Certainty is currency. It sells books and speaking tours, builds fan bases and markets. Confident and convinced voices dominate our media, our professions and workplaces, our world. Uncertainty is often dismissed as a sign of incompetence, weakness even. Come back when you’ve made your mind up.

Not knowing can be uncomfortable. Sometimes profoundly so. Shedding assumptions and preconceived solutions can feel disorienting. If not that, then what?

And we don’t want a lack of definitive answers to become a lack of hope. Not knowing does not mean having nothing. There are paths to try, both well worn and emerging. There are threads to follow, patterns to explore and stepping stones that have held others well.

But there is also a joy in not knowing. A sense of wide, expansive wonder. Like a native forest, uncertainty pulses with life. In contrast, conclusions delivered with the authoritative air of fact can feel like pinning dead butterflies to a display in a museum. Reality is far more magical and mysterious.

Providing therapy can feel like starting a thousand books you never got to finish. We see people for this slice of their life, maybe a chapter or two, and rarely get to find out what happens after that. Funding models that rely on brief interventions can feel like reading just a few pages.

We need to be careful not to overgeneralise and have our window of engagement define the person, where ‘this moment’ becomes ‘this person’. And we need some gentleness with ourselves. It’s not easy holding so many unfinished stories with so many unanswered questions.

As helping professionals and carers, we too are an unfinished book. We too run the risk of defining ourselves based on this slice of time, this chapter, this role. Our work of supporting others, and our relationship with it, is an unfolding story. And like any good tale, there may be unexpected twists and turns.

Our skills, our interests, our strengths evolve. What challenged us once may no longer hold the same fascination. What we used to be able to take on board may now feel too heavy or too much to carry. We may fall out of love with one kind of work only to fall in love with another. We may decide to run away with an entirely different career altogether.

We want to be where we are right now, in this chapter, with integrity and curiosity. But we also need to stay be open to new paths forming that may take us in unexpected directions.

Conversations are made of bits. Individual skills, wording, tone, rhythm. The spaces between of silence and anticipation. The flow, the pace, the music.

Much like doing scales on a musical instrument or drills at sports training, we can practice the individual elements of good communication away from the people we support. And the more we do that, the more honed and flexible those skills will be when they most matter.

Many of us grew up with the phrase “practice makes perfect”. And later maybe got the more refined version “perfect practice makes perfect”. Because if we practice with bad technique, all we do is reinforce bad habits.

Which all makes sense in theory, but in reality it puts a lot of pressure on us. And increases the chance we don’t do any practice at all.

We don’t do practice to get perfect at practice. We practice to have better conversations with people. The aim is not to get it right every time, the aim is to learn. And the best way to learn is to enjoy the process. Have fun, hold it lightly, be playful.

Yes, we want to be informed and intentional. And yes, we absolutely want to reflect on the experience and how to improve. But we also need to make room for curiosity. We want to feel free to try things out, make mistakes, laugh at the convoluted phrases we form on the way.

And maybe the more comfortable we get with the messiness of our own learning, the better able we will be to support others through their own trials and errors and growth.

On the surface, the idea of evidence-based practice is solid. We don’t want to be acting on assumption, impulse or “I reckon it’s a good idea”. Decades of research have clearly shown that what one person thinks will be helpful for another person isn’t always the case. 

However we also need to take a considered approach to the evidence base we are drawing from. The techniques we choose only account for a modest prediction of positive outcome. They’re important but far from enough. 

This broader body of research highlights that the quality of the therapeutic relationship and the qualities of the helper have a greater impact. Who delivers the treatment, and how, matters. 

It is easier to recommend a specific intervention, write manuals and roll out training. It is harder to create systems that prioritise workers feeling well-rested, supported and resourced to be their best self for the people they work with. 

We can take the lens even wider. There is a solid body of research that emphasises the importance of more systemic factors, such as feeling connected to a community, to nature, to meaningful work. Or the relief of secure accommodation or employment.

And it is much easier to fund six sessions of a clearly prescribed intervention than to address social and financial inequality, ensure fair and safe workplaces, tackle the threat of climate change or the need for affordable housing. 

But if we only focus on the evidence for specific techniques, we risk being evidence-biased by selecting narrow fields of research at the expense of other just as valid ones.  

Well-constructed, well-conducted scientific method has been invaluable in the helping professions to focus and evolve treatment. It has helped us to direct our energy toward what is more likely to be helpful and to keep questioning and improving as we go.

But there is another side of helping others that is more art than science. More Goldilocks and the Three Bears than peer-reviewed journal, where how we do something is as important as what we do.

We often talk about the qualities we want to embody, but in reality we’re aiming more for a series of delicate balances that create a therapeutic potential. We want to be curious but not intrusive. Authentic, but not unfiltered. Optimistic but not unrealistic. Non-judgemental but not undiscerning. Self-aware but not hyper self-conscious.

We want to be responsive without being inconsistent or inauthentic, and consistent without being rigid or inflexible. We want to be present but not at the expense of losing our focus on why we are there together in the first place. We want to be friendly but not in an unboundaried way. And definitely not in a creepy way.

If we think of a surfer skilfully riding a big wave, there’s a lot of physics going on there, a lot of opposing forces. But when experienced surfers talk about it, they typically don’t talk about the individual mechanics. They talk about flow, being at one with the wave, the board, their body, their whole experience.

And while science may be able to describe it, the way we want to be with people is more of an exquisite balance than a fixed state. And like all good balances, we may never arrive, or if we do it’s for a fleeting moment as we sail past into the opposite.

And maybe that’s OK. If we can hold our destination more lightly, we are more able to attune and recalibrate. If we are less focused on achieving an ideal, we can be more in the process. We may not find those unicorns of perfect balance. But we may experience more flow, both within ourselves and with the other person.