The Art and Science of Embracing Uncertainty – Finding the Upside in the Unknown

Following a very stressful year last year I’m happy to say that I’m now through the other side and have learned much and grown, so I thought I’d share a bit of a follow up with you, which is about my experience of living with uncertainty and how I’ve been able to (almost!) make it my friend.

On 11^th June my hubby and I said goodbye to our home of the past 6 years on the beautiful Northern Beaches of Sydney and hello to the next Chapter, in a lovely house 2 hours north. Less than 2 weeks before the move we still had no idea where we were going to be living and, as the deadline grew closer, our stress levels grew higher and so we decided to do something to deal with the unknown.

Our Brain’s Paradox

Our brains crave certainty, they are prediction machines. This is what kept us alive 200,000 years ago as, if we didn’t know where the lion had its lair or the enemy tribe was lurking, we would soon be lunch.

Our brain continually and unconsciously scans for danger and threat about 5 times per second (Baumeister, 2001) because ‘different’ meant ‘danger’. Over time this scanning began to include novelty from a positive perspective.

There always has to be a reason for evolutionary changes and when it comes to novelty, when we experience surprise or novelty that’s pleasant, we get a little hit of dopamine, which motivates us to want to experience more novelty. Finding a new home, hubby looking for a new job and me starting from scratch again in a new place, oh yes, there would be novelty aplenty!

Back to Finding a Roof over our Heads!

Our search for a new home taught us much and, having lived with stress for a while, we decided to implement some known strategies and research others. Here are our top 5 that worked a treat.

1. Identify your Circle of Certainty – similar to Stephen Covey’s circle of control and influence, the Circle of Certainty exercise (Linda Ray 2014) is a highly effective perspective-taking initiative where you identify 1. what you have absolute certainty about 2. what you have some level of certainty about and 3. where there’s absolutely no predictability at all.

Just the act of identifying and clarifying what’s what helps us to get things into perspective and rebalance our sympathetic nervous system. As we were doing this exercise together, we could feel the tension easing and became more accepting of the situation we were in.

If you’d like to have the full instructions for this exercise, please get in touch.

2. Think in Terms of Options – under stress our brains close down to options, our focus narrows and our negativity bias takes over. Discussing what options were available to us helped clear our minds to broaden the scope of opportunity and lessen the stress.

Autonomy, or rather the perception of autonomy, is one of our 6 core needs (which I’ve covered in previous info journals with my SOCIAL Model) and so identifying options is a way to get this need met

3. Worst Case Scenario Planning – this might seem counter-intuitive but planning for the worst was the best thing we could have done! In project management this is called a ‘pre mortem’, where you think of everything that could possibly go wrong and reverse engineer it to mitigate.  

We looked at the various options we had discussed, we then looked at the worst-case scenario and asked ourselves “could we live with this?” The answer was a definite (and sometimes reluctant) “yes”, even though it wasn’t what we wanted. We also realised (and were extremely grateful) that we wouldn’t be left homeless with all the options considered.

This might sound exaggerated but that’s exactly what can happen in stress – our thinking becomes exaggerated and catastrophic – I imagined us living out of our car!

4. The Antidote to WORRY – I once read that WORRY is an acronym that stands for ‘Working On Rubbish And Ruining Yourself’. Whilst our woes are by no means rubbish, it’s the act of worrying, when we look at it rationally, that serves little purpose. We are either ruminating about the PAST (too late) or catastrophising about the FUTURE (hasn’t happened yet) and so the antidote to worry is taking purposeful action in the PRESENT.

If you wake up in the middle of the night worrying about something, get up, write it down then select one action you can take in the morning to deal with it. I promise, you’ll have a greater chance of getting back to sleep (it’s also a brain thing which I’ll cover in a future info journal)

5. Creating Uncertainty Balancers – in their book ‘The Upside of Uncertainty’ authors Nathan Furr and Susannah Harmon Furr introduce the concept of ‘uncertainty balancers’.  As certainty is another of our core needs, it really helps to create certainty in areas where we have control.

Many entrepreneurs thrive in uncertainty in their business world but crave sameness and predictability elsewhere, for example where they stay when travelling, what they wear, having a stable relationship etc.

Creating certainty is also a good idea to save precious brain resources as, when faced with uncertainty, we have to make numerous important decisions, and this takes its toll on the executive function of our brain.

Barack Obama had it right when he said:-

In Summary

One thing we can be certain of is that uncertainty is on the increase, so the more we can do today to get comfortable and live with it, the sooner we can get on with our work and lives (and unpack an inordinate amount of boxes).

Go well and remember that to take any action at all is a step in the right direction!