When Knowing Overreaches

We spend years learning how to know.

Education, development and immersion in human complexity give us theories, frameworks, methods and nuanced ways of interpreting what may be happening. We grow attuned to subtleties. Patterns register sooner. We acquire language for what once felt indistinct, alongside tacit knowledge from situations lived, witnessed or explored with others.

Yet there is a paradox here. As our repertoire expands, early conclusions form more readily. We perceive differences that once escaped us while, at the same time, genuine not-knowing may prove harder to sustain.

So the question is not simply how much we know, but what happens to our ‘knowing’ once another person enters the space.

The Authority of Knowing

Knowing carries currency. Credibility is frequently associated with an ability to explain, assess, anticipate, advise or solve. Even in coaching, where partnership rather than prescription is fundamental, it can be surprisingly difficult to loosen the expectation that our competence ought to be apparent.

Through mentor coaching, coach education and exchanges with colleagues, I have heard fears of appearing foolish, underachieving or falling short. Perfectionism, overthinking and imposter dynamics can intensify the impulse to foresee where things are heading. 

This rarely announces itself. It can manifest in a question carrying an unspoken hypothesis, an approach adopted because the circumstances seem to fit, an inference made fractionally too soon, or an internal assurance that we have grasped what the other person means.

None of this requires poor intent. It may arise precisely because we care about being of service.

The urge to contribute can propel us towards premature certainty.

The Paradox of Accumulation

A novice is often acutely aware of not knowing. With time comes a less obvious predicament: what has been absorbed can recede from conscious awareness while quietly guiding our focus.

Research provides an interesting analogue. Camerer, Loewenstein and Weber called one such phenomenon the “curse of knowledge”: once people hold information, they can find it difficult to disregard what they know when considering someone without the same information. Their experiments concerned economic decision-making rather than coaching, so direct transfer warrants caution. The underlying proposition is nevertheless intriguing: what we know alters how we read what is before us.

For an experienced coach, the present inevitably carries traces of former clients, recurring themes, theoretical constructs, remembered outcomes, implicit appraisal and years spent accompanying other people's thinking. These resources allow finer distinctions, yet we never arrive untouched by what has preceded us.

This is where resemblance can exert disproportionate influence. A client's story evokes a previous client. An organisational dilemma recalls a past situation. A phrase summons an established concept. What someone describes resonates strongly with our own history.

The sense of knowing arrives quickly. Whether it is well-founded takes longer.

Maturity, then, may depend upon discerning when accumulated knowledge should wait.

When Proximity Distorts

I am particularly alert when a client's account echoes my life. The correspondence can produce immediacy, giving an impression that I know the terrain. It can also reduce the distance between their reality and mine.

When I first considered the not-knowing stance, I treated such moments as a cue for curiosity. I now think curiosity is necessary but insufficient. The task is to examine what my first reading has excluded.

What have I foregrounded? What am I no longer hearing? What has become persuasive because it aligns with something already known to me? Whose meaning is directing the exchange?

The issue reaches beyond coaching. A colleague’s reluctance can seem self-explanatory to a leader. A parent anticipates what their child is about to say. A clinician sees symptoms that appear to indicate a diagnosis. A teacher attributes a pupil's disengagement to a plausible cause.

Prior knowledge is indispensable in each case. Distrusting it would be illogical. But the moment something feels convincing may be exactly when inquiry is warranted.

Intellectual Humility Is Not Intellectual Absence

Scholarship on intellectual humility complicates the assumption that certainty accompanies capability. Although definitions vary, there is broad agreement that it includes acknowledging the limitations and potential fallibility of one's own beliefs. It does not imply indecision or feigned ignorance.

A study involving physicians working amid profound uncertainty connected humility with receptiveness to other perspectives and a readiness to revise their view as evidence changes. Confidence and uncertainty need not, therefore, occupy opposite ends of a continuum.

This gives not-knowing a more exacting intellectual basis. It is neither an empty state awaiting an answer nor a performance of modesty. It is an epistemic position: what I know may be relevant without being exhaustive; one interpretation can be tenable without being definitive; conviction can coexist with corrigibility.

