87. The Leadership Trap of "I Don't Know"
Do you ever walk into a room feeling like everyone else knows more than you? Or let a single piece of feedback throw you off completely? Most high-achieving women are unconsciously trained to scan for gaps, deficiencies, and what they haven’t mastered yet. That constant focus on “not enough” quietly disconnects you from your actual intelligence, capability, and leadership presence, leaving you second-guessing yourself and hesitating when it matters most.
In this episode, I dive into why ambitious women emotionally collapse under pressure and how that “I don’t know” mindset keeps you from stepping fully into your leadership. Using real coaching examples, you’ll see how grounding yourself in your knowledge, experience, and value transforms your nervous system activation from panic to presence. You’ll learn how to reality check your assumptions, reconnect with your strengths, and respond intentionally instead of reacting automatically to fear or uncertainty.
You’ll learn how to recognize when “I don’t know” is sabotaging your authority, how to hold desire and uncertainty at the same time, and how to rebuild self-trust in real time. I walk you through how to navigate fear, ambiguity, and overthinking without collapsing, and how to reclaim your presence and influence in every room. This episode is essential for any woman ready to stop letting fear and perceived gaps define her leadership and start leading with clarity, confidence, and grounded authority.
Interested in working with me? Book a free 1:1 consultation here!
What You’ll Learn from this Episode:
Why scanning for gaps and deficiencies quietly disconnects you from your actual leadership capability.
How nervous system activation turns uncertainty into self-doubt under pressure.
How to shift from “I don’t know” to “What do I know?” in real time.
Why reality checking your assumptions strengthens confidence and presence.
How to recognize the difference between useful curiosity and paralyzing fear.
How to hold desire and uncertainty at the same time without collapsing.
Strategies to rebuild self-trust and lead with authority, even when you feel behind.
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Full Episode Transcript:
If you constantly feel behind, if you're over-focused on your gaps, if one piece of feedback emotionally takes you out, if you walk into rooms wondering what everyone else knows that you don't, this episode is going to change the way you lead. Because most high-achieving women are unconsciously trained to scan for deficiency, for not-enoughness, what's missing, what haven't I mastered, what should I know by now? And that pattern quietly disconnects you from your actual intelligence, capability, leadership, and presence.
Today we're talking about why ambitious women emotionally collapse under pressure, how nervous system activation creates self-doubt, and one of the most powerful leadership shifts you can make. Moving from "I don't know" to "what do I know?" By the end of this episode, you will stop spiraling around perceived inadequacy, understand how nervous system activation distorts your thinking, learn how to reality check, and rebuild grounded self-trust in leadership moments.
Welcome to The Balanced Leader, hosted by Yann Dang, a Leadership and Life Coach with over 20 years of corporate experience. Drawing from her journey as a former global finance leader and second-generation immigrant, Yann understands the unique challenges women face in male-dominated workplaces.
Each episode offers insights on balancing masculine and feminine energies, mastering soft skills and building emotional intelligence. Join us to transform frustration into empowerment and unlock your authentic leadership potential.
Hey, podcast listeners, welcome to today's episode. This is all about what happens when you are full of fear and when you are scanning for what is missing, right? And I wanted to share this pattern because recently, in one of my group coaching courses, this woman was full of fear because she was sharing with a group of people at her company that, "Hey, I'm new here." And the CEO interjected and said, "You're not new." And she had such an emotional reaction to this, you know? And I was asking her, "Okay, well, what did that mean to you? Like, what were you worried about when he said that?" Because she had been with the company for about six weeks, and she's like, "Well, I'm still new. There are things I don't know. I don't know everything about this company. You know, this is a whole different industry for me."
And so I wanted to ask her some of these questions because I think what happens to a lot of women, right, is that we really focus on scanning for threats, scanning for deficiency, scanning for not-enoughness. And there's a healthy part of that, right? A healthy part of us being like, okay, we don't know. But when that part of us is scanning and when we're feeling lots of fear, we can get into very unhelpful patterns. So let me break this down for you.
So, in the scanning for deficiencies, oftentimes you may notice in yourself you're asking, what's missing? What other people know better? What might I fail at? What haven't I mastered yet? We've put this like really high bar of like competence and knowledge. Like, I need to know this stuff, right? And really, I think a lot of times women feel like if I know this information, I'll feel safe in my body. I will feel like less vulnerable. I'll feel confident, right? So it's almost like a lie that like if we know enough stuff, we're not going to have emotions or feel like a human person, right?
