet most of the time we are tuned into the filing cabinet of knowledge in our minds which is limited and constrained in its potential compared to the infinite potential of our inner GPS.
So rather than saying we have all the answers and knowledge, or the complete plan, how about we reply with honesty saying it’s not clear. That response enables other people to explore their position and ideas rather than jumping in feeling compelled to have an instant response. This simple step opens us up to robust dialogue and enables us to access a much wider range of options.
The options are endless when we loosen our grip on having all the knowledge and answers and open up to the power and potential that lies in not knowing. So, let’s ask that question again, do you know enough?
