4.15 What to do when you don’t know what to do

One of the most paralysing thoughts in academia is “I don’t know what to do”. Whether it’s about your next career move or how to analyse your data or what argument you want to emphasise, we can get stuck in the “don’t knows” for weeks or months. In this episode I help you break “I don’t know” down into “I can find out”, “I can’t know”, and “I get to decide”, so that you can plan a route forwards. Perfect for anyone who is bored of feeling stuck in indecision!

If you liked this episode, you should check out my episode on how to use a “do know don’t know” list.

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I'm Dr Vikki Wright, ex-Professor and certified life coach and I help everyone from PhD students to full Professors to get a bit less overwhelmed and thrive in academia. Please make sure you subscribe, and I would love it if you could find time to rate, review and tell your friends! You can send them this universal link that will work whatever the podcast app they use. http://pod.link/1650551306?i=1000695434464

I also host a free online community for academics at every level. You can sign up on my website, The PhD Life Coach. com - you'll receive regular emails with helpful tips and access to free online group coaching every single month! Come join and get the support you need.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach Podcast and this week we are gonna be talking about a phrase that comes up in my coaching program all the time. And that is the phrase I don't know. You probably hear yourself say this a lot as well in the context of all sorts of things. I don't know where to start. I don't know if I can get this all done. I don't know what argument I'm trying to make. I don't know whether to go to the conference. I don't know if I'm ready to apply for promotion. I don't know if I'll pass my Viva. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.

And the problem with that phrase, and we've touched on it in the podcast before, the problem with that phrase is that it is just infinitely paralyzing. When we tell ourselves we simply don't know something, it becomes almost impossible to decide what we're gonna do next. And what we usually do is when we think, I don't know, we think therefore I can't decide what to do, then we end [00:01:00] up feeling some really uncomfortable emotions, right?

We feel overwhelmed, we feel anxious, we feel worried, whatever it might be. When we feel negative emotions, we all know, or at least any of you who have been here, when I've been talking about procrastination, when we feel uncomfortable emotions, the tendency is to try and avoid them. So what happens is we tell ourselves we don't know something then we feel uncomfortable emotions, and then we avoid those uncomfortable emotions by doing something different, whatever it is for you, I'm a scroller, I have to say. So we avoid our uncomfortable emotions by scrolling and then at the end of the day, we still don't know. We're still no closer to knowing, but now we're also beating ourselves up about the fact that we've wasted the day procrastinating.

If that sounds like you don't worry. This is totally, totally normal. It happens all the time, whether you are a PhD student or all the way through to full professor or anything in between. There are so many things that it feels like we don't know and that we should be able to know [00:02:00] that it can be really, really overwhelming.

What I'm gonna do in this episode is help you break down that sensation of, I don't know, into four different types of, I don't know. And from there, once we've identified which type of, I don't know we are in, it's a lot easier to start planning a way forward.

So what are these four categories that I've identified? Well, the first is, I don't know, but I could know. So this is, I don't know if that journal accepts qualitative research or I don't know if it's possible to apply for that job when I have a PhD, but I don't have postdoctoral experience or a publication or whatever, or I don't know what the word limit of my PhD thesis is. So these are issues where there's something that actually is identifiable, [00:03:00] that is objectively true in some sort of meaningful way, and which you are able to find out at the moment. You may not know it right now and you may not fully see what routes there are to you finding it out, but it would be possible to find it out.

So these are usually to do with rules and regulations or specific ways to do things where there is a set way to do it. How to perform a particular analysis for example. Whether an archive has the thing you want to find there. If we identify this as a, you know what, there actually is a objective truth here somewhere, then we can spin our brain off into, okay, how do I find out? Who might know about this? Where can I go to figure this stuff out? What do I need to do? What are the steps I need to take to identify the answer? To move from, I don't know, [00:04:00] to, I do know. Identifying that there actually is an objective answer out there makes it so much easier to then start brainstorming about how you can figure it out and how you can move forward.

