Whats Important To You? dartboard
For many, opening up a newspaper or turning on the television to a news channel may lead to increased anxiety. Instability and uncertainty seem to be all around us right now, both globally and locally, in the public and private spheres. According to the American Psychological Association in partnership with The Harris Poll, Americans are emotionally overwhelmed and showing signs of fatigue due to what they see as a constant stream of crises over the last two years. Whether because of inflation, the war in Ukraine, legal or political instability, or general variability regarding where and how they will work, uncertainty is stressing Americans out.
However, while the constant barrage of worldwide volatility may seem to be causing emotional turmoil, uncertainty does not need to lead to higher stress levels or increased anxiety. There can be an upside to uncertainty. Even if people are predisposed to have a loss aversion bias, making change difficult and the risks that it brings more salient than any potential gains, developing the skills to face that uncertainty can lead to growth and transformation. Moreover, the good news is that these skills can be learned.
In their new book, The Upside of Uncertainty: A Guide to Finding Possibility in the Unknown, Nathan Furr and Susannah Harmon Furr explain how people can achieve what they call transilience—the ability to change from one state to another. Unlike resilience, which allows a person simply to recover from difficulty, transilience gives people the tools not only to weather a storm but also to see the silver lining in the dark clouds. It gives them the skills to navigate planned uncertainties, such as starting a new venture, as well as growing personally and professionally despite unplanned uncertainties, examples of which are all around us.
The authors provide four broad categories of skills and concepts that can help people face uncertainty. The first category focuses on reframing one’s perspective to be able to see potential opportunities amidst the risks of the current situation. The second deals with priming oneself to recognize which opportunities speak to what one wants and what one can achieve, given one’s own personal strengths and proclivities. The third category explores how to perform or engage in those actions that allow one to achieve what one wants, and the final category is about sustaining one’s focus and reminding oneself why it is important to push through uncertainty when facing challenges. The authors point out that these tools are not linear, even if it seems natural to consider them so. Rather, each tool can and should be utilized when the moment requires it, making this toolkit even more useful today, when uncertainty is so ubiquitous.
The most important lesson that the authors convey is that the difference between anxiety and success may lie in a person having clarity on their goals and values. Rather than chasing after fickle success or trying to avoid being blown over by uncertainty, personal and professional achievements can be realized if one harnesses the winds of change in ways that speak to who you are and what you believe in. They write, “Quite simply, the ability to calmly face uncertainty seems to be related to whether you view your goals as internal (i.e., doing your best, being your best, learning) rather than external (i.e., being the best, being the most famous) and whether you view outcomes as partly outside your control versus completely inside your control.” While the message is innovative, it is not new. Aristotle introduces his Nicomachean Ethics with a very similar idea. The major difference between the authors and Aristotle is that Nathan Furr and Susannah Harmon Furr provide us with a toolkit to achieve personal growth and success rather than provide a theoretical description of how such growth can occur. One piece of advice that they give to clarify how to use those tools and direct them towards what one wants to achieve is to write an “uncertainty manifesto,” which is a personal statement that frames how one wants to confront uncertainty, what internal goals one wants to accomplish and how one will reflect on both success and setbacks.
When goals are internal, they are more akin to values. Because they relate to what people deem important about themselves and their work rather than approval or approbation from others, achieving one’s goals is about finding ways to do and to succeed in doing what one loves—or believes is worth doing. This paradigm shift from focusing on external measures of success to valuing internal metrics of personal achievement removes the illusion of control over those things over which we have no power. It also can alleviate anxiety when things do not go as planned, as well as allow one to see the possibilities for pivoting when the course one is on is not working. Focusing on what one can control rather than on what one cannot will also minimize the risk of acting against one’s own values for the sake of trying to achieve an outcome that one has little ability to effect.
In the face of uncertainty, it is essential to understand one’s own risk tolerance and what possibilities may be available. However, it is even more important to know what you care about—both in terms of the values you believe in and the activities you want to spend your life doing. Only then, can risk aversion be balanced with regret minimization, i.e. reducing the feeling that one didn’t take the chance that he or she should have taken. It will also give a new perspective on uncertainty, one that gives focus to what a person wants to do and how to leverage what one can do to achieve it, rather than create anxiety over what one cannot control.
