#2. Permission to Not Know Yet

If you've ever felt lost between who you were and who you're becoming, this episode is for you. As women in midlife, we often find ourselves in this uncomfortable limbo, feeling lost and disconnected while simultaneously hungry for something more. We discuss that the uncomfortable place of uncertainty isn't a detour, it's precisely where transformation happens. Most of us have been taught that clarity equals competence, that knowing exactly where we're headed somehow makes us more worthy or successful. We look around at other women who seem to have it all figured out - while we're stumbling through fog, hungry for something more but without a map to get there.

This episode invites you to exhale and release the pressure. You don't need perfect clarity to be on your path. That space of not knowing isn't evidence of failure, it's a time where your authentic self can finally emerge. We explore how awakening rarely arrives as expected. 

The episode also dives into a couple scientific explanations, from neuroplasticity to quantum physics, to help explain how our thoughts literally help shape our reality. Learn how practices like gratitude journaling can rewire neural pathways, shifting us from our natural negativity bias toward positive patterns that invite transformation.

Whether you're standing at the edge of change or feeling lost in the midst of it, this conversation offers gentle reassurance that you're exactly where you need to be. And it offers an actionable step to help you feel better, no matter where you are along the path. Remember: you're not lost, you're on the edge of something real.

🦋 Would you like help walking through these steps, or with accountability, or deeper dives into these topics? Interested in learning more about working 1:1 with me to transform your life in your rediscovery? Schedule a free Discovery call with me here: https://stan.store/edgeofreal

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📌 Leave a review, then email us a screenshot at edgeofrealpodcast@gmail.com and we will send you a beautiful free digital journal to help you work through some of your thoughts and get some clarity about what you truly want out of your life.

📹 Photo by Rob Merritt – used with permission.

🎵 Theme Music: Home by Vlad Gluschenko @vladest_art — Home

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Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome to Edge of Real

Transcript

Kristin: 0:08

Welcome to Edge of Real. I'm your host, Kristin Hamilton. This is a podcast for women waking up later in life, rediscovering themselves beyond roles, rules and expectations, and realizing they are ready for something more. Each week, we explore rebecoming. Where identity shifts, truth rises and we return to our true selves, helping you remember you're not lost. You're on the edge of something real.

Kristin: 0:38

Hello, my friends, today's episode is a bit of an exhale. It's for the part of you that's been trying so hard to figure it all out but is starting to wonder if, maybe, maybe, it's okay not to so today. I want to begin with this you don't need a five-year plan to be whole. You don't need perfect clarity to be on the path, and not knowing is not a failure. It's a phase and it is sacred. I've heard from so many women lately who feel lost, disconnected and discontent, yet are scared to make changes because they don't have full clarity on where exactly they even want to be headed, yet they just know that they don't want to be where they currently are. So let's take the pressure off today. Let's talk about what it means to give yourself permission to not know.

Kristin: 1:28

Yet there was a season not too long ago, as I shared in my last episode, where I kept looking around at other women and thinking how do they all seem to know what they're doing? I felt behind, like I had missed the class where everyone else learned how to do life confidently. And God, I can tell you at my age that did not feel comfortable at all. They had direction, vision boards, next steps. They knew how to do the things that I thought of as so I don't know, sophisticated, I guess, while they were confidently controlling the flow of their lives. I felt like I was just kind of stumbling along, going from fire to fire. I had well, I had a fog, I had a hunger for more, but no map to get there. You know, I remember journaling one evening several years ago, trying to force clarity, and I wrote down what's my purpose, what should I do next? Then I just stared at the page. No answers. Now that not one thing entered my brain, just complete and utter silence. And when I reflect on this now, instead of spiraling as I did at the time, I needed to soften. It would have been okay for me to gently respond with you're not supposed to know. Yet I'd spent so much of my life equating certainty with safety. If I didn't have a clear plan, I thought I was lost off track, failing. But this, this was actually the beginning of something. There was a deeper knowing forming beneath the surface Not answers, but awareness, not a roadmap but but an awakening, and I now trust that maybe, just maybe, this space of unclarity wasn't a problem to fix. It was an invitation to listen more closely. You know, I used to think that my awakening would be loud and obvious, maybe even glamorous, but mine Mine looked like crying while folding laundry. It was silence at dinner time, when I couldn't make small talk anymore. It felt like being surrounded by life I had built and realizing I was missing from it. Awakening didn't fix everything overnight. It actually stirred up more questions than answers. But it cracked something open and from that crack light did start to pour in.

