When you’re new at something, confidence often feels tied to knowing.

You know the system. You know the answer. You know what to do next.

There’s comfort in that. You can recognize the problem, explain what’s happening, and take action without spending much time wondering whether you’re missing something.

Then the work gets harder.

You encounter situations where the information is incomplete. Several explanations seem plausible. Something that worked before doesn’t work this time, and you can’t immediately explain why.

If knowing the answer is how you measure your competence, this can feel like going backward. You may be becoming more capable while feeling less sure of yourself.

Reflecting on my first five years at AWS brought that tension into focus for me. The biggest change in my confidence has been learning to trust myself to work through what I don’t know.

Knowing more helps, of course. But as problems become more complex, “knowing everything” stops being a realistic expectation.

You need another way to proceed.

The pressure of “I should know this”

“I don’t know” describes a gap in your information.

“I should know this” adds a judgment.

Suddenly, you’re evaluating yourself while also trying to solve the problem. How could you have missed this? What will someone think if you ask? Haven’t you been doing this long enough?

That extra pressure can change your behavior. You hold back a useful question. Keep searching alone when someone else could provide the missing context. Wait to act because you want to feel certain first.

Or you become so focused on appearing competent that you make your uncertainty harder to examine.

There will be things you reasonably need to know for your role. Sometimes a gap needs attention, study, or practice. But self-criticism doesn’t tell you which kind of gap you have.

A more useful question is: “What, specifically, am I missing?”

That gives you something to work with.

Harder problems ask something different of you

Consider a straightforward support issue. There’s a recognizable symptom, a documented cause, and a known fix. Familiarity helps you respond quickly.

Now consider an issue involving several systems. The evidence is incomplete. Different observations suggest different causes. You don’t yet know whether two symptoms are connected.

Recalling more facts may help, but it won’t necessarily resolve the issue.

You have to establish what happened, question the initial explanation, and decide what evidence would help distinguish one possibility from another. You may need context from someone who sees a different part of the system.

The difficult question becomes: “What do you do when the answer is not obvious?”

Knowledge still matters. It helps you recognize patterns and choose useful questions. But competence also includes how you investigate, when you ask for help, and whether you can revise an explanation you initially thought was right.

Making “I can figure it out” concrete

“I can figure it out” may sound like something you tell yourself when you have no plan.

For me, the more useful version has a process behind it:

Start with what is known. Separate the observations from the explanations attached to them. Name the missing information. Look for a reliable source or a person with relevant context.

Then choose a next step that will teach you something.

Suppose you suspect a recent change caused a problem. The timing makes that explanation plausible. It does not make it proven.

You can ask what evidence supports the connection, what contradicts it, and what else changed. You can look for a safe way to test the explanation, rather than allowing the first plausible story to become the final answer.

If the evidence does not support your idea, you adjust.

That’s the substance behind a more durable form of confidence:

“I may not know yet, but I know how to work the problem.”

It also includes recognizing when you need help. “Figuring it out” does not require doing every part yourself. Sometimes your most useful contribution is finding the person who can explain what everyone else has missed.

Self trust leaves room for being wrong

Trusting yourself to figuring it out does not mean that your first instinct will always be correct.

It includes trusting yourself to take conflicting evidence seriously. To say, “this changes my understanding.” And to seek better information when the stakes exceed what you can responsibly decide on your own.

You can feel confident in your ability to investigate, while remaining uncertain about your current explanation.

Those two things can coexist.

In fact, confidence becomes more useful when it allows correction. You don’t have to defend an assumption just because you were the person who made it.

You can acknowledge what you missed, address the consequences, and decide what to do next. A mistake may still be uncomfortable or costly. Self-trust gives you a way to respond without requiring you to pretend it didn’t happen.

Career decisions create the same pressure

Career change brings its own version of “I should know this.”

You have years of experience. You’ve made difficult decisions before. Surely you should know what role you want next.

Instead, you may find yourself asking:

What if I choose wrong?
What if I regret it?
What if the work sounds appealing but I don’t like doing it?

You may not be able to answer those questions through reflection alone. Some answers require contact with the actual work.

This is one of the ideas behind the Tech Career Reset framework I’m developing: a possible career direction can begin as a hypothesis.

You can define what you need from your next role. Identify work that appears to meet those criteria. Talk to people doing it. Ask about their ordinary week, including the frustrating parts. Especially the frustrating parts. Look for opportunities to try a relevant task.

Each step gives you evidence.

For example, “I want more strategic work” is a starting point. You still need to discover what that means in practice. Which decisions would you help make? How much influence would you have? What would fill the rest of your time?

An appealing title cannot answer those questions for you.

You don’t have to treat every possibility as a commitment. A particular career direction can start as just “something worth investigating,” with room to revise your view before making a larger move.

Experience can make learning feel more exposed

By mid career, you may be accustomed to being someone other people rely on.

You have a history of solving problems. You know where to look, who to ask, and which details deserve attention. That familiarity becomes part of how you reassure yourself that you’re good at your work.

Entering an unfamiliar area temporarily removes some of those cues.

Things take longer. You have to ask basic questions. You encounter terms everyone else seems to understand.

It can feel especially uncomfortable when you compare your first attempts in a new area with your practiced judgment in a familiar one.

But both of these statements can be true:

“I have substantial experience.”
and
“I’m still learning this.”

Your experience does not disappear when you reach something unfamiliar. Some of it will transfer. Some of it will need adapting. There will also be things you need to learn from the beginning.

You can give yourself permission to work through which is which.

Function before familiarity

There is a name for the ability to function while things remain unclear: ambiguity tolerance.

In practical terms, it means you can stay engaged without forcing an answer before the evidence supports one.

That trait is essential in technical work, leadership, career decisions, and building something new. It also helps in parenting and relationships, where you rarely have complete access to another person’s thoughts or experience.

It doesn’t mean waiting indefinitely or taking careless risks. Sometimes the right next step is to pause, consult someone, or limit the consequences of being wrong.

The key is deciding what you can responsibly do with the information available, while staying open to what you have yet to learn.

Try the “I don’t know yet” reset

The next time you catch yourself thinking “I should know this,” write down answers to these five questions:

What do I know?
Facts only. What have you observed or verified?

What am I assuming?
Which parts of your explanation are interpretations, predictions, or guesses?

What do I need to learn?
Turn the uncertainty into specific questions.

What is one way I can test this?
Choose a small, proportionate step that could support or challenge your explanation.

Who or what could give me better information?
Identify a person, document, reliable source, conversation, experiment, or observation.

Then ask yourself:

What would I do next if I trusted myself to figure this out?

You may still feel unsure. This exercise does not require you to be sure before taking a useful step.

For everyday use, shorten it to one quick sentence:

“What do I know, what am I assuming, and what can I test next?”

Confidence after certainty

I don’t expect the next five years to bring fewer things I don’t know.

There will be unfamiliar problems, incomplete information, and decisions without an obvious answer. I want to meet those challenges without treating every unknown as evidence against me.

An unanswered question can be the beginning of the work.

Confidence is not knowing that you will always have the answer. It’s trusting yourself to gain enough understanding to take the next step.