July 14, 2025 by Ekaterina Kuznetsova

Why You Don’t Need All the Answers to Move Forward

Who am I? What do I want? What will I never agree to? Until the age of 25, I thought I knew it all: I felt confident, self-reliant, and free.

I had always known myself as someone who was calm, knew what they did and why they did. From deciding what to eat for lunch to moving to a new house or choosing a job. I made decisions fast and reached the goals fast. I rarely was stuck in not knowing. Not knowing what to do, what I wanted, what I needed. I thought that I knew myself, and that would prevent me from getting confused or stuck. At that point of life, it was indeed working out just fine.

Then things started shifting. The interesting and not easy period of my life started when I was 25. That’s what people usually call crisis and transition, transformation even. When there are new needs and desires, but the tools you have to fulfil those are still old and do not help with this new situation. So there’s a huge ask for finding new ways, for a change.

And this was the time when there was no “knowing” anymore. And that was freaking me out. After doing a lot of introspective work, with the help of mental health specialists and in my coaching and counselling education, I uncovered why it was so hard for me to be in the “not knowing” and was able to reshape my perspectives on this. More on my journey’ with the discomfort of not knowing — in one of the next posts. Here I want to summarize the key insights — my new way of looking at the “knowing”.

Note: it’s my personal journey, and I am not here yet with “having it all figured out’ (no one ever would be). These are just my thoughts at this moment, not the final truth. If this resonates and helps — I’m happy. If it doesn’t — that is also perfectly fine. We are all different, and different things can speak to you, also at different moments in life. So please feel free to say ‘this is not how I feel and see it”, and share your own views — that’s the best part. This article is just an invitation to pause and look inside: how is it for you?

So here are the key points and questions to reflect on:

• What if there is no perfect solution to know? What if you never know? How would that feel?
• Knowing is an illusion. Doing and seeing what happens is the reality.
• Taking an action (any small and imperfect action) is the only way to find out. There’s a thin line between being considerate of others and consequences (while still doing) AND trying to forecast the outcome of every action without acting. The knowing expands only when you do and experiment. There’s a lot of good in thinking, but no growth in being stuck in a fantasy.
• You don’t need to know to act. You don’t need to know to say. You don’t need to know to try and find out.
• You are allowed to choose something and find out that you don’t want it anymore. There is no shame in not knowing. There is no shame in changing your mind. There is no shame in making a mistake or failing.
• There’s a huge power in just being able to notice the things that are already there. If you analyze too much, you’re too busy to notice what you already know. As one of my teachers was always saying: “when you know — you know”.
• It’s more about curiosity, openness to notice and experiment – much less about knowing.

How do you feel about these thoughts? Let’s talk. Let’s connect and exchange our views.