So what happens is, you over-prepare. You hesitate to speak or you're afraid to ask questions because you're like, is that a stupid question? Or you mentally collapse after feedback because you're like, you're so triggered by it. Or you wait until certainty arrives, like at a 95% level before saying something. Or you assume others are more confident and knowledgeable and competent than you are, right? So, women are often trained to earn safety through preparedness and knowledge, right? Preparedness and knowledge is valuable, but deficiency scanning is exhausting.
And the reality is, in this real world of AI, like, knowledge is so much more powerfully there for us. We can actually put something in chat and ask it some question and ask it to look up all of the relevant resources. And so, I feel very strongly that you know, this question that women often ask themselves or say to themselves, like, I don't know, I don't know. It's like, well, now we have something that does know, and now we can use this information. And instead of feeling like this I don't know, almost like I need oxygen, right? Like I need to know in order to breathe, we can learn how to quiet that voice for ourselves to really ground ourselves and connect to ourselves, right?
So let me just dive more into this specific story, right, of this person of my client that I was talking to, because I was asking her like, what's coming up for you of like, why are you so triggered by needing to say that you're new? Like, why is it so important? And for her, she was like, "Well, I haven't been in this industry for like the 20 years that most people have." And there were just thoughts about like that somehow she's behind, that she should know more by now, and that she was like disappointed in her own leadership.
But what I asked her is, do you know what your strategy is? Do you know why they brought you in? And here's the thing. She did know. She was very clear. And it was amazing. This is why group coaching is amazing because when you're in this group with other people, they can notice your energy shift right away. You shift from this I don't know energy, I'm scared, I don't know. It's almost like this damsel in distress energy. That's how I would say it because that was kind of my thing too. It's like, oh my god, I don't know, I don't know. Somebody help me, you know, like I'm grasping for air. But then when somebody asks you a really grounded, clear question, like, what do you know?
And I asked her, "What do you know? Why did they bring you in here?" And she said, "I know exactly how to grow this company to double-digit growth. They want that. They want my knowledge and my experience to do this." And I said, "Well, do you know how to do it?" And she's like, "Yes, I know exactly how to do it." So part of it was like, yes, you don't know things, but what you don't know actually isn't that important if the goal of them hiring you for the specific need, you're very clear on.
And in that moment, her whole energy shifted. She knew what she was talking about. She seemed very confident in herself. She seemed very grounded. And even people in the room noticed it. They were like, "Wow, you just shifted from like this 'I don't know' frantic energy to this grounded leader that was certain, that was convicted, that was very clear in why she was there and how she was going to really help this company, right?" That's the reality check that we have to give ourselves. We can give it to ourselves when we're nervous system is activated, or we can ask for it from other people too, and even reality check the situation.
So, I asked her, you know, "Hey, are you willing to ask somebody in the room, like how did they interpret your CEO asking that question?" And she actually found out afterwards that it's like a joke that if you're with the company for more than four weeks, you're not new anymore. And she was with them for six weeks, right? And even getting clear and reality checking, I think that's super powerful for her because no longer is she thinking that maybe this CEO is making fun of her or is talking down to her or has this expectation of her that's unreasonable. Now she's like, "Oh, it was just a joke." I've been here six weeks. And what's even more powerful is that she's very clear that she knows what she's doing. She may not know all of the knowledge and the data, but that's what subject matters are there for. That's what her team is there for. That's what research and AI is there for, right? You don't need to know all of the things, right?
So, one gap became bigger than her entire body of knowledge, right? So, that's why it's so important because when we have this thought in our minds, "I don't know," right? We are disconnected from what we do know. And for her, she knew about her leadership, she knew about strategy, team dynamics, organizational growth, communication, even business judgment. So we really need to watch ourselves and listen to ourselves when our nervous system is activated. And when the thought in our head is, "I don't know, I don't know."
When the nervous system is activated, ambiguity feels dangerous. Fear feels factual. Criticism feels catastrophic, and learning feels like failure. An activated nervous system is not an objective narrator, right? When you are activated, when your emotions are high, your critical thinking is low because your prefrontal cortex actually isn't online. It's actually your nervous system is online trying to protect yourself. And this is why reality checking is so important. This is why slowing down is so important. You can ask yourself, what actually happened? What facts do I know? What assumptions did I add? Or what am I assuming here? What else could be true? Is this discomfort or danger?
This is where you can slow yourself down because so often, right? Women are more emotionally in touch with themselves and feel much stronger emotions than men do. And this is actually what makes women really amazing leaders, especially when there's a big group of people because they can scan the room and feel the emotions. Now, on the opposite side, if you can feel the emotions but you don't feel grounded in them, those emotions can really take us for a ride. Without reality checking, ambitious women weaponize ambiguity against themselves constantly, right?