The second category are things where we don't know and we will find out, but we can't know right now. So these are things like, I don't know if my PhD is good enough. I don't know if my article will get published. I don't know if my promotion will be accepted. So there is an answer. It's just not accessible right now.

And the problem with that is where there is an answer and it's not accessible right now, we can often feel quite discombobulated, right? We can feel quite uncomfortable where we're having to work towards something that [00:05:00] we don't know if it's going to work. This can also be true if you are doing analysis and things where there's maybe not a right way. Maybe you are developing a new methodology or something like that, and you are having to kind of figure it out. You will find out whether this way of measuring whatever it is you're measuring is working or not, right? Say we're doing lab work, for example, you will find out at some point whether you get a meaningful result, but you don't know yet.

And in these situations, what we get to do is we get to accept that there are gonna be some uncomfortable emotions associated with the not knowing bit. Often we want to know because we want to take away those uncomfortable emotions, that sort of feeling of certainty and confusion and stuff, we're often not used to tolerating that, and so we sort of convince ourselves somehow that if only I knew this was gonna work, it would be fine. Or if only I [00:06:00] knew whether I was gonna get the job or not, it would be okay.

What we often then do in these situations is we look for reassurance, right? If we are not sure that our paper's gonna get accepted, we, you know, go on our co-authors or our bosses or whatever to reassure us that they think it's good enough. We get 20 different people to read it so they can reassure us that it probably will be good enough. And in actual fact, none of those things really help 'cause they can't tell you that it's definitely good enough. They can only give you their advice, and in many ways it just doesn't actually fix the uncomfortable feelings at all.

The magic here is accepting that we don't have to fix those uncomfortable feelings. That we can tolerate the uncertainty of not knowing whether we are gonna pass or not, whether we're gonna get the job or not, whether we're gonna get promoted or not, that we can tolerate that uncertainty and therefore we can live in a world where we don't know that yet.

Now, how do we do that? [00:07:00] Part of it is about being kind to ourselves, so it is not sort of spiraling and making it very dramatic the consequences of it not being okay. Part of it is having faith that whatever happens, future you is gonna figure it out. So one of the things I often say, whether it's work related things or home related things, is we cross that bridge when we come to it. So well known phrase for a good reason because when we try and sort of cross all the bridges before we even get to them, you don't know what problems you're solving. And so many ways what we end up doing is kind of solving every eventuality, which is awful, right?

So we end up in this situation where it's like if that article gets rejected from there, then I'm gonna submit it to this one. But if it gets rejected there as well, then it's gonna be this one, but then I'm gonna need to shorten it or lengthen it or change the framing of it, or whatever it might be. But then if it does get accepted, then this is gonna be a, you know, you can hear from my voice how exhausting it is to try and cover off every eventuality, and that's what [00:08:00] happens when we get ahead of ourselves on these paths. We don't even know what bridge we need to cross, yet we're trying to plan for all of them in the mistaken belief that we think it will help us feel better.

It doesn't, we have to be able to stay here and say, at the moment, I can tolerate the uncertainty of not knowing. I can reassure myself that whatever happens, I will figure it out when I get there and that it's okay not to know at the moment.

And what we then get to do is we get to say to ourselves, okay, if I can't know at the moment, whether this is gonna be okay, if I can't know at the moment what the outcome is going to be, how do I want to behave in that period of not knowing? What sort of person do I want to show up as? What kind of thoughts do I want to be saying to myself? What kind of actions do I want to be taking? And from there, we get to look after ourselves during this period of [00:09:00] unknowing, and then we indirectly make it feel more comfortable because suddenly we are moving in a way that is coherent with the person that we wanna be, that feels authentic, that feels like our future self, even though we don't know.

