As I listened to my coachee I started wondering how many times I had been shocked by the fact that nobody had told me what I needed to hear.

Inquiring into my memories I remembered details nobody shared because they assumed I knew, or I didn’t want to talk about. Then there were those where people assumed that it was too touchy a subject to talk about. And yes, on this list there were also the details that had become hype or had suddenly slipped into my awareness. It was a list I could reduce to its essence, that is the list of things I didn’t know that I didn’t know.

It seemed that my coachee had the same experience. She too was being put in front of things she would have preferred to know. However, she was also in pain. She believed that she should have been told. She was dealing with the feeling that society wasn’t caring for her as she had expected it to be capable of.

She was struggling to switch to being grateful or appreciative of having learned what she didn’t know. The sense of lack of care was preventing her from moving on. In a way, the new knowledge was too overwhelming, and her expectations of what should have happened made it hard for her to become curious.

For our work it meant to step back and learn what it was that could give her access to gratefulness, to her ability to deal with knowing, or to letting go of what should have been.