THROUGH THE VAGUENESS

“Are You Sure?” she said. “Is anybody?” I replied.

Vaguery is Hard

“Hardest Thing to Do” rankings are a fun rhetorical discussion among friends and fodder for Buzzfeed clickbait articles, so I won’t try to make an argument for how hard living with Ambiguity is by comparison to other things. I’ll simply state that living without specificity is extremely taxing on your psychological and emotional well-being, as well as your mental health. It creates uncertainty which leads to worry, which leads to panic. Panic isn’t good for anyone or anything.  Panic leads to poor decision making and is generally deleterious to one’s health. If you constantly live in a state of panic, YOU WILL DIE.

The Base Emotions

Let’s start with something simple – the basics. There are four emotions that people deal with every day – Joy, Fear, Rage, and Despair. Each of these four can be sliced and diced into sub-components, but these are the basics that command our thoughts and control our actions (e.g. - we chase Joy and run from Fear). Each emotion is a response to an external stimulus. They can interact and compound each other, which is what leads to all kinds of trouble.

Being a grown up is hard.

The reality is hard enough, but finding ways to cope with reality can also trigger these negative emotions. Often the only way out is through.    

Evolution of Humanity

If we take a broad approach to our evolution on this planet, we can determine certain characteristics that have made us what we are today – we need food, shelter, and protection from the elements (clothing). We also evolved to be social, we like to be around and rely on others. We seek community. The development of these base emotions helped humans become the dominant life form on this planet such that we could consider things much larger than our survival. We do not have sex only to produce children. We do not eat only when we are hungry, and our activities are not motivated solely by kill or be killed. We have built in buffer areas where we have time to ponder questions that the gazelle on the veldt doesn’t have the capacity to deal with. The pre-Socratic philosophers were concerned with concepts of Justice and Divinity. Apes, birds, and fish look for two things: food and mates.  

That doesn’t mean we aren’t victims to the discomfort of not knowing. Fear of uncertainty is in our DNA.

As standup comics like to tell us, we are not descendant from the burly, brave cavepeople that stared down the sabretooth cat, we are descended from the quick little guys that ran back to the cave.

William Peterson gave a great line on his tv show CSI that speaks to this idea:

“You're a primitive man on the Savannah. You see something move out of the corner of your eye. You assume it's a hyena. You run, you live. If you assume it's the wind and you're wrong, you die. We have the genes of the ones who ran. We're genetically hard-wired to believe living forces that we cannot see.”

Fear

It can be said that Depressed people are living in the past, while Anxious people are living in the future. The only way to find real peace is to live in the present. Anyone who says they don’t get Anxiety is lying. We all deal with some form of discomfort that affects our decision making. That discomfort is the unknown which could manifest itself in feelings of failure and rejection. We make dumb decisions when we are anxious. We may think we are helping, when in fact we are making things worse.

Fear is real.

The trick is to recognize fear and acknowledge it. Know it’s there and keep an eye on it. If you don’t, it will slowly take control of everything and do some serious damage.

Dealing With Uncertainty

Pandemic, Recession, Political Gridlock, and Unemployment. Bad combination for creating uncertainty. The coronavirus created distrust because we can’t even trust that we know if we’re sick or not (i.e. - asymptomatic). Recession creates discomfort about the future of economic security. Political gridlock creates binary divisions of people – us vs them. Unemployment and food insecurity exacerbate all of the above.

What is there left to do? I present four possibilities:

One: Breathe. We’ll touch on this later.

Two: Focus on what you know and what you can control. Dale Carnegie refers to it as living in “day-tight compartments”. Your only concern should be the next hour or the rest of today, or this week. You start thinking about the next month of the next year and your head will spin right off your neck.

Three: Acknowledge what’s bothering you and say it out loud. Open your mouth and say it where others could hear it. What’s the worst that could happen? “I die.” Ok, now you said it. How realistic is that? 1 in 30 million? 1 in a billion? If it’s less than 1 in 86,400, that means the worst-case scenario won’t happen today. Worry about it tomorrow.

Start working your way down the list. Will you be crippled with injury? NO. Will you be thrown in jail? NO. Will you lose a loved one? NO. Will your house burn down? NO.

You will eventually end up at a more realistic conclusion, like: somebody will be mad at me. That’s realistic. That can be dealt with. That is not the end of the world.

Four: What’s the BEST that could happen? Spend your time on that. This is a form of Growth Mindset thinking. It’s worth typing into Google. You’ll be glad you did.

Breathing

Dr. Leah Lagos, PhD has done extensive research on the benefits of Heart Rate Variability Biofeedback. It’s a breathing technique that transfers activity from your sympathetic nervous system to your parasympathetic nervous system. She wrote a book on it called Heart Breath Mind. The liner on the book is pretty simple: Stress is not in your head, it’s in your body. She posits that peak performance can be achieved in 4.5 to 6.5 breaths per minute. That's 10 seconds per breath, or 4 seconds in, 6 seconds out. She says to focus on the exhale. That means you need to slow it down.

