The upside of uncertainty and how to find your way through it

?In the Arena is LinkedIn News’ weekly human potential podcast hosted by (me)?Leah Smart. You’ll hear from some of the world's brightest minds and bravest hearts about how to show up daily to live a better & more meaningful life.?Subscribe to the show's newsletter?here. This week, we're sharing the conversation with the recent authors of The Upside of Uncertainty, Nathan and Susannah Furr.

If you called me this time last year, you would have been eyeing some version of a woman who’d come a tad undone. After a series of changes at work, my decision to temporarily uproot my life from New York City to Bend, Oregon, and some personal challenges, I was experiencing endings and beginnings in more than one area of my life.

An onlooker watching my simultaneous choices and unchosen circumstances might have called me crazy to change so much at once. But my empathetic and spiritual friends called me a butterfly emerging from a cocoon. “Time for you to shine my light beam,” I can remember one of them encouraging in her bright, sing-song trill. And it sounded fantastic…until it happened. For someone trying to navigate the balance between being “super spontaneous” and “effectively routinized”, I was feeling a little untamed with all these transitions (and not in the liberated, Glennon Doyle kind of way). I can imagine this feeling isn't unfamiliar to you.

The beginning of most experiences also signals the end of others. As exciting as saying "goodbye" to what doesn’t work for us anymore or saying "hello" to what we hope will is, we still have this phase that author Bruce Feiler named after studying hundreds of life transitions: the messy middle. It’s where uncertainty plays.

Moving to a new neighborhood? Exhilarating but also where will I get my coffee from in the mornings? And will my new neighbors be as interesting as my last? ?Getting out of a job that felt like a dead end? The opportunity is exactly what you’d hoped for but who will replace your old work BFF?

Few of us feel only a delightful flutter in our hearts when we experience uncertainty. We’re wired for fear of the unknown. So it’s more like stomach drops and heart flutters. And yet, we all have a dream, large or small that could positively impact our lives. But uncertainty can keep up paralyzed, even if we’re giddy at the possibility of a desire happening.

So how do we shift this? Well, in their book The Upside of Uncertainty, Nathan and Susannah Furr- an INSEAD entrepreneurship professor & Dutch baroque entrepreneur and designer- share relatable stories and simple tools for us to use when we experience uncertainty or when we know something uncertain is coming.

The image they use to describe the four-prong approach is an uncertainty red cross. In their book, you’ll find countless tools for each prong but I’ve chosen a few for you to try today.

Sustain

When I asked Susannah what we needed most now, she said “sustain” so let’s start there. Sustain offers comfort and support in the downside of uncertainty. It’s most helpful when things get really tough.

Connection and community in the following 3 areas offer one way to find support in others who make you feel brighter, more optimistic.

Try this

Value: find someone or a group who shares a value you can bond over. Perhaps you join a group focused on family or health.

Similar experiences: what’s something you do today that others might also be doing? You could be someone who nerds out on coffee, hiking or music.

Team or company: sometimes most obvious but also overlooked is the community we can create within our organizations. If something is already established, like an employee resource group, even better. If not, find someone to partner with to create community.

Reframe

This is where you generally want to start when approaching uncertainty. Reframe is all about changing your perspective. Imagine we're all wearing different colored glasses in our daily lives. Think about the friend you call because they can almost always turn something hard around and help you see it differently. Reframing allows you to try on someone else’s glasses.

And the Furr’s describe one of their reframing tools, frontiers, as any boundary between where we feel comfortable and where we don’t. While we might tend to think of frontiers as wild, we can also consider the possibility of exploration.

Try this

Think about something small you want to approach as a new frontier. What’s possible there? How have other small frontiers you’ve tried in the past been a great decision for you? So why not this one?

Prime

This phase is about getting yourself ready for what’s next.

Oftentimes before a race, a track runner will spend some time just putting their feet in the starting blocks and fingers in position. They’ll even imagine themselves doing it when they’re away from the track. Partially it’s because how you get out of the blocks matters (a lot) but it’s also about preparing the mind and body for that strange angle of the feet, the tight crouch of the body, and the tented fingers. The more you do it, the more your body and mind are ready for what is coming. You spend time in the priming phase so your action is even better.

Try this

An uncertainty balancer is a tool that helps us counteract the unknowns we face. We can deliberately have something familiar to help us accept the unfamiliar territory we're approaching. We prime by building more certainty where we can and avoid unnecessary energy spent on less important decisions.

1. Examine your routine- list out what you do every day.
2. Adopt new rituals- figure out which ritual, large or small would create stability.
3. Adjust for your context- based on the uncertainty you face, perhaps you need a few more or less new rituals. Gear up or down based on your timing.

Do

What action can you take? And how can you do it in an intentional way? This prong asks us to show up in some way to meet uncertainty with action.

Try this

The Activate and unlock approach is related to a term scholars call endogenous uncertainty. This theory says we can unlock more possibilities by actually increasing uncertainty. And though this can sound counterintuitive, working through these questions might give you a different perspective.

Questions to ask for activation include:

• Where do you have curiosities, interests, or talents??
• Where do you imagine change?
• What are you doing anyway??

How to unlock what you're activating:

• Create space to explore.?
• Stop being busy.?
• Inject uncertainty.
• Trust it’s there and that you won’t mess it up.?
• Drop your ego.

My life since last summer is of course, drastically different. In many ways, it's much better. In some areas, I'm still exploring but optimistic. Fortunately, I am mostly out of the previous storm of uncertainty. The tough part about being in the eye of that storm is it can be quite turbulent. But then later, in the warmth of better weather, we all have the ability to look back and connect the dots. And though we may not have enjoyed the hardship, it was perhaps part of a bigger plot we couldn't be aware of until it later.

Each of us has and will have more experiences of unknowns in our lives. And aside from these powerful tools, the trust (or the magic) we can hang on to is the evidence in our own histories which shows us that while circumstances at work, school, in relationships, and in new cities may have felt like an unraveling, it was an unfolding.

Until next time...where could you shift your perspective from unraveling to unfolding?

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