Embracing Not-Knowing

I confessed to a friend this weekend that as I start the healing farm, I don’t really know what I’m doing. He’s an entrepreneur and he told me that through starting multiple businesses, he hasn’t known what he was doing the whole time. He approaches problems with curiosity and openness and tries to learn as he goes. As a woman of color, the privilege to have space to make mistakes and recover from them is something that I have had to convince myself is mine. I have earned that privilege, and the risks I take belong to me.

After spending four years in medical school plus an extra research year, and then four years of residency so that I would absolutely know what I was doing in a variety of complicated situations, this new experience of conscious not-knowing feels a little seismic. The big difference is that nobody will die if I make a business mistake. Still, there is no handbook to turn to, no peer-reviewed study to guide decision-making, and no clinical guidelines to tell me what to do next. I wonder at times if medical education itself is stifling to innovation because we constantly learn and memorize what the literature tells us we should do. We become intensely risk averse and often don’t have the space for creative problem solving.

I’m developing my own top five principles for functioning reasonably when you don’t know what you’re doing. Here they are:

1)?????Write down your plan. Then read it and see if the plan seems reasonable. The rewrite your plan as you go. Make it pretty if you like graphics because it will seem more official if rendered visually pleasing.

2)?????Talk to people you trust often as problems arise. Build a tribe of confidants who understand your risk tolerance, your resources and your timeline and ask them the questions that keep you awake at night.

3)?????Do not rush. Actively practice alignment with true time, which does not follow a quarterly report cadence but is much deeper, more ancient, and more gradual. If you are doing something truly different it will just take time for people to understand it and get to know you and you must be patient. Giving up too soon is almost as bad as not starting at all.

4)?????Hold your vision as sacred. Our integrity and willingness to sacrifice to create the world we envision are the real source of goodness and change on this Earth. Fear can drive us to unconsciously undermine our vision for our lives. Imaginal exercises where you bask in the vision of what you are creating are critical to staying on the path. I sit back, close my eyes, and walk around the finished farm in my imagination. I see the people and the animals, the food forest and the pond. I hear the wind in the trees and smell the flowers and herbs. It’s magic.

5)?????Know your values. Write them down. If you aren’t sure what your personal values are, I recommend the Personal Values Card Sort exercise to whittle down which forces drive you. Live those values actively and enthusiastically – when you have a choice to make go back to the values and make the choice that reinforces them.

The process of turning vision into reality means venturing into the unknown. But as you do what seems right, you get to know yourself. The creative process demands experience, empirical knowledge and self-awareness – I consider it the best adventure imaginable. ????????