So you use this "I don't know," this uncertainty against yourself versus if you're grounded in yourself and you feel safe in your body, that you can feel these emotions and that an emotion is happening, you're able to move things forward. So, oftentimes, even with myself, when my brain is offering me, "I don't know, I don't know, I don't know," I often ask my brain, "What do you know?" Let's ground into what do you know, because this is the shift from that frantic energy where it's like, I need more, more, more, more, more, and I can't breathe, right? To, I can slow down, I can calm down, and I can ask myself, what do you know? And having this really honest, grounded conversation with yourself.
You want to ask, what do I know? What strengths already exist? What perspective do I bring? What experience can I trust? What value am I already adding? Grounded leaders do not ignore gaps. They simply stop making gaps their identity.
So, these are practical ways of really thinking about this. Speaking before perfection, being able to have this relationship with yourself where you're like, I'm going to do it, contribute while learning, trusting pattern recognition, staying emotionally grounded under uncertainty. Right? I'm actually going to share with you guys a thought that I've been really working on for myself is that I can hold desire and uncertainty. As I've been doing all of these different new offerings for my business, I am really holding on to this thought that I can hold the desire for wanting to help and impact more and more people and the uncertainty. I am as an entrepreneur testing things out constantly. And we need to be willing to test things out and to hold the uncertainty while we're doing it.
And what I teach in my groups to women, right? And, you know, you probably heard about Command, if you've been listening to this podcast for a while. It's my group coaching container. It's a leadership accelerator for women. And what I actually teach is staying connected to yourself while learning, tolerating uncertainty, not outsourcing your authority, and leading before you feel ready. And it all starts with what do I know, not I don't know, I don't know. The women who advance are not the women who know everything. They are the women who stop collapsing every time they don't know something.
And this is why it's so important because you are going to be doing amazing things in your life. You're going to be expanding, and there are going to be a lot of things you don't know, but you do not need to make not knowing a problem. And you do not need to spin around in "I don't know" energy. And you can bring yourself back to what do I know? How much energy are you spending scanning for what's missing? I want you to do an audit. I want you to inventory this, instead of grounding into what's already true about you, in what you know about you. And what would change if you stopped entering rooms trying to prove yourself and you started entering them remembering yourself, remembering who it is that you are being in that moment and who you're becoming?
Your leadership expands the moment uncertainty stops meaning inadequacy. Right? We have to have this different relationship with fear and uncertainty. They are part of the journey. They're part of the ride. They're part of the discomfort. We just don't need to allow them to take us on a ride. We need to move ourselves into what do I know space? Who am I when I'm grounded, convicted, and in command? And let's have that conversation with that woman inside of you because she already exists. You just need to connect back to her and you need to find your way back to her consistently.
And this is exactly what we do in Command. So, if you are interested in Command, find out more about it, go to my website and you can find about the next enrollment launch for it. But this is where you exercise that muscle every single week for six months and you start building that self-trust. You start building that internal authority, that conviction within yourself. All right, have a beautiful day forward. And if that thought comes up where you say, "I don't know," take a deep breath and shift to, "What do I know?" This is a powerful tool for you. Use it and tell me about it. Find me on LinkedIn. DM me. I always love to hear from all of my listeners. All right, have a beautiful day. I will see you next week. Bye.
Thank you for being a part of The Balanced Leader community. We hope you found today's episode inspiring and actionable. For more resources and to connect with Yann, visit us at aspire-coaching.co. Until next time, keep leading with confidence and purpose.
Today we're talking about why ambitious women emotionally collapse under pressure, how nervous system activation creates self-doubt, and one of the most powerful leadership shifts you can make. Moving from "I don't know" to "what do I know?" By the end of this episode, you will stop spiraling around perceived inadequacy, understand how nervous system activation distorts your thinking, learn how to reality check, and rebuild grounded self-trust in leadership moments.
Welcome to The Balanced Leader, hosted by Yann Dang, a Leadership and Life Coach with over 20 years of corporate experience. Drawing from her journey as a former global finance leader and second-generation immigrant, Yann understands the unique challenges women face in male-dominated workplaces.
Each episode offers insights on balancing masculine and feminine energies, mastering soft skills and building emotional intelligence. Join us to transform frustration into empowerment and unlock your authentic leadership potential.
Hey, podcast listeners, welcome to today's episode. This is all about what happens when you are full of fear and when you are scanning for what is missing, right? And I wanted to share this pattern because recently, in one of my group coaching courses, this woman was full of fear because she was sharing with a group of people at her company that, "Hey, I'm new here." And the CEO interjected and said, "You're not new." And she had such an emotional reaction to this, you know? And I was asking her, "Okay, well, what did that mean to you? Like, what were you worried about when he said that?" Because she had been with the company for about six weeks, and she's like, "Well, I'm still new. There are things I don't know. I don't know everything about this company. You know, this is a whole different industry for me."
