It’s OK to not know.
One of the stressors for me at work was customer meetings or meetings with senior stakeholders. Irrespective of whether I was actually preparing for the meeting or not, I could not do pretty much anything else on the day of the meeting. I wondered why it stressed me out so much and boiled it down to the fear of not knowing. Would I be unable to answer questions? Would they think I was a fake? An imposter who had somehow made it to this level?
My therapist would patiently ask me every time I told him I was stressed about an impending meeting- can everyone know everything? Can a single person know everything? Let’s take your boss- does he know everything? When he says he does not know the answer in a meeting, what do you think of him? – ‘he’s being honest without bullshitting, which is great’. However, when you say you don’t know, you are worried that they’ll think you are an imposter? Does that sound logical? He’d also say, with a touch of humour- ‘First of all, nobody has the time to think about you or how good or bad you are; they are busy thinking about themselves’.
Over time, my fear of having to say ‘I don’t know’ in a meeting and the associated stress, came down. Today, I’m much more calmer on the day of these meetings, and I don’t get stressed out as much. It still happens on some days and those are those one-off days, when my brain just refuses to recollect any of the learnings from my therapy. It’s like my mind telling me- ‘don’t come to me with all this nonsense. Today is my spa day. I’m going to be stressed.’ Other than those days, I’ve become better at dealing with these meetings.
The other thing that’s helped me out with getting my stress levels down with big meetings is visualising a positive outcome. I once had to present in a conference hosted by another company and I was representing my company. It was an online conference; covid times. I was stressed about this conference for almost a month; it wasn’t just that day. A week before the meeting I had a session with my therapist to deal specifically with this. He asked me to visualise myself presenting excellently, to a standing ovation, and asked me how it felt. I said it felt free and I was happy. He asked me to imagine myself sitting in a chair in that state, in that happy stress-free state after finishing the presentation, and look at the present me. ‘How does the present ‘you’ look?’ ‘I look stressed and tense’. ‘Doesn’t all the stress seem pointless to you, who’s completed the presentation successfully?’ ‘Yes. I don’t understand why I had to go through so much pain’. He then asked me to have a proper conversation- alternating between the future me and the present me. The entire experience drastically reduced my stress levels. I do this even now sometimes. If I sense that a meeting is stressing me out (yes, sometimes my mind camouflages it so well that I might not know what’s stressing me out), I visualise myself doing well in the meeting and try to experience that feeling. Helps me calm down significantly.
Coming back to not knowing. While my stress levels with meetings are now manageable, I still feel the need to know everything. I am in a techno-functional role, which means I need to be able to understand and influence technological decisions, without the need to have actually worked hands-on on a specific technology. However, I would subscribe to several trainings, all going really deep; hours and hours of trainings, but never do any of them. I do believe I can get as detailed as I want and I also feel the need to, driven by my fear of being caught wanting, but I’ve never completed a hands-on training till date. A cousin of mine had come down from another country, and he knew some of my stress stories. Having been through many of them himself (he is a good 10 or 12 years older than me I think), he wanted to see how I was doing. We met for dinner, and he coincidentally spoke about his fear of saying ‘I don’t know’. And we kept going deeper. There were similar patterns, including the training ones. An interesting insight from his exploration of why he wasn’t completing many of the trainings he had subscribed to, was the fear of finding out that he might actually not be capable of getting to that level of detail. By not taking the training, he was safe from finding out. It wasn’t the fear of not knowing. It was fear of failure.
It was a light bulb moment for me. It could definitely be one of the reasons why I wasn’t doing any of my trainings. My engineering major was electronics. However, we weren’t getting jobs in the field of electronics then, and the only way was to do a masters abroad. At that point in India, most job opportunities were with software companies. I took up a computer science certification course with a training company, and strongly believed that I could become a C/C++ programmer. However, I failed interviews after interviews, written tests after written tests. By then, it was 8 months since I completed my engineering and I had no job. A well-wisher referred me to a software company for a quality assurance position. I was hesitant to take up a software testing position, as I felt it was inferior to an actual software developer role. After all, I’m not the one writing the software. I was only testing it. However, I was pretty much in the dumps by then, and had asked everyone I could have possibly asked for a reference. I desperately needed a job, and I took it. Once I took the job, we had to go through some technical trainings. Based on the tests after the training, we were segregated into two groups- one team of testers were moved to the Research and Development team, which required some amount of programming even for quality assurance engineers, and another team of testers were moved to a customer focused team, which required slightly lesser technical knowledge. I was in the customer focused team and I was disappointed. That all of this turned out to be a good thing for me in the long run, is a different topic we will talk about some other time. The one year after engineering probably made me believe I’m not capable of doing a technical job. What was interesting throughout this time was that I always felt I was good technically and could be excellent if I wanted to, if I took the necessary training or effort, which of course I never did.
I wonder if I had made it into a coping mechanism for my failures in getting a technical job. It’s not that the customer focused team wasn’t technical; it just wasn’t as technical as the research and development group. This pattern continued in all my jobs; I would stay at the surface level, subscribe to a ton of trainings that will take me deep into the technology, strongly believe I’m capable of doing core technical work if I take the time to learn; but I never did. The pattern continues until today, in my current job. What a nice loop I have got myself into.
However, this is not the most important problem for me to solve. My current job does not require me to know technology to the level of a software developer. However, even at an more abstract level, there is so much that I can learn. I don’t have a middle ground though. If I have to learn more, it will be the most detailed course. So, the first thing I had to internalise was that I did not need to be that technical to do my job well and it was ok to say I don’t know if a question required me to have that level of knowledge. That’s what I’m working on now and it’s helped me keep my stress levels lower than before.
I still need to do one detailed training though. I need to know if I can do it, irrespective of whether the result goes this way or that way. And, I have found just the right course for it- 86 hours of detailed training videos! 🙂
