Also knowing is different from doing. What’s stopping you learning karate or bjj from books or even videos? You already have the hardware for it. But you need to learn new patterns, and a coach can often get you there more effectively. Also having a sparring partner is a good way to break old patterns and build new ones. Now replace karate with mental models/peace of mind etc, except now your system is not performing optimally by this point.
- Some people just want to get straight to the point. They don't want to have to research, they might not even enjoy reading. They would just rather see a domain expert.
- Some people struggle with being vulnerable. Even around friends or family.
- Some people are not comfortable with not knowing the answer to certain questions so they never ask themselves or when they put these questions to themselves they get back toxic answers from their own mind.
- Some people are very resistant to change but understand that it is necessary.
In my case the problems were not obvious. I was enjoying my life and was professionally and dating-wise successful. So the analogy would be a system that appears to be running fine.
My psychiatrist friend made me realize there could be more. So by the time I went to see the therapist I wasn't really sure that there is a problem. They helped me see that a bunch of areas in my life were suboptimal and I was getting in my own way.
So in my case it wasn't like hiring someone to debug problems I am seeing in my system. It was like hiring a systems architect and saying "this seems to be working fine but we probably don't know what we don't know about performance" or whatever.