AtQ – What Do You Know?

Asking Powerful Questions

One of the hardest things for me to do is to state a claim and put my body in service of that claim – to act on my beliefs. This is difficult particularly with far reaching beliefs. There are easier ways to live, I’ve found. I could act on someone else’s belief (or knowledge) and lay blame on them if anything were to go wrong. I could simply to wait until I’m more confident about a particular belief before I act on it and maybe never deal with the ramifications of acting on said belief.

I see my own lack of assurance shows up in my language. I will undercut my own thoughts with a disclaimer. Even after confidently stating a belief I will say something like, “Yeah, but I don’t know.” In this week’s Talking Note, I explored the relationship between belief and knowledge and the journey from one to the other. Here we will explore a powerful question that I‘ve found helpful in that journey.

What do you know?

If beliefs are things that we are ready to act upon as if they were true, and what we know are things that we have interacted with and found to be true, then I would want both to be undergirded with confidence. I want to be willing to act upon my belief to gain knowledge and be responsible with the knowledge I have. Catching myself being unsure of either brings with it the opportunity for growth. Asking this question helps identify my starting place. With any particular belief, I can ask if there something, even a small part, that I do know?