You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know
It’s an irritatingly obvious statement.
You don’t know what you don’t know.
Of course you don’t. If you knew about it, it would move neatly into the category of Things You Know, and the problem would be solved.
Or at least labelled.
But what we don’t yet know can have an enormous influence on our lives.
It can keep us repeating the same responses, misunderstanding the same people and trying harder at things that were never going to work that way.
Not because we’re foolish.
Because we’re working with the information and skills currently available to us.
There are different kinds of not knowing
There are things you know.
There are things you know you don’t know.
I know very little about engineering, car engines or why printers can sense when you’re in a hurry and immediately refuse to co-operate.
I’m aware of those gaps. Should I ever need to rebuild an engine or reason with a printer, I can find someone who knows more than I do.
Then there are the things you don’t know you don’t know.
Those are more interesting.
They sit outside your current awareness, so you can’t search for them, question them or deliberately learn more about them.
You may not
- know that another way of responding exists
- recognise that something you regard as a fact is actually an assumption
- see the pattern connecting several apparently unrelated problems
- realise that something happening automatically in your mind is influencing how you feel and behave
It is difficult to change what you cannot yet see.
Learning happens whether we intend it or not
Learning is not limited to classrooms, qualifications and alarming piles of reading.
It is something human beings do naturally.
You hear a song often enough and discover you know the words, despite never deciding to learn them. (OK sometimes you mis-hear them and create your own unintentional version.)
You gradually work out which cupboard door needs lifting slightly before it will close.
You learn that a particular person’s “Fine” does not necessarily mean fine.
Our brains are constantly noticing, associating, predicting and forming patterns.
Some of that learning is useful.
Some of it becomes outdated.
And much of it happens without us consciously deciding what should be learned.
That is one reason we can find ourselves reacting in ways that no longer make much sense.
The pattern was learned somewhere.
We simply may not remember learning it.
Something that had been in front of me all along
One of my most memorable learning experiences happened during my NLP Practitioner Training in 1994.
I was introduced to NLP eye accessing cues: patterns in the way people move their eyes while thinking and retrieving information. I’ve written a short eBook about eye accessing cues for anyone curious to explore them further.
Suddenly, I began noticing movements I had seen thousands of times but had never paid attention to.
They had always been there in plain sight.
Yes, I am resisting several obvious eye-related puns.
Mostly.
Eye movements are not a magical mind-reading system, and they shouldn’t be treated as one. They can, however, offer another piece of information about how someone is processing an experience.
What fascinated me was not simply the eye movements themselves.
It was the realisation that I had been surrounded by information I had never learned to notice.
Once I knew it was there, I couldn’t go back to not seeing it.
That experience has repeated itself throughout my work.
I learn a new distinction, question or way of observing someone and think:
“That is so obvious now. How did I miss it before?”
The answer is usually simple.
Nobody had pointed it out.
What keeps us stuck is not always the problem we can see
When people want to change something, they usually begin by working on the part they can already recognise.
They try to become more disciplined.
They promise themselves they will remain calm next time.
They explain their point more clearly.
They make another list.
They read another book.
They tell themselves to stop overthinking, which is particularly effective because the mind always responds beautifully to being ordered about.
When those attempts don’t work, people often blame themselves.
They assume they lack motivation, confidence, willpower or some essential quality that more successful humans were apparently supplied with at birth.
But the difficulty may not be a lack of effort.
They may be applying all the strategies they currently know to a problem they do not yet fully understand.
You can’t make a better choice if you don’t know another choice exists.
Marcus wanted to change, but didn’t know how
Marcus attended The Power of Personal Change because he knew something needed to change in the way he related to people.
He later said:
“I found I had a lot of defences, walls and barriers up. I pushed people away. I didn’t want people to know me, because I’d already made up my mind what I thought they’d think of me, which wasn’t fair on them.”
He had spoken with his manager about wanting to change, but he didn’t know what to do differently.
That distinction matters.
Wanting to change is not the same as knowing how.
During the course, Marcus began recognising what happened inside him before his familiar reactions took over.