And so I wanted to ask her some of these questions because I think what happens to a lot of women, right, is that we really focus on scanning for threats, scanning for deficiency, scanning for not-enoughness. And there's a healthy part of that, right? A healthy part of us being like, okay, we don't know. But when that part of us is scanning and when we're feeling lots of fear, we can get into very unhelpful patterns. So let me break this down for you.
So, in the scanning for deficiencies, oftentimes you may notice in yourself you're asking, what's missing? What other people know better? What might I fail at? What haven't I mastered yet? We've put this like really high bar of like competence and knowledge. Like, I need to know this stuff, right? And really, I think a lot of times women feel like if I know this information, I'll feel safe in my body. I will feel like less vulnerable. I'll feel confident, right? So it's almost like a lie that like if we know enough stuff, we're not going to have emotions or feel like a human person, right?
So what happens is, you over-prepare. You hesitate to speak or you're afraid to ask questions because you're like, is that a stupid question? Or you mentally collapse after feedback because you're like, you're so triggered by it. Or you wait until certainty arrives, like at a 95% level before saying something. Or you assume others are more confident and knowledgeable and competent than you are, right? So, women are often trained to earn safety through preparedness and knowledge, right? Preparedness and knowledge is valuable, but deficiency scanning is exhausting.
And the reality is, in this real world of AI, like, knowledge is so much more powerfully there for us. We can actually put something in chat and ask it some question and ask it to look up all of the relevant resources. And so, I feel very strongly that you know, this question that women often ask themselves or say to themselves, like, I don't know, I don't know. It's like, well, now we have something that does know, and now we can use this information. And instead of feeling like this I don't know, almost like I need oxygen, right? Like I need to know in order to breathe, we can learn how to quiet that voice for ourselves to really ground ourselves and connect to ourselves, right?
So let me just dive more into this specific story, right, of this person of my client that I was talking to, because I was asking her like, what's coming up for you of like, why are you so triggered by needing to say that you're new? Like, why is it so important? And for her, she was like, "Well, I haven't been in this industry for like the 20 years that most people have." And there were just thoughts about like that somehow she's behind, that she should know more by now, and that she was like disappointed in her own leadership.
But what I asked her is, do you know what your strategy is? Do you know why they brought you in? And here's the thing. She did know. She was very clear. And it was amazing. This is why group coaching is amazing because when you're in this group with other people, they can notice your energy shift right away. You shift from this I don't know energy, I'm scared, I don't know. It's almost like this damsel in distress energy. That's how I would say it because that was kind of my thing too. It's like, oh my god, I don't know, I don't know. Somebody help me, you know, like I'm grasping for air. But then when somebody asks you a really grounded, clear question, like, what do you know?
And I asked her, "What do you know? Why did they bring you in here?" And she said, "I know exactly how to grow this company to double-digit growth. They want that. They want my knowledge and my experience to do this." And I said, "Well, do you know how to do it?" And she's like, "Yes, I know exactly how to do it." So part of it was like, yes, you don't know things, but what you don't know actually isn't that important if the goal of them hiring you for the specific need, you're very clear on.
And in that moment, her whole energy shifted. She knew what she was talking about. She seemed very confident in herself. She seemed very grounded. And even people in the room noticed it. They were like, "Wow, you just shifted from like this 'I don't know' frantic energy to this grounded leader that was certain, that was convicted, that was very clear in why she was there and how she was going to really help this company, right?" That's the reality check that we have to give ourselves. We can give it to ourselves when we're nervous system is activated, or we can ask for it from other people too, and even reality check the situation.
So, I asked her, you know, "Hey, are you willing to ask somebody in the room, like how did they interpret your CEO asking that question?" And she actually found out afterwards that it's like a joke that if you're with the company for more than four weeks, you're not new anymore. And she was with them for six weeks, right? And even getting clear and reality checking, I think that's super powerful for her because no longer is she thinking that maybe this CEO is making fun of her or is talking down to her or has this expectation of her that's unreasonable. Now she's like, "Oh, it was just a joke." I've been here six weeks. And what's even more powerful is that she's very clear that she knows what she's doing. She may not know all of the knowledge and the data, but that's what subject matters are there for. That's what her team is there for. That's what research and AI is there for, right? You don't need to know all of the things, right?