As an example, if you are coming up to your Viva or a promotion interview or something like that, and you don't know if you're gonna get it or not, what do you want to have done between now and then in the not knowing? What actions do you wanna take? How do you wanna reassure yourselves? What emotions do you wanna be trying to induce in yourself to support yourself through that unknowing and to have as positive as possible an influence on that outcome?

Because that's the thing we have to remember. One of the reasons that we don't know what's gonna happen is that there are so many variables, and some of them you are in control of, not all of them, [00:10:00] right? Which is why no one can ever reassure you fully. We are not in control of what the interviewer says, what the viva examiner says but there is a bunch that we are in control of, and that's the bit we get to focus on when we stop trying to fix the uncertainty with certainty, and instead try and support the uncertainty with kind of care and sensible actions forward.

So we've got, so far, we've got the, I don't know where it's possible to know, and I'm gonna go and find out. We've got the, I don't know yet, but I will know in the future. Okay. Where we get to decide what we're gonna do in the meantime. The third type of, I don't know, I want to talk about today is the, I don't know, and I'll probably never know stuff.

This can be some of the hardest to get used to because it can really spin in your brain and there's [00:11:00] no point in your life at which you will know for sure, and the problem is, this is, to be honest, most of the big questions in our lives. Was it the right thing to take this job instead of that job? Will it be the right thing to move countries or to not move countries, to stay at the same institution, to pursue this line of research instead of that line of research? Now, we'll obviously get some subjective information in the future when we see whether we like where we are, whether we're enjoying the research and all of those things, but we'll never know for sure whether it was the best decision or not because we didn't take the other decision.

You can't decide whether staying in this country was a better decision than moving to a different country because you didn't do the other one. You don't know how it would've worked out if you had done the other one. It's the same as big personal decisions, you know, is this the right [00:12:00] person to marry? Is this the best possible person to marry? Well, we don't know 'cause we didn't live all the other lives. So what we get to do here when we identify that this is something where there is no knowing, then we get to make our decisions from that place. And I have a whole episode about how to make decisions that you love, in fact, I have it as a workshop that I run for universities as well. So how to make decisions that you love. So if you are thinking, okay, there's decisions I need to make that I will probably never know whether it was the right decision, best decision, or whatever, then I would really recommend that episode. 

Now some of these become an I get to decide problem, which is my fourth category of don't knows, which I'll talk about in a second. But not all of them will. Some of them are gonna be things like I don't know if my supervisor rates me or not. I don't know if my head of school likes me. These sorts of things [00:13:00] you are probably never gonna know. Maybe something will happen at some point that will convince you one way or the other, but usually when it comes to other people's opinions of you, things like that, we are never going to know. And so it's really useful to practice being okay not knowing, and again, this is an example of where the trying to find out in order to reassure yourself can make it worse. So this is where we end up being needy with people. Do you like me? Do you like me? Can I come to this? Do you want to come to that? You my friend, are you really? Do you love me? All that stuff. None of that makes you more attractive, right? None of that makes people wanna spend time with you. But that's us trying to shore up our own sort of self-esteem by feeling more certain about these things. When instead where we can identify that this is a, I'll never know for sure problem then we get to [00:14:00] ask ourselves, how do I look after myself? How do I look after myself when I'll never know for sure whether this was the best thing I could have done and whether I'll never know for sure what these people think of me.

Again, we then get to say, okay, how do I look after myself in that environment? What do I wanna say to myself? What emotions do I wanna induce in myself? What actions do I want to take? What sort of person do I want to be when I'm not sure? This is something, especially the, what do people think of me? Think This is something that I struggled with a lot, especially growing up, but even into a long way into my adulthood, to be honest. I think it is part of having a, not really a DHD diagnosis. But lots of tendencies in that direction. People have lots of opinions about whether you talk too much, whether you interrupt too much, whether you do this too much, that too much, whether you don't do this. Yeah, you get lots of opinions. I don't have super strong rejection sensitivity. I do to some extent, but not as bad as some people with A DHD have [00:15:00] it but as I got to understand. This all better and understand myself better. One of the things I decided was I'm just gonna assume people like me it 'cause it just struck me that it doesn't really help to behave in any other way.