On the second day, he experienced something very different:
“One morning I was listening to someone, and I was thinking about all the ways I could respond to what was happening. It was as if all the choices of how I could respond were laid out in front of me, like I had multiple choices.
“It was almost like slow motion. I could feel all these different multi-choice decisions, starting with my old reaction and slowly coming around to what I’d learnt. It was very powerful for me.”
The important change wasn’t that Marcus had memorised the correct response.
He had become aware of the space between what happened and what he did next.
Previously, his old reaction had felt automatic.
Now he could notice it and see alternatives.
The pattern had moved from something he didn’t know he was doing to something he could recognise and influence.
That is where choice begins.
Awareness comes before change
Awareness is sometimes treated as though it is the change.
It isn’t.
You can be fully aware that you procrastinate, interrupt people or become defensive and continue doing it with impressive consistency.
But awareness gives you something to work with.
Instead of:
“I’m hopeless at difficult conversations,”
you may notice:
“When I think someone is criticising me, I stop listening and begin preparing my defence.”
That is far more specific.
Now you can become curious.
What tells you that you are being criticised?
What do you assume the other person means?
What happens in your body?
Where does your attention go?
What do you do next?
What effect does that have on them?
The more precisely you can recognise a pattern, the easier it becomes to experiment with a different response.
Not because somebody has told you to be better.
Because you can finally see what you have been doing.
Sometimes we need more than information
There is plenty of information available about confidence, communication, habits, beliefs and personal change.
Much of it is useful.
But blind spots are difficult to locate alone.
We interpret our experiences through the same assumptions and patterns we are trying to examine. It is a little like attempting to inspect the back of your own head without a mirror.
Training gives you opportunities to learn distinctions you may never have encountered, practise them with other people and receive feedback.
Someone may notice an assumption hidden inside your question.
You may discover that the way you listen is different from how you imagined you listened.
An exercise may reveal that a problem you thought was about motivation is actually connected to a conflict between two important values.
The benefit is not simply gaining more information.
It is discovering what becomes possible once you notice something that had previously been invisible to you.
You probably don’t need to try harder
When something has not changed despite repeated effort, trying harder can feel like the responsible thing to do.
Sometimes it is.
But sometimes you need a different question, a new distinction or a skill you have never learned.
You might ask:
- What am I assuming here?
- What pattern keeps repeating?
- What happens immediately before I react?
- What am I not noticing?
- What skill would make this situation easier?
- Who already knows how to do this well?
- What might they understand that I don’t yet?
These questions are more useful than treating every difficulty as evidence of a personal deficiency.
You have been doing the best you can with what you currently know.
That doesn’t mean you have to keep doing it.
The capacity to learn is a gift; the ability to learn is a skill; the willingness to learn is a choice. ~ Brian Herbert
What don’t you know yet?
You can’t answer that question directly.
That’s rather the point.
But the places where you repeatedly feel stuck can offer clues.
If you keep producing the same result despite your best efforts, there may be something about the pattern, the situation or yourself that you have not yet recognised.
That is not failure.
It is an invitation to become curious.
The Power of Personal Change is a six-day immersive NLP-based training that helps you notice more of what happens beneath your familiar reactions, communication habits and patterns.
It is designed as a useful course in its own right. There may also be an opportunity to continue into NLP Practitioner Training if enough people want to take the learning further.
You don’t need to know exactly what you’re missing before you arrive.
You couldn’t.
But being willing to discover it is a very good start.
A personal note
Learning about eye accessing cues in 1994 gave me one of those memorable moments when something that had always been visible suddenly became noticeable.
Since then, I’ve had many more.
A question I hadn’t thought to ask. A pattern I hadn’t recognised. A simple distinction that made me wonder how I’d managed without it.
That is still one of the things I enjoy most about learning.
Not collecting more information for the sake of it, but discovering something that changes what I notice and gives me more choice about what I do.
There will always be things I don’t know I don’t know.
Frankly, I’m quite pleased about that. Life would be incredibly dull if there were nothing left to discover.
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Tags: Change, Interpersonal skills, Learning and memory, Problem solving, Thinking and mindset
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