So, one gap became bigger than her entire body of knowledge, right? So, that's why it's so important because when we have this thought in our minds, "I don't know," right? We are disconnected from what we do know. And for her, she knew about her leadership, she knew about strategy, team dynamics, organizational growth, communication, even business judgment. So we really need to watch ourselves and listen to ourselves when our nervous system is activated. And when the thought in our head is, "I don't know, I don't know."
When the nervous system is activated, ambiguity feels dangerous. Fear feels factual. Criticism feels catastrophic, and learning feels like failure. An activated nervous system is not an objective narrator, right? When you are activated, when your emotions are high, your critical thinking is low because your prefrontal cortex actually isn't online. It's actually your nervous system is online trying to protect yourself. And this is why reality checking is so important. This is why slowing down is so important. You can ask yourself, what actually happened? What facts do I know? What assumptions did I add? Or what am I assuming here? What else could be true? Is this discomfort or danger?
This is where you can slow yourself down because so often, right? Women are more emotionally in touch with themselves and feel much stronger emotions than men do. And this is actually what makes women really amazing leaders, especially when there's a big group of people because they can scan the room and feel the emotions. Now, on the opposite side, if you can feel the emotions but you don't feel grounded in them, those emotions can really take us for a ride. Without reality checking, ambitious women weaponize ambiguity against themselves constantly, right?
So you use this "I don't know," this uncertainty against yourself versus if you're grounded in yourself and you feel safe in your body, that you can feel these emotions and that an emotion is happening, you're able to move things forward. So, oftentimes, even with myself, when my brain is offering me, "I don't know, I don't know, I don't know," I often ask my brain, "What do you know?" Let's ground into what do you know, because this is the shift from that frantic energy where it's like, I need more, more, more, more, more, and I can't breathe, right? To, I can slow down, I can calm down, and I can ask myself, what do you know? And having this really honest, grounded conversation with yourself.
You want to ask, what do I know? What strengths already exist? What perspective do I bring? What experience can I trust? What value am I already adding? Grounded leaders do not ignore gaps. They simply stop making gaps their identity.
So, these are practical ways of really thinking about this. Speaking before perfection, being able to have this relationship with yourself where you're like, I'm going to do it, contribute while learning, trusting pattern recognition, staying emotionally grounded under uncertainty. Right? I'm actually going to share with you guys a thought that I've been really working on for myself is that I can hold desire and uncertainty. As I've been doing all of these different new offerings for my business, I am really holding on to this thought that I can hold the desire for wanting to help and impact more and more people and the uncertainty. I am as an entrepreneur testing things out constantly. And we need to be willing to test things out and to hold the uncertainty while we're doing it.
And what I teach in my groups to women, right? And, you know, you probably heard about Command, if you've been listening to this podcast for a while. It's my group coaching container. It's a leadership accelerator for women. And what I actually teach is staying connected to yourself while learning, tolerating uncertainty, not outsourcing your authority, and leading before you feel ready. And it all starts with what do I know, not I don't know, I don't know. The women who advance are not the women who know everything. They are the women who stop collapsing every time they don't know something.
And this is why it's so important because you are going to be doing amazing things in your life. You're going to be expanding, and there are going to be a lot of things you don't know, but you do not need to make not knowing a problem. And you do not need to spin around in "I don't know" energy. And you can bring yourself back to what do I know? How much energy are you spending scanning for what's missing? I want you to do an audit. I want you to inventory this, instead of grounding into what's already true about you, in what you know about you. And what would change if you stopped entering rooms trying to prove yourself and you started entering them remembering yourself, remembering who it is that you are being in that moment and who you're becoming?
Your leadership expands the moment uncertainty stops meaning inadequacy. Right? We have to have this different relationship with fear and uncertainty. They are part of the journey. They're part of the ride. They're part of the discomfort. We just don't need to allow them to take us on a ride. We need to move ourselves into what do I know space? Who am I when I'm grounded, convicted, and in command? And let's have that conversation with that woman inside of you because she already exists. You just need to connect back to her and you need to find your way back to her consistently.
And this is exactly what we do in Command. So, if you are interested in Command, find out more about it, go to my website and you can find about the next enrollment launch for it. But this is where you exercise that muscle every single week for six months and you start building that self-trust. You start building that internal authority, that conviction within yourself. All right, have a beautiful day forward. And if that thought comes up where you say, "I don't know," take a deep breath and shift to, "What do I know?" This is a powerful tool for you. Use it and tell me about it. Find me on LinkedIn. DM me. I always love to hear from all of my listeners. All right, have a beautiful day. I will see you next week. Bye.
Thank you for being a part of The Balanced Leader community. We hope you found today's episode inspiring and actionable. For more resources and to connect with Yann, visit us at aspire-coaching.co. Until next time, keep leading with confidence and purpose.
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