Kristin: 3:51

You know, we live in a culture that celebrates clarity, direction, action. We're taught that being uncertain is a weakness, something to get through, something to cover up or overcome. But here's the truth Uncertainty is a portal. It's the place where truth begins to rise. It's the space before the insight, the pause before the shift. Sitting in uncertainty breeds change. You either sit with it longer, you determine you're okay with where you are, or you decide you don't want to be in that reality anymore and you make some changes.

Kristin: 4:29

When you're in a season of rediscovery, especially in midlife, there will be chapters where you don't have the answers. You've outgrown the old version of yourself, but the new one hasn't fully arrived yet. And that space, that unknown space, that edge, that is not a void. That is sacred ground. It's where we can allow that softness in. That softness is born and we can allow it to grow. We can stop forcing ourselves into boxes that no longer fit. We can allow curiosity to return and when the truth starts to come back, it starts to whisper and we can let it in. We don't have to rush that process. We can honor it, because not knowing isn't a flaw in you or in your journey. It is the journey Again. It's that portal, it's how we get.

Kristin: 5:27

If you're in that foggy space right now, if you're somewhere between no longer and not yet, I offer you an invitation to reflect. As always, here's a journal prompt to explore what if I gave myself full permission not to know yet? What becomes possible when I stop needing clarity right now? Let it be messy, let it be real. You don't need to write something profound, you just need to be honest. What pressures can you let go of? What deeper part of you is asking to be heard? You're not lost. You're listening and you're not behind. You're becoming, and the not knowing is where the becoming begins.

Kristin: 6:10

So, as always in these episodes, I like to discuss another actionable step in the segment tools I'm using, loving exploring right now, and I want to go back to the gratitude journal that I mentioned in episode one. I'm really going all in on this. I'm still writing 10 every night, though that may go down to five, as I'm seeing that 10 is a lot to come up with daily. Not because I don't have 10 things I'm grateful for in a day, but I'm wanting them to be unique things each day and not just a repetition of something from the day before. The more I learn about gratitude, the more convinced I am that this is worthy of my time and attention in bettering my life. Now I'm about to go pretty deep into some scientific reasoning here, so please bear with me. Scientific studies have been done that show that people who consciously think of and express gratitude have lower blood pressure, increased sleep, less physical pain, more happiness, better relationships and so much more.

Kristin: 7:14

As humans, we naturally have what's called negativity bias. This is our subconscious protecting us for our safety. Back in the day it kept us safe from lions and tigers and bears, oh my. What becomes ingrained in our subconscious then affects our thoughts, behaviors and actions. When we're stuck in a negative loop, we can't be grateful. This would create cognitive dissonance, which occurs when there's a clash between what we believe and how we act. For example, if you value healthy living but drink alcohol every night, your mind feels uncomfortable because your behavior doesn't match your belief. Having a gratitude practice keeps that negativity bias in check, rewires some of the thoughts, thus affecting our behavior. So this gets into self-directed neuroplasticity, the creation of new neural pathways within our brain, the rewiring of old ones that no longer serve us. So it comes full circle. Being more positive and conscious of the good things in your life consistently actually changes your brain to make this your new MO, your new default. And when these are more consistently your thoughts, you act according to them, thus taking inspired action toward what you want out of life.

Kristin: 8:36

You know I'd also like to touch a bit on energy and quantum studies and manifestation here. Now, if this is something that isn't in your wheelhouse yet, I'd like for you to stick with me for the next few minutes and just see if it makes sense for you. So Oxford Dictionary defines manifestation as the action or fact of showing an abstract idea. Manifestation is the act of bringing something into physical reality through conscious or unconscious thought and action. Manifestation is based on the idea that your thoughts and beliefs can influence your reality? Well, of course they can. If I want to make soup for dinner, I first have to have the thought to do so. Maybe I can picture it. I smell it, I remember how delicious it tastes, so I go to the grocery store, my pantry, my fridge. Delicious it tastes, so I go to the grocery store, my pantry, my fridge, and then I make the soup. I have just manifested soup into my life. I turned a thought into reality through inspired action. No-transcript At its core, manifestation is just the process of turning thoughts into reality through focused energy, belief and action.

