Tales of a Tradesman - #3 The Difference Between Thinking And Knowing

Most of us aren't stuck because we lack information.

We know our situation. We've thought about it — in the van, in the shower, lying awake at some point. We could explain the problem clearly. We just haven't done much about it.

That's a specific type of stuck, and in my experience, thinking harder doesn't shift it.

The walk

A few years ago I walked the Camino de Santiago. Six hundred miles across Spain, on my own, over about six weeks.

I was 29. I'd just come off a business failure — a vegan food trailer, converted horsebox, all my savings — and I was back living at my parents, about to return to the electrical trade I'd spent years building and then abandoned.

A mate mentioned the Camino. I said yes almost immediately. I needed to think, and the sofa wasn't going to cut it.

Week one: my head got louder. Took away the phone, the jobs, the daily busyness — and everything I'd been putting off thinking about was suddenly right there with me.

Week two: it started to settle.

Day 28, middle of Spain, sun just up. Quiet.

A thought came through — not a revelation, just something I'd probably been circling for a while without properly landing on it: I'd been making decisions based on what seemed like the right thing to want. What looked sensible. What other people around me appeared to be doing. Not really stopping to ask what I actually wanted from the whole thing.

I don't think that's unusual. I think most of us do it more than we realise, particularly when we're busy and the next thing is always right in front of us.

I wrote one line in my journal: Three days a week. That's what this business needs to give me.

Not a plan. Just an honest answer to a question I hadn't been asking properly.

Thinking vs knowing

We're generally good thinkers — tradespeople especially. Practical, problem-solving, used to working things out.

But thinking is most useful when a problem has a correct answer you can work towards. There's a different kind of stuck where we've already done enough of it. We know the situation. We know something needs to shift. We're just running the same loop because stopping feels like falling behind.

What tends to break that isn't more analysis. It's a bit of honest space — enough quiet that the answer we probably already have can surface properly.

Thinking is constructed. Knowing tends to surface. They feel different if you pay attention, and it's worth learning to tell them apart.

What I built when I got back

I came home with one sentence and built backwards from it.

Three days a week meant a specific rate. Specific type of job. A particular kind of client — and a particular kind I'd stop saying yes to. A simple enough system that the business could run without me being on my phone all day.

Eighteen months in: three days a week, close to £4,000 a month after tax.

The money was the result. The actual thing was finishing on a Thursday afternoon without the job coming home with me. That's what the sentence was always pointing at.

The part worth mentioning

The practical side of this — pricing, booking systems, client qualification — is learnable. Straightforward, even, once you know where to start.

But underneath the system there's usually something else worth looking at. The reason we undercharge isn't always about not knowing our worth on paper. The reason we can't say no to the wrong clients isn't always about communication skills.

We carry patterns — around money, around rest, around what we're allowed to ask for — and those patterns will quietly undermine a good system if they're not looked at honestly alongside it.

That's the part most business coaching skips. It's also the part that tends to make the difference between a system that holds and one that quietly gets abandoned after three months.

In the work I do with self-employed tradespeople, we look at both at the same time. The practical structure and the stuff running underneath it. Not dramatically — just honestly.

To finish

If you're sitting with a decision right now — about your work, your rate, your direction — and going over it more isn't shifting it, there's a reasonable chance the answer's already there.

It might not need more thinking.

It might just need a bit of room.

I work one-to-one with self-employed tradespeople on both the practical business system and the patterns that shape it underneath. First conversation is free — no pitch, just an honest exchange about where you are and whether this is the right fit. Link in bio.