Now, does that mean I force myself on people? No, absolutely. I vaguely read a room. You know, if you are not making tons and tons of effort to spend time with me or to talk to me, that's fine. Uh, you know, happy days, whatever. But I'm not gonna assume it means you hate me. I'm gonna, you know, my baseline assumption is that people like me and also that if you don't, that's okay too, because there's a lot of people... I was about to say, there's a lot of people I don't like. I don't think they're actually, I don't think that's actually true. There are a bunch of people I dislike. There are elements of a bunch of people I [00:16:00] dislike. I don't think I'm someone who really dislikes lots and lots of people. But there's people, right? We all got people. And so if I'm allowed to dislike people, then people are allowed to dislike me too. So that's one of the ways that I've kind of managed that uncertainty of not knowing what people think of me, is to kind of act as though I assume people like me and to try not to ruminate too much if evidence to the contrary comes up. Is it easy? Not always, but as a general rule of thumb, that has really, really helped me.

Now that's the, I don't know, and I'll never know stuff. And then the fourth group is the, I don't know, but I get to decide group. And to be honest, this is the biggest group of all. There are some things that we'll never know. There are some things that we'll know in time we can't know now, and there are some things where there's a truly factual answer, but the vast [00:17:00] majority of things fall into the, I don't know, but I get to decide category. And this is essentially anything to do with choosing a direction moving forward.

So this can be what research to focus on, how to make your argument, what to do first. Most of the, I don't knows, that you have in your life are I get to decide things. I don't know if I should do this or I should do that. I don't know if I should apply for promotion this year or next year. I don't know if I should change institution. These are all I get to decide problems. Will we ever know if it was the right decision? No. Is there such a thing as a right decision? Probably not, but we get to decide. And when we really grasp that, suddenly we get to start asking ourselves, how am I gonna decide, on what basis am I gonna decide? What do I want to prioritize? What's important to me right now? What sort of person do I want to [00:18:00] be?

One of the biggest causes of, I dunno what to do, is getting conflicting opinions. So particularly as a PhD student, but even into your academic career, one person's saying, oh, you should focus on this. And someone's saying, focus on that. Or someone saying, include this stuff or exclude that stuff. You're like, I dunno what to do. I'm getting different advice. That is the perfect example of a, you get to decide problem. If people have got different opinions on it, that is like living proof that there's not one right way. That if that one person was in charge, they'd have done that and if that person was in charge, they'd have done something completely different. And you get to decide.

So those are my four different types of, don't knows. I don't know but there is an objective answer that I can find out. I don't know, but I will know at some point in the future. I don't know and there's no way to ever find out and I don't know, but I get to decide. If you can pick apart your particular problem, I want you to think [00:19:00] now, what do I keep telling myself I don't know about? Pick which of those it is. And then you get to explore what your route forward from there can be.

Before we finish, I'm gonna take one example that people often find difficult to put into one of these thing categories, and that is, I don't know if I've got time to do this. So let's work it through. Is it a, there's an objective answer to this? Possibly. So the first step would be to figure that out. Is there an objective amount of time that this thing takes? So is it fixed scope, fixed quality, and therefore a kind of predictable amount of time? Is there a way of knowing that?

Often there's not, right? Often there's a variety of different scopes and qualities, and sometimes we work faster than others when we're up against the deadline or whatever, but [00:20:00] you can go, you know what, actually it takes me two hours to process each person's data. I've got 200 people, I've got this many hours. Actually, this just isn't possible. So it is useful if you are asking yourself, I don't know if I have time to do this, to say, okay, is there a way that this is actually quantifiable that I could work out whether it is or isn't possible. Now, usually it's hard to say it is possible, but you should be able to work out whether it is objectively not possible.

