I Don’t Know, Yet
When Your Body Knows Before Your Brian
In serious careers, you get paid to know things. Markets, models, clauses, covenants, diagnoses, regulations, scenarios. So when someone asks you a direct question and the real answer is “I don’t know,” you feel a quiet panic: this is exactly what you are not supposed to say.
That’s usually the moment the mask takes over.
And right there is where the trouble starts.
The first warning isn’t in your head
Notice what actually happens in those moments.
You’re asked a hard question in a meeting, on a call, in front of a client, or in an exam room. There is no clean answer in your mind. Before a single word comes out of your mouth, your body has already voted.
Your stomach tightens.
Your throat goes a little dry.
Your breathing shifts.
You feel a tiny urge to dodge.
That reaction isn’t stupidity. That reaction is honesty. Your nervous system is telling you, “You don’t have this yet.” Your body knows before your ego does.
You then have a split-second choice:
Respect that signal and say some version of “I don’t know yet, but I can find out,” or
Ignore the signal and start decorating the gap.
Most credentialed professionals have been trained, directly or indirectly, to do the second.
Waffle has a recognizable sound
You see this all the time in press conferences and earnings calls. The question is sharp and simple; the answer is a warm fog.
The person on the podium:
repeats the question back in slightly different words
wanders into safe talking points
answers a different question than the one they were asked
uses twenty sentences where one would do
As the audience, you feel the gap immediately. You might not think, “They are lying,” but you do feel, “They are not really levelling with us.” Your body reads the performance faster than your intellect does.
What almost no one talks about is how miserable that feels from the inside.
When you are the one talking and the answer starts to bloat instead of sharpen, your body protests in real time. You feel slightly detached from your own words. There’s a small knot in your gut saying, “This isn’t clean.” Your nervous system is flagging the difference between judgment and theatre.
The discomfort isn’t caused by ignorance. The discomfort is caused by pretending.
Facade, ego, and the “professional” act
A lot of people in your world were trained to see this act as part of professionalism. You are paid to be confident. You are paid to provide answers. The facade becomes a kind of armour: polished language over genuine uncertainty.
The risk is that the facade slowly teaches your ego the wrong lesson.
A healthy ego can say, “I don’t know yet.” A swollen ego cannot. It treats not-knowing as a flaw that must be covered, spun, or rebranded as “strategic ambiguity.” Over time, the gap between who you are and who you perform becomes a permanent strain. Your body keeps protesting; your facade keeps talking over the top.
Professionals with codes of ethics are supposed to know better.
You are required to stay in your lane of competence and to avoid faking expertise.
But the social pressure to sound sure – in front of boards, clients, regulators, peers – can push you right up against that boundary.
When bluffing becomes a habit, you are no longer just protecting your pride. You are eroding trust, and you are training yourself to ignore one of the most reliable signals you have: the moment your body knows you’ve crossed into pretending.
Your body as an early warning system
Think about the last time you genuinely said, “I don’t know.” Not as a shrug of apathy, but as a clear, grounded statement.
Often your body relaxes the moment you say it. Shoulders drop. Breathing steadies. The knot in your stomach loosens. You may feel exposed, but you also feel strangely aligned. Your words and your insides match.
That alignment is not weakness. That alignment is judgment.
You are drawing a boundary around what you can stand behind. You are also leaving room for better thinking:
you can ask a clarifying question
you can request time to review the data
you can bring in someone whose lane this truly is
In high-stakes work, that kind of humility is not a luxury. It is risk management. Markets move, regimes shift, counterparties lie, models miss. Under real uncertainty, wisdom is mostly about knowing where knowledge stops.
Your body tends to ring the alarm exactly at that border.
Exams, careers, and “hedging” your answers
If you’ve sat essay-style professional exams, you have seen a miniature version of this.
You read a CFA Level III essay question. You half-know the topic. Instead of cutting to the chase with a short, honest answer, you start covering every angle on the page, hoping that somewhere in the sprawl you’ll hit the marking key.
From the outside, it looks like effort. From the perspective of the examiner, it looks like someone who cannot distinguish signal from noise. From the inside, if you are honest, it feels like anxiety in ink.
The same behaviour shows up later in careers.
You “answer” stakeholders by flooding them with context.
You go into meetings with a deck of fifty slides because fewer feels too naked.
You copy more people on emails “just in case.”
You are hedging, not deciding.
Again, your body knows. You leave the room tired, unsatisfied, a little off-centre. The performance was busy. The judgment was thin.
Integrity over performance
The real distinction is not between people who know and people who don’t. The real distinction is between people who respect the moment of not-knowing and people who try to perform their way past it.
One group says, “This is where my knowledge ends. Here’s what I can say, here’s what I can’t, and here is how we will find out more.”
The other group keeps talking.
A healthy ego does not need to win every argument or answer every question. A healthy ego can shrug and say, “I don’t know yet,” without collapsing.
There is no gap between ego and facade in that moment. The ego and the voice are aligned. Your inside and outside match. The value underneath that alignment is simple and stubborn:
I would rather be honest than impressive.
That value is the core of professional integrity. It is also the foundation for real authority. People may not always like the answer, but in the long run they learn they can trust you.
Listening to the signal
In practice, this means treating your body as part of your decision equipment, not as an inconvenience to override.
The next time you feel your stomach tighten as you’re tempted to waffle, pause for half a breath. Notice the urge to decorate the gap. Notice the little spike of fear that saying “I don’t know” will make people think you are unworthy of your role.
Then ask yourself which is more dangerous in a life like yours:
admitting not-knowing in time to make a better call, or
drifting into confident nonsense because your facade is afraid of silence.
You built a career on intelligence, discipline, and credentials. Wisdom is learning to let your body have a vote. When your gut tells you the answer is not ready, the most professional sentence you can say might be the one you were trained to avoid:
“I don’t know yet. Let me look at this properly and come back with something I can stand behind.”
That is not weakness. That is what it looks like when conscience, competence, and courage are finally on the same side.