Kristin: 9:59

Now, from a quantum perspective, pioneers like Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla explored how everything in our universe, including our thoughts, is made of energy and vibration. Einstein's famous quote E equals MC, squared, energy equals matter. They're interchangeable Meaning our mental and emotional energy is not intangible fluff, but it's part of the same energetic fabric as the physical world. Tesla famously said if you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy frequency and vibration. Our inner state, our beliefs, emotions and attention is constantly broadcasting a signal into the field around us, interacting with the quantum soup of possibilities.

Kristin: 10:49

So manifestation isn't just wishful thinking. It's the intentional use of your mind's energy, your thoughts, feelings and attention to influence the reality you experience. We're essentially tuning our personal frequency to match that reality. So think of your thoughts as electrical signals, each carrying a frequency. Just like a radio tunes into a certain station, your mind tunes into certain outcomes by repeatedly focusing on them. Every radio frequency is around us all the time, but you only experience it when you tune into it. In the same way, your focus observes a possibility and begins to bring it into form. This is why manifestation starts, not by forcing outcomes, but by aligning your inner frequency, through your thoughts, feelings and intentions, with what you want to experience. So quantum physics shows that particles exist in the state of pure infinite potential until they are observed or interacted with, at which point they take a specific form, or interacted with, at which point they take a specific form.

Kristin: 11:59

If you don't know about the double slit experiment, I highly encourage you to go to YouTube and find an explanation, a video, an explanation about it, because it is fascinating and it explains the scientific study that made us know this. You know the idea of if a tree falls in the forest and no one's around, does it actually make a sound. Well, the tree isn't actually in the forest, or rather, every tree is in every forest, but it doesn't come into matter. Reality until someone is there to observe it. Reality until someone is there to observe it. So our lives hold infinite possibilities, and once our focus and beliefs are on them, that's when they collapse into form.

Kristin: 12:43

You're not creating from scratch. You're selecting from infinite possibilities, and your consistent energetic signal helps collapse the desired wave of potential into your lived reality. In this way, manifestation is both ancient wisdom and cutting-edge science. It's an act of co-creation between you and the energetic fabric of the universe. Manifestation, then, is about aligning your inner state with what you want to experience, trusting that energy leads to matter and that, by holding a clear, coherent vibration, you invite the matching reality to take shape. And all of this is to explain why I find a gratitude practice to be of the utmost importance in my rebecoming. Having the positive thoughts and holding that higher frequency are paramount to my manifesting the life I want.

Kristin: 13:39

I hope this has all made sense, and if this is something new in your life, you may want to listen to this part again, maybe a couple times. I know it can feel a bit overwhelming, but once the concepts become a conscious part of your life, it really does open up your mind to the infinite possibilities you can fight in. It is so exciting to know that literally anything is possible. So, to wrap up, if no one's told you lately, I am really proud of you, not for having your ducks in a row and having it all figured out. Really proud of you, not for having your ducks in a row and having it all figured out. No, for staying with yourself in the space where you don't know, where nothing is certain, where that errant duck might not actually be a duck at all. That's where the real magic begins. That's the edge of real.

Kristin: 14:28

If this episode gave you something to think about, I'd love for you to share it with a friend who you know needs to hear this message. Or you can send me a message and let me know what landed for you. You can also tag me on Instagram at at your real podcast, and if you want a bit more space to explore this idea, there's a beautiful free journal that I'd love to give to you when you share a review of this podcast. There's more information on that in the show notes. Until next time, be gentle, stay curious and know that your becoming is unfolding beautifully.

Kristin: 15:01

You're not lost. You're on the edge of something real. I'm already looking forward to our time together next week. Love you Bye-bye.