Look, you don’t know everything.
Anybody can see that’s true. You hardly know which breakfast cereal to choose. At least, that’s how I feel most of the time. We all let confusion and anxiety about what’s coming next push us around sometimes. Work is full of choices. We’re asked to know which project to tackle next, which email to answer first, where our attention is best focused.
It can leave us hamstrung, standing with our arms tightly wrapped around the one or two things we’re actually certain of.
Afraid to move ahead; clearly stuck.
The truth is, we really don’t know what the end result of most of our actions will be. The way we speak to each other, our tone of voice, the time of day or location a conversation occurs in can all impact the outcome we so desperately want to control. There are so many variables and we want to be perfect. Our concern about not knowing makes us feel vulnerable and keeps us stuck, looking at one more option, one more outcome.
We think of decisions like they’re skidding cars, sliding on ice. Once we decide on a course of action, the whole thing is out of our control.
So we delay the decision.
Ouch! Decision delay and fear of uncertainty – our brains just hate both of those things. Our brains are certainty machines. In fact, we’re so aligned with certainty that we will manufacture evidence for practically anything. This love of certainty means that as soon as we decide, we get a rush of relief. ( For more information on confirmation bias, check out lessons 5 & 6 here.) So we delay decision making out of fear and uncertainty, and our brain’s discomfort with the lack of a decision makes us feel even worse. Decisions are a beast!
Ready for the beauty part of this?
Don’t know.
Seriously. You actually don’t know, so why not own that?
Here’s how it works. When you’re facing uncertainty, rephrase it into a question and answer it with “don’t know.” Don’t know in the big sense. The sense that NONE of us know how ANYTHING will turn out.
Will your business people need the data in the next 90 days? Don’t know.
Should you confront your staff about talking too much during the day? Don’t know.
Your company wants you to predict the cost of a project with very little specifications. What will it cost? Don’t know.
What will happen in the next five seconds? Don’t know.
Because everything in life is interconnected, even if you have all the information, still the answer is – don’t know.
And – that’s OK.
Because a decision isn’t a car on ice. It’s a car in motion.
You have a steering wheel. You have a gas pedal, you have brakes.
The only thing you don’t have is a crystal ball.
And that? Is just good to know.
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