Not-knowing is not an abdication of knowledge.

It is a refusal to give knowledge authority it has not yet earned.

The Seduction of Usefulness

Another tension sits beneath all of this. We want to matter.

In The Human Behind the Coach, Claire Pedrick and Lucia Baldelli pose an important challenge in a few words: “More of you is not necessarily better.”

The implication is uncomfortable: how much of what we do serves the person before us, and how much reassures us that our presence is worthwhile?

An incisive reflection, a timely prompt, a compelling connection or a trusted model might deepen the session. Equally, each can relieve our own unease when clarity is elusive. Telling the difference is not always straightforward.

British improviser and writer Pippa Evans draws a parallel with improvisation, where the course is not predetermined. She argues that complete control compromises the capacity to adapt and create in the moment. In improvisation, what comes next cannot be fully prepared because the material to which one will respond does not yet exist.

Neither, quite often, does the next part of a coaching conversation.

The Problem with Arriving Too Soon

In coach education, I introduce the phrase avoid surging too early.

I once understood this primarily as avoiding pre-emptive movement towards solutions: staying with uncertainty long enough for what is actually at stake to emerge. My thinking has shifted. The distortion can begin sooner.

We may participate in deciding too quickly what the problem is.

Tiredness may signify more than a condition to overcome. A contradiction can contain meaning that disappears when we reconcile it. Silence may be doing what a question would interrupt. An outcome identified at the outset can lose its relevance in light of what follows.

Restraint is not passivity. Direction need not precede meaning-making.

Perhaps the test lies in tolerating the absence of immediate confirmation.

The Edges of Knowing

Years of learning enlarge what we know. They can also expose what knowing cannot settle: another person's interiority, the significance they may eventually attribute to an event, what has yet to surface, even what a session is about before enough time has been given to discover it.

A not-knowing stance asks for neither the abandonment of what we have learned nor the suppression of insight. It changes the weight we give to what we know. An observation can remain provisional rather than be defended. What we perceive need not become a template into which another person is placed. Existing knowledge can inform our attention without deciding in advance what we will find. The unresolved does not always demand resolution.

This asks considerably more of us than curiosity. It calls for discipline, intellectual humility, discernment and the confidence to remain corrigible.

Increasing knowledge need not culminate in greater certainty. It may instead make the limits of our knowing harder to ignore.

The question is not whether we have something useful to offer. It is whether we can resist offering it before it becomes useful.

Kirsty Knowles

Founder of Think Being®

Accredited Coach, Facilitator, Mentor Coach, Coach Educator, Consultant & Board Director of Professional and Personal Development at UK ICF

Co-creating Change & Development for Mindset, Leadership and Culture

With dynamic style, sense of play, and intuitive practice, Kirsty co-creates an engaging thinking partnership for personal or professional mindset, leadership and culture development. She fosters self-discovery to surface what has fallen into shadow, and agency for future-fit impact across different domains of life. It surpasses technique; it’s about being fully by your side. Kirsty is advancing the profession through daring dialogue.

References

Camerer, C., Loewenstein, G. & Weber, M. (1989). The curse of knowledge in economic settings: An experimental analysis. Journal of Political Economy, 97(5), 1232–1254. https://doi.org/10.1086/261651

Michalec, B., Papanagnou, D., Raj, L., Lundgren, H., Watkins, K. E., Marsick, V. J., Ziring, D. & Vaid, U. (2025). Exploring the presence and roles of humility when experiencing situations of uncertainty. AEM Education and Training, 9(1), e11055. https://doi.org/10.1002/aet2.11055 

Pedrick, C. & Baldelli, L. (2023). The Human Behind the Coach. Open University Press.

Porter, T., Elnakouri, A., Meyers, E. A., Shibayama, T., Jayawickreme, E. & Grossmann, I. (2022). Predictors and consequences of intellectual humility. Nature Reviews Psychology, 1, 524–536. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-022-00081-9