What You Don't Know Is Holding You Back

Are you where you want to be in your career? Do you have the position you would like at your current organization? Does your volunteer strategy look on paper and/or in reality reflect how you envision it in your head? If the answer to any of these questions is NO, you are not alone. Keep reading. The truth is, it’s not what you know that limits you. It’s what you don’t know that is secretly holding you back.

We often assume that hard work alone will carry us forward. But in reality, unseen gaps in knowledge, skill, mindset, or perspective can create invisible barriers that we unintentionally allow to hold us back. These blind spots don’t just slow us down—they can reroute the entire trajectory of our careers.

The Comfort Zone

Now, the Comfort Zone gets a bad rap. The comfort zone itself isn’t such a bad thing, because well, you are comfortable. If you are happy where you are in your career and fulfilled, that is something to celebrate. However, if you want to grow as a professional and/or elevate in your career, the Comfort Zone can be your greatest enemy. If you’ve never stepped outside the nonprofit volunteer engagement arena, you are missing out on tools, strategies, or even entire careers better suited for you that you had no idea existed. I mean, have you ever heard of a Scrum Master?

So How Do You Know What You Don’t Know?

1. Step Into Different Rooms (Outside of Your Comfort Zone). New experiences, perspectives, and people challenge your current operating system—and that’s exactly the point. Attend webinars at industry-adjacent professions and/or industries that directly affect your profession, such as fundraising.
2. Ask different questions. Don’t just ask “What do I want?”— ask “What don’t I see?” For the Volunteer Engagement Profession, this Career Pathways document is a comprehensive look at every aspect of the profession from salary to skills needed.
3. Invite feedback. Constructive feedback can shine a light on your blind spots, but only if you’re open enough to receive it.
4. Self-Assessment Tools. For the profession of Volunteer Engagement, both The Association of Leaders in Volunteer Engagement (AL!VE) and CCVA have self-assessment tools specifically designed to help you identify your knowledge gaps. These aren’t the only ones out there, but they can be a start.
5. Invest in learning. Whether it’s hiring a coach, taking a class, reading a new genre, or attending a different kind of event, exposure is expansion. Better Impact has several phenomenal blogs with this type of content, and LinkedIn Learning is a vast resource of knowledge for all things professional development from change management to leadership.
6. Invest in Certification. CVA, CFRE, SHRM. The acronyms go on and on (I purposely didn’t put what the acronyms stand for because if you haven’t heard of them, you have just unlocked something you didn’t know and are expanding your knowledge base). Look into upskilling with a certification within and outside of your profession. It will expand your knowledge base dramatically.
7. Evaluate. Raise your hand to sit on a committee that certifies other organizations or helps to select excellence in the field such as the Better Impact Awards or Service Enterprise Accreditation Program.
8. Serve. They say when you give back, it comes back to you. I find that to be true for giving of your time too! If you want to learn a lot about what you don’t know, consider serving on a Board. You can learn so much from others not only in your industry, but outside of the industry as well. Additionally, you can better understand how nonprofits operate on an overarching scale to better understand how to position yourself and strategize.

The Hidden Cost of Not Knowing

There’s a cost to not knowing—and it often comes in the form of missed opportunities, wasted time, and stunted growth. Speaking of wasted time, for example, I once wasted one hour recreating a policy that had I just read the organization’s volunteer handbook in its entirety, I would have discovered the policy didn’t need to be created from scratch, but maybe just updated.

Lesson learned and here’s the good news: Once you’re aware that your unknowns are holding you back, you’re already taking one step forward. For example, I won’t be coming up with any bright ideas for policies until I have read the volunteer handbook in its entirety. What does this example look like for you?

Final Thought: It’s OK Not to Know

It’s not a weakness to not know something— admitting it to yourself is actually wisdom. The most successful people aren’t the ones who know it all. They’re the ones who keep asking, listening, and learning. Once you know what you don’t know, you can take the steps you need to be in the know. Good luck on your journey and continue to learn and discover what you don’t know.

• Learn by Sharing Your Skills on an AL!VE Volunteer Committee.
• Explore AL!VE Membership, the nation’s only association dedicated to supporting Volunteer Engagement Professionals.

If this topic resonated with you, be sure to check out Nicole’s recent webinar, What You Don’t Know is Holding You Back: The Case for Professional Development (at any stage). You can watch the recording here: betterimpact.com/webinar-resources/alive-webinar.