Stress is a response to stimulus and it takes root in your heart, which eventually transfers to your brain and from there it goes throughout your entire body. This physical stress can trigger the basic emotions and the corresponding psychosomatic conditions that lead to feelings of creeping uncertainty. Your heart rate jumps and your skin starts crawling because your mind controls everything from muscle and eye movements to your breathing. Why does your blood pressure jump when you see a police car turn on its lights behind you? Nothing's happened yet. But your body thinks something will happen.

Hack your mind. Control your breathing to slow down your body. 

My Story

I worked for a great manager as head of a Service department. I ran the call center, warranty claims administration, and the service repair depot. It was a great gig. I was paid very well, my boss was an amazing empath, and I really enjoyed working with my team. The job tasks had their thankless moments – nobody likes to be yelled at all day and blamed for things outside their control, but it also built resilience in the face of uncertainty. It builds a comfort with Ambiguity.

Ambiguity [?amb??ɡyo?ow?dē] NOUN - the quality of being open to more than one interpretation; inexactness.

There were simply problems that could not be solved. Either we didn’t have the technology, the knowhow, the resources, or the cooperation of our partners. Sometimes there was simply a ghost in the machine, or the customer was dealing with their own discomfort (see above) and unwilling to admit they had contributed to the problem.

Every day a new challenge propagated through the service organization. People from different departments would appear with competing problems all claiming theirs to be of the highest priority to the company. It created stress, but it also expanded comfort zones and opened opportunities for diplomacy and collaboration. It produced opportunities for give-and-take.

When you can manage stress and anxiety in the face of not knowing anything and not being able to solve a serious problem, it’s extremely liberating. Like all jobs, there were good days and bad days.

When an opportunity to take on a much larger role at the global level appeared, I didn’t need to hesitate. The prospect of what “could be” loomed larger than the security of what I had known to this point. When my colleague Stu questioned me about it, he had a look of incredulity: “You don’t know what the plan is? You don’t have written instructions? What if you fail?”

I responded, “What if I succeed?”

5 Years Later

I took the leap. I made great friends. I still keep in touch with them. There was a ton of uncertainty.  There was more than a little dose of Ambiguity. There were very tough moments to get through. The pandemic compounded the pain of that uncertainty. Now that I’ve left the organization, I look back on my time with fondness. It made me stronger. My current situation produces its own stress and anxiety, but I feel I’m much more equipped to deal with it. It’s nothing to be afraid of. I know my fear and I perform the four steps I recommend above.

The Vagueness

You won’t always know the answer. Your boss won’t know either. That’s the curse of the Ambiguity. Wikipedia defines Ambiguity:

Ambiguity is a type of meaning in which a phrase, statement, or resolution is not explicitly defined, making several interpretations plausible. A common aspect of ambiguity is uncertainty. It is thus an attribute of any idea or statement whose intended meaning cannot be definitively resolved according to a rule or process with a finite number of steps.

I agree with this definition. I also try to counsel others on how to identify it; how to deal with it.

You know what Ambiguity is? A TEST.

Ambiguity is an ethereal monster searching for leadership. It craves ownership and it’s always looking for opportunities to produce Leaders. It likes the ones who stick their neck out. Who have “skin in the game”. If you fall victim to the old Asian proverb “the nail that sticks out gets hammered”, you are not ready for leadership when the Ambiguity monster comes along. People need answers.  They crave stability. They want an explanation. They want a decision. 

Here’s the thing about Ambiguity, if there are (see above) several plausible interpretations, who is to say that yours is wrong? Who is to say that your rival on the team is correct?  The boss has a wonderful opportunity in this situation to define the ambiguity and prove they deserve the job. How many bosses do that? How many supervisors stick their neck out? How many team captains fail to perform their duty? The capacity for leadership is in all of us and Ambiguity is always lurking in the corner waiting to produce opportunities for those willing to provide what others are looking for.  

Final Thoughts

Uncertainty, Ambiguity, and Vagueness will always be with us. We will NEVER escape them. They are part of the human condition. We can study them, we can question them, we can demonize them. When faced with uncertainty, make your best guess. Yes, people will question your decision. They may pick it apart and criticize it. Walk into it knowing that you chose the best course of action based on the information available. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Don’t be paralyzed by the Vagueness.

Breathe, Focus, State the worst-case, and Think about the BEST case.

Push through it. On the other side is what you are looking for.

"Make today more uncertain than yesterday. Once you live with uncertainty, nothing ever goes wrong." —Deepak Chopra