New Beginnings: The Beauty of Not Knowing

In much of the Northern Hemisphere, schools and universities return after the summer months, and a new year begins. It’s a time for students to learn new things and become a little wiser.

It can feel like a second New Year, one that many of us sense even when we are no longer part of the new beginnings of an academic year.

So, if we run with the idea that autumn is your ‘New Year’ season, I invite you to take a moment and ask: what is it I actually want to be doing? And who do I want to be as I do it?

Where Coaching Begins

As you sit with those questions, I want to think about what often brings someone to coaching in the first place. They’ve had enough of how things are, what they’re doing isn’t working anymore, and they want something to change.

Naturally, that feeling comes in different intensities. What about you? How dissatisfied are you with the way things are right now?

This dissatisfaction can be a powerful driver for change.

But fear can spring up before we even take the first step. How do you know that what you want will come to fruition? What would your life look like? What do you need to do? Who would you even be if you changed? Can you do it? What would it ask of you?

All those thoughts are exhausting, and they can hold you back. In coaching, we acknowledge both the trepidation and the desire for a new beginning. Where are you now, and what do you want?

We explore the bigger picture: how would you like things to be different, and why? Why that, and why now?

That ‘why’ helps uncover the emotional reason underneath the desire. The goal stops being another item on a to-do list and becomes something you genuinely care about creating.

There is another, deeper question here too. Not just what do you want to do, but who do you want to become?

Because creating change isn’t only about the end goal. It’s also about how you show up each day and the choices and actions you take to move towards it.

This is why I consider coaching to be a creation. You are making something new for yourself: a life, yes, but also a self. And it is yours to create and shape as you wish.

Being Okay With Not Knowing

At the start of something new and of becoming someone new, we have to be willing not to know how it will turn out.

We cannot predict the future, and that uncertainty can be uncomfortable. Our brains don’t particularly like it either. They prefer certainty and naturally try to minimise uncertainty to keep us safe, often treating the unknown as a low-level threat.

So, the flutter of apprehension you feel at the edge of change is simply your brain trying to look after you. It is not a sign that you aren’t ready.

If you’d like to explore this concept further, I have a FREE course: Rewire Your Brain for Sustainable Change.

The trouble is, if you wait for that discomfort to pass before you begin, you may never take the first step.

We need to be okay with not knowing and with some of the discomfort that comes with it. This is what the poet John Keats called ‘negative capability’: the ability to stay “in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

The Blank Page

Think of a beautiful new, unopened journal. There is nothing in it yet. It’s full of possibility and potential, but all those empty pages can also feel intimidating.

What do you write? What do you create? What if you do it wrong?

Or we can embrace the blank page. With nothing written yet, anything could be, and what goes onto those pages is entirely yours to decide.

Your new beginning is that blank page.

It gives you the opportunity to write something you actually want and to become someone you actually want to be, rather than carrying on with a story that no longer fits who you are growing into.

So maybe this September, as our second New Year, it’s worth sitting with a few questions:

And if it’s the uncertainty of change that tends to hold you back, my FREE Rewire Your Brain for Sustainable Change course explores why our brains can resist change and how we can work with them, rather than against them.