where are you not admitting what you know?
a mentor once told me that whenever people ask for clarity, it’s usually courage, not clarity, that they lack.
does that ring true for you?
it certainly rang a gong for me.
my whole life i’ve been pretending not to know what i know, have you?
many of us grew up in families where things were happening that we were not allowed to speak of or give voice to.
sometimes it’s because only we seem to know it. and it can be embarrassing to be the only person in a room of people who knows the direction that things will really go regardless, long before the rest of them know it.
it can also seem pointless to say something that perhaps is brand new without proven facts to back it up. i think this is one reason i stayed in school so long: the more i studied, the more i read, and the more likely i was to come across research that supported my conclusions. and maybe if i cited a study, they’d believe me when i said it.
and man, did i like my studies, especially the social science experiments i read. in the early weeks of dating someone new, i can remember him saying, “i don’t think i’ve ever met someone who had a favorite experiment before. especially one who talks about it in bed.”
he meant that as a compliment, so i married him.
for years, back in the days of paper, we maintained his and her piles of clippings in the house. one with articles i clipped to convince him of something, the other with articles he clipped to convince me of something.
but why did i have to have an article to bolster my point? why couldn’t it just be something i knew? i mean, at work, yes, maybe i need to prove my point, but in other settings, can’t i just know?
don’t get me wrong, just because we know and know that we know doesn’t mean the people around us will get it. part of the invitation to stand in our own truth may be letting go of a need for someone else to validate that truth.
in ralph waldo emerson’s influential essay “self-reliance,” emerson says that when we read something or hear something that strikes us as genius, it does because it matches our intuition. it matches what we already know to be true.
of course, here i go again, using a great master to prove my point.
what do you think of all this? please put your thoughts and experiences about knowing your truth when others don’t in the comments or email me.
maybe you’re not crazy; you’re just getting there before others do.
I like to call it‘natural knowing’ or intuition, but I have learned to trust it implicitly. most of the time I don’t try to convince anyone else. but for managing my own affairs, I follow my gut. failure to do so has cost me in the past, so I just do it. actually, i hesitate to move forward until i get that inner guidance!