This is always particularly relevant for those of you who are balancing PhD with other full-time part-time work. If there's not an objective answer, we get to say, is there, is this a problem where we will know at some point?

Well, yes. When we hit the deadline and we either have or haven't done it, we're gonna find out then whether it was possible to do it or not. However, because of the way our silly little brains work, there will still probably be a part of you that are saying, oh, but if I had done this, then it would've been possible. [00:21:00] If I'd just worked hard, if I'd stayed up later, if I'd been more focused, if I'd procrastinated less, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.

So is it gonna be possible at some point in the future to know whether you did do it or not? Yes. Absolutely. We will find that out in the future. Will you ever know for sure whether you could have done it? No. That falls into the, I don't know whether it would've been possible and I can't know because I can't do all the versions of it, so I don't know whether it was possible or not. The only way I guess we get a definitive answer is if you do get it done and then you know it was possible.

So then what we get to say is, okay, I either need to accept that i'm gonna find out at some point, and I need to decide how I'm gonna behave in the meantime or we get to decide whether I'm giving it time or not, and I would always recommend you go this way. Most people go for the, okay, I'm either gonna stress about the fact that I don't have time to do this, [00:22:00] or I'm just gonna have a go and see how I get on. So that's the deciding. It's a, I'll find out at some point if I have enough time, and in the meantime I wanna work hard answer.

Okay. There's nothing inherently wrong with that way of doing it. The problem is it does often lead to burnout. It often leads to overwork. It often leads to other stuff getting neglected because you're putting everything into this one thing that you don't know whether it's possible or not.

I would always encourage you to consider, I don't know if I have time to do this or not a I get to decide problem. The reason for that is most tasks don't have an objective amount of time that they take, and most lives don't have an objective amount of stuff that has to be done. Now you might feel like it does. Okay. Often there's a lot of things that we do with our lives that we just take for granted as have to be done, where actually it's, it's often [00:23:00] not true.

You know, if you are somebody who has to walk for an hour every day, there's lots of people who don't walk for an hour every day. If you are somebody who has to cook, cook all their kids' meals from fresh, there are lots of people who don't cook all their kids' meals from fresh. Many of these things are decisions. Okay. The reason I really like going for the, I don't know if I have time as being an I get to decide problem is because what you then get to do is you get to decide, okay, how many hours do I have access to that I am willing to give this, that I am able to give this, what am I able or willing to stop doing in order to buy myself some more hours?

How fast or how limited in scope or quality am I willing to do this in order to get it done? And then I get to decide whether I want to do that or not. It might be that sometimes you get to decide that you wanna put more of your own resource into it, that you wanna work more hours than you normally would in order to get this thing done, in which [00:24:00] case we then get to decide how we look after ourselves.

Or it might be that you get to decide that you are gonna limit the scope of it, or you are gonna limit the quality of the piece of work that you are doing, or that you get to decide, you're gonna have to just be decisive on your first idea and go with it. For example, rather than exploring all the different ways this could be written. We get to decide how long things take.

So I would always encourage you to make the, I don't know if I have time for this problem as an I get to decide how much time I'm giving it and therefore what it's gonna look like by the end. If you have other examples, if you can think of, I don't know, questions that you have that you can't fit into one of those four categories, I want you to let me know and I will help you out.

So all of you who are already on my newsletter know this, but if you're not, you can sign up for my newsletter on my website, and then every week you'll get [00:25:00] an email from me, which tells you about the podcast, but also gives you the opportunity to reply to me, ask any questions, follow up, tell me anything you disagree with. I'm an academic. I love nothing better than people disagreeing with me about things. So if you can think of a problem where you are saying, this is an I don't know problem, and I don't think it's any one of those four. Let me know and I will reply to you and I'll talk about it in a future episode. I hope that helps you see a route forward from that kind of place of confusion. Thank you all for listening, and I will see you next week.