Sitting in the uncertainty

Life, eh?! Jeez, team, it’s a bit of work. I have to admit parts of it have been kind of kicking my ass recently and it has made me realise a lot about how I function and about how my brain works. And interestingly (to me, I’m making no promises that it’s interesting to you), it’s highlighting something I already knew to some extent: the systems that have made me very good at what I do at work often don’t serve me well in my personal life.

Focusing on a possible problem down the line at work? It’s my job and I can implement a defined set of steps to avoid or minimise that problem.

Focusing on a possible problem in life? HELLO ANXIETY. And life stuff, personal stuff, relationship stuff is not like a pipeline. There aren’t always a clear set of steps to solve the problem you imagined in advance.

Living in uncertainty on how some process will go or how someone will perform? Put a structure in place to bolster that part of production and make sure there are check-ins and safety nets built in. Turning uncertainty into certainty isn’t all that tough.

Living in uncertainty in a personal situation? We never know how things can go. We can manage our own actions and responsibilities and then everyone else has their own feelings and agency so, after that, welcome to UNCERTAINTY CITY.

I’m not good with uncertainty.

And in the absence of information, my brain tries to create every potential scenario. And dwell on the negative ones. On a loop. At 4am.

So where am I going with this other than using you as an excuse for free therapy? It’s this: I have found out over the last few years as I matured into this role in my industry that I have become pretty good at being the solid person in the room. Difficult to shake. Proactive. Someone who sees problems coming down the line and does something about them. I have strengths that I’ve trained extremely well.

Great for producing something complicated and expensive.

But not necessarily the guy you want running your personal life. And honestly, that guy is exhausting. That guy is a pain in my ass.

And here’s the real kick in the pants: just as I’m realising that my professional brain doesn’t always work well in my personal life, the industry I work in has decided to become suspiciously more like my personal life. Thanks for that, media landscape. You’re now uncontrollable and, since 2022, we’ve all been living in a collective state of anxiety wondering what will happen next and what we do about that.

And it’s not like we don’t need to think about that. We do. But we (and me, Jay) need to recognise the point at which thinking about uncertainty stops being productive and starts just wearing us down. Many of the questions of this industry we simply can’t answer yet. We can control our own actions and our own responsibilities within that. But beyond that, the information does not yet exist. Resilience isn’t about successfully predicting which future is coming and preparing perfectly for that.

It’s about doing our damndest to do the best work we can, and then being adaptable enough that we don’t have to know exactly what’s coming.

Which I guess brings me back to the lesson my wider personal life is trying endlessly to beat into me: I don’t have to know what’s going to happen.

I can’t know.

Turns out I don’t have to solve it today. Or indeed at 4am.

I have to learn just to do what I do well. And then I can damn well sit in the uncertainty. Apparently, team, this is not total failure. Apparently it’s just life.