Becoming Comfortable with the Unknown

Photo by Edurne Tx on Unsplash

Like many of us, my family contracted covid over the past two weeks. My kids and their dad picked it up on the way home from a holiday flight to see their grandma. After two years of this, we’re all familiar with the isolation, the waiting for symptoms, and now the search for at-home test kits or test appointments. I’ve had a lot of time to ponder my impatient reactions to the waiting, and the fear of the unknown.

I like to live my life in a state of certainty. I like to be confident of my decisions and have solid plans. The structure gives me comfort. It puts my mind at ease to have these knowns:

• Dates for my speaking engagements, teaching commitments, events and retreats
• Dates for personal and professional travel
• Dates when my children are with me (I have shared custody with their dad)
• When I’ll have downtime for personal vacation and retreats
• What to expect with my weekly work meetings and weekend plans
• The months when I will be busy and slow (based on the seasonality of a consulting & coaching business)

Creating these plans gives me a sense of control over how I spend my time. Yet as we’ve all learned with covid, all these plans can be instantly disrupted and we can be dropped into an overwhelming state of unknown.

These are four strategies that help me become more comfortable with the unknown.

1. Reframe plans as fluid pencil sketches

Whether plans feel like a satisfying commitment or a disliked obligation, consider reframing your mindset around them. Make the plans, but know that they can always change. Global supply chain issues will cause a delay to the product release date with a major retailer. Unprecedented sick days will cause a team to be weeks or months behind and unable to hit a release date. Major events will get cancelled or postponed, making that major marketing campaign irrelevant.

If you count on plans as a certainty, you will be disappointed.

Instead, make your plans. But consider them a fluid pencil sketch to be held lightly. External circumstances may cause them to change. Equally important, you can change…