If you didn’t ask… “Know Enough For what?!” then you can consider that you are trapped, at the moment, by the question in the title.
That was the purpose of the title, by the way. To trap you.
While you read your article, to get the most out of it, allow yourself to find yourself in my experience, instead of agree or not agree… OK?
Every person with a mind (that is every person alive!) moves back and forth on a continuum (scale) of knowing enough or not knowing enough… Some days you feel you know everything, on others you feel you know nothing.
But the important times to watch are when the knowledge that is either enough or not enough is necessary for a task, for a job at hand.
Let me share with you an experience I had. Four years after I graduated as an architect (it’s a master’s degree, by the way) I found myself not trusting myself.
I was in a job where I had to do a lot of presentations at meetings, and after a while I asked a co-worker to do it for me. I trained her to say whatever I had to say, and then we went to meetings together. It was intolerable time to sit in those meetings, knowing that I was supposed to do the presentation and I could not.
I was depressed, and devastated. A doctor who was an amateur hypnotist offered to help. I didn’t know anything about hypnosis, other than it was a trick.
He came to my house, wiggled his pocket watch, put me into a state (he said), but obviously, to me, he was failing, because I could feel his bad breath.
I heard everything that he said… and he kept repeating the words, without any change, either in content or in inflection of the voice: “You have everything you need to do your job”
Was I hypnotized? I don’t know. I know one thing, from the distance of 40 years: I snapped out of looking at myself as someone who was lacking knowledge to do my job, to someone who had the knowledge to do my job.
The truth was that I had the knowledge, after all I trained that co-worker to say what I needed to say.
What I didn’t have is the right perspective. I was looking at all the things I could know, should know, might learn… instead of matching the job and the knowledge, and find the knowledge sufficient.
You also fall into this mistake, this trap a lot. You are afraid to put yourself on the playing field because you pay attention to all the things that you don’t have, that are wrong with you, all the things you lack.
The other question I could ask: Are you smart enough? And we can go through the same “exercise” where you’ll find that you are looking at all the things you are not smart enough for… and not the things that are in front of you, like your job, like the course you paid hundreds of dollars for… and you now have doubts about being able to do… because your perspective is completely off.
One of the most impactful demonstrations I have ever seen, and then had a chance to participate in, is the tennis ball experiment.
the tennis ball experiment
In part one of that experiment a smart but clumsy person is asked to play catch with the leader of the experiment.
The clumsy person, true to form, drops the balls consistently.
In part two, the game changes: the game is now to indicate to the leader of the experiment which direction the ball was spinning… catching the ball is not important.
The clumsy person is very apt at getting and seeing the spin. After a few balls she catches the ball to prevent it from going all the way back to the corner of the room… and throws it back to the experiment leader.
In the new context, which direction the ball is spinning, clumsy doesn’t exist, and it doesn’t show up.
What happened in this experiment is that the perspective was skillfully altered, and in the new perspective the clumsy person was very capable… which pretty much means, there is no clumsy in reality… only inside a certain context, a certain perspective.
Oh, and returning to the story of the hypnosis session: the next day and from that day on, I didn’t need anyone to do my presentations for me: I successfully altered my perspective to see that I indeed had what I needed to get the job done.
Was I hypnotized? I don’t know. But I know that changing perspective is one of the highest prized skills you can learn.
how do YOU change your perspective?
I teach one great version of it in the Instant Coherence workshop, and we practice many forms of it in the Playground workshop.
You are welcome to come.
