Perhaps one of the most limiting claims I get to hear as an English Tutor is the phrase ‘I don’t know’.
These words are often spoken when we arrive at the EXPLANATION part of our PEE model. Perhaps you feel frozen by the pressure to explain, maybe you dislike the subject, maybe you would rather think about something else anyway?
I don’t know.
Saying ‘I don’t know’ closes our minds to the zillions of things we do know or might know if we DARED! It closes our minds to possibility and of course to a better answer!
Opening our minds to risk and our INTUITIVE ‘flow’ brings us to richer aspects of our minds and our creativity. Go with your first thought, allow your intuitive greater freedom, UNFETTER your thinking!
Unfettered thinking unlocks us from the prison house of ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ and the suffocation of believing somebody’s ideas are more valid than our own.
I don’t know.
How risky is it to remain silent? Voices grow rusty too! Ask yourself what is STRANGE perhaps about this text?
What are we doing to our mind’s intuition or as the short story writer Katherine Mansfield put it, to our mind’s ‘wild places’?
So trust to your intuition and say what you feel, take a risk with your imagination and speak up and out..
Here’s an example from Steinbeck’s novel and here another..