Why Didn’t Captain Cook Turn Left?
My supervisor is a bit of a history buff. Whenever I start getting ahead of myself in case formulation or treatment planning (which happens more often than I’d like to admit) he sometimes interrupts with a simple question:
“Why didn’t Captain Cook turn left?”
Here’s the backstory: in 1770, James Cook charted the east coast of Australia and named Botany Bay. Eighteen years later, the First Fleet arrived intending to establish a settlement there. It didn’t take long for them to realise the site wasn’t suitable — Botany Bay was shallow, exposed, and swampy, hardly ideal for sustaining a new colony. Within days, Arthur Phillip sailed a little further north and found something far better: a deep natural harbour at Sydney Cove within Port Jackson.
The right place, it turned out, was just around the corner.
(My supervisor is still flabbergasted that both Cook and Phillip sailed past the glistening white beaches of Cronulla — although he admits he’s generally grateful for how it all turned out as a Shire local.)
This idea of missing something obvious while following a determined plan is surprisingly relevant to therapy.
As a developing therapist, having a plan feels essential. A clear formulation, a structured treatment pathway, the right intervention at the right time — these things signal competence. Preparation gives the sense that we are doing the best thing for the client and delivering evidence-based care. And to a point, that’s true.
But sometimes planning quietly hardens into something else: rigidity. Not just structural rigidity — ego rigidity.
Once we decide where therapy should go, it can become surprisingly easy to start steering the ship in that direction. We may notice a pattern and ask questions that confirm our formulation. We guide conversations toward interventions we feel confident using. We look for progress along the routes we’ve already mapped out.
Part of this comes from a very human place. Early in our careers especially, we crave reassurance that we’re doing therapy well. Movement in a session can feel like evidence that we’re helping. When things feel uncertain or slow, it can trigger the quiet anxiety many therapists carry:
Am I actually doing this right?
Do we really know where we are going — or where we should go?
This is where curiosity becomes one of the most valuable skills a therapist can cultivate. Curiosity slows us down. It invites us to ask questions not to confirm what we already believe, but to discover what we might be missing. It keeps us listening a little longer, wondering a little more, and tolerating the discomfort of not yet knowing.
Without curiosity, formulation can quietly turn into confirmation. With curiosity, formulation stays alive — something we test, reshape, and sometimes abandon when the client’s experience points somewhere unexpected.
Without meaning to, we sometimes steer the ship toward waters that feel more predictable — waters where progress is easier to recognise.
Clients often do something similar in their own lives. They arrive in therapy with fixed ideas about how life should look, what success means, or what healing must involve. When reality diverges from that map, they sometimes double down on the course they’ve already chosen. Sometimes they come in already knowing what problem they want fixed, while overlooking other issues entirely.
Persistence can be admirable. But sometimes it lands people in emotional landscapes that feel swampy, stuck, and unsustainable.
Therapy, at its best, invites something different. It asks both therapist and client to pause long enough to notice the terrain, rather than forcing the journey to match the map. It requires curiosity, flexibility, and occasionally the humility to admit that the direction we had in mind might not be the best one.
Sometimes the most important skill in therapy — and in life — isn’t knowing exactly where you’re going. It’s recognising when you might be steering the ship for your own reasons… and having the courage to look around and wonder whether a better harbour might be just around the corner.
